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Lost in Their Own Wilderness

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Washington, DC -- Republicans shouldn't worry that President Obama is trying to destroy the GOP. Why would he bother? The party's leaders are doing a pretty good job of it themselves.

As they try to understand why the party lost an election it was confident of winning -- and why it keeps losing budget showdowns in Congress -- Republican grandees are asking the wrong questions. Predictably, they are coming up with the wrong answers.

They prefer to focus on flawed tactics and ineffectual "messaging" rather than confront the essential problem, which is that voters don't much care for the policies the GOP espouses.

In post-debacle speeches and interviews, Republicans are sounding -- and there's no kind way to put this -- paranoid and delusional. House Speaker John Boehner said in a speech to the Ripon Society that the Obama administration is trying to "annihilate the Republican Party." Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the party's fiscal guru and failed vice presidential candidate, claimed Sunday on "Meet the Press" that Obama seeks "political conquest" of the GOP.

It is no secret that Obama is trying to advance a progressive agenda. He promised as much in his campaign speeches. Were Republicans not listening? Did they think he was just joshing?

In five of the last six presidential elections, Democrats have won the popular vote. Republicans have done well at the state level, and through redistricting have made their majority in the House difficult to dislodge. But it's not possible to lead the country from the speaker's chair, as Boehner can attest. To have a chance at effecting transformative change, you have to win the White House.

And to win the White House, you have to convince voters that the policies you seek to enact are the right ones. This is what the GOP doesn't seem to understand.

"We've got to stop being the stupid party," Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, one of the GOP's brightest young stars, said in a much-anticipated speech at the party's winter meeting last week. "We've got to stop insulting the intelligence of voters. We need to trust the smarts of the American people."

That's all well and good. But Jindal also warned that the party should not "moderate, equivocate or otherwise change our principles" on issues such as abortion, gay marriage, "government growth" and "higher taxes."

On abortion, there is an uneasy consensus that the procedure should be legal but uncommon; the GOP wants to make abortion illegal, and the party's loudest voices on the issue do not even favor exceptions for incest or rape. On gay marriage, public opinion is shifting dramatically toward acceptance; the Republican Party is adamantly opposed. On the size of government, Americans philosophically favor "small" -- but, as a practical matter, demand services and programs that can only be delivered by "big." And on taxes, voters agreed with Obama that the wealthy could and should pay a bit more.

"We must reject the notion that demography is destiny, the pathetic and simplistic notion that skin pigmentation dictates voter behavior," Jindal said. These are noble and stirring words. But the GOP is insane if it does not at least ask why 93 percent of African-Americans, 71 percent of Latinos and 73 percent of Asian-Americans voted for Obama over Mitt Romney.

If minority voters continue to favor the Democratic Party to this extent, then demography will indeed prove to be destiny. What would be simplistic is to attribute the disparity to the fact that Obama is the first black president, or the fact that Republicans have been perceived as so unsympathetic on issues concerning immigration. If they want to attract minority support, Republicans will have to take into account what these voters believe on a range of issues, from the proper relationship between government and the individual to the proper role of the United States in a rapidly changing world.

I have to wonder if the GOP is even getting the tactics-and-messaging part right. Michael Steele (now an MSNBC colleague of mine) served as party chairman when Republicans won a sweeping victory in 2010; he was promptly fired. Reince Priebus presided over the 2012 disaster; last week, he was rewarded with a new term as chairman.

But no matter who's in charge, the GOP will have a tough time winning national elections until it has a better understanding of the nation. If Boehner is worried about being shoved "into the dustbin of history," what he and other Republicans need to do is put down the broom.

ALEC Has Opposed “Popular Vote” Efforts Which Would Protect Against Partisan Rigging of Electoral...

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The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has actively lobbied against state plans to implement a national popular vote for president, urging state legislators to preserve the Electoral College -- which GOP legislators are now trying to rig to ensure the the next president is a Republican. In late 2011, ALEC officially changed its policy on the Electoral College to implicitly support allocating electoral votes by congressional district.

ALEC Recently Shifted Policy on Electoral College

In December 2011, ALEC reconfirmed its support for the Electoral College, but with one tweak -- official ALEC policy no longer supports allocating electoral votes based on the winner of a state's popular vote for president.

Republican leaders, including Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus, have been criticized for recent proposals to allocate electoral votes according to the victor in each Congressional district, rather than according to the winner-take-all system. This change would significantly benefit the GOP's presidential chances, in part because Republicans were able to re-draw Congressional districts to favor their party after the 2010 elections.

In Virginia, where the Republican-led legislature has taken the first step toward reallocating the state's electoral votes, Mitt Romney would have garnered nine of Virginia's electoral votes in 2012, and Obama would have won four -- despite Obama beating Romney by 150,000 votes and four percentage points in the state as a whole.

The proposals come on the heels of a 2011-2012 legislative term where Republicans proposed bills to twist the democratic system for partisan gain through restrictive voter ID and registration requirements, many of which can be traced back to ALEC "model" bills.

ALEC Has Pushed Back on National Popular Vote

Even without the proposed rigging by GOP leaders, the Electoral College is an imperfect system. The winner of the national popular vote can still lose the presidential election, which has occurred four times in American history (three times over a century ago, and most recently in 2000 after the Supreme Court intervened to put George W. Bush in the White House). Under the Electoral College, presidential campaigns focus their energies on a handful of swing states and largely ignore the rest of the country, particularly those states where a majority consistently supports one party. Votes for president don't really count from Republicans in blue states like California and Democrats in red states like Texas.

The GOP's recently-proposed changes to the Electoral College make a bad system worse, further limiting the number of voters who actually matter in presidential elections. But a bipartisan movement has been underway in recent years to replace the Electoral College's indirect election of the president with a system where the candidate who gets the most votes in all 50 states wins the presidency.

The bipartisan organization National Popular Vote (NPV) has been promoting an interstate compact where states agree to award their electoral votes to the winner of the nationwide popular vote, rather than according to votes within the state. Choosing the president by way of the Electoral College is part of the U.S. Constitution, but Article II leaves it up to state legislatures to decide how to allocate electors. Such an agreement between states would help create a more level playing field, particularly when compared to the Republican effort to split Electoral College votes in blue states but continue the "winner-take-all" method in red states.

"Our goal is to make sure every voter in every state matters equally," says Pat Rosenstiel, a Senior Consultant to NPV. Rosenstiel, who is a Republican, says that "four out of five voters are on the sidelines" under the current system, where presidential elections are decided by just a few swing states like Ohio or Florida.

Eight states and the District of Columbia have passed national popular vote compact legislation into law. A national popular vote would take effect if the legislation is enacted by enough states to constitute a majority of electors (270 out of the country's 538 electoral votes), and these nine enactments count for 132 electoral votes, bringing NPV nearly halfway to its goal of 270.

ALEC has pushed back hard against this effort. The group has adopted model resolutions in opposition to the national popular vote and in favor of the Electoral College, has repeatedly rejected appeals from NPV to support its legislation, and has actively lobbied legislators in opposition to the national popular vote interstate compact.

ALEC Lobbied Legislators to Defeat NPV

In 2007, Maryland was the first state in the country to adopt national popular vote legislation. That year, ALEC adopted its "Resolution in Opposition to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact" and its"Resolution in Support of the Electoral College."

"[T]he State of [insert state] shall defeat any legislation that creates a multi-state compact for the purpose of dismantling its current Electoral College system," the latter ALEC document provides.

NPV paid thousands of dollars to join ALEC in 2008 and encourage ALEC legislators to drop their opposition to national popular vote legislation. The group was represented at ALEC meetings by former California Sen. Ray Haynes, a Republican who was the ALEC National Chairman in 2000, as well as other representatives. But according to minutes from ALEC meetings, NPV has been repeatedly rebuffed in their efforts.

Despite ALEC's opposition, national popular vote legislation has nonetheless advanced in the states with bipartisan support. In 2008, New Jersey, Illinois, and Hawaii enacted legislation, followed by Washington in 2009 and both Massachussetts and Washington, D.C., in 2010. Legislation was enacted in California and Vermont in 2011 and proposed in multiple states that year.

ALEC spent considerable energy lobbying legislators in opposition to these bills.

"Under the National Popular Vote system, a candidate could emerge victorious from a multi-party race for president, having won only a majority of votes in one region of the country," reads an 'issue alert' sent by ALEC to legislators in Louisiana when it was considering NPV legislation. "This interstate compact is an end-run around the Constitution ... Louisiana should stick with its current system and reject the interstate compact."

Identical "issue alerts" were sent to legislators in states like AlaskaArizonaCaliforniaConnecticut,DelawareMichiganNebraskaOklahomaUtahVermont, and West Virginia.

ALEC has consistently told the IRS that it does "zero" lobbying but these "issue alerts" tell another story. These and other "issue alerts" provided support for an IRS complaint filed by Common Cause alleging ALEC actively lobbies and has misled in its IRS filings.

ALEC Change to Resolution Opened Door for Electoral Rigging

In December 2011, at the final meeting of the "Public Safety and Elections Task Force" (before it was allegedly disbanded under public pressure after CMD connected ALEC to "Stand Your Ground" laws and voter ID), NPV representative Ray Haynes proposed an overhaul of the 2007 "Resolution in Support of the Electoral College" to replace the provisions opposing the national popular vote with language supporting it.

The task force's private and public sector members -- which included state legislators and lobbyists for the NRA and other groups -- rejected all of his changes but one. Those ALEC legislators and corporate representatives amended the 2007 "Resolution in Support of the Electoral College" to eliminate this one line:

WHEREAS, the current Electoral College system ensures that (insert state)'s electoral votes are awarded based on how the majority of the State's citizens vote;

This deletion effectively changed ALEC's policy to sanction electoral votes being allocated based on Congressional district, rather than on the winner-take-all basis that has been the practice for decades.

At the time, the issue had already been placed on the political agenda. Legislators in Pennsylvania andWisconsin proposed awarding electoral votes by Congressional district in 2011 (months before the ALEC meeting), but the bills did not pass.

In 2013, ALEC members and their fellow Republicans in those states and others are again taking up proposals to rig the already-broken Electoral College in their favor -- and with the 2012 "Resolution in Support of the Electoral College" amendments, official ALEC policy implicitly supports it.

Republicans are not discussing changes to electoral allocation in solidly red states, but only in states like Virginia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan -- all states where a majority of residents voted for President Obama, but which are controlled by Republicans at the state level and whose congressional maps were recently gerrymandered to benefit the GOP. RNC Chair Priebus has said explicitly that the plan is only intended for "states that have been consistently blue that are fully controlled red." If the proposed changes for these four states had been in place during the 2012 election, Mitt Romney would have received 35 electoral votes and Obama just 23, despite Obama winning the popular vote in each state (the proposal in Virginia would allocate all electoral votes according to Congressional district, but in the other states two votes would go to the statewide winner).

Making these changes to how electoral votes are allocated "takes a bad system and makes it worse," says NPV's Rosenstiel. By shifting the fight for electoral votes from just a few swing states to just a few contested districts, "It concentrates power in the hands of even fewer voters, not more."

As for NPV and ALEC, Rosenstiel says, "our membership with ALEC has run its course."

China Just Threatened a Currency War if the Fed Doesn’t Stop Printing

The tension between Central Banks that we noted yesterday continues to worsen. This time it was China and the EU, not just Germany, that fired warning shots at the US Fed.

A senior Chinese official said on Friday that the United States should cut back on printing money to stimulate its economy if the world is to have confidence in the dollar.

Asked whether he was worried about the dollar, the chairman of China's sovereign wealth fund, the China Investment Corporation, Jin Liqun, told the World Economic Forum in Davos: "I am a little bit worried."

 

"There will be no winners in currency wars. But it is important for a central bank that the money goes to the right place," Li said.

 

Speaking at the same session, French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici voiced concern that the euro was becoming overvalued as a result of quantitative easing and other stimulus actions taken by other nations' central banks.

 

"Certainly, the level of the euro is high and creates some problem," he said, attributing the single currency's recent gains partly to the return of confidence created by the European Central Bank and euro zone governments in starting to overcome Europe's debt crisis.

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/25/us-davos-currencies-idUSBRE90O10620130125

 

So first Germany begins pulling its Gold reserves from the US, and now China and the EU are saying publicly that the Fed’s policies are damaging confidence in the US Dollar.

This does not bode well for the financial system. The primary role of Central Banks is to maintain confidence in the system. If the Central Banks begin to turn on one another it is only a matter of time before the system breaks down.

Remember, every time the Fed debases the US Dollar it forces the Euro and other currencies higher, hurting those countries’ exports. The Fed has recently announced it will be printing $85 billion every month until employment reaches 6.5% (obviously the Fed is ignoring the mountains of data that indicate QE doesn’t create jobs).

How long will the other Central Banks tolerate this before they initiate a currency war? Both Germany and China have fired warning shots at the Fed. And we all know that just beneath the veneer of goodwill, tensions are building between the primary players of the global financial system.

We offer several FREE Special Reports to help investors navigate this risks and others in the financial system. They include:

Preparing Your Portfolio For Obama’s Economic Nightmare

How to Protect Yourself From Inflation

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Turning Tide? Lawmakers Look to Pentagon for Budget Cuts

Don’t let the forces of regression dominate the media in 2013 - click here to support brave, independent reporting today by making a contribution to Truthout.

Washington, DC — As another debt-deal deadline looms this winter in Congress, an unusual alliance of lawmakers has joined forces to put the Pentagon budget under greater scrutiny and to end the almost carte blanche status it enjoyed in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In a letter last month to President Barack Obama and congressional leaders, 11 Democratic and 11 Republican lawmakers asked that Defense Department spending be put squarely on the table in the coming clashes over debt reduction.

“We believe that substantial defense savings can be achieved over the long term without compromising national security, through strategic reductions in the Pentagon’s budget,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter.

Shifting fiscal and political pressures influence the emerging congressional coalition; approval ratings have hit historic lows among Americans upset by political gridlock.

But some military experts, both analysts who favor deeper spending cuts and those who oppose them, say there are additional reasons for the re-examination: The record federal debt, now at more than $16.4 trillion, has become a crucial priority that Pentagon leaders say affects military planning. At the same time, the national urgency over anti-terrorism has subsided as the Sept. 11 attacks recede into the chronological distance; the Iraq War has ended, the Afghanistan War is winding down and anti-terror efforts shift to new strongholds such as Mali and Yemen.

Lawrence Korb, who held a senior Pentagon post under President Ronald Reagan, sees a group of unlikely partners: Democrats who want to preserve social programs, tea party-backed Republicans focused on slashing the debt and libertarians aligned with Rep. Ron Paul – the Texas Republican and 2012 presidential candidate – who generally oppose U.S. military ventures abroad.

The congressional coalition has been at the center of a movement that’s stunted defense spending since its 2010 peak of $729 billion.

“The tide has turned,” Korb said.

First came the 2011 Budget Control Act, which imposed $487 billion in Pentagon funding cuts over a decade. It also directed Congress to find an additional $500 billion in reductions or accept forced across-the-board 8.6 percent cuts amounting to that total, now slated to start March 1.

Then, last July, the House of Representatives comfortably approved a one-year freeze on defense spending, with 89 Republicans joining 158 Democrats in voting for it. While the moratorium didn’t become law, it sent a signal that bipartisan resistance to unbridled military funding was rising.

Rep. Mick Mulvaney, a South Carolina Republican who helped spearhead the bipartisan letter, said it was intellectually dishonest for his party to protect the Pentagon while taking the knife to other large federal agencies.

“It undermines Republicans’ credibility on spending issues if we’re not willing to also look at the defense budget for possible savings,” said Mulvaney, who’s just starting his second term. “It’s hard to go home and say that we want to cut everything but not cut a penny on defense. People don’t believe that. More and more Republicans are willing to talk about this openly now.”

While the lawmakers who wrote last month’s letter have yet to get a response, the broader movement they represent alarms some defense analysts, who fear the pushback against military spending may go too far.

“By the time the Obama administration and Congress are done, we won’t have a big enough military to do what we need to do to remain a global power,” Thomas Donnelly, an analyst with the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute in Washington, told McClatchy.

“A lot of people who are in favor of cutting the Pentagon budget want to see the United States play a lesser role in the world,” Donnelly said.

Korb, though, said the Pentagon could easily absorb an additional $500 billion in cuts over a decade, which he said would take its budget down to 2007 levels when adjusted for inflation. He’d like to see Obama, lawmakers and top military brass find the cuts instead of having them indiscriminately imposed across the board.

“The defense budget went up so rapidly, they didn’t have to make any hard choices,” said Korb, who’s now a national security analyst at the liberal Center for American Progress in Washington. “They had waste like I’ve never seen. They spent $50 billion on weapons that they then canceled. Their cost overruns on new weapons systems were $400 billion to $500 billion.”

Korb said the last time Congress had forced significant cuts in military spending was during Reagan’s second term, after passage of the 1985 Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget Act, following a large surge in Pentagon funding that the late president had championed to counter the Soviet Union.

Rep. Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat who joined Mulvaney in leading the effort, said the major defense contractors made it difficult for lawmakers to back military spending cuts by spreading subcontractors and suppliers for huge weapons systems such as the F-35 fighter jet across virtually every state.

“Members (of Congress) don’t evaluate the need for weapons systems in terms of national security,” Ellison said. “They’re worried about families coming up to them and asking why they’re cutting jobs.”

Mulvaney cited Republican President Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings about the growing might of “the military-industrial complex” in the former World War II commander’s January 1961 farewell address.

“It is a problem for Republicans who think that defense spending creates jobs but other government spending doesn’t create jobs,” Mulvaney said. “That opens us up to charges of hypocrisy, and rightly so. We’re selective in our Keynesian philosophy.”

Keynesian economists, following the late John Maynard Keynes’ ideas, believe that government intervention is often necessary for sustained growth, especially during recessions and other economic downturns.

Some independent studies have indicated that Pentagon funding of big weapons systems has diminishing returns when it comes to job creation.

Total federal money to the five biggest defense contractors – Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon – increased by 10 percent from 2006 to 2011. But their combined number of employees dropped by 3 percent during the same period, according to a report last year by the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group in Washington.

The Pentagon budget rose from $421 billion in 2001 – that inflation-adjusted figure is in current dollars – to $711 billion in 2011, a 69 percent hike. The increases were used mainly to finance the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and other anti-terror initiatives.

The defense budget fell to $656 billion last year, mainly because of the cuts in the 2011 Budget Control Act.

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars alone cost $1.4 trillion in the decade after the Sept. 11 attacks, with annual expenditures now declining thanks to the exit of most U.S. troops from Iraq and the ongoing drawdown in Afghanistan.

In last fall’s presidential campaign, Republican nominee Mitt Romney criticized Obama’s proposed future Pentagon funding levels and called for billions of dollars in new military spending.

Now some Republican senators have challenged Obama’s choice of former Sen. Chuck Hagel, himself a Republican, as defense secretary because of Hagel’s past opposition to the Iraq War and his recent calls for major decreases in Pentagon funding.

And lawmakers of both parties – especially those who represent heavy military states – warn of disastrous impacts on national security if the more than $500 billion in military cuts over 10 years proceeds under the forced spending reductions scheduled to begin March 1.

Rep. Tom McClintock, a California Republican who signed the Mulvaney-Ellison letter, said some calls for greater defense spending had baffled him.

“I’ve never understood why we continue to defend Europe from Russia more than two decades after the Soviet Union collapsed,” McClintock said. “We’re spending considerably more today, even inflation-adjusted, than we spent at the height of the Vietnam War, when we were facing down the Soviet Union and had 500,000 combat troops in the field.”

McClintock said the need to reduce the federal debt had made trimming military costs a necessity.

“Before you can provide for the common defense, you have to be able to pay for it. The ability of our country to do so is coming into grave doubt.”

Demand Progress Commends House Oversight Committee’s Call for DOJ Briefing About Aaron Swartz Prosecution

WASHINGTON - January 29 - Demand Progress is praising the leadership of the House Oversight Committee -- Representatives Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Elijah Cummings (D-MD) -- for demanding a briefing from the Department of Justice on the prosecution of De...

Demand Progress Commends House Oversight Committee’s Call for DOJ Briefing About Aaron Swartz Prosecution

WASHINGTON - January 29 - Demand Progress is praising the leadership of the House Oversight Committee -- Representatives Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Elijah Cummings (D-MD) -- for demanding a briefing from the Department of Justice on the prosecution of De...

ACLU Urges Congress to Pass Paycheck Fairness Act

WASHINGTON - January 29 - On the fourth anniversary of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the American Civil Liberties Union is urging members of Congress to support and pass the Paycheck Fairness Act (S. 84/H.R. 377) – the next step in the fight for pay equity. Its reintroduction by Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) and Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) comes on the heels of President Obama’s inaugural speech highlighting equal pay for women as a priority for his next term.

Signed four years ago today by President Obama, the Ledbetter Act restored the law to ensure that the time limit for bringing pay discrimination claims would renew with each discriminatory paycheck, thereby giving women a reasonable amount of time to file after learning of discrimination. The Paycheck Fairness Act, on the other hand, which updates and strengthens the Equal Pay Act of 1963, would give women the tools they need to challenge the wage gap itself.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, women who work full time, on average, earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn. Women of color fare far worse, with African American women earning 64 cents and Latinas 55 cents for each dollar earned by a white man.

“Fifty years after the signing of the Equal Pay Act, unacceptable disparities in what men and women earn for the same work persists,” said Deborah J. Vagins, Senior Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office and Co-Chair of the National Paycheck Fairness Coalition. “In addition, many workers can still be fired for asking about their wages at work. In fact, Lilly Ledbetter worked at a company where employees could not share wage information. The Paycheck Fairness Act would give workers the help they need to be treated fairly, including strengthening remedies for discrimination against women and protecting employees’ jobs when they seek information about their wages. If you don’t know about discrimination, you can’t do anything about it. This ongoing injustice is particularly troubling when you consider that nearly 40 percent of women are primary breadwinners in their households.”

If Congress does not move the Paycheck Fairness Act forward, the ACLU urges the President to sign an Executive Order that would protect people employed by federal contractors from retaliation for disclosing or asking about their wages.

For additional information, read our factsheet on the Paycheck Fairness Act, letter to Members of Congress in support of the Paycheck Fairness Act, and letter to President Obama on an Executive Order on retaliation against wage disclosure.

9/11 trial censorship? Gitmo court feed cut

(L-R) Ramzi, Walid bin Attash and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, three of the alleged conspirators in the 9/11 attacks, attend court dressed in camouflage during hearings in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba January 28, 2013 in this Pentagon-approved court sketch (Reuters / Janet Hamlin)

(L-R) Ramzi, Walid bin Attash and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, three of the alleged conspirators in the 9/11 attacks, attend court dressed in camouflage during hearings in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba January 28, 2013 in this Pentagon-approved court sketch (Reuters / Janet Hamlin)

The first day of a pretrial hearing for five men accused of plotting the September 11 attacks was swirling with intrigue on Monday after the audio feed at a Guantanamo war crimes court was abruptly cut off.

The incident prompted the military judge to ask whether someone outside the courtroom was censoring the hearing.

Observers were listening to the trial behind a glass window when the feed was suddenly cut. The audio went silent when David Nevin, a lawyer for Khalid Sheik Mohammed – the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks – asked if the lawyers and judges needed to meet in closed session before considering a request by the defense.

In previous hearings for alleged Al-Qaeda operatives sentenced to CIA prisons, a court security officer controlled a button which muffled audio to spectators when secret information was disclosed. During the censoring process, a red light flashes and observers hear nothing but static.

But that wasn’t the case this time around, as the judge’s reaction made clear once the sound was restored moments later.

"If some external body is turning things off, if someone is turning the commissions off under their own views of what things ought to be, with no reason or explanation, then we are going to have a little meeting about who turns that light on or off," Army Colonel James Pohl told the courtroom.

Pohl seemed to be addressing the prosecution team, saying that Nevin had only referred to the caption of an unclassified document asking the judge to preserve as evidence the secret CIA prisons where the defendants say they were tortured, Reuters reported.

Nevin and the other defense attorneys said they wanted to know whether there was a third party monitoring the proceedings, and whether that entity could be listening to private communications between the lawyers and their clients, the Washington Post reported.

Justice Department lawyer Joanna Baltes said she could explain the reason behind the audio cut – but not in public. Pohl said he would meet in closed session with the lawyers and reopen the public part of the hearing on Tuesday. If the reason behind the cut could be explained to the public, he would do so then.

Mohammed and his four co-defendants are accused of training and aiding the hijackers who flew commercial airliners into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field on September 11, 2001.

They could be sentenced to death if convicted on charges including terrorism, attacking civilians and murdering 2,976 people.

The men were among the suspected Al-Qaeda captives who were moved across borders without judicial review, and held and interrogated in secret CIA prisons overseas during the presidency of George W. Bush.

The CIA has acknowledged that Mohammed was subjected to the controversial interrogation practice known as waterboarding. The defendants also claimed they were subjected to threats, sleep deprivation and being chained in painful positions.

The defense lawyers have argued that the CIA’s treatment of the defendants constituted illegal pretrial punishment, and “outrageous government misconduct” that could justify dismissal of the charges, or at the very least spare the defendants from execution if convicted.

There are currently 166 detainees at Guantanamo Bay detention camp, including Mohammed. In 2009, US President Barack Obama ordered the prison to be shut within a year. However, it is still open and operational.

Guantanamo remaining open is yet another example of Congress overpowering the president – the prison was bundled together with the National Defense Authorization Act, which serves as the overall US defense budget. Obama has the power to veto the entire act, but not to individually challenge the administration of Guantanamo Bay.

Obama has threatened such a veto several times, but backed down on every occasion.

Failed Filibuster Reform Threatens Legislative Agenda

Despite Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (Nev) repeated pronouncements that the Republican stranglehold on the Senate’s filibuster could no longer be tolerated, that is exactly the final outcome of recent reform efforts. With the success of important Obama legislative initiatives like depending on a Democratic Senate for enactment, what was Harry Reid thinking? Reid’s stunning flip in favor of retaining the most egregious elements of the Republican filibuster clearly jeopardizes the President’s legislative agenda.

Since the 2010 Congressional election when Senate Democrats lost their 60th vote to Scott Brown of Massachusetts, the minority Republicans played hardball requiring a 60 vote majority to bring any legislation to the Senate floor for a vote. Even with a clear advantage of 59 – 41 votes, Senate Democrats remained inexplicably unable to assert their legislative resolve as the business of running the government fell into disarray and public support for Congress dropped to historic lows.

As recently as the day after the 2012 election which kept the Senate majority in Democratic hands (56-44), Reid indicated that the filibuster rules were being abused by Republicans and that he would act to change them. With that encouragement, reform-minded Senators Tom Udall (NM) and Jeff Merkley (Ore) took up the banner as they had two years ago to require that any Senator who wanted to filibuster a bill must personally appear on the Senate floor to defend their filibuster and to inform the country why their filibuster was needed to stop what they considered to be an ill-conceived act. The current rules allow any Senator to ‘hold’ a bill without having to be publicly identified or to provide any explanation for that hold.

Yet given public anger at Congressional gridlock and the Senate’s inability to function as Republicans brazenly brought public business to a near-halt, last week Reid formalized a “gentlemen’s agreement” with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky) by stating that he was “not ready to get rid of the 60 vote threshold.”

What is unfathomable is Reid’s disregard for improving the Senate’s stature or making it an efficient, effective legislative body to assure passage of the President’s most important legislative issues. Yet to be explained is why the Udall-Merkley proposal could not muster a simple majority of 51 Democratic votes for adoption or why every Democrat in the Senate voted (86-9) to adopt the Reid McConnell watered -down ‘reform.’ Only Senator Bernie Sanders (Vt) and 8 ultra-conservative Republicans were in opposition. It is with no small irony that the vote to continue the requirement for a Super-Majority of 60 votes was adopted with the requirement of 60 votes.

Even as Republicans remain mired in a disconnect from political reality and despite reports of a bi-partisan agreement on an immigration reform ‘blueprint’, there is little reason to expect that the party of Lincoln will not continue to effectively stonewall every reasonable legislative initiative addressing the country’s most critical problems. And as Senate Democrats continue to stumble into an era of lost principles, there will be no one to blame but themselves.

Renee Parsons

Renee Parsons was a lobbyist for Friends of the Earth in Washington, D.C. focusing on nuclear energy issues. While at FOE, she was responsible for a TRO that stopped the Dept of Energy from conducting an experimental drilling program at 12 locations along the perimeter of Canyonlands National Park as a possible high-level nuclear waste repository. Her efforts included opposing the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and organizing the coalition that successfully defunded the Clinch River Breeder Reactor. She also served as staff in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2005, she was elected to the Durango City Council (Colorado) and served four years as Councilor and Mayor.

Failed Filibuster Reform Threatens Legislative Agenda

Despite Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (Nev) repeated pronouncements that the Republican stranglehold on the Senate’s filibuster could no longer be tolerated, that is exactly the final outcome of recent reform efforts. With the success of important Obama legislative initiatives like depending on a Democratic Senate for enactment, what was Harry Reid thinking? Reid’s stunning flip in favor of retaining the most egregious elements of the Republican filibuster clearly jeopardizes the President’s legislative agenda.

Since the 2010 Congressional election when Senate Democrats lost their 60th vote to Scott Brown of Massachusetts, the minority Republicans played hardball requiring a 60 vote majority to bring any legislation to the Senate floor for a vote. Even with a clear advantage of 59 – 41 votes, Senate Democrats remained inexplicably unable to assert their legislative resolve as the business of running the government fell into disarray and public support for Congress dropped to historic lows.

As recently as the day after the 2012 election which kept the Senate majority in Democratic hands (56-44), Reid indicated that the filibuster rules were being abused by Republicans and that he would act to change them. With that encouragement, reform-minded Senators Tom Udall (NM) and Jeff Merkley (Ore) took up the banner as they had two years ago to require that any Senator who wanted to filibuster a bill must personally appear on the Senate floor to defend their filibuster and to inform the country why their filibuster was needed to stop what they considered to be an ill-conceived act. The current rules allow any Senator to ‘hold’ a bill without having to be publicly identified or to provide any explanation for that hold.

Yet given public anger at Congressional gridlock and the Senate’s inability to function as Republicans brazenly brought public business to a near-halt, last week Reid formalized a “gentlemen’s agreement” with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky) by stating that he was “not ready to get rid of the 60 vote threshold.”

What is unfathomable is Reid’s disregard for improving the Senate’s stature or making it an efficient, effective legislative body to assure passage of the President’s most important legislative issues. Yet to be explained is why the Udall-Merkley proposal could not muster a simple majority of 51 Democratic votes for adoption or why every Democrat in the Senate voted (86-9) to adopt the Reid McConnell watered -down ‘reform.’ Only Senator Bernie Sanders (Vt) and 8 ultra-conservative Republicans were in opposition. It is with no small irony that the vote to continue the requirement for a Super-Majority of 60 votes was adopted with the requirement of 60 votes.

Even as Republicans remain mired in a disconnect from political reality and despite reports of a bi-partisan agreement on an immigration reform ‘blueprint’, there is little reason to expect that the party of Lincoln will not continue to effectively stonewall every reasonable legislative initiative addressing the country’s most critical problems. And as Senate Democrats continue to stumble into an era of lost principles, there will be no one to blame but themselves.

Renee Parsons

Renee Parsons was a lobbyist for Friends of the Earth in Washington, D.C. focusing on nuclear energy issues. While at FOE, she was responsible for a TRO that stopped the Dept of Energy from conducting an experimental drilling program at 12 locations along the perimeter of Canyonlands National Park as a possible high-level nuclear waste repository. Her efforts included opposing the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and organizing the coalition that successfully defunded the Clinch River Breeder Reactor. She also served as staff in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2005, she was elected to the Durango City Council (Colorado) and served four years as Councilor and Mayor.

The Non Zero-Sum Society: How the Rich Are Destroying the US Economy

As President Obama said in his inaugural address last week, America “cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.”

Yet that continues to be the direction we’re heading in.

 A newly-released analysis by the Economic Policy Institute shows that the super-rich have done well in the economic recovery while almost everyone else has done badly. The top 1 percent of earners’ real wages grew 8.2 percent from 2009 to 2011, yet the real annual wages of Americans in the bottom 90 percent have continued to decline in the recovery, eroding by 1.2 percent between 2009 and 2011.

In other words, we’re back to the widening inequality we had before the debt bubble burst in 2008 and the economy crashed.

But the President is exactly right. Not even the very wealthy can continue to succeed without a broader-based prosperity. That’s because 70 percent of economic activity in America is consumer spending. If the bottom 90 percent of Americans are becoming poorer, they’re less able to spend. Without their spending, the economy can’t get out of first gear. 

That’s a big reason why the recovery continues to be anemic, and why the International Monetary Fund just lowered its estimate for U.S. growth in 2013 to just 2 percent. 

Almost a quarter of all jobs in America now pay wages below the poverty line for a family of four. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates 7 out of 10 growth occupations over the next decade will be low-wage — like serving customers at big-box retailers and fast-food chains.

It’s not a zero-sum game. Wealthy Americans would do better with smaller shares of a rapidly-growing economy than with the large shares they now possess of an economy that’s barely moving.

At this rate, who’s going to buy all the goods and services America is capable of producing? We can’t return to the kind of debt-financed consumption that caused the bubble in the first place.

Get it? It’s not a zero-sum game. Wealthy Americans would do better with smaller shares of a rapidly-growing economy than with the large shares they now possess of an economy that’s barely moving.

If they were rational, the wealthy would support public investments in education and job-training, a world-class infrastructure (transportation, water and sewage, energy, internet), and basic research – all of which would make the American workforce more productive.

If they were rational they’d even support labor unions – which have proven the best means of giving working people a fair share in the nation’s prosperity.

But labor unions are almost extinct.

The decline of labor unions in America tracks exactly the decline in the bottom 90 percent’s share of total earnings, and shrinkage of the middle class.

In the 1950s, when the U.S. economy was growing faster than 3 percent a year, more than a third of all working people belonged to a union. That gave them enough bargaining clout to get wages that allowed them to buy what the economy was capable of producing.

Since the late 1970s, unions have eroded – as has the purchasing power of most Americans, and not coincidentally, the average annual growth of the economy.

Last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics  reported that as of 2012 only 6.6 percent of workers in the private sector were unionized. (That’s down from 6.9 percent in 2011.) That’s the lowest rate of unionization in almost a century.

What’s to blame? Partly globalization and technological change. Globalization sent many unionized manufacturing plants abroad.

Manufacturing is starting to return to America but it’s returning without many jobs. The old assembly line has been replaced by robotics and numerically-controlled machine tools.

Technologies have also replaced many formerly unionized workers in telecommunications (remember telephone operators?) and clerical jobs.

But wait. Other nations subject to the same forces have far higher levels of unionization than America. 28 percent of Canada’s workforce is unionized, as is more than 25 percent of Britain’s, and almost 20 percent of Germany’s.

Unions are almost extinct in America because we’ve chosen to make them extinct.

Unlike other rich nations, our labor laws allow employers to replace striking workers. We’ve also made it exceedingly difficult for workers to organize, and we barely penalized companies that violate labor laws. (A worker who’s illegally fired for trying to organize a union may, if lucky, get the job back along with back pay – after years of legal haggling.)

Republicans, in particular, have set out to kill off unions. Union membership dropped 13 percent last year in Wisconsin, which in 2011 curbed the collective bargaining rights of many public employees. And it fell 18 percent last year in Indiana, which last February enacted a right-to-work law (allowing employees at unionized workplaces to get all the benefits of unionization without paying for them). Last month Michigan enacted a similar law.

Don’t blame globalization and technological change for why employees at Walmart, America’s largest employer, still don’t have a union.

Don’t blame globalization and technological change for why employees at Walmart, America’s largest employer, still don’t have a union. They’re not in global competition and their jobs aren’t directly threatened by technology.

The average pay of a Walmart worker is $8.81 an hour. A third of Walmart’s employees work less than 28 hours per week and don’t qualify for benefits.

Walmart is a microcosm of the American economy. It has brazenly fought off unions. But it could easily afford to pay its workers more. It earned $16 billion last year. Much of that sum went to Walmart’s shareholders, including the family of its founder, Sam Walton.

The wealth of the Walton family now exceeds the wealth of the bottom 40 percent of American families combined, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.

But how can Walmart expect to continue to show fat profits when most of its customers are on a downward economic escalator?

Walmart should be unionized. So should McDonalds. So should every major big-box retailer and fast-food outlet in the nation. So should every hospital in America.

That way, more Americans would have enough money in their pockets to get the economy moving. And everyone – even the very rich – would benefit.

As Obama said, America cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Robert Reich

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.

The Non Zero-Sum Society: How the Rich Are Destroying the US Economy

As President Obama said in his inaugural address last week, America “cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.”

Yet that continues to be the direction we’re heading in.

 A newly-released analysis by the Economic Policy Institute shows that the super-rich have done well in the economic recovery while almost everyone else has done badly. The top 1 percent of earners’ real wages grew 8.2 percent from 2009 to 2011, yet the real annual wages of Americans in the bottom 90 percent have continued to decline in the recovery, eroding by 1.2 percent between 2009 and 2011.

In other words, we’re back to the widening inequality we had before the debt bubble burst in 2008 and the economy crashed.

But the President is exactly right. Not even the very wealthy can continue to succeed without a broader-based prosperity. That’s because 70 percent of economic activity in America is consumer spending. If the bottom 90 percent of Americans are becoming poorer, they’re less able to spend. Without their spending, the economy can’t get out of first gear. 

That’s a big reason why the recovery continues to be anemic, and why the International Monetary Fund just lowered its estimate for U.S. growth in 2013 to just 2 percent. 

Almost a quarter of all jobs in America now pay wages below the poverty line for a family of four. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates 7 out of 10 growth occupations over the next decade will be low-wage — like serving customers at big-box retailers and fast-food chains.

It’s not a zero-sum game. Wealthy Americans would do better with smaller shares of a rapidly-growing economy than with the large shares they now possess of an economy that’s barely moving.

At this rate, who’s going to buy all the goods and services America is capable of producing? We can’t return to the kind of debt-financed consumption that caused the bubble in the first place.

Get it? It’s not a zero-sum game. Wealthy Americans would do better with smaller shares of a rapidly-growing economy than with the large shares they now possess of an economy that’s barely moving.

If they were rational, the wealthy would support public investments in education and job-training, a world-class infrastructure (transportation, water and sewage, energy, internet), and basic research – all of which would make the American workforce more productive.

If they were rational they’d even support labor unions – which have proven the best means of giving working people a fair share in the nation’s prosperity.

But labor unions are almost extinct.

The decline of labor unions in America tracks exactly the decline in the bottom 90 percent’s share of total earnings, and shrinkage of the middle class.

In the 1950s, when the U.S. economy was growing faster than 3 percent a year, more than a third of all working people belonged to a union. That gave them enough bargaining clout to get wages that allowed them to buy what the economy was capable of producing.

Since the late 1970s, unions have eroded – as has the purchasing power of most Americans, and not coincidentally, the average annual growth of the economy.

Last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics  reported that as of 2012 only 6.6 percent of workers in the private sector were unionized. (That’s down from 6.9 percent in 2011.) That’s the lowest rate of unionization in almost a century.

What’s to blame? Partly globalization and technological change. Globalization sent many unionized manufacturing plants abroad.

Manufacturing is starting to return to America but it’s returning without many jobs. The old assembly line has been replaced by robotics and numerically-controlled machine tools.

Technologies have also replaced many formerly unionized workers in telecommunications (remember telephone operators?) and clerical jobs.

But wait. Other nations subject to the same forces have far higher levels of unionization than America. 28 percent of Canada’s workforce is unionized, as is more than 25 percent of Britain’s, and almost 20 percent of Germany’s.

Unions are almost extinct in America because we’ve chosen to make them extinct.

Unlike other rich nations, our labor laws allow employers to replace striking workers. We’ve also made it exceedingly difficult for workers to organize, and we barely penalized companies that violate labor laws. (A worker who’s illegally fired for trying to organize a union may, if lucky, get the job back along with back pay – after years of legal haggling.)

Republicans, in particular, have set out to kill off unions. Union membership dropped 13 percent last year in Wisconsin, which in 2011 curbed the collective bargaining rights of many public employees. And it fell 18 percent last year in Indiana, which last February enacted a right-to-work law (allowing employees at unionized workplaces to get all the benefits of unionization without paying for them). Last month Michigan enacted a similar law.

Don’t blame globalization and technological change for why employees at Walmart, America’s largest employer, still don’t have a union.

Don’t blame globalization and technological change for why employees at Walmart, America’s largest employer, still don’t have a union. They’re not in global competition and their jobs aren’t directly threatened by technology.

The average pay of a Walmart worker is $8.81 an hour. A third of Walmart’s employees work less than 28 hours per week and don’t qualify for benefits.

Walmart is a microcosm of the American economy. It has brazenly fought off unions. But it could easily afford to pay its workers more. It earned $16 billion last year. Much of that sum went to Walmart’s shareholders, including the family of its founder, Sam Walton.

The wealth of the Walton family now exceeds the wealth of the bottom 40 percent of American families combined, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.

But how can Walmart expect to continue to show fat profits when most of its customers are on a downward economic escalator?

Walmart should be unionized. So should McDonalds. So should every major big-box retailer and fast-food outlet in the nation. So should every hospital in America.

That way, more Americans would have enough money in their pockets to get the economy moving. And everyone – even the very rich – would benefit.

As Obama said, America cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Robert Reich

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.

Wilkerson: Why Hagel is a Good Choice

Context: As yet there are no context links for this item.

Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore. And welcome to this week's edition of The Wilkerson Report with Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson.

Larry Wilkerson was the former chief of staff for U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. He's currently an adjunct professor of government at the College of William & Mary and a regular contributor to The Real News. Thanks for joining us.COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON, FMR. CHIEF OF STAFF TO COLIN POWELL: Thanks for having me, Paul.JAY: So I've been wanting to ask you about this for a couple of weeks now. What do you make of President Obama's nomination of Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense?WILKERSON: I think the president has made a pretty astute move putting John Kerry in the State Department and, hopefully, Chuck Hagel in the Department of Defense. He's covered his bases, so to speak, with national security issues with Chuck Hagel's appointment, and he's done the same thing with John Kerry at State. Both have almost unimpeachable credentials with regard to national security policy, and so I think it's a good move on both counts.JAY: Now, he had to know that this was going to infuriate, first of all, one gentleman named Netanyahu, AIPAC and such, and the whole neocon constituency, 'cause, I mean, Chuck Hagel became a very strong critic of the Iraq War, and he's been very unwilling to jump on board sort of hysteria about Iran, and they don't like that.WILKERSON: That's true. I like it a great deal, and I think 60 to 70 percent of Americans will appreciate it also, because that group of Americans, who constitute the bulk of Americans, of course, are not interested in another war in the Middle East, a war which would probably be catastrophic, as former secretary of defense Robert Gates called it. And so I think President Obama has made a move that is in line with his electoral mandate. After all, he won for another four years. And he's selecting people whose views more or less reflect the views of a majority of Americans.JAY: But why are they so antagonistic to Hagel? I mean, he is a Republican. He caucused with them. They know him well. But they're really pulling out their guns.WILKERSON: That's the problem—they do know him well, just as they knew George Voinovich of Ohio well and Olympia Snowe and others—Susan Collins, and other Republicans who are of the—what I shall call the Nelson Rockefeller framework or the Lawrence Wilkerson framework or the Colin Powell framework. They're people who think critically. They're people who are interested in the national outcome of this country's efforts in the world, both foreign and domestic. They're people who believe in allies, believe in friends, believe in talking and acting diplomatically with enemies or potential enemies. They're sane people, in other words. I don't know, Paul, but you may have checked the Republican Party lately. It's got a lot of crazy people in it. It's got a lot of extremists in it. That's why they lost the election. That's why they'll lose the next election if they don't correct their problems. So I'm wonderful with this idea that we've got some Republicans who [are] moderate in their outlook and who are nonetheless going to be in positions of power.JAY: Now, I mean, the group that seems to really be opposing it is sort of not the kind of Tea Party types; it's the old-guard neocon foreign policy guys, you know, Lindsey Graham and his gang of people, I guess the old Bush gang Karl Rove type people. What is it about Hagel? What has he done specifically that they're so worried about?WILKERSON: It's the John Boltons, it's the Douglas Feiths, it's the Elliott Cohens, its others who believe that American military power should be used almost as the sole instrument of American policy. And they're irritated because Chuck Hagel doesn't believe that way. They're irritated because in the past Hagel has shown that he has a very balanced view towards the Israeli-Palestinian issue, that he knows all the guilt isn't on the Palestinian and Arab side, that some of it's on the Israeli side.He's very balanced on the Iran issue. That is to say, he believes diplomacy should run its full course before any option looking like military force is turned to. [snip] also a person who understands, I think, that we are frittering away our military power on the fringes of our empire, and that that's the way empires in the past have gone the route of the dodo. And he doesn't want the American enterprise to go that way. So he's very concerned about our getting our economic house in order, the ultimate bastion/foundation of our power in the world in general, and very [inaud.] in getting our foreign policy issues straight so that we don't further diminish the ability of our domestic scene to correct itself.We've got a lot of work to do in this country, rebuilding infrastructure, addressing climate change, coming up with alternative energy sources, and leading the world, more or less, in this effort, so at the same time we restore our economic power while we're leading the world in a way that will be sustainable to the end of this century. These are huge challenges confronting us. And only now do I see, you know, these brief inklings of recognition of some of these challenges beginning to blossom in the White House, maybe even in that Luddite group of congressmen, many of whom deny that global warming and climate change is even changing.So the challenges that are confronting us are huge, and we don't need people who are so focused on what the neocons are focused on in positions of power. And I'm delighted to see people who have a wider vista and a more moderate approach to foreign and security policy in ministerial positions. It's—this is a great change.JAY: Now, you once gave a speech—I think it was at the Samuel Adams awards that we taped that year, and you said that there's kind of two roads here for people in positions of power who look at the current American empire. You said that there's a fact here, which is the empire is going to come to an end over the next few decades, but sooner than later, and it can either manage that, where United States becomes a kind of a—more of a coequal player in the global scene, or you can manage it in a way that you kind of strike out and make, you know, every attempt to defend something that can't be defended, and that gets very dangerous. What does Hagel's appointment tell you, not so much about him, but even more about President Obama in that context?WILKERSON: I hope it tells me that he's beginning to show he recognizes some of these long-term and far more serious challenges, for example, than Iran. Whether Iran has a nuclear weapon or not, it pales in significance when confronted with some of these other challenges.Richard Haass has a new book that's coming out, Foreign Policy Begins at Home, and in that book I'm sure Richard is going to talk about how we need desperately to repair our home ground in order to have any hope of having an effective foreign and security policy. I think Senator Hagel believes that. I think Senator Kerry believes that. I hope—I hope—that President Obama believes that. [snip] no question about it. There are going to be 3 billion people, many of them in India and China, who are going to come into the middle class and are going to want the standard of living that that connotes.What we're talking about is six to nine planets' worth of resources just to satisfy those desires. We don't have those six to nine planets' worth of resources. So we'd best get busy building the kind of sustainable, the kind of regenerative agriculture, for example, that goes along with that sustainability, and building the kind of infrastructure, technologically and otherwise, that can accommodate this new, massive entry into the middle class, or we're going to have by 2050 nothing but war and anarchy and chaos and, I'm sorry to say, probably a whole lot of death.JAY: So when you assess these personalities—President Obama, Hagel, Kerry—the question comes up about how much they can, even if they do believe in a more rational foreign policy—. And I take your point: I think at least the appointment of Hagel says something about Obama vis-à-vis Iran, that he's not wanting to jump on the go to war with Iran bandwagon. But if you look at Kerry, I mean, Kerry began as this critic of Vietnam, but seems to come, like, full circle—or half a circle, maybe not full circle, 'cause he's not back to being the critic—I mean, this is the guy that said, even if he knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he'd still vote for supporting it. But he's even going further than some of the Republicans and others that voted at the time.WILKERSON: I think it's mostly an effort to shore up what (at least until, maybe one can say, the killing of bin Laden) had been very, very weak foundation for the Democrats on national security. I know for someone who knows about Harry Truman, FDR, and all that they represented in those times, that seems nonsensical, but let's face it. Since George McGovern and his run for the presidency in—what was it?—1968, I guess, the Democrats have really had problems bolstering their national security bona fides. They've had a tremendous problem competing with the Republicans in the realm of national security.And I think that accounts for some of the more, shall we say, out-of-character remarks from time to time from Democrats, because they're trying to reestablish those bona fides. And in a time of post-9/11, it's a very critical thing, politically, for some of them to do. So I think that accounts for some of the more bellicose remarks, if you will, coming from people like John Kerry. I hope it doesn't represent a change in his basic outlook, because the basic outlook is that military force should be the last, the absolute last resort after you have exhausted political, economic, financial, diplomatic, informational, cultural, and all other aspects of national power. Military power should only be the last resort.JAY: Alright. Thanks for joining us, Larry.WILKERSON: Thanks for having me, Paul.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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The Setting Sun and the American Empire

The euphemisms will come fast and furious.  Our soldiers will be greeted as “heroes” who, as in Iraq, left with their “heads held high,” and if in 2014 or 2015 or even 2019, the last of them, as also in Iraq, slip away in the dark of night after lying to their Afghan “allies” about their plans, few here will notice.Sunset in Afghanistan.

This will be the nature of the great Afghan drawdown. The words “retreat,” “loss,” “defeat,”  “disaster,” and their siblings and cousins won’t be allowed on the premises.  But make no mistake, the country that, only years ago, liked to call itself the globe’s “sole superpower” or even “hyperpower,” whose leaders dreamed of a Pax Americana across the Greater Middle East, if not the rest of the globe is… not to put too fine a point on it, packing its bags, throwing in the towel, quietly admitting—in actions, if not in words —to mission unaccomplished, and heading if not exactly home, at least boot by boot off the Eurasian landmass.

Washington has, in a word, had enough. Too much, in fact.  It’s lost its appetite for invasions and occupations of Eurasia, though special operations raids, drone wars, and cyberwars still look deceptively cheap and easy as a means to control... well, whatever.  As a result, the Afghan drawdown of 2013-2014, that implicit acknowledgement of yet another lost war, should set the curtain falling on the American Century as we’ve known it.  It should be recognized as a landmark, the moment in history when the sun truly began to set on a great empire.  Here in the United States, though, one thing is just about guaranteed: not many are going to be paying the slightest attention.

No one even thinks to ask the question: In the mighty battle lost, who exactly beat us?  Where exactly is the triumphant enemy?  Perhaps we should be relieved that the question is not being raised, because it’s a hard one to answer.  Could it really have been the scattered jihadis of al-Qaeda and its wannabes?  Or the various modestly armed Sunni and Shiite minority insurgencies in Iraq, or their Pashtun equivalents in Afghanistan with their suicide bombers and low-tech roadside bombs?  Or was it something more basic, something having to do with a planet no longer amenable to imperial expeditions?  Did the local and global body politic simply and mysteriously spit us out as the distasteful thing we had become?  Or is it even possible, as Pogo once suggested, that in those distant, unwelcoming lands, we met the enemy and he was us?  Did we in some bizarre fashion fight ourselves and lose?  After all, last year, more American servicemen died from suicide than on the battlefield in Afghanistan; and a startling number of Americans were killed in “green on blue” or “insider” attacks by Afghan “allies” rather than by that fragmented movement we still call the Taliban. 

Whoever or whatever was responsible, our Afghan disaster was remarkably foreseeable.  In fact, anyone who, from 2006 on, read Ann Jones’s Afghan reports at TomDispatch wouldn’t have had a doubt about the outcome of the war. Her first piece, after all, was prophetically entitled “Why It’s Not Working in Afghanistan.” (“The answer is a threefold failure: no peace, no democracy, and no reconstruction.”)  From Western private-contractors-cum- looters making a figurative killing off the “reconstruction” of the country to an Afghan army that was largely a figment of the American imagination to up-armored U.S. soldiers on well-guarded bases whose high-tech equipment and comforts of home blinded them to the nature of the enemy, hers has long been a tale of impending failure.  Now, that war seems headed for its predictable end, not for the Afghans who, as Jones indicates in her latest sweeping report from Kabul, may face terrible years ahead, but for the U.S.  After more than 11 years, the war that is often labeled the longest in American history is slowly winding down and that’s no small thing.

So leave the mystery of who beat us to the historians, but mark the moment. It’s historic.

© 2012 TomDispatch.com

Tom Engelhardt

WATCH: Bad Lip Reading Beyoncé’s Inauguration Performance

The Bad Lip Reading team have already given us their take on President Obama's second inauguration - including Beyoncé's rendition of 'The Star-Spangled Banner'.

But now, they've tackled Ms Knowle's epic performance in full. Ladies and gentlemen, will you please be upstanding for... 'La Fway'!

"Last night I scratched your pig," she warbles. "His name was Rusty," she croons.

It's pretty epic. And possibly more stirring than 'The Star-Spangled Banner'. But then, we are British...

Also on HuffPost:

US lawmakers push immigration reform bid

US senators from both dominant political parties have announced agreement over a plan for the country’s immigration reform just before President Barack Obama is set to reveal his own, more liberal scheme, on the issue.

Following weeks of negotiations, a group of Republican and Democratic senators outlined a far-reaching blueprint in a joint news conference on Monday to overhaul US immigration laws, insisting that it is time to correct “our broken immigration system.”

The move came just a day before Obama is set to declare on Tuesday his own proposals on fixing the nation’s controversial immigration policy and facilitating the legalization of the nation’s more than 11 million undocumented immigrants living and working “illegally” throughout the country, often subjected to harassment and abuse by US police and immigration officers as well as employers and anti-immigrant groups and individuals.

The measures reportedly include increased border security through the use of drones and other surveillance systems, tighter immigration requirements, stricter employment checks and tougher measures, including deportation, against immigrants with even minor criminal.

The efforts come following an unprecedented voter turnout of immigrant US citizens during the country’s last presidential and congressional elections in November 2012, when Obama won the backing of overwhelming majority of migrant voters on his repeated pledge to overhaul and fix the nation’s immigration laws and streamline the process of legalization for the millions of existing undocumented immigrants.

Furthermore, the development comes after other attempts to pass immigration reform packages through the US Congress failed in 2007, during the administration of George W. Bush, and in 2010, during Obama’s first presidential term mainly due to fierce opposition by Republican lawmakers who have traditionally leaned against immigration.

Despite the claimed bipartisan support for the new bid to reform US immigration laws, the proposal is still expected to face sharp opposition in the US Congress.

A number of key Republicans who have long opposed such comprehensive reform bid in the past have reiterated that their worries on the issue have not faded, according to local press reports.

Texas Congressman Lamar Smith, who just concluded a term as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which oversees immigration issues, criticized the recent agreement on immigration reform, saying in a statement that “by granting amnesty, the Senate proposal actually compounds the problem by encouraging more illegal immigration.”


Furthermore, Republican Senators Jeff Sessions of Alabama and David Vitter of Louisiana, who had helped lead efforts to foil comprehensive immigration reform bill in 2007, again expressed “deep reservations” about the recent plan during a Senate session.

Meanwhile, Obama reportedly intends to provide some details of the White House immigration reform plans during a Tuesday appearance in Las Vegas. His address in expected to set off a public drive by the administration in support of the most comprehensive overhaul of the nation’s immigration law in the past 30 years.

US-based Human Rights Watch, however, has expressed concerns the reform plan will bring new pressures on illegal immigrants and make their waiting time even longer.

"The wait under the existing system already can be almost 20 years, because of the limited number of family-based immigration visas available. The wait could become even longer if legalization is to be contingent on the border being deemed secure," the group said in a statement.

A coalition of immigration advocates, meanwhile, announced plans on Monday for a huge rally in support of comprehensive immigration reforms on April 10 in Washington.

MFB/GVN/MFB

Department of Homeland Security to Purchase 7,000 “Assault Weapons”

Via Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

The hypocrisy of the government knows no bounds.  I have said repeatedly, and continue to say, that I am against all gun control at the moment because our government is extremely violent and not only do I not expect it to protect the American people in general, I believe it is far more concerned with protecting the status quo from the people.  It has become crystal clear that the political and financial oligarchs are quite intentionally attempting to disarm the populace while arming themselves to the teeth in anticipation of some horrible economic event they know is inevitable.  From the Blaze:

The Department of Homeland Security is seeking to acquire 7,000 5.56x45mm NATO “personal defense weapons” (PDW) — also known as “assault weapons” when owned by civilians. The solicitation, originally posted on June 7, 2012, comes to light as the Obama administration is calling for a ban on semi-automatic rifles and high capacity magazines.

Citing a General Service Administration (GSA) request for proposal (RFP), Steve McGough of RadioViceOnline.com reports that DHS is asking for the 7,000 “select-fire” firearms because they are “suitable for personal defense use in close quarters.” The term select-fire means the weapon can be both semi-automatic and automatic. Civilians are prohibited from obtaining these kinds of weapons.

That being said, it is reasonable for the Department of Homeland Security to request these rifles as they are indeed effective personal defense weapons. The agency is tasked with keeping Americans safe from those who wish to do the country harm, and its officials should be equipped with all the tools they need to do so effectively.

See the meme being pushed here?  These guys want the entire population completely domesticated.  They want us to depend on the government for food.  For healthcare.  For self-defense.  Two sets of laws.  One for the “rulers” and one for the “ruled.”  This is the opposite of how things function in a free society.

I am sorry, but unless you think the DHS is preparing for an invasion by Al Qaeda, it is quite clear these weapons are being bought for future use against the citizenry of the United States.  The writing on the wall couldn’t be clearer.

Full article here.

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Corporate Speech and Advertising Are at the Heart of Solving Gun Violence

There's a big difference between the free speech rights of individuals under the First Amendment and socially destructive marketing by corporations of products that kill.

January 28, 2013  |  

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The Obama Administration's gun-control agenda is unlikely to prevail unless it's accompanied by a wrenching national struggle on two fronts: re-thinking the "well regulated" part of the Second Amendment, and curbing paid corporate gun glorification that undermines "free" speech under the First Amendment. As the president said in his inaugural address, we must re-impose rules of fair play on markets.

National Rifle Association vice-president Wayne LaPierre was right to charge that violent video-games such as Doom and Call of Duty seed social storms of fear and mistrust with gladiatorial spectacles that have been virtual instruction manuals for mass shooters in Colorado, Connecticut and Norway, who were inveterate players of those games.

But LaPierre didn't note that game producers had "a mutually beneficial marketing relationship" with the very gun manufacturers that support his own NRA.  As the New York Times reported, the games' pictures of real guns come with embedded links to sales sites. Commercial speech like that can be regulated without violating the First Amendment.

Most of these games' content isn't free "speech" at all. Only the Supreme Court's confusion of free speech with anything that profit-driven corporations pay anyone to say or depict makes it seem otherwise. Regulating some games' marketing -- or even content -- would not suppress speech that a republic should protect.

The problem isn't that the profit-driven, legally constrained corporations driving violent entertainment are malevolent; it's that they're civically mindless. They're inherently incapable of free speech because the positions they take are just the result of fiduciaries -- directors, managers and public relations officers -- attempting to maximize stock value without regard to their own values, or anyone else's. Advances in manipulative advertising and a narrow focus on profit have made them runaway engines that can't be persuaded by rational or moral appeals to stop inciting exaggerated fears of armed home invasion, government takeovers, or fantasies of victory by gunplay. So long as the law and stock market demand they pursue profit, and selling guns and vengeance remains profitable, they'll keep doing it.

The danger we're facing isn't majoritarian censorship of noisy argument, transgressive art, or survivalists' politics. It's law promoting profiteers' own "sensor-ship," if you will -- their ever-more intrusive, intimate shaping of how people, especially of the immature and impressionable, view the world.

Rational and robust debate about the effects of gun violence is forced to compete with an eerily silent, algorithmically driven, massively funded effort to titillate and intimidate audiences -- bypassing our brains and hearts on its way to our lower viscera and wallets.

We have every right to stop uses of corporate money that impair the public good, just as we can break up monopolies, require firms to pay for the pollution they cause, and stop misleading advertising.Only a few people take such messages literally, but the relentless depiction of "bad guys" who must be killed undermine hopes, along with republican politics. Lonely mass murderers may actually be attuned more acutely to these undercurrents than those who insist they don't matter.

Nothing obligates us to let the minions of marketing manipulate our deliberations using "other people's money," as Justice Louis Brandeis put it in referring to corporate abuses of politics. We can change corporate law -- without interfering with any actual citizen's speech -- to prevent customers' and investors' money from overwhelming democratic give and take by using it to pay for political and other messages driven only by the firms' bottom lines, without regard to other priorities that citizens might share.

To do that, we need to insist on some crucial distinctions.

US considering new drone base in Africa – report

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton holds a small US-made drone drone that the Ugandan military uses in Somalia to fight al-Qaida linked militants (AFP Photo / Pool / Jacquelyn Martin)

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton holds a small US-made drone drone that the Ugandan military uses in Somalia to fight al-Qaida linked militants (AFP Photo / Pool / Jacquelyn Martin)

The US is planning to consolidate its position in Africa with a new drone outpost in Niger, with the stated purpose of providing unarmed surveillance support to French efforts in Mali and keeping tabs on al-Qaeda elements on the continent.

­In the future, though, the US command does not rule out using the base to conduct military strikes if the situation deteriorates or the extremist threat increases, military officials told The New York Times.

In the meantime, the US military's Africa Command is reviewing the options for the base with other countries in the region, including Burkina Faso.

The Africa Command’s scheme still needs the go-ahead from the Department of Defense, President Barack Obama and Niger. No final decision had been made, but a status-of-forces agreement has been reached between the two governments in Niger on Monday, providing legal protection to American troops in the African country.

If the drone base plan goes through, the facility could become home to as many as 300 American military and contractual personnel.

The United States so far has only one permanent base in Africa, in Djibouti. The drone base there is widely used for missions in nearby Yemen and allows access to Somalian and Sudanese airspace. A base in Niger would drastically shorten the response time to developing situations in the region.

The ongoing discussions about the installation follow the French military intervention in Mali and the Algerian hostage crisis, which left at least 37 foreigners dead and highlighted the threat from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

On Wednesday, outgoing US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised not to let northern Mali become a “safe haven” for extremists in the region as al-Qaeda-affiliated insurgents have become a “a very serious, ongoing threat.”

Last week, Washington sent approximately 100 military trainers to nations that are prepared to, or have already deployed, troops to Mali – including Nigeria, Niger, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Togo and Ghana.

Dear Republicans: It’s Not Your ‘Messaging’. It’s You.


Psst, Bobby? You can't stop 'being' the stupid party. You can only stop acting stupid!

Once, when I was embroiled in some relationship drama, I said to one of my male friends, "Why doesn't he just tell me if he doesn't want to be with me?" My friend paused and finally said, "Look, he's telling you in every way he can without actually using the words."

I never forgot that. Rejection is so painful, people tie themselves in knots just to avoid the soul-crushing reality. And it sounds like the Republicans are still in that stage where they just can't acknowledge the truth: It's not the way you look or that extra ten pounds. It's you. The voters just aren't into you!

But instead of real change, you just know they're going for the new hairdo. Jamelle Bouie writes in the American Prospect:

Mitt Romney didn’t just lose to Obama in the 2012 presidential election: He underperformed. The consensus projection from political scientists and election forecasters was that it would be a close election, with a slight advantage for President Obama. Romney wouldn’t win, but he would come close to breaking 50 percent. This, it turns out, was too optimistic for the former Massachusetts governor, who lost by 4 million votes. In the end, he finished with 47.1 percent of the vote, a small improvement over John McCain’s performance in 2008.

Fundamentals can explain Obama’s win, but they don’t account for Romney’s surprisingly small share of the vote—and they certainly don’t explain the GOP’s poor performance in Senate elections, where mainstream and Tea Party Republicans lost to their Democratic counterparts. Twenty-twelve began as the year Republicans would win a majority in the Senate, and ended as the year Democrats expanded their advantage.

Exit polls provide a few clues about why voters rejected the Republican Party at all levels. Thirty-eight percent of voters said unemployment was the biggest issue facing people like themselves, and of them, 54 percent voted for President Obama. Fifty-five percent of voters said the U.S. economic system favors the wealthy (71 percent of them voted for Obama), and 53 percent said Mitt Romney’s policies “generally favor the wealthy” (87 percent voted for Obama).

If you weren’t well-off—if you were struggling—you didn’t vote for Romney; the GOP had nothing to offer you. Romney might disparage politicians who give “gifts” to the public, but the fact of the matter is that voters support leaders who provide—or can promise—tangible benefits. At most, Republicans promised greater “growth” from cutting taxes, slashing spending, and reducing regulations.

Americans didn’t bite, because those policies don’t work (they remember the previous administration) and because they don’t trust Republicans to govern (they remember the previous administration). The GOP brand is still reeling from the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush. To wit, 53 percent of voters last year said Bush was responsible for our current economic problems, compared with 38 percent for Obama. It’s no wonder voters gave Obama a second term—it takes more than four years to clean up a mess of that magnitude.

Any attempt to fix the problems of the Republican Party—to build a conservatism attuned to the needs of ordinary people—needs to start with an examination of the Bush years. So far, however, Republicans seem uninterested in self-reflection. The most prominent voices in the party—Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, Florida senator Marco Rubio, Wisconsin representative Paul Ryan, Texas senator Ted Cruz—insist on purity as the way back to power. If Bush failed, it’s because he spent too much. Unmentioned is everything else—the belligerence, the wars, the general incompetence.

In Walmart and Fast Food, Unions Scaling Up a “Strike-First Strategy”

Small but highly publicized strikes by Walmart retail and warehouse workers last fall set the labour movement abuzz and gained new respect for organizing methods once regarded skeptically. “The labour movement is all about results,” says Dan Schlademan, who directs the Making Change at Walmart project of the Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). “The results are creating the energy.”

Walmart is a particularly rich target because the company is so large that it sets wages and prices among suppliers and competitors.

What’s the strategy behind the latest surprising wave of activism? Like most new organizing in the private sector, decades of attempts to unionize Walmart stores in the U.S. and Canada have been met with firings, outsourcing, and even closings.

So retail workers who staff the stores, warehouse workers who move Walmart’s goods, and even guest workers who peel crawfish for a supplier are ignoring the path laid out by U.S. labour law, in which workers sign a petition asking to vote on a union. Instead, they’re exercising their rights to redress grievances together, whether a majority can be rallied to support the effort or not.

One-day strikes in dozens of stores last October and November protested illegal retaliation against those who had spoken up at their workplaces and joined the Organization United for Respect (OUR) at Walmart. Several had been fired and many experienced threats and cuts in hours for their participation. “We have a way to respond to illegal actions,” Schlademan said: “the power of the strike.”

Spread to Fast Food

Last summer, following the OUR Walmart model, the Service Employees (SEIU) started funding an effort to organize fast food workers in New York, Chicago, and other cities. Inspired by the Walmart warehouse and store strikes, workers launched one-day strikes in New York City a week after Black Friday. Workers marched back in with clergy, elected officials, and press, shaming managers who had hoped to retaliate, and reinstating one Wendy’s striker when her manager fired her for participating.

While last fall was the first time Walmart has faced strikes in the U.S., it’s not the first time groups of Walmart workers have organized successfully. The Service Employees (SEIU) and the Food and Commercial Workers funded a pilot project in 2005 to form store committees in Florida, where the company was expanding rapidly at the time, and then in California.

After a year, the Florida Walmart Workers Association (WWA) had 800 dues-paying members in around 40 stores, according to Rick Smith, a co-director of the project. “The goal was 25 per cent [membership] in the store, then do shop floor actions to get people some gains in the stores,” he said.

It worked. Workers in South St. Petersburg got a co-worker unfired after half the day shift quit in protest. After their hours were cut, workers in a small town circulated a petition in the community and got their schedules restored. Others won a place to park their bikes.

A chief complaint was skimpy schedules, so WWA organized workers to apply for unemployment checks when their hours were cut back. The jump in claims meant that Walmart had to pay higher unemployment insurance premiums, leading the company to rethink its scheduling at stores where WWA was strong.

Simultaneously, the unions created leverage by hindering Walmart’s expansion in Florida, by attending hearings and challenging permits for new stores and distribution centers.

“Walmart is all about logistics,” said Smith.

No one was fired for organizing, and WWA filed no charges with the Labor Board.

Don’t Use the Hotline

Although Walmart maintains a hotline to corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, for any manager who suspects union activity, some Florida store managers avoided calling it, said Smith. They feared that anti-union teams sent by headquarters would blame them and transfer or demote them.

WWA members took advantage of management’s jumpiness, occasionally suggesting they would call Bentonville themselves if a problem could not be solved, Smith said. Store managers would back down, saying they were sure issues could be handled locally.

The Florida effort fell apart when the unions withdrew support, partly due to a fight between them. “It was frankly an experiment,” said Smith, who currently works for SEIU. “We believed you could build a workers’ organization without having collective bargaining.”

He described the effort as “outrageously successful… In some ways it’s harder now because of the economy.”

But the next steps are far from certain. “Are you trying to have a union like we have now? If so I would say forget it, don’t do it,” said Rick Smith, who was involved in a 2005 pilot project to organize Walmart in Florida. Instead, he advised activists to “figure it out as you go along.”

That’s pretty much the attitude of organizers who are making interesting things happen in warehouses, retail, restaurants, fast food, and along Walmart’s supply chain from the ports to the stores. Their efforts are part “non-majority” organizing on the job site, part strategic besmirching of their employers’ brands, part community-labour coalescing – and several parts chutzpah.

Born of Desperation

“The labour movement has tried a range of strategies over the last 20 years,” said Mark Meinster, who’s organizing Walmart warehouse workers in Illinois.

“Comprehensive campaigns, neutrality agreements, NLRB organizing – and while we’ve learned a lot through those strategies, none of it has reversed the decline.

“So now we’re at a point where there’s openness to new strategies. There’s an understanding that we won’t get labour law reform soon, that employers will continue to take a more aggressive stance toward workers and their unions, and so unions are looking at ways to impact those employers economically.”

Meinster also praised the skills labour has learned in its decades of operating from weakness: research, using the law, capital strategies, international work. The trick now, he said, is to combine those staff skills with building leaders in the workplaces and a willingness to use pre-majority organizing and, if workers so choose, strikes.

“I don’t know how to grasp corporate attention,” said Martha Sellers, a cashier in Paramount, California, who struck on Black Friday. “I expect we get to them through their paycheck.”

Interestingly Quiet

Despite Walmart’s fearsome reputation, the Black Friday strikes did not produce additional firings. “We’re not assuming a new reality inside the company, but it’s interestingly quiet,” said Schlademan.

The walkouts involved some 500 workers in dozens of stores. In some stores as few as two workers struck; in others half the shift walked out. Around 13 walked out of the Walmart in Paramount. “We were all scared, but we did it,” said Sellers. Though the store is now more understaffed than ever, managers have not taken action against the strikers, she said, and are “being very careful about what they say.”

That calm may be because the public eye is on Walmart. The actions at 1,000 stores held by community supporters, ranging from small informational pickets outside to musical flash mobs inside, gained plenty of media glare.

Walmart also wants to protect its image because it’s trying to convince city councils to let it build in urban areas that have thus far rejected the big box, markets like New York City and Seattle. Having paved rural and suburban America with its stores, Walmart is desperate to grow in cities.

Nick Allen of Warehouse Workers United believes Walmart cares about “reputational harm” that can’t be quantified, like the hit the company took when 112 apparel workers at a supplier were burned to death in Bangladesh. “When you’re the biggest employer it puts a level of scrutiny on you,” he said.

But even with Walmart on its best behavior for now, it’s unclear – even to organizers – how to take today’s retail effort to the next level. Many worker complaints, such as those about health care or pay, hit the heart of Walmart’s low-road business model and solutions can’t be extracted from local store managers. For example, workers want regular shifts. But managers get bonuses (and preserve their jobs) by keeping labour costs down using a hated just-in-time scheduling system, said Nelson Lichtenstein, a historian who writes about Walmart.

Still, “Walmart will accommodate various kinds of pressures,” said Lichtenstein, as long as it doesn’t mean recognizing a union. The penny-pinching corporation contradicted its own forecasts and raised wages in 700 of its stores in 2006, according to recently revealed company communications. The increase was likely a result of vigorous non-majority organizing in 2005 and 2006.

And on January 15 there was a sign the strikes have made top management defensive about scheduling. Walmart CEO Bill Simon announced vague intentions to change the company’s scheduling practices, which elicited a skeptical response from OUR Walmart: “We need these words to translate into real action.”

Raising Pay

If the current effort ends up raising Walmart pay substantially, it will be good news for retail and grocery workers around the country – another reason for organizers to target the company.

Walmart employs nearly one out of every 100 U.S. workers. It also sells more groceries than any of the largest U.S. grocery chains and undermines wages for grocery and other retail workers, many of them UFCW members. Walmart’s poor standards are used to justify low pay and unpredictable schedules everywhere from big box Target to New York boutiques.

OUR Walmart’s demands include $13 an hour, and fast food workers in New York and Chicago recently united under the banner of “Fight for $15.” Politicians are limping behind. In January, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo suggested that the state’s minimum wage should increase by $1.50 to $8.75, still miserably low. Nationally, the average Walmart worker makes around $8.81.

Trying to pit workers against customers, naysayers claim that higher wages will increase Walmart’s prices. But a recent study by the think tank Demos calculated that if all big low-wage retailers raised store workers to $12.25 a hour, it would lift three quarters of a million Americans above the poverty line – and cost customers only 15 cents per shopping trip.

Meanwhile, those same customers’ own wages have been dragged down by the Walmartized economy. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the Walton family controls $100-billion, more wealth than the bottom 42 per cent of Americans combined.

‘Open Source’ Organizing

Walmart has more than 4,000 stores and 1.4 million employees in the U.S., so OUR Walmart has just scratched the surface. Hoping to grow quickly, organizers describe the group as “open source,” meaning that workers can stumble upon it, talk to existing activists, and then organize themselves. The group boasts thousands of members, up from 100 in early 2011, in 43 states. Members pay dues of $5 a month. UFCW has put in considerable resources and is “in it for the long haul,” said Schlademan.


Bargaining Without a Majority?

OUR Walmart members aren’t a majority even in stores where they are relatively strong, and they aren’t seeking Labor Board elections because Walmart has a track record of closing stores in retaliation.

Labour law protects them when they take action together, but without collective bargaining, will they ever be able to establish the schedules, job security, pay, and health care they’re demanding?

U.S. labour law in the 1930s provided that any group of workers could bargain on behalf of its members, even if they weren’t a majority of the workforce, according to labour law scholar Charles Morris.

This is how fast food workers in New Zealand have gained contracts with better pay – which the employer then extends to all workers lest everyone join the union (see article here). In the U.S., though, the labour board and the courts have not recently allowed non-majority bargaining.

The United Electrical Workers have organized the most sustained examples of non-majority (or pre-majority) unions, in both private and public sector workplaces in North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia. UE is among several unions that have asked the NLRB to allow non-majority bargaining, arguing that the law clearly provides for it.

However, even if the Obama administration’s Labor Board did recognize non-majority bargaining, the concept would face an uphill battle in the courts and in Congress, said UE’s general counsel, Joseph Cohen.

Nonetheless, the general crisis in private sector organizing and the non-majority organizing at Walmart have stimulated some union strategists to take a new look.

The Illinois AFL-CIO is co-sponsoring a conference at the University of Illinois at Chicago on March 7 to discuss “New Models of Worker Representation,” including that employed by the UE’s Warehouse Workers for Justice. Charles Morris and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka will speak.


Walmart managers are spreading the word, too. As Black Friday protests approached, workers around the country reported meetings warning them not to participate.

There is a spontaneous quality to the group. OUR Walmart’s Facebook page bustles with discussions of goings-on at the stores. Workers compare their quarterly profit-sharing bonuses (measly), tell stories about crazy managers (one in Alabama recently held a 30-minute meeting in the freezer to punish staff), compare their hours (dropping since Christmas), and write in to ask for help.

“I work at the Walmart in Moultrie, Georgia,” wrote Michael Brady on December 30. “Managers use their power to fire people just because they don’t like you… I heard about this group from a friend and we really need some help here.”

Others are frustrated at work but express skepticism about organizing. “There will never be respect for us, we just work, that’s all we do… The ones that bitch get fired, so good luck with your little deal here,” wrote Travis Ratajcyzk, an unloader in Covina, California. OUR Walmart activists in other stores reassured him they had been active for over a year and had not been fired.

It’s possible the current composition of the National Labor Relations Board is helping forestall retaliatory firings. In 2000, Walmart faced board charges for retaliation against store employees across the country. Forty-one were fired for concerted activity between 1998 and 2003, says UFCW.

The union hoped to win a broad injunction against the company, which might have given workers nationwide breathing room to organize. But, according to Lichtenstein, Walmart made a call to the White House, and the incoming Bush administration promptly fired sympathetic NLRB General Counsel Leonard Page. The complaint went nowhere.

Under President Obama, the board and general counsel have been more sympathetic to worker organizing and have even sought injunctions against anti-union activity at other companies.

The board could be helpful if the company returns to its “fire first, deal with the legal problems later” attitude.

“We’re assuming the worst and hoping for the best,” said Schlademan of the company’s recent behavior. “Walmart is good at being patient and waiting until the spotlight is off of them.”

In preparation, the union and OUR Walmart have been trying out adopt-a-store ideas, so community members can immediately raise a fuss if workers are fired. They’ve also been developing an electronic rapid-response system and connecting with sympathetic local clergy and elected leaders. And they plan more strikes. •

Jenny Brown is a staff writer for Labor Notes where this article first appeared.

‘Deficit’ Deal Included Sweetheart Tax Break For Biotech Firm

So much for the alleged "deficit reduction," huh? (As Atrios keeps repeating, nobody really cares about the deficit.) Bill Moyers interviews Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) about a corporate tax exemption for Amgen, the world's largest biotech company, that was included in the "fiscal cliff" deal:

A recent article in The New York Times reported on a cost-control exception provided to Amgen, the world’s largest biotechnology firm. According to the report, the sweetheart deal — hidden in the Senate’s final “fiscal cliff” bill — will cost taxpayers half a billion dollars. Bill talks to U.S. Representative Peter Welch (D-VT) about the bi-partisan bill he recently sponsored to repeal that giveaway, and the political factors that allow such crony capitalism to occur.

“When there is this back room dealing that comes at enormous expense to taxpayers and enormous benefit to a private, well-connected, for-profit company, we’ve got to call it out,” Welch tells Bill. “Those members of Congress who are concerned about the institution, about our lack of credibility, about the necessity of us doing things that are in the public good as opposed to private gain, we’ve got to call it out.”

As Dave Johnson recently pointed out, let's not call this "crony capitalism" or plain old political reality. Call it what it is. It's corruption.

Our political culture is such that coercion, threats, extortion, blackmail and payoffs are now more common than not. And it all goes back to the same thing: Money in politics. Election finance reform would fix most of the problems. We've always had corrupt politicians, but we could at least minimize their impact.

Senator Confronted on Government Spending and Aggressive Military Policies

US Senator John Kerry's hearing to replace Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State this week was pretty uneventful... until this happened. 19-year-old Lachelle Roddy from Tampa, Florida was arrested for her outburst, who urged an end to excessive US fin...

Kerry Confronted: “When are enough people going to be killed?”

US Senator John Kerry's hearing to replace Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State this week was pretty uneventful... until this happened. 19-year-old Lachelle Roddy from Tampa, Florida was arrested for her outburst, who urged an end to excessive US fin...

On the News With Thom Hartmann: Senators Reach Across the Aisle to Promote Immigration...

Jim Javinsky in for Thom Hartmann here – on the news...

You need to know this. A rare word is coming out of the Senate today: "compromise." With President Obama set to tackle immigration reform on Tuesday, a bipartisan group of Senators came out today with their own compromised deal. The team of four Democrats and four Republicans introduced a plan that will put the more than 11 million undocumented immigrants, currently in the United States, on a path to citizenship. But first, they will have to register with the government, pass background checks, pay back taxes and penalties, and then move to the back of the line for full citizenship status. The proposal also puts in place new border security measures – and young people – or "DREAMers" who were brought to the country illegally when they were a child, but have gone to school here and kept their nose clean, will be put on a faster track toward citizenship. This is a good sign that a deal on comprehensive immigration reform can be struck this year. Stay tuned.

In screwed news..the banking sector is ruled by monopolies. New data from the Dallas Federal Reserve shows that a small group of "mega banks" control upwards of 70% of all banking assets. Just twelve banks, out of the total 56-hundred commercial banks in operation across the nation – have assets between $250 billion and $2.3 trillion dollars. They represent only point- 2% of all banks in operation, yet they account for 69% of the industry's total assets. This is the definition of "Too Big to Fail." In fact, as Senator Sherrod Brown has pointed out, these banks aren't just too big to fail, "they're too big to manage."

In the best of the rest of the news...

As state senators in Virginia contemplate taking up legislation, to rig the Electoral College for the benefit of Republicans, lawmakers in Michigan are considering doing the same exact thing. Last Friday, Michigan's Republican House Speaker, Jase Bolger, was quoted as saying, "I hear more and more from our citizens in various parts of the state of Michigan, that they don't feel like their vote for president counts because another area of the state may dominate that, or could sway their vote...They feel closer to voting for their congressman or their congresswoman, and if that vote coincided with their vote for president they would feel better about that." Michigan is one of the bluer states taken over by Republicans in 2010 – and if Republicans succeed in rigging the Electoral College there, then that would seriously hurt Democrats' chances of taking the White House in the future. In fact, if all states took up this election rigging scheme last year – then Mitt Romney would be our president today.

Last Friday, the so-called pro-life movement marched in Washington, DC, to take away a woman's right to make a choice about her body. And while they got all the media attention, a different kind of pro-life movement arrived in Washington, DC over the weekend. Thousands of protestors flocked to the nation's capital, calling for national gun control legislation. The march was organized after the Newtown massacre – and more than 100 residents of the Connecticut town joined in, to demand a ban on military style assault weapons and high capacity ammo magazines. Senator Dianne Feinstein, who introduced an assault weapons ban last week, appeared on CNN on Sunday claiming that she does have the support for such a ban – and that she's been promised by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, that it will receive an up-or-down vote on the floor of the Senate.

The NYPD's controversial stop-and-frisk policy may have recently been ruled unconstitutional, but that doesn't bother New York police, who are set to unveil a new type of technology that makes stop-and-frisk unnecessary. NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly announced over the weekend, that within the year, his police force will begin using what are called Tera-Hertz scanners – or T-Ray machines – that can see through people's clothing, to determine if they are carrying any weapons. As Raw Story reports, "The new device utilizes T-rays, which pass through fabric and paper, but cannot pass through metals." The NYPD plans to deploy the machines in police cruisers at first, but eventually hope they can get the technology into a small enough machine, that it can fit on an officer's belt. Privacy activists cheered the decision by the TSA, to get rid of the porno scanners in our airports, but now the fight for privacy continues on the streets of the Big Apple.

Don't touch our libraries! That's what the American people are saying amid the age of austerity and privatization, as they watch their community libraries lose funding, and close their doors. A new survey by the Pew Research center, found that 91% of Americans felt that libraries are important to their community. Another 76% said that libraries are important to them personally – and to their family. Unfortunately, public libraries are often the victim of budget cuts on a local, state, and federal level. In fact, the coming sequestration included a $19 million cut to a federal program that provides extra funding for public libraries around the nation.

And finally...Sarah Palin is out at Fox so-called News. Last Friday, Real Clear Politics reported that Fox News has decided to part ways with the gubernatorial quitter turned political celebrity. Over the last three years, she was a paid contributor, earning roughly a million bucks a year. A study out of the University of Minnesota analyzed Palin's appearances on the network, and concluded that between 2010 and 2012 – Palin spoke nearly 190,000 words on the network – meaning she was paid roughly $15.85 per word. And that includes some of the words that none of us have ever heard before, and don't even appear in any English language dictionary.

And that's the way it is today – Monday, January 28, 2013. I'm Jim Javinsky in for Thom Hartmann – on the news.

American Workers’ Access to Birth Control Must Not Be Subject to Employers’ Religion, Says...

WASHINGTON - January 28 - American workers’ access to birth control should not be subject to their employers’ religious beliefs, Americans United for Separation of Church and State has told a federal appeals court.

In a friend-of-the-court brief, Americans United urged the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the Obama administration’s contraceptive mandate, which requires most businesses to provide workers with a health insurance that includes no-cost birth control.

Several businesses, represented by Religious Right legal groups, have filed lawsuits contending that they have a religious liberty right to refuse to comply with the mandate, a federal regulation issued in conjunction with the Affordable Care Act.

Americans United disagrees.

“The decision to use birth control must rest with the individual,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United executive director. “We simply can’t have a health care system in which Americans’ access to contraception varies depending on where the boss goes to church.”

The case, Newland v. Sebelius, concerns a Colorado firm called Hercules Industries that manufactures heating and air conditioning equipment. The company’s owners say they have religious objections to artificial contraceptives and are arguing that a 1993 federal law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, frees them from providing it to employees, even indirectly.

Americans United says the company has misconstrued the law. In the brief, AU argues that the firm’s owners don’t suffer a substantial burden because some employees might choose to use birth control.

“An exemption for [Hercules’ owners] would significantly burden Hercules Industries’s employees – many of whom do not share Plaintiffs’ religious beliefs – by making it more difficult, and sometimes impossible, for them to obtain contraception,” asserts the brief.

The brief goes on to assert, “[Hercules owners] have every right to refrain from using contraception and to attempt to persuade others to do the same. But once they enter the secular market for labor to staff their secular, for-profit corporation, they may not force their religious choices on their employees, who are entitled to make their own ‘personal decisions relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, [and] child rearing.’”

The brief was drafted by Americans United Legal Director Ayesha N. Khan, Senior Litigation Counsel Gregory M. Lipper, and Madison Fellow Ben Hazelwood.

Americans United is a religious liberty watchdog group based in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1947, the organization educates Americans about the importance of church-state separation in safeguarding religious freedom.

American Workers’ Access to Birth Control Must Not Be Subject to Employers’ Religion, Says...

WASHINGTON - January 28 - American workers’ access to birth control should not be subject to their employers’ religious beliefs, Americans United for Separation of Church and State has told a federal appeals court.

In a friend-of-the-court brief, Americans United urged the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the Obama administration’s contraceptive mandate, which requires most businesses to provide workers with a health insurance that includes no-cost birth control.

Several businesses, represented by Religious Right legal groups, have filed lawsuits contending that they have a religious liberty right to refuse to comply with the mandate, a federal regulation issued in conjunction with the Affordable Care Act.

Americans United disagrees.

“The decision to use birth control must rest with the individual,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United executive director. “We simply can’t have a health care system in which Americans’ access to contraception varies depending on where the boss goes to church.”

The case, Newland v. Sebelius, concerns a Colorado firm called Hercules Industries that manufactures heating and air conditioning equipment. The company’s owners say they have religious objections to artificial contraceptives and are arguing that a 1993 federal law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, frees them from providing it to employees, even indirectly.

Americans United says the company has misconstrued the law. In the brief, AU argues that the firm’s owners don’t suffer a substantial burden because some employees might choose to use birth control.

“An exemption for [Hercules’ owners] would significantly burden Hercules Industries’s employees – many of whom do not share Plaintiffs’ religious beliefs – by making it more difficult, and sometimes impossible, for them to obtain contraception,” asserts the brief.

The brief goes on to assert, “[Hercules owners] have every right to refrain from using contraception and to attempt to persuade others to do the same. But once they enter the secular market for labor to staff their secular, for-profit corporation, they may not force their religious choices on their employees, who are entitled to make their own ‘personal decisions relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, [and] child rearing.’”

The brief was drafted by Americans United Legal Director Ayesha N. Khan, Senior Litigation Counsel Gregory M. Lipper, and Madison Fellow Ben Hazelwood.

Americans United is a religious liberty watchdog group based in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1947, the organization educates Americans about the importance of church-state separation in safeguarding religious freedom.

9/11 suspects’ lawyers demand CIA ‘black sites’ to be preserved as evidence

AFP Photo / Michelle Shephard / Toronto Star / Pool

AFP Photo / Michelle Shephard / Toronto Star / Pool

Self-confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other defenders claim they were tortured in Guantanamo, prompting their lawyers to call for the preservation of the CIA secret prisons to use them as evidence.

The pretrial hearing for the suspected terrorist conspirators began Monday. Facing the death penalty for their involvement in the deadly attacks that killed 2,976 people on September 11, 2011, the five prisoners are making a last-ditch attempt to reduce sentence by describing their torture experiences at the Guantanamo Bay US Naval Base.

Mohammed previously accused the US government of killing millions of people and employing inhumane torture procedures “under the name of national security.” Attorneys representing the defendants are now calling for the judge to demand the preservation of the CIA “black sites” to use as evidence in the case against the US government. If the attorneys are able to prove that any of the evidence against the conspirators was obtained through torture, then this evidence may be excluded during the trial and lead to reduced sentences.

The defense team has also asked the judge to order the US government to give all White House and Justice Departments documents about the CIA’s handling of the prisoners to the defense. The agency moved its al-Qaeda prisoners across borders to the Guantanamo prison after the 9/11 attacks and questioned them without a judicial review. Documents regarding the actions of the intelligence agency have not yet been made available to the defense.

This week’s pretrial hearing is “the first step toward finding what happened in the torture of these men,” James Connell, an attorney for Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, an accused 9/11 conspirator and nephew of Mohammed, said in a press conference on Sunday.

Mohammed and the other defendants will argue that they were subjected to torture including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and threats. The prisoners were allegedly also forced to endure painful positions while having their arms and legs tightly chained.

The preservation of the “black sites” could open the doors for investigation and analysis regarding the treatment of its inmates.

If a person is in isolation,” Connell argues, “how that isolation is enforced is a relevant legal factor as to whether they’ve been illegally punished, and the building design is relevant to that.”

The legality of torture is negated by the Geneva Convention and the UN Convention Against Torture, and its practice is illegal in the US. The CIA has not always been opposed to torturous interrogation techniques, but their implementation was allegedly reduced in 2004 and banned after President Obama took office.

The team of defense lawyers in the 9/11 case will attempt to have some of their defendants’ charges dismissed by bringing up the misconduct that the CIA may have committed in torturing the detainees.

"By its nature, torture affects the admissibility of evidence, the credibility of witnesses the appropriateness of punishment and the legitimacy of the prosecution itself," the defense lawyers wrote in court documents.

Ordering the preservation of a CIA “black site” is difficult, but not impossible: in 2004, the judge overlooking the 9/11 trial ordered the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to be preserved as a crime scene – even though Iraq was still under US occupation.

It is unclear whether the black sites are at risk of destruction, and in an interview with Wired, Connell said he can “neither confirm nor deny that”, but that the defense should have access to the evidence.

“If the government wants to go forward with a case seeking the death penalty against these men, it has to make the evidence which may still exist available to them,” Connell says. “If they will not make relevant evidence available, the law suggests the prosecution cannot go forward with the case. ”

“Shocking” Recess Appointment Decision By Republican Judges Will Be Appealed

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A penal of three Republican judges today knocked down the President’s three recess appointments last year to the National Labor Relations Board. The President appointed the three NLRB members following Republican filibusters of his nominees, intended to keep the agency from operating to protect the rights of working people to organize. This decision, if upheld, could invalidate hundreds of NLRB decisions.

The Obama administration will likely appeal the decision. Note that there were several similar decisions knocking down and supporting the Presidents health care reform act before it was finally upheld by the Supreme Court.

The ruling by the three judges might also invalidate Obama’s recess appointment of Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, after Republicans also filibustered his nomination in an attempt to kep that agency from operating to protect consumers. Republicans claim the ruling should also invalidate all of the consumer protections the agency has announced.

President Obama made these appointments following Senate Republican filibusters of these and other nominees, some of the more-than-380 filibusters by Senate Republicans in the last few years.

Reaction To The Decisions

Tom Donohue of the anti-union Chamber of Commerce business-lobbying organizationissued a statement saying he was “pleased” by the decision.

The blog of the anti-union National Association of Manufacturers business-lobbying organization said this is an “important moment” for “manufacturers that have been forced to deal with increased burdensome regulations.”

Karen Harned, executive director of the National Federation of Independent Business, another business-lobbying organization, said the decision is good because the NLRB is “a pro-union government agency.”

Republicans have claim that the NLRB, whose job is to protect union rights as well as business rights, is “pro-union.”

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka tweeted, “Fully expect radical DC Circuit decision to be reversed, and that other courts will uphold the President’s recess appointment authority” and in an official statement called the 3-judge panel’s decision “shocking.”

Statement by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka On Decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on the NLRB Recess Appointments:

Today’s decision by a panel of Republican judges on the DC Circuit is nothing less than shocking. In a radical and unprecedented decision, the court has interpreted the Constitution in a way that would deprive both Republican and Democratic presidents of a critical tool they have used hundreds of times over the years – including 179 appointments by former President George W. Bush and 139 appointments by former President Clinton – to keep agencies functioning and make the government work. In this case, the affected agency is the National Labor Relations Board – a crucially important agency that enforces workers’ rights.

We strongly disagree with the court’s reasoning and decision. We fully expect this radical decision to be reversed, and that other courts addressing this issue will uphold the President’s recess appointment authority. In the meantime, the appointees to the National Labor Relations Board remain in their jobs and the NLRB remains open for business.

The rights protected by this agency are too important for the agency to have to operate under a legal cloud. We urge the Senate to promptly confirm a package of nominees to the NLRB.

The Judges

Nicole Flatow, writing at the ThinkProgress blog, in BREAKING: Federal Appeals Court Invalidates Obama’s Recess Appointments to NLRB, (click through for links and more),

The opinion is the latest demonstrations of the radical views of Judge David Sentelle, who authored this opinion and has previously suggested that all business, labor and Wall Street regulation is constitutionally suspect.

[. . .] The D.C. Circuit’s opinion, however, goes well beyond this technicality argument to invalidate at least a century of accepted recess appointments procedure. Acknowledging that then-Republican Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty had advised in 1921 that recess appointments constituted breaks of “substantial length,” Sentelle rejects “that practice of more recent vintage” and holds that only breaks between congressional sessions, and not during sessions can be considered a “Recess:”

… Sentelle’s opinion also rejects the ruling of another federal appeals court that such “intersession” appointments are entirely valid. In fact, his originalist analysis focuses only on the text of the clause, and overtly rejects any recent precedent, history, or context that would elucidate modern understanding of the words.

This opinion is the latest reminder of the influence of federal judges, particularly on the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. President Obama’s attempts to get a single nominee confirmed to that court have been met with extreme resistance and obstruction — of the same sort that moved Obama to fill several urgent executive branch vacancies through recess appointments.

Frum Calls Palin Leaving Fox a ‘Milestone’ Similar to Removal of Beck

I hate to break it to Mr. Axis-of-Evil David Frum -- who was more than happy to be one of those conservative flame throwers when he was still in the club -- but Fox finally getting rid of Palin doesn't represent any kind of sea change for the networ...

As Federal Prosecutors Cash In, Big Bankers Go Unpunished

Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, center, testifies before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism in Washington, Nov. 1, 2011. (Photo: Stephen Crowley / The New York Times) Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, center, testifies before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism in Washington, Nov. 1, 2011. (Photo: Stephen Crowley / The New York Times) We need your help to sustain grassroots, groundbreaking journalism. Make a tax-deductible contribution to Truthout now by clicking here.

We needed heroes after the financial crisis. Instead we got bureaucrats, compromisers, and perhaps something much worse. Federal law enforcement officials, our “thin gray line” against banker crime, were charged with restoring the balance of justice and reducing the threat of future crises. Seems they had other things on their minds.

Now the Obama administration’s first-term posse is riding off into the sunset. The most visible departure is Deputy Attorney General Lanny Breuer. Remember those submissive or avaricious sheriffs in the old Westerns, the ones who were always letting the bad guys run wild ?  ”Sorry, Ma’am, I’d like to help you and the boy but there ain’t nothin’ I can do.”  That’s Breuer, whose shattered credibility and extreme reluctance to prosecute has become the stuff of legend.

But he’s not the only one. Meet the senior partners in a firm that is more aptly named “Covington, Burling and Justice.”

Lanny Breuer

All it took was a well-edited compilation of his own words on PBS’ Frontline to spur an announcement of Breuer’s unscheduled resignation. (Mary Bottari has the Frontlinehighlights.) They’re denying any connection between the program and the resignation, of course, but the denials ring false. Breuer was already on the record in a speech before the New York City Bar Association as saying that “we must take into account the effect of an indictment on innocent employees and shareholders” at major Wall Street firms.

That’s like not arresting Tony Soprano because they’d all be out of a job down at the Bada Bing Club.

And note  that Breuer did not say “We must take into account the effect of unpunished wrongdoing on defrauded investors, homeowners, or the American and global economies.”  The entire premise is bogus anyway. It’s possible to criminally indict individual bankers without bringing down the whole bank. If necessary, the government can assume control of a failing institution to make sure that its workforce stays employed.

Besides, when did prosecutors start worrying about stock market value before deciding whether or not to indict suspected crooks? It must’ve been after Wall Street wrongdoing brought down the world economy and shattered global markets.

This anarchic reasoning reached its apotheosis (or nadir) with the Justice Department’s recent refusal to indict anyone at HSNBC for laundering money on behalf the murderous Mexican drug cartels.  Here’s what that means in very real terms: If you work at a big bank you can fatten your bonus by breaking the law as many times as you want. You won’t even be punished for colluding with crazed drug-dealing killers who have murdered 35,000 people, sometimes by tossing their severed heads onto a club’s dance floor or leaving them in the town square to show everybody who’s boss.

We know who’s boss on Wall Street, too.

If Attorney General Holder endorses Breuer’s thinking he’s had the good sense to keep it to himself. But Breuer, who met Holder when they both worked for Wall Street firm Covington & Burling, couldn’t resist the temptation to brag. Still, shed no tears. Public shame can be a ticket to Wall Street prosperity.

Robert Khuzami

Robert Khuzami was Breuer’s partner in crime non-punishment over at the SEC.  Khuzami ran the agency’s enforcement division until his resignation was announced earlier this month. That inspired a Ben Protess puff piece in The New York Times Dealbook page that reads like a regulatory ”Fifty Shades of Gray” - call it ”Fifty Shades of Gray Pinstripe” - with Khuzami as the “dominant” and the rest of us as “submissives.” We’re told that Khuzami is “an imposing presence with a piercing stare,” an effect he tries to replicate for the camera with lamentable results.

We’re also told Khuzami had “a knack for grilling lawyers” who worked for him – a knack that clearly did not extend to bankers under his scrutiny.

Dealbook claimed that Khuzami’s accomplishments include “becoming the public face of Wall Street enforcement and reining in firms like Goldman Sachs.”  Make that the public face of non-enforcement, as firms like Goldman Sachs openly mocked and defied enforcement efforts.  While his Justice Department colleagues looked the other way – at behavior that allegedly included Congressional perjury by Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein – Khuzami dutifully allowed executives at Goldman and other firms to buy their way out of trouble with other people’s money while “neither admitting nor denying wrongdoing.”

Note to journalists: It’s possible for a fine to be “record-breaking” in its size and also be inadequate for the gravity of the offense. That’s the Goldman Sachs story – and Khuzami’s. And since the fine was paid by shareholders, not the perps themselves, there’s no incentive not to keep committing the same crimes.  Dealbook informs us that Khuzami, the former general counsel for Deutsche Bank, is “is positioned for a lucrative job at a white-shoe law firm.” Tell us something we didn’t know.

We’re also told that Khuzami told his attorneys to ask themselves every evening, “How did I add value today?” Which begs the question: Value for whom?

Halls of Injustice

Bobby Kennedy took on the racketeers when he ran the Justice Department, and the motto on the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building says “Justice is founded in the rights bestowed by nature upon man. Liberty is maintained in security of justice.” It may be time to update both the building’s name and the letters engraved on its facade.

Peter Schweizer notes that Covinton & Burling, which gave us both Breuer and Holder, “currently represents Wells Fargo and J.P. Morgan Chase … Bank of America, Citibank, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, ING, Morgan Stanley, UBS, and Wilmington Trust – many of which the Department has investigated for potential criminal activity.”

Schweizer also observes that when Lanny Breuer ran Covington’s white-collar defense team, “his counselor at Justice was another colleague from Covington, Steve Fagell, who was responsible for coordinating the Criminal Division’s work with the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force. Fagell returned to Covington in 2010 to rejoin the firm’s white-collar defense practice.”

We’re not saying Covington & Burling is the Justice Department. Think of it more as lead counsel – for the defense, of course.  But other firms get a piece of the action, too. Another analysis from Dealbook (which has multiple contributors) noted that senior Justice Department oficial Greg Andres, who worked for Breuer at Justice, went to Covington competitor Davis & Polk.

Dealbook also notes that “Recent moves (from Holder’s Justice Department) include Christine A. Varney, the government’s former top antitrust lawyer, who left last year to join Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and Boyd M. Johnson III, the former deputy United States attorney in Manhattan, who recently departed for WilmerHale.”

The New Sheriff

Greg Andres’ new firm also employs Linda Chatman Thomsen, Robert Khuzami’s predecessor as the Securities and Exchange Commission’s head of enforcement. Now Obama has nominated Mary Jo White to run the entire SEC, and lots of smart people are hopeful.

It’s true that White was a tough and aggressive prosecutor – a “total badass,” says Business Insider - pursuing targets like John Gotti and Osama Bin Laden. But then she turned in her badge and went to work for the other side like the others, defending Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis – among the worst of the worst – as well as JPMorgan Chase and the board of Morgan Stanley (a group which includes Erskine Bowles of “Simpson Bowles” notoriety.)

It’s easy to lose your edge once you become part of a social circle. Jailing your friends and clients begins to feel unimaginable.  Still, White’s got guts and character.  Let’s make the forecast ‘guardedly optimistic,’ with some of the ‘guarded’ part coming from concerns about the Justice Department/Covington & Burling gang. They can make her task easier … or much, much harder.

Executive Inaction

It’s the president and the attorney general who call the shots, and who will ultimately be judged by their actions – or lack thereof. Change can only come from the top.  What are the prospects?

Judge for yourselves: Last week the Obama/Holder Justice Department told producers of the hard-hitting “Frontline” report that “they thought (the bank crime episode) was a hit piece” and that “they will never cooperate” with the program again.

Ask not for whom the revolving door turns, Wall Street. As of this writing, it still turns for thee.

‘Saudi King overthrow imminent’

A close aide to US President Barack Obama has warned the president about the imminent downfall of the ruling monarchy in Saudi Arabia.

Bruce Riedel, an adviser on foreign policy to US President Barack Obama and also director for Near East and North African Affairs in the US National Security Council, recently penned a memorandum to the president noting that “Saudi Arabia is the world's last absolute monarchy” and that “like [France's] Louis XIV, King Abdullah has complete authority.”

He wrote that the ongoing wave of "Awakening” is making a revolution possible in the Arab kingdom most probably during the second term in office of President Obama.

“Revolutionary change in the kingdom would be a disaster for American interests across the board,” Riedel warned.

He noted that the United States would have “serious option for heading off a revolution” if it is going to happen in Saudi Arabia, which is Washington’s oldest ally in the Middle East.

Since February 2011, protesters have held demonstrations on an almost regular basis in Saudi Arabia, mainly in Qatif and Awamiyah in Eastern Province, primarily calling for the release of all political prisoners, freedom of expression and assembly, as well as an end to widespread discrimination.

However, the demonstrations turned into protests against the repressive Al Saud regime, especially after November 2011, when Saudi security forces killed five protesters and injured many others in the province.

KA/SS/MA

Finally: The UN Will Investigate Drone Strikes

A mock drone set up to protest government surveillance at a protest representing a variety of causes near the site of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., Sept. 2, 2012. (Photo: Max Whittaker / The New York Times) A mock drone set up to protest government surveillance at a protest representing a variety of causes near the site of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., Sept. 2, 2012. (Photo: Max Whittaker / The New York Times) Don’t let the forces of regression dominate the media in 2013 - click here to support brave, independent reporting today by making a contribution to Truthout.

It’s about time: the United Nations is set to investigate drone strikes, reports the New York Times. The technologically advanced killing machines have become a staple for developed nations, particularly the United States. However, the lack of oversight and accountability with drone usage has critics wondering whether the robots are successfully combatting the war on terror or merely spreading terror further.

Ben Emmerson, a British lawyer who works for the U.N.’s Human Rights Council, will head a panel for a nine-month investigation. While Emmerson said the findings will pertain to all nations utilizing drone technology, any proclamations the United Nations makes will be most relevant to the United States, the leader in that field by far.

The United Nations’s goal is not to eliminate drones altogether, but find acceptable regulations for drone usage. “This form of warfare is here to stay,” said Emmerson. “It is completely unacceptable to allow the world to drift blindly toward the precipice without any agreement between states as to the circumstances in which drone strike targeted killings are lawful, and on the safeguards necessary to protect civilians.”

The fact that most American citizens know nothing about drone attacks is no accident. Although the White House says that President Barack Obama authorizes many of the drone strikes himself, it does not acknowledge or comment on specific attacks. Names of the targets are not provided – and sometimes not even known by the CIA itself – and the U.S. does not need to provide evidence to anyone to show that the killings are warranted.

Despite the mystery surrounding this emerging technology, ProPublica has a great primer explaining the information that is known about the drone warfare. Around 3,000 individuals that the United States suspects of having ties with terrorism have been killed abroad, which includes a few American citizens. The U.S. gives itself the discretion to kill potential terrorists when capture of these individuals appears too difficult, although it now seems to be the primary mode of handling suspects.

Then there’s the matter of civilian casualties: though the White House’s estimates of bystander fatalities is significantly lower than that of independent journalists, the number of bystander fatalities seems to be at least a few hundred. That’s a lot of human lives with no terrorist connections to be chalked up to collateral damage.

Two Americans will serve on the ten-person United Nations panel: Captain Jason Wright, a lawyer for the U.S. Army, and Sarah Knuckey, a human rights lawyer and professor at NYU. They will be joined by a few British professionals as well as a judge from Pakistan and an activist from Yemen, two countries that have been the target of many drone strikes.

Although Emmerson acknowledges that the White House has been extremely secretive about its drone program thus far, he is “strongly optimistic” that the U.S. will adhere to any recommendations developed by the U.N.

The Benghazi Affair: Uncovering the Mystery of the Benghazi CIA Annex

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“The U.S. effort in Benghazi was at its heart a CIA operation, according to the officials who briefed on intelligence.” WSJ, Nov 1, 2012

Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, finally appeared before the US Senate and House Foreign Relations Committees on Wednesday, January 23, after a long delay. She was asked many questions by the Congress about what had happened in Benghazi on September 11 and how this could happen. The problem with the responses she gave to these questions was that she focused on the narrative presented in the State Department Report that had been released a month earlier, and which is deeply flawed.

In order to understand the nature of what happened on September 11, 2012 in Benghazi, and how the State Department under Hillary Clinton has been an important part of the cover up of what this second September 11 is actually a part of, it is important to understand the problem with the State Department Report being used to carry out the US government cover up of what I call the Benghazi Affair.

On December 18, the US State Department released its report on the September 11, 2012 attacks on two US facilities in Benghazi, Libya. These attacks had resulted in the deaths of the US Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, and three other Americans working for the US government in Libya. The US government had claimed that its report would shed light on what had become a contentious Congressional and media debate over the cause and details of the attack on these two US government compounds in Benghazi.

Soon, however, it became clear that the State Department Report issued by the Accountability Review Board (hereafter ARB Report), offered the public little information to add to what had already been made available by the State Department or the media. Instead, the public version of the ARB Report, referred to as the “unclassified” version, actually functions as part of the cover-up of what happened on September 11, 2012 in Benghazi. Most of this public document carefully refrains from any discussion of the role or activities of the CIA and what bearing this had on the events of September 11-12 2012 in Benghazi. But the role of the CIA in Benghazi and its bearing on what happened there on September 11 is the crucial question that any legitimate investigation into the situation must explore.

The trick of the Accountability Review Board (ARB) was that it issued two different versions of its Report. One version was an “unclassified” report that was available to the press, the public and the US Congress to discuss in public.(1) The other version was a “classified” report that was to be hidden from public or press scrutiny and was only to be available to Congress in a closed Congressional process. The unclassified version of the ARB Report could not mention the CIA activities. It could only discuss the role of the State Department in what happened.

The problem with such a restriction is that one of the US government sites in Benghazi that was attacked was a CIA facility referred to as the ‘Annex’ (hereafter CIA annex compound). The other site was allegedly a State Department administered facility referred to as the ‘Special Mission Benghazi Compound’ (hereafter special mission compound). This second compound, according to the WSJ, was actually created to provide diplomatic cover for the CIA facility.(2)

While some US Congressional Committees have been conducting investigations into what happened in Benghazi, they have agreed to discuss only the activities of the State Department in their open, public sessions, and to reserve any consideration or questions about the activities of the CIA for closed sessions of their committees, away from public view.(3)

Not only is the US Congress restricted from discussing the role of the CIA in Benghazi in open session, some of the mainstream US media have agreed to a request by the US government to withhold details about the CIA operations in Benghazi. The New York Times (NYT) is one such publication. (4) In an article briefly referring to the CIA annex compound, which the NYT says “encompassed four buildings inside a low-walled compound….” The NYT acknowledges that, “From among these buildings, the C.I.A. personnel carried out their secret missions.” But then the article explains that, “The New York Times agreed to withhold locations and details of these operations at the request of Obama administration officials….”

To declare an investigation into or discussion of the activities regarding the role of the CIA and its Annex compound as a forbidden subject during an open committee meeting of Congress, is to prevent the US Congress from fulfilling its oversight obligations over the US Executive branch of government. For the US government to require the US media to restrict coverage is to shroud the needed public discussion and investigation in darkness.

The effort to cover up the role of the CIA in the events resulting in the attack on the two US government facilities in Benghazi, however, demonstrates that something important is at stake and worth investigating.

Despite the US government effort to impose such restrictions, there are media accounts and some Congressional documents that provide a glimpse into the details of hidden CIA activity that the attacks on the US facilities in Benghazi help to reveal.

To understand the nature of this hidden activity, requires a willingness not only to critique the official explanations, but also to examine the events that can help to uncover the actual forces at work in Benghazi and the role they played in CIA activities in Libya.

One Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article is particularly helpful. The article, is titled “CIA Takes Heat for Role in Libya.” It provides a rare window into details of the murky world of the CIA operation in Benghazi and how it came about.(5)

The article notes that former CIA Director David Petraeus did not greet the bodies of the four Americans killed in Benghazi when they were returned to the US, even though two of those killed are acknowledged to have worked for the CIA. “Officials close to Mr. Petraeus,” the WSJ explains, “say he stayed away in an effort to conceal the agency’s role in collecting intelligence and providing security in Benghazi.”

Of the 30 or more American officials evacuated from Benghazi, only seven worked for the State Department. According to the WSJ, “Nearly all the rest worked for the CIA, under diplomatic cover, which was a principle purpose” of the special mission compound.

Soon after the struggle against the government of Libya began in February 2011, the CIA set up a compound in Benghazi for its spy operations. Eventually, the CIA gave its compound a State Department office name, the Annex, to disguise its purpose, the WSJ reveals. According to the US government, the role of the CIA in Benghazi was “focused on countering proliferation and terrorist threats….A main concern was the spread of weapons….”

“At the annex,” the WSJ explains, “many of the analysts and officers had what is referred to in intelligence circles as ‘light cover’ carrying U.S. diplomatic passports.”

Providing a cover for the secret operation of the CIA, however, created problems for State Department officials who felt the CIA was not “forthcoming with information,” even in the midst of the attack on the US facilities. As the WSJ notes, on September 11, 2012, “At 5:41 p.m. Eastern time, Mrs. Clinton called Mr. Petraeus. She wanted to make sure the two agencies were on the same page.”

Even after the attack was over and the analysts and officers had been evacuated, the accounts in the WSJ and McClatchy Newspapers, describe how quickly the CIA acted to clean out documents and equipment from the Annex. By contrast, the US government left the premises of the special mission compound unguarded and open to looters for weeks after the attack.

“The significance of the annex was a well-kept secret in Benghazi,” the WSJ reporters conclude. A McClatchy article documents how a well guarded secret was even the location of the CIA Annex compound. (6)

The implication is that the attackers at the special mission compound intended to flush out the covert location and presence of the CIA Annex compound so as to end its ability to continue its secret activities.(7)

An opinion piece, “The Fog of Benghazi”, appeared in the WSJ on November 3. It discusses what was at stake for the US government as a result of the September 11 attack in Benghazi(8): “America has since closed the Libya diplomatic outpost and pulled a critical intelligence unit out of a hotbed of Islamism, conceding a defeat. U.S. standing in the region and the ability to fight terrorist groups were undermined, with worrying repercussions for a turbulent Middle East and America’s security. This is why it’s so important to learn what happened in Benghazi.”

The effort to learn what happened in the Benghazi Affair, is similarly the subject of a 10 page letter dated October 19 sent by two US Congressmen to President Obama. (9) One of the Congressmen, Darrell Issa, is Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The other, Jason Chaffetz, is Chairman of the House Subcommittee on National Security, Homeland Defense and Foreign Operations.

Their letter raises ten questions for President Obama, the answers to which they explain are needed for the US Congressional investigation to determine the significance of the Benghazi affair. Also in their letter they include an attachment of 160 pages of data and photos which document the lawless environment in Libya, and particularly in Benghazi in the months before the Benghazi attack. This data was obtained by the US Congress from the State Department. (10) Though the data is labeled as sensitive, it is not classified material.

This data documents in a way that is now public, the perilous environment existing in Libya, providing a graphic description of the armed militias who carry out bombings, murders and kidnappings of government officials and others who try to challenge the lawlessness.

The data demonstrates the details of what the ARB Report acknowledges as “a general backdrop of political violence, assassinations, targeting former regime officials, lawlessness, and an overarching absence of central government authority in eastern Libya.” (11)

The Internet has made possible the publication of a number of investigative accounts of various aspects of the Benghazi Affair. Several of these propose that the CIA and even Chris Stevens were part of a gun running operation, gathering up weapons from Libya and facilitating their shipment to the insurgents fighting against the government in Syria. Some of the articles also propose that the CIA operation in Benghazi helped to send mercenaries from other countries to fight against the government of Syria. (12)

Fox News and a number of associated websites have featured articles which offer such accounts. Often, however, the articles rely on anonymous sources to support their claims.

Rarely are media offering accounts that portray this reality able to present direct evidence to support the narratives they develop.

An important exception is an article that appeared in the Times of London on September 14, 2012. This was three days after Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed.

The article documents that a ship, the Al Entisar (also written as Intisaar or The Victory in English), sailing under a Libyan flag with a 400 ton cargo, which included SAM-7 surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and some humanitarian supplies, is said to have arrived September 6 at the Turkish Port of Iskenderun.(13)

The captain of the ship, Omar Mousaeeb, a Libyan from Benghazi, was accompanied by 26 Libyans who were on board to help smuggle the shipment from the Turkish Port across the border into Syria. The plan was then to distribute the weapons to insurgents in Syria who were allied with the Muslim Brotherhood.

This account by the Times of London provides specific details about the mechanisms and problems of this Libyan weapons pipeline to the insurgency in Syria. The article describes the conflict between the Muslim Brotherhood and other groups of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) over who would get the weapons from the Al Entisar shipment.

“The scale of the shipment and how it should be disbursed, has sparked a row between the FSA and the Muslim Brotherhood, who took control of the shipment when it arrived in Turkey,” writes Sheera Frenkel, the author of the Times of London article.

Though the ship arrived at the port in Turkey on September 6, not all of the cargo had been transported into Syria by September 14, the article notes, though this is over a week after the ship arrived at the port in Turkey. While “more than 80 percent of the ship’s cargo,” the Times of London explains, “had been moved into Syria, Mr. Mousaeeb and a group of Libyans who had arrived with the ship said they were preparing to travel with the final load into Syria to ensure it was being distributed.” Actually their concern appeared to be to whom it was distributed, not how.

The Times of London refers to two Syrian activists with the FSA who complained that infighting within the insurgent ranks had delayed the arrival of the weapons in Syria, “There was widespread talk of Syrian groups who allied themselves with the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood movement being given a larger share of the ship’s cargo.” One activist quoted objects that, “The Muslim Brotherhood, through its ties with Turkey, was seizing control of this ship and its cargo.”

While the Times of London does not directly link Chris Stevens or the CIA annex compound to the Al Entisar arms shipment to Turkey, the article does provide an important context for how the conflict over which insurgent group would get weapons from the shipment created a source of significant tension at the very time the attack on the two US compounds in Benghazi took place.

Given the question, “Why Chris Stevens would have traveled to Benghazi to be in this perilous environment on September 11,” an answer which points to some urgent matter which needed his attention, would help to provide the rationale for him to ignore the security considerations against his making such a trip.

Keeping in mind the importance of this shipment of weapons from Benghazi to Turkey, the need to work out the details of the weapons distribution process could very well have provided the motive for Stevens to plan a visit in Benghazi during such a perilous period as the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attack on the US.

By September 11, infighting among the Muslim Brotherhood and other insurgent groups, over who would be given the weapons from the Al Entisar shipment, suggests the likelihood that Turkey’s Consul General in Benghazi and the US Ambassador needed to discuss the conflict over the weapons and the problem of how they should be moved into Syria and distributed among the insurgent groups.

In line with this reasoning, it is not surprising that Chris Stevens had a meeting with Turkey’s Consul General to Benghazi, Ali Sait Akin on September 11 at the Benghazi special mission compound.

The description of the infighting over the Al Entisar shipment to a port in Turkey of weapons for the Syrian insurgency, raises the possibility that the Turkish Consul General to Benghazi and Stevens discussed the conflict over the weapons. As of September 11, there were weapons that had yet to be distributed and smuggled into Syria from the Al Entisar shipment.

On September 10, when Stevens arrived in Benghazi, the shipment of arms had only recently been received at the Turkish port of Iskenderun, and the conflict among the insurgent groups who were to receive the weapons was not yet resolved.

According to documents that Congress received from the State Department, soon after Stevens arrived in Benghazi on September 10, he visited the CIA annex compound for a briefing.

On September 11 he stayed at the special mission compound but had meetings scheduled with someone from the Arabian Gulf Oil Co. (AGOCO), and later in the afternoon with someone from the Al Marfa Shipping and Maritime Services Co. (The names of the individuals were blacked out.) Then he had dinner and discussion with Ali Sait Akin, Turkey’s Consul General to Benghazi.(14)

While there has been no specific information made available by the State Department about the content of the meetings Stevens had on September 10 and 11, Turkey’s role in the shipping of weapons and foreign fighters into Syria to assist the fight against the Syrian government is the subject of numerous articles. The Times of London article describes previous difficulty experienced in trying to ship a cargo of weapons to where they could be safely unloaded and moved to insurgents in Syria. Given this previous experience it is not surprising that it was necessary to have the Turkish government intervene to settle problems that arose with the Al Entisar weapons shipment. It had taken several weeks “to arrange the paperwork for the Turkish port authorities to release the cargo.”(15) The Times of London quoted Suleiman Haari, who worked with Captain Mousaeeb. Haari explained that “Everyone wanted a piece of the ship. Certain groups wanted to get involved and claim the cargo for themselves. It took a long time to work through the logistics.”

This could account for the surprise visit by the then head of the CIA, David Petraeus on September 2 to Ankara. (16) Petraeus arrived in Ankara for what appeared to be talks with the President of Turkey and other Turkish government officials. Were Petraeus’s meetings with Turkish government officials needed to help make the arrangements for the Libyan ship to dock at the port in Turkey and unload the weapons that were to be smuggled across the border into Syria? This is a question Petraeus could answer if he were to testify at a US Congressional hearing again.

In light of the WSJ claim that the special mission compound had been set up to provide diplomatic cover for the CIA operation run out of the Annex, the question is raised as to whether the special mission compound was actually a State Department facility or a CIA facility acting under cover as a State Department operation.

According to the unclassified version of the ARB Report, Chris Stevens had arrived in Benghazi on April 5, 2011, “via a Greek cargo ship at the rebel-held city of Benghazi to re-establish a U.S. presence in Libya.” He had been appointed the US government’s “Special Envoy to the Libyan Transitional National Council” (TNC), acting as an official contact between the insurgents fighting to overthrow the government of Libya and the US government that was aiding them to bring about regime change in Libya. (17) Such an activity is contrary to international law and provisions of the UN charter (Article 2 Sections 1, 4, 7) which prohibit interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states. (18)

Stevens’ mission, the Report states, “was to serve as the liaison with the TNC” for a post-Qaddafi government in Libya. The US embassy had been closed in February 2011, and was only reopened on September 22, 2011 with Gene Cretz as the Ambassador.

The ARB Report notes, however, that the CIA had set up the CIA compound in Benghazi in February 2011 soon after the insurgency arose against the Libyan government. This is a confirmation that the US government had put intelligence operatives on the ground in Benghazi just as the insurgency against the Libyan government was getting underway. This is also at least one month before Chris Stevens arrived in Benghazi.

The ARB Report also reveals that Chris Stevens stayed at the CIA Annex from the beginning of June, 2011 until June 21, 2011. Not until June 21 did “he and his security contingent move into what would become the Special Mission Benghazi compound….” According to the ARB Report the special mission compound in Benghazi was set up a few months after the CIA compound. (19)

This puts in perspective why the WSJ article on November 1 says that the special mission compound was established to provide diplomatic cover for the CIA facility, subsequently referred to as “the Annex”. Stevens remained as Special Envoy to the TNC and stayed in Benghazi until November 17, 2011. On May 26, 2012 Stevens arrived in Tripoli to replace Cretz as US Ambassador to Libya.

What was the State Department responsibility for the special mission compound? If its purpose was to provide diplomatic cover for the CIA, then what was the CIA responsibility? These are significant questions. But it is unlikely that such questions will be asked at the public Congressional oversight investigations because questions about the role of the CIA Annex in Benghazi have been declared to be a classified matter.

Though the NYT article, ”U.S. Approved Weapons for Libya Rebels Fell into Jihadis’ Hands,” about the Benghazi affair doesn’t go into detail about what the CIA was doing in Benghazi, it raises a significant issue that is likely to be at the root of why there was an attack on both the special mission compound and the CIA Annex compound.(20) The NYT refers to the concern US government officials involved in the program raise about the problems created by the US government helping to provide weapons to insurgents fighting in Libya and Syria. According to the NYT, what these Islamic militants will do with these weapons worries high level US government national security officials.

While officially, the US government claims it is not providing weapons, the Times of London article about the shipment of weapons from Benghazi to Turkey, provides a striking example of how the US and Turkish governments, both overtly, and covertly, appear to be involved in collecting weapons in Libya and helping to ship them to be used against the Syrian government and people.(21)

The NYT claims that the US government has little control over where these weapons go and the harm they do when used in Libya, Syria, or other conflicts in the region. The NYT reports, “Concerns in Washington soon rose about the groups Qatar was supporting, officials said. A debate over what to do about the weapons shipments dominated at least one meeting of the so-called Deputies Committee, the interagency panel consisting of the second-ranking officials in major agencies involved in national security. ‘There was a lot of concern that Qatar weapons were going to Islamist groups,’ one official recalled.” (22)

These supposed ‘Qatar’ weapons, however, did not originate with Qatar alone. By way of an example, the NYT quotes one US weapons dealer who wanted to sell weapons to the insurgency in Libya during the war against Libya. The NYT describes how he applied to the State Department for a license. “He also sent an e-mail to J. Christopher Stevens, then the special representative to the Libyan rebel Alliance, ” reports the NYT. According to e-mails provided to the NYT by the arms dealer, Marc Turi, Stevens wrote back to Turi that he would “share Mr. Turi’s proposal with colleagues in Washington.” Eventually the weapons dealer was encouraged to communicate with contacts in Qatar.(23)

Such examples help to demonstrate both that there is concern among US government officials in Washington about the US government arming militant Islamists, the very people the US government condemns as “terrorists” in other situations. Also though the weapons pipeline may have on the surface been made to appear unconnected to the US actually supplying the arms that are being distributed by Qatar or Saudi Arabia, in the case of Marc Turi, as one example, the weapons pipeline was arranged for by a license provided by the US government to ship the weapons to Qatar.

Such examples provide the context for how the US government has covertly and overtly been helping to provide the weapons that are then used by those hostile to the US to inflict harm on the Libyan and Syrian people and even on Americans, as those killed in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. This situation, several commentators have noted, is reminiscent to the Iran Contra Affair where the US government entities covertly acted in a way that jeopardized the interests and even the physical well being of US officials and civilians. And it is likely that the actions being taken by US government officials to arm and provide other forms of support for the Libyan and Syrian insurgencies, are contrary to US laws and constitutional obligations.(24)

Such considerations reflect some of the salient concerns raised by a number of online commentators about the Benghazi Affair. One example of many that have been published online in the last few months is the article “Benghazigate: The Cover-up continues” by Bill Shanefeld published at the American Thinker website. The article raises two important questions (25): “(1) The pre-”event” purpose of the compound and its Annex (since these operations probably motivated the perpetrators of the “event”); and (2) Team Obama’s failed policies in North Africa, the Middle East, and Afghanistan.”

The article also refers to some of the many contributions made by other online commentators. These various commentaries help to clarify that the Benghazi affair offers a relatively rare window into the on the ground actions of the US government’s clandestine operations. These actions are the partner to the role the US government is playing in the UN Security Council and the UN in general in its efforts to turn the UN into a partner in its CIA and NATO activities. The Benghazi Affair is an important situation and the question remains as to whether the illegal activities of the US government acting contrary to the obligations of the UN Charter in Libya and more recently Syria will come to light.
Notes

1. U.S. State Department Public Accountability Board Report

http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/202446.pdf

2.Margaret Coker, Adam Entous, Siobhan Gorman, Margaret Coker, ”CIA
Takes Heat for Role in Libya,” WSJ, November 1, 2012.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204712904578092853621061838.html

3. Dana Milbanks, “Letting Us in on a Secret,” Washington Post,
October 10, 2012,

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-letting-us-in-on-a-secret/2012/10/10/ba3136ca-132b-11e2-ba83-a7a396e6b2a7_print.html

4.Helene and Eric Schmidt, Michael S Schmidt, “Deadly Attack In Libya
was Major Blow to CIA Efforts,” New York Times, September 23, 2012.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/24/world/africa/attack-in-libya-was-major-blow-to-cia-efforts.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

5. Margaret Coker, Adam Entous, Siobhan Gorman, Margaret Coker, ”CIA
Takes Heat for Role in Libya,” WSJ, November 1, 2012.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204712904578092853621061838.html

6.Nancy A. Youssef, “Libyans, diplomats: CIA’s Benghazi station a
secret – and quickly repaired,” McClatchy Newspapers, November 12,
2012.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/11/12/174455/libyans-diplomats-cias-benghazi.html

7. Catherine Herridge, “CIA moved swiftly to scrub, abandon Libya
facility after attack, source says,” Fox News, December 5, 2012.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/12/05/cia-moved-swiftly-scrub-abandon-libya-facility-after-attack-source-says/#ixzz2IE8icKIQ

8. “The Fog of Benghazi,” Opinion Piece, WSJ, Nov. 3, 2012

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204712904578090612465153472.html

9. Letter from Representative Issa and Representative Chaffetz to
President Obama, October 19, 2012

http://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/10.19.12-Issa-and-Chaffetz-to-President.pdf

10. The Oversight Committee’s letter was accompanied by 166 pages of
documents and photos.

http://oversight.house.gov/release/oversight-committee-asks-president-about-white-house-role-in-misguided-libya-normalization-effort/

documents

http://1.usa.gov/S89qG7

11. U.S. State Department Public Accountability Board Report

http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/202446.pdf

12. See for example, ”Interview with Clare M. Lopez”

http://goldandguns.wordpress.com/2012/10/31/former-cia-clare-lopez-on-the-benghazi-gun-running/

13. Sheera Frenkel, “Syrian rebels squabble over weapons as biggest
shipload arrives from Libya; Turkey,” Times (London), September 14,
2012, p. 23

14. Schedule of Chris Stevens activities on September 10 and September 14.

Included in data sent to President Obama by Issa and Chaffetz

15. Sheeran Frenkel, “Syrian rebels squabble over weapons as biggest
shipload arrives from Libya; Turkey,” Times (London), September 14,
2012, p. 23

16. “CIA chief Petraeus pays surprise visit to Turkey,” Hurriyet Daily
News, September 2, 2012

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/cia-chief-petraeus-pays-surprise-visit-to-turkey.aspx?pageID=238&nid=29175

J. Millard Burr, “The Benghazi Attack: Some Thoughts,” Economic
Warfare Institute Blog, Oct 24, 2012.

http://econwarfare.org/viewarticle.cfm?id=5109

17. U.S. State Department Public Accountability Board Report

http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/202446.pdf

18. Dr. Curtis Doebbler, “It is illegal to support rebels fighting a
legitimate government,” Note from Sibialiria.org,
http://syria360.wordpress.com/2012/11/20/supporting-the-doha-coalition-violates-international-law/

19. U.S. State Department Public Accountability Board Report

http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/202446.pdf

Margaret Coker, Adam Entous, Siobhan Gorman, Margaret Coker, ”CIA
Takes Heat for Role in Libya,” WSJ, November 1, 2012.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204712904578092853621061838.html

20. Mark Mazzetti, James Risen, Michael S Schmidt, ”U.S. Approved Arms
for Libya Rebels Fell into Jihadis’ Hands,” NYT, December 5, 2012.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/06/world/africa/weapons-sent-to-libyan-rebels-with-us-approval-fell-into-islamist-hands.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

21. Sheera Frenkel, “Syrian rebels squabble over weapons as biggest
shipload arrives from Libya; Turkey,” Times ( London), September 14,
2012, p. 23

Also see other relevant articles such as:

Christina Lamb, “Covert US Plan to Arm Rebels,” The Sunday Times
(London), December 9, 2012, p. 1,2

Franklin Lamb, “Flooding Syria with Foreign Arms: A View from
Damascus”, Foreign Policy Journal, Nov. 5, 2012.

http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2012/11/05/flooding-syria-with-foreign-arms-a-view-from-damascus/

J. Millard Burr, “You Can Kiss Petraeus Goodbye,” End Time News, Nov. 5, 2012

http://endtimesnews.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/benghazi-attack-reveals-split-in-gun-running-factions/

22. Mark Mazzetti, James Risen, Michael S Schmidt, ”U.S. Approved Arms
for Libya Rebels Fell into Jihadis’ Hands,” NYT, December 5, 2012.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/06/world/africa/weapons-sent-to-libyan-rebels-with-us-approval-fell-into-islamist-hands.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

23. Mark Mazzetti, James Risen, Michael S Schmidt, ”U.S. Approved Arms
for Libya Rebels Fell into Jihadis’ Hands,” NYT, December 5, 2012.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/06/world/africa/weapons-sent-to-libyan-rebels-with-us-approval-fell-into-islamist-hands.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

24. Michael Kelley, “The CIA’s Benghazi Operation May Have Violated
International Law,” Nov. 5, 2012

http://endtimesnews.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/benghazi-attack-reveals-split-in-gun-running-factions/

Oona A. Hathaway, Elizabeth Nielsen, Chelsea Purvis, Saurabh Sanghvi,
and Sara Solow, “ARMS TRAFFICKING: THE INTERNATIONAL AND DOMESTIC
LEGAL FRAMEWORK.,” Yale Law School Report. Posted Nov. 15, 2011.

http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/cglc/YLSreport_armsTrafficking.pdf

25. Bill Shanefeld, “Benghazigate the cover-up continues.” American
Thinker, January 9, 2013.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/01/benghazigate_the_cover-up_continues.html

A version of this article appears on my netizenblog at
http://blogs.taz.de/netizenblog/2013/01/24/benghazi-affair-cia-annex/

Employees? Consumers? Feh!

Should the Supreme Court uphold it, last Friday’s decision by three Reagan-appointees to the D.C. Circuit Appellate Court appears at first glance to rejigger the balance of power between Congress and the president. The appellate justices struck down three recess appointments that President Obama had made to the five-member National Labor Relations Board during the break between the 2011 and 2012 sessions of Congress partly on the grounds that Congress wasn’t formally in recess, since one and sometimes two Republicans showed up to nominally keep it in session for the sole reason of denying Obama the right to recess appointments. Two of the three justices went further, ruling that the president can’t really make recess appointments at all.

It’s not that Obama has made a lot of recess appointments. He’s only made 32—compared to the 171 made by George W. Bush; one of Bush’s appointees was John Bolton to the post of UN ambassador. Presidents have been making recess appointments since the mid-19thcentury, but this is the first time that the courts have objected. Certainly, the three judges on the D.C. appellate court voiced no such opinions when Bush was president.

The real issue here is who Obama appointed, and to what agencies. The recess appointments he made in the 2011-2012 break were to the NLRB (two Democrats, one Republican) and the directorship of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (former Ohio attorney general Richard Cordray). Obama had sent these nominations to the Hill, but invoking the 60-vote supermajority rule, Republicans refused to consider them. They made clear that their problem with Cordray wasn’t Cordray; it was that they opposed the very existence of the Bureau, which had been created as part of Dodd-Frank in 2010. The idea of an agency that represented financial consumers solely—as opposed to other agencies like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Controller of the Currency—struck them as a terrible idea. They proposed to amend the act by reconstituting the bureau as an agency, with multiple board members, that represented banks’ interests as well as their consumers. In short, they proposed a house divided against itself.

But Democrats still controlled the Senate in 2011-12, and Obama the White House, so the Republicans had no chance of passing legislation that would reduce the new agency to impotence. However, Dodd-Frank did stipulate that unless the agency had a director, it couldn’t write rules for banks’ treatment of consumers, so Senate Republicans filibustered against Cordray’s confirmation.

A similar logic informed their opposition to confirming Obama’s NLRB, even a Republican who’d been a longtime aide to Republican Senator Mike Enzi (Wyo). When Obama sent his three nominations to the Hill, the Board was down to two of its five members—and the Supreme Court had ruled in 2010 that unless the Board had a quorum of three, it could make no rulings —on unfair labor practices, worker rights, employer rights, anything. Viewing unions as among their primary election-time enemies, Republicans arrived at the expedient of confirming no appointees at all. Obama then made his three recess appointments, but Friday’s court decision means that the board’s rulings over the past year—including recent ones that gave workers the right to discuss their working conditions on Facebook without fear of being fired—probably will not stand. It means that workers illegally denied the right to join a union, or illegally fired during an organizing drive, will have no effective recourse.

What congressional Republicans have done, then, is used their power in the Senate minority not just to deny the president’s appointments, though they had majority support. They have blocked these particular appointments because they effectively repeal the legal authority of these two agencies to do anything. They’ve found a way to repeal some or all of major, foundational laws—the 1935 National Labor Relations Act and 2010’s Dodd-Frank financial reform bill—that empower employees in their workplaces and bank customers, without actually having the votes to repeal the laws. Indeed, this is repeal on the sly, since the laws are still on the books, but largely unenforceable.

So, were the Republican judges really seeking to rein in presidential power or simply advance the GOP’s war on workers and consumers? For 150 years, the president’s recess appointment powers weren’t challenged by Republican jurists. The real issue here looks to be the Republicans’ insistence on absolute unregulated employer and bank autonomy, and holding a minority of seats in the Senate, they’ve managed, for now, to get what they want.

Can’t we revisit filibuster reform?

US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s “Economic Legacy”

Trilateral Geithner: Corrupted Regulator?

From January 26, 2009 – January 25, 2013, he was Obama’s Treasury Secretary. He and Fed chairman Bernanke engineered crisis conditions.

Bankers profited hugely. They still do. Ordinary people were scammed. Geithner’s gone. His legacy speaks for itself. His background showed what to expect. He spent three years at Kissinger Associates.

From 1988 – 2002, he held various Treasury posts. He left to become Council on Foreign Relations international economics department senior fellow.

From 2001 – 2003, he was IMF Policy Development and Review director. He left to become New York Fed president.

He partnered with Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Bernanke. They planned the grandest of grand thefts. They implemented banker bailouts.

They looted the federal treasury. They stuck taxpayers with the bill. They debased the currency. They transformed America into an unprecedented money making racket.

As New York Federal Reserve Bank president/vice chairman of the Fed Open Market Committee (FOMC), Geithner helped engineer crisis conditions.

As Treasury Secretary, he exacerbated them. He turned them into a protracted mainstream depression.

In November 2008, Michel Chossudovsky asked “Who are the Architects of Economic Collapse?”

The “financial meltdown (wasn’t) the result of a cyclical economic phenomenon.” It was willful government policy. It was implemented “through the Treasury and the US Federal Reserve Board.”

It was and remains “the most serious economic crisis in World history.” Banker bailouts exacerbated crisis conditions. They “trigger(ed) an unprecedented concentration of wealth.”

Economic and social inequality followed. Indebtedness “skyrocketed.” Everything that happened was planned. Robbing poor Peter to pay rich Paul became policy.

Geithner and Bernake bear full responsibility. They partnered in crime. Neil Barofsky was Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) watchdog. He served as SIGTARP (Special Inspector General for TARP).

In July 2009, he estimated the initial $700 billion bailout could balloon to $23.7 trillion. He said Obama administration secrecy concealed what’s essential to reveal.

Trillions were stolen. From $9 to $14 trillion is known. Estimates range to multiples that amount. Corrupt bureaucrats and crooked bankers alone know how much.

Five major ones matter most: JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo. They reflect more than too big to fail. What they say goes. They occupy Washington. They run America. They dictate policy.

Geithner and Bernanke are crime bosses. They’re complicit in grand theft. They abandoned Main Street for Wall Street. They know where the bodies are buried. They know the harm they caused.

Bankers got bailouts. Ordinary people were lied to and scammed. Geithner and Bernanke exceeded the worst of Bush administration policies. Too big to fail became a license to steal.

They serve Wall Street giants. They engineered a financial coup d’etat. They created a fraudulent housing and debt bubble. They illegally shifted vast amounts of capital offshore.

Privatization became piracy. It was used as pretext to shift government assets to private investors. They did so at below-market prices.

At the same time, they moved private liabilities to government. They did it at no cost to private interests.

They’re waging war on middle America. They want social societies destroyed. They want banana republics replacing them. Labor is earmarked for destruction. Totalitarian neoliberal rule is planned.

Unaccountability is institutionalized. Crisis conditions remain unresolved. Much worse ahead looms. Expect Geithner to return to his ideological roots. He’s heading back to Wall Street. Expect him to cash in for services rendered.

Days before he left, he called his bailout scheme doomed to be unpopular. “You look like you’re giving aid to the arsonist,” he said.

He claims history will judge him more kindly. He turned reality on its head. He wrecked the economy. He claims he saved it. He didn’t avoid a Great Depression. He caused one.

He didn’t save millions of jobs. He destroyed them. He engineered fake financial reform. He capitulated to Wall Street. He avoided real change. He advanced global monetary control. He did it at the expense of fairness.

He took advantage of a corrupted system. It’s crisis-prone, unstable, anarchic, ungovernable, and self-destructive. It repeats boom and bust cycles.

Crooks run monetary and fiscal policy. Recessions and depressions follow. Ordinary people are hurt most. Bankers and other financial giants profit enormously. Add money laundering to their profit centers.

Money power controls America. Policy facilitates grand theft. Too big to fail banks consolidate. They become larger and more powerful.

They game the system for profit. They gamble with public money. They wage financial war on humanity. Massive fraud facilitates private gain. Reform is a figure of speech.

Last July, New York Fed documents implicated Geithner in rigging Libor (the London Interbank Offered Rate). It’s a fundamental rate-setting benchmark. It’s set daily between UK banks for overnight to 12 month durations.

It’s produced for ten currencies with 15 maturities. It represents the London market’s lowest cost of unsecured funding. It’s the primary global short-term rate benchmark.

Last summer’s scandal reflected a cesspool of financial fraud. Manipulating the rate up lets banks steal countless billions in inflated loan costs.

Downward manipulation deprives states, communities, pension funds, ordinary investors, and retirees of similar amounts from fixed income holdings.

As New York Fed president and Treasury Secretary, Geithner was complicit in fraud. His mandate was to facilitate it. He didn’t disappoint.

Instead of fixing a corrupted system, he advanced and exacerbated it. He turned crisis conditions into disaster. He and Bernanke share honors as public enemy number one.

They gave away the store to Wall Street. They laid foundational plans for greater grand theft. In real democracies, they’d be in prison. Washington will have to explain why not.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

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

http://www.dailycensored.com/tim-geithners-legacy-of-shame/

‘Dirty Wars’: Documentary on US Covert Warfare Abroad, Takes Award at Sundance

The documentary "Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield" follows investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill to Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen as he chases down the hidden truth behind America’s expanding covert wars, focusing on the Obama administration’s increasing use of armed drones and secretive units including the Joint Special Operations Command. On Saturday, the film’s director, Richard Rowley, was awarded the Sundance Film Festival prize for best cinematography in a U.S. documentary, honored for "elevating the art of observational cinema through sophisticated lensing and an electric-color palette." Accepting the award, Rowley said: "Almost three years ago, when Jeremy and I knocked on a door in Gardez in rural Afghanistan, we were the first Americans that a family there had seen since Americans kicked their door in and killed half their family. And they invited us in, and they shared the most difficult story of their lifetime with us, because we promised them we’d do everything we could to make their story heard in America."

© 2013 Democracy Now!

Counting Down to 2014 in Afghanistan: Three Lousy Options, Pick One

Don’t let the forces of regression dominate the media in 2013 - click here to support brave, independent reporting today by making a contribution to Truthout.

Compromise, conflict, or collapse: ask an Afghan what to expect in 2014 and you’re likely to get a scenario that falls under one of those three headings. 2014, of course, is the year of the double whammy in Afghanistan: the next presidential election coupled with the departure of most American and other foreign forces. Many Afghans fear a turn for the worse, while others are no less afraid that everything will stay the same.  Some even think things will get better when the occupying forces leave.  Most predict a more conservative climate, but everyone is quick to say that it’s anybody’s guess.

Only one thing is certain in 2014: it will be a year of American military defeat.  For more than a decade, U.S. forces have fought many types of wars in Afghanistan, from a low-footprint invasion, to multiple surges, to a flirtation with Vietnam-style counterinsurgency, to a ramped-up, gloves-off air war.  And yet, despite all the experiments in styles of war-making, the American military and its coalition partners have ended up in the same place: stalemate, which in a battle with guerrillas means defeat.  For years, a modest-sized, generally unpopular, ragtag set of insurgents has fought the planet’s most heavily armed, technologically advanced military to a standstill, leaving the country shaken and its citizens anxiously imagining the outcome of unpalatable scenarios.

The first, compromise, suggests the possibility of reaching some sort of almost inconceivable power-sharing agreement with multiple insurgent militias.  While Washington presses for negotiations with its designated enemy, “the Taliban,” representatives of President Hamid Karzai’s High Peace Council, which includes12 members of the former Taliban government and many sympathizers, are making the rounds to talk disarmament and reconciliation with all the armed insurgent groups that the Afghan intelligence service has identified across the country. There are 1,500 of them.

One member of the Council told me, “It will take a long time before we get to Mullah Omar [the Taliban’s titular leader].  Some of these militias can’t even remember what they’ve been fighting about.”

The second scenario, open conflict, would mean another dreaded round of civil war like the one in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union withdrew in defeat -- the one that destroyed the Afghan capital, Kabul, devastated parts of the country, and gave rise to the Taliban.

The third scenario, collapse, sounds so apocalyptic that it’s seldom brought up by Afghans, but it’s implied in the exodus already underway of those citizens who can afford to leave the country.  The departures aren’t dramatic.  There are no helicopters lifting off the roof of the U.S. Embassy with desperate Afghans clamoring to get on board; just a record number of asylum applications in 2011, a year in which, according to official figures, almost 36,000 Afghans were openly looking for a safe place to land, preferably in Europe.  That figure is likely to be at least matched, if not exceeded, when the U.N. releases the complete data for 2012.

In January, I went to Kabul to learn what old friends and current officials are thinking about the critical months ahead.  At the same time, Afghan President Karzai flew to Washington to confer with President Obama.  Their talks seem to have differed radically from the conversations I had with ordinary Afghans. In Kabul, where strange rumors fly, an official reassured me that the future looked bright for the country because Karzai was expected to return from Washington with the promise of American radar systems, presumably for the Afghan Air Force, which is not yet “operational.” (He actually returned with the promise of helicopters, cargo planes, fighter jets, and drones.) Who knew that the fate of the nation and its suffering citizens hinged on that?  In my conversations with ordinary Afghans, one thing that never came up was radar.

Another term that never seems to enter ordinary Afghan conversation, much as it obsesses Americans, is “al-Qaeda.” President Obama, for instance, announced at a joint press conference with President Karzai: “Our core objective -- the reason we went to war in the first place -- is now within reach: ensuring that al-Qaeda can never again use Afghanistan to launch attacks against America.”  An Afghan journalist asked me, “Why does he worry so much about al-Qaeda in Afghanistan? Doesn’t he know they are everywhere else?”

At the same Washington press conference, Obama said, “The nation we need to rebuild is our own.” Afghans long ago gave up waiting for the U.S. to make good on its promises to rebuild theirs. What’s now striking, however, is the vast gulf between the pronouncements of American officialdom and the hopes of ordinary Afghans.  It’s a gap so wide you would hardly think -- as Afghans once did -- that we are fighting for them.

To take just one example: the official American view of events in Afghanistan is wonderfully black and white.  The president, for instance, speaks of the way U.S. forces heroically “pushed the Taliban out of their strongholds.” Like other top U.S. officials over the years, he forgets whom we pushed into the Afghan government, our “stronghold” in the years after the 2001 invasion: ex-Taliban and Taliban-like fundamentalists, the most brutal civil warriors, and serial human rights violators.

Afghans, however, haven’t forgotten just whom the U.S. put in place to govern them -- exactly the men they feared and hated most in exactly the place where few Afghans wanted them to be.  Early on, between 2002 and 2004, 90% of Afghans surveyed nationwide told the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission that such men should not be allowed to hold public office; 76% wanted them tried as war criminals.


In my recent conversations, many Afghans still cited the first loya jirga, an assembly convened in 2003 to ratify the newly drafted constitution, or the first presidential election in 2004, or the parliamentary election of 2005, all held under international auspices, as the moments when the aspirations of Afghans and the “international community” parted company. In that first parliament, as in the earlier gatherings, most of the men were affiliated with armed militias; every other member was a formerjihadi, and nearly half were affiliated with fundamentalist Islamist parties, including the Taliban.

In this way, Afghans were consigned to live under a government of bloodstained warlords and fundamentalists, who turned out to be Washington’s guys.  Many had once battled the Soviets using American money and weapons, and quite a few, like the former warlord, druglord, minister of defense, and current vice-president Muhammad Qasim Fahim, had been very chummy with the CIA.

In the U.S., such details of our Afghan War, now in its 12th year, are long forgotten, but to Afghans who live under the rule of the same old suspects, the memory remains painfully raw.  Worse, Afghans know that it is these very men, rearmed and ready, who will once again compete for power in 2014.

How to Vote Early in Afghanistan

President Karzai is barred by term limits from standing for reelection in 2014, but many Kabulis believe he reached a private agreement with the usual suspects at a meeting late last year. In early January, he seemed to seal the deal by announcing that, for the sake of frugality, the voter cards issued for past elections will be reusedin 2014.  Far too many of those cards were issued for the 2004 election, suspiciously more than the number of eligible voters.  During the 2009 campaign, anyone could buy fistfuls of them at bargain basement prices.  So this decision seemed to kill off the last faint hope of an election in which Afghans might actually have a say about the leadership of the country.

Fewer than 35% of voters cast ballots in the last presidential contest, when Karzai’s men were caught on video stuffing ballot boxes.  (Afterward, President Obama phoned to congratulate Karzai on his “victory.”) Only dedicated or paid henchmen are likely to show up for the next “good enough for Afghans” exercise in democracy. Once again, an “election” may be just the elaborate stage set for announcing to a disillusioned public the names of those who will run the show in Kabul for the next few years.

Kabulis might live with that, as they’ve lived with Karzai all these years, but they fear power-hungry Afghan politicians could “compromise” as well with insurgent leaders like that old American favorite from the war against the Soviets, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who recently told a TV audience that he intends to claim his rightful place in government. Such compromises could stick the Afghan people with a shaky power-sharing deal among the most ultra-conservative, self-interested, sociopathic, and corrupt men in the country.  If that deal, in turn, were to fall apart, as most power-sharing agreements worldwide do within a year or two, the big men might well plunge the country back into a 1990s-style civil war, with no regard for the civilians caught in their path.

These worst-case scenarios are everyday Kabuli nightmares.  After all, during decades of war, the savvy citizens of the capital have learned to expect the worst from the men currently characterized in a popular local graffiti this way: “Mujahideen=Criminals. Taliban=Dumbheads.”

Ordinary Kabulis express reasonable fears for the future of the country, but impatient free-marketeering businessmen are voting with their feet right now, or laying plans to leave soon. They’ve made Kabul hum (often with foreign aid funds, which are equivalent to about 90% of the country’s economic activity), but they aren’t about to wait around for the results of election 2014.  Carpe diem has become their version of financial advice.  As a result, they are snatching what they can and packing their bags.

Millions of dollars reportedly take flight from Kabul International Airport every day: officially about $4.6 billion in 2011, or just about the size of Afghanistan’s annual budget. Hordes of businessmen and bankers (like those who, in 2004, set up the Ponzi scheme called the Kabul Bank, from which about a billion dollars went missing) are heading for cushy spots like Dubai, where they have already established residence on prime real estate.

As they take their investments elsewhere and the American effort winds down, the Afghan economy contracts ever more grimly, opportunities dwindle, and jobs disappear.  Housing prices in Kabul are falling for the first time since the start of the occupation as rich Afghans and profiteering private American contractors, who guzzled the money that Washington and the “international community” poured into the country, move on.

At the same time, a money-laundering building boom in Kabul appears to have stalled, leaving tall, half-built office blocks like so many skeletons amid the scalloped Pakistani palaces, vertical malls, and grand madrassas erected in the past four or five years by political and business insiders and well-connected conservative clerics.

Most of the Afghan tycoons seeking asylum elsewhere don’t fear for their lives, just their pocketbooks: they’re not political refugees, but free-market rats abandoning the sinking ship of state.  Joining in the exodus (but not included in the statistics) are countless illegal émigrés seeking jobs or fleeing for their lives, paying human smugglers money they can’t afford as they head for Europe by circuitous and dangerous routes.

Threatened Afghans have fled from every abrupt change of government in the last century, making them the largest population of refugees from a single country on the planet.  Once again, those who can are voting with their feet (or their pocketbooks) -- and voting early.

Afghanistan’s historic tragedy is that its violent political shifts -- from king to communists to warlords to religious fundamentalists to the Americans -- have meant the flight of the very people most capable of rebuilding the country along peaceful and prosperous lines.  And their departure only contributes to the economic and political collapse they themselves seek to avoid.  Left behind are ordinary Afghans -- the illiterate and unskilled, but also a tough core of educated, ambitious citizens, including women’s rights activists, unwilling to surrender their dream of living once again in a free and peaceful Afghanistan.

The Military Monster

These days Kabul resounds with the blasts of suicide bombers, IEDs, and sporadic gunfire.  Armed men are everywhere in anonymous uniforms that defy identification.  Any man with money can buy a squad of bodyguards, clad in classy camouflage and wraparound shades, and armed with assault weapons.  Yet Kabulis, trying to carry on normal lives in the relative safety of the capital, seem to maintain a distance from the war going on in the provinces.

Asked that crucial question -- do you think American forces should stay or go? -- the Kabulis I talked with tended to answer in a theoretical way, very unlike the visceral response one gets in the countryside, where villages are bombed andcivilians killed, or in the makeshift camps for internally displaced people that now crowd the outer fringes of Kabul. (By the time U.S. Marines surged into Taliban-controlled Helmand Province in the south in 2010 to bring counterinsurgency-style protection to the residents there, tens of thousands of them had already moved to those camps in Kabul.)  Afghans in the countryside want to be rid of armed men.  All of them.  Kabulis just want to be secure, and if that means keeping some U.S. troops at Bagram Air Base near the capital, as Afghan and American officials are currently discussing, well, it’s nothing to them.

In fact, most Kabulis I spoke to think that’s what’s going to happen.  After all, American officials have been talking for years about keeping permanent bases in Afghanistan (though they avoid the term “permanent” when speaking to the American press), and American military officers now regularly appear on Afghan TV to say, “The United States will never abandon Afghanistan.”  Afghans reason: Americans would not have spent nearly 12 years fighting in this country if it were not the most strategic place on the planet and absolutely essential to their plans to “push on” Iran and China next.  Everybody knows that pushing on other countries is an American specialty.

Besides, Afghans can see with their own eyes that U.S. command centers, including multiple bases in Kabul, and Bagram Air Base, only 30 miles away, are still being expanded and upgraded.  Beyond the high walls of the American Embassy compound, they can also see the tall new apartment blocks going up for an expanding staff, even if Washington now claims that staff will be reduced in the years to come.

Why, then, would President Obama announce the drawdown of U.S. troops to perhaps a few thousand special operations forces and advisors, if Washington didn’t mean to leave?  Afghans have a theory about that, too.  It’s a ruse, many claim, to encourage all other foreign forces to depart so that the Americans can have everything to themselves.  Afghanistan, as they imagine it, is so important that the U.S., which has fought the longest war in its history there, will be satisfied with nothing less.

I was there to listen, but at times I did mention to Afghans that America’s post-9/11 wars and occupations were threatening to break the country.  “We just can’t afford this war anymore,” I said.

Afghans only laugh at that.  They’ve seen the way Americans throw money around.  They’ve seen the way American money corrupted the Afghan government, and many reminded me that American politicians like Afghan ones are bought and sold, and its elections won by money. Americans, they know, are as rich as Croesus and very friendly, though on the whole not very well mannered or honest or smart.

Operation Enduring Presence      

More than 11 years later, the tragedy of the American war in Afghanistan is simple enough: it has proven remarkably irrelevant to the lives of the Afghan people -- and to American troops as well.  Washington has long appeared to be fighting its own war in defense of a form of government and a set of long-discredited government officials that ordinary Afghans would never have chosen for themselves and have no power to replace.

In the early years of the war (2001-2005), George W. Bush’s administration was far too distracted planning and launching another war in Iraq to maintain anything but a minimal military presence in Afghanistan -- and that mainly outside the capital.  Many journalists (including me) criticized Bush for not finishing the war he started there when he had the chance, but today Kabulis look back on that soldierless period of peace and hope with a certain nostalgia.  In some quarters, the Bush years have even acquired something like the sheen of a lost Golden Age -- compared, that is, to the thoroughgoing militarization of American policy that followed.

So commanding did the U.S. military become in Kabul and Washington that, over the years, it ate the State Department, gobbled up the incompetent bureaucracy of the U.S. Agency for International Development, and established Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in the countryside to carry out maniacal “development” projects and throw bales of cash at all the wrong “leaders.”

Of course, the military also killed a great many people, both “enemies” and civilians.  As in Vietnam, it won the battles, but lost the war.  When I asked Afghans from Mazar-e-Sharif in the north how they accounted for the relative peacefulness and stability of their area, the answer seemed self-evident: “Americans didn’t come here.”

Other consequences, all deleterious, flowed from the militarization of foreign policy.  In Afghanistan and the United States, so intimately ensnarled over all these years, the income gap between the rich and everyone else has grown exponentially, in large part because in both countries the rich have made money off war-making, while ordinary citizens have slipped into poverty for lack of jobs and basic services.

Relying on the military, the U.S. neglected the crucial elements of civil life in Afghanistan that make things bearable -- like education and health care.  Yes, I’ve heard the repeated claims that, thanks to us, millions of children are now attending school.  But for how long?   According to UNICEF, in the years 2005-2010, in the whole of Afghanistan only 18% of boys attended high school, and 6% of girls.  What kind of report card is that?  After 11 years of underfunded work on health care in a country the size of Texas, infant mortality still remains the highest in the world.

By 2014, the defense of Afghanistan will have been handed over to the woefulAfghan National Security Force, also known in military-speak as the “Enduring Presence Force.”  In that year, for Washington, the American war will be officially over, whether it’s actually at an end or not, and it will be up to Afghans to do the enduring.

Here’s where that final scenario -- collapse -- haunts the Kabuli imagination.  Economic collapse means joblessness, poverty, hunger, and a great swelling of the ranks of children cadging a living in the streets.  Already street children are said to number a million strong in Kabul, and 4 million across the country.  Only blocks from the Presidential Palace, they are there in startling numbers selling newspapers, phone cards, toilet paper, or simply begging for small change. Are they the county’s future?

And if the state collapses, too?  Afghans of a certain age remember well the last time the country was left on its own, after the Soviets departed in 1989, and the U.S. also terminated its covert aid.  The mujahideen parties -- Islamists all -- agreed to take turns ruling the country, but things soon fell apart and they took turns instead lobbing rockets into Kabul, killing tens of thousands of civilians, reducing entire districts to rubble, raiding and raping -- until the Taliban came up from the south and put a stop to everything.

Afghan civilians who remember that era hope that this time Karzai will step down as he promises, and that the usual suspects will find ways to maintain traditional power balances, however undemocratic, in something that passes for peace.  Afghan civilians are, however, betting that if a collision comes, one-third of those Afghan Security Forces trained at fabulous expense to protect them will fight for the government (whoever that may be), one-third will fight for the opposition, and one-third will simply desert and go home.  That sounds almost like a plan.

Counting Down to 2014 in Afghanistan: Three Lousy Options, Pick One

Don’t let the forces of regression dominate the media in 2013 - click here to support brave, independent reporting today by making a contribution to Truthout.

Compromise, conflict, or collapse: ask an Afghan what to expect in 2014 and you’re likely to get a scenario that falls under one of those three headings. 2014, of course, is the year of the double whammy in Afghanistan: the next presidential election coupled with the departure of most American and other foreign forces. Many Afghans fear a turn for the worse, while others are no less afraid that everything will stay the same.  Some even think things will get better when the occupying forces leave.  Most predict a more conservative climate, but everyone is quick to say that it’s anybody’s guess.

Only one thing is certain in 2014: it will be a year of American military defeat.  For more than a decade, U.S. forces have fought many types of wars in Afghanistan, from a low-footprint invasion, to multiple surges, to a flirtation with Vietnam-style counterinsurgency, to a ramped-up, gloves-off air war.  And yet, despite all the experiments in styles of war-making, the American military and its coalition partners have ended up in the same place: stalemate, which in a battle with guerrillas means defeat.  For years, a modest-sized, generally unpopular, ragtag set of insurgents has fought the planet’s most heavily armed, technologically advanced military to a standstill, leaving the country shaken and its citizens anxiously imagining the outcome of unpalatable scenarios.

The first, compromise, suggests the possibility of reaching some sort of almost inconceivable power-sharing agreement with multiple insurgent militias.  While Washington presses for negotiations with its designated enemy, “the Taliban,” representatives of President Hamid Karzai’s High Peace Council, which includes12 members of the former Taliban government and many sympathizers, are making the rounds to talk disarmament and reconciliation with all the armed insurgent groups that the Afghan intelligence service has identified across the country. There are 1,500 of them.

One member of the Council told me, “It will take a long time before we get to Mullah Omar [the Taliban’s titular leader].  Some of these militias can’t even remember what they’ve been fighting about.”

The second scenario, open conflict, would mean another dreaded round of civil war like the one in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union withdrew in defeat -- the one that destroyed the Afghan capital, Kabul, devastated parts of the country, and gave rise to the Taliban.

The third scenario, collapse, sounds so apocalyptic that it’s seldom brought up by Afghans, but it’s implied in the exodus already underway of those citizens who can afford to leave the country.  The departures aren’t dramatic.  There are no helicopters lifting off the roof of the U.S. Embassy with desperate Afghans clamoring to get on board; just a record number of asylum applications in 2011, a year in which, according to official figures, almost 36,000 Afghans were openly looking for a safe place to land, preferably in Europe.  That figure is likely to be at least matched, if not exceeded, when the U.N. releases the complete data for 2012.

In January, I went to Kabul to learn what old friends and current officials are thinking about the critical months ahead.  At the same time, Afghan President Karzai flew to Washington to confer with President Obama.  Their talks seem to have differed radically from the conversations I had with ordinary Afghans. In Kabul, where strange rumors fly, an official reassured me that the future looked bright for the country because Karzai was expected to return from Washington with the promise of American radar systems, presumably for the Afghan Air Force, which is not yet “operational.” (He actually returned with the promise of helicopters, cargo planes, fighter jets, and drones.) Who knew that the fate of the nation and its suffering citizens hinged on that?  In my conversations with ordinary Afghans, one thing that never came up was radar.

Another term that never seems to enter ordinary Afghan conversation, much as it obsesses Americans, is “al-Qaeda.” President Obama, for instance, announced at a joint press conference with President Karzai: “Our core objective -- the reason we went to war in the first place -- is now within reach: ensuring that al-Qaeda can never again use Afghanistan to launch attacks against America.”  An Afghan journalist asked me, “Why does he worry so much about al-Qaeda in Afghanistan? Doesn’t he know they are everywhere else?”

At the same Washington press conference, Obama said, “The nation we need to rebuild is our own.” Afghans long ago gave up waiting for the U.S. to make good on its promises to rebuild theirs. What’s now striking, however, is the vast gulf between the pronouncements of American officialdom and the hopes of ordinary Afghans.  It’s a gap so wide you would hardly think -- as Afghans once did -- that we are fighting for them.

To take just one example: the official American view of events in Afghanistan is wonderfully black and white.  The president, for instance, speaks of the way U.S. forces heroically “pushed the Taliban out of their strongholds.” Like other top U.S. officials over the years, he forgets whom we pushed into the Afghan government, our “stronghold” in the years after the 2001 invasion: ex-Taliban and Taliban-like fundamentalists, the most brutal civil warriors, and serial human rights violators.

Afghans, however, haven’t forgotten just whom the U.S. put in place to govern them -- exactly the men they feared and hated most in exactly the place where few Afghans wanted them to be.  Early on, between 2002 and 2004, 90% of Afghans surveyed nationwide told the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission that such men should not be allowed to hold public office; 76% wanted them tried as war criminals.


In my recent conversations, many Afghans still cited the first loya jirga, an assembly convened in 2003 to ratify the newly drafted constitution, or the first presidential election in 2004, or the parliamentary election of 2005, all held under international auspices, as the moments when the aspirations of Afghans and the “international community” parted company. In that first parliament, as in the earlier gatherings, most of the men were affiliated with armed militias; every other member was a formerjihadi, and nearly half were affiliated with fundamentalist Islamist parties, including the Taliban.

In this way, Afghans were consigned to live under a government of bloodstained warlords and fundamentalists, who turned out to be Washington’s guys.  Many had once battled the Soviets using American money and weapons, and quite a few, like the former warlord, druglord, minister of defense, and current vice-president Muhammad Qasim Fahim, had been very chummy with the CIA.

In the U.S., such details of our Afghan War, now in its 12th year, are long forgotten, but to Afghans who live under the rule of the same old suspects, the memory remains painfully raw.  Worse, Afghans know that it is these very men, rearmed and ready, who will once again compete for power in 2014.

How to Vote Early in Afghanistan

President Karzai is barred by term limits from standing for reelection in 2014, but many Kabulis believe he reached a private agreement with the usual suspects at a meeting late last year. In early January, he seemed to seal the deal by announcing that, for the sake of frugality, the voter cards issued for past elections will be reusedin 2014.  Far too many of those cards were issued for the 2004 election, suspiciously more than the number of eligible voters.  During the 2009 campaign, anyone could buy fistfuls of them at bargain basement prices.  So this decision seemed to kill off the last faint hope of an election in which Afghans might actually have a say about the leadership of the country.

Fewer than 35% of voters cast ballots in the last presidential contest, when Karzai’s men were caught on video stuffing ballot boxes.  (Afterward, President Obama phoned to congratulate Karzai on his “victory.”) Only dedicated or paid henchmen are likely to show up for the next “good enough for Afghans” exercise in democracy. Once again, an “election” may be just the elaborate stage set for announcing to a disillusioned public the names of those who will run the show in Kabul for the next few years.

Kabulis might live with that, as they’ve lived with Karzai all these years, but they fear power-hungry Afghan politicians could “compromise” as well with insurgent leaders like that old American favorite from the war against the Soviets, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who recently told a TV audience that he intends to claim his rightful place in government. Such compromises could stick the Afghan people with a shaky power-sharing deal among the most ultra-conservative, self-interested, sociopathic, and corrupt men in the country.  If that deal, in turn, were to fall apart, as most power-sharing agreements worldwide do within a year or two, the big men might well plunge the country back into a 1990s-style civil war, with no regard for the civilians caught in their path.

These worst-case scenarios are everyday Kabuli nightmares.  After all, during decades of war, the savvy citizens of the capital have learned to expect the worst from the men currently characterized in a popular local graffiti this way: “Mujahideen=Criminals. Taliban=Dumbheads.”

Ordinary Kabulis express reasonable fears for the future of the country, but impatient free-marketeering businessmen are voting with their feet right now, or laying plans to leave soon. They’ve made Kabul hum (often with foreign aid funds, which are equivalent to about 90% of the country’s economic activity), but they aren’t about to wait around for the results of election 2014.  Carpe diem has become their version of financial advice.  As a result, they are snatching what they can and packing their bags.

Millions of dollars reportedly take flight from Kabul International Airport every day: officially about $4.6 billion in 2011, or just about the size of Afghanistan’s annual budget. Hordes of businessmen and bankers (like those who, in 2004, set up the Ponzi scheme called the Kabul Bank, from which about a billion dollars went missing) are heading for cushy spots like Dubai, where they have already established residence on prime real estate.

As they take their investments elsewhere and the American effort winds down, the Afghan economy contracts ever more grimly, opportunities dwindle, and jobs disappear.  Housing prices in Kabul are falling for the first time since the start of the occupation as rich Afghans and profiteering private American contractors, who guzzled the money that Washington and the “international community” poured into the country, move on.

At the same time, a money-laundering building boom in Kabul appears to have stalled, leaving tall, half-built office blocks like so many skeletons amid the scalloped Pakistani palaces, vertical malls, and grand madrassas erected in the past four or five years by political and business insiders and well-connected conservative clerics.

Most of the Afghan tycoons seeking asylum elsewhere don’t fear for their lives, just their pocketbooks: they’re not political refugees, but free-market rats abandoning the sinking ship of state.  Joining in the exodus (but not included in the statistics) are countless illegal émigrés seeking jobs or fleeing for their lives, paying human smugglers money they can’t afford as they head for Europe by circuitous and dangerous routes.

Threatened Afghans have fled from every abrupt change of government in the last century, making them the largest population of refugees from a single country on the planet.  Once again, those who can are voting with their feet (or their pocketbooks) -- and voting early.

Afghanistan’s historic tragedy is that its violent political shifts -- from king to communists to warlords to religious fundamentalists to the Americans -- have meant the flight of the very people most capable of rebuilding the country along peaceful and prosperous lines.  And their departure only contributes to the economic and political collapse they themselves seek to avoid.  Left behind are ordinary Afghans -- the illiterate and unskilled, but also a tough core of educated, ambitious citizens, including women’s rights activists, unwilling to surrender their dream of living once again in a free and peaceful Afghanistan.

The Military Monster

These days Kabul resounds with the blasts of suicide bombers, IEDs, and sporadic gunfire.  Armed men are everywhere in anonymous uniforms that defy identification.  Any man with money can buy a squad of bodyguards, clad in classy camouflage and wraparound shades, and armed with assault weapons.  Yet Kabulis, trying to carry on normal lives in the relative safety of the capital, seem to maintain a distance from the war going on in the provinces.

Asked that crucial question -- do you think American forces should stay or go? -- the Kabulis I talked with tended to answer in a theoretical way, very unlike the visceral response one gets in the countryside, where villages are bombed andcivilians killed, or in the makeshift camps for internally displaced people that now crowd the outer fringes of Kabul. (By the time U.S. Marines surged into Taliban-controlled Helmand Province in the south in 2010 to bring counterinsurgency-style protection to the residents there, tens of thousands of them had already moved to those camps in Kabul.)  Afghans in the countryside want to be rid of armed men.  All of them.  Kabulis just want to be secure, and if that means keeping some U.S. troops at Bagram Air Base near the capital, as Afghan and American officials are currently discussing, well, it’s nothing to them.

In fact, most Kabulis I spoke to think that’s what’s going to happen.  After all, American officials have been talking for years about keeping permanent bases in Afghanistan (though they avoid the term “permanent” when speaking to the American press), and American military officers now regularly appear on Afghan TV to say, “The United States will never abandon Afghanistan.”  Afghans reason: Americans would not have spent nearly 12 years fighting in this country if it were not the most strategic place on the planet and absolutely essential to their plans to “push on” Iran and China next.  Everybody knows that pushing on other countries is an American specialty.

Besides, Afghans can see with their own eyes that U.S. command centers, including multiple bases in Kabul, and Bagram Air Base, only 30 miles away, are still being expanded and upgraded.  Beyond the high walls of the American Embassy compound, they can also see the tall new apartment blocks going up for an expanding staff, even if Washington now claims that staff will be reduced in the years to come.

Why, then, would President Obama announce the drawdown of U.S. troops to perhaps a few thousand special operations forces and advisors, if Washington didn’t mean to leave?  Afghans have a theory about that, too.  It’s a ruse, many claim, to encourage all other foreign forces to depart so that the Americans can have everything to themselves.  Afghanistan, as they imagine it, is so important that the U.S., which has fought the longest war in its history there, will be satisfied with nothing less.

I was there to listen, but at times I did mention to Afghans that America’s post-9/11 wars and occupations were threatening to break the country.  “We just can’t afford this war anymore,” I said.

Afghans only laugh at that.  They’ve seen the way Americans throw money around.  They’ve seen the way American money corrupted the Afghan government, and many reminded me that American politicians like Afghan ones are bought and sold, and its elections won by money. Americans, they know, are as rich as Croesus and very friendly, though on the whole not very well mannered or honest or smart.

Operation Enduring Presence      

More than 11 years later, the tragedy of the American war in Afghanistan is simple enough: it has proven remarkably irrelevant to the lives of the Afghan people -- and to American troops as well.  Washington has long appeared to be fighting its own war in defense of a form of government and a set of long-discredited government officials that ordinary Afghans would never have chosen for themselves and have no power to replace.

In the early years of the war (2001-2005), George W. Bush’s administration was far too distracted planning and launching another war in Iraq to maintain anything but a minimal military presence in Afghanistan -- and that mainly outside the capital.  Many journalists (including me) criticized Bush for not finishing the war he started there when he had the chance, but today Kabulis look back on that soldierless period of peace and hope with a certain nostalgia.  In some quarters, the Bush years have even acquired something like the sheen of a lost Golden Age -- compared, that is, to the thoroughgoing militarization of American policy that followed.

So commanding did the U.S. military become in Kabul and Washington that, over the years, it ate the State Department, gobbled up the incompetent bureaucracy of the U.S. Agency for International Development, and established Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in the countryside to carry out maniacal “development” projects and throw bales of cash at all the wrong “leaders.”

Of course, the military also killed a great many people, both “enemies” and civilians.  As in Vietnam, it won the battles, but lost the war.  When I asked Afghans from Mazar-e-Sharif in the north how they accounted for the relative peacefulness and stability of their area, the answer seemed self-evident: “Americans didn’t come here.”

Other consequences, all deleterious, flowed from the militarization of foreign policy.  In Afghanistan and the United States, so intimately ensnarled over all these years, the income gap between the rich and everyone else has grown exponentially, in large part because in both countries the rich have made money off war-making, while ordinary citizens have slipped into poverty for lack of jobs and basic services.

Relying on the military, the U.S. neglected the crucial elements of civil life in Afghanistan that make things bearable -- like education and health care.  Yes, I’ve heard the repeated claims that, thanks to us, millions of children are now attending school.  But for how long?   According to UNICEF, in the years 2005-2010, in the whole of Afghanistan only 18% of boys attended high school, and 6% of girls.  What kind of report card is that?  After 11 years of underfunded work on health care in a country the size of Texas, infant mortality still remains the highest in the world.

By 2014, the defense of Afghanistan will have been handed over to the woefulAfghan National Security Force, also known in military-speak as the “Enduring Presence Force.”  In that year, for Washington, the American war will be officially over, whether it’s actually at an end or not, and it will be up to Afghans to do the enduring.

Here’s where that final scenario -- collapse -- haunts the Kabuli imagination.  Economic collapse means joblessness, poverty, hunger, and a great swelling of the ranks of children cadging a living in the streets.  Already street children are said to number a million strong in Kabul, and 4 million across the country.  Only blocks from the Presidential Palace, they are there in startling numbers selling newspapers, phone cards, toilet paper, or simply begging for small change. Are they the county’s future?

And if the state collapses, too?  Afghans of a certain age remember well the last time the country was left on its own, after the Soviets departed in 1989, and the U.S. also terminated its covert aid.  The mujahideen parties -- Islamists all -- agreed to take turns ruling the country, but things soon fell apart and they took turns instead lobbing rockets into Kabul, killing tens of thousands of civilians, reducing entire districts to rubble, raiding and raping -- until the Taliban came up from the south and put a stop to everything.

Afghan civilians who remember that era hope that this time Karzai will step down as he promises, and that the usual suspects will find ways to maintain traditional power balances, however undemocratic, in something that passes for peace.  Afghan civilians are, however, betting that if a collision comes, one-third of those Afghan Security Forces trained at fabulous expense to protect them will fight for the government (whoever that may be), one-third will fight for the opposition, and one-third will simply desert and go home.  That sounds almost like a plan.

Pentagon’s New Massive Expansion of ‘Cyber-Security’ Unit is About Everything Except Defense

As the US government depicts the Defense Department as shrinking due to budgetary constraints, the Washington Post this morning announces "a major expansion of [the Pentagon's] cybersecurity force over the next several years, increasing its size more than fivefold."

The National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. Among other forms of intelligence-gathering, the NSA secretly collects the phone records of millions of Americans, using data provided by telecom firms AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth. (Photo: NSA/Getty Images)

Specifically, says the New York Times this morning, "the expansion would increase the Defense Department's Cyber Command by more than 4,000 people, up from the current 900." The Post describes this expansion as "part of an effort to turn an organization that has focused largely on defensive measures into the equivalent of an Internet-era fighting force." This Cyber Command Unit operates under the command of Gen. Keith Alexander, who also happens to be the head of the National Security Agency, the highly secretive government network that spies on the communications of foreign nationals - and American citizens.

The Pentagon's rhetorical justification for this expansion is deeply misleading. Beyond that, these activities pose a wide array of serious threats to internet freedom, privacy, and international law that, as usual, will be conducted with full-scale secrecy and with little to no oversight and accountability. And, as usual, there is a small army of private-sector corporations who will benefit most from this expansion.

Disguising aggression as "defense"

Let's begin with the way this so-called "cyber-security" expansion has been marketed. It is part of a sustained campaign which, as usual, relies on blatant fear-mongering.

In March, 2010, the Washington Post published an amazing Op-Ed by Adm. Michael McConnell, Bush's former Director of National Intelligence and a past and current executive with Booz Allen, a firm representing numerous corporate contractors which profit enormously each time the government expands its "cyber-security" activities. McConnell's career over the last two decades - both at Booz, Allen and inside the government - has been devoted to accelerating the merger between the government and private sector in all intelligence, surveillance and national security matters (it was he who led the successful campaign to retroactively immunize the telecom giants for their participation in the illegal NSA domestic spying program). Privatizing government cyber-spying and cyber-warfare is his primary focus now.

McConnell's Op-Ed was as alarmist and hysterical as possible. Claiming that "the United States is fighting a cyber-war today, and we are losing", it warned that "chaos would result" from an enemy cyber-attack on US financial systems and that "our power grids, air and ground transportation, telecommunications, and water-filtration systems are in jeopardy as well." Based on these threats, McConnell advocated that "we" - meaning "the government and the private sector" - "need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace" and that "we need to reengineer the Internet to make attribution, geolocation, intelligence analysis and impact assessment - who did it, from where, why and what was the result - more manageable." As Wired's Ryan Singel wrote: "He's talking about changing the internet to make everything anyone does on the net traceable and geo-located so the National Security Agency can pinpoint users and their computers for retaliation."

The same week the Post published McConnell's extraordinary Op-Ed, the Obama White House issued its own fear-mongering decree on cyber-threats, depicting the US as a vulnerable victim to cyber-aggression. It began with this sentence: "President Obama has identified cybersecurity as one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation, but one that we as a government or as a country are not adequately prepared to counter." It announced that "the Executive Branch was directed to work closely with all key players in US cybersecurity, including state and local governments and the private sector" and to "strengthen public/private partnerships", and specifically announced Obama's intent to "to implement the recommendations of the Cyberspace Policy Review built on the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI) launched by President George W. Bush."

Since then, the fear-mongering rhetoric from government officials has relentlessly intensified, all devoted to scaring citizens into believing that the US is at serious risk of cataclysmic cyber-attacks from "aggressors". This all culminated when Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, last October, warned of what he called a "cyber-Pearl Harbor. This "would cause physical destruction and the loss of life, an attack that would paralyze and shock the nation and create a profound new sense of vulnerability." Identifying China, Iran, and terrorist groups, he outlined a parade of horribles scarier than anything since Condoleezza Rice's 2002 Iraqi "mushroom cloud":

"An aggressor nation or extremist group could use these kinds of cyber tools to gain control of critical switches. They could derail passenger trains, or even more dangerous, derail passenger trains loaded with lethal chemicals. They could contaminate the water supply in major cities, or shut down the power grid across large parts of the country."

As usual, though, reality is exactly the opposite. This new massive new expenditure of money is not primarily devoted to defending against cyber-aggressors. The US itself is the world's leading cyber-aggressor. A major purpose of this expansion is to strengthen the US's ability to destroy other nations with cyber-attacks. Indeed, even the Post report notes that a major component of this new expansion is to "conduct offensive computer operations against foreign adversaries".

It is the US - not Iran, Russia or "terror" groups - which already is the first nation (in partnership with Israel) to aggressively deploy a highly sophisticated and extremely dangerous cyber-attack. Last June, the New York Times' David Sanger reported what most of the world had already suspected: "From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran's main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America's first sustained use of cyberweapons." In fact, Obama "decided to accelerate the attacks . . . even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran's Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet." According to the Sanger's report, Obama himself understood the significance of the US decision to be the first to use serious and aggressive cyber-warfare:

"Mr. Obama, according to participants in the many Situation Room meetings on Olympic Games, was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade. He repeatedly expressed concerns that any American acknowledgment that it was using cyberweapons - even under the most careful and limited circumstances - could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers to justify their own attacks."

The US isn't the vulnerable victim of cyber-attacks. It's the leading perpetrator of those attacks. As Columbia Professor and cyber expert Misha Glenny wrote in the NYT last June: Obama's cyber-attack on Iran "marked a significant and dangerous turning point in the gradual militarization of the Internet."

Indeed, exactly as Obama knew would happen, revelations that it was the US which became the first country to use cyber-warfare against a sovereign country - just as it was the first to use the atomic bomb and then drones - would make it impossible for it to claim with any credibility (except among its own media and foreign policy community) that it was in a defensive posture when it came to cyber-warfare. As Professor Glenny wrote: "by introducing such pernicious viruses as Stuxnet and Flame, America has severely undermined its moral and political credibility." That's why, as the Post reported yesterday, the DOJ is engaged in such a frantic and invasive effort to root out Sanger's source: because it reveals the obvious truth that the US is the leading aggressor in the world when it comes to cyber-weapons.

This significant expansion under the Orwellian rubric of "cyber-security" is thus a perfect microcosm of US military spending generally. It's all justified under by the claim that the US must defend itself from threats from Bad, Aggressive Actors, when the reality is the exact opposite: the new program is devoted to ensuring that the US remains the primary offensive threat to the rest of the world. It's the same way the US develops offensive biological weapons under the guise of developing defenses against such weapons (such as the 2001 anthrax that the US government itself says came from a US Army lab). It's how the US government generally convinces its citizens that it is a peaceful victim of aggression by others when the reality is that the US builds more weapons, sells more arms and bombs more countries than virtually the rest of the world combined.

Threats to privacy and internet freedom

Beyond the aggressive threat to other nations posed by the Pentagon's cyber-threat programs, there is the profound threat to privacy, internet freedom, and the ability to communicate freely for US citizens and foreign nationals alike. The US government has long viewed these "cyber-security" programs as a means of monitoring and controlling the internet and disseminating propaganda. The fact that this is all being done under the auspices of the NSA and the Pentagon means, by definition, that there will be no transparency and no meaningful oversight.

Back in 2003, the Rumsfeld Pentagon prepared a secret report entitled "Information Operations (IO) Roadmap", which laid the foundation for this new cyber-warfare expansion. The Pentagon's self-described objective was "transforming IO into a core military competency on par with air, ground, maritime and special operations". In other words, its key objective was to ensure military control over internet-based communications:

dod cyber

It further identified superiority in cyber-attack capabilities as a vital military goal in PSYOPs (Psychological Operations) and "information-centric fights":

dod cyber

And it set forth the urgency of dominating the "IO battlespace" not only during wartime but also in peacetime:

dod cyber

As a 2006 BBC report on this Pentagon document noted: "Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military's psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans." And while the report paid lip service to the need to create "boundaries" for these new IO military activities, "they don't seem to explain how." Regarding the report's plan to "provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum", the BBC noted: "Consider that for a moment. The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet."

Since then, there have been countless reports of the exploitation by the US national security state to destroy privacy and undermine internet freedom. In November, the LA Times described programs that "teach students how to spy in cyberspace, the latest frontier in espionage." They "also are taught to write computer viruses, hack digital networks, crack passwords, plant listening devices and mine data from broken cellphones and flash drives." The program, needless to say, "has funneled most of its graduates to the CIA and the Pentagon's National Security Agency, which conducts America's digital spying. Other graduates have taken positions with the FBI, NASA and the Department of Homeland Security."

In 2010, Lawrence E. Strickling, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information, gave a speech explicitly announcing that the US intends to abandon its policy of "leaving the Internet alone". Noting that this "has been the nation's Internet policy since the Internet was first commercialized in the mid-1990s", he decreed: "This was the right policy for the United States in the early stages of the Internet, and the right message to send to the rest of the world. But that was then and this is now."

The documented power of the US government to monitor and surveil internet communications is already unfathomably massive. Recall that the Washington Post's 2010 "Top Secret America" series noted that: "Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications." And the Obama administration has formally demanded that it have access to any and all forms of internet communication.

It is hard to overstate the danger to privacy and internet freedom from a massive expansion of the National Security State's efforts to exploit and control the internet. As Wired's Singel wrote back in 2010:

"Make no mistake, the military industrial complex now has its eye on the internet. Generals want to train crack squads of hackers and have wet dreams of cyberwarfare. Never shy of extending its power, the military industrial complex wants to turn the internet into yet another venue for an arms race.

Wildly exaggerated cyber-threats are the pretext for this control, the "mushroom cloud" and the Tonkin Gulf fiction of cyber-warfare. As Singel aptly put it: "the only war going on is one for the soul of the internet." That's the vital context for understanding this massive expansion of Pentagon and NSA consolidated control over cyber programs.

Bonanza for private contractors

As always, it is not just political power but also private-sector profit driving this expansion. As military contracts for conventional war-fighting are modestly reduced, something needs to replace it, and these large-scale "cyber-security" contracts are more than adequate. Virtually every cyber-security program from the government is carried out in conjunction with its "private-sector partners", who receive large transfers of public funds for this work.

Two weeks ago, Business Week reported that "Lockheed Martin Corp., AT&T Inc., and CenturyLink Inc. are the first companies to sign up for a US program giving them classified information on cyber threats that they can package as security services for sale to other companies." This is part of a government effort "to create a market based on classified US information about cyber threats." In May, it was announced that "the Pentagon is expanding and making permanent a trial program that teams the government with Internet service providers to protect defense firms' computer networks against data theft by foreign adversaries" - all as "part of a larger effort to broaden the sharing of classified and unclassified cyberthreat data between the government and industry."

Indeed, there is a large organization of defense and intelligence contractors devoted to one goal: expanding the private-public merger for national security and intelligence functions. This organization - the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) - was formerly headed by Adm. McConnell, and describes itself as a "collaboration by leaders from throughout the US Intelligence Community" and " combines the experience of senior leaders from government, the private sector, and academia."

As I detailed back in 2010, one of its primary goals is to scare the nation about supposed cyber-threats in order to justify massive new expenditures for the private-sector intelligence industry on cyber-security measures and vastly expanded control over the internet. Indeed, in his 2010 Op-Ed, Adm. McConnell expressly acknowledged that the growing privatization of internet cyber-security programs "will muddy the waters between the traditional roles of the government and the private sector." Indeed, at the very same time McConnell published this Op-Ed, the INSA website featured a report entitled "Addressing Cyber Security Through Public-Private Partnership." It featured a genuinely creepy graphic showing the inter-connectedness between government institutions (such as Congress and regulatory agencies), the Surveillance State, private intelligence corporations, and the Internet:

Private-sector profit is now inextricably linked with the fear-mongering campaign over cyber-threats. At one INSA conference in 2009 - entitled "Cyber Deterrence Conference" - government officials and intelligence industry executives gathered together to stress that "government and private sector actors should emphasize collaboration and partnership through the creation of a model that assigns specific roles and responsibilities."

As intelligence contractor expert Tim Shorrock told Democracy Now when McConnell - then at Booz Allen - was first nominated to be DNI:

Well, the NSA, the National Security Agency, is really sort of the lead agency in terms of outsourcing . . . . Booz Allen is one of about, you know, ten large corporations that play a very major role in American intelligence. Every time you hear about intelligence watching North Korea or tapping al-Qaeda phones, something like that, you can bet that corporations like these are very heavily involved. And Booz Allen is one of the largest of these contractors. I estimate that about 50% of our $45 billion intelligence budget goes to private sector contractors like Booz Allen.

This public-private merger for intelligence and surveillance functions not only vests these industries with large-scale profits at public expense, but also the accompanying power that was traditionally reserved for government. And unlike government agencies, which are at least subjected in theory to some minimal regulatory oversight, these private-sector actors have virtually none, even as their surveillance and intelligence functions rapidly increase.

What Dwight Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex has been feeding itself on fear campaigns since it was born. A never-ending carousel of Menacing Enemies - Communists, Terrorists, Saddam's chemical weapons, Iranian mullahs - has sustained it, and Cyber-Threats are but the latest.

Like all of these wildly exaggerated cartoon menaces, there is some degree of threat posed by cyber-attacks. But, as Single described, all of this can be managed with greater security systems for public and private computer networks - just as some modest security measures are sufficient to deal with the terrorist threat.

This new massive expansion has little to do with any actual cyber-threat - just as the invasion of Iraq and global assassination program have little to do with actual terrorist threats. It is instead all about strengthening the US's offensive cyber-war capabilities, consolidating control over the internet, and ensuring further transfers of massive public wealth to private industry continue unabated. In other words, it perfectly follows the template used by the public-private US National Security State over the last six decades to entrench and enrich itself based on pure pretext.

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited

Glenn Greenwald

Pentagon’s New Massive Expansion of ‘Cyber-Security’ Unit is About Everything Except Defense

As the US government depicts the Defense Department as shrinking due to budgetary constraints, the Washington Post this morning announces "a major expansion of [the Pentagon's] cybersecurity force over the next several years, increasing its size more than fivefold."

The National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. Among other forms of intelligence-gathering, the NSA secretly collects the phone records of millions of Americans, using data provided by telecom firms AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth. (Photo: NSA/Getty Images)

Specifically, says the New York Times this morning, "the expansion would increase the Defense Department's Cyber Command by more than 4,000 people, up from the current 900." The Post describes this expansion as "part of an effort to turn an organization that has focused largely on defensive measures into the equivalent of an Internet-era fighting force." This Cyber Command Unit operates under the command of Gen. Keith Alexander, who also happens to be the head of the National Security Agency, the highly secretive government network that spies on the communications of foreign nationals - and American citizens.

The Pentagon's rhetorical justification for this expansion is deeply misleading. Beyond that, these activities pose a wide array of serious threats to internet freedom, privacy, and international law that, as usual, will be conducted with full-scale secrecy and with little to no oversight and accountability. And, as usual, there is a small army of private-sector corporations who will benefit most from this expansion.

Disguising aggression as "defense"

Let's begin with the way this so-called "cyber-security" expansion has been marketed. It is part of a sustained campaign which, as usual, relies on blatant fear-mongering.

In March, 2010, the Washington Post published an amazing Op-Ed by Adm. Michael McConnell, Bush's former Director of National Intelligence and a past and current executive with Booz Allen, a firm representing numerous corporate contractors which profit enormously each time the government expands its "cyber-security" activities. McConnell's career over the last two decades - both at Booz, Allen and inside the government - has been devoted to accelerating the merger between the government and private sector in all intelligence, surveillance and national security matters (it was he who led the successful campaign to retroactively immunize the telecom giants for their participation in the illegal NSA domestic spying program). Privatizing government cyber-spying and cyber-warfare is his primary focus now.

McConnell's Op-Ed was as alarmist and hysterical as possible. Claiming that "the United States is fighting a cyber-war today, and we are losing", it warned that "chaos would result" from an enemy cyber-attack on US financial systems and that "our power grids, air and ground transportation, telecommunications, and water-filtration systems are in jeopardy as well." Based on these threats, McConnell advocated that "we" - meaning "the government and the private sector" - "need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace" and that "we need to reengineer the Internet to make attribution, geolocation, intelligence analysis and impact assessment - who did it, from where, why and what was the result - more manageable." As Wired's Ryan Singel wrote: "He's talking about changing the internet to make everything anyone does on the net traceable and geo-located so the National Security Agency can pinpoint users and their computers for retaliation."

The same week the Post published McConnell's extraordinary Op-Ed, the Obama White House issued its own fear-mongering decree on cyber-threats, depicting the US as a vulnerable victim to cyber-aggression. It began with this sentence: "President Obama has identified cybersecurity as one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation, but one that we as a government or as a country are not adequately prepared to counter." It announced that "the Executive Branch was directed to work closely with all key players in US cybersecurity, including state and local governments and the private sector" and to "strengthen public/private partnerships", and specifically announced Obama's intent to "to implement the recommendations of the Cyberspace Policy Review built on the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI) launched by President George W. Bush."

Since then, the fear-mongering rhetoric from government officials has relentlessly intensified, all devoted to scaring citizens into believing that the US is at serious risk of cataclysmic cyber-attacks from "aggressors". This all culminated when Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, last October, warned of what he called a "cyber-Pearl Harbor. This "would cause physical destruction and the loss of life, an attack that would paralyze and shock the nation and create a profound new sense of vulnerability." Identifying China, Iran, and terrorist groups, he outlined a parade of horribles scarier than anything since Condoleezza Rice's 2002 Iraqi "mushroom cloud":

"An aggressor nation or extremist group could use these kinds of cyber tools to gain control of critical switches. They could derail passenger trains, or even more dangerous, derail passenger trains loaded with lethal chemicals. They could contaminate the water supply in major cities, or shut down the power grid across large parts of the country."

As usual, though, reality is exactly the opposite. This new massive new expenditure of money is not primarily devoted to defending against cyber-aggressors. The US itself is the world's leading cyber-aggressor. A major purpose of this expansion is to strengthen the US's ability to destroy other nations with cyber-attacks. Indeed, even the Post report notes that a major component of this new expansion is to "conduct offensive computer operations against foreign adversaries".

It is the US - not Iran, Russia or "terror" groups - which already is the first nation (in partnership with Israel) to aggressively deploy a highly sophisticated and extremely dangerous cyber-attack. Last June, the New York Times' David Sanger reported what most of the world had already suspected: "From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran's main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America's first sustained use of cyberweapons." In fact, Obama "decided to accelerate the attacks . . . even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran's Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet." According to the Sanger's report, Obama himself understood the significance of the US decision to be the first to use serious and aggressive cyber-warfare:

"Mr. Obama, according to participants in the many Situation Room meetings on Olympic Games, was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade. He repeatedly expressed concerns that any American acknowledgment that it was using cyberweapons - even under the most careful and limited circumstances - could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers to justify their own attacks."

The US isn't the vulnerable victim of cyber-attacks. It's the leading perpetrator of those attacks. As Columbia Professor and cyber expert Misha Glenny wrote in the NYT last June: Obama's cyber-attack on Iran "marked a significant and dangerous turning point in the gradual militarization of the Internet."

Indeed, exactly as Obama knew would happen, revelations that it was the US which became the first country to use cyber-warfare against a sovereign country - just as it was the first to use the atomic bomb and then drones - would make it impossible for it to claim with any credibility (except among its own media and foreign policy community) that it was in a defensive posture when it came to cyber-warfare. As Professor Glenny wrote: "by introducing such pernicious viruses as Stuxnet and Flame, America has severely undermined its moral and political credibility." That's why, as the Post reported yesterday, the DOJ is engaged in such a frantic and invasive effort to root out Sanger's source: because it reveals the obvious truth that the US is the leading aggressor in the world when it comes to cyber-weapons.

This significant expansion under the Orwellian rubric of "cyber-security" is thus a perfect microcosm of US military spending generally. It's all justified under by the claim that the US must defend itself from threats from Bad, Aggressive Actors, when the reality is the exact opposite: the new program is devoted to ensuring that the US remains the primary offensive threat to the rest of the world. It's the same way the US develops offensive biological weapons under the guise of developing defenses against such weapons (such as the 2001 anthrax that the US government itself says came from a US Army lab). It's how the US government generally convinces its citizens that it is a peaceful victim of aggression by others when the reality is that the US builds more weapons, sells more arms and bombs more countries than virtually the rest of the world combined.

Threats to privacy and internet freedom

Beyond the aggressive threat to other nations posed by the Pentagon's cyber-threat programs, there is the profound threat to privacy, internet freedom, and the ability to communicate freely for US citizens and foreign nationals alike. The US government has long viewed these "cyber-security" programs as a means of monitoring and controlling the internet and disseminating propaganda. The fact that this is all being done under the auspices of the NSA and the Pentagon means, by definition, that there will be no transparency and no meaningful oversight.

Back in 2003, the Rumsfeld Pentagon prepared a secret report entitled "Information Operations (IO) Roadmap", which laid the foundation for this new cyber-warfare expansion. The Pentagon's self-described objective was "transforming IO into a core military competency on par with air, ground, maritime and special operations". In other words, its key objective was to ensure military control over internet-based communications:

dod cyber

It further identified superiority in cyber-attack capabilities as a vital military goal in PSYOPs (Psychological Operations) and "information-centric fights":

dod cyber

And it set forth the urgency of dominating the "IO battlespace" not only during wartime but also in peacetime:

dod cyber

As a 2006 BBC report on this Pentagon document noted: "Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military's psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans." And while the report paid lip service to the need to create "boundaries" for these new IO military activities, "they don't seem to explain how." Regarding the report's plan to "provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum", the BBC noted: "Consider that for a moment. The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet."

Since then, there have been countless reports of the exploitation by the US national security state to destroy privacy and undermine internet freedom. In November, the LA Times described programs that "teach students how to spy in cyberspace, the latest frontier in espionage." They "also are taught to write computer viruses, hack digital networks, crack passwords, plant listening devices and mine data from broken cellphones and flash drives." The program, needless to say, "has funneled most of its graduates to the CIA and the Pentagon's National Security Agency, which conducts America's digital spying. Other graduates have taken positions with the FBI, NASA and the Department of Homeland Security."

In 2010, Lawrence E. Strickling, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information, gave a speech explicitly announcing that the US intends to abandon its policy of "leaving the Internet alone". Noting that this "has been the nation's Internet policy since the Internet was first commercialized in the mid-1990s", he decreed: "This was the right policy for the United States in the early stages of the Internet, and the right message to send to the rest of the world. But that was then and this is now."

The documented power of the US government to monitor and surveil internet communications is already unfathomably massive. Recall that the Washington Post's 2010 "Top Secret America" series noted that: "Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications." And the Obama administration has formally demanded that it have access to any and all forms of internet communication.

It is hard to overstate the danger to privacy and internet freedom from a massive expansion of the National Security State's efforts to exploit and control the internet. As Wired's Singel wrote back in 2010:

"Make no mistake, the military industrial complex now has its eye on the internet. Generals want to train crack squads of hackers and have wet dreams of cyberwarfare. Never shy of extending its power, the military industrial complex wants to turn the internet into yet another venue for an arms race.

Wildly exaggerated cyber-threats are the pretext for this control, the "mushroom cloud" and the Tonkin Gulf fiction of cyber-warfare. As Singel aptly put it: "the only war going on is one for the soul of the internet." That's the vital context for understanding this massive expansion of Pentagon and NSA consolidated control over cyber programs.

Bonanza for private contractors

As always, it is not just political power but also private-sector profit driving this expansion. As military contracts for conventional war-fighting are modestly reduced, something needs to replace it, and these large-scale "cyber-security" contracts are more than adequate. Virtually every cyber-security program from the government is carried out in conjunction with its "private-sector partners", who receive large transfers of public funds for this work.

Two weeks ago, Business Week reported that "Lockheed Martin Corp., AT&T Inc., and CenturyLink Inc. are the first companies to sign up for a US program giving them classified information on cyber threats that they can package as security services for sale to other companies." This is part of a government effort "to create a market based on classified US information about cyber threats." In May, it was announced that "the Pentagon is expanding and making permanent a trial program that teams the government with Internet service providers to protect defense firms' computer networks against data theft by foreign adversaries" - all as "part of a larger effort to broaden the sharing of classified and unclassified cyberthreat data between the government and industry."

Indeed, there is a large organization of defense and intelligence contractors devoted to one goal: expanding the private-public merger for national security and intelligence functions. This organization - the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) - was formerly headed by Adm. McConnell, and describes itself as a "collaboration by leaders from throughout the US Intelligence Community" and " combines the experience of senior leaders from government, the private sector, and academia."

As I detailed back in 2010, one of its primary goals is to scare the nation about supposed cyber-threats in order to justify massive new expenditures for the private-sector intelligence industry on cyber-security measures and vastly expanded control over the internet. Indeed, in his 2010 Op-Ed, Adm. McConnell expressly acknowledged that the growing privatization of internet cyber-security programs "will muddy the waters between the traditional roles of the government and the private sector." Indeed, at the very same time McConnell published this Op-Ed, the INSA website featured a report entitled "Addressing Cyber Security Through Public-Private Partnership." It featured a genuinely creepy graphic showing the inter-connectedness between government institutions (such as Congress and regulatory agencies), the Surveillance State, private intelligence corporations, and the Internet:

Private-sector profit is now inextricably linked with the fear-mongering campaign over cyber-threats. At one INSA conference in 2009 - entitled "Cyber Deterrence Conference" - government officials and intelligence industry executives gathered together to stress that "government and private sector actors should emphasize collaboration and partnership through the creation of a model that assigns specific roles and responsibilities."

As intelligence contractor expert Tim Shorrock told Democracy Now when McConnell - then at Booz Allen - was first nominated to be DNI:

Well, the NSA, the National Security Agency, is really sort of the lead agency in terms of outsourcing . . . . Booz Allen is one of about, you know, ten large corporations that play a very major role in American intelligence. Every time you hear about intelligence watching North Korea or tapping al-Qaeda phones, something like that, you can bet that corporations like these are very heavily involved. And Booz Allen is one of the largest of these contractors. I estimate that about 50% of our $45 billion intelligence budget goes to private sector contractors like Booz Allen.

This public-private merger for intelligence and surveillance functions not only vests these industries with large-scale profits at public expense, but also the accompanying power that was traditionally reserved for government. And unlike government agencies, which are at least subjected in theory to some minimal regulatory oversight, these private-sector actors have virtually none, even as their surveillance and intelligence functions rapidly increase.

What Dwight Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex has been feeding itself on fear campaigns since it was born. A never-ending carousel of Menacing Enemies - Communists, Terrorists, Saddam's chemical weapons, Iranian mullahs - has sustained it, and Cyber-Threats are but the latest.

Like all of these wildly exaggerated cartoon menaces, there is some degree of threat posed by cyber-attacks. But, as Single described, all of this can be managed with greater security systems for public and private computer networks - just as some modest security measures are sufficient to deal with the terrorist threat.

This new massive expansion has little to do with any actual cyber-threat - just as the invasion of Iraq and global assassination program have little to do with actual terrorist threats. It is instead all about strengthening the US's offensive cyber-war capabilities, consolidating control over the internet, and ensuring further transfers of massive public wealth to private industry continue unabated. In other words, it perfectly follows the template used by the public-private US National Security State over the last six decades to entrench and enrich itself based on pure pretext.

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited

Glenn Greenwald

Timothy Geithner Saved Wall Street, Not the Economy

The accolades for Timothy Geithner came on so thick and heavy in the last week that it’s necessary for those of us in the reality-based community to bring the discussion back to earth. The basic facts of the matter are very straightforward. Timothy Geithner and the bailout he helped engineer saved the Wall Street banks. He did not save the economy.

We can’t know exactly what would have happened if we did not have the TARP in October of 2008. We do know there was a major effort at the time to exaggerate the dangers to the financial system in order to pressure Congress to pass the TARP.
For example, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernacke highlighted the claim that the commercial paper market was shutting down. Since most major companies finance their ongoing operations by issuing commercial paper, this raised the threat of a full-fledged economic collapse because even healthy companies would not be able to get the cash needed to pay their bills.

What Bernanke neglected to mention was that he personally had the ability to sustain the commercial paper market through direct lending from the Fed. He opted to go this route by announcing the creation of a Fed special lending facility to support the commercial paper market the weekend after Congress voted to approve the TARP.

It is quite likely that Bernanke could have taken whatever steps were necessary himself to keep the financial system from collapsing even without the TARP. The amount of money dispersed through the Fed was many times larger than the TARP, much of which was never even lent out. The TARP was primarily about providing political cover and saying that the government stood behind the big banks.

Of course we can never know the right counterfactual had the TARP and related Treasury efforts not been put in place, but even if we assume the worst, the idea that we would have seen a second Great Depression was always absurd on its face.  The example of Argentina proves otherwise.

In December of 2001 Argentina did have a full-fledged financial collapse. In other words, all the horrible things that we feared could happen in the United States in 2008 actually did happen in Argentina. Banks shut down. People could not use their ATMs or get access to their bank accounts.

This led to a 3-month period in which the economy was in free fall. It stabilized over the next 3 months. Then it began growing rapidly in the second half of 2002. By the middle of 2003 it had made up all the ground lost in financial crisis. Its economy continued to grow strongly until the world economic crisis brought it to a standstill in 2009.

Even if Obama’s economic team may not have been quite as competent as the folks in Argentina, they would have to be an awful lot worse to leave us with a decade of double-digit unemployment, the sort of story that would be associated with a second Great Depression. In short, the second Great Depression line was just a bogeyman used to justify the government bailout of the Wall Street banks.

As it is, the economy has already lost more than $7 trillion in output ($20,000 per person) compared to what the Congressional Budget Office projected in January of 2008. We will probably lose at least another $4 trillion before the economy gets back to anything resembling full employment. And, millions of people have seen their lives turned upside down by their inability to get jobs, being thrown out of their homes, or their parents’ inability to get a job. And this is all because of the folks in Washington’s inability to manage the economy.

But the Wall Street banks are bigger and fatter than ever. As a result of the crisis, many mergers were rushed through that might have otherwise been subject to serious regulatory scrutiny. For example, J.P. Morgan was allowed to take over Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, two huge banks that both faced collapse in the crisis. Bank of America took over Merrill Lynch and Countrywide. By contrast, there can be little doubt that without the helping hand of Timothy Geithner, most or all of the Wall Street banks would have been sunk by their own recklessness.

There is one other hoary myth that needs to be put to rest as Timothy Geithner heads off to greener pastures. The claim that we made money on the bailout is one of those lines that should immediately discredit the teller. We made money on the loans in the same way that if the government issued mortgages at 1 percent interest it would make money, since the vast majority of the mortgages would be repaid.

The TARP money and other bailout loans were given to banks at way below market interest rates at a time when liquidity carried an enormous premium. Serious people know this, and the people who don’t are not worth listening to. It was a massive giveaway as the Congressional Oversight Panel determined at the time.   

It’s impossible to know whether the economy would have bounced back more quickly and we would be closer to full employment now without the bailouts, since none of us know what other policies would have been pursued. We do know that we would have been freed of the albatross of a horribly bloated financial sector that sucks the life out of the economy and redistributes income upward to the very rich. For that fact, Timothy Geithner bears considerable responsibility.  

Secret Donors Finance Fight Against Hagel

A brand new conservative group calling itself Americans for a Strong Defense and financed by anonymous donors is running advertisements urging Democratic senators in five states to vote against Chuck Hagel, President Obama's nominee to be secretary of...

What’s in the New Immigration Reform Deal?

Lawmakers have put forth a deal. Here's what's in it.

January 28, 2013  |  

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Eight US lawmakers crossed party lines to unveil a plan Monday that would provide a pathway to citizenship for 11 million illegal immigrants currently living in the shadows in the United States.

"We recognize that our immigration system is broken," the senators said in their bipartisan framework, which comes as President Barack Obama vows a fresh push on immigration in his second term.

It promises a "tough but fair" path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, reform that would build the US economy, an "effective" employment verification system and an improved process to admit future workers.

The proposed legislation also increases the number of drones and other surveillance equipment, as well as the number of agents at and between ports of entry in a bid to better secure the long borders the United States shares with Canada to the north and especially Mexico to the south.

Senators backing the measure are Republicans John McCain, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham and Jeff Flake, along with Democrats Robert Menendez, Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin and Michael Bennet.

Rubio's Republican support would be vital to any deal going forward. He has spoken in recent weeks about his immigration stance, which includes a multi-step pathway to citizenship, as well as improved skill-based immigration, visa enforcement and border safety and enforcement.

"We can't round up millions of people and deport them," Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, wrote in an opinion article published in the Las Vegas Review-Journal ahead of Obama's visit to the state of Nevada on Tuesday.

"But we also can't fix our broken immigration system if we provide incentives for people to come here illegally -- precisely the signal a blanket amnesty would send."

Although the bill seeks to boost security measures, it also vows to "strengthen prohibitions against racial profiling and inappropriate use of force," as well as improve training for border patrol agents and increase oversight.

In a bid to combat visa overstays, the lawmakers offered a requirement for those in the country illegally to register with the government.

Around 40 percent of the illegal immigrants now in the United States entered the country legally but then let their visa expire, according to official estimates.

But under the plan, they would also be able to earn "probationary" legal status -- to live and work legally in the US -- after passing a background check and paying a fine and back taxes.

Those with a "serious" criminal background or who otherwise threaten US national security would not be eligible for legal status and would face deportation, according to the framework document.

"Individuals with probationary legal status will be required to go to the back of the line of prospective immigrants" and pass an additional background check, among other requirements, the document said.

Under the plan, individuals who fulfill the requirements could eventually obtain a green card for permanent residency.

On Sunday, the bitterly divided lawmakers expressed optimism they could unite on immigration reform.

"I'm confident, guardedly optimistic, that this time we can get it done," McCain told ABC television's "This Week," confirming that Republican and Democratic senators had been meeting on the issue in recent weeks.

McCain, who once championed comprehensive reform but backtracked during his failed 2008 presidential run, said there was a greater willingness to address the issue after last year's election, in which the increasingly important Hispanic vote swung strongly behind Obama's Democrats.

He also acknowledged that Republicans were "losing dramatically" the Hispanic vote.

Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat who attended a meeting on Friday between Obama and congressional Hispanic leaders, said he too was "cautiously optimistic."

Global Mining and Tar Sands Oil Drive Canadian Foreign Policy

Context: As yet there are no context links for this item.

Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore. And we're continuing our series of interviews with Yves Engler, author of the book The Ugly Canadian, all about Stephen Harper's foreign policy. And Yves now joins us from Ottawa. Thanks for joining us, Yves.

YVES ENGLER, AUTHOR AND POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Thanks for having me.JAY: When you look at Stephen Harper's foreign policy in sort of big-picture terms, in terms of the political centers in the United States, the sort of neocons around the Republican Party, the sort of center, center-right neoliberals, if you want to call them, in the Democratic Party, I mean, both see America as—needs to be the dominant power. Both want to project American strength and so on and shape events in the globe as best they can through military strength. But there is a difference between that neocon strategy that led to the Iraq War and the sort of, you could say, more—some people call more rational or more pragmatic strategy, empire strategy of Obama. During the time of the Iraq War, Stephen Harper was against Jean Chrétien, the prime minister of Canada. Chrétien was—mostly kept Canada out of the Iraq War. But Stephen Harper was gung ho. He wanted Canada to join in with Iraq. ~~~STEPHEN HARPER, MEMBER, CANADIAN HOUSE OF COMMONS: Mr. Speaker, the situation in Iraq is moving towards imminent crisis and military action. Canadian forces have been on the ground there for some time. In fact, 150 military personnel are involved in joint command arrangements with British and American troops on the ground. Is this deployment continuing? Will these personnel remain in the event of war with Iraq?~~~JAY: Does Harper come down more on the side of the neocons? And is he part of that both mindset and alliances?ENGLER: Yeah, I think so. I mean, he called for Canada to join the Iraq War. I think it's, like, 45 times in the House of Commons he criticized the Liberal government for not explicitly joining or demanding to join. So, yeah, I think he comes down more on the neocon side. I think part of what—and there is a sense of the Conservatives' party, I think, wants—to a certain extent want to kind of replicate what the hard right of the Republican Party has created, in terms of a political party based upon, you know, big-business interests and a sort of base of the party that is very socially conservative kind of Christian fundamentalist. And I think that the Harper government wants to—would like to replicate that and sees that very positively.And a lot of the Harper government foreign policy, you know, one element of understanding this is that foreign policy is the place where he really plays to the most right-wing sectors of the party—the Christian fundamentalists, the right-wing Jewish organizations, the Islamophobes, the mining sector, this military, mining and oil executives, military types. And foreign policy's the place where Harper gets to be as right-wing as he would want to be. On a lot of—on domestic issues he hasn't been as right-wing as a lot of the base would want him to be. And so he—foreign policy sort of—that's how it fits with his sort of electoral strategy. At the more kind of structural level, this rightward shift on Canadian foreign policy, I think, is largely explained by the incredible rise of Canadian mining investment abroad, going from $30 billion in 2002 to $210 billion today; in the case of Africa, going from about $250 million of Canadian investment in—mining investment in Africa in 1989 to $29 billion today. Canadian companies over the past 20, 25 years have just become huge players in international mining. And that's very much tied into the rise of structural adjustment programs that the International Monetary Fund pushed in Latin America and Africa. This sort of opening up of a country's national resource sector to foreign ownership has been very beneficial to Canadian companies. So I think that and the rise of Canadian mining investment's a big explanation for the more rightward shift in Canadian foreign policy. Another explanation is the rise of the tar sands and the oil there, the very highly—very dirty oil, heavy carbon emitting fuel that comes out of the tar sands. And basically, if you're going to expand the tar sands like the Conservative government, like the oil companies would like to see, you're basically telling the rest of the world to screw off when it comes to international climate negotiations. So they've sort of developed a sort of hostility towards the UN because of those oil interests in Latin America. So I think at a structural level the explanation for the more rightward shift in Harper's foreign policy is the rise in mining investment abroad and the rise of the tar sands over the past ten, 20 years.JAY: And in terms of Canadian public opinion, in the last federal election, foreign policy wasn't that big an issue, and he doesn't seem to be suffering consequences from a rightward shift in foreign policy. And even though, I guess, people can argue that the Harper government would not have been elected if there hadn't been sort of a split between the Liberals and NDP of some of the vote, they still didn't do very bad; they did pretty well, and many ridings won outright, in spite of the—they would have won anyway, even if there wasn't a split vote. Has something shifted in terms of Canadians, more broadly speaking, about foreign policy?ENGLER: No, I don't think the public attitude has shifted in—very minimally. I think that the reality is foreign policy is very rarely a major issue when it comes to elections. And most of the time, the dominant media and the opposition parties just go along with whatever the foreign-policy establishment puts forward. That's the general tendency. And so foreign policy's—because there's so little opposition, it is the place to really please the base of his party, right, because there's so little opposition being put up among the official sort of, you know, established political parties and media institutions.So there hasn't—I don't think that—if anything, in fact, Canadians are more internationalist today than they've ever been, I think, much more multicultural, people from many different countries around the world, you know, living in Canada and the population being more aware of global affairs. It's just that foreign-policy issues don't tend to be that high on people's lists of concerns.JAY: Let me ask you a question about Canadian media. What do you make of Canadian media coverage of foreign policy, and then particularly CBC, which one could say at least in the past was more willing to be critical of Canadian foreign policy, but I'm not so sure about these days?ENGLER: Yeah. I mean, the Canadian media is—it's owned by—vast majority of it's owned by a handful of companies. It's much more concentrated than U.S. media is, even. So, you know, it's—the coverage is absolutely terrible from the standpoint of an internationalist, humanist perspective. It's terrible coverage.And the CBC is very much unwilling to forthrightly criticize the Conservative government. Just a couple of nights ago, there was a four-person panel on The National, 15, 20 minutes where they dealt with Canadian foreign policy. And there's—you know, none of the four panelists are willing to—The National being the most important news show that is on the CBC, the nightly news, and there's almost no—the four panelists, basically no substantive criticism, or, you know, very soft criticism of the Conservative government.And, you know, there's—the media's not willing to stand up and say that, you know, Palestinians have been dispossessed for 100 years by Zionism in Israel and it's, you know, morally indefensible to support Israel's ongoing dispossession. You know, media's not willing to say, you know, climate change is already causing hundreds of thousands of people's deaths around the world, and, you know, it's a crime against humanity to try to block all international climate negotiation meetings like the Conservative government has done. Like, the media's not—you know, I had a producer at The Current, one of the big radio programs on the CBC, where he told me about how he'd bring to higher-up producers a story of a Canadian mining company involved with a local community in sort of devastating the local community. And the producer was [incompr.] didn't we cover that story last week? Well, yeah, you did, you covered that story last week from Guatemala. This story's about a Canadian mining company in Mexico, and the story is precisely the fact that this is happening all over the world, that Canadian mining companies are involved in these abuses all over the world, and that there needs to be, you know, public policy change in Canada to rein in some of these practices. But, you know, the media, the producer, higher-up producers, you know, didn't see it that way.JAY: Don't forget Canada's involved in a war. You wouldn't know it. Canada's still fighting in Afghanistan, and next to no debate about why Canada's there. I mean, I used to do a show on CBC called CounterSpin, and we had lots of debates, but we got canceled, and I don't think there's—even at that time, other than our show, there was debates about do Canadian jeeps have enough armor on them. There weren't a heck of a lot of debate on CBC other than CounterSpin—and since, not much—about why Canada's there anyway.ENGLER: Exactly. The media, that's one of the recent times they've just basically taken the government's talking points that the 950 Canadian troops that are still in Afghanistan, that's just training; we don't need to discuss that anymore; that's just training. Well, if you want to train Afghan troops, there's a very easy way of doing it: bring Afghan troops to Canada and train them here. It would be cheaper to do it than to maintain 950 Canadian troops there. It's about supporting the ongoing U.S.-led military mission in Afghanistan. That's the point. It's—you know, we—very clearly. But the media just basically, you know, does the government's talking points. And that's—unfortunately, that's been mostly the nature of the dominant media. They basically follow the government's perspective.JAY: I should throw in there are exceptions that are notable. And on CBC you do find, you know, on certain shows, certain radio shows, you find individuals in some of the shows, like Fifth Estate, and on The Current, like you mentioned, you can find exceptions where there really is a critique, there's a guest. But they really are the exceptions.ENGLER: Of course. And I think those exceptions are becoming less and less. One of the things in the case of the CBC is the government has cut the CBC's budget back and has made it very clear that, you know, it's prepared to do, you know, further cutbacks if it is not pleased by what's on the CBC. But the CBC's just one example. For myself personally, I've now written five books about Canadian foreign policy. I can submit op-eds to from The National Post to The Toronto Star, the most left-wing newspaper in the country, and none of papers in the country will publish the op-eds, right, on Canadian foreign policy. On domestic issues, I've been able to submit some op-eds and get those pieces in. When it comes to foreign policy, the room for debate, the narrowness of the spectrum is very tight.JAY: Any mainstream media, CBC or otherwise, paying attention to your recent book about the ugly Canadian?ENGLER: I got a nice review in The Halifax Chronicle Herald, which is the daily in Halifax—you know, smaller marketplace; a small mention in The Toronto Star by a columnist, paragraph mentioned in a larger column; and, you know, a few very community—during the tour, a few sort of community or smaller-center newspapers, a little bit of coverage. But no one at the CBC, both at TV or radio—are completely unwilling to cover it. You know, a producer—I've been in communication with a producer at The Current. You know, she says, oh, yeah, I got your book, but, you know, can't do a story on this; maybe I'll keep you in mind for the future.JAY: It's kind of outrageous.ENGLER: I mean, the book is incredibly topical, right? There's all these stories about what the Conservatives are doing in terms of foreign policy. But their willingness to go to the point of saying things, making criticisms of the Conservative policy to say, you know, these are tantamount to crimes against humanity or that, you know, the fundamental moral criticisms of what's taking place, there's very little room for that. You can say, yes, these are mistakes they're making, these are—you know, this is weakening Canada's influence in the world. Those types of criticisms are sort of acceptable. If you start talking about these being fundamentally immoral policies, there's very little room for making those types of criticisms.JAY: Well, Yves's going to be a regular commentator on The Real News. So, Canadians, you'll have to stick with us if you want to see more of Yves Engler. 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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Media Politics: Outrage, Lies and Occasional Facts

[h/t Heather at VideoCafe] This moment on This Week wasn't earthshaking. There are no snappy soundbites, no one to get your blood boiling. Yet, it was one of the most interesting topics raised on a Sunday show in a long time not only because of the...

Media Politics: Outrage, Lies and Occasional Facts

[h/t Heather at VideoCafe] This moment on This Week wasn't earthshaking. There are no snappy soundbites, no one to get your blood boiling. Yet, it was one of the most interesting topics raised on a Sunday show in a long time not only because of the...

‘No Team GB, No Olympic Dream, No Goal’

Luol Deng, Britain's biggest basketball star, has written a furious letter to David Cameron, vowing he will not sit back and allow the legacy of his sport to be "demolished", following an announcement that the sport will receive no funding for Rio 2016.

The six-foot-nine Chicago Bulls Star, who has a £50m, six-year contract with the basketball team, is a bigger star than David Beckham across the Atlantic.

Deng, who is described as the Chicago Bulls' "new Michael Jordan", the face of President Barack Obama's home team, said funding cuts to his home sport were "deeply upsetting and confusing at the least."

luol deng

Luol Deng jumps to score during the Men's Basketball at London 2012


Deng, a civil war refugee from Sudan who attended school in Croydon, captained the Team GB basketball team at London 2012. He returns home to the UK often to mentor kids from all backgrounds and promote the sport in the UK.

"We all heard about the 'legacy' that London 2012 was going to bring to sport in the UK and I refuse to sit back and let that legacy be completely demolished for basketball.

"I, along with other people involved in the game, have put too much in and care too greatly to let this happen.

"The sport of basketball is a pathway, a pathway that teaches so many valuable lessons on and off the court - how are we supposed to motivate these kids to carry along their journey when there's now nothing at the end?

"No Team GB, no Olympic dream, no goal."

British Basketball intends to make an "informal representation" to UK Sport this week and ask for a rethink of the cut.

Its performance chairman Roger Moreland said: "Luol's support for us is massively important.

"He recognises the value of funding, not just for the elite levels of sport but to carry on investing in grass roots and creating a route for young people to realise their dreams."

If this is unsuccessful, then a formal appeal could be lodged. This would be heard by the Sport Dispute Resolution Panel.

Stephen Mosley, the Conservative MP for Chester, has secured an adjournment debate in Parliament on funding for basketball, which will take place on Monday night.

So far 11,630 people, including Deng, have signed an online petition which asks: "What happened to Olympic 'legacy'?"
With its worldwide popularity, basketball has huge potential to grow and improve. It argues that Britain needs a high profile national team programme to succeed.

Some sports were given two or three cycles of funding before they achieved a medal, while others who underperformed at London 2012 only saw reductions in funding, not a complete end to it, the petition adds.

A UK Sport spokesman said: "UK Sport has a very clear remit to target resources at the top end of the high performance system to deliver success at the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

"Our investment approach helped lead Britain's athletes to the impressive 65 Olympic and 120 Paralympic medal haul at London 2012.

"Our investment allocations for the Rio 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games followed an intensive planning process and dialogue with summer Olympic and Paralympic sports, which began over a year ago.

"Sports were invited and supported to produce business cases for investment in their programmes for the Rio cycle, which provided UK Sport with evidence of medal potential for Rio 2016 and/or the following summer Games in 2020.

"This has been the most robust and challenging process ever carried out by UK Sport with sports to ensure that the record investment of £347m will be to the right athletes as we aim to win more medals in Rio than we did at London 2012."

Only Three Choices for Afghan Endgame: Compromise, Conflict, or Collapse

KABUL, Afghanistan – Compromise, conflict, or collapse: ask an Afghan what to expect in 2014 and you’re likely to get a scenario that falls under one of those three headings. 2014, of course, is the year of the double whammy in Afghanistan: the next presidential election coupled with the departure of most American and other foreign forces. Many Afghans fear a turn for the worse, while others are no less afraid that everything will stay the same.  Some even think things will get better when the occupying forces leave.  Most predict a more conservative climate, but everyone is quick to say that it’s anybody’s guess.

Only one thing is certain in 2014: it will be a year of American military defeat.  For more than a decade, U.S. forces have fought many types of wars in Afghanistan, from a low-footprint invasion, to multiple surges, to a flirtation with Vietnam-style counterinsurgency, to a ramped-up, gloves-off air war.  And yet, despite all the experiments in styles of war-making, the American military and its coalition partners have ended up in the same place: stalemate, which in a battle with guerrillas means defeat.  For years, a modest-sized, generally unpopular, ragtag set of insurgents has fought the planet’s most heavily armed, technologically advanced military to a standstill, leaving the country shaken and its citizens anxiously imagining the outcome of unpalatable scenarios.

The first, compromise, suggests the possibility of reaching some sort of almost inconceivable power-sharing agreement with multiple insurgent militias.  While Washington presses for negotiations with its designated enemy, “the Taliban,” representatives of President Hamid Karzai’s High Peace Council, which includes 12 members of the former Taliban government and many sympathizers, are making the rounds to talk disarmament and reconciliation with all the armed insurgent groups that the Afghan intelligence service has identified across the country. There are 1,500 of them.

One member of the Council told me, “It will take a long time before we get to Mullah Omar [the Taliban’s titular leader].  Some of these militias can’t even remember what they’ve been fighting about.”

The second scenario, open conflict, would mean another dreaded round of civil war like the one in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union withdrew in defeat -- the one that destroyed the Afghan capital, Kabul, devastated parts of the country, and gave rise to the Taliban.

The third scenario, collapse, sounds so apocalyptic that it’s seldom brought up by Afghans, but it’s implied in the exodus already underway of those citizens who can afford to leave the country.  The departures aren’t dramatic.  There are no helicopters lifting off the roof of the U.S. Embassy with desperate Afghans clamoring to get on board; just a record number of asylum applications in 2011, a year in which, according to official figures, almost 36,000 Afghans were openly looking for a safe place to land, preferably in Europe.  That figure is likely to be at least matched, if not exceeded, when the U.N. releases the complete data for 2012.

In January, I went to Kabul to learn what old friends and current officials are thinking about the critical months ahead.  At the same time, Afghan President Karzai flew to Washington to confer with President Obama.  Their talks seem to have differed radically from the conversations I had with ordinary Afghans. In Kabul, where strange rumors fly, an official reassured me that the future looked bright for the country because Karzai was expected to return from Washington with the promise of American radar systems, presumably for the Afghan Air Force, which is not yet “operational.” (He actually returned with the promise of helicopters, cargo planes, fighter jets, and drones.) Who knew that the fate of the nation and its suffering citizens hinged on that?  In my conversations with ordinary Afghans, one thing that never came up was radar.

Another term that never seems to enter ordinary Afghan conversation, much as it obsesses Americans, is “al-Qaeda.” President Obama, for instance, announced at a joint press conference with President Karzai: “Our core objective -- the reason we went to war in the first place -- is now within reach: ensuring that al-Qaeda can never again use Afghanistan to launch attacks against America.”  An Afghan journalist asked me, “Why does he worry so much about al-Qaeda in Afghanistan? Doesn’t he know they are everywhere else?”

At the same Washington press conference, Obama said, “The nation we need to rebuild is our own.” Afghans long ago gave up waiting for the U.S. to make good on its promises to rebuild theirs. What’s now striking, however, is the vast gulf between the pronouncements of American officialdom and the hopes of ordinary Afghans.  It’s a gap so wide you would hardly think -- as Afghans once did -- that we are fighting for them.

To take just one example: the official American view of events in Afghanistan is wonderfully black and white.  The president, for instance, speaks of the way U.S. forces heroically “pushed the Taliban out of their strongholds.” Like other top U.S. officials over the years, he forgets whom we pushed into the Afghan government, our “stronghold” in the years after the 2001 invasion: ex-Taliban and Taliban-like fundamentalists, the most brutal civil warriors, and serial human rights violators.

Afghans, however, haven’t forgotten just whom the U.S. put in place to govern them -- exactly the men they feared and hated most in exactly the place where few Afghans wanted them to be.  Early on, between 2002 and 2004, 90% of Afghans surveyed nationwide told the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission that such men should not be allowed to hold public office; 76% wanted them tried as war criminals.

In my recent conversations, many Afghans still cited the first loya jirga, an assembly convened in 2003 to ratify the newly drafted constitution, or the first presidential election in 2004, or the parliamentary election of 2005, all held under international auspices, as the moments when the aspirations of Afghans and the “international community” parted company. In that first parliament, as in the earlier gatherings, most of the men were affiliated with armed militias; every other member was a former jihadi, and nearly half were affiliated with fundamentalist Islamist parties, including the Taliban.

In this way, Afghans were consigned to live under a government of bloodstained warlords and fundamentalists, who turned out to be Washington’s guys.  Many had once battled the Soviets using American money and weapons, and quite a few, like the former warlord, druglord, minister of defense, and current vice-president Muhammad Qasim Fahim, had been very chummy with the CIA.

In the U.S., such details of our Afghan War, now in its 12th year, are long forgotten, but to Afghans who live under the rule of the same old suspects, the memory remains painfully raw.  Worse, Afghans know that it is these very men, rearmed and ready, who will once again compete for power in 2014.

How to Vote Early in Afghanistan

President Karzai is barred by term limits from standing for reelection in 2014, but many Kabulis believe he reached a private agreement with the usual suspects at a meeting late last year. In early January, he seemed to seal the deal by announcing that, for the sake of frugality, the voter cards issued for past elections will be reused in 2014.  Far too many of those cards were issued for the 2004 election, suspiciously more than the number of eligible voters.  During the 2009 campaign, anyone could buy fistfuls of them at bargain basement prices.  So this decision seemed to kill off the last faint hope of an election in which Afghans might actually have a say about the leadership of the country.

Fewer than 35% of voters cast ballots in the last presidential contest, when Karzai’s men were caught on video stuffing ballot boxes.  (Afterward, President Obama phoned to congratulate Karzai on his “victory.”) Only dedicated or paid henchmen are likely to show up for the next “good enough for Afghans” exercise in democracy. Once again, an “election” may be just the elaborate stage set for announcing to a disillusioned public the names of those who will run the show in Kabul for the next few years.

Kabulis might live with that, as they’ve lived with Karzai all these years, but they fear power-hungry Afghan politicians could “compromise” as well with insurgent leaders like that old American favorite from the war against the Soviets, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who recently told a TV audience that he intends to claim his rightful place in government. Such compromises could stick the Afghan people with a shaky power-sharing deal among the most ultra-conservative, self-interested, sociopathic, and corrupt men in the country.  If that deal, in turn, were to fall apart, as most power-sharing agreements worldwide do within a year or two, the big men might well plunge the country back into a 1990s-style civil war, with no regard for the civilians caught in their path.

These worst-case scenarios are everyday Kabuli nightmares.  After all, during decades of war, the savvy citizens of the capital have learned to expect the worst from the men currently characterized in a popular local graffiti this way: “Mujahideen=Criminals. Taliban=Dumbheads.”

Ordinary Kabulis express reasonable fears for the future of the country, but impatient free-marketeering businessmen are voting with their feet right now, or laying plans to leave soon. They’ve made Kabul hum (often with foreign aid funds, which are equivalent to about 90% of the country’s economic activity), but they aren’t about to wait around for the results of election 2014.  Carpe diem has become their version of financial advice.  As a result, they are snatching what they can and packing their bags.

Millions of dollars reportedly take flight from Kabul International Airport every day: officially about $4.6 billion in 2011, or just about the size of Afghanistan’s annual budget. Hordes of businessmen and bankers (like those who, in 2004, set up the Ponzi scheme called the Kabul Bank, from which about a billion dollars went missing) are heading for cushy spots like Dubai, where they have already established residence on prime real estate.

As they take their investments elsewhere and the American effort winds down, the Afghan economy contracts ever more grimly, opportunities dwindle, and jobs disappear.  Housing prices in Kabul are falling for the first time since the start of the occupation as rich Afghans and profiteering private American contractors, who guzzled the money that Washington and the “international community” poured into the country, move on.

At the same time, a money-laundering building boom in Kabul appears to have stalled, leaving tall, half-built office blocks like so many skeletons amid the scalloped Pakistani palaces, vertical malls, and grand madrassas erected in the past four or five years by political and business insiders and well-connected conservative clerics.

Most of the Afghan tycoons seeking asylum elsewhere don’t fear for their lives, just their pocketbooks: they’re not political refugees, but free-market rats abandoning the sinking ship of state.  Joining in the exodus (but not included in the statistics) are countless illegal émigrés seeking jobs or fleeing for their lives, paying human smugglers money they can’t afford as they head for Europe by circuitous and dangerous routes.

Threatened Afghans have fled from every abrupt change of government in the last century, making them the largest population of refugees from a single country on the planet.  Once again, those who can are voting with their feet (or their pocketbooks) -- and voting early.

Afghanistan’s historic tragedy is that its violent political shifts -- from king to communists to warlords to religious fundamentalists to the Americans -- have meant the flight of the very people most capable of rebuilding the country along peaceful and prosperous lines.  And their departure only contributes to the economic and political collapse they themselves seek to avoid.  Left behind are ordinary Afghans -- the illiterate and unskilled, but also a tough core of educated, ambitious citizens, including women’s rights activists, unwilling to surrender their dream of living once again in a free and peaceful Afghanistan.

The Military Monster

These days Kabul resounds with the blasts of suicide bombers, IEDs, and sporadic gunfire.  Armed men are everywhere in anonymous uniforms that defy identification.  Any man with money can buy a squad of bodyguards, clad in classy camouflage and wraparound shades, and armed with assault weapons.  Yet Kabulis, trying to carry on normal lives in the relative safety of the capital, seem to maintain a distance from the war going on in the provinces.

Asked that crucial question -- do you think American forces should stay or go? -- the Kabulis I talked with tended to answer in a theoretical way, very unlike the visceral response one gets in the countryside, where villages are bombed and civilians killed, or in the makeshift camps for internally displaced people that now crowd the outer fringes of Kabul. (By the time U.S. Marines surged into Taliban-controlled Helmand Province in the south in 2010 to bring counterinsurgency-style protection to the residents there, tens of thousands of them had already moved to those camps in Kabul.)  Afghans in the countryside want to be rid of armed men.  All of them.  Kabulis just want to be secure, and if that means keeping some U.S. troops at Bagram Air Base near the capital, as Afghan and American officials are currently discussing, well, it’s nothing to them.

In fact, most Kabulis I spoke to think that’s what’s going to happen.  After all, American officials have been talking for years about keeping permanent bases in Afghanistan (though they avoid the term “permanent” when speaking to the American press), and American military officers now regularly appear on Afghan TV to say, “The United States will never abandon Afghanistan.”  Afghans reason: Americans would not have spent nearly 12 years fighting in this country if it were not the most strategic place on the planet and absolutely essential to their plans to “push on” Iran and China next.  Everybody knows that pushing on other countries is an American specialty.

Besides, Afghans can see with their own eyes that U.S. command centers, including multiple bases in Kabul, and Bagram Air Base, only 30 miles away, are still being expanded and upgraded.  Beyond the high walls of the American Embassy compound, they can also see the tall new apartment blocks going up for an expanding staff, even if Washington now claims that staff will be reduced in the years to come.

Why, then, would President Obama announce the drawdown of U.S. troops to perhaps a few thousand special operations forces and advisors, if Washington didn’t mean to leave?  Afghans have a theory about that, too.  It’s a ruse, many claim, to encourage all other foreign forces to depart so that the Americans can have everything to themselves.  Afghanistan, as they imagine it, is so important that the U.S., which has fought the longest war in its history there, will be satisfied with nothing less.

I was there to listen, but at times I did mention to Afghans that America’s post-9/11 wars and occupations were threatening to break the country.  “We just can’t afford this war anymore,” I said.

Afghans only laugh at that.  They’ve seen the way Americans throw money around.  They’ve seen the way American money corrupted the Afghan government, and many reminded me that American politicians like Afghan ones are bought and sold, and its elections won by money. Americans, they know, are as rich as Croesus and very friendly, though on the whole not very well mannered or honest or smart.

Operation Enduring Presence      

More than 11 years later, the tragedy of the American war in Afghanistan is simple enough: it has proven remarkably irrelevant to the lives of the Afghan people -- and to American troops as well.  Washington has long appeared to be fighting its own war in defense of a form of government and a set of long-discredited government officials that ordinary Afghans would never have chosen for themselves and have no power to replace.

In the early years of the war (2001-2005), George W. Bush’s administration was far too distracted planning and launching another war in Iraq to maintain anything but a minimal military presence in Afghanistan -- and that mainly outside the capital.  Many journalists (including me) criticized Bush for not finishing the war he started there when he had the chance, but today Kabulis look back on that soldierless period of peace and hope with a certain nostalgia.  In some quarters, the Bush years have even acquired something like the sheen of a lost Golden Age -- compared, that is, to the thoroughgoing militarization of American policy that followed.

So commanding did the U.S. military become in Kabul and Washington that, over the years, it ate the State Department, gobbled up the incompetent bureaucracy of the U.S. Agency for International Development, and established Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in the countryside to carry out maniacal “development” projects and throw bales of cash at all the wrong “leaders.”

Of course, the military also killed a great many people, both “enemies” and civilians.  As in Vietnam, it won the battles, but lost the war.  When I asked Afghans from Mazar-e-Sharif in the north how they accounted for the relative peacefulness and stability of their area, the answer seemed self-evident: “Americans didn’t come here.”

Other consequences, all deleterious, flowed from the militarization of foreign policy.  In Afghanistan and the United States, so intimately ensnarled over all these years, the income gap between the rich and everyone else has grown exponentially, in large part because in both countries the rich have made money off war-making, while ordinary citizens have slipped into poverty for lack of jobs and basic services.

Relying on the military, the U.S. neglected the crucial elements of civil life in Afghanistan that make things bearable -- like education and health care.  Yes, I’ve heard the repeated claims that, thanks to us, millions of children are now attending school.  But for how long?   According to UNICEF, in the years 2005-2010, in the whole of Afghanistan only 18% of boys attended high school, and 6% of girls.  What kind of report card is that?  After 11 years of underfunded work on health care in a country the size of Texas, infant mortality still remains the highest in the world.

By 2014, the defense of Afghanistan will have been handed over to the woeful Afghan National Security Force, also known in military-speak as the “Enduring Presence Force.”  In that year, for Washington, the American war will be officially over, whether it’s actually at an end or not, and it will be up to Afghans to do the enduring.

Here’s where that final scenario -- collapse -- haunts the Kabuli imagination.  Economic collapse means joblessness, poverty, hunger, and a great swelling of the ranks of children cadging a living in the streets.  Already street children are said to number a million strong in Kabul, and 4 million across the country.  Only blocks from the Presidential Palace, they are there in startling numbers selling newspapers, phone cards, toilet paper, or simply begging for small change. Are they the county’s future?

And if the state collapses, too?  Afghans of a certain age remember well the last time the country was left on its own, after the Soviets departed in 1989, and the U.S. also terminated its covert aid.  The mujahideen parties -- Islamists all -- agreed to take turns ruling the country, but things soon fell apart and they took turns instead lobbing rockets into Kabul, killing tens of thousands of civilians, reducing entire districts to rubble, raiding and raping -- until the Taliban came up from the south and put a stop to everything.

Afghan civilians who remember that era hope that this time Karzai will step down as he promises, and that the usual suspects will find ways to maintain traditional power balances, however undemocratic, in something that passes for peace.  Afghan civilians are, however, betting that if a collision comes, one-third of those Afghan Security Forces trained at fabulous expense to protect them will fight for the government (whoever that may be), one-third will fight for the opposition, and one-third will simply desert and go home.  That sounds almost like a plan.

© 2013 Ann Jones

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.

Only Three Choices for Afghan Endgame: Compromise, Conflict, or Collapse

KABUL, Afghanistan – Compromise, conflict, or collapse: ask an Afghan what to expect in 2014 and you’re likely to get a scenario that falls under one of those three headings. 2014, of course, is the year of the double whammy in Afghanistan: the next presidential election coupled with the departure of most American and other foreign forces. Many Afghans fear a turn for the worse, while others are no less afraid that everything will stay the same.  Some even think things will get better when the occupying forces leave.  Most predict a more conservative climate, but everyone is quick to say that it’s anybody’s guess.

Only one thing is certain in 2014: it will be a year of American military defeat.  For more than a decade, U.S. forces have fought many types of wars in Afghanistan, from a low-footprint invasion, to multiple surges, to a flirtation with Vietnam-style counterinsurgency, to a ramped-up, gloves-off air war.  And yet, despite all the experiments in styles of war-making, the American military and its coalition partners have ended up in the same place: stalemate, which in a battle with guerrillas means defeat.  For years, a modest-sized, generally unpopular, ragtag set of insurgents has fought the planet’s most heavily armed, technologically advanced military to a standstill, leaving the country shaken and its citizens anxiously imagining the outcome of unpalatable scenarios.

The first, compromise, suggests the possibility of reaching some sort of almost inconceivable power-sharing agreement with multiple insurgent militias.  While Washington presses for negotiations with its designated enemy, “the Taliban,” representatives of President Hamid Karzai’s High Peace Council, which includes 12 members of the former Taliban government and many sympathizers, are making the rounds to talk disarmament and reconciliation with all the armed insurgent groups that the Afghan intelligence service has identified across the country. There are 1,500 of them.

One member of the Council told me, “It will take a long time before we get to Mullah Omar [the Taliban’s titular leader].  Some of these militias can’t even remember what they’ve been fighting about.”

The second scenario, open conflict, would mean another dreaded round of civil war like the one in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union withdrew in defeat -- the one that destroyed the Afghan capital, Kabul, devastated parts of the country, and gave rise to the Taliban.

The third scenario, collapse, sounds so apocalyptic that it’s seldom brought up by Afghans, but it’s implied in the exodus already underway of those citizens who can afford to leave the country.  The departures aren’t dramatic.  There are no helicopters lifting off the roof of the U.S. Embassy with desperate Afghans clamoring to get on board; just a record number of asylum applications in 2011, a year in which, according to official figures, almost 36,000 Afghans were openly looking for a safe place to land, preferably in Europe.  That figure is likely to be at least matched, if not exceeded, when the U.N. releases the complete data for 2012.

In January, I went to Kabul to learn what old friends and current officials are thinking about the critical months ahead.  At the same time, Afghan President Karzai flew to Washington to confer with President Obama.  Their talks seem to have differed radically from the conversations I had with ordinary Afghans. In Kabul, where strange rumors fly, an official reassured me that the future looked bright for the country because Karzai was expected to return from Washington with the promise of American radar systems, presumably for the Afghan Air Force, which is not yet “operational.” (He actually returned with the promise of helicopters, cargo planes, fighter jets, and drones.) Who knew that the fate of the nation and its suffering citizens hinged on that?  In my conversations with ordinary Afghans, one thing that never came up was radar.

Another term that never seems to enter ordinary Afghan conversation, much as it obsesses Americans, is “al-Qaeda.” President Obama, for instance, announced at a joint press conference with President Karzai: “Our core objective -- the reason we went to war in the first place -- is now within reach: ensuring that al-Qaeda can never again use Afghanistan to launch attacks against America.”  An Afghan journalist asked me, “Why does he worry so much about al-Qaeda in Afghanistan? Doesn’t he know they are everywhere else?”

At the same Washington press conference, Obama said, “The nation we need to rebuild is our own.” Afghans long ago gave up waiting for the U.S. to make good on its promises to rebuild theirs. What’s now striking, however, is the vast gulf between the pronouncements of American officialdom and the hopes of ordinary Afghans.  It’s a gap so wide you would hardly think -- as Afghans once did -- that we are fighting for them.

To take just one example: the official American view of events in Afghanistan is wonderfully black and white.  The president, for instance, speaks of the way U.S. forces heroically “pushed the Taliban out of their strongholds.” Like other top U.S. officials over the years, he forgets whom we pushed into the Afghan government, our “stronghold” in the years after the 2001 invasion: ex-Taliban and Taliban-like fundamentalists, the most brutal civil warriors, and serial human rights violators.

Afghans, however, haven’t forgotten just whom the U.S. put in place to govern them -- exactly the men they feared and hated most in exactly the place where few Afghans wanted them to be.  Early on, between 2002 and 2004, 90% of Afghans surveyed nationwide told the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission that such men should not be allowed to hold public office; 76% wanted them tried as war criminals.

In my recent conversations, many Afghans still cited the first loya jirga, an assembly convened in 2003 to ratify the newly drafted constitution, or the first presidential election in 2004, or the parliamentary election of 2005, all held under international auspices, as the moments when the aspirations of Afghans and the “international community” parted company. In that first parliament, as in the earlier gatherings, most of the men were affiliated with armed militias; every other member was a former jihadi, and nearly half were affiliated with fundamentalist Islamist parties, including the Taliban.

In this way, Afghans were consigned to live under a government of bloodstained warlords and fundamentalists, who turned out to be Washington’s guys.  Many had once battled the Soviets using American money and weapons, and quite a few, like the former warlord, druglord, minister of defense, and current vice-president Muhammad Qasim Fahim, had been very chummy with the CIA.

In the U.S., such details of our Afghan War, now in its 12th year, are long forgotten, but to Afghans who live under the rule of the same old suspects, the memory remains painfully raw.  Worse, Afghans know that it is these very men, rearmed and ready, who will once again compete for power in 2014.

How to Vote Early in Afghanistan

President Karzai is barred by term limits from standing for reelection in 2014, but many Kabulis believe he reached a private agreement with the usual suspects at a meeting late last year. In early January, he seemed to seal the deal by announcing that, for the sake of frugality, the voter cards issued for past elections will be reused in 2014.  Far too many of those cards were issued for the 2004 election, suspiciously more than the number of eligible voters.  During the 2009 campaign, anyone could buy fistfuls of them at bargain basement prices.  So this decision seemed to kill off the last faint hope of an election in which Afghans might actually have a say about the leadership of the country.

Fewer than 35% of voters cast ballots in the last presidential contest, when Karzai’s men were caught on video stuffing ballot boxes.  (Afterward, President Obama phoned to congratulate Karzai on his “victory.”) Only dedicated or paid henchmen are likely to show up for the next “good enough for Afghans” exercise in democracy. Once again, an “election” may be just the elaborate stage set for announcing to a disillusioned public the names of those who will run the show in Kabul for the next few years.

Kabulis might live with that, as they’ve lived with Karzai all these years, but they fear power-hungry Afghan politicians could “compromise” as well with insurgent leaders like that old American favorite from the war against the Soviets, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who recently told a TV audience that he intends to claim his rightful place in government. Such compromises could stick the Afghan people with a shaky power-sharing deal among the most ultra-conservative, self-interested, sociopathic, and corrupt men in the country.  If that deal, in turn, were to fall apart, as most power-sharing agreements worldwide do within a year or two, the big men might well plunge the country back into a 1990s-style civil war, with no regard for the civilians caught in their path.

These worst-case scenarios are everyday Kabuli nightmares.  After all, during decades of war, the savvy citizens of the capital have learned to expect the worst from the men currently characterized in a popular local graffiti this way: “Mujahideen=Criminals. Taliban=Dumbheads.”

Ordinary Kabulis express reasonable fears for the future of the country, but impatient free-marketeering businessmen are voting with their feet right now, or laying plans to leave soon. They’ve made Kabul hum (often with foreign aid funds, which are equivalent to about 90% of the country’s economic activity), but they aren’t about to wait around for the results of election 2014.  Carpe diem has become their version of financial advice.  As a result, they are snatching what they can and packing their bags.

Millions of dollars reportedly take flight from Kabul International Airport every day: officially about $4.6 billion in 2011, or just about the size of Afghanistan’s annual budget. Hordes of businessmen and bankers (like those who, in 2004, set up the Ponzi scheme called the Kabul Bank, from which about a billion dollars went missing) are heading for cushy spots like Dubai, where they have already established residence on prime real estate.

As they take their investments elsewhere and the American effort winds down, the Afghan economy contracts ever more grimly, opportunities dwindle, and jobs disappear.  Housing prices in Kabul are falling for the first time since the start of the occupation as rich Afghans and profiteering private American contractors, who guzzled the money that Washington and the “international community” poured into the country, move on.

At the same time, a money-laundering building boom in Kabul appears to have stalled, leaving tall, half-built office blocks like so many skeletons amid the scalloped Pakistani palaces, vertical malls, and grand madrassas erected in the past four or five years by political and business insiders and well-connected conservative clerics.

Most of the Afghan tycoons seeking asylum elsewhere don’t fear for their lives, just their pocketbooks: they’re not political refugees, but free-market rats abandoning the sinking ship of state.  Joining in the exodus (but not included in the statistics) are countless illegal émigrés seeking jobs or fleeing for their lives, paying human smugglers money they can’t afford as they head for Europe by circuitous and dangerous routes.

Threatened Afghans have fled from every abrupt change of government in the last century, making them the largest population of refugees from a single country on the planet.  Once again, those who can are voting with their feet (or their pocketbooks) -- and voting early.

Afghanistan’s historic tragedy is that its violent political shifts -- from king to communists to warlords to religious fundamentalists to the Americans -- have meant the flight of the very people most capable of rebuilding the country along peaceful and prosperous lines.  And their departure only contributes to the economic and political collapse they themselves seek to avoid.  Left behind are ordinary Afghans -- the illiterate and unskilled, but also a tough core of educated, ambitious citizens, including women’s rights activists, unwilling to surrender their dream of living once again in a free and peaceful Afghanistan.

The Military Monster

These days Kabul resounds with the blasts of suicide bombers, IEDs, and sporadic gunfire.  Armed men are everywhere in anonymous uniforms that defy identification.  Any man with money can buy a squad of bodyguards, clad in classy camouflage and wraparound shades, and armed with assault weapons.  Yet Kabulis, trying to carry on normal lives in the relative safety of the capital, seem to maintain a distance from the war going on in the provinces.

Asked that crucial question -- do you think American forces should stay or go? -- the Kabulis I talked with tended to answer in a theoretical way, very unlike the visceral response one gets in the countryside, where villages are bombed and civilians killed, or in the makeshift camps for internally displaced people that now crowd the outer fringes of Kabul. (By the time U.S. Marines surged into Taliban-controlled Helmand Province in the south in 2010 to bring counterinsurgency-style protection to the residents there, tens of thousands of them had already moved to those camps in Kabul.)  Afghans in the countryside want to be rid of armed men.  All of them.  Kabulis just want to be secure, and if that means keeping some U.S. troops at Bagram Air Base near the capital, as Afghan and American officials are currently discussing, well, it’s nothing to them.

In fact, most Kabulis I spoke to think that’s what’s going to happen.  After all, American officials have been talking for years about keeping permanent bases in Afghanistan (though they avoid the term “permanent” when speaking to the American press), and American military officers now regularly appear on Afghan TV to say, “The United States will never abandon Afghanistan.”  Afghans reason: Americans would not have spent nearly 12 years fighting in this country if it were not the most strategic place on the planet and absolutely essential to their plans to “push on” Iran and China next.  Everybody knows that pushing on other countries is an American specialty.

Besides, Afghans can see with their own eyes that U.S. command centers, including multiple bases in Kabul, and Bagram Air Base, only 30 miles away, are still being expanded and upgraded.  Beyond the high walls of the American Embassy compound, they can also see the tall new apartment blocks going up for an expanding staff, even if Washington now claims that staff will be reduced in the years to come.

Why, then, would President Obama announce the drawdown of U.S. troops to perhaps a few thousand special operations forces and advisors, if Washington didn’t mean to leave?  Afghans have a theory about that, too.  It’s a ruse, many claim, to encourage all other foreign forces to depart so that the Americans can have everything to themselves.  Afghanistan, as they imagine it, is so important that the U.S., which has fought the longest war in its history there, will be satisfied with nothing less.

I was there to listen, but at times I did mention to Afghans that America’s post-9/11 wars and occupations were threatening to break the country.  “We just can’t afford this war anymore,” I said.

Afghans only laugh at that.  They’ve seen the way Americans throw money around.  They’ve seen the way American money corrupted the Afghan government, and many reminded me that American politicians like Afghan ones are bought and sold, and its elections won by money. Americans, they know, are as rich as Croesus and very friendly, though on the whole not very well mannered or honest or smart.

Operation Enduring Presence      

More than 11 years later, the tragedy of the American war in Afghanistan is simple enough: it has proven remarkably irrelevant to the lives of the Afghan people -- and to American troops as well.  Washington has long appeared to be fighting its own war in defense of a form of government and a set of long-discredited government officials that ordinary Afghans would never have chosen for themselves and have no power to replace.

In the early years of the war (2001-2005), George W. Bush’s administration was far too distracted planning and launching another war in Iraq to maintain anything but a minimal military presence in Afghanistan -- and that mainly outside the capital.  Many journalists (including me) criticized Bush for not finishing the war he started there when he had the chance, but today Kabulis look back on that soldierless period of peace and hope with a certain nostalgia.  In some quarters, the Bush years have even acquired something like the sheen of a lost Golden Age -- compared, that is, to the thoroughgoing militarization of American policy that followed.

So commanding did the U.S. military become in Kabul and Washington that, over the years, it ate the State Department, gobbled up the incompetent bureaucracy of the U.S. Agency for International Development, and established Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in the countryside to carry out maniacal “development” projects and throw bales of cash at all the wrong “leaders.”

Of course, the military also killed a great many people, both “enemies” and civilians.  As in Vietnam, it won the battles, but lost the war.  When I asked Afghans from Mazar-e-Sharif in the north how they accounted for the relative peacefulness and stability of their area, the answer seemed self-evident: “Americans didn’t come here.”

Other consequences, all deleterious, flowed from the militarization of foreign policy.  In Afghanistan and the United States, so intimately ensnarled over all these years, the income gap between the rich and everyone else has grown exponentially, in large part because in both countries the rich have made money off war-making, while ordinary citizens have slipped into poverty for lack of jobs and basic services.

Relying on the military, the U.S. neglected the crucial elements of civil life in Afghanistan that make things bearable -- like education and health care.  Yes, I’ve heard the repeated claims that, thanks to us, millions of children are now attending school.  But for how long?   According to UNICEF, in the years 2005-2010, in the whole of Afghanistan only 18% of boys attended high school, and 6% of girls.  What kind of report card is that?  After 11 years of underfunded work on health care in a country the size of Texas, infant mortality still remains the highest in the world.

By 2014, the defense of Afghanistan will have been handed over to the woeful Afghan National Security Force, also known in military-speak as the “Enduring Presence Force.”  In that year, for Washington, the American war will be officially over, whether it’s actually at an end or not, and it will be up to Afghans to do the enduring.

Here’s where that final scenario -- collapse -- haunts the Kabuli imagination.  Economic collapse means joblessness, poverty, hunger, and a great swelling of the ranks of children cadging a living in the streets.  Already street children are said to number a million strong in Kabul, and 4 million across the country.  Only blocks from the Presidential Palace, they are there in startling numbers selling newspapers, phone cards, toilet paper, or simply begging for small change. Are they the county’s future?

And if the state collapses, too?  Afghans of a certain age remember well the last time the country was left on its own, after the Soviets departed in 1989, and the U.S. also terminated its covert aid.  The mujahideen parties -- Islamists all -- agreed to take turns ruling the country, but things soon fell apart and they took turns instead lobbing rockets into Kabul, killing tens of thousands of civilians, reducing entire districts to rubble, raiding and raping -- until the Taliban came up from the south and put a stop to everything.

Afghan civilians who remember that era hope that this time Karzai will step down as he promises, and that the usual suspects will find ways to maintain traditional power balances, however undemocratic, in something that passes for peace.  Afghan civilians are, however, betting that if a collision comes, one-third of those Afghan Security Forces trained at fabulous expense to protect them will fight for the government (whoever that may be), one-third will fight for the opposition, and one-third will simply desert and go home.  That sounds almost like a plan.

© 2013 Ann Jones

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.

Court Ruling on Labor Board a Bid to Return to Era of Open Season...

(Photo: National Nurses United)The appeals court ruling Friday overturning President Obama’s recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board is a huge gift to Wall Street, big corporations and the politicians they control who have worked for years to overturn protections for working people in the U.S.

In healthcare the implications are especially insidious. It is a clear assault on the ability of nurses to act collectively to improve safety standards and public protections for patients. If nurses are unable to speak out for patients and act together to safeguard conditions, all patients are threatened in an era in which most hospital employers place their bottom line above patient safety.

When the board is not dominated by corporate-oriented appointees, as it has been most of the past four decades, the game plan of the anti-union crowd is to bar it from operating, either by refusing to confirm appointees, defunding or other destabilization tactics. That was what prompted these recess appointments, made by President Obama only after the Senate minority blocked confirmation of his nominees needed to restore a quorum on the board to enable it to function.

Without a quorum, the effect of the court ruling and the goal of those who brought it, workers experience delays that can drag on for years if they object to unfair discipline, intimidation or harassment by employers, or attempt to form a union to represent them.

In 2007, for example, the California Nurses Association filed labor board charges in response to retaliation by a rural Northern California hospital against RNs for legally protected union activity and other violations of federal law. 

After initial board delays, an NLRB administrative law judge ruled in 2009 that the hospital had acted illegally.  But when the hospital employer appealed to Washington, the NLRB was unable to act for years because of the lack of a quorum on the NLRB.

Only after the recess appointments were made was the NLRB able to act on this case along with a large backlog of other delayed decisions. 

A final decision on the 2007 charge was issued just days ago affirming the 2009 law judge ruling. Now that decision, too, is in jeopardy, further delaying justice for the nurses. Once again justice delayed is justice denied.

That, of course, is the real intent of this court challenge, the obstruction of the Senate in confirming Presidential appointees, and blatant attempts by the U.S. Chamber of Chamber and the politicians they heavily influence. They want to gut any semblance of federal protection for workers who need a collective voice to counter multi-million dollar employers who profit off denying workplace rights, consumer rights, and reducing worker living standards.

Labor law was enacted in the 1930s precisely to provide some balance in the workplace and fairer treatment for workers. It helped sustain the growth of unions which led to dramatic improvements in living standards for all Americans in the 1950s and 1960s.

Since then, the neo-liberal agenda has been to overturn any labor law rights for workers which has contributed to the growing decline of union membership and the concurrent stagnation in wages and economic security for all U.S. workers, while more wealth is transferred to corporate board rooms and private jet owners.

 This decision is a further reminder that the labor movement, and all those who believe in workplace and democratic rights, need to step up our efforts to challenge Wall Street, the Chamber and those on its strings. We need to get back in the streets, forcefully challenge those who would deny our rights, and unite a broad movement to press for participatory democracy and social change.

Rose Ann DeMoro

Rose Ann DeMoro is executive director of the 185,000-member National Nurses United, the nation’s largest union and professional association of nurses, and a national vice president of the AFL-CIO. Follow Rose Ann DeMoro on Twitter: www.twitter.com/NationalNurses

The Trouble with Roe

The Supreme Court Decision legalizing a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy has turned forty years old. Protestors last week turned out at the court in support of the decision and also against. For opponents, the problem is the way Roe was decided. The problem for supporters is, in many ways, the same.

Roe vs. Wade was decided on privacy grounds. Eight years before, the Supreme Court heard arguments Griswold v. Connecticut, and ruled that a Connecticut law prohibiting the use of contraceptives violated the constitutionally protected “right to privacy.” In Roe, the court decided the abortion decision fell under that same rubrick.

The trouble is, privacy doesn’t get a mention in the Constitution.  At the basis of the Justices’ verdict was the idea that there’s an implied commitment to civil liberties. The First Amendment protects free speech, the fourth protects one’s private belongings and there’s protection for religious choice, etc. In deciding Roe, the Court wrapped the right to make healthcare decisions into individual rights, but it did not, for example, rule on women’s status as equal citizens deserving of equal freedoms and protections say, even when they happen to get pregnant.  And there’s the rub.

You’d think after the 2012 elections swept a record-breaking number of women into Congress; after eighteen congressional seats swopped from unreliable or anti- to pro-choice; after the GOP suffered and 18-point gender gap, the anti-choice Right would be cowed.  Far from it.  As soon as the new term started, failed presidential candidate Michele Bachmann introduced a bill to repeal the Affordable Healthcare Act (which required most employers to cover contraception in their insurance), and failed vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan co-sponsored the Sanctity of Human Life Act again, a bill that specifies that a “one-celled human embryo” should be granted “all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood.”

Not choice. Not privacy. Not individual rights but “personhood.” Paul Ryan knows what the battle over control of reproduction is really about.

Conservatives aren’t cowed because their cause has historic resonance and roots that run deep. For a bit of history, colonial America was ok with abortion. In 1800 abortion wasn’t even mentioned in the laws of any jurisdiction. One hundred years later, it was a criminal offense in every state. As historian James Mohr has written, criminalization of abortion took off at the same time that criminalization of free Blacks took off, after the Civil War. More than thirty anti-abortion laws were passed in just the years from 1866 to 1877.

Think about it: while Southern plantation owners were passing so called “Black codes” and “anti-vagrancy” laws that made it virtually impossible for freed slaves to work for themselves or make a go of it as free people; so-called social reformers and newly established professional doctors’ associations were pushing anti-abortion laws. By way of justification they talked about fetal rights and morality and the glories of “Victorian motherhood.” What were women actually doing at the time? Thousands of women who’d been working in paid jobs in factories and offices while their men fought the Civil War were hankering to limit their childbearing and stay in paid work.

“The question isn’t are you for or against abortion. It’s do you believe that upon becoming pregnant we put women in a new category or underclass?” reproductive justice attorney Lynn Paltrow said this month, when her group, National Advocates for Pregnant Women released a study of just how criminalized pregnant women have become in the US.

NAPW’s identified 413 criminal and civil cases across 44 states involving the arrest, detention and equivalent denial of women’s basic rights between 1973 and 2005 and another 250 or so since. Women of all races, but especially low-income women and women of color are “significantly more likely to be arrested, reported by hospital staff, and subjected to felony charges” reports NAPW.  In the majority of cases, the denial of fundamental rights to pregnant women was done in the name of protecting fetuses.

“Women are experiencing what amounts to regime of Jane Crow” says Paltrow. It’s a phrase that gives us a lot to think about.

In his Inauguration Address this week, Barack Obama made at least one important point. “Preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action,” he said. The comment reflects an idea about government that’s been debated throughout the history of the US.

Individual, personal, private rights: are they sufficient? Unions and mass movements exist because they’re not.  In our time, millions of dollars have gone into reversing the notion that government has any responsibility to act assertively to protect the vulnerable or make this country a fairer place. The New Deal, the War on Poverty, the right to bargain collectively, integration, civil rights… It’s not just that the drive to criminalize abortion is embraced by the same party that has all but destroyed those things. The attack on women’s autonomy and the attack on workers are part of the same attack. Deciding Roe on the grounds of privacy was a dodge. The Congress has never legislated women’s equality. The sooner we change that the better.  Forty years of privacy rights have brought some women some distance, but not enough women, far enough.

© 2013 CounterPunch

Laura Flanders

Laura Flanders was the founder and host of GRITtv and is the author of the books BUSHWOMEN and Blue Grit. She's the editor of At the Tea Party

FeMa MeIN KaMPF

MEIN FEMA KAMPF (with editorial)

 

FEMA MEIN KAMPF (an Uncomfortable Reflection)

 

What is interesting is the following. Four years ago people did Hitler images of Obama that were deemed politically incorrect and in terribly bad taste. There was no apparent factual context justifying such satire.

 

Here we are 4 years on and an analogy what was seen as politically incorrect  has become perfectly legitimate satire for any number of good reasons. Many people still don't like it when they see this. But it is the reality conveyed by the image  that they should dislike. Here we see another great sovereign who decides the exception.

Those repelled by an image like this would be better served directing thier indignation the facts that put wheels on the satire.

 

Liberals and conservatives should stop hammering each other over the head and start looking at their common enemies. You want your guns and you want your civil liberties; and they want to take it all from both of you!

 

Last week we heard all kinds of inaugural blathering and pontifications about American ideals. 

 

Meanwhile, reports of untouchable corruption and cronyism reached a fevered pitch. When legal scholars and judges argue that the Constitution is dead, we all have a great deal to be concerned about. When the rats that enable Wall Street lawlessness while hounding people like Aaron Swartz to the grave are allowed to scurry back to their cushy white shoe enclaves, it is compulsory to be outraged.

 

There can be no crony elite respect for the the concept of "a nation of laws and not men." 

 

For Hitler and the Nazis, the ends always justified their means as well. For too many in the halls of power, looking at an image like this certainly can be unsettling, because it has become a kind of crony American mirror. A mirror that projects itself with reflections of truth.

To them I say: Time to wake up to the smell of populist napalm you morons!

 

There is a reason behind the renaissance popularity of Orwell's 1984. He apparently got the date wrong. He actually meant 2014.

 

History does not it repeat itself, but it rhymes, to paraphrase Mark Twain.

 

And fascism is alive and well in klepto-corporatist Amerika.

 

h/t @ElizaWindsor

 

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Netanyahu Deploys ‘Syrian’ Iron-Dome As Israeli Minister Claims US Preparing ‘Surgical’ Strikes Against Iran

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu says his nation must prepare for the threat of a chemical attack from Syria, amid concern at enemy efforts to test a post-election coalition Israel, and, as Bloomberg reports, has deployed its new Iron Dome anti-missile system near the border with its northern neighbor. Along with this concern, as many have perhaps suspected, the Israeli Defense Minister confirmed yesterday that the US has prepared plans for a 'surgical' military operation to delay Iran's nuclear program.

As The Jerusalem Post reports, Ehud Barak, speaking in Davos, does not believe any military operation against Iran would devolve into a "full fledged war the size of the Iraqi war" but rather "there should be a readiness and an ability to launch a surgical operation that will delay them by a significant time frame and probably convince them that it won’t work because the world is determined to block them."

Barak added that in the past the US has been heavy-handed but that under Barack Obama, the United States has "prepared quite sophisticated, fine, extremely fine, scalpels," if the worse comes to the worst - even though the Israeli preference would be to end the nuclear threat diplomatically , calling for tougher sanctions (though he expressed doubt that diplomacy would lead to success).

Just another geopolitical hotspot that the world's markets choose to ignore in deference to the one true leader - central bankers.

Via Bloomberg,

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel must prepare for the threat of a chemical attack from Syria as the army deployed its new Iron Dome anti- missile system near the border with its northern neighbor.

Netanyahu told members of the Cabinet during the weekly meeting in Jerusalem today that Israel faces dangers from throughout the Middle East. Top security officials held a special meeting last week to discuss what may happen to Syrian stocks of chemical weapons amid the civil unrest there, Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom told Army Radio.

“We must look around us, at what is happening in Iran and its proxies and at what is happening in other areas, with the deadly weapons in Syria, which is increasingly coming apart,” Netanyahu told his Cabinet, according to an e-mailed statement.

Syrian rebels, mostly Sunni Muslims, have been fighting to oust President Bashar al-Assad since March 2011 in a conflict that the United Nations says has left at least 60,000 people dead. Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war.

The Iron Dome system, which was used to shoot down hundreds of rockets fired from the Gaza Strip during Israel’s November conflict with Hamas and other militant groups, is being deployed at an unspecified site in the north, according to an Israeli army spokeswoman. She spoke anonymously in accordance with military regulations and said setting up the anti-missile battery was part of routine operations.

Israeli forces must be particularly alert during the period following last week’s election in which Netanyahu is trying to form a new coalition government and enemies are looking for signs of weakness, the prime minister said. Netanyahu’s Likud- Beitenu alliance lost 11 parliamentary seats in the vote and the prime minister said he needs a broad and stable coalition to deal with security threats from the region.

Via The Jerusalem Post,

Defense minister challenges idea that military operation against Iran would develop into a "full fledged war the size of the Iraqi war"; says surgical strikes will delay Tehran's nuclear drive "by a significant time frame."

The United States has prepared plans for a "surgical" military operation to delay Iran's nuclear program in the event that diplomatic efforts to thwart Tehran's drive for nuclear weapons capability fail, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said in an interview with The Daily Beast on Friday.

Speaking from Switzerland, where he is attending the Davos World Economic Forum, Barak challenged the notion that a military operation against Iran would develop into a "full fledged war the size of the Iraqi war or even the war in Afghanistan."

“What we basically say is that if worse comes to worst, there should be a readiness and an ability to launch a surgical operation that will delay them by a significant time frame and probably convince them that it won’t work because the world is determined to block them,” Barak told The Daily Beast.

The defense minister stated that, while the US was once heavy-handed in its attempts to carry out pinpointed military actions, under the leadership of President Barack Obama, the United States has "prepared quite sophisticated, fine, extremely fine, scalpels. So it is not an issue of a major war or a failure to block Iran. You could under a certain situation, if worse comes to worst, end up with a surgical operation."

Barak said that even a small-scale series of surgical strikes was a last resort, and that Israel's preference would be to neutralize the Iranian nuclear threat diplomatically.

Barak called for harsher sanctions against the Islamic Republic, but noted that he did not believe the diplomatic path was likely to succeed in halting Iran's nuclear drive given Russia and China's tendency to thwart harsher measures in the United Nations.

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Israeli Spy was Central Cog in Nuclear Weapons Proliferation Alliance

israelflag

It is clear that during the middle of December of last year that the Obama White House had settled on former Nebraska Republican Senator Chuck Hagel to be the Secretary of Defense. The U.S. Intelligence Community and defense establishment was told to come up with a strategy to combat the expected strong opposition to the nomination of the critical of Israel Hagel by that nation’s lobby in the United States.

The pro-Hagel circles needed a secret weapon to counteract the Israel supporters who would stress that Hagel was not supportive of the «special relationship» between the United States and Israel. There was no better way to demonstrate that Israel was no special ally of the United States but a longtime hostile intelligence threat to America by declassifying a large part of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Damage Report arising from the intense espionage carried out by one-time U.S. Naval Intelligence spy Jonathan Jay Pollard on behalf of Israel…

The declassification of the long-classified Pollard report was made on December 16, 2012. However, the first substantial media reports on the report began around December 26. The Jewish media, including Yeshiva World, Tablet Magazine, and Jewish Week, contended the report only showed that Pollard disclosed classified information on Arab and Soviet military capabilities, ignoring the fact that Pollard’s disclosures revealed the nature of U.S. intelligence sources and methods in obtaining such information, thereby putting U.S. civilian and military assets in extreme jeopardy.

The one major explosive revelation in the declassified report is Pollard’s involvement in a highly-classified Israeli-South African program to test a nuclear weapon in the South Atlantic/South Indian Ocean region in September 1979.

The Pollard Damage Assessment was prepared by the Director of Central Intelligence’s Foreign Denial and Deception Analysis Committee and issued on October 30, 1987. The report reveals for the first time that Pollard began working as a U.S. naval intelligence watch officer the same month that Israel and South Africa, possibly with the financial support of Taiwan, detonated a nuclear device in the South Atlantic/South Indian Ocean near South Africa’s Prince Edward Islands. The un-redacted damage assessment report also provides details of Pollard’s espionage work for South Africa before or at the same time he was spying for Israel.

Pollard’s espionage for Israel and South Africa provide evidence of his a key role in providing faulty intelligence to higher U.S. intelligence echelons concerning the nuclear test. Pollard’s mission was clear: his Israeli handlers wanted the details of the nuclear test kept secret. If it were proven that Israel was violating South African sanctions, the Symington Amendment would have required the United States to cut off all military and economic assistance to Israel. Even the powerful Jewish Lobby could not get around what was U.S. law.

The report describes Pollard’s work in September 1979 in the Navy Field Operational Intelligence Office (NFOIO) in Suitland, Maryland, outside of Washington, DC. The report states: “He began work as an Intelligence Research Specialist assigned to the Naval Ocean Surveillance Information Center (NOSIC} of the Navy Field Operational Intelligence Office in September 1979.” The report also states that during the same month of the South African-Israeli nuclear test Pollard “admitted that he had attended a clandestine meeting with the South African Defense Attaché.”

In July 1980 Pollard admitted to his superiors that he lied about his contacts with South African intelligence. However, this «admission» was to cover up what Pollard knew about the successful nuclear test the previous year and after Pollard and, presumably other Israeli moles, tainted U.S. intelligence into believing that the double flash normally associated with a nuclear detonation spotted on September 22, 1979 by the bhangmeter photo sensors on U.S. VELA 6911 nuclear detection satellite, orbiting over the South Atlantic at one-third the distance to the moon, was nothing more than a meteor entering the atmosphere or some other natural event.

Pollard failed to highlight several key indicators from his ocean surveillance duties that would have prompted U.S. intelligence assets to turn their attention toward South African extended waters on September 22, 1979. The entire South African Navy was placed on alert for the entire week surrounding September 22 and the Simonstown and Saldanha naval bases were placed under tight security that same week, But Pollard sat on the information and likely deep sixed analysis reports from co-workers on South Atlantic/South Indian Ocean operations during the fateful week.

It is clear that certain intelligence quarters in the U.S. Navy began feeding false intelligence on the double nuclear flash to the CIA. The CIA decided to hire the contractor firm MITRE to analyze recorded acoustic data gathered by the Navy’s Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) and the Air Force Technical Applications Center (AFTAC) less than one-hertz acoustic monitoring systems that piggybacked off the Navy’s SOSUS acoustic hydrophone arrays extending from Bermuda, Wales, and Iceland. The tests revealed that there was a 2-4 kiloton nuclear bomb test in the South Atlantic with acoustic intelligence confirming concussive blast low-level harmonics from Navy and Air Force sonar arrays.

An auroral flash normally associated with nuclear blasts was detected by meteorological stations on Norway’s Bouvet Island, France’s île de la Possession in the nearby Crozet Islands, and at the Japanese Showa station in Antarctica. Further intelligence supporting the nuclear blast event was compiled by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Naval Research Laboratory, and Los Alamos National Laboratory including increased radiation found in sheep downwind of the blast site in Western Australia, Tasmania, and Victoria and in ionospheric disturbances detected by the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico.

Someone within the ranks of Navy intelligence was preparing incorrect intelligence reports and covering for Israel’s and South Africa’s involvement in a nuclear test. One of those suspected is Pollard, whose job was to monitor naval operations around the world the day the nuclear test was conducted in the South Atlantic.

The report’s description of Pollard’s early association with South Africa, which some authors of the damage report attempted to debunk, at the same time Israel and the apartheid regime were cooperating on nuclear weapons development is as follows:

“The following factors that have come to light about his employment with the Navy indicate that Pollard was unsuited for access to sensitive national security information:

- False claims concerning professional qualifications. Pollard falsely stated on his naval employment application that he had a ‘provisional’ M.A. degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Moreover, in February 1980 during an interview with Task Force 168, the intelligence element charged with HUMINT collection, Pollard falsely claimed to have an M.A. degree, to be proficient in Afrikaans, and to have applied for a commission in the naval reserve. Pollard made another, more farfetched statement to his immediate supervisor in NOSIC: he said he had key South African contacts who could provide him with valuable information, and that he had known South African citizens for many years because his father bad been the CIA Station Chief in South Africa.”

The report also states: “Pollard claimed in a post-arrest debriefing that he had come very close to volunteering to commit espionage while holding a conversation in Hebrew with the Israeli Naval Attaché during a U.S.-Israeli intelligence exchange in 1983. Although it is not clear exactly when Pollard first began to consider espionage, we believe it was at least as early as 1980-81.”

The damage report’s Executive Summary is surprisingly soft on Israel’s use of Pollard as a spy. The summary states that Pollard’s “short but intensive espionage career on behalf of Israel lasted from June 1984 until his arrest on 21 November 1985.” However, other sections of the report state that Pollard considered spying for Israel at least as early as 1980-81. Other parts of the report indicate that Pollard’s espionage for both Israel and South Africa began much earlier and that even as a teen Pollard was a committed Zionist who placed loyalty to Israel above the United States.

Of course, it is this sort of hard intelligence that can be used to show that Israel has long been an adversary of the United States and a dangerous espionage center for anti-U.S. operations. At the time of the South African-Israeli nuclear test, the administration of President Jimmy Carter was actively enforcing military sanctions against South Africa imposed by UN Security Council resolution 418 of 1977.

Two years before Pollard was arrested by the FBI after trying to seek political asylum in the Israeli embassy in Washington, the FBI arrested in New York South African Navy Commodore Dieter Gerhardt and his East German spy wife, Ruth, based on a tip from a Soviet defector code named «Farewell.» Gerhardt was the commander of the South African Navy’s Simonstown naval base and had access to signals intelligence intercepts from South Africa’s secret Silvermine listening post near Cape Town. South Africa and the U.S.U.K. signals intelligence alliance shared some intelligence at a low level during this time frame.

Gerhardt’s role as a possible liaison to Pollard and Israeli intelligence in the United States becomes apparent when Gerhardt’s own admission: that he was an important liaison in South African – Israeli military cooperation. Gerhardt later revealed that he was aware of the South African-Israeli nuclear test in the South Atlantic, which he said was code named Operation Phoenix. Gerhardt’s later admission also revealed that the nuclear test was a «clean» blast, an indication that South Africa and Israel had tested a neutron bomb. Israel’s possession of neutron bombs is one of the Jewish state’s most closely-guarded secrets. The Israeli Lobby’s unofficial conspiracy debunking journal, Popular Mechanics, which ruled out any official U.S. or Israeli government involvement in the 9/11 attack, stated that there was no nuclear explosion and that Gerhardt lacked credibility. The Pollard Damage Report and other revelations have substantiated Gerhardt’s claims. Pollard also was dealing with both the South Africans and Soviets. Moreover, it was later determined that Israel later swapped some of Pollard’s classified information with the Soviets in return for an increase in exit visas for Soviet Jews to Israel.

After Gerhardt was sentenced to life imprisonment in South Africa, and Gerhardt’s wife received a ten year sentence, South African President P. W. Botha offered amnesty to some prisoners in 1988, including Nelson Mandela. Ruth Gerhardt applied for the amnesty. The request was turned down by none other than Justice Richard Goldstone, the self-proclaimed Zionist who has run hot and cold on Israeli atrocities in Gaza. Goldstone in 1988 was obviously acting under orders from Israel to keep Ruth Gerhardt under lock and key. In 1985, Israeli nuclear scientist Mordechai Vanunu began passing secrets on Israel’s nuclear weapons program to the media, including the fact that South African uclear scientists were frequent guests at the top secret Israeli nuclear facility at Dimona in the Negev Desert.

In 1986, Vanunu was forcibly kidnapped by Israeli agents in Rome after he was lured into a Mossad «honey trap» and imprisoned in Israel. Efforts by some in U.S. intelligence to trade Vanunu for Pollard were met with stony silence from Israeli officials. In 1988, Israel was trying to get Pollard released from the life prison sentence handed down in 1987 and Goldstone was under pressure to ensure that the Gerhardts remained silent, especially after Vanunu’s embarrassing disclosures about Israeli nuclear weapons and South Africa. Ruth was released in 1990 and her husband was released in 1992. In 1999, Gerhardt received amnesty and his rank of Rear Admiral was restored. Vanunu was eventually released but his «freedom» has largely consisted of virtual house arrest in Israel.

Later, Deputy South African Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad and former CIA Pretoria station officer Tyler Drumheller confirmed that Israel and South Africa jointly tested the South Atlantic nuclear weapon.

The Pollard deception continues to haunt the world today. One of the key players in the Israel-South African nuclear weapons research was Israeli arms smuggler Shaul Eisenberg, the head of the Israel Corporation and a provider of military hardware to China, North Korea, and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Eisenberg, whose Wikipedia entry has been re-written by Israeli propagandists, controlled Israel Aircraft Industries and Zim Israel Navigation Shipping Company. Eisenberg was able to provide needed nuclear weapons components from Operation Phoenix to China and two of its major allies, North Korea and Pakistan.

It is with this knowledge of Israel’s destructive actions against America that Hagel and his supporters prepare to do battle with the nefarious Israel Lobby during the expected heated Senate confirmation hearings.

The Pacific Ocean: The Pentagon’s Next “Human Battleground”

The Pentagon planners and their paid anthropologist shills are gearing up for the Pentagon’s next battle: the one for the Pacific that will ensure that the island nations that dot the vast maritime expanse will remain a part of the Anglo-American sphere of influence and not become part of a «Chinese lake».The Pacific Ocean has been a favorite stomping ground for U.S. government-financed anthropologists ever since Margaret Mead ‘s 1928 treatise on the Samoan people, Coming of Age in Samoa, laid the groundwork for the intelligence-related anthropological study of the peoples of the Pacific Ocean by the U.S. military and intelligence services. Mead later became a researcher for the CIA-connected RAND Corporation and became a supporter of CIA funding of anthropologic surveys and studies via laundered academic research grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).USAID / CIA/Special Operations projects with names like Phoenix, Prosyms, Sympatico, and Camelot used anthropologists and social scientists to reconnoiter targeted tribal areas in South Vietnam, Indonesia, Pakistan, Colombia, and Chile to determine how U.S. Special Forces and intelligence agents could use indigenous peoples to further American military goals. The operations in the cases of Phoenix in South Vietnam and Prosyms in Indonesia resulted in genocide on a massive scale…

Today, the military’s tribal and native peoples targeting programs fall under the nomenclature of «human terrain systems» or HTS. Brought back to life in Afghanistan and Iraq, these genocidal programs now have their eyes on the Pacific in order to gear up for what the Pentagon and Langley planners believe is an inevitable war with China.

It is fitting, therefore, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are now looking for up to 15,000 acres of land to lease on American Samoa. The U.S. military wants to establish a major training base on American Samoa for at least five years and probably longer. The base is to provide 24-hour road access that will permit 60 full days of training per year. The Army also wants the base to permit the use of pyrotechnic and blank ammunition during daytime and nighttime training. It is certain that the U.S. is looking at building a simulated rural and village tropical environment for the use of U.S. and future «coalition of the willing» armies to practice battling an enemy in the Pacific region. That «enemy» is China.

The United States obviously foresees the Pacific as a future battleground between American and its allied forces and China for control of the important trade routes that crisscross the vast maritime region. Not since the U.S. military campaign against Japan during World War II has the Pacific seen such an American military projection of power.

The decision by the Obama administration to «pivot» its military forces into Asia and the Pacific has brought about a strong response from China, which sees itself as the ultimate target for the increased U.S. military presence. China’s ambassador to Australia Chen Yuming called the stationing of 2500 U.S. Marines in Darwin an «affront» and a Cold War containment policy toward China.

The establishment of a U.S. military training base on American Samoa follows Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s first ever attendance by a U.S. Secretary of State of a Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) summit in Rarotonga, Cook Islands on August 31, 2012. It was the first such visit to the Cook Islands and underscored America’s decision to maintain its stranglehold over the small Pacific island nations while at the same time beefing up its military forces in the region.

The United States and its two Pacific overseers – Australia and New Zealand –- are attempting to cement their neo-colonialist hegemony over the Pacific states, which are independent in name only. Enter the Human Terrain practitioners from the Pentagon and CIA to keep the Pacific islanders divided. Clinton’s participation in the PIF summit is aimed at not only maintaining the status quo but in promoting the rivalries between Polynesians, Micronesians, and Melanesians among the island states.

The United States, having virtual ownership of the quasi-independent Micronesian nations of Micronesia, Palau, and the Marshall Islands, as well as total control over the U.S. territories of Guam and the Northern Marianas, can use its influence over Micronesians to play them off against the other two major ethnic groups. They are the Melanesian Spearhead Group of Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and the New Caledonia (Kanaky) liberation front and the Polynesian Leaders Group of Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, Cook Islands, Niue, Tokelau, French Polynesia, as well as the intelligence eyes and ears of Washington, American Samoa. The United States, Australia, and New Zealand can use their Human terrain System knowledge of ethnic rivalries in the Pacific to ensure that China is kept out of the area.

Part of the strategy relies on Taiwan’s «checkbook» diplomacy to maintain Taiwanese rather than Chinese embassies and aid missions in the small island states. There are currently Taiwanese embassies in Tuvalu, Solomon Islands, Marshall Islands, Palau, Nauru, and Kiribati. Among these, Nauru, Solomon Islands, and Kiribati switched their recognition back to Taiwan after opening up diplomatic relations with China. Kiribati came under pressure after it decided to allow China to build a missile tracking station on south Tarawa. The U.S. believed the China Space Telemetry Tracking Station was going to spy on the «Star Wars II» activity at the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site in the Kwajalein Atoll of the Marshall Islands. The Marshallese on the atoll are under constant surveillance by well-armed U.S. security personnel.

In 2004, Vanuatu switched its recognition back to China from Taiwan after Prime Minister Serge Vohor paid a secret visit to Taiwan and was ejected from office in a vote of no confidence. Vohor actually punched the Chinese ambassador after Vohor returned from Taiwan. Such incidents in the Pacific Islands have been known to set off riots between opposing political parties and ethnic groups. The Pentagon will use such politico-ethnic tinderboxes as a secret weapon against China.

The CIA, Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO), and New Zealand Secret Intelligence Service (NZSIS) have programs to undermine South Pacific governments that establish close relations with Beijing. However, the Human Terrain operatives have gone further. Aware of the animosity that poor Pacific Islanders have toward local successful Chinese businessmen, the bought—and-paid for anthropologists have stirred up riots, especially in Solomon Islands and Tonga, to marginalize China’s influence in the region.

There are contingency plans to foment riots against ethnic Chinese in Fiji, Vanuatu, and Papua New Guinea. The CIA’s Operation Prosyms in Indonesia relied on longstanding animosity between Muslim Indonesians and ethnic Chinese to stoke riots against the Chinese in the aftermath of the 1965 CIA coup against President Sukarno. The mayhem resulted in the deaths of over 100,000 ethnic Chinese and a severance of relations between the CIA-installed Suharto government and China. President Obama’s anthropologist mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, played a crucial role in Prosyms. Mrs. Dunham’s son appears prepared to reenact anti-Chinese pogroms in the islands of the Pacific.

It is clear that the U.S. military training in American Samoa will be used to train Pacific Islander mercenaries, many of whom, such as Marshall Islanders, American Samoans, and Guamanians already serve in the U.S. military, to train young men from impoverished Kiribati, Micronesia, Samoa, and Fiji. Fijian and Tongan mercenaries, battle-hardened from Western campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other regions, are also available to supplement the U.S. Pacific Command’s training complex on American Samoa. If Fiji’s military-led government , which has been the subject of diplomatic sanctions by Australia and New Zealand, continues to get close to China and North Korea, these Fijian mercenaries could see coup d’état duty on behalf of the CIA, ASIO, and NZSIS in their homeland of Fiji. And the diplomats of the small Chinese embassy in Nuku’alofa, Tonga have witnessed how fast the fury of local Tongans can be turned on the Chinese business community. These blood-soaked scenarios all figure heavily into Pentagon HTS plans for the Pacific.

The United States will continue to keep the Pacific Islands within its vast gulag to prevent the extension of Chinese influence. Today, Pacific Islanders are faced with a virtual «Berlin Wall» that keeps Pacific Islanders confined to their own islands while outsiders, like Chinese and Russians, are kept out. The method by which Washington, Canberra, and Wellington have created airline and sea transit monopolies and transit visa requirements means that Samoans from the Independent State of Samoa cannot visit nearby American Samoa without a special permit. And the U.S. Department of Homeland Security decides who will receive special permits and transit visas, including for those traveling on diplomatic passports. Any scheduled airline that connects any of the islands via American Samoa, Guam, or Hawaii requires a U.S. transit visa and that entails invasive interviews by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel.

There is a reason why so many negotiations and agreement to establish the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership have been secret. As the title indicates, the TPP, as it is known, is a «strategic» trade bloc, which means it also has a military dimension. In essence, it is no different than the Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere established by Imperial Japan during World War II. The United States, not wanting to be viewed as starting the bloc but wanting it to be a replacement for the Cold War military alliance, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), sat in the background while New Zealand, Singapore, Brunei, and Chile signed up as charter members in 2005.

As more nations joined, the TTP’s military profile became clearer. The countries that signed up to the TPP were all being groomed for the anti-China military bloc for the Pacific: Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Mexico, Vietnam, Peru, and the United States signed on. Japan, Thailand, South Korea, the Philippines, Colombia, Costa Rica, Laos, and Taiwan later expressed an interest in joining the TPP. The eastward blockade of China became clear. The United States already had existing military alliances with six of the other ten TPP member nations. From Darwin, Australia and Subic Bay, Philippines to Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam and the U.S. built Mataveri Airport on Easter Island (Rapa Nui), the U.S. was delineating the borders of its own Asia-Pacific Sphere and a line over which China would be warned not to cross.

Mrs. Clinton may have arrived in Rarotonga last year amid waves and smiles but her sinister plans for the Pacific region have more to do with using the Pacific Islanders for cannon fodder in what Washington expects to be a coming regional war with China.

Germany Fires a Warning Shot at the Fed

Germany has the second largest Gold reserves in the world behind the US. Since the early ‘80s, it has stored the majority of these reserves with the NY Fed (45% vs. 13% in London, 11% in Paris and the remaining 31% in Frankfurt).

With that in mind, everyone needs to be aware that last Monday Germany’s Bundesbank announced it will be moving a major portion of its reserves from the US and all of its reserves from France back to Frankfurt.

Nearly half of Germany’s gold reserves are held in a vault at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — billions of dollars worth of postwar geopolitical history squirreled away for safe keeping below the streets of Lower Manhattan.

 

Now the German central bank wants to make a big withdrawal — 300 tons in all.

 

On Wednesday, the Bundesbank said that it would begin moving some of the reserves, the second-largest stock in the world after that of the United States. The goal is to house more than 50 percent of German gold in Bundesbank vaults in Frankfurt by 2020, up from a little less than a third today, the bank said…

 

The new policy will include the complete withdrawal of 374 tons of German gold stored at the Banque de France in Paris, about 11 percent of the total. Bundesbank officials were quick to note that the decision was not a reflection of French trustworthiness. Rather, because France and Germany now share the euro, there is no need for reserves as insurance against currency crises.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/17/business/global/german-central-bank-to-repatriate-gold-reserves.html

This announcement came with the usual political statements that the decision had nothing to do with a lack of trust between the Bundesbank and the US Fed or Bank of France, but the message is obvious: Germany sees the writing on the wall and is moving to secure its Gold reserves.

Remember, Germany has spent the better part of two years preparing for financial chaos. Since the autumn of 2011, it has:

  1. Implemented legislation that would permit Germany to leave the Euro but remain a part of the EU.
  2. Revived its Special Financial Market Stabilization Funds, or SoFFin for short, allocating 480 billion Euros to the fund (and also providing German banks with a place to dump their Euro-zone Government bonds if they need to).
  3. Implemented reforms that would allow it to close off its borders for as long as 30 days if it needed to (so individuals and capital couldn’t leave Germany)
  4. Created a working group to assess both the economic impact of a Greek exit from the Euro as well as how to manage the impact of a collapse in France.
  5. Pulling all of its Gold from France as well as a major portion of its Gold from the US.

All of these are verifiable facts that the Western Media has avoided talking about. It is very easy to connect the dots here: Germany is implementing a contingency plan to put a firewall around its financial system for when the EU finally breaks down.

A final note here: the tension between the world’s Central Banks just increased dramatically.

Since the Great Crisis began in 2008, the world’s Central Banks have collectively pumped $10 trillion into the global financial system. Every major Central Bank from Germany to the US and China wants to debase its currency to benefit exports and facilitate dealing with its debt load (even China sports a real Debt to GDP north fo 200%).

This competitive debasement has lead to increased tension between the world’s Central Banks. You will never hear their stated outright for the simple reason that the single most important responsibility of the Central Banks is to maintain confidence in the system.

However, underneath the veneer of goodwill and the occasional necessary coordinated intervention, tensions are rising between Central Banks. When the US debases the US Dollar it pushes the Euro higher. This hurts German exports which in turn angers the Bundesbank.

The Bundesbank fired a warning shot at the Fed last autumn when it announced it wanted to have its Gold reserves at the Fed audited. To be clear here: no one of major financial import has ever questioned the Fed’s trustworthiness before. However, at the time of this announcement Germany stated it had no intentions of actually moving its reserves.

Fast-forward to today and Germany has not only audited and checked its Gold reserves at the Fed but it is now moving them. In plain terms, Germany has told the world that A) it does not trust the Fed and B) it is through playing around.

This situation will likely be getting worse going forward. The fact that Germany will be removing all of its Gold reserves from France certainly doesn’t bode well for future German French relations if push ever comes to shove (it’s not as though Europe has a history of getting along well).

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Mehdi’s Morning Memo: The Great Train Rebellion

The ten things you need to know on Monday 28 January 2013...

THE GREAT TRAIN REBELLION

First, there were the Euro-rebels. Then the gay-marriage rebels. Now, it's the train-spotting rebels. David Cameron, it seems, can't stop picking fights with his backbenchers.

The Times splashes on the Tories' "high speed rebellion":

"David Cameron faces a grassroots Tory rebellion after he unveils plans today to drive the fastest railway in Europe through the party’s heartlands to Manchester and Leeds.

"The Times can reveal that a blueprint for the £33 billion High Speed 2 line, to be published this morning, will" - among other things - "pledge to create 100,00 jobs, including 10,000 during construction". Hmm, they had me at "100,000 jobs".

This could be the moment that former Welsh secretary Cheryl Gillan - leader of parliament's Nimby brigade, whose Amersham and Chesham seat is on the route and has described it as "the wrong railway in the wrong place at the wrong time and for such a high cost" - takes revenge on the PM for sacking her from the cabinet last year. Dave may come to regret giving Cheryl the boot while swilling a glass of red wine...

Note: Apologies for the lack of a Morning Memo yesterday. I was out of the country, at a conference. Normal Sunday service will resume next weekend.

2) DAVE VS ADAM

Perhaps Cheryl Gillan will have to get in line. Yesterday, a new challenger appeared on the scene: (backbench) Conservative MP for Windsor, Adam Afriyie. (Adam who?)

The Independent's Andy McSmith reports:

"The debate began after three Tory-supporting Sunday newspapers reported a 'well-organised' campaign to secure the leadership for Mr Afriyie, who was a frontbench spokesman for the Conservatives in opposition but was excluded from the Government.

"... Mr Afriyie said he almost choked on his breakfast cereal when he read the reports. He told Sky News: 'I will never stand against David Cameron. I am 100 per cent supportive of David Cameron... There is no truth to any of it. We are working very hard to keep David Cameron secure, to make sure there is not a vacancy.'

"However, he also said he and his allies had talked about 'the long-term future of the party,' indicating that he sees himself as a candidate in a post-2015 leadership contest if the Tories lose the general election.

"The promise not to stand against Mr Cameron is actually meaningless, because the rules of the Conservative Party, revised after the fall of Margaret Thatcher, do not permit a direct challenge to a Tory Prime Minister, who must be felled by a vote of no confidence before an election can be held to choose a successor."

The Telegraph reveals, on its front page, that "a handful of former ministers who were sacked by Mr Cameron in the reshuffle have been working for weeks, trying to cement support for Mr Afriyie if the Tories lose the likely May 2015 election".

The paper's leader concludes: "The silly season appears to have started early this year."

Indeed.

3) LIB DEMS FOREVER

"England does not love coalitions," Benjamin Disraeli famously remarked. This morning's Independent has this as one of its front-page headlines: "Prepare for an era of coalitions, say Lib Dems."

The paper's Andrew Grice has interviewed the Tories' favourite Lib Dem minister, David Laws, and reports:

"Liberal Democrat leaders want all three main parties to draw up a slimline manifesto for an era of 'coalition politics' as well as an 'age of austerity' at the 2015 general election.

"In an interview with The Independent, David Laws, who heads the Liberal Democrats' manifesto group, said: 'We have to learn the lesson of tuition fees.'"

The Indy also notes how party leader Clegg told the BBC's Andrew Marr programme yesterday that the Lib Dems would be up for joining a coalition with Labour if the latter beat the Conservatives at the next election.

Is the country ready for its own version of Germany's Free Democrats - i.e. a third party that is permanently in government via ever-changing coalitions?

4) DON'T COME TO BRITAIN. IT SUCKS HERE.

This is my favourite story of the day - from the Guardian's front page:

"Please don't come to Britain – it rains and the jobs are scarce and low-paid. Ministers are considering launching a negative advertising campaign in Bulgaria and Romania to persuade potential immigrants to stay away from the UK.

"The plan, which would focus on the downsides of British life, is one of a range of potential measures to stem immigration to Britain next year when curbs imposed on both country's citizens living and working in the UK will expire.

"A report over the weekend quoted one minister saying that such a negative advert would 'correct the impression that the streets here are paved with gold'."

Well, of course, they're not. We're on the verge of a triple-dip recession, with real wages falling and child poverty on the rise. Thanks, in part, to policies backed by that unnamed, anonymous minister.

But, take a step back, what kind of government is so obsessed with 'cracking down' on immigration that it's willing to consider doing down the country's international image in order to keep migrants out? You could not make it up.

To be fair, the FT reports: "Downing Street played down any such campaign yesterday, with one aide dismissing the idea as 'kite flying'."

5) DON'T FORGET MALI

Hats off to the Indy and the Guardian for keeping news the conflict in Mali on their front pages.

The Independent's splash headline reads: "Revealed: how French raid killed 12 Malian villagers."

The paper reports:

"A father last night described the moment a French attack helicopter bombed his town in Mali, killing his wife and at least three children from another family. Amadou Jallo, 57, lost his wife, Aminata, in the attack on Konna, in which 12 civilians died and 15 more were injured."

Meanwhile, the Guardian's Luke Harding reports:

"Just two weeks after intervening in Mali, French troops, together with the Malian army, have wrested back control of most of the north of the country from Islamist rebels.

But, he adds:

"... despite these swift successes, it is uncertain whether France's giddy military advance will deliver any kind of lasting peace. So far the 'war' in Mali has involved little fighting. Instead Islamist rebels have simply melted back into the civilian population, or disappeared."

Hmm. Sounds like Afghanistan circa late 2001.

BECAUSE YOU'VE READ THIS FAR...

Watch this video: "Six dogs. One Dish. One incredibly cute trick."

6) ERIC PICKLES VS 'CHEATING' COUNCILS

The Telegraph splashes on the "minister at war over 'cheating' councils":

"Councils are treating local residents 'with contempt' and will be cheating taxpayers if they increase local taxes without public backing, the Local Government Secretary warns.

"In an article for The Daily Telegraph, Eric Pickles says he will introduce new laws to stop councils abusing the system by hitting householders with stealth tax rises next year.

"Mr Pickles, who describes some councils as 'cheating their taxpayers', discloses that only about a third have so far signed up for a national council tax freeze, with dozens more threatening to defy government calls for restraint amid the ongoing economic turmoil."

Perhaps, just perhaps, if the coalition hadn't frontloaded their cuts to local government budgets, councils wouldn't need to raise council tax.

7) VOTE TORY, GET NO HOLIDAYS?

From the Guardian:

"David Cameron will use EU reforms to repatriate and weaken workers' rights, Frances O'Grady, the new leader of the Trades Union Congress will warn on Monday.

"Speaking at a conference in Madrid she will say that, if the prime minister gets his way, employees across Europe may no longer receive health and safety protection, equal treatment as part-time workers and women, or paid holidays."

8) NO NEED TO SMELL THE COFFEE

The papers this morning are all ove the so-called 'spat' between the government and Starbucks. The Express reports:

"Conservative party chairman Grant Shapps yesterday denied that the Tories had 'singled out' coffee giant Starbucks over how much tax it paid.

"His comments follow claims that the US firm had threatened to stop investing in Britain after Prime Minister David Cameron urged business last week to 'wake up and smell the coffee' about public anger over tax avoidance.

"It was seen as a dig at Starbucks, which has paid no corporation tax in the last three years and only £8.6million in 14 years in Britain."

9) 'DIVERSITY CRISIS'

The Guardian's splash is a self-professed 'exclusive':

"Police forces should be made to positively discriminate in favour of black and ethnic minority officers in the face of a growing diversity crisis, according to one of the country's leading chief constables.

"The radical proposal – which would mean a change in the law – from Sir Peter Fahy, of Greater Manchester, comes in the face of what he said was an embarrassing paucity of black and minority ethnic officers (BME) at the top of British policing."

I'm all for more diversity, and even - as a last resort - positive discrimination, but Fahy's rather odd comments about more BME officers helping with "undercover surveillance" won't go down that well with BME communities...

10) BARACK AND HILLARY SITTING IN A TREE...

It's not often you see the president of the United States sit down for a joint interview alongside his secretary of state.

From the Guardian:

"Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton coyly batted away questions over any White House succession plan during a mutually appreciative interview on Sunday...

"'You guys in the press are incorrigible. I was literally inaugurated four days ago, and you're talking about the elections four years from now,' offered Obama.

"Clinton likewise gave an answer that could be interpreted any number of ways: 'Obviously the president and I care deeply about what's going to happen for our country in the future. And I don't think, you know, either he or I can make predictions about what's going to happen tomorrow or the next year,' she said."

Obama declared, with Clinton at his side: "I'm going to miss her." Awww - to think it was only five years ago that they were tearing strips out of each other in public as they tried to destroy each other's political careers.

PUBLIC OPINION WATCH

From yesterday's Sunday Times/YouGov poll:

Labour 41
Conservatives 35
Lib Dems 12
Ukip 7

That would give Labour a majority of 78.

140 CHARACTERS OR LESS

@TomHarrisMP If Cameron fails to win a majority in 2015, then obviously *someone* will take over. That doesn't necessarily mean there's a conspiracy.

@BevanJa Is it possible for newspapers to suggest a black politician may be a future party leader without a crude comparison to Obama?

@DanHannanMEP Does Nick Clegg lack all self-awareness? A referendum on AV was critical, but a referendum on the EU is a distraction?

900 WORDS OR MORE

Boris Johnson, writing in the Telegraph, says: "Only a coward would deny the people their voice on Europe."

Gavin Kelly, writing in the Guardian, says: "Could the Tories' plan for re-election in 2015 cost just 10p?"

David Blunkett, writing in the Daily Mail, says: "Coalition's constituency boundary reforms are a complete mess and an insult to voters."


Got something you want to share? Please send any stories/tips/quotes/pix/plugs/gossip to Mehdi Hasan (mehdi.hasan@huffingtonpost.com) or Ned Simons (ned.simons@huffingtonpost.com). You can also follow us on Twitter: @mehdirhasan, @nedsimons and @huffpostukpol

Paul Ryan Says Sequester Likely To Take Place

When the Republican party agreed last week to a push back on the debt ceiling discussion by three months to May 19, virtually without a fight in a move that may presage what is set to become a quarterly can kicking exercise on the US credit card max, some were curious what the quo to this particular quid may be. Earlier today on Meet the press Paul Ryan explained: the pound of spending flesh demanded by the GOP in exchange for caving on yet another key GOP hurdle is, as our readers have known for over two weeks, the Sequester, which is set to hit on March 1 and possibly the stop-gap government funding on March 27, after which various government agencies will start shutting down. Both programs are set to kick in automatically as incremental spending cuts, chopping away even more basis points from the 2013 US GDP, unless the GOP votes affirmatively to extend them in what would then be seen as a move that destroys any last trace of leverage and credibility that GOP may have had.

From The Hill:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) predicted Sunday that “the sequester is going to happen,” and blamed Democrats for not producing an alternative set of spending reductions to circumvent the across-the-board cuts.

“We think these sequesters will happen because the Democrats have opposed our efforts to replace those cuts with others and they’ve offered no alternative,” Ryan said on NBC’s Meet the Press.

The sequester cuts, delayed by the “fiscal cliff” deal reached at the beginning of the year, are now slated to take effect on March 1.

Ryan added that the cuts needed to happen because Republicans can’t risk losing the only leverage they have when it comes to cutting spending.

“I think the sequester is going to happen, because that $1.2 trillion in spending cuts, we can’t lose those spending cuts, that was to pay for the last debt-ceiling increase, let alone any future increase.”

Ironically it is the military - so dear to the republicans - that may be impacted most acutely by the sequester, as Reuters explains:

Some Republicans have called for delaying the planned spending cuts in defense while increasing cuts in other areas of the federal government. The Pentagon said on Friday it had begun laying off most of its 46,000 temporary and term employees and cutting maintenance on ships and aircraft in an effort to slow spending before nearly $50 billion in new cuts are due to go into effect on March 1.

In addition to the sequester, there is also the stop-gap government funding measure, which is set to take place on March 27, and following which various government agencies will begin shutting down without much if any clarity as to what happens next:

March 27 is the expiration date for a stop-gap government funding measure. If Congress does not authorize a new spending bill by that date, government agencies and programs would have to start shutting down. In such a scenario, military activities could be curtailed and federal employees put on unpaid leave.

While Republicans in the past have threatened similar shutdowns to press for spending cuts, the tactic could backfire. Republican-led government shutdowns in 1995 and 1996 met with strong public disapproval.

Ryan played down a potential fight with Democrats over the stop-gap spending measure.

"No one is talking about shutting the government down," Ryan said.

The House last Wednesday passed a Republican plan to allow the government to keep borrowing money through mid-May, clearing it for quick enactment after the top Senate Democrat and White House endorsed it.

The measure includes a measure requiring the House and Senate to pass a formal budget resolution by April 15. Under the provision, if either chamber fails to meet this deadline, lawmakers' pay would be suspended until they pass a budget.

Ryan's interview can be seen in the clip below.

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The one topic that has been left untouched is what the impact on US growth as a result of the sequester will be, because while it is known that the expiration of the payroll tax cut extension will cut 1% of GDP, few have discussed the impact of the sequester. Luckily, some ten days ago we covered just this. We repost that analysis in its entirety now that the sequester is more than a fleeting possibility.

Here Comes The Sequester, And Another 1% Cut To 2013 GDP

Several days ago we showed an analysis that indicated that the elimination of the payroll tax cut would likely eat into 1.5% of 2013 US GDP and subtract as much as 3.5% of 2013 growth based on one submodel - a deduction to overall US growth which already puts US GDP forecasts in borderline recession territory. We also added the caveat that "no estimates take into account spending cuts, which may happen, and which will serve as a double whammy to consumption in addition to already enacted tax hikes." Today, we present the flip side to the GDP calculation, namely what may and likely will happen to US growth once the pound of flesh is extracted by the GOP in exchange for raising the debt ceiling, which will eventually be raised even if it means a shutdown in the government for an indefinite period of time.

The reason: the sequester, whose implementation most thought would be delayed until well into 2014, is now starting to loom as the logical counterpoint to the debt ceiling compromise. And here comes Goldman with the first shot across the bow on what this quid pro quo would likely mean for US GDP: "Allowing the sequester to hit would, in our view, have greater implications for growth than a short-lived government shutdown, but would not be as severe as a failure to raise the debt limit. Although Republicans in Congress generally support replacing the defense portion of the sequester with cuts in other areas, there is much less Republican support for delaying them without offsetting the increased spending that would result."

And in bottom line terms: "Sequestration would reduce the level of spending authority by $85bn in fiscal year (FY) 2013 and $109bn for subsequent fiscal years through 2021. The actual effect on spending in calendar 2013 would be smaller--around $53bn, or 0.3% of GDP--since reductions in spending authority reduce actual spending with a lag. The reduction in spending would occur fairly quickly; the change would be concentrated in Q2 and particularly Q3 and could weigh on growth by 0.5pp to 1.0pp."

In other words: payroll tax eliminates some 1.5% of 2013 GDP growth; on the other side the sequester cuts another 1%: that's a total of 2.5%. So: is the US now almost certainly looking at a recession when all the fiscal components to "growth" are eliminated? And what will the Fed do when it is already easing on "full blast" just to keep US growth barely above 0%?

Of course, don't tell the market, whose only illogical response to what is an increasingly ugly fundamanetal picture would be to... sell vol, and push the ES to new 5 year highs.

Full note from Goldman:

Spending Cuts Under the Sequester: A Question of When, Not If

  • Failure to raise the debt ceiling would have severe economic consequences, but for this reason Congress seems likely to increase it. By contrast, a temporary government shutdown would have a limited effect on growth if it were resolved quickly, and this lack of severe consequences makes it more likely to occur. In the middle of these two extremes lie the spending cuts under sequestration--allowing them to take effect in full could impose a meaningful drag on growth, but the effect might not be severe enough to dissuade Congress from allowing it to occur.
  • Our forecast assumes that $15bn in sequestration-related spending cuts will take effect in 2013, with the remainder implemented in 2014 and 2015. But while we have been assuming that the sequester will be allowed to take effect eventually, that moment may come sooner than we had expected, for two reasons: (1) many members of Congress dislike the sequester, but reversing it amounts to a spending increase, which would be politically difficult; and (2) the sequester takes effect March 1, and Congress may not have resolved the two other fiscal issues by that point.
  • While there is a growing risk that some of these cuts are allowed to take effect, we suspect that Congress will reverse at least some of them, potentially replacing them with phased-in savings elsewhere in the budget. The Dept. of Defense has already announced that it will have to undertake several disruptive steps, including employee furloughs, if the cut is implemented on schedule. Delaying it until the start of the coming fiscal year would avoid most of this disruption, but would not have that significant an effect on the 10-year budget projections.

Once again, the White House and congressional Republicans find themselves with seemingly irreconcilable differences on key fiscal issues. Speaker Boehner has insisted that an increase in the debt limit must be matched with spending cuts of an equal amount (when measured over ten years), while President Obama reiterated today that he will not negotiate on any other policy changes in return for the increase. Settling this disagreement will be harder than it was in 2011, when the debt limit was increased by $2.1 trillion in return for $2.1 trillion in spending cuts over ten years. Further budget savings would need to come mainly from entitlement programs or tax increases, which are much more controversial.

President Obama is unlikely to accept entitlement cuts without a second tax increase. Republicans are therefore looking for a way to convince the administration that agreeing to entitlement cuts will be better than what would occur if no agreement is reached. To be successful, the mechanism Republicans use to force the issue must have severe enough consequences that the White House will want to reach an agreement instead, but not so severe that no one believes it could be allowed to happen. They have three options to choose from:

Debt limit - severe effects but low likelihood: The Treasury has indicated it expects to exhaust its borrowing capacity "between mid-February and early March," similar to our previous projection of March 1. There is little risk to Treasury's ability to make scheduled interest or principal payments, in our view, given their small size relative to Treasury's overall cash flows. But there still would be two important consequences: first, the inability to borrow would force the Treasury to immediately eliminate the budget deficit, leading to a delay in payments to federal employees, federal contractors, and beneficiaries of entitlement programs, among others; second, rating agencies might downgrade the US rating following a failure to raise the limit in a timely manner. Even Speaker Boehner has described potential failure to raise the debt limit as a "financial disaster." The upshot is that since leaders of both parties accept the need to raise it and recognize the negative consequences of a failure to do so, opposing an increase in the debt limit is no longer as credible a threat as it was in 2011.

A government shutdown -- modest effects but increasingly likely: Congress opted in September 2012 to extend spending authority for six months, until March 27, 2013. This has been done frequently in recent years when lawmakers cannot agree on full-year spending levels. If spending authority is not extended further, the Obama administration will lose its authority to carry out activities funded by appropriations and will be forced to shut down non-essential government operations. This is not as bad as it sounds, for a few reasons: first, only 40% of federal spending relies on congressional appropriations; the remainder is unaffected by a failure to extend spending authority. Second, about two-thirds of that 40% is deemed "essential" and continues even without a renewal of spending authority. This includes defense functions and services "essential to protect life and property." The upshot is that a one-week shutdown of these activities would reduce federal spending by $8bn to $12bn (annualized). Since a shutdown that begins on March 27 would straddle the end of Q1 and the start of Q2, the effect on quarterly growth is hard to estimate but might be around 0.1pp in each quarter. (For more discussion of the effects of a government shutdown, see our April 8, 2011 US Economics Analyst).

Sequester -- meaningful effects and quite possible: Allowing the sequester to hit would, in our view, have greater implications for growth than a short-lived government shutdown, but would not be as severe as a failure to raise the debt limit. Although Republicans in Congress generally support replacing the defense portion of the sequester with cuts in other areas, there is much less Republican support for delaying them without offsetting the increased spending that would result.

Among these three options, the sequester may present the greatest risk to growth in 2013 because it might actually happen--unlike a debt-limit induced default which is very unlikely--and because it would have longer lasting effects, unlike a government shutdown, which would be reversed quickly.

Sequestration would reduce the level of spending authority by $85bn in fiscal year (FY) 2013 and $109bn for subsequent fiscal years through 2021. The actual effect on spending in calendar 2013 would be smaller--around $53bn, or 0.3% of GDP--since reductions in spending authority reduce actual spending with a lag. The reduction in spending would occur fairly quickly; the change would be concentrated in Q2 and particularly Q3 and could weigh on growth by 0.5pp to 1.0pp.

The sequester would weigh on growth mid-year

Unlike the other two issues noted above, the sequester is not a "cliff." There would be few spending cuts implemented in the days immediately following March 1 if Congress allows the sequester to take effect on schedule. It would probably take federal agencies several weeks to put the cuts into effect. Moreover, the law provides federal agencies 120 days to take "administrative regulations or similar actions implementing sequestration." So it is possible for Congress to allow the sequester to be implemented on schedule, but to "turn off" the sequester a few weeks later without a significant effect on spending.

If the sequester were fully implemented, it would have very disruptive effects in some areas of the budget, particularly defense. In order to fulfill the requirements of the sequester, the Department of Defense (DoD) would need to reduce spending authority by around 9% for FY2013. The administration would have little flexibility in how to implement this cut, so every program, project, and account would need to be cut by the same amount. This would mean, for example, furloughing most civilian DoD employees for a full month before the end of the fiscal year, and cutting basic activities like healthcare for active-duty military and aircraft maintenance. On the non-defense side, the cuts would be similarly disruptive though the political effects might not be as salient.

Sequestration would be much more disruptive in 2013 than it would be in 2014 and beyond. The budget agreement that Congress reached in the summer of 2011 cut spending through two mechanisms: (1) annual caps on congressional appropriations and (2) the sequester, which cuts the level of spending authority by $109bn below the cap just mentioned. Since the 2011 law called for sequestration to take effect January 1, 2013--three months into the fiscal year--it was structured as an across the board cut to the spending level already in place. For 2014 and beyond, the sequester simply lowers the cap mentioned earlier by an additional $109 billion. That means that instead of across the board cuts, for FY 2014 and beyond Congress can appropriate funds as it sees fit as long as it stays below the caps. Delaying the sequester to the start of the coming fiscal year would not simply "kick the can" on fiscal restraint but it would also allow a less disruptive and more efficient cut to be implemented.

However, the cost of a delay could be a problem. Delaying the entire sequester until the next fiscal year starts (October 1, 2013) would increase projected spending over the next ten years by $85bn. Finding savings elsewhere in the budget to offset that increase in spending would be difficult, particularly if Republicans insist that the new deficit reduction measures used to replace the sequester should come entirely from domestic spending like entitlement programs. If the budget effects of a delay become prohibitive, Congress might opt to reduce but not eliminate the sequester for FY2013.

Even if Congress does manage to delay the onset of the sequester past March 1, the cuts are likely to be implemented eventually. As noted above, our forecast assumes that $15bn of the cuts will be implemented in 2013 (versus $53bn if Congress takes no further action) with the remainder implemented in 2014. This is based on the premise that although neither party likes the sequester, the entitlement spending cuts and tax increases that would be necessary to replace the sequester over the longer term are even less popular.

Ultimately, it is only a matter of time before the sequester will be implemented. While we have assumed that Congress would delay part of the sequester until 2014, when it could be implemented with much less disruption to the military and other federal activities, it is very possible that some or most of it could take effect earlier than expected, in 2013.

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McCain Now Says Immigration Reform Must Include Path to Citizenship

As McCain openly admitted during his interview on This Week, there's nothing like losing huge segments of the population in a national election to finally get politicians to moderate their views and as Think Progress pointed out, that includes his own: McCain: Comprehensive Immigration Reform Must Include Path To Citizenship:

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) confirmed on Sunday morning that he that he and a bipartisan group of senators will roll out a comprehensive immigration reform effort in Congress. Speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” McCain, who has previously fluctuated on his support of a full path to citizenship, stressed that any reform bill must include such a measure, and that the effort must be done in one piece of all-encompassing legislation.

His support for the bill is a pivot from earlier comments that citizenship for undocumented immigrants would be “amnesty.” But McCain defended his shift by pointing out how citizenship for Latinos would benefit the Republican party, and by questioning what would otherwise happen to those undocumented people “living in the shadows”: [...]

McCain said that Sens. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Lindsay Graham (R-SC), Dick Durbin (D-IL), and others will be working on the legislation. The exact outline of what will be in the bill is unclear, but McCain said the Senators will announce its key “principals” this week.

RADDATZ: Welcome, Senator McCain. You have spent a great deal of time in your career working on immigration issues. When do you think you can get this bipartisan plan out? And how much can you tell us about what's in it?

MCCAIN: Well, we're going to be announcing the principles that will be guiding our translation of it into legislation. We've still got a lot of hard work ahead, but I'm very pleased with the progress. Frankly...

RADDATZ: You're announcing this week?

MCCAIN: Yeah, we'll be -- Senator Menendez and I and Senator Schumer, Senator Graham, Senator Durbin, and some -- we are -- we've been working together for some weeks now. We'll be coming forward. It's not that much different from what we tried to do in 2007. Martha, what's changed is -- honestly, is that there is a new, I think, appreciation on both sides of the aisle -- including maybe more importantly on the Republican side of the aisle -- that we have to enact a comprehensive immigration reform bill.

RADDATZ: So this is comprehensive. It's not piecemeal?

MCCAIN: Yeah, this piecemeal stuff, the way the Senate works -- very briefly -- is that you bring up one section of it, somebody has an amendment that brings up another part.

RADDATZ: We've seen a lot of that lately. We've definitely seen a lot of that. But what about a path to citizenship?

MCCAIN: That has to be also part of it. But from my perspective, also -- and I'm sure that Senator Menendez understands, as Senator Schumer and Durbin do, that my state, most of the drugs now coming across the Mexican border into the United States comes through -- across the Arizona-Sonora border. So border enforcement, also, is a very important aspect of this. We have made progress on border enforcement. There has been significant improvements. But we've still got a ways to go. But I'm confident, guardedly optimistic, that this time we can get it done.

RADDATZ: Citizenship is obviously the most controversial aspect for some of your Republican colleagues, and you've gone back and forth. In 2005, you were for it. By 2010, you wanted border security first and, quote, "certainly no amnesty," so you're solidly behind a pathway to citizenship. How do you convince some of those Republicans who are not behind it?

MCCAIN: Well, first of all, I've always been for border security. I mean, there are citizens in my state who do not live in a secure environment. We live in a pretty secure environment here, certainly in the Senate. We've got guards around and everything. There's people every night in the part -- in the southern part of my state that have drug-traffickers and people going across, the guns, that...

(CROSSTALK)

RADDATZ: So how do you convince Republicans about the path to citizenship?

MCCAIN: Well, look, I'll give you a little straight talk. Look at the last election. Look at the last election. We are losing dramatically the Hispanic vote, which we think should be ours, for a variety of reasons, and we've got to understand that.

Second of all, this -- we can't go on forever with 11 million people living in this country in the shadows in an illegal status. We cannot forever have children who were born here -- who were brought here by their parents when they were small children to live in the shadows, as well.

So I think the time is right. By the way, we just acted to avert a nuclear option in the Senate. Believe it or not, I see some glimmer of bipartisanship out there.

RADDATZ: But how about -- we've got President Obama out this week also pushing a plan.

MCCAIN: Yes.

RADDATZ: Does that help, hurt?

MCCAIN: I think it helps. I think it's important that we all work together on this. I think it can be helpful, and I look forward to sitting down. I'm sure we will, the group of us who are working on this legislation, with the president and the White House and our colleagues on the other side of the Capitol.

Hope and Climate Change

While there is a vast chasm between rhetoric and reality, however, it's hard to not be optimistic that President Obama made specific mention of actively working towards solutions to deal with the very real fact of climate change in his inaugural address.

“We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,” Mr. Obama said on Monday at the start of eight sentences on the subject, more than he devoted to any other specific area. “Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.”

Laying out an agenda to deal with climate change may be the single most important legacy that the Obama presidency could have. It's hard to look at the devastating hurricanes in both the Gulf Coast and Eastern Seaboard, the fires in the West, earthquakes due to fracking, droughts in the Midwest and not come to the obvious conclusion that we're facing some very real threats that will magnify exponentially the longer we avoid dealing with it. Chris Hayes:

[W]hen it comes to domestic and economic policy the president isn’t really the most pressing issue. If you were to start listing the obstacles to climate progress in order you’d start with the major fossil fuel companies themselves, you’d then go to the conservative noise machine that has converted climate change into a culture war issue, another example of out of touch elites trying to tell you what to do, and then the House Republican caucus, which almost unanimously committed to the most depraved kind of denialism, then Senate Republicans who managed to kill the last big climate bill and then Democrats from coal country and other regions that depend on fossil fuel extraction, then Democrats who say they care about climate change but wouldn’t go along with the kind of reform of the filibuster that would make a Senate climate bill a reality and only after that would you get to President Barack Obama.

For this reason, it’s somewhat perverse to focus discussions of climate policy exclusively on Barack Obama. But Barack Obama is also the most powerful person in the world who says he’s committed to averting climate disaster, and with acknowledging that comes some responsibilities. It turns out that even short of congressional action there are a number of extremely significant things the executive branch could do to reduce emissions, develop alternatives and move us closer to the radical, generative transformation of our industrial life we must have very soon. The environmental protection agency actually has the legal authority to begin regulating carbon under the Clean Air Act–no need for congressional approval. The executive branch is such a massive purchaser of energy, vehicles and equipment, it could use that purchasing power to create new, vibrant markets for clean energy.

And the White House currently has the authority to block the Keystone XL pipeline, which would pipe extremely carbon intensive tar sands oil from Canada to refineries in Texas. If that pipeline is built, it means a huge new source of emissions into the foreseeable future. The cliche about second presidential terms, one with, I think, a good deal of truth to it, is that in a second term, a president’s attention turns to leaving a legacy. I am almost certain that 50 or 100 years from now, the only issue that will really matter to people is what we did about the climate.

US Increases Aid to France for Mali Quagmire

The U.S. has significantly increased its aid to France for its current military operations in Mali, the Pentagon announced Saturday night, including aerial refueling and more planes to transport soldiers from other African nations.

French soldiers check an aircraft at Bamako airport on Jan. 26, 2013.War in Mali (Source: Washington Post) The Pentagon made the announcement after Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta spoke to "his French counterpart" Jean-Yves Le Drian on Saturday about the conflict in Mali, the Washington Post reports.

The move comes as French forces attempt to violently regain power in the former French Colony and current 'trade partner', alongside the Mali military, for fear that Islamists will take over the West African nation.

Critics of U.S. support for French intervention have pointed out that U.S. law forbids foreign assistance funds to leaders that came to power through a coup, the Post reports. Mali’s military leaders, many of whom were trained by U.S. troops, seized power last year via military coup, causing an increase in conflict in the country—a hint towards the complex effects of U.S. foreign policy on Mali's internal politics, which, as many have argued, has largely been exasperated in the rifts created in the region by the recent U.S. and NATO intervention in Libya.

As the current conflict heightens, French forces reportedly move quickly through the country, and reports surface of innocent civilians being killed—including children—many commentators have shown that an imminent quagmire has already formed for the involved nations.

Victor Kotsev for WhoWhatWhy recently wrote:

The situation could easily spin out of control and become a West African quagmire for France and the neighboring countries which are participating in the UN-sanctioned intervention. The Islamists have threatened to turn Mali into a “French Afghanistan,” and this appears to be more than an empty threat. Mali is almost twice the size of Afghanistan, and with its desert and mountainous terrain in the north, somewhat resembles its Asian counterpart. Central authority was never very well established in that part of the country, if at all. [...]

The mixture of rugged terrain, a vast expanse populated sparsely with nomadic tribes, and the presence of numerous militias with diverging agendas suggests that the war will be long, brutal and asymmetric.

Thus, when at the start of the operation the French government said that the military was going into Mali merely for several weeks, a colleague who specializes in Russia giggled. “This is exactly what the Russians said before they invaded Afghanistan,” he said. Mere days later, French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian announced that his country would continue to be involved in the conflict for “as long as necessary.”

And Pepe Escobar for Asia Times adds today:

It's enlightening to regard all this under the perspective of President Obama 2.0 administration's foreign policy, as (vaguely) outlined in his inauguration. Obama promised to end US wars (shadow wars are much more cost-efficient). He promised multilateral cooperation with allies (while Washington effectively calls the shots), negotiation (as in our way or the highway) and no new war in the Middle East.

To take the president at his word, this translates into no US war against Syria (just the shadow variety); no Bomb, Bomb Iran (just murderous sanctions); and France gets the Mali prize. Or will it?

In North Carolina, Nation: School Resegregation by Charter?

North Carolina could soon see a dramatic increase in the number of charter schools, with as many as 150 of the public-private hybrids opening across the state next year.

But new research from Duke University suggests the charter school boom will result in greater racial imbalance in the state's public education system -- and that can have negative educational consequences for students.

North Carolina limited the number of charter schools that could operate in the state to 100 until 2011. That's when the General Assembly -- with Republicans controlling both the House and Senate for the first time since Reconstruction and embracing a school-choice agenda -- lifted the cap.

Charter schools are K-12 schools that are publicly funded but privately run, are exempt from some regulations that traditional public institutions must follow, and are attended by choice rather than by assignment. Though operated as nonprofits, some are managed by for-profit corporations.

Since North Carolina lifted its cap, applications for new charter schools have soared, with one charter advocate recently telling The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C. that the cap removal was "sort of like seeing a dam break."

Charter school advocates, whose ranks include President Obama as well as North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R), tout them as bastions of educational innovation and excellence. But research raises questions about those claims.

An authoritative 2009 study by Stanford University researchers found that 37 percent of charter school students showed poorer academic gains than their counterparts in traditional public schools. Only 17 percent of charter school students experienced academic gains that were significantly better than their traditional public school students, while 46 percent showed no difference.

That study, which looked at charters in 16 states including North Carolina, also found that the learning gains of African-American and Latino charter school students were significantly worse than their counterparts in traditional public schools.

Students with disabilities have also experienced problems in charter schools. In New Orleans -- the only place in the country where a majority of students attend charter schools as a result of policy changes made in the wake of Hurricane Katrina -- some charters have failed to adequately serve special-needs students, which sparked the filing of a federal lawsuit against the school system.

Now new research suggests another problem with charters: They increase racial isolation, which can harm educational quality.

Last week, researchers at Duke University in Durham, N.C. released an update of their earlier study on racial and economic disparities in the state's public school system. They found that the racial balance in North Carolina's public schools has remained steady over the past seven years, ending the previous decade's trend of growing racial disparity.

However, they also found that charter schools are much more likely than traditional public schools to be racially unbalanced. According to a an announcement about the study from Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy:

Whereas 30 percent of regular public school students attended a racially unbalanced school (one with less than 20 percent or more than 80 percent minority enrollment), more than 60 percent of charter school students attended a racially unbalanced school.

Mecklenburg County, N.C., whose single public school system has the highest number of students enrolled in charter schools of any county the state, is also among the counties with the greatest racial imbalance in their schools, according to the Duke researchers.

The Duke study also found that students in North Carolina schools -- both charters and traditional public institutions -- are increasingly separated by family income. Looking at the percentage of students eligible for free lunch in schools within each of the state's 100 counties, the researchers discovered that imbalance by economic status has increased steadily since 1994-95.

"These disparities are important because research shows they can have negative educational consequences for students,” said Helen Ladd, a Sanford School professor and one of the study's authors.

Schools serving a disproportionately African-American, Latino or low-income student body tend to have teachers with weaker credentials in terms of teaching experience, degrees from competitive colleges, and regular teaching licenses or National Board Certification, the Duke researchers note. In addition, students who attend racially isolated schools miss out on opportunities to interact and learn from with students from different backgrounds.

Charles Clodfelter, a co-author of the Duke study, called the disparities "among the most pressing civil rights issues of our time."

What's happening in North Carolina is taking place in a national context of growing school segregation. A study released last year by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA found that while residential segregation was declining nationwide, school segregation for black students remains very high across the United States.

That research also found that segregation is increasing most dramatically in the South, which in the past has led the nation in school desegregation efforts. The changes now underway in North Carolina's public schools suggest that -- without a concerted effort toward integration -- that trend won't be reversing any time soon.

© 2012 Facing South

Sue Sturgis

Sue Sturgis is the Director and regular contributor to the Institute for Southern Study's online magazine, Facing South, with a focus on energy and environmental issues. Sue is the author or co-author of five Institute reports, including Faith in the Gulf (Aug/Sept 2008), Hurricane Katrina and the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement (January 2008) and Blueprint for Gulf Renewal (Aug/Sept 2007). Sue holds a Masters in Journalism from New York University.

To Follow in MLK’s Footsteps, Join the Fight Against Foreclosure

Today we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday, almost fifty years after the historic 1963 March on Washington. Today we also bear witness to the second inauguration of President Barack Obama. The simultaneity of these events is remarkable, serving both as a signal of how far we’ve come as a nation, and how far we’ve left to go.

The economic crisis Barack Obama discussed in his first inaugural address—a new iteration of the economic crisis Martin Luther King jr. spent the last years of his life fighting—continues unabated. More specifically, the foreclosure crisis, which disproportionately affects people of color, continues to exact harsh costs.

But unlike the situation in King’s time, no significant movement exists to transform the crisis into an opportunity to generate economic equity. Just last week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced new provisions that should make it harder for banks to give mortgages to unqualified men and women, and that should help people going through foreclosure. Banks now have to ensure that the person applying for a mortgage has a high enough income to be able to pay the monthly bills and associated fees, as well as any other debts that individual may have, whether it be credit card debt or student loan debt. Furthermore, banks can no longer “dual-track” homeowners, foreclosing on their homes even as they work through the loan-modification process. These new provisions should help some homeowners.

But they do not go far enough.

The new provisions do little to nothing to ease the burden of the millions of American homeowners who are either underwater because their homes have fallen drastically in value, or on the verge of foreclosure because of job loss or health issues. It’s time for concerned Americans to figure out some new organizing strategies that will keep us in our homes and prevent further evictions.

Nationwide, a variety of groups have begun to do this, using a number of tactics up to and including civil disobedience. But the challenge here is a straightforward one: people are still too ashamed to even talk about their circumstances amongst family and friends, much less in a broader public forum, and as a result these organizations have found it difficult to build a critical mass of support for their activities.

Movements, like people, need homes

Five months after Occupy Wall Street began, a group of civil rights leaders formed Occupy the Dream. Although it amounted to little more than a photo opportunity, I think the idea of connecting the fight against rampant economic inequality to the strategies and tactics of the civil rights movement is one that deserves further examination.

We should begin with the church.

Approximately 57 years ago last year, a group of political organizers in the Deep South made a tactical decision to fight busing segregation. Though they’d had some success in finding individuals willing to challenge Jim Crow, they hadn’t yet found a way to mobilize the broader community.

They needed a central space within which to dialogue, to organize, and to provide legitimacy for their work. They chose the church because it was one of the few institutions blacks had a modicum of control over, one of the few institutions a significant number of blacks routinely participated in, perhaps the only institution with moral authority, one of the few institutions they could gain legitimacy from.

After Rosa Parks was arrested, the organizers identified a church led by young Martin Luther King jr. and Ralph Abernathy, and were able to successfully use the church to wage what would become the longest boycott Montgomery had ever seen. Victory came a full year later, when the Supreme Court upheld a federal district court ruling that found the segregation of buses in Alabama unconstitutional. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was created as a result.

Now, the causes and consequences of the Montgomery Bus Boycott are far more complex than I note above. Furthermore, the circumstances we face now are very different than the ones faced by black Montgomery denizens suffering under Jim Crow. Black churches are not the force they used to be (for good reason).

Yet a few facts remain. America remains a nation deeply segregated by race and class. Along those lines, even though churches are not as central a part of black life as they once were, they still represent an important gathering spot for African Americans. And they are still one of the only places where people from different walks of life routinely gather to gain moral and ethical instruction and guidance.

Given these realities, churches could be a wonderful place for organizing and mobilizing Americans against foreclosures. Organizations like Take Back the Land, Occupy Our Homes Atlanta, and Occupy Baltimore (among others), have done a masterful job of getting citizens to realize that the foreclosure crisis is not driven by irresponsible individuals taking out loans they can’t afford, but rather by an irresponsible system. But imagine how this movement could be broadened if churches became involved, given how many churchgoers routinely attend church once a week if not more.

What would it look like?

I believe that a church-led movement against mortgage debt should have a few key components.

It would begin with a church-based anti-shame campaign modeled off the one developed by Strike Debt. Once a week or one Sunday a month, churchgoers either would be given (or should take) the opportunity to speak candidly about their mortgage debt. At best, this should be combined with sermons that emphasize the immorality of the ongoing debt crisis. Contrary to the views of prosperity gospel adherents—who believe that material wealth is a sign of God’s approval—Jesus was far from what we would today call a capitalist. The den of thieves he refers to in Matthew 21 was arguably the biggest bank in Jerusalem. If done correctly, the personal testimonies and sermons should reduce stigma around foreclosure within the church membership, and create a space for public conversations and political actions around debt. Churches can involve everyone in this activity—choirs can perform songs, children can draw pictures, and so on.

The second component is creating debt committees. These committees would exist for the purpose of identifying the roots of churchgoer debt. Are the mortgages held by one bank in particular or several? Are the terms of the loan onerous, as they were with the subprime mortgages disproportionately handed out to African Americans and latinos? Are the mortgages themselves under water? If individuals are in the foreclosure process, where are they in the process?

These committees would exist as both a short-term means of giving churchgoers the means of coping with the stresses and anxieties of being in debt and as long-term means of both giving churchgoers the information they need to take individual control over their debt and placing them within a broader community able to aggressively fight unfair practices.

The third component would be foreclosure defense committees. These committees would work to keep individuals who are in foreclosure in their homes through non-violent methods. This is perhaps the most critical component, the one most needed to transform the mortgage crisis from a fiscal crisis with minor moral consequences into a fully moral crisis. Churchgoers should learn nonviolent foreclosure defense tactics.

Note here that I am not simply talking about marches and/or boycotts—tactics associated with the civil rights movement but today used more often to release steam than to foment change. I am talking about engaging in tactics of civil disobedience designed to prevent bank officials and law officers from taking people out of their homes, tactics that force bankers, police, locksmiths, and the like to make a tough moral choice. Community outreach is important here—informing people in the affected communities of their plans to prevent foreclosures from happening. At best, given the concentration of the housing crisis in black communities, they will find other individuals willing to speak out and act against foreclosures.

Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King jr. spoke plaintively about a “promissory note” that guaranteed all Americans, regardless of race, “the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” For African Americans, he said, that note had come back marked “insufficient funds.” Just four years ago, Barack Obama noted that “the success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity…”

These visions overlap, but not enough. Let’s begin to use our churches to bring Obama’s vision more in line with the one that made his re-election possible.

FBI Militant Informant Tells All

Bill Fulton, undercover FBI informant in the “Alaska Militia Trial,” gave a lengthy interview to The Mudflats about his role in the case, and his controversial life in Anchorage before it was revealed. In this article, he shares his candid opinion about local Anchorage media, national progressive media, Joe Miller, and what they got wrong. Yours truly didn’t even escape entirely unscathed.

Bill Fulton came to Alaska, the biggest small town in the world, and became instantly “known.” He owned a shop in Anchorage that was utterly unforgettable. A military supply store, which doubled as offices for a security company, and a fugitive recovery service. The name was Drop Zone, and to members of the military, outdoor and gun enthusiasts, Alaska survivalists, and members of the many militia groups in the state, it was a haven and a gathering place. To those outside that world, who drove past the foreboding store front and saw the large poster of Obama with a joker face in the window, it was a little creepy to say the least.

Its owner was chummy with well-known fringe right wing personalities in Anchorage, like radio personality Eddie Burke and other outspoken Tea Party activists. His security services were utilized widely, including by then US Senate candidate Joe Miller. Fulton’s company provided security for Miller, whom he characterizes as “paranoid.”

The security wing of Drop Zone was forced to shut down after an infamous incident in which Fulton arrested Alaska Dispatch journalist Tony Hopfinger at a Miller campaign event. Fulton calls what happened “the Hopfinger incident,” and after it went viral, and hit the national media, Hopfinger and Fulton were paired forever – broadcast into living rooms across the country. To many, Hopfinger became a symbol of the First Amendment, the rights of journalists, and those who stood nose-to-nose with a right wing faction whom they saw as becoming increasingly militant. But on the other side, the militia movement, and those with anti-media anti-government sentiments who believed the Tea Party candidate was the last best hope, saw Fulton as a hero with real steely-spine cred, defending the candidate, and sticking it to the liberal media.

Miller won the Republican nomination in 2010 with his support from the Tea Party crowd, but was ultimately defeated in a historic write-in candidacy by the incumbent Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski.

During the course of the militia trial, Fulton was outed as one of the two informants the FBI used to solidify their case against Cox and others. He was immediately whisked out of Alaska, and he and his family were located out of reach of those who might wish him harm. Imagine finding out that the dynamic and infamous poster boy for one side, is really a mole for the other side. The right wing felt betrayed and duped. The left had an awkward moment where the guy they loved to hate became the guy they were supposed to just love, and the harsh words and vitriol they’d hurled in his direction became a little awkward. Old habits die hard.

Hero to goat, and goat to hero in a matter of moments for Fulton. For Alaska, there was one big simultaneous, “Holy crap.”

After the trial drew to a close, militia leader Schaeffer Cox, and Lonnie Vernon both received more than 25 years in prison for conspiracy to commit murder, and a third member Coleman Barney got a 5 year sentence on weapons charges.

And Fulton was now free to speak. Speak he did to Salon, the Los Angeles Times, The Huffington Post, and other outlets – national and local – including the Alaska Dispatch, the online newspaper started by Tony Hopfinger, of the Hopfinger incident.

And as you can imagine, with the worlds of everyone who had contact with Fulton turned upside-down, there was a flurry of accusations and damage control. Fulton called Miller paranoid and talked about fitting him with a bullet-proof vest on primary night in the bathroom at Election Central. Miller countered by saying that Fulton had been following him around, and was exaggerating Miller’s desire for protection. Others on the right began accusing Fulton of working for the left, and deliberately trying to sabotage Miller’s campaign by falsely arresting Hopfinger just to give Miller bad press.

And today, a hyperbolic story in the Alaska Dispatch asserts that Fulton “apparently had an agenda to undermine Miller’s campaign.” Not “apparent” to Fulton who said that the Huffington Post had taken some offhanded comments, and created “a hit piece on Miller, which the Dispatch (who can contact me but didn’t) runs an article based off theirs and solidifies, and regurgitates the slant he put on it. Frustrating.”

I spend four and a half hours on the phone Friday. I’m not sure how much time others did, but I figured the best way to find out what Fulton was actually thinking was not to cut and paste the impressions of “Outside journalists,” whose opinions are generally condemned by Craig Medred, the author of the Alaska Dispatch piece, but simply to ask Fulton himself. Since he’s the only real source, any journalism had to originate with him. There’s no need to “play telephone” as a story gets further and further from its primary source.

I’ve reported enough on the trial, and the characters in it to know that people are complicated, and rarely fit the stereotype. So, rather than to rely on pre-existing conclusions, or call Fulton a “rogue security agent,” I decided to let him tell his own story, and let the reader decide.

The Meeting

Devon:  So, you first met Schaeffer Cox in a meeting with Joe Miller, correct?

Fulton: It was at the 2008 Republican convention – a meeting with (Palin aide) Frank Bailey and Joe. I’ve known Joe for a long time. It’s funny to see what they’re putting out.

So, Schaeffer was this young up-and-coming guy. They said, “He can bring Ron Paul delegates – delegates to help with the coup to oust [Republican Party Chair] Randy Ruedrich.

[Activists like Miller, and Bailey, with the nod from then Governor Sarah Palin, were actively seeking to eliminate Ruedrich whose corrupt practices Palin had exposed, and replace him with Tea Partier Cathy Giessel (now a state senator), or Miller himself. They were unsuccessful in 2008, but managed to replace Ruedrich at his retirement with Tea Partier Russ Millette, the new incoming Chair.]

Fulton: And I’m thinking there’s something wrong with this guy. He wouldn’t shut up. This guys is like a complete nobody, except that he won’t shut the hell up. He keeps interrupting Frank and Joe. I’m trying to listen, which is what you do as a junior. I’m thinking, “Who is this guy? Who does he think he is?”

I still find this as unbelievable as everyone. This is impossible. This is nuts. I can tell you that every so often I have to ask, “Did this really happen? It’s so crazy. It can only happen in Alaska, because everybody knows everybody.

Somebody not from Alaska wouldn’t understand that something like this can just happen. It could only happen there.

The fact that I as a first time delegate was sitting in a smoke filled room with these guys.

And this is where I first figured out Joe Miller was paranoid. After that meeting, it was either that night or the next day, Joe’s like, “Hey, you have a security company, that does personal protection stuff, right?”

And I’m like, “Yeah, that’s our specialty. That’s what we do.”

And he says, “Well, these people are trying to kill me.”

So, I’m like,  ”In Alaska? No. Really? Ohhkay…. Well, what’s going on?”

“Well, somebody loosened the nuts on my SUV, and this has happened, and that’s happened…”

And so I pull out our threat assessment form, because we actually had a form. And I started asking him questions – and he doesn’t know who it is, and he doesn’t know why they’re doing it. So, the whole threat assessment doesn’t work – which is kind of what we base these whole things off of.

So, there’s something wrong here, because nobody doesn’t know what their threat is. (laughs)

Devon: So, what did you do?

Fulton: I said, “Sure. We’ll pull a security team in, and do security on you.” At this point I’m like, screw it. Why not? He’s a friend of the governor, he wants our help, fine. You know? So, I pull a team in, we run a security detail on him. The next time we did security for him was the night he won the Republican nomination for Senate, against Murkowski.

Who Invited Cox?

Devon: Before we move on, a spokesman for Joe Miller stated that, “Fulton may very well have invited Cox [to the meeting], but Joe does not have any specific memory of inviting him to the meeting.” Did you have a comment on that?

Fulton: Bullshit! He didn’t know Cox? Cox is the one who knew Miller’s kids! They knew each other. He’d been helping Joe out on his campaign. I mean, come on. Really? I really don’t like politicians. On either side. They all make me angry. But I guess he’s not even a politician any more – he’s a blogger now, or something.

The Politics

Devon: Somebody also quoted you as saying you’ve “become disillusioned” with Joe Miller’s politics, and I wondered what that meant.

Fulton: (laughs)

Devon: Because I didn’t get the impression that you were ever in line with his politics to begin with.

Fulton: No, not at all!

Devon: So “becoming disillusioned” is a mischaracterization.

Fulton: (laughs) Yes.

I had a store that sold items to the military, and crazy right-wing people. Our relationship with Joe Miller and anyone else in the right wing was to further those causes. My politics are that I’m an Independent. I don’t carry a party. I’m very, very socially liberal, and fiscally conservative.

I don’t think we should spend money on shit that doesn’t work. But I think that if two gay people want to get married, I think that’s great, and I don’t even think we should have a debate on it. I just think that’s asinine. And global warming is real.

Devon: And Barack Obama?

Fulton: I’ve sworn to uphold and protect the Constitution. That’s why I do a lot of what I do. He’s better than the guy with the magic underwear, or somebody stupid enough to pick Sarah Palin as a running mate.

But, I mean, let’s look at our options, here. I’m definitely not happy with the guy. There are a lot of things I don’t like. He said he’d get us out of Afghanistan, and close Gitmo. He’s using all the drone strikes. There’s a lot of things with him I’m not happy about. But there are also a lot of things about him that make him the lesser of two evils in my mind. They’re all politicians. It’s not like any of them are great. It’s just I don’t think he believes in magic underwear, and that’s enough for me. And you can quote me on that one.

Devon: OK, I will.

Sabotage?

Devon: And I want to get your comment on another quote from Bill Peck, Joe Miller’s communications person.

Fulton: Joe Miller has a communications person?

Devon: He does. And he said, “Although Joe has not adopted this theory, some have suggested that Fulton may have been used by the federal government to sabotage Joe Miller’s campaign.

Fulton: Absolutely not. Unequivocably, absolutely, NOT. He did that all on his own. I had bigger fish to fry than Joe Miller’s campaign, or Lisa Murkowski.

And I’ll get into more when we talk about the Hopfinger incident, and you’ll probably be able to write the best of anyone about that. Those were the dark days.

Eddie Burke as Muse

Devon: Thank you. I’ll certainly try.  Can I ask how exactly were you involved in Eddie Burke’s campaign? Were you just security, or did you have another function?

[Eddie Burke was a well-known and infamous former radio talk show host in Anchorage. He and Fulton were often seen together. Burke ran an unsuccessful campaign for Lt. Governor in 2010.]

Fulton: His wife was the campaign manager, and I was the treasurer, or the campaign advisor or something. And I like Eddie. I don’t believe everything that he believes, but I kind of like Eddie. He’s a big, gruff, kind of rude guy, a Navy vet with lots of good stories. And I kind of used him as my… what do actors use to get ready for their roles? He was my case study. Eddie Burke was good for business at the shop, and he was deeply embedded with the fringe right wing, which you know. And if one is playing in the world of the fringe right wing, there’s nothing better than helping their poster boy run for public office. It might actually help you get in deeper. I worked for Eddie, and again, there was no “sabotage” there. I did my job. Even though I know that the left-wing conspiracy theorists (which I did not even know existed until I read the Huffington Post today) would like to believe that I was the cape-wearing Superman liberal superhero, we all just had a job to do. If it meant that I was going to go be Eddie Burke’s treasurer, then that’s exactly what I did. If it meant go do security for Joe Miller, that’s what I did.

The whole Joe Miller thing, I think, is a little paranoia on their part. It wasn’t about that. It was never about that.

It was about us, integrating ourselves. And it wasn’t like the FBI said, “Hey, go work for Joe Miller. It was me going, “You know what? That’s a good opportunity. We’re going to do that.”

It wasn’t them saying, “Hey, get in close with Eddie Burke.” It was me going, “You know, that’ll be good for business at the shop, and whatever the shop made, we just recycled back into investigations.

It’s kind of funny to see what’s coming out now on both sides, that there’s this huge conspiracy theory thing. I mean, Joe Miller was connected to the right wing, so…

For God’s sake, he’s got guys walking down the street with assault weapons next to his Hummer. If you think that somebody who’s trying to get in with the right wing is not going to cozy up next to him, you’re out of your mind.

But there was nothing nefarious there, just because I didn’t like him didn’t mean I wasn’t going to do the job. But there’s a lot of people who will just never accept that.

Devon: Oh, I know. Believe me. Yeah. From writing as much as I have about Sarah Palin, you don’t have to explain that phenomenon. I totally get it.

Fulton: There’s even a lot of liberal people out there who can’t accept the fact that I’m not a right wing crazy that was trying to avoid criminal charges. There are still people out there saying that. Even on Democratic Underground today. I even responded to some guy’s post saying that I was under investigation for illegal weapons sales. And I’m just like, “Come on, folks… It was said in court, not just by me, but by multiple federal agents that I was not under investigation for anything.”

Devon: Right. I remember that.

Fulton: I wasn’t a criminal. And I see a lot of this on the right wing, but even on the left wing, a lot of those people are never going to accept the truth. And because of the Hopfinger incident a lot of that was reported by the media – not you in particular – but there was some from you and Shannyn [Moore], but not the majority from you guys, but a lot of that will forever be questioned. That’s just my opinion on that.

Devon: Yes, I think that’s true. I think it’s a valid opinion. People tend to believe the first thing they hear. So back on track…

Joe Miller & The Bulletproof Vest

Fulton: So, Eddie loses, I’m at Election Central. And this is something that is total bullshit that they’re reporting on, saying I was following Joe Miller around. He came over to me and was like, “Hey, Bill. Do you have a bullet-proof vest?” And I told this as a funny story  to Ryan at the Huffington Post when he interviewed me. I told him as just a funny story and he turned the whole article into it.

But as Joe Miller is winning this nomination, we’re in the bathroom of the Egan Center and I’m fitting him in a bulletproof vest. I just found it freaking hilarious. So that’s the bullet-proof vest story. And then he asked me if I had a few guys around. I already knew Joe was a little bit nuts after the first thing, so I was like, “OK. Par for the course. But, hey; the guy might be a US senator and he’s nuts, so I better get close – it’s my job.

So, we did security for him, dropped him off at the travel trailer he was staying at, and then I didn’t see Joe again until the Hopfinger incident.

Devon: He was staying in a travel trailer?

Fulton: Yeah, that night. It was like an RV.

I don’t know whose RV it was. I really didn’t care.

By the time we got back there it was like 3 in the morning, and I needed to get my body armor back and go home. I had fugitives to capture the next day and I needed that.

Devon: Gosh, you have such a boring job.

Fulton: Yeah, I had a real boring job. (laughs) I don’t miss it, though. This is nice. I pick up my kids from school, I help with crafts. I like that.

So, the next time our story picks up is going to be the Hopfinger incident, which a lot of people up there are still interested in.

The Hopfinger Incident

Fulton: This is what happened. The night before his campaign event, I get a call from somebody in his campaign. “Joe’s had some problems with people,” and I just start thinking in my head again, “this guy’s starting to get a little old.”

“So, can you guys pull some security for us?” I’m like, “Sure man, no problem.” You know? I was like, “What time? Where do you need us?” And just so you know, we do security unarmed. There was a lot of reporting when that happened that we were armed. I want to make it clear that while we wore body armor, we did not do armed security. Because there’s been a lot of reporting that we were armed. And that’s not the case at all.

So, we get to the school, I check in with the front office, said we were security, he shows us around, we check radios. Again, we do this all the time. Nothing different. And then one of the Joe Miller campaign workers comes in, and she’s like, “Why are you guys wearing suits?” And I said, “Because we’re doing security. I mean, we can go put on big shirts that say ‘Security’…” And she’s like, “No, but you guys are going to kind of stand out.” And I told her, “That’s kind of the idea, when you do security. You don’t want people doing things.

And I figured out that this was one of the national people who would have come in to help him. And then she says, “Um, well, can you guys not stand up?” And I’m like, “What kind of security do you actually want us to do here?” “Well, you know, somebody could damage something in the school, or if somebody rushes Joe…” And we’re like, “Well, that’s kind of why we should be standing up.”

And the campaign lady says, “Yeah, but you know, there’s already a little talk that Joe’s paranoid in the media.” And I’m thinking in my brain, “Yeah, no shit!”

(laughs) But I said, “Yeah, OK.” So I told the guys to take their ear pieces out of their ears, sit down around the room, keep your eyes open, and if anything looks weird we’ll deal with it then.”

And we also at that time got a copy of the lease. Because we had to make sure they had a lease on the building, which made it private property at the time. So, we got a copy of the lease and we’re good to go. Because you can’t do anything on school district property, or any kind of government property unless it’s leased, you know what I’m saying?

Devon: Yeah, I do. Although I didn’t at the time.

Fulton: So, you can’t just say, “Hey, the school’s going to let us use the school building, and bring security in. It doesn’t work like that. Because security has to have the authority for the building under lease law in Alaska, and it’s important for us. So we get a copy of the lease, we sit down, it’s just a little campaign thing. It’s all over.

So afterwards, the guys stood up, it’s time for Joe to leave, and I’ve got this lady’s words in the back of my mind, and I’m thinking we should probably back off a little bit, while Joe’s leaving, but keep him within eyesight. And we put our radios back in our ears so we could talk to each other.

And for us, this is getting really uncomfortable because we do these types of security details all the time, but we’re not trying to hide while we do them – we just do them.

So, as Joe’s leaving, this guy starts running towards him, yelling things at him, with this white thing in his hand.

And Joe turns around and looks at me, and he’s got this look in his eyes like, “Do something!” And I’m like, “Let’s go, guys,” because we do this all the time. This is some crazy guy.

We go up, and we get between Joe and this guy, and this guy is just screaming these questions at Joe, and stuff, and I’m wondering if this is one of those people they talked about. And he starts banging up against us. And I get between him and Joe, because this is the job we were hired for.

And so I start explaining to him that he needs to leave. And he starts yelling, “This is a public event!” And I’m like, “No, It’s a private event.”

“Well, it’s a public school and I’m allowed to be here!” And I’m saying, “No, it is a public school during the day, but we have a lease for this facility, and it’s private property right now, so you need to leave. It’s a private event that the public was invited to, and you need to leave.” We keep telling him he needs to leave, and then we start in with the trespass. And we have a policy that you trespass them 3 times before you put them in custody. Well, we’re telling him that he’s trespassing, and then it comes to this thing where he’s with the press. Well, everyone else that was there with the press that we knew about had badges on. You know what I’m talking about? Or they had a jacket that said KTUU, or they had like you see at a concert except that it had their picture, and Anchorage Daily News on it or something. So, everybody had these badges and stuff on. This guy didn’t have that on.

At this point I figured out that the little thing he was holding was a camera. But, I’m like, you know dude, whatever. I don’t care what your job is, you’re trespassing, and you need to leave. “No, I don’t! This is a public school!” And I’m like, “No, you can’t do any of this.” And I don’t know what’s going on with Joe behind me at this point, because I’m busy dealing with this – what I thought was a crazy guy in front of us.

As we’re working through this, and telling him he’s trespassing – all this transpired in 3 or 4 minutes. It doesn’t take you that long to get through all this. There’s a guy that comes along side him, and I think he did think it was one of our guys, and he pushes the guy into one of the lockers in the hallway. At that point I said, “That’s it, you’re done. You’re under arrest.” And he’s like, “You can’t arrest me, I’m a reporter!” And I said, “Well actually I can, and I am.” So, we put Tony into custody, take him around the corner, and sit him in a chair where he’ll be comfortable and he’ll be away from other people, because that’s one of our policies. We don’t want to arrest someone and leave them out there where they can hurt themselves, someone else can hurt them, or they’re a spectacle.

And all the other reporters in the room thought that we were trying to get him away from them. And what they didn’t understand was that we have a responsibility, once we put someone into custody before we pass them along to the police. If anything happens to that human being, we are responsible for it. Period. Until the police show up. So we started asking the other reporters to back off and leave, and they start refusing. So we start again, back to our policy – you’re trespassing, you need to leave. During this, one of our guys has called APD, told him that we have a trespassing issue, which we had done a hundred times before.

The unique thing about the law in Alaska is that anybody can arrest anyone for any crime that they see. So, if you witness a crime, and it’s an arrestable offense, you can actually go arrest somebody. You don’t need to be a cop, you don’t need to be a licensed security guard. And I wanted to explain all that because that never got explained correctly. Alaska still has a lot of those laws on the books from when there were only like 10 state troopers. So, in Alaska if you observe a crime, you may make the arrest, and deposit them either with the nearest magistrate or the nearest law enforcement person. We, of course, do that all the time with security and bail bonds, because that’s what we do. So for us, up until APD got there, this was totally normal. We had zero idea what this was about to become. It was as straightforward as doing our job, gave him the warnings, touched somebody, escalated the situation, went into custody, we called APD.

As soon as APD gets there, and they figure out it’s a reporter, they said, “We can’t take this guy.” And I make an offhanded comment to the APD dude like “Yeah, dude, thanks for screwing my liability insurance.” It wasn’t like we thought we’d done wrong, even though it played that way in the press. The Sergeant was just like, “hey, we can’t take this guy.” And that was one of the things I was so mad about. That’s kind of messed up that that out of everything else that happens, that comment would come out. My sense of humor – probably not OK to be used at that point in time. (laughs) So, APD says we have to forward charges to the prosecutor, and I was like “Why aren’t you going to take him?” And they were like, “Do you really want the answer to that question?” And I said, “Yeah, I do.”

“They’re not going to spend a million dollars for accusing a reporter of trespass. And we’re not going to give them a million dollars to take him into custody.” And I said, “I don’t care what the guy’s job is, this is the deal.” And he said, “We’ll, forward it to the DA. It’s not going to be on our ass.” And I said, “OK.”

And we kind of cleaned up there, and Tony was giving an interview. His first interview with KTUU he admitted to pushing someone. He never really admitted to it after that. But that’s OK. I don’t really hold any ill will against Tony, and if Tony actually looks back on it, I think he does still hold some ill will towards me. But if he actually looks back on it, that event catapulted him into the stratosphere of liberal love. He got to meet Maddow, The Dispatch started paying its own bills. So all in all, it didn’t work out so bad for Mr. Hopfinger. I don’t want to make it sound like it was good that we arrested him, but it was actually good for him that he got arrested. It was 20 minutes of his life that he got to sit there, and then it was the next two months of him being foo-fooed over by every reporter in the country.

The Blowback

I remember after that KTUU wanted a statement from me, and the campaign approved it. And I went down to KTUU, and I walk through, andthere’s this lady there, and a reporter from ADN. I don’t remember the name, and she asked if I minded talking to him and I I said, “No. Not at all. We don’t have anything to hide.” So I start talking and this guy starts screaming at me. Up until this event, I actually thought… I had a different impression of the media. This reporter is like, “You knew that the guy was a reporter, and Joe Miller’s people told you who this guy was beforehand.” And I’m like “who is this guy? You’re a reporter. You’re not supposed to be telling me what my thoughts are. I’m here to answer questions to who they may be.” And I’m thinking what is wrong with this dude? And that’s when I think it began to dawn on me that there was an issue going on here, and this is really going to suck. Because, even now, when I look back on that and think you’re not allowed to create your own story, and that’s exactly what he was trying to do. He was so mad that we’d arrested another reporter that he had lost total sight of actually being a journalist. It really sucked. But that’s when I figured out this whole thing was going to suck.

And over the next couple days, it was you and Shannyn and ADN and a lot of the local guys. After Maddow and Olbermann picked it up, and what they said, that’s when the death threats rolled in. And I think that was the hardest on me, and definitely on my wife.

Devon: Wow, I didn’t realize that.

Fulton: Oh, yeah. We had people calling our house, telling my wife they were going to come kill our kids, and burn our house down, and that we were Nazis. And we had people coming by our house, people following me and my wife around town. I was up for 3 days straight trying to answer phone calls at the shop. Because the media wouldn’t stop calling, and then crazy people wouldn’t stop calling.

So about 2 days into this, the FBI steps in and says, “Hey, we are the FBI, we handle interstate threats via telecom. We can deal with this.” And I said, “Absolutely not. I have not done the last two and a half years worth of work to have it ruined by you guys stepping in and helping.” You know? It was kind of one of those Catch 22 things, where the militia was loving us at that time, right?

They just thought we were the greatest thing since sliced bread because we’d just arrested this reporter, and protected Joe Miller. And the press hated us, which made the militia like us more.

And you couldn’t have the FBI investigate the death threats because it would have exposed that we were… well, it wouldn’t have exposed that I was working with the FBI, but it would have told the militia that we’d invited the FBI to help us, you know what I’m saying.

Devon: Yeah, I see what you’re saying.

Fulton: So all in all, I had to just sit there and take it, and it just sucked. Because up until then, I watched Maddow. I watched Olbermann. These were people that I got my news from .

I remember when Maddow called me a Nazi, and I was just like, “What the…?”

Devon: That must have been very surreal.

Fulton: Oh, it was! I remember when her producers called me. It was the day after she aired that show where she talked about me on it. And they were like, “She’s coming up to Alaska. Would you like to do an interview?” And I said, “Well, normally you interview people before you do a segment on them – the same thing you guys did last week when you called me a nazi. Normally one would do an interview before you put that out to the world. There’s no freaking way I’m going to give you an interview, (laughs) You just called me a nazi on national TV! On top of that, I couldn’t have given them an interview anyway, because 90% of it would have been false. Talking Points Memo asked me a question – are you part of the militia? And I said no, we do business with the militia. If you look at the questions I answered, they were all honestly answered, but I was just unable to answer them fully.

Devon: So how did this all play out?

Then I became the “militia supply store.” Then I became a “member of the militia.” I became all these things I wasn’t, in the media. And it was destroying my reputation and my family, so it was hard. That was probably the darkest time for me in this whole investigation.

The darkest time was having to deal with my wife crying in a corner because she got another death threat, and not being able to do anything about it because we had dangerous people we needed to catch.

And I was disappointed with the left wing. I really was. I mean, I know that they were left-wing crazies out there, but they were just as bad as the right wing.

Devon: I guess in a way it validates the good job you were doing. You were clearly convincing to both sides.

Fulton: Yeah, I guess.

I’ve got this letter hanging on my wall. I kept it and I can read it to you.

It says:

“Dear Nazi Douche C**t,” which is why I kept it. (chuckles) Because I was in the military for 8 years, and I have heard a lot of profanity, and I have used a lot of profanity, as you well know.

Devon: Yes, I remember the surveillance tapes.

Fulton: I had never heard that before, and I liked it, so I kept the letter and framed it and put it on my wall. The guy that wrote it would probably be very unhappy to know that it’s there.

It says:

“You should be thrown in jail for trampling civil liberties and unlawfully detaining a journalist,” and it’s OK because he wrote it out in ink, and people just don’t do that any more unless they care.

“You teabaggers are showing your true colors as jack-booted, wannabe Gestapo thugs. You have serious issues. Go into therapy. Go into a closet and suck each other off. Whatever. Just stop assaulting citizens at the bidding of your Nazi wannabe overlords. Fuck you.”

That’s it verbatim – a letter I received where they guy used a Mutual of Omaha envelope so there wasn’t a return address, and had been sent from a mailbox, and he rubbed it clean and washed the paper.

And that’s the general tone of the letters and the phone calls that we were receiving, but I kept that one because I’d never heard that particular phrase of profanity, and had my eyes opened to that.

Devon: How was this affecting your wife?

Fulton: I’ve been in the army. It freaked me out a little bit but it didn’t really faze me. My wife? If I ever find the people who made those phone calls, I’m going to want to punch them all in the face individually. There was just no reason to do that to her. You know? That really, really sucked.

Devon: Is there anything else you think people got wrong?

Fulton: The people that said we were a security guard agency, which we weren’t. The statute for a security guard agency in Alaska is very, very definitive, and we stay away from it. Always did. We called our guys ‘agents.’ We didn’t ever protect facilities, we protected individuals or events. There was a bar exemption, so we protected bars, but we never did anything in the security guard license realm. We never called ourselves that, and we’d actually gone to the state prior, the year before, to make sure that we were good.

And so the media reported, “They’re being investigated by the Alaska State Troopers.” Well, a week later the investigation was over, but nobody reported that we got cleared. And “They’re being investigated by APD.” Even the FBI again asked if we needed help, and I was like, “No, we’re good. It was a clean arrest, it was a good arrest.” The attorney for Anchorage never prosecuted us for making a false arrest, which he would have done if we had. We just didn’t. And he chose not to prosecute Tony’s charge, and I believe he was right. It wouldn’t have been worth the money.

The media not only painted an incorrect picture of what went on, they continued to paint that picture for quite a few weeks, because it didn’t fit what they wanted it to fit.

They wanted it to fit a certain mold, and it didn’t. And both sides of the media do it all the time – I’m not blaming any particular side here. But this was the first time I ever saw it that blatant. And it was sad. We had to close down our security business after that, because I wasn’t willing to go through it again. And my wife told me to close it down because we weren’t going through it again. When I closed that down, that was the jobs for some of my guys, so I had to let guys go.

We closed down the fugitive recovery business, where we got 600 fugitives in 2 years that didn’t cost the taxpayers of Anchorage a dime. And that got closed down over it.

And then you had APD who had two fugitive recovery guys that would capture, you know, maybe 30 guys a year. There were times when they asked us to slow down because the jail was full. There were days we’d go out and get 10, 15, 20 people in a day. There were a lot of unforeseen consequences to that. And it gave us huge props from the right wing, but it really hurt our ability to do our jobs, which was essentially tracking these guys . We couldn’t, because we had to dal with the media, and people calling in death threats, and driving by our homes.

The two poor guys that were there in the army had to deal with all that. The funny thing about that is how everyone said they didn’t have permission. They did. They’d had a change of command, and their new commander hadn’t given them permission yet. They still had permission from their old commander. These guys never got in trouble for that because they never did anything wrong. They had permission. But when the media asked, “Has their commander given them permission?” the Army, of course, is going to cover its ass. And the commander is going to say, “No, I never gave permission,” because he’d only gotten there a week earlier. Of course he hadn’t, but the one who’d been there the year prior had. So everybody was covering their own ass, and their own agenda. That’s the way it turned out. But then again, it was kind of good for us on getting our stripes with the militia. Yeah. But it sucked. Sorry. I didn’t mean to talk about it for that long. It was just very dark.

Devon: Oh, that’s OK. It sounds like what you’re saying was the most frustrating part was not being able to say then what you just said now.

Fulton: Yeah. I’m not that guy. That was probably the worst part. And also to have my wife be brought into it and not be able to defend her against it. Any time that you do something like this, and it affects your family negatively, and you can’t fix it. That sucks, because then you’re having to choose other people’s safety and other people’s wellbeing over the wellbeing of your family. I had to do that when we had to move out when they closed up the case with Schaeffer. I had to make the decision to give up a million dollar business and move my family out of Alaska so Schaeffer Cox doesn’t kill people. Those are the tougher decisions in this job, and they suck, and there is no right decision in it. I’d still do it again but it does suck. My wife is a very strong, wonderful woman.

Devon: It sounds like it.

Fulton: Yeah. She’d have to be to put up with me.

Devon: And your crazy job.

Fulton: Yeah, everybody’s got their crazy stuff. At least I’m not into golf. I find better hobbies than golf.

Drone Wars: “The Ethics of Killing Civilians”

While Americans debate the ethics of killing American citizens abroad without a trial, as happened when a U.S. predator drone targeted U.S.-born Al Qaeda campaigners Anwar Al-Awlaki and Samir Khan last month, there has been little talk about the ethics of killing civilians.

In Yemen, however, the subject is on everyone’s mind.

Although drones have been flying over the country for almost a decade, the frequency of the attacks have increased significantly in recent years. Locals in southern Yemen, where the drone strikes are primary concentrated, said that these days, the U.S. drones have been bombing on a near daily basis.

Yemen drone wars 2011 10 7Yemeni boys vent their anger at a rally in Sanaa on Sept. 30, 2011. (Mohammed Huwais/AFP/Getty)

The practice of using unmanned aerial vehicles to target suspected terrorists in southern Yemen has had myriad repercussions, beyond just civilian casualties. Local government officials say outside of the psychological impact of hearing the endless buzz of drones flying overhead, they have had an economic impact on the region, as well as a political one.

Despite the claims of large numbers of civilian deaths, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, a controversial U.S. ally in the war on terror, has always supported the drones. As a result — and likely the reason for his continued support, analysts say — the United States remained largely quiet during the massive protests that engulfed the country earlier this year, only backing an internationally-brokered plan for a transfer of power after his security forces opened fire on unarmed activists in Sanaa, Yemen’s capital.

Saleh’s cooperation with the United States, and his support of the air strikes, has further enraged average Yemenis and is often cited as one of the reasons why millions of people have risen up against his government over the last eight months.

“The Saleh regime allowed the U.S. to intervene and desecrate our homeland from end to end,” said a local politician in the rural village of Muajala, located in southern Abyan Province, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Yemen has been turned into Afghanistan and its people, either in mountains or valleys, were turned into [members] of Al Qaeda.”

The political repercussions don’t stop with the protests.

The Drone Wars: The humans behind the technology

In May 2010, an errant U.S drone strike killed Jabr Al-Shabwani, the popular deputy governor of Marib Province, in the country’s east. Al-Shabwani had been mediating a discussion between militants and the government when the hellfire missile struck. The death of Al Shabwani outraged Yemenis across the country. And the government approval of the drone strikes has stoked separatist sentiments in the south that have plagued the country for generations.

“Our reaction [to the presence of drones] is like any Yemeni’s. It is a violation of Yemen’s sovereignty and a crime committed against the Yemeni people,” said Ahmed Al-Shabwani, the deputy governor’s brother.

The Al-Shabwani family retaliated, carrying out a series of attacks against the country’s oil and power industry, demanding that Saleh stop cooperating with the U.S. drone program.

Yemeni Vice President Abd Rabo Mansur Hadi, in a speech in July, revealed that the United States was providing “logistical” support to the Yemeni military in their operations against militants in the country’s south. Later, after President Saleh returned from Saudi Arabia after being injured in an assassination attempt on his palace, Saleh himself thanked the United States, as well as Saudi Arabia, for their help in fighting militants in southern Yemen.

“The drones fly over Marib every 24 hours and there is not a day that passes that we don’t see them. The atmosphere has become weary because of the presence of U.S. drones and the fear that they could strike at any time. The drones themselves are getting inaccurate information … and that is what happened when they martyred Sheikh Jabr Al-Shabwani,” said Ibrahim Al-Shabwani, another one of the deputy governor’s brothers.

“Marib’s sovereignty has been breached. We demand that they [the Yemeni and American governments] give us the truth, otherwise disastrous things will happen to either Americans or Yemenis,” he added.

Although, since no one keeps track, it’s nearly impossible to tally just how many civilians have been killed in drone strikes, local reports put the number well into the hundreds or more.

Days before the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Detroit-bound jet liner in 2009, the Obama administration authorized a cruise missile strike on Muajala against suspected Al Qaeda militants. Fifty-two civilians were killed in that attack, many of who were women and children.

“There were elements of Al Qaeda about three kilometers away from civilians when the missiles hit,” said Yaslam Al-Anbory, a resident of Muajala, whose relative was killed in the 2009 missile strike. “But the majority of those killed were civilians.”

Locals claim that the drones have been only marginally more accurate. While the U.S. government hails the killing of Awlaki has a major success in the fight against Al Qaeda around the world, Yemenis themselves, who say they have barely heard of the man, are forlorn. They know that with every perceived success, the drone program gains legitimacy. And they are worried that more civilians will be killed.

Today, with little success, some relatives are seeking justice for the loved ones they have lost.

“We have asked for compensation from the government but have received nothing. I swear nothing was paid. We demand fair compensation from America,” Al-Anbory said.

Additionally, the link between the failing Yemeni economy and American drone and missile strikes is a strong one, according to Yemeni political analyst Abdul Ghani Al-Iryani.

For instance, as tribes continue to attack Yemen’s already meager oil infrastructure in retaliation for the death of Jabr Al Shabwani, the economic cost is felt.

“That one drone strike in May of last year has cost Yemen over $1 billion,” he said.

‘No flexibility yet’ in Russia-US relations — PM Medvedev

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev gives an interview to CNN news channel (RIA Novosti/Dmitry Astakhov)

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev gives an interview to CNN news channel (RIA Novosti/Dmitry Astakhov)

Prior to the US presidential election, Obama promised ‘more flexibility’ with Russia during his second term in the office. But Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev says Washington’s position on the missile shield is still driving the two countries apart.

“No ease in relations over missile defense, no flexibility arose. We stand at the same positions – the position of the United States is one, the position of the Russian Federation is, unfortunately, different. And the convergence of these positions is not happening,” Medvedev told CNN.

Speaking to the “Fareed Zakaria GPS” program at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the prime minister expressed his concerns over the on-going anti-missile defense program provided by NATO, involving several countries bordering on Russia.

“We clearly understand that if we do not have guarantees such as the pairing of our programs, that means that missile defense could also work against the Russian nuclear arsenal. What does this mean? This means that the parity, which we recorded with President Obama by signing the New START treaty (a very important and very helpful treaty, by the way: I think this is the achievement of the so-called reset), [the parity] is being cracked by that, because the missile defense – is a direct continuation of nuclear offensive capability, combat nuclear weapons,” emphasized Medvedev.

Assad’s chances of retaining power get ‘smaller and smaller’

Discussing the ongoing civil war in Syria, which has seen around 60,000 people killed there during almost two years, Medvedev said that Syrian President Bashar Assad's chances of retaining power are getting "smaller and smaller" every day.

"President Assad made a mistake in carrying out political reforms. He had to do everything much more quickly, attracting to his side part of the moderate opposition, which was ready to sit with him at the same table. This is a considerable mistake, maybe a fatal one," said Medvedev adding that Assad's days could be numbered.

Medvedev reiterated calls for talks between the government and its foes and repeated Moscow's position that Assad must not be pushed out by external forces.

“Therefore, the task of the international community and all countries – and the United States and the Europeans, and regional powers, such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other countries – to put parties together at the negotiating table, but not just demand that Assad should leave, and then he is either executed like Gaddafi, or carried on a stretcher at the hearing, as they are carrying now Hosni Mubarak,” concluded the PM.

“The American Military Coup of 2012″: Encroachment upon Basic Freedoms, Militarized Police State in...

THE COUP OF 2012: Encroachment upon Basic Freedoms, Militarized Police State in America

Back in 1992 the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff held a “Strategy Essay Competition.”

The winner was a National War College student paper entitled, “The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012.” Authored by Colonel Charles J. Dunlap, Jr. the paper is a well documented, “darkly imagined excursion into the future.”

The ostensibly fictional work is written from the perspective of an imprisoned senior military officer about to be executed for opposing the military takeover of America, a coup accomplished through “legal” means. The essay makes the point that the coup was “the outgrowth of trends visible as far back as 1992,” including “the massive diversion of military forces to civilian uses,” particularly law enforcement.

http://www.carlisle.army.mil/USAWC/Parameters/Articles/1992/1992%20dunlap.pdf

Dunlap cites what he considered a dangerous precedent, the 1981 Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act, an act that sanctioned US military engagement with law enforcement in domestic “support operations,” including “civil disturbance” operations. The act codified the lawful status and use of military “assets” in domestic police work. 

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/subtitle-A/part-I/chapter-18

Encroachment upon Basic Freedoms

Since that time the American people have been subject to a series of deeper and deeper encroachments upon our basic freedoms, increasingly extensive deployment of military operations on the home front, perpetrated by a corporate driven military mission creep that now claims the right and duty to arrest and detain us on the word of a Pentagon or White House operative. President Obama’s signing of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) whose Section 1021 sanctions the military detention of American citizens without charge, essentially aims to put the last nail in the coffin of our Constitution, our teetering Republic and our most basic democratic traditions.

The statute contains a sweeping worldwide indefinite detention provision. While President Obama issued a signing statement saying he had “serious reservations” about the provisions, the statement only applies to how his administration (“you can trust me”) would use the authorities granted by the NDAA, and would not affect how the law is interpreted by subsequent administrations. The White House had threatened to veto an earlier version of the NDAA, but reversed course (of course) shortly before Congress voted on the final bill, which the President signed on the 31st of December 2011, a day that will go down in infamy.

“President Obama’s action today is a blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law,” said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU executive director. “The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield.” According to Senator Dianne Feinstein. “Congress is essentially authorizing the indefinite imprisonment of American citizens, without charge,” she said. “We are not a nation that locks up its citizens without charge.” Think again. (Guardian, 12/14/11)

Under the legislation, suspects can be held without trial  ”until the end of hostilities.” They will have the right to appear once a year before a committee that will decide if the detention will continue. A spokesperson for Human Rights Watch implied that the signing of such a bill by a President would have once been unthinkable, noting that “the paradigm of the war on terror has advanced so far in people’s minds that this has to appear more normal than it actually is.” Further, “it wasn’t asked for by any of the agencies on the frontlines in the fight against terrorism in the United States. It breaks with over 200 years of tradition in America against using the military in domestic affairs.”

In fact, the heads of several “security agencies,” including the FBI, CIA, the director of national intelligence and the attorney general objected to the legislation. Even some within the Pentagon itself said they were against the bill. No matter, and no matter the intention inherent in lip service opposition, the corporate elite who drive the disastrous and inhumane polices of this country see it otherwise, and they, not the generals or anyone else, call the shots!

And they’ve been at this for some time. A persistent and on-gong counter-insurgency directed against the American people, the detention provisions embedded in the NDAA are about more than “social control.” It amounts to a direct attack on the person, an “unreasonable search and seizure” in the cause of maintaining the shaky capitalist ship of state; suppressing popular resistance, dissent and protest, movements of peace and justice, recast as “civil disorder,” “civil disturbance” and “domestic terror.”

Current U.S. military preparations for suppressing “civil disturbance” and “domestic terrorism” including the training of National Guard troops, local police and the authorization of massive surveillance, are part of a long history of American “internal security” measures dating back to the first American Revolution. Generally, these measures have sought to thwart the aims of social justice movements, embodying the concept, promulgated by elite sectors intent on maintaining their grip on the levers of state; that within the civilian body politic lurks an enemy that one day the military might have to fight; or at least be ordered to fight. (See: Army Surveillance in America, 1775-1980, Joan M. Jensen, Yale University Press, 1991)

Thus, in reaction to a period of social upsurge flush with movements of liberation, justice and peace, and the mounting of powerful campaigns which threatened the status quo and elite control, the US military’s stand alone apparatus for conducting “civil disturbance suppression” operations, including detention, was born, immediately on the heels of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968.

The Garden Plot Operation

US Military Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2, code-named Operation Garden Plot, follows, as was mentioned, in the footsteps of a long tradition of US military involvement in the suppression of dissent. Intriguingly, the Garden Plot operation is cited in documents related to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. (See: Orders to Kill: The Truth Behind the Murder of Martin Luther King, William Pepper, Carroll and Graf, 1995)

http://www.dod.gov/pubs/foi/operation_and_plans/Other/GARDEN_PLOT_DoD_Civil_DisturbancePlan.pdf

http://www.911truth.org/osamas/morales.html

Currently, the Garden Plot operation is centered at the Pentagon’s Northern Command (USNORTHCOM). “Stood up” in 2002, (though In the works prior to 9/11), NORTHCOM, America’s “domestic military command,” is tasked with various “counter-terror,” “homeland defense” and “homeland security” activities, including “civil disturbance suppression” operations, and “assisting law enforcement” within Canada, the United States and Mexico. http://www.northcom.mil/

Under NORTHCOM, Operation Garden Plot functions, with the US Army as “executive agent,” as “ConPlan 2502.” In two parts, the “con plan” is officially listed as: United States Northern Command, Concept Plan (CONPLAN) 3501 (formerly 2501), Defense Support of Civil Authorities (DSCA), dated 11 April 2006; and the United States Northern Command, Concept Plan 3502 (formerly 2502), Defense Support of Civil Authorities for Civil Disturbance Operations (CDO), 23 January 2007.

As noted above, the latest development in the Pentagon’s evolving mission of suppressing, at the behest of it’s corporate “civilian” overseers, a detention provision, is buried within the massive National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2012 signed by President Obama in the fog (grog) of this past New Years Eve.

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112hr1540enr/pdf/BILLS-112hr1540enr.pdf

NDAA 2012

Section 1021 of the NDAA 2012 seemingly allows (the language is evasive) for the detention (without trial or charges) of American citizens redefined by the “executive” elite as “enemy combatants” in the so-called “war on terror, ” a “war” which has become in the eyes of many, a war against the Constitution and civil liberties, a war against the disenchanted, fed-up and dissenting American public, spearheaded by a militarized police state allied to imperial military courts and “tribunals,” buttressed and rationalized with mind-bending mil-speak of “enemy combatants,” “unlawful combatants,” “enemy belligerents,” “homeland battlefield” “domestic extremists” “domestic terrorists” and the like.

And yet, behind all the sophistry, lies and manipulation, the brutal truth is obvious: The corporate elite that directs things has seen fit to unleash it’s military on it’s own people in a desperate attempt to suppress the democratic (read: protest) rights of it’s citizenry, us! Why? Simple: the paranoia of the thief, the well founded fear that knows that forced deprivation and scarcities, violence at home and abroad, rooted in greed, has run it’s course in America. And they are right! And so, it makes ominous sense that we are confronted with the horrific machinations of forced detention for those who resist a “new world order” come home in a “homeland” which opportunistically collapses all distinction between dissent and terrorism, police and military, right and wrong, obfuscating the truth of who the real terrorists are!

When Congress passed the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), it included provisions that authorized U.S. armed forces to detain persons who are captured in the conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or “associated forces.”

Section 1021 entitled “AFFIRMATION OF AUTHORITY OF THE ARMED FORCES OF THE UNITED STATES TO DETAIN COVERED PERSONS PURSUANT TO THE AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF MILITARY FORCE” allows for the President (whoever that may be) “to use all necessary and appropriate force pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force … to detain covered persons …pending disposition under the law of war.”

“A covered person,” according to the edict’s malleable lingo, is “any person … who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored those responsible for those attacks …” or, who “was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban,” or “associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.”

Accordingly, “the disposition of a person under the law of war” will include “detention under the law of war without trial until the end of the hostilities …” Now, by stating that “nothing in this section is intended to limit or expand the authority of the President or the scope of the Authorization for Use of Military Force,” and that “nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States,” it would appear that the law exempts American citizens from the threat of detention. Correct?

Detention is a Booming Industry

Don’t be too confident. Detention is a booming industry. In 2006 the Journal of Counterterrorism & Homeland Security International reported that Halliburton off-spring, “global engineering and technical services powerhouse KBR [Kellogg, Brown & Root] announced in January 2006 that its Government and Infrastructure division was awarded an Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract to support U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities in the event of an emergency.” The $385 million dollars over 5 year contract “is to be executed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers” building “temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing ICE Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs.” Could the 2012 NDAA / Section 1021 be such a “new program?”

There has been some confusion over what Section 1021 actually means, and that in and of itself is cause for concern. Congressional spokespeople have stated that the provisions of NDAA 2012 / Sec 1021 do not provide any “new authority” to detain U.S. citizens or others who may be captured in the United States. Obama waffled likewise in the lead up to his signing the provision. Sen. Carl Levin, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, ho-hummed and said that, “we are simply codifying existing law.” But that was an evasion, since existing law, like it or not, regarding the detention of U.S. persons in the “war on terror” is indeterminate in important respects. And “indeterminate” is not good enough!

A recent report from the Congressional Research Service fleshes out the law of detention as set forth in Section 1021, identifying what is known to be true as well as what is unsettled and unresolved. It is perfectly clear, for example, that a U.S. citizen who fights alongside “enemy forces” against the United States on a foreign battlefield could be lawfully detained. This was affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case Hamdi v. Rumsfeld.

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R42337.pdf

On the other hand, the CRS report explains, “the President’s legal authority to militarily detain terrorist suspects apprehended in the United States has not been definitively settled.” Nor has Congress helped to settle it. “This bill does not endorse either side’s interpretation,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, “but leaves it to the courts to decide.”

So, if a detention of a U.S. person does occur, the CRS said, “it will be up to a court to determine Congress’s intent when it enacted the AUMF [the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force], or alternatively, to decide whether the law as it was subsequently developed by the courts and executive branch sufficiently established that authority for such detention already exists.”

Up to now, “lower courts that have addressed questions the Supreme Court left unanswered have not achieved a consensus on the extent to which Congress has authorized the detention without trial of U.S. persons as ‘enemy combatants,’ and Congress has not so far clarified its intent.”

Well, it is certainly reassuring that a New York court has sought to clarify it’s intent on the matter. On May 16, 2012 a newly appointed federal district judge, Katherine Forrest of the Southern District of New York, issued a ruling, hailed by many, which preliminarily enjoins (prohibits) enforcement of the indefinite detention provisions (Sec 1021) of the NDAA 2012.

http://sdnyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/12-Civ.-00331-2012.05.16-Opinion-Granting-PI.pdf

The “temporary restraining order” came as a result of a lawsuit brought by seven dissident plaintiffs — including Chris Hedges, Dan Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky, and Birgitta Jonsdottir — alleging that the NDAA violated both their free speech and associational rights guaranteed by the First Amendment as well as due process rights guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution. “The government was unwilling or unable to state that these plaintiffs would not be subject to indefinite detention under [Section] 1021,” Judge Forrest said in her ruling. “Plaintiffs are therefore at risk of detention, of losing their liberty, potentially for many years.”

Where it will go from here is anybodies guess. Judge Forrest’s ruling was not permanent. A day after the ruling, the Wall Street Journal, for it’s part, offered it’s sour grapes, pontificating that the ruling “will be overturned on appeal,” while “its reasoning needs to be deconstructed so it doesn’t do more harm in the meantime.” A week later, on the 25th, federal prosecutors from Obama’s Department of Justice, calling Judge Forrest’s ruling “extraordinary,” suggested that she lift the injunction, claiming further that her ruling only effects those plaintiffs named and not other potential or future targets of the draconian legislation.

http://sdnyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/12-Civ.-00331-2012.05.25-Govt-Motion-for-Reconsideration.pdf

Well, a few days ago on June 6th the upright Judge Forrest responded with an 8 page, “memorandum and opinion” in which she sought to “eliminate any doubt as to the May 16 order’s scope.” (New York Times, “Detention Provision is Blocked” 6/7/12). And as to whom and for whom her original order was intended: “The May 16th order enjoined enforcement of Section 1021(b)(2) against anyone until further action by this, or a higher, court – or by Congress.” That’s clear enough!

So, as it stands now now, although Judge Forrest’s decision may temporarily protect Americans from provision 1021, it remains to be seen what the higher courts do should Obama’s people appeal. And unfortunately, Judge Forrest’s ruling, as praiseworthy as it is, does nothing to spare both foreign reporters and civilians from a life of imprisonment, let alone the more than 6 billion citizens of foreign nations who can still be handcuffed and hauled away to a US military prison without ever being brought to trial.

So, bottom line, given the indeterminate nature of a law that would snatch us up off the streets, throw away the key, and grant us little or no access to a trial let alone legal counsel of choice not vetted by the Pentagon, we should have no illusions that we are well along the slippery indeterminate slope to a full blown militarized police state; the complete identification, coordination and consolidation of the police and military function in America in the interests of an elite who regard us as the enemy, maybe even their property! Maybe even as targets for assassination!

Naked violation of the 4th and 5th Amendments to the US Constitution

We should recall, that the current attempt by the executive to designate American citizens for detention without trial; a naked violation of the 4th and 5th Amendments to the US Constitution against unreasonable search and seizure and the guarantee of a trial, was preceded by the administration’s “resolve” to assassinate at will Americans abroad, place them on a “kill list,” and eliminate them. According to the New York Times “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” (5/29/12) the President and his advisors have made it clear that they have the authority “to order the targeted killing of an American citizen, in a country with which the United States was not at war, in secret and without the benefit of a trial.”

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel rationalized such a move in “a lengthy memo justifying that extraordinary step, asserting that while the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process applied, it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.” (New York Times, “Secret U.S. Memo Made Legal Case to Kill a Citizen,” 10/8/11) Accordingly, after a dubious period of “internal deliberations,” Mr. Obama gave his approval, and the cleric Anwar al-Awlak was assassinated in September 2011, along with an associate Samir Khan, an American citizen who was not on the target list but happened to be traveling with Mr. al-Awlak. Apparently, campaign rhetoric and public demeanor to the contrary, when asked what surprised him most about Mr. Obama, Mr. Donilon, the national security adviser, answered immediately: “He’s a president who is quite comfortable with the use of force on behalf of the United States.”

The Posse Comitatus Act

How did we get here? We need to recognize that the “massive diversion of military resources” into domestic law enforcement for the purposes of suppressing dissent and worse has a long history, a history that has witnessed the steady evisceration of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, the sole federal statute that criminalizes military incursions into the domain of domestic law enforcement. The Act is the backbone of our democratic republican tradition of separating the military and police function in this country and represents the ultimate bulwark against military dictatorship in the interests of the rich. That is the reason it is and continues to be attacked, ridiculed and ignored by elements in both the corporate and military spheres. For example, “Current Obstacles to Fully Preparing Title 10 Forces for Homeland Defense and Civil Support” by Commander James S. Campbell, United States Navy, May 2008 and, “The Role of Federal Military Forces in Domestic Law Enforcement Title” by COL (Ret) John R. Brinkerhoff, December 2004, both seek to delegitimize and undercut the status and importance of the Act, a law so critical to the maintenance of our freedoms, and yet, a law about which most Americans remain unaware.

http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA487235

http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/call/docs/10-16/ch_11.asp

The 1878 Act, 18 USC § 1385 – USE OF ARMY AND AIR FORCE AS POSSE COMITATUS, more popularly known as The Posse Comitatus Act, reads as follows:

“Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, wilfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a Posse Comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”

As noted, the 1981 Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement law would seemingly violate the spirit if not the letter of this Act. Nonetheless, like a slowly boiling pot relentlessly eating away at our freedom of movement, assembly, association and expression, the utilization of military assets, under cover of law enforcement to suppress our democratic rights has proceeded steadily by design, virtually un-noticed.

Historical milestones: eating away at our freedom of movement, assembly, association and expression

A very limited listing of some historical milestones:

* In 1968, as mentioned above, concurrent with the creation of the Federal Commission on Civil Disorder, better known as the Kerner Commission, the Pentagon hatched it’s very own “civil disorder” operation. “US Military Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2,” code named “Garden Plot,” coordinates, until this day, all aspects of “civil disturbance suppression” in America, including the use of so-called “non-lethal weapons” during conveniently designated domestic “operations other than war” (OOTW), and “military operations in urban terrain” (MOUT), a “war” which pits “non-combatant” citizens and protesters (overwhelmingly non-violent) against militarized police on the streets of America.

* Only a few months after the round up and detention of 7,000 anti-war protesters in Washington DC, imprisoned in RFK stadium, an early Garden Plot operation, the 1971 Non-Detention Act was passed, specifically to repeal portions of the 1950 “anti-communist” “Emergency Detention Act” which had allowed for detention of suspected subversives without the normal Constitutional checks required for imprisonment. The Non-Detention Act required specific Congressional authorization for such detention. It reads that, “no citizen shall be imprisoned or otherwise detained by the United States except pursuant to an Act of Congress.” In recent years, the statute has been used to challenge military detainment of U.S. citizens accused of terrorist activity, as in the case of Jose Padilla.

http://www.jenner.com/system/assets/assets/5417/original/18.pdf?1321652398

A Congressional Research Service report on the history of the Non-Detention Act noted that, “legislative debate, committee reports, and the political context of 1971 indicate that when Congress enacted Section 4001(a) it intended the statutory language to restrict all detentions by the executive branch, not merely those by the Attorney General.” Further, “lawmakers, both supporters and opponents of Section 4001(a), recognized that it would restrict the President and military authorities.”

As for the Padilla case, the Supreme Court of the United States originally took the 2004 case of Rumsfeld v. Padilla to decide the question of whether Congress’s Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) authorized the President to detain a U.S. citizen, which would run afoul of the Non Detention Act. But it did not give an answer, instead ruling that the case had been “improperly filed.” And so the issue, as to whether and under what circumstances the military can pick you up, detain and imprison you, without charging you, from the point of view the Supreme Court, remains “unsettled.”

* Also in 1971, the California Specialized Training Institute (CSTI) was created. Headed up by Louis Giuffrida, formerly of Army Combat Command, the first director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), CSTI introduced the Special Weapons And Tactics (SWAT) concept, offering courses on “civil disorder management” for select “militarized” police and National Guard units armed and trained for domestic operations in the urban centers of America. During this period the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) facilitated federal funding and other military largess to the burgeoning militarized sectors of the domestic police forces along with training of selected National Guard units. Still in operation, CSTI is currently headed up by William J. Hatch Colonel, USA (RET), while funding for militarizing local police departments these days is facilitated by the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA, funding which has increased drastically since 9/11.

http://americaswarwithin.org/articles/2011/12/21/local-police-stockpile-high-tech-combat-ready-gear

* In 1975 the Trilateral Commission, a Western European, Japanese, US corporate think-tank convened by David Rockefeller, issued a report entitled, “The Crisis of Democracy.” (NYU Press, 1975) Authored by none other than Samuel  Huntington. (“Clash of Civilizations”). Huntington’s book is a blueprint for the on-going counter-revolution in America, emphasizing the elite requirement of suppressing democratic “insurgency,” the “distemper” of the 60s, a “distemper” that according to Huntington, stemmed from an “excess of democracy.” The only and final solution therefore is to “moderate” and “shrink democracy,” concluding that, “there are potentially desirable limits to the indefinite extension of political democracy.”

http://www.wrijneveld.nl/Boekenplank/BoekenVanAanhangersVanDeNieuweWereldOrde/1975-TC-The-Crisis-of-Democracy.pdf

* In 1983, the US Army published Field Manual 3-19-15, Civil Disturbance Operations (since updated in 2005). The manual addresses civil disturbance operations in both continental United States (CONUS) and outside continental United States (OCONUS). It states that, “today, United States (US) forces are deployed on peacekeeping, peace enforcement, and humanitarian assistance operations worldwide. During these operations, US forces are often faced with unruly and violent crowds intent on disrupting peace and the ability of US forces to maintain peace. Worldwide instability coupled with increasing US military participation in peacekeeping and related operations requires that US forces have access to the most current doctrine and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) necessary to quell riots and restore public order.”

“In addition to covering civil unrest doctrine for CONUS operations, FM 3-19.15 addresses domestic unrest and the military role in providing assistance to civil authorities requesting it for civil disturbance operations …The principles of civil disturbance operations, planning and training for such operations, and the TTP [“tactics, techniques and procedures”] employed to control civil disturbances and neutralize special threats are discussed in this manual. It also addresses special planning and preparation that are needed to quell riots in confinement facilities are also discussed. In the past, commanders were limited to the type of force they could apply to quell a riot. Riot batons, riot control agents, or lethal force were often used. Today, there is a wide array of nonlethal weapons (NLW) available to the commander that extends his use of force along the force continuum. This manual addresses the use of nonlethal (NL) and lethal forces when quelling a riot.” And as noted, the training is meant to be operative in both foreign and domestic contexts, the war abroad, the war at home.

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-19-15.pdf

* In 1986, the Pentagon issues Department of Defense Directive 5525.5, or DoD Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Officials. US military involvement in domestic law enforcement is subsumed and rationalized under “doctrines” entitled Operations Other Than War (OOTW) and Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT), along with divisions known as Military Support to Law Enforcement Agencies (MSLEA) and Military Support to Civil Authorities (MSCA)

http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/552505p.pdf

* In 1992 President Clinton’s Justice Department consolidated a partnership with the Pentagon in the area of “technology transfer.” The so-called “technology transfer agreements” allowed for the military to weaponize domestic police forces, further enhancing the growth of para-military “special forces” like “special units” in local police departments across the country, including “civil disturbance” units and training. The Clinton administration extended the police/military connection by mandating that the Department of Defense and its associated private industries form a partnership with the Department of Justice to “engage the crime war with the same resolve they fought the Cold War.” The program, entitled, “Technology Transfer From Defense: Concealed Weapons Detection,” (“Technology Transfer from Defense: Concealed Weapons Detection,” National Institute of Justice Journal, No 229, August, 1995), calls for the transfer of military technology to domestic police organizations to better fight “crime.” Previously, direct “transfers” of this sort were made only to friendly foreign governments. The Clinton directive enhanced and formalized direct militarization of domestic police forces.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/39680373/The-Militarization-of-the-Police-by-Frank-Morales

Currently, Title XIV of an earlier NDAA in 2007 entitled, “Homeland Defense Technology Transfer Legislative Provisions,” authorizes “the Secretary of Defense to create a Homeland Defense Technology Transfer Consortium to improve the effectiveness of the Department of Defense (DOD) processes for identifying and deploying relevant DOD technology to federal, State, and local first responders.” In other words, the law facilitates the “transfer” of the newest in so-called “crowd control” and surveillance technology to local militarized (politicized) police units.

* In 1993, the US Army and Marine Corps publish Domestic Support Operations Field Manual 100-19.

http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/service_pubs/fm100_19.pdf

* In 1994, the Department of Defense issued Directive 3025.12, Military Assistance for Civil Disturbances (MACDIS) that details the rationale and means (“tactics, techniques and procedures”) for suppressing dissent. It states that, “the President is authorized by the Constitution and laws of the United States to suppress insurrections, rebellions, and domestic violence under various conditions and circumstances. Planning and preparedness by the Federal Government and the Department of Defense for civil disturbances are important, do to the potential severity of the consequences of such events for the Nation and the population.”

http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/302512p.pdf

* In 1995, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), an key elite “policymaker” headquartered in New York City, set up an “Independent Task Force on Nonlethal Weapons (NLW)” in order “to assess the current status of non-lethal weapons development and availability within the Department of Defense, in light of their potential to support U.S. military operations and foreign policy,” not to mention the suppression of dissent at home. The 16 member Task Force, which published its’ findings in 1999, was chaired by IBM executive Richard L. Garwin, CFR “Senior Fellow for Science and Technology.” Other members of the Task Force included CFR “military fellow” David Jones, United States Navy, Commander, Edward N. Luttwak, member, “National Security Study Group administered by the Department of Defense,” Edward C. Meyer, USA (Ret.), Chair of Mitretek Systems, formerly Chief of Staff, US Army, and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Janet and Christopher Morris, President/Vice President, M2 Technologies, Inc, members US Global Strategy Council.

The Director of the CFR task force on non-lethal “technologies” was W. Montaque Winfield, former Executive Officer to the Commander of the “Stabilization Force” stationed in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. Also a 1998-9 CFR “military fellow,” Brigadier General Winfield, some of you might recall, was the deputy director for operations (DDO) in the National Military Command Center (NMCC) at the Pentagon on the morning of 9/11, who according to the 9/11 Commission, left his post that very morning to attend a “pre-scheduled meeting” and allowed a colleague who had only recently qualified to take over his position, to stand in for him. He didn’t return to his post until after the terrorist attacks had ended. http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=montague_winfield

The CFR had issued an earlier report on the subject of “non-lethal” weapons in 1995, and stated in the 1999 report that they had regrettably “found that the DoD has made only limited progress developing and deploying nonlethal weapons since 1995.” The CFR, offering a bit of a tongue lashing to it’s hired generals, considered the “shortfall” the result of a “continued lack of appreciation for NLW among civilian and military policymakers.” Taking a firm line, the CFR report recommends that, “senior civilian and military leaders should make NLW development a priority.” After all, “nonlethal weapons could give policymakers a more potent weapon than economic sanctions.” In fact, “used alone”, the report notes, “NLW could penalize civilian economies without high civilian casualties.” Looking for something between “diplomatic table thumping and outright annihilation,” the armchair corporate warriors at the CRR continued to pound away at the need for accelerated “non-lethal” R and D.

http://revoltrevolt.org/demilitarizethepolice/nonlethal.html

* Subsequently, on July 9, 1996, the Department of Defense complied, issuing Directive 3000.3, Policy for Non-Lethal Weapons. The Directive established Department of Defense policies and responsibilities for the development and employment of so-called “non-lethal weapons,” designating the Commandant of the Marine Corps as Executive Agent for the Department of Defense Non-Lethal Weapons Program. On July 1, 1997, the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate was established to support the Executive Agent for Non-Lethal Weapons in the day-to-day management of the Department of Defense Non-Lethal Weapons Program putting the “best and the brightest” at work in designing soft-kill means (including neuro-weapons) of “crowd dispersal” and “social control” set within a strategy of so-called “low-intensity warfare” and “counter-insurgency.”

http://jnlwp.defense.gov/pdf/2011%20Public%20%20Release%20%20NLW%20Reference%20Book%20V1.pdf

http://www.zcommunications.org/electromagnetic-weapons-by-frank-morales

http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/columnists/hugh-gusterson/the-militarization-neuroscience

Recently, this past May 17, 2012 the DoD issued Instruction 3200.19. Entitled “Non-Lethal Weapons (NLW) Human Effects Characterization,” the “instruction” “establishes policy, assigns responsibilities, and provides procedures for a human effects characterization process in support of the development of NLW, non lethal technology and NLW systems.” It also establishes a “Human Effects Review Board,” which “scientifically” evaluates and quantifies levels of pain, calculating the most desirable “effects” in regard to the use of non-lethal force against non-combatants and protesters. In this regard, they receive a lot of assistance from their friends and associates in academia.

http://cryptome.org/dodi/dodi-3200-19.pdf

In 1997 Penn State University established the Institute for Non-Lethal Defense Technologies. The Institute is “dedicated to providing a base of multidisciplinary knowledge and technology that supports development and responsible application of non-lethal options for both military and civilian law enforcement. “ The Institute is administered by Penn State’s Applied Research Laboratory (ARL), under the direction and support of the University’s Office of the Vice President for Research. http://nldt2.arl.psu.edu/

Its Human Effects Advisory Panel sponsored a conference in September 2000, whose purpose was “to assess crowd behavior and the potential for crowd control … a leading core capability sought by the Joint Non-lethal Weapons Program.” Their 2001 report was entitled, “Crowd Behavior, Crowd Control, and the Use of Non-Lethal Weapons.”

http://nldt2.arl.psu.edu/documents/crowd_control_report.pdf

Meanwhile, the University of New Hampshire’s Non-Lethal Technology Innovation Center (NTIC) was created by a grant from the DoD’s Joint Non-lethal Weapons Directorate about the same time “to effect the next generation of NL capabilities by identifying and promoting the development of innovative concepts, materials and technologies within the academic community.” Its “Society of Force Effectiveness, Analysis and Techniques” (FEAT) was “established to engage primary source scientists to share results and analyses from studies of applied force, whether physical, psychological, or emotional. The Society’s scope of interests includes the impact of non-lethal or less lethal force intervention on sustained attention; performance degradation due to fatigue or intentional distraction; compliance; vigilance; and stress resilience.” The Society, given its specific intent on affecting “motivational behavior,” is keen on identifying “disciplines that support the development of tools of behavioral modification through force (e.g., kinetic and electromagnetic energies, psychological operations).”

http://www.unh.edu/ntic/

* In August of 2001, the Pentagon issued Field Manual 3-19.40, Internment and Resettlement Operations. Explicating the role of military police engaged in law enforcement, including at the point of domestic detention activities set within the context of “emergency” support, the extensive manual covers detention policies and methodologies and the use of non-lethal weapons. Chapter 10, Sections 49-66 detail the nature of “emergency services” within the “continental United States,” explaining that “MP (military police) units assisting ES (emergency service) operations in CONUS involve DoD-sponsored military programs that support the people and the government at all levels within the US and its territories.” Classified as “domestic support,” the manual states that, “federal armed forces can be employed when …” in the face of a declared “emergency,” “state and local authorities do not take appropriate action.”

In that instance, FEMA would serve as “the single POC within the government.” With a nod to the Posse Comitatus Act the document goes on to state that, “the MP support to ES in CONUS varies significantly from other I/R (internment/resettlement) operations. The basic difference is that local and state governments and the federal government and its agencies have a greater impact and role in supporting and meeting the needs in an affected community.” “If tasked to set up and operate an I/R facility, the MP commander retains control of military forces under his command,” and can operate “in conjunction with local, state and federal law enforcement officials.”

http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/a22.pdf

* September 11 provided the elite Project for a New American Century and their associates with the “new Pearl Harbor” they sought, as set forth in Rebuilding America’s Defenses (pg.51), a major consequence of which was the September 18, 2001 passage of the Authorization for Use of Military Force or AUMF.

http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf

http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/terrorism/sjres23.es.html

The Pentagon can invade, occupy and destroy at will, pre-emptively (with little or no reason), anyone, anywhere in the world

This singular, presumably legal rationale for much of what we now endure, the AUMF substantiates the notion that the Pentagon can invade, occupy and destroy at will, pre-emptively (with little or no reason), anyone, anywhere in the world, any time it chooses. In addition, apparently as we now see, the AUMF gives the Pentagon and it’s covetous corporate directors justification for the military takeover of America itself and the detention of its people. Thus, the AUMF is cited by the peddlers of Section 1021 of the NDAA 2012.

The modern “military tribunal” structure, which is a major piece of the detention/repression apparatus, came into formal existence as a consequence of the 2002 Department of Defense Military Commission Order No.1, issued on March 21, 2002 by former president (war criminal) George W. Bush.

http://www.defense.gov/news/Mar2002/d20020321ord.pdf

The entire military commission/tribunal structure is a work in progress, or more precisely, a dynamic and strategic power play on the part of the rulers set in motion following 9/11; a “might makes right” gambit undertaken by the militarist directors in the smoke of 9/11. Like the so-called Patriot Act, it was forced down the throats of a submissive, clueless public, sufficiently softened by means of prime time terror, fear and panic. Taking two steps forward and one step back, the militarists act first and then rationalize (or more precisely have their employees in the Congress) baptize the move after the fact. Where do presidents like Dubya, and now Obama get the authority to issue such blanket, unilateral decrees, totalitarian “executive orders,” such as Obama’s “National Defense Preparedness Order” of this year, which would force us to work for the Pentagon? The answer: No where! They have no authority! Particularly to set up parallel systems of jurisprudence as a means of by-passing Constitutional protections. In historical fact, this approach has a parallel in earlier maneuvers of another former “executive,” Adolph Hitler. (see Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich, Ingo Muller, Harvard, 1991)

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/03/16/executive-order-national-defense-resources-preparedness

Concurrent with the round-up of over a thousand people following the September 11 attack, many of whom are still being held, many in solitary confinement, with no charges being filed, President Bush signed in November 2001 an order, establishing military “tribunals” for those non-citizens, accused, anywhere, of “terrorist related crimes.” And now, with the NDAA, citizens might soon face the same fate. Just imagine some smug and starchy government lawyer arguing that “the right to equal protection,” a fundamental principle of both U.S. and international law, demands that Americans be detained too!

At the time (2001), the National Legal Aid & Defender Association stated that the Bush promulgated “military order” violated the constitutional separation of powers:

“It has not been authorized by the Congress and is outside the President’s constitutional powers … the order strips away a variety of checks and balances on governmental power and the reliability and integrity of criminal judgments… undermines the rule of law worldwide, and invites reciprocal treatment of US nationals by hostile nations utilizing secret trials, a single entity as prosecutor, judge and jury, no judicial review and summary executions.”

More recently, in October 2009, the U.S. Congress passed and Obama dutifully signed the Military Commissions Act of 2009 (2009 MCA), which remains in effect today, legalizing further, if you will, the naked power grab by the executive in behalf of the elite. Since then the “Office of Military Commissions” has been set up as a public relations/propaganda front for the dictatorship. It promises to “provide fair and transparent trials of those persons subject to trial by Military Commissions while protecting national security interests.” Kind of like Fox’s “fair and balanced” news reporting. http://www.mc.mil/

Finally, we should recall that the NDAA of past years, aside from providing the funding of vast sums for illegal and immoral wars, torture and assassination, has been the site of various embedded measures designed to further limit our democratic rights of free expression and assembly, which is the foundation of effective and meaningful dissent. One such measure dates back to 2007, to the then so-called John Warner NDAA, named after militarism’s best friend and sponsor of the iconic AUMF.

Public Law 109-364, or the “John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007″ (H.R.5122), was signed by George Bush on October 17th, 2006, in a private Oval Office ceremony. It allowed the President to declare a “public emergency” and subsequently station troops anywhere in America, seizing control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to “suppress public disorder.” Well, fortunately, a massive protest ensued and the sections of the law that allowed for such were eventually repealed in the midst of which Senator Pat Leahy commented that, “we certainly do not need to make it easier for Presidents to declare martial law.” Preparing to order the military onto the streets of America, the presumption is that some form of martial law would be in evidence. Note that the term for putting an area under military law enforcement control is precise; the term is “martial law.”

http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/911/

The concept of martial rule, as distinct from martial law, is not written, and therefore is an eminently more workable arrangement for “law enforcement forces.” That’s because, as US Army Field Manual 19-15 points out, “martial rule is based on public necessity. Public necessity in this sense means public safety.” According to the manual (cited above), updated in 2005, U.S. state authorities “may take such action within their own jurisdictions.” And yet, “whether or not martial rule has been proclaimed, commanders must weigh each proposed action against the threat to public order and safety. If the need for martial rule arises, the military commander at the scene must so inform the Army Chief of Staff and await instructions. If martial rule is imposed, the civilian population must be informed of the restrictions and rules of conduct that the military can enforce.”

Now, respecting the power of free speech, the manual suggests that, “during a civil disturbance, it may be advisable to prevent people from assembling. Civil law can make it unlawful for people to meet to plan an act of violence, rioting, or civil disturbance. Prohibitions on assembly may forbid gatherings at any place and time.” And don’t forget, “making hostile or inflammatory speeches advocating the overthrow of the lawful government and threats against public officials, if it endangered public safety, could violate such law.”

Further, during civil disturbance operations, “authorities must be prepared to detain large numbers of people,” forcing them into existing, though expanded “detention facilities.” Cautioning that, “if there are more detainees than civil detention facilities can handle, civil authorities may ask the control forces to set up and operate temporary facilities.” Pending the approval of the Army Chief of Staff, the military can detain and jail citizens en masse. “The temporary facilities are set up on the nearest military installation or on suitable property under federal control.” These “temporary facilities” are “supervised and controlled by MP officers and NCOs trained and experienced in Army correctional operations. Guards and support personnel under direct supervision and control of MP officers and NCOs need not be trained or experienced in Army correctional operations. But they must be specifically instructed and closely supervised in the proper use of force.”

According to the Army, the detention facilities are situated near to the “disturbance area,” but far enough away “not to be endangered by riotous acts.” Given the large numbers of potential detainees, the logistics (holding, searching, processing areas) of such an undertaking, new construction of such facilities “may be needed to provide the segregation for ensuring effective control and administration.” It must be designed and “organized for a smooth flow of traffic,” while a medical “treatment area” would be utilized as a “separate holding area for injured detainees.” After a “detainee is logged in and searched,” “a file is initiated,” and a “case number” identifies the prisoner. In addition, “facility personnel also may use hospital ID tags. Using indelible ink, they write the case number and attach the tag to the detainees wrist. Different colors may be used to identify different offender classifications ”

Finally, if and when it should occur, “release procedures must be coordinated with civil authorities and appropriate legal counsel.” If the “detainee” should produce a writ of habeas corpus issued by a state court, thereby demanding ones day in court, the Army will “respectfully reply that the prisoner is being held by authority of the United States.”

In conclusion:

There is no question that the militarized police state, in all its myriad permutations has arrived. In fact, the militarizing of American cities and society as a whole proceeds apace in lock step (Cities Under Seige: The New Military Urbanism, Stephen Graham, 2010) with the racist, anti-immigrant “defense” of the borders, a veritable cash cow for military contractors, booming. The cities, the borders, so how bout the skies? Well, as this is being written, the latest 2013 NDAA discussions include a Senate Armed Services Committee call to allow drones to operate “freely and routinely” in America!

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2012_cr/sasc-uas.html

http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/7/bringing-battlefield-border-wild-world-border-security-and-boundary-building-arizona

Meanwhile, the GAO has just issued a report to Congress entitled “DOD Should Reevaluate Requirements for the Selective Service System” which calls for an evaluation of Pentagon “manpower needs for the Selective Service System in light of current national security plans.” Such an evaluation would, the report notes, “better position Congress to make an informed decision about the necessity of the Selective Service System or any other alternatives that might substitute for it.”

http://cryptome.org/2012/06/gao-12-623.pdf

Yes indeed, the water is boiling. Not to mix metaphors, but it’s time to jump out of the frying pan and hopefully not into the fire, which I take to mean that we must confront and deconstruct, in a non-violent way, the increasing potential for far more violence and suppression of our basic freedoms. The handing over of our resources, lives, fortune and reputation to a clique of thieves and murderers dressed up as presidents, congress people and corporate military executives and underlings is to foster our continued enslavement to the perpetrators of injustice and genocide, here and broad, inequality and greed, here and abroad, and signals the political suicide for our republic. We have got to act to stop the police state and reassert the values of community, justice and equality in the councils of governance. And to do so we must dis-empower the militarists.

One thing we can do right now is to initiate organizing campaigns in neighborhoods and communities across the country aimed at the passing of Posse Comitatus-like legislation on the local and state level, encouraging dialogue on the de-militarization of our communities, and raising the human right to be free of the violation inherent in all forms of militarism. By removing all aspects of militarism from domestic policing, lock, stock and barrel, we can expand the terrain of dissent and begin to reclaim our country back from the economic vultures and parasites and their violent mercenaries who are killing this country and the world. But first we must criminalize, like the Posse Comitatus Act does, all military involvement in law enforcement.

Communities must organize to de-militarize their police

Communities must organize to de-militarize their police. By analyzing police budgets, cutting the “special ops” training and funding and weapons transfers that fuel the militarization of law enforcement, we will most certainly decrease the level of police violence directed against the citizenry, and bridge issues and communities concerned with the epidemic of racist “police brutality” and the burgeoning of militarized police forces, veritable occupation armies in communities of color across America.

Along with criminalizing the militarization of local police we must work to criminalize racial profiling on the part of the police, a practice (indoctrinated in soldiers) that provides naked justification for “stop and frisk” harassment and the murde

US Chamber CEO Donohue: Fracking Is Our Future, Safety Nets Be Damned

If you want to understand the source of the world's problems, follow the Davos coverage by CNN and Bloomberg News for a few days. Not only will they tell you what the source is, they'll prove that your instincts are right about billionaires and thos...

ALEC Has Opposed “Popular Vote” Efforts Which Would Protect Against Partisan Rigging of Electoral...

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has actively lobbied against state plans to implement a national popular vote for president, urging state legislators to preserve the Electoral College -- which GOP legislators are now trying to rig to ensure the the next president is a Republican. In late 2011, ALEC officially changed its policy on the Electoral College to implicitly support allocating electoral votes by congressional district.

ALEC Recently Shifted Policy on Electoral College

In December 2011, ALEC reconfirmed its support for the Electoral College, but with one tweak -- official ALEC policy no longer supports allocating electoral votes based on the winner of a state's popular vote for president.

Republican leaders, including Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus, have been criticized for recent proposals to allocate electoral votes according to the victor in each Congressional district, rather than according to the winner-take-all system. This change would significantly benefit the GOP's presidential chances, in part because Republicans were able to re-draw Congressional districts to favor their party after the 2010 elections. 

In Virginia, where the Republican-led legislature has taken the first step toward reallocating the state's electoral votes, Mitt Romney would have garnered nine of Virginia's electoral votes in 2012, and Obama would have won four -- despite Obama beating Romney by 150,000 votes and four percentage points in the state as a whole.

The proposals come on the heels of a 2011-2012 legislative term where Republicans proposed bills to twist the democratic system for partisan gain through restrictive voter ID and registration requirements, many of which can be traced back to ALEC "model" bills.

ALEC Has Pushed Back on National Popular Vote

Even without the proposed rigging by GOP leaders, the Electoral College is an imperfect system. The winner of the national popular vote can still lose the presidential election, which has occurred four times in American history (three times over a century ago, and most recently in 2000 after the Supreme Court intervened to put George W. Bush in the White House). Under the Electoral College, presidential campaigns focus their energies on a handful of swing states and largely ignore the rest of the country, particularly those states where a majority consistently supports one party. Votes for president don't really count from Republicans in blue states like California and Democrats in red states like Texas. 

The GOP's recently-proposed changes to the Electoral College make a bad system worse, further limiting the number of voters who actually matter in presidential elections. But a bipartisan movement has been underway in recent years to replace the Electoral College's indirect election of the president with a system where the candidate who gets the most votes in all 50 states wins the presidency.

The bipartisan organization National Popular Vote (NPV) has been promoting an interstate compact where states agree to award their electoral votes to the winner of the nationwide popular vote, rather than according to votes within the state. Choosing the president by way of the Electoral College is part of the U.S. Constitution, but NPV notes that Article II leaves it up to state legislatures to decide how to allocate electors. Such an agreement between states would help create a more level playing field, particularly when compared to the Republican effort to split Electoral College votes in blue states but continue the "winner-take-all" method in red states.

"Our goal is to make sure every voter in every state matters equally," says Pat Rosenstiel, a Senior Consultant to NPV. Rosenstiel, who is a Republican, says that "four out of five voters are on the sidelines" under the current system, where presidential elections are decided by just a few swing states like Ohio or Florida.

Eight states and the District of Columbia have passed national popular vote compact legislation into law. A national popular vote would take effect if the legislation is enacted by enough states to constitute a majority of electors (270 out of the country's 538 electoral votes), and these nine enactments count for 132 electoral votes, bringing NPV nearly halfway to its goal of 270.

ALEC has pushed back hard against this effort. The group has adopted model resolutions in opposition to the national popular vote and in favor of the Electoral College, has repeatedly rejected appeals from NPV to support its legislation, and has actively lobbied legislators in opposition to the national popular vote interstate compact.

ALEC Lobbied Legislators to Defeat NPV

In 2007, Maryland was the first state in the country to adopt national popular vote legislation. That year, ALEC adopted its "Resolution in Opposition to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact" and its  “Resolution in Support of the Electoral College.”

"[T]he State of [insert state] shall defeat any legislation that creates a multi-state compact for the purpose of dismantling its current Electoral College system," the latter ALEC document provides. 

NPV paid thousands of dollars to join ALEC in 2008 and encourage ALEC legislators to drop their opposition to national popular vote legislation. The group was represented at ALEC meetings by former California Sen. Ray Haynes, a Republican who was the ALEC National Chairman in 2000, as well as other representatives. But according to minutes from ALEC meetings, NPV has been repeatedly rebuffed in their efforts.

Despite ALEC's opposition, national popular vote legislation has nonetheless advanced in the states with bipartisan support. In 2008, New Jersey, Illinois, and Hawaii enacted legislation, followed by Washington in 2009 and both Massachussetts and Washington, D.C., in 2010. Legislation was enacted in California and Vermont in 2011 and proposed in multiple states that year.

ALEC spent considerable energy lobbying legislators in opposition to these bills.

"Under the National Popular Vote system, a candidate could emerge victorious from a multi-party race for president, having won only a majority of votes in one region of the country," reads an 'issue alert' sent by ALEC to legislators in Louisiana when it was considering NPV legislation. "This interstate compact is an end-run around the Constitution . . . Louisiana should stick with its current system and reject the interstate compact." 

Identical "issue alerts" were sent to legislators in states like Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Utah, Vermont, and West Virginia

ALEC has consistently told the IRS that it does "zero" lobbying but these "issue alerts" tell another story. These and other "issue alerts" provided support for an IRS complaint filed by Common Cause alleging ALEC actively lobbies and has misled in its IRS filings.

ALEC Change to Resolution Opened Door for Electoral Rigging

In December 2011, at the final meeting of the "Public Safety and Elections Task Force" (before it was allegedly disbanded under public pressure after CMD connected ALEC to "Stand Your Ground" laws and voter ID), NPV representative Ray Haynes proposed an overhaul of the 2007 "Resolution in Support of the Electoral College" to replace the provisions opposing the national popular vote with language supporting it. 

The task force's private and public sector members -- which included state legislators and lobbyists for the NRA and other groups -- rejected all of his changes but one. Those ALEC legislators and corporate representatives amended the 2007 "Resolution in Support of the Electoral College" to eliminate this one line:

WHEREAS, the current Electoral College system ensures that (insert state)’s electoral votes are awarded based on how the majority of the State’s citizens vote;

This deletion effectively changed ALEC's policy to sanction electoral votes being allocated based on Congressional district, rather than on the winner-take-all basis that has been the practice for decades. 

At the time, the issue had already been placed on the political agenda. Legislators in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin proposed awarding electoral votes by Congressional district in 2011 (months before the ALEC meeting), but the bills did not pass.

In 2013, ALEC members and their fellow Republicans in those states and others are again taking up proposals to rig the already-broken Electoral College in their favor -- and with the 2012 "Resolution in Support of the Electoral College" amendments, official ALEC policy implicitly supports it.

Republicans are not discussing changes to electoral allocation in solidly red states, but only in states like Virginia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan -- all states where a majority of residents voted for President Obama, but which are controlled by Republicans at the state level and whose congressional maps were recently gerrymandered to benefit the GOP. RNC Chair Priebus has said explicitly that the plan is only intended for "states that have been consistently blue that are fully controlled red." If the proposed changes for these four states had been in place during the 2012 election, Mitt Romney would have received 35 electoral votes and Obama just 23, despite Obama winning the popular vote in each state (the proposal in Virginia would allocate all electoral votes according to Congressional district, but in the other states two votes would go to the statewide winner). 

Making these changes to how electoral votes are allocated "takes a bad system and makes it worse," says NPV's Rosenstiel. By shifting the fight for electoral votes from just a few swing states to just a few contested districts, "It concentrates power in the hands of even fewer voters, not more."

As for NPV and ALEC, Rosenstiel says, "our membership with ALEC has run its course." 

-- Calvin Sloan, of People for the American Way, contributed to this article --

© 2012 PR Watch

Brendan Fischer

Brendan M. Fischer is a law fellow with the Center for Media and Democracy and a student at the University of Wisconsin Law School in the class of 2011.

ALEC Has Opposed “Popular Vote” Efforts Which Would Protect Against Partisan Rigging of Electoral...

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has actively lobbied against state plans to implement a national popular vote for president, urging state legislators to preserve the Electoral College -- which GOP legislators are now trying to rig to ensure the the next president is a Republican. In late 2011, ALEC officially changed its policy on the Electoral College to implicitly support allocating electoral votes by congressional district.

ALEC Recently Shifted Policy on Electoral College

In December 2011, ALEC reconfirmed its support for the Electoral College, but with one tweak -- official ALEC policy no longer supports allocating electoral votes based on the winner of a state's popular vote for president.

Republican leaders, including Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus, have been criticized for recent proposals to allocate electoral votes according to the victor in each Congressional district, rather than according to the winner-take-all system. This change would significantly benefit the GOP's presidential chances, in part because Republicans were able to re-draw Congressional districts to favor their party after the 2010 elections. 

In Virginia, where the Republican-led legislature has taken the first step toward reallocating the state's electoral votes, Mitt Romney would have garnered nine of Virginia's electoral votes in 2012, and Obama would have won four -- despite Obama beating Romney by 150,000 votes and four percentage points in the state as a whole.

The proposals come on the heels of a 2011-2012 legislative term where Republicans proposed bills to twist the democratic system for partisan gain through restrictive voter ID and registration requirements, many of which can be traced back to ALEC "model" bills.

ALEC Has Pushed Back on National Popular Vote

Even without the proposed rigging by GOP leaders, the Electoral College is an imperfect system. The winner of the national popular vote can still lose the presidential election, which has occurred four times in American history (three times over a century ago, and most recently in 2000 after the Supreme Court intervened to put George W. Bush in the White House). Under the Electoral College, presidential campaigns focus their energies on a handful of swing states and largely ignore the rest of the country, particularly those states where a majority consistently supports one party. Votes for president don't really count from Republicans in blue states like California and Democrats in red states like Texas. 

The GOP's recently-proposed changes to the Electoral College make a bad system worse, further limiting the number of voters who actually matter in presidential elections. But a bipartisan movement has been underway in recent years to replace the Electoral College's indirect election of the president with a system where the candidate who gets the most votes in all 50 states wins the presidency.

The bipartisan organization National Popular Vote (NPV) has been promoting an interstate compact where states agree to award their electoral votes to the winner of the nationwide popular vote, rather than according to votes within the state. Choosing the president by way of the Electoral College is part of the U.S. Constitution, but NPV notes that Article II leaves it up to state legislatures to decide how to allocate electors. Such an agreement between states would help create a more level playing field, particularly when compared to the Republican effort to split Electoral College votes in blue states but continue the "winner-take-all" method in red states.

"Our goal is to make sure every voter in every state matters equally," says Pat Rosenstiel, a Senior Consultant to NPV. Rosenstiel, who is a Republican, says that "four out of five voters are on the sidelines" under the current system, where presidential elections are decided by just a few swing states like Ohio or Florida.

Eight states and the District of Columbia have passed national popular vote compact legislation into law. A national popular vote would take effect if the legislation is enacted by enough states to constitute a majority of electors (270 out of the country's 538 electoral votes), and these nine enactments count for 132 electoral votes, bringing NPV nearly halfway to its goal of 270.

ALEC has pushed back hard against this effort. The group has adopted model resolutions in opposition to the national popular vote and in favor of the Electoral College, has repeatedly rejected appeals from NPV to support its legislation, and has actively lobbied legislators in opposition to the national popular vote interstate compact.

ALEC Lobbied Legislators to Defeat NPV

In 2007, Maryland was the first state in the country to adopt national popular vote legislation. That year, ALEC adopted its "Resolution in Opposition to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact" and its  “Resolution in Support of the Electoral College.”

"[T]he State of [insert state] shall defeat any legislation that creates a multi-state compact for the purpose of dismantling its current Electoral College system," the latter ALEC document provides. 

NPV paid thousands of dollars to join ALEC in 2008 and encourage ALEC legislators to drop their opposition to national popular vote legislation. The group was represented at ALEC meetings by former California Sen. Ray Haynes, a Republican who was the ALEC National Chairman in 2000, as well as other representatives. But according to minutes from ALEC meetings, NPV has been repeatedly rebuffed in their efforts.

Despite ALEC's opposition, national popular vote legislation has nonetheless advanced in the states with bipartisan support. In 2008, New Jersey, Illinois, and Hawaii enacted legislation, followed by Washington in 2009 and both Massachussetts and Washington, D.C., in 2010. Legislation was enacted in California and Vermont in 2011 and proposed in multiple states that year.

ALEC spent considerable energy lobbying legislators in opposition to these bills.

"Under the National Popular Vote system, a candidate could emerge victorious from a multi-party race for president, having won only a majority of votes in one region of the country," reads an 'issue alert' sent by ALEC to legislators in Louisiana when it was considering NPV legislation. "This interstate compact is an end-run around the Constitution . . . Louisiana should stick with its current system and reject the interstate compact." 

Identical "issue alerts" were sent to legislators in states like Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Utah, Vermont, and West Virginia

ALEC has consistently told the IRS that it does "zero" lobbying but these "issue alerts" tell another story. These and other "issue alerts" provided support for an IRS complaint filed by Common Cause alleging ALEC actively lobbies and has misled in its IRS filings.

ALEC Change to Resolution Opened Door for Electoral Rigging

In December 2011, at the final meeting of the "Public Safety and Elections Task Force" (before it was allegedly disbanded under public pressure after CMD connected ALEC to "Stand Your Ground" laws and voter ID), NPV representative Ray Haynes proposed an overhaul of the 2007 "Resolution in Support of the Electoral College" to replace the provisions opposing the national popular vote with language supporting it. 

The task force's private and public sector members -- which included state legislators and lobbyists for the NRA and other groups -- rejected all of his changes but one. Those ALEC legislators and corporate representatives amended the 2007 "Resolution in Support of the Electoral College" to eliminate this one line:

WHEREAS, the current Electoral College system ensures that (insert state)’s electoral votes are awarded based on how the majority of the State’s citizens vote;

This deletion effectively changed ALEC's policy to sanction electoral votes being allocated based on Congressional district, rather than on the winner-take-all basis that has been the practice for decades. 

At the time, the issue had already been placed on the political agenda. Legislators in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin proposed awarding electoral votes by Congressional district in 2011 (months before the ALEC meeting), but the bills did not pass.

In 2013, ALEC members and their fellow Republicans in those states and others are again taking up proposals to rig the already-broken Electoral College in their favor -- and with the 2012 "Resolution in Support of the Electoral College" amendments, official ALEC policy implicitly supports it.

Republicans are not discussing changes to electoral allocation in solidly red states, but only in states like Virginia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan -- all states where a majority of residents voted for President Obama, but which are controlled by Republicans at the state level and whose congressional maps were recently gerrymandered to benefit the GOP. RNC Chair Priebus has said explicitly that the plan is only intended for "states that have been consistently blue that are fully controlled red." If the proposed changes for these four states had been in place during the 2012 election, Mitt Romney would have received 35 electoral votes and Obama just 23, despite Obama winning the popular vote in each state (the proposal in Virginia would allocate all electoral votes according to Congressional district, but in the other states two votes would go to the statewide winner). 

Making these changes to how electoral votes are allocated "takes a bad system and makes it worse," says NPV's Rosenstiel. By shifting the fight for electoral votes from just a few swing states to just a few contested districts, "It concentrates power in the hands of even fewer voters, not more."

As for NPV and ALEC, Rosenstiel says, "our membership with ALEC has run its course." 

-- Calvin Sloan, of People for the American Way, contributed to this article --

© 2012 PR Watch

Brendan Fischer

Brendan M. Fischer is a law fellow with the Center for Media and Democracy and a student at the University of Wisconsin Law School in the class of 2011.

Sunday Morning Bobblehead Thread


The Rachel Maddow Show -- November 22, 2012

Guess who is going to be wrong on the Sunday shows again? That's right, Mr. Perennial John McCain. There is a truly unique sense of "failing up" that takes place within the Beltway and the Sunday shows that I don't think you could find anywhere else. If you or I in our job was as consistently wrong as John McCain has been, we would be on the unemployment rolls. But there is literally no way for a Republican or conservative to be so wrong, so out of touch that he or she will not be invited back to sit on the Sunday shows panels, especially someone like McCain. I suspect that he has a staffer whose sole purpose is to keep in touch with bookers for all the news outlets and offer his availability week after week.

And bookers, lazy little buggers that they are, don't want to work to find different and maybe better voices.

And hosts, as compromised as they are, don't want to make their golfing buddies or the guy they just sat next to at a fundraiser the night before, feel dismissed or ignored.

And executive producers, as cognizant as they are of the interests of their parent company, aren't invested in informing viewers or framing issues that follow the concerns of anyone outside the Beltway.

And so we are left with yet another Sunday with John McCain being wrong. And Paul Ryan being wrong, and Marsha Blackburn being wrong, and Newt Gingrich, being so very wrong. Thanks, Beltway media.

ABC's "This Week" -- Sens. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., and John McCain, R-Ariz. Panel: ABC News' George Will; Rep. David Schweikert, R-Ariz.; Democratic strategist and ABC News contributor Donna Brazile; NPR "Morning Edition" host Steve Inskeep; and New Republic owner and publisher Chris Hughes. Zero Dark Thirty" screenwriter and producer Mark Boal and Atlantic national correspondent Mark Bowden, best-selling author of "Blackhawk Down."

NBC's "Meet the Press" -- Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis.; Panel: Incoming President of the Heritage Foundation, former Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC); President and CEO of the NAACP Ben Jealous; Washington Post Associate Editor Bob Woodward; NBC’s Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell; and NBC News Special Correspondent Ted Koppel.

NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" -- Chuck Todd, NBC News Chief White House Correspondent; Kelly O'Donnell, NBC News Capitol Hill Correspondent; Kathleen Parker, The Washington Post; Chris Frates, National Journal.

CBS' "Face the Nation" -- Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.; New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly; Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.; former House Speaker Newt Gingrich; former Romney Senior Adviser Kevin Madden and Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter.

MSNBC's "UP with Chris Hayes" -- Ambassador Swanee Hunt, the former ambassador to Austria, now the Elizabeth Roosevelt Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government; Robin Wright, joint fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson International Center, author of “Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion across the Islamic World;” Horace Campbell, professor of African politics, African-American studies and political science at Syracuse University, author of “Pan Africanism, Pan Africanists, and African Liberation in the 21st Century;” Joshua Trevino, vice president of external public relations at the Texas Public Policy Foundation; Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights; Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, author of “Ending the Iraq War;” Adam Serwer, reporter and blogger for Mother Jones.

"Melissa Harris-Perry" -- Guest list not released.

CNN's "State of the Union" -- Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal; former CIA Director Michael Hayden; Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Ca); Govs. Bob McDonnell, R-Va., and Scott Walker, R-Wis.; Mia Love, mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah; former Commerce Secretary Carlos Guttierez.

CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" -- Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, King Abdullah II of Jordan.

CNN's "Reliable Sources" -- Bob Costas; Newsweek/Daily Beast's David Frum, Chicago Tribune's Clarence Page; Washington Post’s “Reliable Source” columnist Amy Argetsinger.

"Fox News Sunday" -- Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Bob Corker, R-Tenn.; retired Air Force Col. Martha McSally; retired Army Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin, executive vice president of the Family Research Council. Panel: Brit Hume, Fox News Senior Political Analyst; Jeff Zeleny, The New York Times; Kimberley Strassel, The Wall Street Journal; Juan Williams, Fox News Contributor.

So, what's catching your eye this morning?

Drone Proliferation — Crimes Against Humanity for “Global Security”

DRONERQ-170_Sentinel_impression_3-view

The Children Killed by America’s Drones. “Crimes Against Humanity” committed by Barack H. Obama., Prof Michel Chossudovsky, January 26, 2013

Behind each name there is the face of a child with a family history in a village in a far away country, with a mom and a dad, with brothers and sisters and friends.


U.S. government smear campaign against reporters exposing the drone wars

Proliferation of Armed Drones for “Global Security”: Will the UN Drone Inquiry Get to the Heart of the matter?, Chris Cole, January 26, 2013

The UN inquiry into the use of armed drones for targeted killing, announced yesterday by London-based UN Special Rapporteur on Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights, Ben Emmerson, is very much to be welcomed. Undertaken at the direct request of several…


drone

UN Launches Major Investigation into Civilian Drone Deaths, 

Chris Woods and Alice K Ross, January 26, 2013

A UN investigation into the legality and casualties of drone strikes has been formally launched, with a leading human rights lawyer revealing the team that will carry out the inquiry. The announcement came…


martin-luther-king-jr

Obama Inauguration Day: Two Nobel Peace Laureates, “Drones Apart”. Martin Luther King: “From Every Mountainside, Let Freedom Ring.”, Felicity Arbuthnot, January 21, 2013

One day … Children at school will ask: What is war? You will answer them. You will tell them: Those words are not used any more. Like stagecoaches, galleys or slavery. Words no longer meaningful … (Martin Luther King,15th January…


DRONERQ-170_Sentinel_impression_3-view

Institutionalized Killing: Obama to Approve Drone Assassination Manual, 

Patrick Martin, January 21, 2013

President Obama is about to sign off on a manual that will institutionalize the process by which the White House orders and approves killings by remote-controlled drones, according to a report Sunday. The so-called counterterrorism “playbook” will define the circumstances…


DRONERQ-170_Sentinel_impression_3-view
 Drone Wars UK, January 20, 2013

“What is needed is a clear understanding of the issues involved so that informed decisions can be made.” The UK Approach to Unmanned Aircraft Systems, MoD 2011 In 2011 the MoD published its policy document on the use of armed…


king2
 Norman Solomon, January 19, 2013

A simple twist of fate has set President Obama’s second Inaugural Address for January 21, the same day as the Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday. Obama made no mention of King during the Inauguration four years ago — but since then, he has done much to distinguish himself from the man who said “I have a dream.”


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Is This Man Plotting A Coup Against Cameron?

Speculation in three Sunday newspapers suggests Tory MP, Adam Afriyie, is a surprise contender to be the next party leader if David Cameron fails to deliver a majority at the 2015 general election.

MPs are reported to have been approached to endorse the credentials of the self-made IT millionaire - who became the party's first black MP in 2005.

A number of sources however have questioned the story with Tory MP, Margot James, dismissing the rumours as "ridiculous".

The alleged campaign was said to be a "well organised" by individuals concerned about the party's prospects of being returned to office amid poor opinion poll ratings and grim economic news.

But the Prime Minister's popular promise of an in/out referendum on Europe appeared to have squashed speculation that it could be part of a plot to oust him before the election.

Mark Field, one of those reported to have been pushing Afriyie as a potential leader, said: "I do not think it's any plot against the Prime Minister".


Sophy Ridge

That's some briefing operation - Adam Afriyie leadership bid in three Sunday papers...

When the Mail on Sunday, who refer to Windsor MP Afriyie as the "Tory Barack Obama", asked about the campaign, he said: "You are being very mischievous.

"I supported David Cameron to become leader. I love him and want him to be leader for the next 20 years."

He later told the newspaper in an email: "David Cameron is Prime Minister and I am concerned that the media is taking attention away from the promised referendum.


Walaa Idris

The story of Adam Afriyie ‘coup’ is so ridiculous & insulting but it shows the media's desperation for a Tory division

"We are all working hard to achieve a Conservative majority so the British people get their say on the EU."

The newspaper said MPs approached to give their support had been told Afriyie had the backing of 40 MPs although others put the number at half that.

Field told the Mail on Sunday that he had had "a handful of conversations with people" but that there was "no mass campaign" in support of Afriyie.


Jonathan Haynes

About 9 out of 10 who replied (and you're an engaged group!) have not heard of Adam Afriyie, who MoS and ST are touting as a Tory challenger

"Discussing him as a long-term option has nothing to do with destabilising the Coalition or plotting against the current leadership. It would be impossible to do that given how the rules operate and counter-productive."

The Sunday Times quoted a "friend" of Afriyie, who is 47, as saying: "The team are well organised.

"They are very concerned about the long-term future of the party and believe Adam is the future. He has a fantastic back story and is very impressive."

Among factors in favour of the relatively-unknown MP - who was shadow science minister before the 2010 election - are said to be his upbringing in a poor part of south London and the fact that he has never claimed travel or second home expenses.

Maddow Looks at List of Wingnuts Hoping to Succeed Chambliss

Now that Saxby Chambliss has decided he doesn't want to have to face a primary race for his Senate seat, Rachel Maddow took her viewers through the list of potential replacements that would like to succeed him, and it's a doozy.

Georgia's Saxby Chambliss to retire:

Just a few months ago, Sen. Saxby Chambliss, a two-term Republican incumbent from Georgia, started facing credible primary threats in advance of his 2014 re-election bid. In a bit of a surprise, the senator has said there won't be a re-election campaign -- Chambliss is retiring at the end of his term (via James Carter). [...]

The news was not widely expected, and Chambliss was expected to win re-election if he sought another term.

What's especially interesting now, however, is the field of Republican candidates who may try to succeed Chambliss in 2014. One of the leading GOP officials to watch is Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.), who said just this week that was considering taking on Chambliss in a primary, and with the incumbent stepping down, the congressman is that much more likely to run himself.

That would set up quite a campaign -- Broun is one of Congress' more ridiculous members, and a Senate campaign would create an Akin-in-Missouri situation in which a candidate may simply be too nutty to compete on a statewide level, even in the South. In this case, Broun is perhaps best known for arguing that that cosmology, biology, and geology are, quite literally, "lies straight from the pit of Hell," and that President Obama only believes in supporting "the Soviet constitution."

In other words, even among loony extremists, Broun is almost a caricature of himself.

This matters because Georgia could prove to be far more interesting than expected. In 2008, when Chambliss sought a second term, he won by a narrow margin after being forced into a runoff when he won 49% of the vote on Election Day. Since then, Georgia's population has only grown more diverse.

If a strong Democratic candidate faced off against a ridiculous right-wing extremist, could this become a blue-to-red pick-up opportunity? Quite possibly, yes.

We've got more on Broun here: Is Paul Broun the dumbest member of Congress? Signs point to Yes and here: Rep. Paul Broun: Evolution, Embryology, and the Big Bang Theory are 'Lies Straight from the Pit of Hell'.

And as Rachel mentioned, another potential candidate is Karen Handel whose anti-abortion views are so extreme they just about took down a cancer charity: Former Susan G. Koman Exec May Run For Senate In Georgia.

And then there's Todd Akin's buddy Phil Gingrey: Republican Congressman Backs Akin’s ‘Legitimate Rape’ Comments: ‘He’s Partly Right’.

Steve Benen's article also mentioned Herman Cain, but Rachel informed her viewers that alas, Cain has said he's not running.

Thousands march for gun control in Washington (PHOTOS)

Washington DC Mayor Vincent Gray (4th L) helps lead the March on Washington for Gun Control on the National Mall in Washington, January 26, 2013. (Reuters / Jonathan Ernst)

Washington DC Mayor Vincent Gray (4th L) helps lead the March on Washington for Gun Control on the National Mall in Washington, January 26, 2013. (Reuters / Jonathan Ernst)

Amid growing national debate over gun violence, thousands of people marched in Washington on Saturday to press Congress and state legislators to back gun control measures.

The marchers were joined by some 100 residents of Newtown, Connecticut, where a mass elementary school shooting left 20 first-graders and six teachers dead.

People in the crowd were seen carrying signs reading “We Are Newtown,” “Guns Control Now,” “Stop NRA,” “What Would Jesus Pack” and many more. The demonstrators walked from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. Some held signs with the names of the victims of gun violence.

Among the speakers at the event was Education Secretary Arne Duncan who reassured the crowd that gun control was not about limiting firearm rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment. "This is about gun responsibility. This is about gun safety. This is about fewer dead Americans, fewer dead children, fewer children living in fear."

People gather near the U.S. Capitol to participate in the March on Washington for Gun Control on the National Mall in Washington, January 26, 2013. (Reuters / Jonathan Ernst)
People gather near the U.S. Capitol to participate in the March on Washington for Gun Control on the National Mall in Washington, January 26, 2013. (Reuters / Jonathan Ernst)

He said he and President Barack Obama would do everything possible to enact gun control policies. The organizers of the march backed Obama’s proposed sweeping package of federal gun-control laws, such as a ban on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines.

"This is about trying to create a climate in which our children can grow up free of fear," Duncan said. "This march is a starting point; it is not an ending point … We must act, we must act, we must act."

The horrific massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, has reinvigorated the national debate about gun violence. With exceptionally liberal gun control laws the United States has seen almost 88,000 Americans die in gun violence between 2003 and 2010, a UN reports says.

According to a 2007 Arms Survey, Americans possess an average of 88 guns per 100 people – the highest rate of gun ownership in the world.

Participants from Newtown, Connecticut, wearing the green and white colors of Sandy Hook Elementary School where 26 children and adults were killed. (Reuters / Jonathan Ernst)
Participants from Newtown, Connecticut, wearing the green and white colors of Sandy Hook Elementary School where 26 children and adults were killed. (Reuters / Jonathan Ernst)

Saturday’s rally comes a week after gun right advocates rallied across the country to show their opposition to firearms control. They argue that gun ownership is a constitutional right protected under the Second Amendment and helps protect their freedom.

With a powerful gun lobby even bereaved family members, who’ve lost loved ones to gun violence admit that the change would be difficult to be achieved.

"It's difficult to get laws changed when politicians are bought out, but we have to start somewhere," said Amy Journo, 38, an occupational therapist whose two sons, ages 5 and 7, attended Sandy Hook.

"I want to ensure that they (children) are safer, not just my children but all across the United States," Journo said.

Meanwhile, on the same day as the march took place, an unknown gunman opened fire outside a nightclub in Washington, DC, injuring at least five people, according to NBC4 Washington.

People hold signs memorializing Sandy Hook Elementary School. (Reuters / Jonathan Ernst)
People hold signs memorializing Sandy Hook Elementary School. (Reuters / Jonathan Ernst)

A pair of pro-gun rights protesters carry signs across the street from thousands who gathered at the start of the March on Washington for Gun Control on the National Mall in Washington, January 26, 2013. (Reuters / Jonathan Ernst)
A pair of pro-gun rights protesters carry signs across the street from thousands who gathered at the start of the March on Washington for Gun Control on the National Mall in Washington, January 26, 2013. (Reuters / Jonathan Ernst)

Peyton Tremont, aged seven, holds a sign as people gather near the U.S. Capitol to begin the March on Washington for Gun Control on the National Mall in Washington, January 26, 2013. (Reuters / Jonathan Ernst)
Peyton Tremont, aged seven, holds a sign as people gather near the U.S. Capitol to begin the March on Washington for Gun Control on the National Mall in Washington, January 26, 2013. (Reuters / Jonathan Ernst)

People carry signs as they gather near the U.S. Capitol to participate in the March on Washington for Gun Control on the National Mall in Washington, January 26, 2013. (Reuters / Jonathan Ernst)
People carry signs as they gather near the U.S. Capitol to participate in the March on Washington for Gun Control on the National Mall in Washington, January 26, 2013. (Reuters / Jonathan Ernst)

A Terrible Normality: The Massacres and Aberrations of History

parenti2

 Through much of history the abnormal has been the norm.

This is a paradox to which we should attend. Aberrations, so plentiful as to form a terrible normality of their own, descend upon us with frightful consistency.

The number of massacres in history, for instance, are almost more than we can record.  There was the New World holocaust, consisting of the extermination of indigenous Native American peoples throughout the western hemisphere, extending over four centuries or more, continuing into recent times in the Amazon region.

There were the centuries of heartless slavery in the Americas and elsewhere, followed by a full century of lynch mob rule and Jim Crow segregation in the United States, and today the numerous killings and incarcerations of Black youth by law enforcement agencies.

Let us not forget the extermination of some 200,000 Filipinos by the U.S. military at the beginning of the twentieth century, the genocidal massacre of 1.5 million Armenians by the Turks in 1915, and the mass killings of African peoples by the western colonists, including the 63,000 Herero victims in German Southwest Africa in 1904, and the brutalization and enslavement of millions in the Belgian Congo from the late 1880s until emancipation in 1960—followed by years of neocolonial free-market exploitation and repression in what was Mobutu’s Zaire.

French colonizers killed some 150,000 Algerians. Later on, several million souls perished in Angola and Mozambique along with an estimated five million in the merciless region now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The twentieth century gave us—among other horrors—more than sixteen million lost and twenty million wounded or mutilated in World War I, followed by the estimated 62 million to 78 million killed in World War II, including some 24 million Soviet military personnel and civilians, 5.8 million European Jews, and taken together:  several million Serbs, Poles, Roma, homosexuals, and a score of other nationalities.

In the decades after World War II, many, if not most, massacres and wars have been openly or covertly sponsored by the U.S. national security state. This includes the two million or so left dead or missing in Vietnam, along with 250,000 Cambodians, 100,000 Laotians, and 58,000 Americans.

Today in much of Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East there are “smaller” wars, replete with atrocities of all sorts. Central America, Colombia, Rwanda and other places too numerous to list, suffered the massacres and death-squad exterminations of hundreds of thousands, a constancy of violent horrors. In Mexico a “war on drugs” has taken 70,000 lives with 8,000 missing.

There was the slaughter of more than half a million socialistic or democratic nationalist Indonesians by the U.S.-supported Indonesian military in 1965, eventually followed by the extermination of 100,000 East Timorese by that same U.S.-backed military.

Consider the 78-days of NATO’s aerial destruction of Yugoslavia complete with depleted uranium, and the bombings and invasion of Panama, Grenada, Somalia, Libya, Yemen, Western Pakistan, Afghanistan, and now the devastating war of attrition brokered against Syria. And as I write (early 2013), the U.S.-sponsored sanctions against Iran are seeding severe hardship for the civilian population of that country.

All the above amounts to a very incomplete listing of the world’s violent and ugly injustice. A comprehensive inventory would fill volumes. How do we record the countless other life-searing abuses: the many millions who survive wars and massacres but remain forever broken in body and spirit, left to a lifetime of suffering and pitiless privation, refugees without sufficient food or medical supplies or water and sanitation services in countries like Syria, Haiti, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Mali.

Think of the millions of women and children around the world and across the centuries who have been trafficked in unspeakable ways, and the millions upon millions trapped in exploitative toil, be they slaves, indentured servants, or underpaid laborers. The number of impoverished is now growing at a faster rate than the world’s population.  Add to that, the countless acts of repression, incarceration, torture, and other criminal abuses that beat upon the human spirit throughout the world day by day.

Let us not overlook the ubiquitous corporate corruption and massive financial swindles, the plundering of natural resources and industrial poisoning of whole regions, the forceful dislocation of entire populations, the continuing catastrophes of Chernobyl and Fukushima and other impending disasters awaiting numerous aging nuclear reactors.

The world’s dreadful aberrations are so commonplace and unrelenting that they lose their edge and we become inured to the horror of it all. “Who today remembers the Armenians?” Hitler is quoted as having said while plotting his “final solution” for the Jews. Who today remembers the Iraqis and the death and destruction done to them on a grand scale by the U.S. invasion of their lands? William Blum reminds us that more than half the Iraq population is either dead, wounded, traumatized, imprisoned, displaced, or exiled, while their environment is saturated with depleted uranium (from U.S. weaponry) inflicting horrific birth defects.

What is to be made of all this? First, we must not ascribe these aberrations to happenstance, innocent confusion, and unintended consequences.  Nor should we believe the usual rationales about spreading democracy, fighting terrorism, providing humanitarian rescue, protecting U.S. national interests and other such rallying cries promulgated by ruling elites and their mouthpieces.

The repetitious patterns of atrocity and violence are so persistent as to invite the suspicion that they usually serve real interests; they are structural not incidental.  All this destruction and slaughter has greatly profited those plutocrats who pursue economic expansion, resource acquisition, territorial dominion, and financial accumulation.

Ruling interests are well served by their superiority in firepower and striking force. Violence is what we are talking about here, not just the wild and wanton type but the persistent and well-organized kind. As a political resource, violence is the instrument of ultimate authority. Violence allows for the conquest of entire lands and the riches they contain, while keeping displaced laborers and other slaves in harness.

The plutocratic rulers find it necessary to misuse or exterminate restive multitudes, to let them starve while the fruits of their land and the sweat of their labor enrich privileged coteries.

Thus we had a profit-driven imperial rule that helped precipitate the great famine in northern China, 1876-1879, resulting in the death of some thirteen million. At about that same time the Madras famine in India took the lives of as many as twelve million while the colonial forces grew ever richer.  And thirty years earlier, the great potato famine in Ireland led to about one million deaths, with another desperate million emigrating from their homeland. Nothing accidental about this: while the Irish starved, their English landlords exported shiploads of Irish grain and livestock to England and elsewhere at considerable profit to themselves.

These occurrences must be seen as something more than just historic abnormalities floating aimlessly in time and space, driven only by overweening impulse or happenstance. It is not enough to condemn monstrous events and bad times, we also must try to understand them. They must be contextualized in the larger framework of historical social relations.

The dominant socio-economic system today is free-market capitalism (in all its variations). Along with its unrelenting imperial terrorism, free-market capitalism provides “normal abnormalities” from within its own dynamic, creating scarcity and maldistributed excess, filled with duplication, waste, overproduction, frightening environmental destruction, and varieties of financial crises, bringing swollen rewards to a select few and continual hardship to multitudes.

Economic crises are not exceptional; they are the standing operational mode of the capitalist system. Once again, the irrational is the norm. Consider U.S. free-market history: after the American Revolution, there were the debtor rebellions of the late 1780s, the panic of 1792, the recession of 1809 (lasting several years), the panics of 1819 and 1837, and recessions and crashes through much of the rest of that century. The serious recession of 1893 continued for more than a decade.

After the industrial underemployment of 1900 to 1915 came the agrarian depression of the 1920s—hidden behind what became known to us as “the Jazz Age,” followed by a horrendous crash and the Great Depression of 1929-1942. All through the twentieth century we had wars, recessions, inflation, labor struggles, high unemployment—hardly a year that would be considered “normal” in any pleasant sense. An extended normal period would itself have been an abnormality. The free market is by design inherently unstable in every aspect other than wealth accumulation for the select few.

What we are witnessing is not an irrational output from a basically rational society but the converse: the “rational” (to be expected) output of a fundamentally irrational system. Does this mean these horrors are inescapable? No, they are not made of supernatural forces. They are produced by plutocratic greed and deception.

So, if the aberrant is the norm and the horrific is chronic, then we in our fightback should give less attention to the idiosyncratic and more to the systemic. Wars, massacres and recessions help to increase capital concentration, monopolize markets and natural resources, and destroy labor organizations and popular transformative resistance.

The brutish vagaries of plutocracy are not the product of particular personalities but of systemic interests. President George W. Bush was ridiculed for misusing words, but his empire-building and stripping of government services and regulations revealed a keen devotion to ruling-class interests.  Likewise, President Barack Obama is not spineless. He is hypocritical but not confused. He is (by his own description) an erstwhile “liberal Republican,” or as I would put it, a faithful servant of corporate America.

Our various leaders are well informed, not deluded. They come from different regions and different families, and have different personalities, yet they pursue pretty much the same policies on behalf of the same plutocracy.

So it is not enough to denounce atrocities and wars, we also must understand who propagates them and who benefits. We have to ask why violence and deception are constant ingredients.

Unintended consequences and other oddities do arise in worldly affairs but we also must take account of interest-driven rational intentions. More often than not, the aberrations—be they wars, market crashes, famines, individual assassinations or mass killings—take shape because those at the top are pursuing gainful expropriation. Many may suffer and perish but somebody somewhere is benefiting boundlessly.

Knowing your enemies and what they are capable of doing is the first step toward effective opposition. The world becomes less of a horrific puzzlement.  We can only resist these global (and local) perpetrators when we see who they are and what they are doing to us and our sacred environment.

Democratic victories, however small and partial they be, must be embraced. But the people must not be satisfied with tinseled favors offered by smooth leaders. We need to strive in every way possible for the revolutionary unraveling, a revolution of organized consciousness striking at the empire’s heart with the full force of democracy, the kind of irresistible upsurge that seems to come from nowhere while carrying everything before it.

Michael Parenti’s most recent books are The Culture Struggle (2006), Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (2007), God and His Demons (2010), Democracy for the Few (9th ed. 2011), and The Face of Imperialism (2011). For further information about his work, visit his website: www.michaelparenti.org.

The New Mediterranean Oil and Gas Bonanza

The New Mediterranean Oil and Gas Bonanza

The discovery in late 2010 of the huge natural gas bonanza off Israel’s Mediterranean shores triggered other neighboring countries to look more closely at their own waters. The results revealed that the entire eastern Mediterranean is swimming in huge untapped oil and gas reserves. That discovery is having enormous political, geopolitical as well as economic consequences. It well may have potential military consequences too.

Preliminary exploration has confirmed similarly impressive reserves of gas and oil in the waters off Greece, Turkey, Cyprus and potentially, Syria.

Greek ‘energy Sirtaki’

Not surprisingly, amid its disastrous financial crisis the Greek government began serious exploration for oil and gas. Since then the country has been in a curious kind of a dance with the IMF and EU governments, a kind of “energy Sirtaki” over who will control and ultimately benefit from the huge resource discoveries there.

In December 2010, as it seemed the Greek crisis might still be resolved without the by-now huge bailouts or privatizations, Greece’s Energy Ministry formed a special group of experts to research the prospects for oil and gas in Greek waters. Greece’s Energean Oil & Gas began increased investment into drilling in the offshore waters after a successful smaller oil discovery in 2009. Major geological surveys were made. Preliminary estimates now are that total offshore oil in Greek waters exceeds 22 billion barrels in the Ionian Sea off western Greece and some 4 billion barrels in the northern Aegean Sea. [1]

The southern Aegean Sea and Cretan Sea are yet to be explored, so the numbers could be significantly higher. An earlier Greek National Council for Energy Policy report stated that “Greece is one of the least explored countries in Europe regarding hydrocarbon (oil and gas-w.e.) potentials.” [2] According to one Greek analyst, Aristotle Vassilakis, “surveys already done that have measured the amount of natural gas estimate it to reach some nine trillion dollars.” [3]  Even if only a fraction of that is available, it would transform the finances of Greece and the entire region.

Tulane University oil expert David Hynes told an audience in Athens recently that Greece could potentially solve its entire public debt crisis through development of its new-found gas and oil. He conservatively estimates that exploitation of the reserves already discovered could bring the country more than €302 billion over 25 years. The Greek government instead has just been forced to agree to huge government layoffs, wage cuts and pension cuts to get access to a second EU and IMF loan that will only drive the country deeper into an economic decline. [4]

Notably, the IMF and EU governments, among them Germany, demand instead that Greece sell off its valuable ports and public companies, among them of course, Greek state oil companies, to reduce state debt. Under the best of conditions the asset selloffs would bring the country perhaps €50 billion. [5] Plans call for the Greek state-owned natural gas company, DEPA, to privatize 65% of its shares to reduce debt. [6] Buyers would likely come from outside the country, as few Greek companies are in a position in the crisis to take it.

One significant problem, aside from the fact the IMF demands Greece selloff its public oil interests, is the fact that Greece has not declared a deeper exclusive economic zone like most other countries which drill for oil. There was seen little need until now. An Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) gives a state special mineral rights in its declared waters under the Third United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which came into force in November 1994. Under UNCLOS III, a nation can claim an EEZ of 200 nautical miles from its coastline. [7]

Turkey has previously stated it would consider it an act of war if Greece drilled further into the Aegean. [8] Until now that did not seem to have serious economic consequences, as no oil or gas reserves were known. Now it’s an entirely different ballgame.

Evangelos Kouloumbis, former Greek Industry Minister recently stated that Greece could cover “50% its needs with the oil to be found in offshore fields in the Aegean Sea, and the only obstacle to that is the Turkish opposition for an eventual Greek exploitation.” [9]

Hillary dances the Sirtaki too…

In July 2011 Washington joined the Greek energy Sirtaki. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton flew to Athens with energy on her mind. That was clear by the fact she brought with her her Special Envoy for Eurasian Energy, Richard Morningstar. Morningstar was husband Bill Clinton’s Special Advisor to the President on Caspian Basin Energy Diplomacy, and one of the Washington strategic operatives in the geopolitical battles to dismember the Soviet Union and surround a chaos-ridden Russia with hostile pro-NATO former states of the USSR. Morningstar, along with his controversial aide, Matthew Bryza, have been the key Washington architects of Washington’s geopolitically-motivated oil and gas pipeline projects that would isolate Russia and its Gazprom gas resources from the EU. Bryza is an open opponent of Russian Gazprom’s South Stream gas pipeline that would transit the eastern Mediterranean states. [10] Clearly the Obama Administration is not at all neutral about the new Greek oil and gas discoveries. Three days after Hillary left Athens the Greek government proposed creation of a new government agency to run tenders for oil and gas surveys and ultimate drilling bids.

Morningstar is the US specialist in economic warfare against Russian energy diplomacy. He was instrumental in backing the controversial B-T-C oil pipeline from Baku through Tbilisi in Georgia across to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, a costly enterprise designed solely to bypass Russian oil pipeline transit. He has openly proposed that Greece and Turkey drop all historic differences over Cyprus, over numerous other historic issues and agree to jointly pool all their oil and gas reserves in the Aegean Sea. He also has told the Greek government it should forget cooperation with Moscow on the South Stream and Bourgas-Alexandroupolis gas pipeline projects. [11]

According to a report from Greek political analyst Aristotle Vassilakis published in July 2011, Washington’s motive for pushing Greece to join forces with Turkey on oil and gas is to force a formula to divide resulting oil and gas revenues. According to his report, Washington proposes that Greece get 20% of revenues, Turkey another 20% and the US-backed Noble Energy Company of Houston Texas, the company successfully drilling in the Israeli and Greek offshore waters, would get the lion’s share of 60%. [12]

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s  husband, Bill, is a Washington lobbyist for Noble Energy. [13]

And some Cyprus complications…

As if these geopolitical complications were not enough, Noble Energy, has also discovered huge volumes of gas off the waters of the Republic of Cyprus. In December 2011 Noble announced a successful well offshore Cyprus in a field estimated to hold at least 7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Noble’s CEO, Charles Davidson remarked to the press, “This latest discovery in Cyprus further highlights the quality and significance of this world-class basin.” [14]

Cyprus is a complicated piece of real estate. In the 1970’s as declassified US Government documents recently revealed, then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger actively encouraged and facilitated arms to the Turkish regime of Kissinger’s former Harvard student and then- Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit, to stage a military invasion of Cyprus in 1974, in effect partitioning the island between an ethnically Turkish north and an ethnically Greek Republic of Cyprus in the south, a division which remains.  The Kissinger strategy, backed by the British was believed intended to create a pretext for a permanent US and British military listening post in the eastern Mediterranean during the Cold War. [15]

Today the ethnically Greek south, where Noble has discovered large gas deposits, is a member of the EU. Its President, Demetris Christofias, is the only national leader in the European Union who is a communist. He is also a close friend of Israel, and of Russia. In addition, he is a major critic of American foreign policy, as well as of Turkey. [16]

Now Israel is planning to build an underwater gas pipeline from the Israeli Levantine fields across Cyprus waters onto the Greek mainland where it would be sold on the EU market. The Cyprus and Israel governments have mutually agreed on delimitation of their respective economic zones, leaving Turkey in the cold. Turkey openly threatened Cyprus for signing the agreement with Noble Energy. That led to a Russian statement that it would not tolerate Turkish threats against Cyprus, further complicating Turkish-Russian relations. [17]

Turkish-Israeli relations, once quite friendly, have become increasingly strained in recent years under the Erdogan foreign policies. Ankara has expressed concern about Israel’s recent ties with its historic antagonists, Greece and the Greek side of Cyprus. Turkey’s ally the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, fears it could miss out on its fair share of the gas after Israel and Nicosia signed an agreement to divide the 250 kilometers of sea that separate them. [18]

It becomes evident, especially when we glance at a map of the eastern Mediterranean, that the oil and gas prospective bonanza there is a rapidly unfolding conflict zone of tectonic magnitude involving strategic US, Russian, EU, Israeli and Turkish, Syrian and Lebanese interests.

F. William Engdahl is the author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order        

Notes

1. Ioannis Michaletos, Greek Companies Step Up Offshore Oil Exploration—Large Reserves Possible, December 8, 2010, accessed in http://www.balkanalysis.com/greece/2010/12/08/greek-companies-step-up-offshore-oil-exploration-large-reserves-possible/.

2. Ibid.

3. Hellas Frappe, Hillary came to Greece to seal oil exploration deals!, July 21, 2011, accessed in http://hellasfrappe.blogspot.com/2011/07/special-report-hillary-came-to-greece.html.

4. Chris Blake, Drilling for oil in the Aegean nay help ease Greece’s debt crisis, July 7, 2011, accessed in https://www.hellenext.org/reinventing-greece/2011/07/drilling-for-oil-in-the-aegean-may-help-ease-greeces-debt-crisis/

5. Ibid.

6. John Daly, Greece Considering Plugging Aegean Islands into Turkish Energy Grid, 22 November 2011, accessed in http://www.businessinsider.com/greece-considering-plugging-aegean-islands-into-turkish-energy-grid-2011-11.

7. United Nations, United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 10 December 1982: PART VI: CONTINENTAL SHELF, Article76, Definition of the continental shelf, accessed in http://www.un.org/depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/part6.htm.

8. Chris Blake, op. cit.

9. Ioannis Michaletos, op. cit.

10. Hellas Frappe, op. cit.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Hugh Naylor, Vast gas fields found off Israel’s shores cause trouble at home and abroad, January 24, 2011, accessed in http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/middle-east/vast-gas-fields-found-off-israels-shores-cause-trouble-at-home-and-abroad#full.

14. Noble Energy Press Release, Significant Natural Gas Discovery Offshore Republic of Cyprus, December 28, 2011, accessed in http://www.maritime-executive.com/article/significant-natural-gas-discovery-offshore-republic-of-cyprus.

15. Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane, New documents link Kissinger to two 1970s coups, June 26, 2007, accessed in http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Intelligence_officers_confirm_Kissinger_role_in_0626.html.

16. Yilan, Cyprus conflict defies ready solution, May 30, 2011, accessed in http://turkeymacedonia.wordpress.com/2011/05/30/cyprus-conflict-defies-ready-solution/.

17. Stephen Blank, Turkey and Cyprus Gas: More Troubles Ahead in 2012, Turkey Analyst, vol. 5 no. 1, 9 January 2011, accessed in http://www.silkroadstudies.org/new/inside/turkey/2012/120109B.html.

18. Hugh Naylor, op. cit.

Iceland’s President: Let Irresponsible Banks Go Bankrupt

Sure would be nice if the Obama administration was paying attention: Iceland President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson tells Al Jazeera's Stephen Cole that Europe should let banks that are ran "irresponsibly" go bankrupt. Speaking at the annual World Economi...

Teacher Boycott of Standardized Test in Seattle Continues to Spread

A boycott of Washington state’s mandated standardized test by teachers at a Seattle school is spreading to other schools and winning support across the country, including from the two largest teachers’ unions, parents, students, researchers and educators.

The decision by teachers at Garfield High School to boycott the state’s Measures of Academy Progress because, they say, the exams don’t evaluate learning and are a waste of time is fueling a growing debate about the misuse of standardized tests in public education.

The Garfield teachers have now been joined by some teachers at a few other schools in Seattle, including the alternative Orca K-8 school. Colleagues at other schools have sent letters of support, as have groups including the Garfield PTSA, the Seattle Student Senate and a group of more than 60 researchers, educators and education activists, including Diane Ravitch and Jonathan Kozol.

The boycott is the most recent nationally publicized event in an expanding revolt against high-stakes standardized tests and the use of students’ scores to evaluate teachers, schools, districts and states. The test approach is being followed nationwide with the support of the Obama administration but against the advice of assessment experts who say these exams are not designed for such use.

Parents have started to opt out of having their children take high-stakes tests; school boards have approved resolutions calling for an end to test-based accountability systems; thousands of people have signed a national resolution protesting high-stakes tests; some superintendents have spoken out, and so have teachers. It has been building momentum in the last year, since Robert Scott, then the commissioner of education in Texas, said publicly that the mentality that standardized testing is the “end-all, be-all” is a “perversion” of what a quality education should be. In fact, the Texas House just zeroed out funding for the state’s standardized tests in a draft budget to make a statement about over-testing.

Almost all of the teachers and staff at Garfield High are boycotting the test because they say it is not aligned with curriculum and is inappropriately being used by administrators to evaluate teachers, a purpose for which it was not designed. District administrators have defended the test.

The presidents of both the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, which collectively have more than 4.5 million members, issued separate statements supporting the Garfield-led boycott.

AFT President Randi Weingarten, in this statement, thanked the Garfield teachers “for taking a courageous stand against the fixation on high-stakes testing and its harmful impact on our ability to give our students the high-quality public education they deserve.”

NEA President Dennis von Roekel said in his statement, “I, along with 3 million educators across the country, proudly support their efforts in saying ‘no’ to giving their students a flawed test that takes away from learning and is not aligned with the curriculum.”

Here’s a question: Has anybody told President Obama  that his education policies have resulted in a growing revolt against standardized testing?

© 2012 The Washington Post

Valerie Strauss writes the Answer Sheet blog for the Washington Post.

Teacher Boycott of Standardized Test in Seattle Continues to Spread

A boycott of Washington state’s mandated standardized test by teachers at a Seattle school is spreading to other schools and winning support across the country, including from the two largest teachers’ unions, parents, students, researchers and educators.

The decision by teachers at Garfield High School to boycott the state’s Measures of Academy Progress because, they say, the exams don’t evaluate learning and are a waste of time is fueling a growing debate about the misuse of standardized tests in public education.

The Garfield teachers have now been joined by some teachers at a few other schools in Seattle, including the alternative Orca K-8 school. Colleagues at other schools have sent letters of support, as have groups including the Garfield PTSA, the Seattle Student Senate and a group of more than 60 researchers, educators and education activists, including Diane Ravitch and Jonathan Kozol.

The boycott is the most recent nationally publicized event in an expanding revolt against high-stakes standardized tests and the use of students’ scores to evaluate teachers, schools, districts and states. The test approach is being followed nationwide with the support of the Obama administration but against the advice of assessment experts who say these exams are not designed for such use.

Parents have started to opt out of having their children take high-stakes tests; school boards have approved resolutions calling for an end to test-based accountability systems; thousands of people have signed a national resolution protesting high-stakes tests; some superintendents have spoken out, and so have teachers. It has been building momentum in the last year, since Robert Scott, then the commissioner of education in Texas, said publicly that the mentality that standardized testing is the “end-all, be-all” is a “perversion” of what a quality education should be. In fact, the Texas House just zeroed out funding for the state’s standardized tests in a draft budget to make a statement about over-testing.

Almost all of the teachers and staff at Garfield High are boycotting the test because they say it is not aligned with curriculum and is inappropriately being used by administrators to evaluate teachers, a purpose for which it was not designed. District administrators have defended the test.

The presidents of both the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, which collectively have more than 4.5 million members, issued separate statements supporting the Garfield-led boycott.

AFT President Randi Weingarten, in this statement, thanked the Garfield teachers “for taking a courageous stand against the fixation on high-stakes testing and its harmful impact on our ability to give our students the high-quality public education they deserve.”

NEA President Dennis von Roekel said in his statement, “I, along with 3 million educators across the country, proudly support their efforts in saying ‘no’ to giving their students a flawed test that takes away from learning and is not aligned with the curriculum.”

Here’s a question: Has anybody told President Obama  that his education policies have resulted in a growing revolt against standardized testing?

© 2012 The Washington Post

Valerie Strauss writes the Answer Sheet blog for the Washington Post.

Winger Astroturfers Declare Feb. 23rd ‘Day of Resistance’

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This time around they don't have their buddy Rick Santelli to do their PR work, but just like 2009, the ultra-conservatives are declaring the public relations war ON. I'm certain it's no coincidence that this comes on the heels of the NRA unleashing their gun manufacturer lobbyists and PR machine on the American public.

Via Right Wing News:

While Barack Obama is calling for Americans to give up their freedom, their rights, and their guns, we’re calling for Americans to resist. We’re calling on Tea Partiers, moderate Republicans, Libertarians and even moderate Democrats to stand up one month from today, on the 23rd of February and say, “No more!” Right Wing News is joining Dustin Stockton, Western Representation PAC andThe Tea Party.net in calling for rallies all across the nation next month on the 23rd. It’ll be a Day of Resistance where gun owners and patriots can peacefully gather and show Barack Obama, the media, and the knockkneed Republicans in Congress that we may have lost a battle last November, but we haven’t lost the war. Don’t meekly give up your 2nd Amendment rights when you can stand with us and RESIST!

Oh, my, my, my. Now, these folks would love for everyone to believe this is just a grassroots effort by dedicated patriots, right?

Western Representation PAC (WRPAC) was born in the astroturf health care reform wars of 2009. Formed in April, 2009, it morphed into just another arm of the Republican money river by 2012. WRPAC's director is Roger Stockton of Nevada, who also serves as President of Innovative Networks, Inc., an company which coincidentally earned a whole lot of money from the WRPAC 2012 election efforts for providing email services. Along with Dustin Stockton,
WRPAC supported Allen West's 2012 campaign along with Richard Mourdock and several others.


Put Niedermeyer on it, he's a sneaky little sh*t!

One of WRPAC's more interesting consultants is Edward Niedermeyer, who wrote op-eds for the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal, and has been a vocal critic of the Chevy Volt, which I'm sure has contributed to Fox News' and Rush Limbaugh's periodic trash talk about the Volt.

Neidermeyer was paid $11,000 total from September to November 11, 2012. In the days leading up to the election, his op-ed pieces about the Chrysler Jeep story, long debunked, were published on the Wall Street Journal and Weekly Standard. He received a check for $5,000.00 on November 11, 2012. Nowhere did he disclose that he was being paid by a political action committee for "consulting services" in those articles.

WRPAC also made five-figure transfers on a regular basis to "Stop This Insanity, Inc", a 501(c)4 organization run by Todd Ceferatti, better known as TeaParty.Net. Stop This Insanity's consulting firm is DB Capitol Strategies, run by attorney Dan Backer. Ceferatti is a pyramid builder in Arizona. Here's some background on him:

Among the findings of the CBS 5 News investigation, the organization spent $181,000 on Google, Facebook and other websites for advertising. As a result, when CBS 5 producers typed the phrase “tea party” into the Google search engine, the first paid advertisement that popped up was for JoinTheTeaParty.us. Additional digging into the organization’s background revealed the director of the nonprofit also has ties to companies that collect and sell people’s personal information. Todd Cefaratti is listed as the director the the nonprofit, as well as a company known asreverseleadclub.com.

Raw Story reported on them in 2010, and it wasn't pretty. They collected nearly $500,000 in donations, but none of it went to support candidates.

I'm certain Fox News and Rush Limbaugh will be picking up the drumbeat for this "Day of Resistance" after Dan Backer reaches out to them and they pay a few more "journalists" to write about it without disclosing their affiliation.

They're not going to get away with it this time. We've all gotten a little smarter and a little quicker about identifying these so-called grassroots efforts for what they are: cheap, dirty astroturf.

The Stock Market Is Back To December 2007 Levels; Here Is What Isn’t

This past week, America's premier financial comedy channel, which lately specializes in such "epic financial journalism" as the real billionaire hedge husbands of New York (because sagging Nielsen ratings are always a direct corollary of central marke...

Why Are Right-Wingers So Crazy in Love With Israel?

It's much more than evangelical Christians hoping for the rapture.

Ever since word leaked that Chuck Hagel would be nominated for Secretary of Defense, Senate Republicans have launched a non-stop attack against their former colleague from Nebraska. It’s not just neoconservatives. The assault comes from across the ranks of the GOP. The charge that first dominated the headlines and is still, in many quarters, the loudest: Hagel is “anti-Israel.”

To call the evidence for this charge thin is an understatement. In the Senate Hagel went on record with the same pro-Israel sentiments expected of every senator: “The United States will remain committed to defending Israel. Our relationship with Israel is a special and historic one,” he said.

The L.A. Times notes that he put American money where his mouth was, “voting repeatedly to provide [Israel] with military aid.” He supported an Israeli-Palestinian peace as long as it did not compromise Israel's security or its Jewish identity -- a crucial demand for most Israelis.

So what are his alleged “anti-Israel” crimes?

  1. He suggested that Israel should negotiate directly with Hamas -- which in fact Israel is already doing, since it’s obvious that no peace agreement can endure and keep Israel secure unless Hamas signs on to it.

  1. When Hagel affirmed America's enduring support for Israel, he added that “it need not and cannot be at the expense of our Arab and Muslim relationships.” In other words, he wants an even-handed policy that puts American interests first.

  1. In an interview Hagel once said that, as a senator, he did put U.S. interests first: "The Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people [on Capitol Hill]. … I support Israel, but my first interest is I take an oath of office to the Constitution of the United States.” The interviewer, the State Department’s long-time (and Jewish) Mideast expert Aaron David Miller, saidthat Hagel was merely stating “a fact: the pro-Israeli community or lobby has a powerful voice. … To deny that is simply to be completely out of touch with reality." Miller called the attempts to paint Hagel as anti-Semitic "shameful and scurrilous."

To sum up the charge, Hagel has shown that when it comes to the Israel-Palestine issue he faces the facts, takes a reasonable view, and as Secretary of Defense would put his own country’s interest first.

To his critics, that’s simply unacceptable. Like most supporters of the Israeli government, they treat even the slightest hint of criticism as if it were a mortal attack on Israel itself. The slightest deviation from their “Israel can do no wrong” agenda evokes howls of condemnation.

Who are these American devotees of (right-wing) Israel? Here is the one place Hagel can be faulted. His widely cited comment about the power of “the Jewish lobby” suggests that Jews are to blame for keeping U.S. Mideast policy so blatantly one-sided all these years. Hagel later apologized, saying that he really meant the “pro-Israel lobby.” But the mistaken stereotype persists that Jews control U.S. Mideast policy.

In fact, what American Jews do is debate vigorously among themselves about Israel and U.S. policy. There are multiple Jewish “pro-Israel” lobbies promoting quite different views. A spokesman for one of those lobbies, J Street, rightly says that by now “the center of the community is exactly where Sen. Hagel is on issues relating to Israel.” And J Street has recent polling data to prove it.

Maybe that’s one big reason AIPAC (the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee), the Anti-Defamation League, and other old-guard Jewish groups that typically support Israel, right-wing and wrong, are so far remaining silent on the Hagel nomination. Maybe they’re finally recognizing the truth that Peter Beinart and so many others are revealing: Those big-name organizations are run by aging conservatives who are out of step with the rest of American Jewry. Few serious observers credit their claim to speak for the Jewish community as a whole. As their credibility fades, so does their political power.

Another sign of the changing times: Even the Senate’s most prominent Jewish “pro- (right-wing) Israel”  hawk, Charles Schumer, has announced his support for the Hagel nomination.

Recent polls from CNNthe Huffington Post, and Pew make it clear that, in the U.S., the strongest support for Israel’s right-wing policies now comes not from Jews but from Republicans. They’re roughly twice as likely as Democrats to take Israel’s side, while Democrats are about five times as likely as GOP’ers to sympathize with Palestinians. (About 70 percent of Jews vote Democratic.)

These polls, taken after Israel attacked Gaza in November 2012, showed that men, whites and older people (dare we say, “Romney voters”?) were most likely to support Israel unreservedly in the conflict.

Now we know that Republicans will attack an Obama nominee unreservedly, even when their charges on his Mideast views are irrational, to say the least. The Republican Party has become the strongest “pro- (right-wing) Israel” lobby, demanding 100% blind support for whatever Israel’s government does.

Why are Republicans so crazy in love with Israel?

One common explanation points to a love triangle: Republicans, Israel and evangelical Christianity. But after studying the interface of religion and politics in America for many years, I’m convinced that the power of religion to shape political life is usually overrated.

Some evangelical theologies do preach that Jews must control all of the Holy Land before the second coming of Christ. (The organized “Christian Zionist” movement is based on this concept, but as a political group they get little press and have relatively little clout in Washington.)

However, in the evangelical vision of the future, the powerful Jewish state is just a passing phase. In the next phase (to oversimplify a bit) all the Jews become Christians or go to hell. The New Testament image of Jews as “Christ-killers,” rejecting and therefore rejected by the true God, has never been totally erased either. So, although white evangelicals are more likely than other Americans to support Israel, their religion makes them rather ambivalent toward the Jewish religion, to say the least.

What’s more, conservative evangelicals were enthusiastic supporters of Israel in the state’s earliest years, when a large majority of Israelis were strictly secular and avoided anything that smacked of religion.

In fact many of those first Israelis were socialists. Yet American conservatives, evangelical or not, gave full support to the fledgling Jewish state.

The main reason was not religion, but politics. Israel was created in 1948, the very same year that the U.S. committed itself wholeheartedly to cold war against the "communists.” Israel soon agreed (under strong U.S. pressure, some historians say) to be the main U.S. ally in the Middle East, where, most Americans believed (inaccurately), the Arabs were all turning pro-communist.

Israel served U.S. military needs in various ways, especially as an intelligence-gathering outpost. When Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger formulated their doctrine of appointing regional “policemen” to serve U.S. interests around the world, Israel and the Shah’s Iran got the job for the Middle East. With the fall of the Shah in 1979, Israel was left alone as our cop on the Mideast beat.

But Republican affection for Israel reflects much more than that nation’s military usefulness. The deepest root of the feeling is the symbolic meaning of Israel in the conservative worldview. The cold war reinforced the conservative penchant for seeing the world in moral absolutes. So Israel became the Middle East’s only “good guy,” surrounded by a sea of “bad guys.”

The Israeli government played on this simplistic dualism with a skillful PR campaign, depicting their nation as an outpost of civilized American values in a savage Arab wilderness. To most Americans, it looked like our own “Wild West” story all over again: Brave pioneers turning the desert into a fertile garden, with a plow in one hand and a gun in the other, using the gun only when they were forced to defend themselves.

In the Israeli narrative, Jews were always the victims, constantly on guard against unprovoked attacks -- just like the pioneers of the American Wild West. The fact that Jews had displaced Arabs, just as whites displaced Native Americans, often by violent means, simply wasn’t allowed into the story. Nor was the fact that Israel’s military strength made its existence quite secure. Few Americans questioned the myth of Israel’s constant insecurity.

Americans of the Cold War era empathized with Israel all the more because here in the U.S. we were immersed in our own myth of homeland insecurity, constantly on guard against the imagined threat of communist aggression. In this way as in so many others Israel seemed like a miniature America, a partner in the global battle of good against evil.

Though the Cold War is long gone, that sense of kinship remains just as strong among conservatives, who still see the U.S. and Israel as champions of absolute good in a war against the “evildoers.” Indeed Israel looks even better now because conservatives assume that the “evildoers” plotting to destroy us are the very same Arab “terrorists” who are supposedly trying to wipe out Israel.

Conservatives simply ignore the facts. West Bank Palestinians have shifted almost entirely to nonviolent tactics in their struggle against military occupation. Even in Gaza, Hamas has long observed a truce, firing rockets only when Israeli attacks provoke them. And for years Hamas leaders have been supporting a two-state peace agreement. But none of this fits the conservatives’ beloved Wild West stereotype or their narrative of endless insecurity. So they mistakenly go on assuming that Israel is constantly under attack by vicious savages.

The conservative love for Israel has been strengthened by another mistaken belief: that all Israeli Jews are white folks. In fact a sizeable number of Jewish Israelis came from Muslim lands; they and their descendants have brown skin. But few Americans know it. Yet all know that Arabs generally have brown skin. No one can say exactly how strong the racial (and sometimes, no doubt, racist) factor is in the Republican feeling for Israel. But no one can deny that it’s part of the picture.

Conservatives’ tenuous sense of security depends on the reassurance they get from believing that there’s a permanent structure in the world, based on permanent dividing lines -- between nations, races, religions, and most importantly, between good and evil, with their own kind carrying the banner of the good.

As long as they can see good battling evil, it doesn’t matter exactly who the “good guys” and “bad guys” are. It’s all essentially a matter of symbolism. So the roles can switch in surprising ways. (Osama bin Laden was once the darling of the right-wingers when he fought the communists in Afghanistan.)

Israelis are well aware of how easily American affections can change. Their press is full of discussions about the risk of losing their sole remaining ally.

For now, though, the Republican love for Israel is holding firm. It has been cemented by the recent shift to the right among Israeli Jews. Politically, the last few years in Israel have looked a lot like the Reagan years in the U.S., making it easier for the GOP to feel that sense of kinship.

Even if Israel moves back toward the center, it’s not likely to lose the fervent devotion of Republicans. They’ve been so convinced for so long that Israel can do no wrong, it hardly matters to them what Israel does. It’s Israel the symbol, not the reality, that the Republicans love.

Now they are demonstrating their ardor by acting out a symbolic drama in the Senate, attacking Chuck Hagel on the flimsiest grounds. The “pro- (right-wing) Israel” stance is “very much a litmus test for many in the Republican Party,” as Washington Post analyst Aaron Blake says, “and it will make it difficult for any Republican senator to vote for him.” Like all true lovers, they let their passion overrule reason.

So they’re taking a political gamble. In the latest polls, between 39% and 59% of Americans say they support Israel in its conflict with the Palestinians. (Between 9% and 13% support Palestine.) That imbalance might make the Republican position look safe enough. But it leaves a huge portion of the electorate holding no clear preference. How all those undecided voters respond to this latest display of Republican fanaticism is anyone’s guess.

And even among those who back Israel, many will agree with what Chuck Hagel has said: "I'm a supporter of Israel, always have been. It's in Israel's best interest to get a peace. …Peace comes through dealing with people. Peace doesn’t come at the end of a bayonet or the end of a gun."

The Hagel confirmation hearings should trigger a public debate, weighing the nominee’s view against the Republicans’ irrational love for Israel, which may serve their own needs in a perverse way but wreaks such terrible harm on Arabs, Israelis and the U.S. position in the Middle East. 

Japan’s Currency War. Militarization and Monetary Policy

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Japan’s new Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) government has begun implementing an aggressive nationalist program on two fronts. An expansion of the military unshackled from constitutional restraints is being matched by a unilateralist monetary policy aimed at weakening the yen and expanding exports at the expense of Japan’s rivals.

Under intense pressure from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the Bank of Japan (BoJ) announced on Tuesday that it would expand its inflation target from 1 to 2 percent “at the earliest possible time” through an open-ended purchase of bonds and other assets—a policy in line with the US Federal Reserve’s “quantitative easing.”

However, the central bank, which has been resistant to demands for monetary easing, put off bond purchases until January next year. Money markets responded accordingly. Having driven down the value of the yen by 12 percent against the US dollar since November on the expectation of Abe’s new monetary policy, the markets bid the value of the yen higher following the BoJ announcement.

Abe praised the central bank’s decision, saying that it represented “a step toward bold monetary easing.” This move will not be the last, however. Abe warned in the course of last month’s election campaign that he would, if need be, legislate to force the BoJ to carry out his monetary policy. Moreover, he has the opportunity to install a new BoJ governor when the term of the incumbent ends in March.

The BoJ decision immediately provoked warnings from Japan’s economic rivals that it could trigger a round of competitive devaluations—a “currency war.” Bank of England Governor Mervyn King said that if other countries followed suit, it would be “hard to be optimistic about how easy it will be to manage the resulting tensions.” Michael Meister, a senior member of Germany’s ruling party, warned that the decision could “create a spiral that hurts us all,” and indicated that Berlin might seek G20 support to pressure Japan to change course.

Speaking to the Financial Times, Japan’s economy minister, Akira Amari, hit back at concerns expressed by Jens Weidmann, the president of Germany’s Bundesbank, over “alarming infringements” of the BoJ’s independence. Rejecting the accusation, Akira declared: “Germany is the country whose exports have benefited most from the euro area’s fixed exchange rate system. He’s not in a position to criticise.”

The Abe government’s policies are being driven by the country’s worsening economic crisis. The protracted stagnation following the collapse of speculative property and share bubbles in the late 1980s is intersecting with the global economic breakdown that began with the 2008 financial crisis. Repeated attempts to boost growth through public works programs failed. The result is an unsustainable public debt, currently at 240 percent of gross domestic product—the highest level of any industrialised country.

One of the factors in Japan’s ability to weather the economic storm has been its large trade surpluses, but the trade balance turned sharply negative in past two years. In 2012, Japan experienced its largest-ever trade deficit. Exports plunged 5.8 percent overall and by 15.8 percent to China amid sharp tensions over disputed islands in the East China Sea. Imports increased, particularly of energy, in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the shutdown of nuclear power plants.

Japan’s inherent economic vulnerabilities are being exposed. As an island nation largely devoid of natural resources, Japanese capitalism has always been heavily dependent on export markets and access to cheap raw materials. The air of desperation surrounding the Abe government’s aggressive monetary policy and renewed economic stimulus measures echoes Japan’s response in the 1930s.

Hard hit by the Great Depression and a dramatic slump in exports, the Japanese government that assumed office in December 1931 ended the gold backing for the yen, greatly expanded public spending, especially on the military, and cut interest rates to stimulate business. The value of the yen plunged by 60 percent against the US dollar and 44 percent against the pound sterling.

Writing in Britain’s Daily Telegraph, business commentator Ambrose Evans-Pritchard described Abe’s policies as “a copy of what happened in the early 1930s under [Finance Minister] Korehiyo Takahashi, the first of his era to tear up the rule book and pull his country out of the Great Depression… Few dispute that Japan pioneered the world’s most successful [economic] experiment from 1932 to 1936. The trick was to hit hard and combine all forms of stimulus, each leavening the other.”

This so-called “success,” however, came at a terrible price. Takahashi’s policies were in line with the beggar-thy-neighbour agenda increasingly pursued by all the imperialist powers, which greatly heightened geo-political tensions. Moreover, Japan’s economic program was accompanied by police-state repression against the working class at home and military aggression abroad to open up markets and access to raw materials. Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and China in 1937 set the stage for the eruption the Pacific War in 1941, with devastating consequences for the working class.

Today, the right-wing Abe government is pursuing a similarly perilous mixture of nationalist economic policies and militarism—and it is not alone. The Obama administration’s resort to unlimited quantitative easing and its aggressive “pivot to Asia” to contain China have encouraged Abe to fire his own shot in the developing international currency wars, as well as to remilitarise Japan. After a decade of US-led neo-colonial wars in the Middle East and an emerging scramble for Africa, the Japanese ruling class is drawing the conclusion that a strong military is necessary to prosecute their economic and strategic interests.

This slide towards an even more devastating global war is being accompanied by the whipping up of poisonous nationalism in every country. The only social force that can prevent war is the international working class through a unified struggle to abolish the profit system and its division of the globe into rival nation states, and establish a worldwide planned socialist economy to meet the social needs of humanity as a whole.

West Point Think Tank Buries the Dynamite

The United States Military Academy at West Point's  Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) is often referred to as a "think tank," whose primary mission is to inform and shape counterterrorism policy and strategy.  CTC's  recent study on domestic right-wing terrorist groups clearly reveals that more taxpayer-funded "tanking" than thinking goes on at the CTC. Indeed, after carefully reviewing the study myself, I am confident that the ladies and gentlemen that worked on this project have gone down in flames in the attempted accomplishment of their mission.

The CTC attempts to aim a blinding spotlight at the Racist/White Supremacist Movement, the Anti-Federalist Movement, and the Christian fundamentalist Movement and their potential for violence. While exorbitant amounts of money and time were wasted on the CTC's flimsy, tissue-thin report, it fails to focus so much as a dim penlight on a far greater threat to the liberty of our brave military personnel. Allow me to fill in the blanks for you.

We at the  Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) consider the report pathetically cold consolation to the countless members of our military whose Constitutionally-guaranteed civil and human rights are unceasingly violated by vicious attacks from a far greater and more sinister enemy within. As the founder and President of MRFF, a United States Air Force Academy graduate, and a sentient human being with access to public media, I observe on a daily basis the despicable and systemic abuse of authority by the members of our nation's military, up and down and through the chains of command. The forced imposition of fundamentalist Christianity throughout our American armed forces is the perpetual "flavor of the day," and has been for decades.

To paraphrase, more irreparable harm has been done with the point of a pen than at the point of a gun. The CTC obsesses on skinheads and the most extreme fundamentalist Bible-wavers. In doing so, it ignores the daily, relentless assault on freedom committed by those with stars on their chests and stripes on their shoulders.

There have been an unfathomable number of  personal accounts of our nation's servicemembers being given little choice in whether or not to take part in Christian events, and even many commanders throwing hazard to the wind (along with the United States Constitution) and making participation in religious ceremonies outright mandatory!  We live in a world where our enemies are already hostile to our country because they believe that our leaders are using our armed forces for the purposes of latter day Crusades. How, then, does allowing this utterly reprehensible nonsense to continue not produce a greater threat than the handful of neo-Nazis still getting together for bonfires and hate parades?

The CTC report wantonly ignored the continual, systemic proselytizing among United States military personnel. This brainwashing results in widespread, brutal stigmatizing of those opposed or indifferent to fundamentalist Christian doctrine--a savage trampling of their Constitutional rights!

Foolishly, the CTC engages in high-minded dithering about domestic terrorist groups and their potential for violence. That's like having a casual discussion about removing piles of newspapers and oily rags from the garage, while inside the house, the kitchen, the living room, and the bedrooms are blazing away in full conflagration! Money and time are better spent on exposing to the light of day and aggressively punishing the single-minded, unconstitutional religious predators who serve ubiquitously in our military, constituting literal multitudes of constitutionally crooked American military personnel.

Blake Page, Director of MRFF Affairs at West Point, recently stated, "Some may attempt to mince words... with claims that Christianity is a philosophy and Christmas is a cultural tradition." Page refers to officers who blithely use disgusting ruses such as "ceremony" and "custom" to excuse the blatant and systematic advancement of a rapacious sectarian religious agenda.

Breathless media coverage trumpeted the news of Page's bravery in withdrawing from the Military Academy. Page, a veteran and proud cadet, was a mere six months shy of graduation. His fearless action exposed him to liability for a small fortune in academy tuition and risked his being forced involuntarily back into the Army as a junior enlisted soldier. With the buzz of personal attacks and malcontent directed toward former Cadet Page that resounded up and down the Academy's hallowed halls for weeks after his viral blog titled  "Why I Don't Want to be a West Point Graduate," no one could dare argue that the authors of the CTC's report were unaware the problem existed. Page  continues to fight--a la Rosa Parks--against the insidious, ingrained forces that trample on his rights and those of his fellow cadets.

One hundred and fifty-one West Point cadets, faculty, and staff are MRFF clients, and 90% of those cadets, faculty, and staff are Christians. Clearly, MRFF's battle is not with the Christian religion, despite the bloodthirsty, threatening hate mail, phone calls, and "other serious category" threats that MRFF staffers, my family, and I  receive continuously. The content of these deranged attacks is beyond vitriolic, furthering the false and hateful characterization that MRFF is somehow guilty of the canard of "anti-Christian" bigotry.

Perhaps the CTC has taken a step farther and begun to physically plug their ears and close their eyes to news that might scuff the shine on their donors' highly polished low-quarters. Earlier in 2012, due to MRFF's demands,  unabashed Islamophobe General Boykin was forced to back out after having been invited to speak at an official West Point event, ludicrously dubbed a "Prayer Breakfast."  Boykin is now the Executive Vice President of the wretchedly hateful, Christian extremist Family Research Council.

The skinheads, the sheet-wearers, and the cross-burners are easy to spot. But the more devastating injury, as MRFF has shown repeatedly, is the stark and severe NATIONAL SECURITY THREAT wrought by those in suits, in vestments, and--most disgracefully of all--in the uniform of our nation's armed forces.
 
In short, West Point's Combating Terrorism Center has completely failed to investigate whatsoever the pervasive "inside job" emanating from and permeating the official military establishment of the United States armed forces. There should be no mystery as to why an organization situated at West Point would prefer to feign ignorance.  They do it because they know that speaking up from within can cost them their careers and worse.

As Frederick Douglass said, "Power concedes nothing without a demand." It's hard and it's dangerous to stand up and demand one's civil rights. Look, when even the President of the United States of America gives a  nontrivial, symbolic endorsement of Christian exceptionalism at his second inauguration by having a prayer "In Jesus' name," followed by a choir singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," an unabashed anthem of Christian supremacy, who would dare to step up and say, "No Mr. President, our Constitution applies to you too!"?  If no one else, then MRFF and I will.

New Englanders Converge: ‘No Tar Sands Pipeline’

(Photo: Common Dreams / Creative Commons)Opponents of a proposed pipeline project that would bring Canadian tar sands oil through New England gathered in Portland, Maine Saturday for a regional protest against the scheme by oil pipeline companies to use existing lines to transport what experts call the "world's dirtiest fuel".

Regional allies from across the northeast and Canada took to the streets of the small, coastal city to protest proposed plans to bring toxic tar sands oil from Montreal, Canada to Portland, Maine through an existing pipeline system.

Opposition has been growing in the northeast on both sides of the border against the oil giants behind the toxic plan—Canada's Enbridge and the US-based ExxonMobil.

"This is our water, our land, our homes, our climate and our future. And we say 'No' to dirty tar sands oil." –David Stember, 350.org

In the largest rally against tar sands ever seen in the region, more than two thousand people braved the sub freezing weather, marching to the Maine State Pier for a rally overlooking Casco Bay where the proposed pipeline from Montreal would end at an export terminal.  Saturday's Portland rally was the culminating event which followed a week-long series of smaller actions in towns and cities in Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and other places.

"Our goal this week and here today is to put the powers who think they can make this pipeline decision behind closed doors on notice," said David Stember of Vermont, and an organizer with 350.org, at the rally Saturday.

"Whether it's the National Energy Board deciding on Enbridge's plan to bring tar sands into Montreal, or President Obama who can stop this Exxon/Portland Montreal Pipeline Company project by denying it a new premit, the voice of the people will he heard," he said. "This is our water, our land, our homes, our climate and our future. And we say 'No' to dirty tar sands oil."

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The Portland Montreal Pipeline Company, a subsidiary of ExxonMobil and headquartered in South Portland, says they have no current plans to reverse the flow of their pipeline to transport tar sands oil, but would be open to that option if it became available. Enbridge, for its part, is openly pushing for the reversal of the so-called "Number 9 Line" in Canada.

"The people of eastern Canada and New England have their own plan and are forming a wall of opposition to keep the east tar sands free," the coalition of local and national campaign groups who organized Saturday's actions said in a joint statement.

US Congresswomen Chellie Pingree made news at the rally by telling the crowd that she agreed a flow reversal "would pose serious environmental risk" and would, on behalf of her consituents, "ask the Obama administration to do a full environmental review of any attempts to pump tar sands through that old pipeline."

"Let's just say here and now," Pingree continued, "That ExxonMobil should not be allowed to move ahead with a risky scheme without a presidential permit, and I don't believe the facts will support one."

“Maine and the region have everything to lose and nothing to gain from sending toxic tar sands across our state,” said Lisa Pohlmann of the Natural Resources Council of Maine.

“We cannot afford the risk of tar sands oil oozing across the Northeast in Exxon’s pipeline and we will be calling on the State Department to demand an environmental review of this risky proposal," she added. "There is too much at stake.”

“We call on the National Energy Board of Canada to deny approval of the Canadian section of this tar sands pipeline, and on the U.S. State Department to conduct a full environmental review which allows complete public input,” said Stember from 350.org, which helped organize the rally along with other national groups including the Sierra Club and National Wildlife Federation, and local groups including 350 MaineEnvironment Maine and the Natural Resources Council of Maine.

The already existing 236-mile long, 62-year old pipeline is currently used to pump light crude oil from Portland to Canada; however, the Enbridge/Exxon plan would use the pipeline to pump tar sands originating from Alberta, Canada, to Portland's Casco Bay.

The highly toxic substance is known to be far more corrosive than other forms of oil and presents a much higher risk of pipeline leakage and spills.

"If tar sands are pumped through that pipeline, a leak could endanger the area’s water supply at Sebago Lake and be almost impossible to clean up, because the heavy oil sinks to the bottom of waterways," writes William Hall at Bangor Daily News.

In addition to Saturday’s protest, EcoWatch reports that dozens of solidarity protests have been taking place throughout the week, including the "Hands across the Connecticut River demonstration where the tar sands pipeline crosses the Connecticut river in Vermont and New Hampshire, picket lines and marches in front of numerous Exxon Mobil Stations, Flash Mobs in downtown centers, human oil spills and numerous drop in visits to local offices of members of Congress."

The march wound its way through the streets and alleys Portland's Old Port district:

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(All Photos: CommonDreams / Creative Commons)

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Forging an Independent Foreign Policy

On January 23, 2013, The Jerusalem Post reported on a meeting held by Chuck Hagel, President Barak Obama’s defense secretary nominee, in which Hagel stated his strong commitment to preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and to maintaining Israel’s qualitative military edge. In addition, Hagel’s office stated, “Hagel appreciated the opportunity to have a constructive, informed and wide-ranging discussion.” What is wrong with this picture?Chuck Hagel shakes hands with t Leon Panetta, at a convention in Washington on May 9, 2012. (Photo: Glenn Fawcett)

At the meeting were present US Vice President Joe Biden, and leaders of the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). This meeting followed a previous one held by Hagel with top Jewish Democrats in which he apologized for a 2006 comment in which he described the “Jewish lobby” as intimidating”. During the meeting, he reassured them that despite his past critical stance on war with Iran to prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon, he was now on board with President Obama’s stand on this issue.

And the inevitable question is why does a nominee for defense secretary of an independent country have to explain his intentions to anybody, least of all to people who advocate an aggressive policy against another independent country? And why does the United States Vice President have to be present to give additional authority to his statements?

And the obvious answer seems to be that these organizations, widely known as the pro-Israel lobby, are the ones that through their influence could derail Hagel’s confirmation as secretary of defense. What is the meaning of all of this? Let me bring the voice of Uri Avnery, one of the most honest, lucid and courageous observers of the US and Israel political scene, a former member of the Knesset and a staunch peace activist.

“Americans must be race of angels,” he writes, “how else to explain the incredible patience with which they suffer the fact that in a vital sphere of US interests, American foreign policy is dictated by a foreign country? For five decades, at least, US Middle East policy has been decided in Jerusalem. Almost all American officials dealing with this area are, well, Jewish. The Hebrew-speaking American ambassador in Tel Aviv could easily be the Israeli ambassador in Washington. Sometimes I wonder if in meetings of American and Israeli diplomats, they don’t sometimes drop into Yiddish.”

If anyone doubts the accuracy of Avnery’s characterization, it would be a good memory exercise to remember Netanyahu’s last address to the US congress, where practically all senators and congressmen wildly applauded Netanyahu’s every single sentence, while at the same time jumping up and down like children at a “piñata” party. Is this the behavior one should expect from representatives of an independent country? Why are they so subservient to the interests of a foreign country?

Lawrence Davidson, a professor of history at West Chester University in West Chester, Pennsylvania, offers an explanation through a process that he calls “lobbification.” According to him, at some point in time every single Congressman or Senator has been approached by a lobbyist—in the case of the Middle East, by one representing AIPAC.

The lobbyist offers the representatives financial campaign assistance, good media coverage, briefings on the Middle East and even trips to Israel. All that he is asked in return is that they consistently vote in a pro-Israel way. Should they refuse this offer the lobbyist group will probably support the opponent party, making sure that those who refuse the offer are defeated in the next election.

As a result, Davidson points out, “…the national interest is replaced by the parochial interests of lobbies that are successful at suborning Congress and the White House

-Zionists pushing support for a racist and expansionist foreign power, Cuban-Americans carrying on a 53 year old vendetta against the government in Havana, the NRA striving to protect the right of every American to own a submachine gun, and the like.” Is this the kind of foreign policy we want our country to have? Is this how we want our democracy to work?

César Chelala

 César Chelala, MD, PhD, is a co-winner of an Overseas Press Club of America award. He is also the foreign correspondent for Middle East Times International (Australia).

‘GOP should stop being the stupid party’

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal speaks in Hot Springs, Arkansas. (file photo)

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal says the Republican Party has to stop being the “stupid” party, as its approval ratings dipped to between 10 and 30 percent in recent public opinion polls.

Jindal made the remarks about his own party on Thursday in an address at the three-day winter meeting of the Republican National Committee, which was held in Charlotte, North Carolina and concluded on Friday.

It seems that Jindal has decided to resort to shock therapy to convince GOP officials that they must make serious efforts to improve the Republican Party’s image at this critical juncture.

“The Republican Party does not need to change our principles -- but we might need to change just about everything else we are doing.”

"We've got to stop being the stupid party. It's time for a new Republican Party that talks like adults," Jindal said. "We had a number of Republicans damage the brand this year with offensive and bizarre comments. I'm here to say we've had enough of that."


Jindal, thought to be a potential 2016 presidential contender, said Republicans have become obsessed with Capitol Hill number crunching and have failed to publicize the party's strong points on financial growth policies.

He contended that the Republicans had gone too far in the recent debates with the Democrats over “which party can better manage the federal government” and added, "If our vision is not bigger than that, we do not deserve to win."

Over the past two months, conservative Republicans have held high-stakes budget battles with President Barack Obama over raising the debt limit and "fiscal cliff" spending cuts and tax increases, which have been a public relations catastrophe for the party.

"We as Republicans have to accept that government number crunching -- even conservative number crunching -- is not the answer to our nation's problems," Jindal stated.

"If you take nothing else away from what I say today, please understand this -- we must not become the party of austerity. We must become the party of growth," he added.

GVN/HGL

“Bad Terrorists” versus NATO’s “Good Terrorists”

osamaobama

The chief of the Spanish police Enrique Baron told La Razon newspaper on January 24th that Spanish « jihadists » have left Spain for Syria where they are fighting in Japhat Al Nousra, the Al Qaeda affiliated terrorist group currently at war against the Al Assad government, while other Spaniards have gone to Mali to join the fighting against French forces there. [1]

According to the report, three Spanish jihadists have already been killed in Syria. Baron expressed concerns that these terrorists could pose a future threat to Spanish national security. On March 11th 2004, several trains were bombed in Madrid killing 191 people and wounding hundreds more. The barbaric attacks were blamed on Al Qaeda.

In December 2011, former Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar wrote an article for CNBC where he outlined the dangers presented by the Islamist direction of the Arab Spring and the war in Libya. He noted that the Libyan rebel military commander Abdul Hakim Belhadj was “one of the suspects involved in the Madrid bombing of March 2004”. [2]

Belhadj was made “governor” of Tripoli by NATO during its conquest of Libya in 2011. The Libyan terrorist also enjoyed a brief stint as a columnist with Britain’s “left-wing” Guardian newspaper, where the Islamist claimed to promote “democratic” values. [3]

As calls for president Assad to step down continue to be heard, a strange alliance between Western liberal democracies and Islamic terrorism is manifesting itself throughout Europe. The presence of jihadist fighters from Britain is also well documented. Yet the British government seems blithely indifferent.[4]

Ireland has the distinction of having provided one of the most important jihadi psychopaths for the destruction of Libya in 2011 and the current war on Syria, a Dublin-based thug called Mehdi al-Herati. [5]

Ireland, a country that fought colonialism for hundreds of years, is constitutionally a neutral country. During the War of Independence in 1919, the British government sent dozens of death squads, known as the Black and Tans into Ireland to terrorize the country into submission. This is precisely what NATO is doing to Syria today, yet the Irish Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs Eamon Gilmore, joins his pals in NATO to blame the Syrian government for doing precisely what his forefathers did to protect the motherland against foreign aggression and colonialism.[6]

According to the German daily Die Welt, over one hundred European jihadists are now fighting for Al Qaeda in Syria, where they are preparing a base for operations against European citizens. Florian Flage and Clemens Wergin write :

According to Western intelligence sources, Al Nousra commander Abu Mohammad Al-Dschulani is already planning to extend his operations base from Syria through Turkey into Europe. He is preparing for the day for the fall of Assad, in order to make Syria a centre for Jihadist activity in other countries.” [7]

Yet the German and EU governments continue to support these criminals in Syria while claiming to fight them in Mali. The hollow, mortifying chant of Western governments and corporate media that Assad is “killing his own people” is finally being exposed, as people in Europe wake up to the nightmare that they are being ruled by the mentally ill.

French jihadists are also fighting in Syria. Jacques Bérès, a doctor from Médecins Sans Frontières, said last year that many of the patients he treated in a hospital in Aleppo were jihadists from Paris. Responding to the revelation that French terrorists were fighting the Assad government in Syria, French “anti-terrorist” judge Marc Trévidic smiled and said “ they are our friends, how can we call them terrorists”. It is difficult to know if Trévidic’s smile was meant to indicate the unutterable absurdity of French foreign policy or rather an open admission that the French security state will decide who is a terrorist in accordance with its geopolitical interests. [8]

In an interview with French state radio France Inter on January 5th Trévidic warned that an unlawful system of incarceration similar to Guantanamo Bay could be put in place if France was to experience a wave of terrorist attacks. Yet this same judge openly admits that the French state is aiding Islamist terrorists in its war on Syria. In a normal society Trévidic would have been accused of condoning Islamist terrorism. But ours is not a normal society! [9]

On January 11th Trévidic was interviewed again by France Inter where he was asked if the French jihadists fighting the Syrian government could present a danger to French national security, Trévidic declared that:

“There are many young jihadists who have gone to the Turkish border in order to enter Syria to fight Bachar’s regime, but the only difference is that there France is not the enemy. Therefore we don’t look on that in the same way. To see young men who are at the moment fighting Bachar Al-Assad, they will be perhaps dangerous in the future but for the moment they are fighting Bachar Al-Assad and France is on their side. They will not attack us. Here (in Mali) the problem is that we are not on the same side” Trévidic went on to warn that if the Assad regime does not fall, Assad could attempt to bomb Paris! Terrorists are ok as long as they serve our political interests. Assad and not Al Qaeda could bomb Paris.Reality is turned upside down!

He we have an open admission that the West is helping Islamist terrorists to destroy the Syrian nation while supposedly fighting Islamist terrorists in Mali from the mouth of France’s top anti-terrorist judge! In the same programme Jean-Pierre Filiu, a terrorism expert from Science Po university stated that the terrorists France is fighting in Mali are nothing more than drug trafficking criminals. But it is perfectly acceptable to fight alongside such people in Syria when NATO geopolitical interests seek to replace the government there with their own gang of neo-colonial puppets. [10]

Independent media and geopolitical analysts alerted the world to NATO’s plan to recruit Mujahedeen terrorists to fight in Syria at the very start of the Levantine tragedy in 2011. [11]

Now as many mainstream media sources and Western legal authorities themselves are admitting that this is the case, the infernal rhapsody of “Assad must go” and “Assad is killing his own people”, this sick, psychopathic cover story continues to block the voices of reason that occasionally punctuate the mainstream media matrix.

The infinite cynicism, hubris, absolute hypocrisy, and collective pathology of the Western ruling elite bode ill for the future of humanity.

Notes

[1]http://www.prensa-latina.cu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&idioma=1&id=1041991&Itemid=1

[2] http://www.cnbc.com/id/45600052

[3] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/27/revolution-belongs-to-all-libyans

[4] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2189192/How-British-jihadists-causing-mayhem-Syria.html

[5] http://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article111974882/Syrien-als-al-Qaidas-Terrorbasis-gegen-Europa.html

[6] http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0706/328036-syria-conflict-paris/

[7]http://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article111974882/Syrien-als-al-Qaidas-Terrorbasis-gegen-Europa.html

Quotation in German: “Nach Erkenntnissen westlicher Geheimdienste soll Al-Nusra-Kommandeur Abu Mohammad al-Dschulani schon jetzt planen, seine Operationsbasis von Syrien über die Türkei nach Europa auszudehnen. Er bereitet sich auf den Tag nach dem Sturz Assads vor, um Syrien zu einem Zentrum für dschihadistische Aktivität auch in anderen Ländern zu machen.”-

[8] http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2012/10/03/01016-20121003ARTFIG00569-mali-syrie-les-nouvelles-terres-du-djihad-pour-les-francais.php

[9] http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xbqyx3_marc-trevidic-juge-d-instruction-au_news#.UQKt4R26dD0

[10] http://www.franceinter.fr/emission-le-79-marc-trevidic-et-jean-pierre-filiu

[11 http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-al-qaeda-insurgency-in-syria-recruiting-jihadists-to-wage-nato-s-humanitarian-wars/26351

Has America Become an Authoritarian State?

The debate in both Washington and the mainstream media over austerity measures, the alleged fiscal cliff and the looming debt crisis not only function to render anti-democratic pressures invisible...

US Debt Ceiling Maneuvers Sets the Stage for New Budget Cuts

budget

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives pushed back the deadline for raising the federal debt ceiling Wednesday, voting for a measure that would suspend the current limit on federal borrowing until May 19. The vote averted an immediate crisis over the debt ceiling that threatened to destabilize US and world financial markets.

The move sets the stage for negotiations over the next several months between the two big-business parties over deep cuts in social programs.

The White House endorsed the postponement of the debt ceiling, issuing a conciliatory statement Tuesday, the day before the vote, with White House press secretary Jay Carney saying that if the bill “reaches the president’s desk he would not stand in the way of the bill becoming law.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid hailed the House action, declaring, “I’m very glad that they are going to send us a clean debt-ceiling bill.” Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington state, chair of the Senate Budget Committee, immediately embraced the requirement in the House bill that the Senate pass a budget by April 15.

As the price of voting for this extension, more Republicans demanded an intensification of the assault on essential social benefit programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. This is comprised of at least three separate initiatives:

• The House will adopt a budget resolution, drafted by Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, aimed at reducing the annual federal deficit to zero over the next ten years. While Ryan gave no details, the cuts required would go far beyond his two previous proposals, in 2011 and 2012, which included transforming Medicare into a voucher program and effectively eliminating Medicaid.

• Congressional Republicans will enter the next round of fiscal negotiations on the so-called sequester, spending cuts that take effect March 1, with the demand that the full $110 billion in across-the-board cuts take effect. Any rescinding of scheduled cuts, for example in military spending, as demanded by many congressional Democrats and Republicans, would require equivalent offsetting cuts somewhere else.

• The debt ceiling extension is tied to a requirement that the Democratic-controlled Senate adopt a budget resolution of its own by April 15. Murray’s support means that Senate Democrats will go on record with their own proposal for cuts in entitlement programs for the first time since Obama entered the White House in 2009.

These maneuvers set the stage for a new and greatly accelerated attack on the social programs on which tens of millions of working, disabled and elderly Americans rely on for their health coverage and basic income.

Pushing the debt ceiling back into May gives priority to the budget talks over the sequester cuts, set to take effect March 1, and to a measure that would authorize federal spending for the remainder of the 2013 fiscal year. The current authorization, known in Washington jargon as a “continuing resolution,” was adopted before the 2012 election and expires March 27. At that point, many federal operations would be shut down for lack of funding.

The Treasury hit the previous debt ceiling of $16.4 trillion on December 31 and has been engaged in stopgap measures to avoid further borrowing. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner had said that these efforts would be exhausted as early as mid-February, warning that federal payments, including March 1 Social Security checks, might be endangered.

The House bill does not raise the debt ceiling now, but rather suspends enforcement of it, a largely semantic distinction, since the measure automatically increases the debt ceiling May 19 to whatever level of borrowing has been reached by then.

The Treasury would presumably adopt a new set of stopgap measures after May 19, with some financial market commentators suggesting that the effect of the House bill is to defer any further debt ceiling crisis until late summer.

The vote for the temporary suspension of the debt ceiling was 285-144, with most Republicans supporting the bill (199 for and 33 against) while Democrats were split (86 for and 111 against). Most Democrats withheld their votes until all the Republicans had voted, in an effort to compel as many Republicans as possible to support the measure, which was opposed by Tea Party groups.

The House Republicans decided to push back the debt ceiling deadline largely because of pressure from corporate America, where there was concern that another debt ceiling crisis, like that which led to a downgrade in the US credit rating in August 2011, could have a shock effect on the US and world financial system. This is especially so under conditions of slowdown in China and other previously fast-growing economies in Asia and Latin America, and outright slump in Europe.

The Wall Street Journal voiced the consensus in financial circles with an editorial Wednesday endorsing the House Republican leadership’s decision to put off any direct clash over the debt ceiling, even though they dropped their insistence that any rise in the debt ceiling be matched, dollar for dollar, by spending cuts.

The editorial declared, “Mr. Boehner’s tactical retreat buys some time and puts more spending pressure on Democrats. The automatic sequester cuts that Congress agreed to in 2012 will arrive on March 1, causing an immediate cut of $69 billion in discretionary spending, to $974 billion.”

This argument reflects calculations that there was a better chance to reach a bipartisan budget-cutting deal with the Obama administration in talks over the sequester and the continuing resolution during the next two months.

Obama has repeatedly signaled his willingness to revive a tentative deal with House Speaker John Boehner, reached in July 2011, which called for substantial cuts in both Medicare and Social Security: raising the eligibility age for Medicare from 65 to 67, and cutting future cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients by changing the formula by which they are calculated.

The Obama administration was quick to welcome the Republican move on the debt ceiling because, while it is concerned about the status of US treasuries, it is united with Republicans on its commitment to enforce unpopular cuts to key social programs.

Liberal commentators have hailed Obama’s Second Inaugural address as a renewed commitment to “modern liberalism.” What this means is the combination of empty demagogy and identity politics with a historic attack on the working class.

Finally, the Swaggering Republicans Are Afraid

House Speaker Boehner warned his fellow GOPers that Obama may be preparing “to annihilate” the GOP, marking a stunning reversal of fortune.

January 25, 2013  |  

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During a  private luncheon of the Republican Ripon Society on Tuesday, Boehner cited Obama’s progressive agenda as outlined in his Second Inaugural Address as representing an existential threat to the GOP.

“It’s pretty clear to me that he knows he can’t do any of that as long as the House is controlled by Republicans,” Boehner said. “So we’re expecting over the next 22 months to be the focus of this administration as they attempt to annihilate the Republican Party.” The Ohio Republican also claimed that it was Obama’s goal “to just shove us into the dustbin of history.”

Of course, Boehner may be wildly exaggerating the Republican plight to shock the party out of its funk, raise more money, and get right-wing activists back to the barricades. Still, his comments marked a remarkable reversal of fortune, like the playground bully getting his nose bloodied and running to the teacher in tears.

Even if hyped from political effect, Boehner’s lament also might force some progressives to rethink their negative views about President Obama. If indeed Obama has gotten the upper hand on America’s swaggering Right, then he might not be the political wimp that many on the Left have pegged him to be.

Without doubt, America’s political landscape has shifted from what it was just eight years ago when President George W. Bush was talking about using his political capital to privatize Social Security and Bush’s political guru, Karl Rove, was  contemplating an enduring Republican control of all three branches of the U.S. government.

As part of that Zeitgeist of 2005, as Bush entered his second term, right-wing activist Grover Norquist joked about keeping the Democrats around as neutered farm animals. The president of Americans for Tax Reform – most famous for getting Republicans to pledge never to raise taxes – told the Washington Post that congressional Democrats should grow accustomed to having no power and no reproductive ability.

“Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans,” Norquist said. “Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant. But when they’ve been ‘fixed,’ then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful.”

How We Got There

That moment of right-wing arrogance represented a culmination of decades of hardball Republican politics, a take-no-prisoners style that usually encountered only the softest of responses from the Democrats and progressives.

Arguably the pattern was set in fall 1968 when President Lyndon Johnson learned that GOP presidential nominee Nixon was sabotaging the Vietnam peace talks to ensure his victory over Vice President Hubert Humphrey – but Johnson stayed silent about what he called Nixon’s “treason” out of concern that its exposure would not be “good for the country.” [See Robert Parry’s  America’s Stolen Narrative.]

Nixon’s success in 1968 – and the Democratic silence – contributed to his decision several years later to create an extra-legal intelligence unit to spy on and undermine the Democrats heading into Election 1972. Finally, Nixon’s political chicanery undid him when his team of burglars was arrested inside the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate building. The resulting scandal led to his resignation in 1974.

But the Republican response to Watergate wasn’t to mend the party’s ways but rather to learn how to protect against ever again being held accountable. That reality became the political back story of the next three decades, as the Right built up a fearsome media apparatus and deployed well-funded operatives to shield Republicans and to discredit anyone who presented a threat, whether untamed Democrats, nosy reporters or average citizens.

Ex-CIA officer: Torture great way to get false confessions

Torture brings forth unreliable information and false confessions, apart from the fact that it is a serious violation of all manner of international agreements, former CIA officer Ray McGovern told RT.

“You can’t get reliable information from torture. But torture works beautifully if you want unreliable information” says McGovern.

His comments come amid the trial of John Kiriakou, a CIA veteran sentenced to two years in prison, after leaking sensitive information about Washington’s torture program.

Kiriakou, the man who oversaw the capture of Al-Qaeda's third-in-command, blew the lid on America’s torture program, revealing the name of an alleged torturer at Guantanamo Bay.

Kiriakou came out against Washington’s torture program supporting the notion that torture is illegal, says McGovern adding that the accusations against Kiriakou are political andhe is being punished out due to rank-hypocrisy.

RT: John Kiriakou says he is not punished for what he did but for what he is. What are your thoughts on this?

Ray McGovern: It’s mostly of what he said. He’s being punished out of rank-hypocrisy. Look at the chronology here,in 2007 he came out very loudly against torture as being not worthy of the US and not efficient, not a way to get information.Less than a year later two lawyers confirmed it : one’s name was Obama, the others name was Holder. Obama having become president, Eric Holder another lawyer having become attorney general. They said water boarding is torture, torture is illegal. What happened? Nothing happened to the torturers. What is now happening is with the person who happened to agree with Holder andObama, and disagree with the previous president Bush. What did Bush say? At his exist interview with Matt Lauer, he said that he is proud to have authorized that, the lawyer told me it was legal.

RT: So you are saying that a bearer of bad news is being used as a scape goat here? Ultimately as we all know post 9/11 security has been paramount for America. I suppose one might argue that can indeed former CIA agents run loose with secrets?

RM: The instructions were to make people ‘confess’. Confess to what? Confess to the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Confess to the existence of operational ties between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein? It was all a croc. They had to make this stuff up. You can’t get reliable information from torture. But torture works beautifully if you want unreliable information. So they drew up not only ties weapons of mass destruction but also ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda. When UK and US invaded Iraq, 69 percent of the people in the United States believed that there were operational ties between al-Queda and Iraq. And that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. It was a masterful propaganda performance on the part of the US and UK. How did they do that? One of the ways was that they tortured this one prisoner Alibi sent him to Egypt where he confessed that he sent people from Al-Queda to Hussein in Iraq to receive instruction in explosives…

RT: It’s all kind of murky. There have been people in the past that have said invading Iraq for 9/11 is like invading Mexico for the bombing of Cahaba. Essentially when John Kiriakou comes out with his information about waterboarding, I want to ask you where is the line between whistleblowing and that of leaking sensitive information? It certainly seems a little blurry.

RM: John Kiriakou didn’t leak any sensitive information. George Bush did, so did Eric Holder and Obama. Waterboarding is torture. Torture is a violation of all manner of international agreements. So Kiriakou’s crime is sticking with the notion that torture was illegal. And he is accused I suppose of having identified or leaked to the press a person who is involved in torture. Now that person’s name was already in the press. He lives in northern Virginia, where I live. I’d like to knock on his door and say‘ Do you think its fair for you to have supervised the torture program and John Kiriakou who is against torture going to jail?’ I’d really like to do that. As a matter of fact I may do that when I get home.

US-NATO “Economic Terrorism”: The Collapse of Syria’s Industry and Agriculture

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The Syrian economy is being hit by the combined impacts of the US-NATO sponsored terrorist attacks and the economic sanctions regime. 

The ultimate objective of the US-NATO covert war on Syria is the destabilization of the Syria economy and the destruction of Syria as a nation state.

Economic destabilization is conducted through various means:

  • An economic sanctions regime which has contributed to paralyzing trade and investment,
  • Acts of deliberate sabotage and piracy directed against the country’s industrial base.

Confirmed by the Syrian Chamber of Commerce, the Turkish government has sponsored the outright “stealing of production lines and machines from hundreds of factories in Aleppo city” with a view to disabling Syria’s industrial base.

  • The closing down and/or bankruptcy of the country’s industrial enterprises.

According to a recent report: “More than half of the country’s larger factories and small- and medium-sized workshops have shut down”.

“The state-owned Syrian General Organisation of Engineering Industries announced that it had shut eight of the 12 companies it owns because of sabotage, looting, burning of production lines and warehouses, and the destruction of machines.” albawaba.com

  • The destruction of the country’s agricultural base, leading to food shortages, undernourishment and child malnutrition.

The Sanctions Regime

The Obama administration  has imposed sweeping sanctions on Syria. The sanctions regime was initiated in August 2011 through the issuing of  an executive order “prohibiting the exportation, sale or supply of services from the United States to Syria.” as well as concurrent legislation by the US Congress.

Obama’s Executive order:

“…blocks investment and the export of oil from Syria. On May 30 [2011], the U.S. levied sanctions on the Syria International Islamic Bank. The Treasury Department said the bank has acted as a front for other Syrian financial institutions seeking to circumvent sanctions. A few days prior to this, the U.S. and around a dozen other countries expelled Syrian diplomats following a massacre in al-Houla, Syria, that was blamed without conclusive evidence on al-Assad’s military.

In August of 2011, Congress introduced S.1472, a “bill to impose sanctions on persons making certain investments that directly and significantly contribute to the enhancement of the ability of Syria to develop its petroleum resources, and for other purposes.”

In November 2011, the Arab League suspended Syria’s membership and adopted “unprecedented sanctions at a meeting in Cairo by a vote of 19 to three,”

In the United States, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed the Syrian Freedom Support Act by a unanimous vote in March of this year. It is intended to “strengthen sanctions against the Government of Syria, to enhance multilateral commitment to address the Government of Syria’s threatening policies, to establish a program to support a transition to a democratically-elected government in Syria, and for other purposes.” (See  Kurt Nimmo Crippling Sanctions against Damascus,  Global Research,  June 2012)

The Collapse of Syrian Agriculture

The terrorist actions of the US-NATO sponsored “Free Syrian Army” (FSA)  and its affiliated death squads directed against civilians including farmers has led to the dislocation of agriculture.  The supply of farm inputs including seeds and fertilizer has been disrupted.

The distribution of agricultural goods in urban areas is affected.  Terrorist attacks on the transportation and distribution of agricultural commodities is another related factor.

The terror attacks have uprooted small scale agriculture and have led to the devastation of commercial agriculture.

In a recent report, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) confirms a massive drop in agricultural production:

“Twenty-two months of conflict have left Syria’s agricultural sector in tatters with cereal, fruit and vegetable production dropping for some by half and massive destruction of irrigation and other infrastructure, a UN mission has found.

“Destruction of infrastructure in all sectors is massive and it is clear that the longer the conflict will last, the longer it will take to rehabilitate it,” he said.

Of the 10 million Syrians who live in rural areas – about 46 percent of the population – 80 percent derive their livelihoods from agriculture.

Wheat and barley production dropped to less than 2 million tonnes last year from 4 to 4.5 million tonnes in normal years.

Vegetable, fruit and olive production declined significantly in both Homs and Dara’a Governorates, including a 60 percent drop in vegetable production in Homs and a 40 percent drop in olive oil production in Dara’a.

Only 45 percent of the farmers were able to fully harvest their cereal crops while 14 percent reported they could not harvest due to insecurity and lack of fuel. There is a lack of access to agricultural inputs including quality seeds and fertilizers. There is a lack of irrigation due to damage to main irrigation canals especially in Homs and lack of fuel for irrigation pumps. Movement of livestock to grazing areas has not been possible and their survival is compromised by the lack of animal feed and veterinary drugs, the importation of which is hampered by sanctions. The production of poultry, a traditional source of cheap animal protein has also been severely hit with major farms destroyed in Homs, Hama and Idleb.FAO Media Centre: Syrian agricultural production drops massively as conflict continues

Hikes in Fuel and Gasoline Prices

In recent developments, there have been significant hikes in fuel and gasoline prices which have contributed to disrupting production as well as transportation. These hikes in prices have also led the compression of real purchasing power by households.

The economic sanctions as well as the demise of local industries have led to shortages in essential commodities including medicine.

The monetary system and foreign exchange market are  in crisis, characterized by a major decline in the value of the Syrian pound.

The State fiscal structure  has been disrupted as the government is no longer able to collect taxes from companies which have closed down.

Reversing the Achievements of Economic and Social Development

Prior to 2011, Syria’s external debt was low when compared to other developing countries.Syria’s foreign debt burden had been reduced through bilateral rescheduling deals with its main creditors including Russia, Germany, Iran and France. Syria also managed to settle its debt with the World Bank

According to World Bank figures:

  • primary school enrollment (% gross) was of the order of 118% (2010),
  • life expectancy at birth –which is an indicator of the state of health of the population– was of the order of 76 years, compared to 72 for the Middle East and 65.5 years for the average of  lower middle income countries.  (World Bank, Data on the Syrian Arab Republic)
  • secondary school enrollment was of the order of 72 percent (% gross) World Bank data on Secondary School Enrollment

Jon Stewart Rips Randian Paul Ryan for ‘Makers vs. Takers’

Jon Stewart had a field day with former vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan for his remarks claiming that President Obama used a "straw man" argument during his inaugural speech: Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) reacted to President Barack Obama's in...

Photos: American Presidents Packing Heat

Mac Slavo
January 25th, 2013
SHTFplan.com

Read by 11,157 people

Not everyone in the Oval Office is anti-second Amendment. In fact, until recently, most American Presidents embraced our historically pro-gun culture.

Here’s a collection of images that include U.S. Presidents enjoying some of our country’s most treasured past times – shooting, hunting and sharing an appreciation for really kick-ass guns.


George Washington once said guns “deserve a place of honor with all that’s good.” He probably felt the same way about this cannon:

President Washington

President Theodore Roosevelt loved the outdoors and was an avid hunter, and very much enjoyed going on Safari to Africa. Here he is posing with a favorite rifle in 1885. Notice the ammo belt – because you just never know when you’re going to need more ammunition:

Theodore Roosevelt

President Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed popping off some rounds every so often. Here he is (2nd in prone position) in 1919, when he was the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, taking in some target practice at a Marine Corp range:

Franklin Roosevelt

Before he was President, the man who dropped two nukes on Japan was a Senator. Here is President Harry Truman showing off a pair of his revolvers in 1938. The guns once belonged to infamous outlaw Jesse James:

Harry Truman

President Dwight Eisenhower was no stranger to firearms. Here he is (3rd from the right) along with Winston Churchill and General Omar Bradley having some good old fashioned fun at a British shootin’ range in 1945 (back then you could still have guns in the UK!). The trio was reportedly firing at targets 200 yards down range. Out of 45 targets, they recorded 29 hits:

Ike

Incidentally, President Eisenhower was such a fan of firearms that he built a skeet shooting range at Camp David while serving as President. Here’s President John F. Kennedy having some fun at that very range in 1963:

JFK

Somebody better tell President Kennedy that there are no assault rifles allowed in the Oval Office! Then again, it was 1961, so it was still legal for JFK to be in possession of an M15 militarized weapon of war:

JFK Checks Out an M15

Stop the presses. Is that President Jimmy Carter in 1978, at the height of his Presidency, shooting rifles with CHILDREN watching? Wait, hold on a second. Are some of those kids armed?

Jimmy Carter

Who does this cowboy think he is, some actor in an action movie? Didn’t somebody tell President Ronald Reagan that he’s holding a deadly AR-15 assault weapon? Someone needs to put this rifle on a ban list one of these days:

Ronald Reagan

President Bill Clinton loves styling like the Arkansas militia when he goes duck hunting. These days clothes like that might get you red listed as a domestic terrorist on a DHS watchlist:

President Clinton

Here are President George Herbert Walker Bush and his son President George Walker Bush doing a bit of quail hunting:

George HW Bush

GWB

And, while he may not have been President, Vice President Dick Cheney often hunted with the Bushes. He even shot a friend of his in the face once with a shotgun by accident. But it’s all good – it was only bird shot. But, if you ever going hunting with the former VP, be sure to wear one of those orange vests, just in case:

VP Cheney

Oh, and last but not least, who says President Barack Obama doesn’t know how to have fun with guns, and be safe while doing it? (Is that a high-capacity water magazine? Mr. President, let’s hope Dianne Feinstein doesn’t see this picture!)

Obama

The above photo of President Barack Obama reportedly struck fear deep into the marrow of the bones of Russian President Vladimir Putin:

Vladimir Putin

Via SHTFplan.com

Images made available via various sources including the Library of Congress, Mother Jones, and Google Images

Author: Mac Slavo
Views: Read by 11,157 people
Date: January 25th, 2013
Website: www.SHTFplan.com

Copyright Information: Copyright SHTFplan and Mac Slavo. This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to www.shtfplan.com. Please contact us for permission to reproduce this content in other media formats.

WWJD? Conservative Christian Radio Host Freaks Out About “Family-Destroying Whores”

The conservative Christian take on feminism.

January 25, 2013  |  

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Christian conservative radio hosts Kevin Swanson and Dave Buehner are not exactly big fans of feminism in any of its forms. So far this month, they have opined that a woman fired for being too attractive  shouldn’t have been working for a man who wasn’t her husband in the first place; that “socialist” single women are  taking over America; and that Sandra Fluke  isn’t “ladylike” enough to be considered for Woman of the Year.

On Tuesday’s edition of Generations Radio, Swanson and Buehner sat down in Swanson’s basement studio to discuss a report they came across that claims “rising college costs are driving a new trend called ‘Sugar Daddies.’” This led to a wide-ranging discussion of the scourge of women’s independence and a new unified theory of feminism.

There are “two forms of feminism,” Buehner argued. There are “cute” feminists like Sarah Palin who will find jobs in the “marketplace” and “get themselves a husband” but  will “never submit to the husband, in fact they will use their power probably to make their husband submit to them.” Then, there are the “ugly” feminists whose “lack of attractiveness has not given them access to power that they wanted in the marketplace.” These “attractively challenged” feminists will only find careers in academia and in government agencies, for instance, “you can run the EPA.”

What all these feminists have in common, Swanson argues, is that “all of them want to be free from the family” and together with “the homosexuals” are “destroying society.” Buehner speculates that in the future, feminism will be remembered as “a time in which women lost the love of their children” and “decided to become selfish, narcissistic, family-destroying whores.”

Swanson: Now remember, the goal is that these women have to be independent. The goal is lots and lots of birth control. The goal is lots and lots and lots of fornication. The goal is abortion. The day-after pill will help. And it will help a lot. Remember, the goal is to get that girl a job because she needs no stinkin’ husband, she’s got the fascist corporation and government-mandated insurance programs and socialist welfare that will take care of her womb to tomb. Who needs a cotton-pickin’ husband? Who needs a family? That’s pretty much the worldview that’s dominating, my friends. That’s what the college is all about.

Buehner: Because her feminist professors have told her her husband will abuse her, she will be like a slave to him. Instead she will just go to the slave market and sell herself, at least sell her body, to the highest bidder. See, that’s much, much better!

Swanson: And Dave, you talk about the two kinds of feminists now, this is your new division, you say there’s two kinds of feminists.

Buehner: There are.

Swanson: All of them want to be free from the family. They want to be free from the husband. Who needs a stinkin’ husband? Who wants to be submitting to a husband and find security in the family when she can find security in the state or a sugar daddy for the four years that she needs to get through college?

Buehner: Right. Actually, you’re talking about perhaps even a third stream of feminism. There’s the Sarah Palin kind of feminism that wants to have a husband, just not one to submit to. And she still wants to..

Swanson: But talk about the two forms of feminism you see that are rising today.

Buehner: Right, there are two forms of feminism, and it actually has to do with a division of how attractive a woman is. So, you have the group that is very attractive, they’re in the sororities, they’re gonna be in the beauty contests. They’re actually going to get the good jobs. They’re going to leverage their attractiveness in the marketplace because it has a market value. Marketing. It helps market who you are. They’re going to proceed, now they will probably some of them become the Sarah Palin-style feminists, they’ll get themselves a husband, but they’ll never be dependent on the husband, they’ll never submit to the husband, in fact they will use their power probably to make their husband submit to them.

Foul Play in the Senate

The inauguration of a president is one of those spectacles of democracy that can make us remember we’re part of something big and enduring. So for a few hours this past Monday the pomp and circumstance inspired us to think that government of, by, and for the people really is just that, despite the predatory threats that stalk it.The exterior view of Amgen Inc. offices in Fremont, Calif. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)

But the mood didn’t last. Every now and then, as the cameras panned upward, the Capitol dome towering over the ceremony was a reminder of something the good feeling of the moment couldn’t erase. It’s the journalist’s curse to have a good time spoiled by the reality beyond the pageantry. Just a couple of days before the inaugural festivities, The New York Times published some superb investigative reporting by the team of Eric Lipton and Kevin Sack, and their revelations were hard to forget, even at a time of celebration.

The story told us of a pharmaceutical giant called Amgen and three senators so close to it they might be entries on its balance sheet: Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Democratic Senator Max Baucus, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and that powerful committee’s ranking Republican, Orrin Hatch. A trio of perpetrators who treat the United States Treasury as if it were a cash-and-carry annex of corporate America.

The Times story described how Amgen got a huge hidden gift from unnamed members of Congress and their staffers. They slipped an eleventh hour loophole into the New Year’s Eve deal that kept the government from going over the fiscal cliff. When the sun rose in the morning, there it was, a richly embroidered loophole for Amgen that will cost taxpayers a cool half a billion dollars.

“Two guys nurtured at public expense, paid as public servants, disappear through the gold-plated revolving door of Congress and presto, return as money changers in the temple of crony capitalism.”

Amgen is the world’s largest biotechnology firm, a drug maker that sells a variety of medications. The little clause secretly sneaked into the fiscal cliff bill gives the company two more years of relief from Medicare cost controls for certain drugs used by patients who are on kidney dialysis, including a pill called Sensipar, manufactured by Amgen.

The provision didn’t mention Amgen by name, but according to reporters Lipton and Sack, the news that it had been tucked into the fiscal cliff deal “was so welcome, that the company’s chief executive quickly relayed it to investment analysts.” Tipping them off, it would seem, to a jackpot in the making.

Amgen has 74 lobbyists on its team in Washington and lobbied hard for that loophole, currying favor with friends at the White House and on Capitol Hill. The Times reporters traced its “deep financial and political ties” to Baucus, McConnell and Hatch, “who hold heavy sway over Medicare payment policy.”

All three have received hefty campaign donations from the company whose bottom line mysteriously just got padded at taxpayer expense. Since 2007, Amgen employees and its political action committee have contributed nearly $68,000 to Senator Baucus, $73,000 to Senator McConnell’s campaigns, and $59,000 to Senator Hatch.

And lo and behold, among those 74 Amgen lobbyists are the former chief of staff to Senator Baucus and the former chief of staff to Senator McConnell. You get the picture: Two guys nurtured at public expense, paid as public servants, disappear through the gold-plated revolving door of Congress and presto, return as money changers in the temple of crony capitalism.

Inside to welcome them is a current top aide to Senator Hatch, one who helped weave this lucrative loophole. He used to work as a health policy analyst for — you guessed it — Amgen.

So the trail winds deeper into the sordid swamp beneath that great Capitol dome, a sinkhole where shame has all but disappeared. As reporters Lipton and Sack remind us, just weeks before this backroom betrayal of the public interest by elected officials and the mercenaries they have mentored, Amgen pleaded guilty to fraud. Look it up: fraud means trickery, cheating and duplicity. Amgen agreed to pay $762 million in criminal and civil penalties; the company had been caught illegally marketing another one of its drugs.

The fact that their puppet master had been the subject of fines and a massive federal investigation mattered not to its servile pawns in the Senate, where pomp and circumstance are but masks for the brute power of money.

Peter Welch, Vermont’s Democratic congressman, has just introduced bipartisan legislation to repeal the half billion-dollar giveaway to Amgen [see the video clip below]. Its co-sponsors include Republican Richard Hanna of New York and Democrats Jim Cooper of Tennessee and Bruce Braley of Iowa.

The Amgen deal “confirms the American public’s worst suspicions of how Congress operates,” Representative Welch told us this week. “As the nation’s economy teetered on the edge of a Congressional-created fiscal cliff, lobbyists for a private, for-profit company seized an opportunity to feed at the public trough. It’s no wonder cockroaches and root canals are more popular than Congress.”

In his inaugural address, Barack Obama said the commitments we make to each other through Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security don’t make us a nation of takers. But the actions of Amgen and its cronies under the dome on Capitol Hill show who the real takers are — not those who look to government for support in old age and hard times but the ones at the top whose avarice and lust for profit compel them to take as much as they can from that government at the expense of everyone else

Bill Moyers

Journalist Bill Moyers is the host of the new show Moyers & Company, a weekly series of smart talk and new ideas aimed at helping viewers make sense of our tumultuous times through the insight of America’s strongest thinkers.. His previous shows on PBS included NOW with Bill Moyers and Bill Moyers Journal. Over the past three decades he has become an icon of American journalism and is the author of many books, including Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues, Moyers on Democracy, and Bill Moyers: On Faith & Reason. He was one of the organizers of the Peace Corps, a special assistant for Lyndon B. Johnson, a publisher of Newsday, senior correspondent for CBS News and a producer of many groundbreaking series on public television. He is the winner of more than 30 Emmys, nine Peabodys, three George Polk awards and is the author of three best-selling books.

Michael Winship

Michael Winship, senior writing fellow at Demos and president of the Writers Guild of America-East, is senior writer for Bill Moyers' new weekend show Moyers & Company.

Homeland Security’s Napolitano invokes 9/11 to push for CISPA 2.0

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.(Reuters / Baz Ratner)

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.(Reuters / Baz Ratner)

In an attempt to scare the public with a looming cyber attack on US infrastructure, US Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is once again pushing Congress to pass legislation allowing the government to have greater control over the Internet.

Napolitano issued the warnings Thursday, claiming that inaction could result in a “cyber 9/11” attack that could knock out water, electricity and gas, causing destruction similar to that left behind by Hurricane Sandy.

Napolitano said that in order to prevent such an attack, Congress must pass legislation that gives the US government greater access to the Internet and cybersecurity information from the private sector. Such a bill, known as CISPA or  Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, was already introduced last year, but failed to pass in Congress due to concerns expressed by businesses and privacy advocates.

“We shouldn’t wait until there is a 9/11 in the cyber world. There are things we can and should be doing right now that, if not prevent, would mitigate the extent of the damage,” Napolitano said in a speech at the Wilson Center, a Washington, DC think tank.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has also been a strong advocate for increased governmental grip on the web and in October warned that the US is facing a possible “cyber-Pearl Harbor” by foreign hackers.

“A cyber attack perpetuated by nation states or violent extremist groups could be as destructive as the terrorist attack of 9/11,” he said during a speech. “Such a destructive cyber terrorist attack could paralyze the nation.”

Last September, Napolitano reiterated disappointment with Congress for failing to pass the cybersecurity legislation in August.

“Attacks are coming all the time,” she said in a speech at the Social Good Summit. “They are coming from different sources, they take different forms. But they are increasing in seriousness and sophistication.”

Despite Homeland Security’s constant warnings that hackers could shut down critical US infrastructure, the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 was shot down by the Senate in August, even though the Obama administration had pushed for the bill in numerous hearings and briefings.

Privacy advocates had expressed concern that the US government would be able to read Americans’ personal e-mails, online chat conversations, and other personal information that only private companies and servers might have access to. The head of the National Security Agency promised it wouldn’t abuse its power, but critics have remained skeptical.

A coalition of Democrats this year pledged to make this legislation a priority.

“Given all that relies on a safe and secure Internet, it is vital that we do what’s necessary to protect ourselves from hackers, cyber thieves, and terrorists,” said Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), the new chairman of the Homeland Security Committee.

The White House is also working on an executive order that would encourage companies to meet government cybersecurity standards.

Questions That Need Asking

Washington, DC -- Republicans wanted nothing more than to summon Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Capitol Hill and grill her about the tragic fiasco in Benghazi. Sadly for them, they got their wish. Clinton's smooth and confident performance at W...

CIA Torture Whistleblower Sentenced to 30 Months

CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou was sentenced to 2 &frac12; years in prison on Friday for what critics of his prosecution are calling trumped-up charges by the Department of Justice for his exposure of the spy agency's torture program established by the former Bush administration.

(Associated Press) In a letter urging President Barack Obama to pardon the whistleblower, several high profile civil rights defenders including Ralph Nader and retired CIA officer Raymond McGovern stated:

[Kiriakou] is an anti-torture whistleblower who spoke out against torture because he believed it violated his oath to the Constitution. He never tortured anyone, yet he is the only individual to be prosecuted in relation to the torture program of the past decade. [...]

The interrogators who tortured prisoners, the officials who gave the orders, the attorneys who authored the torture memos, and the CIA officers who destroyed the interrogation tapes have not been held professionally accountable.

Please, Mr. President, do not allow your legacy to be one where only the whistleblower goes to prison.

"He [was] prosecuted not by the Bush administration but by Obama's," added Robert Shetterly, an artist and activist who pointed to the fact that President Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other presidents combined, despite pledges during his first presidential campaign to protect whistleblowers.

"The CIA leadership was furious that I blew the whistle on torture and the Justice Department never stopped investigating me..." – John Kiriakou

Such protections, then Senator Obama said, were vital "to maintain integrity in government."

In October, Kiriakou was charged by the DoJ for violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA) for releasing the name of an officer implicated in a CIA torture program to the media. Federal prosecutors had originally charged Kiriakou for violations against the Espionage Act—which held a sentence of up to 35 years—but a plea agreement saw those charges lessened.

Kiriakou was the first employee of the CIA to publicly acknowledge and describe details of the  torture program that thrived under the Bush administration.

“There is a legal definition of whistleblower and I meet that legal definition,” Kiriakou told Firedoglake in an interview Thursday.

He continued:

I was the first person to acknowledge that the CIA was using waterboarding against al Qaeda prisoners. I said in 2007 that I regarded waterboarding as torture and I also said that it was not the result of rogue CIA officers but that it was official US government policy. So, that’s whistleblowing. That’s the definition of whistleblowing. [...]

The CIA leadership was furious that I blew the whistle on torture and the Justice Department never stopped investigating me from December 2007...They found their opportunity and threw in a bunch of trumped up charges they knew they could bargain away and finally found something with which to prosecute me. [...]

I don’t think I am overstating this when I say I feel like we’re entering a second McCarthy era where the Justice Department uses the law as a fist or as a hammer not just to try and convict people but to ruin them personally and professionally because they don’t like where they stand on different issues... they can convict anybody of anything if they put their minds to it.

On the eve of the sentencing, Americans Who Tell the Truth and the Government Accountability Project unveiled a portrait of Kiriakou by Shetterly, the latest in the AWTT portrait series.  Kiriakou was heralded for his opposition to "this country’s flagrant use of torture and its attempt to justify that use."

RT provides footage from that evening's event:

CIA Torture Whistleblower Sentenced to 30 Months

CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou was sentenced to 2 &frac12; years in prison on Friday for what critics of his prosecution are calling trumped-up charges by the Department of Justice for his exposure of the spy agency's torture program established by the former Bush administration.

(Associated Press) In a letter urging President Barack Obama to pardon the whistleblower, several high profile civil rights defenders including Ralph Nader and retired CIA officer Raymond McGovern stated:

[Kiriakou] is an anti-torture whistleblower who spoke out against torture because he believed it violated his oath to the Constitution. He never tortured anyone, yet he is the only individual to be prosecuted in relation to the torture program of the past decade. [...]

The interrogators who tortured prisoners, the officials who gave the orders, the attorneys who authored the torture memos, and the CIA officers who destroyed the interrogation tapes have not been held professionally accountable.

Please, Mr. President, do not allow your legacy to be one where only the whistleblower goes to prison.

"He [was] prosecuted not by the Bush administration but by Obama's," added Robert Shetterly, an artist and activist who pointed to the fact that President Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other presidents combined, despite pledges during his first presidential campaign to protect whistleblowers.

"The CIA leadership was furious that I blew the whistle on torture and the Justice Department never stopped investigating me..." – John Kiriakou

Such protections, then Senator Obama said, were vital "to maintain integrity in government."

In October, Kiriakou was charged by the DoJ for violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA) for releasing the name of an officer implicated in a CIA torture program to the media. Federal prosecutors had originally charged Kiriakou for violations against the Espionage Act—which held a sentence of up to 35 years—but a plea agreement saw those charges lessened.

Kiriakou was the first employee of the CIA to publicly acknowledge and describe details of the  torture program that thrived under the Bush administration.

“There is a legal definition of whistleblower and I meet that legal definition,” Kiriakou told Firedoglake in an interview Thursday.

He continued:

I was the first person to acknowledge that the CIA was using waterboarding against al Qaeda prisoners. I said in 2007 that I regarded waterboarding as torture and I also said that it was not the result of rogue CIA officers but that it was official US government policy. So, that’s whistleblowing. That’s the definition of whistleblowing. [...]

The CIA leadership was furious that I blew the whistle on torture and the Justice Department never stopped investigating me from December 2007...They found their opportunity and threw in a bunch of trumped up charges they knew they could bargain away and finally found something with which to prosecute me. [...]

I don’t think I am overstating this when I say I feel like we’re entering a second McCarthy era where the Justice Department uses the law as a fist or as a hammer not just to try and convict people but to ruin them personally and professionally because they don’t like where they stand on different issues... they can convict anybody of anything if they put their minds to it.

On the eve of the sentencing, Americans Who Tell the Truth and the Government Accountability Project unveiled a portrait of Kiriakou by Shetterly, the latest in the AWTT portrait series.  Kiriakou was heralded for his opposition to "this country’s flagrant use of torture and its attempt to justify that use."

RT provides footage from that evening's event:

Debt Ceiling Games – Court Could End Leverage

The Constitution of the United States:

Fourteenth Amendment, Section 4: 
The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. 
     
Twenty-Seventh Amendment: No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.

In the debate over whether the president should simply pay bills owed by the United States, missing is the key aspect of whether the Courts would back him up. The bill passed in the House Wednesday, set for passage in the Senate, delays the debt ceiling for four months but ties the action to House and Senate salaries. The courts, including the Supreme Court, would likely confirm the president’s Constitutional obligation to pay the U.S. debts and would declare unconstitutional the link to issuing congressional paychecks. The congressional leadership insisted on reading the full Constitution aloud at the beginning of the session. We do not believe they skipped the relevant sections.

Under contract law, entities must pay bills for expenses they obligate. So must the U.S. government. The 14th Amendment, Section 4 states: "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned." The “inclusion” is to emphasize those are a part of what must be paid, not the sole items. 

The latest House bill “holding salaries of Members of Congress in escrow upon failure to agree to budget resolution” directly flies in the face of the 27th Amendment to the Constitution, which states: “No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.”

A court ruling affirming presidential power under Amendment XIV of the Constitution would remove congressional leverage for another “fiscal cliff” and end stop the now-regular debt ceiling games. It would give teeth to President Obama’s statement that paying the country’s debt is “not a bargaining chip” despite congressional demands that debt be used as leverage to make cuts in Social Security and Medicare. Court approval would stop the congressional fiscal cliff insanity. The White House should institute or support this move.

Congressional legislation on the debt is not needed and has only been passed since 1917.  Prior to 1917 Congress simply “authorized” the funding — which it still separately does in “authorization” bills.


The new Republican strategies are “a reflection of the same kind of politics of that 112th Congress, which reflected political gamesmanship rather than substantive policy," Steny Hoyer, the House Democratic Whip, said. In four months, Republicans will continue to try to use the debt ceiling as leverage.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said that she would use the 14th amendment to pay US debt "in a second." House Democratic Assistant Leader Jim Clyburn (D-N.C.) told us, "The president should just use the Constitution."  

Former President Bill Clinton, who Obama says should be "Secretary of Explaining Stuff," stated he would use the 14th amendment "without hesitation."  Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) asserted the debt ceiling is "frankly a dead loser” because “the whole national financial system is going to say, ‘The entire economy of the world will collapse,’” and Congress “will cave.” 

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee and the second longest serving Member of Congress, argued, “It’s my belief that the courts would support the president if he cited the 14th Amendment and instructed our executive agencies to pay the nation’s debts.”  He told us that the new salary tie “is not constitutional” and “shows how superficial” the legislation is.

Top constitutional authorities Michael Dorf, former law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Kennedy and law professor at Cornell University, and Neil Buchanan, law professor at George Washington University, wrote in the Columbia Law Review in October, “Given the balance of constitutional, practical, and prudential considerations,” the most constitutional choice “would be for the president to continue to issue debt, in the amounts authorized by the duly enacted budget of the United States.”

President Obama has been reluctant so far to say he will invoke the 14th Amendment. The president is by experience a state and federal legislator who has worked by successful compromise and consensus. The White House may not realize the likely Court support for paying the nation's bills.
 
If President Obama wants his 2nd term agenda not to be handcuffed by ongoing debt ceiling games, he could seek Court support against the constant threats to throw our economy under the bus.

FSIS Announces Major Cut in Import Inspections Four Years After It Took Effect

WASHINGTON - January 25 - Today, USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) published a Notice in the Federal Register that it has made a major change to the way it conducts inspections of countries that are eligible to export meat, poultry and egg products to the U.S. (Ongoing Equivalence Verifications of Foreign Regulatory Systems, Docket No. FSIS-2012-0049). The agency is also requesting public comments on this change. Food & Water Watch, a national consumer organization, says the announcement and accompanying public comment period regarding changes in the import inspection program are too little, too late, since the change took place four years ago, at the beginning of the first Obama Administration.

“It is time for the Obama Administration to fund this vital consumer protection program adequately and stop trying to rationalize the ways it has weakened it,” said Hauter. “Publishing a Federal Register Notice four years after the fact and requesting comments on the new policy is both futile and insulting.”

Until 2009, FSIS conducted in-depth annual on-site audits of countries that are eligible to export meat, poultry and egg products to the U.S. The system that FSIS used has been hailed as a model for other food safety agencies both here and abroad to ensure the safety of imported food. Apparently in 2009, a major change occurred when FSIS stopped visiting countries annually and instead started to rely on a “Self-Reporting Tool” for countries as a substitute to annual audit visits; countries were self-reporting that they were in compliance with USDA food safety and inspection standards. FSIS began conducting audit visits every three years instead of annually and the agency stopped the practice of publishing the audit results of individual foreign meat, poultry, egg plants that exported products to the U.S.

Food & Water Watch recently filed a Freedom of information Act request for those plant audits and has received 155 pages of documents in response.

This new policy remained under the radar screen until the fall of 2012 when both the former Under Secretary for Food Safety for the George W. Bush Administration Richard Raymond and Helena Bottemiller of Food Safety News exposed it. Food & Water Watch also became concerned as early as February 2010 when the Obama Administration proposed its FY 2011 budget that showed a 15.8 percent reduction in the FSIS budget for international programs.

The Federal Register Notice that will appear tomorrow is announcing a change the agency has already made. The agency has rationalized its decision to reduce the number of foreign audits based on vague recommendations made by USDA’s National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection in August 2008. Both members of that Committee and former Under Secretary for Food Safety Richard Raymond, have stated that they never contemplated that FSIS would gut the import inspection program the way it has.    

Because FSIS stopped its practice of annual audits, Canada experienced its largest meat recall in history in the fall of 2012 that also spilled over into the U.S., with some 2.5 million pounds of imported contaminated beef entering U.S. commerce. Because FSIS stopped its annual audits, the number of rejections of Australian meat products for fecal contamination has skyrocketed over the past year.

The Obama Administration has cut the budget for the import inspection program at FSIS, despite the fact that Congress has appropriated the money that the Obama Administration requested. In the meantime, the Obama Administration is moving forward with plans to import processed poultry products from the People’s Republic of China and South Korea at a time when FSIS cannot adequately monitor the safety of imports from the countries that already export their products here.

“We’re not just importing China’s food—we’re importing China’s food safety problems along with it,” said Hauter. “It’s doubly important to fund our import food inspection programs adequately as more foods from abroad reach our shores.”

Food & Water Watch works to ensure the food, water and fish we consume is safe, accessible and sustainable. So we can all enjoy and trust in what we eat and drink, we help people take charge of where their food comes from, keep clean, affordable, public tap water flowing freely to our homes, protect the environmental quality of oceans, force government to do its job protecting citizens, and educate about the importance of keeping shared resources under public control.

Food & Water Watch is a nonprofit consumer organization that works to ensure clean water and safe food. We challenge the corporate control and abuse of our food and water resources by empowering people to take action and by transforming the public consciousness about what we eat and drink.

FSIS Announces Major Cut in Import Inspections Four Years After It Took Effect

WASHINGTON - January 25 - Today, USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) published a Notice in the Federal Register that it has made a major change to the way it conducts inspections of countries that are eligible to export meat, poultry and egg products to the U.S. (Ongoing Equivalence Verifications of Foreign Regulatory Systems, Docket No. FSIS-2012-0049). The agency is also requesting public comments on this change. Food & Water Watch, a national consumer organization, says the announcement and accompanying public comment period regarding changes in the import inspection program are too little, too late, since the change took place four years ago, at the beginning of the first Obama Administration.

“It is time for the Obama Administration to fund this vital consumer protection program adequately and stop trying to rationalize the ways it has weakened it,” said Hauter. “Publishing a Federal Register Notice four years after the fact and requesting comments on the new policy is both futile and insulting.”

Until 2009, FSIS conducted in-depth annual on-site audits of countries that are eligible to export meat, poultry and egg products to the U.S. The system that FSIS used has been hailed as a model for other food safety agencies both here and abroad to ensure the safety of imported food. Apparently in 2009, a major change occurred when FSIS stopped visiting countries annually and instead started to rely on a “Self-Reporting Tool” for countries as a substitute to annual audit visits; countries were self-reporting that they were in compliance with USDA food safety and inspection standards. FSIS began conducting audit visits every three years instead of annually and the agency stopped the practice of publishing the audit results of individual foreign meat, poultry, egg plants that exported products to the U.S.

Food & Water Watch recently filed a Freedom of information Act request for those plant audits and has received 155 pages of documents in response.

This new policy remained under the radar screen until the fall of 2012 when both the former Under Secretary for Food Safety for the George W. Bush Administration Richard Raymond and Helena Bottemiller of Food Safety News exposed it. Food & Water Watch also became concerned as early as February 2010 when the Obama Administration proposed its FY 2011 budget that showed a 15.8 percent reduction in the FSIS budget for international programs.

The Federal Register Notice that will appear tomorrow is announcing a change the agency has already made. The agency has rationalized its decision to reduce the number of foreign audits based on vague recommendations made by USDA’s National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection in August 2008. Both members of that Committee and former Under Secretary for Food Safety Richard Raymond, have stated that they never contemplated that FSIS would gut the import inspection program the way it has.    

Because FSIS stopped its practice of annual audits, Canada experienced its largest meat recall in history in the fall of 2012 that also spilled over into the U.S., with some 2.5 million pounds of imported contaminated beef entering U.S. commerce. Because FSIS stopped its annual audits, the number of rejections of Australian meat products for fecal contamination has skyrocketed over the past year.

The Obama Administration has cut the budget for the import inspection program at FSIS, despite the fact that Congress has appropriated the money that the Obama Administration requested. In the meantime, the Obama Administration is moving forward with plans to import processed poultry products from the People’s Republic of China and South Korea at a time when FSIS cannot adequately monitor the safety of imports from the countries that already export their products here.

“We’re not just importing China’s food—we’re importing China’s food safety problems along with it,” said Hauter. “It’s doubly important to fund our import food inspection programs adequately as more foods from abroad reach our shores.”

Food & Water Watch works to ensure the food, water and fish we consume is safe, accessible and sustainable. So we can all enjoy and trust in what we eat and drink, we help people take charge of where their food comes from, keep clean, affordable, public tap water flowing freely to our homes, protect the environmental quality of oceans, force government to do its job protecting citizens, and educate about the importance of keeping shared resources under public control.

Food & Water Watch is a nonprofit consumer organization that works to ensure clean water and safe food. We challenge the corporate control and abuse of our food and water resources by empowering people to take action and by transforming the public consciousness about what we eat and drink.

Frontline Gets Its Man: Lanny Breuer Leaves DOJ After Exposé

In a testament to the power of independent media, the award-winning public television show Frontline this week helped push a top Department of Justice (DOJ) official out the door.

On Tuesday, Frontline aired a report called "The Untouchables" detailing the DOJ's failure to prosecute the big banks for the 2008 financial meltdown and zeroing in on Lanny Breuer, the former White House legal counsel for Clinton who headed the DOJ's criminal division under Obama.

On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that Breuer was stepping down.

Many had criticized Attorney General Eric Holder and Breuer for failing to take action against the mega banks on Wall Street, and watched with disbelief last December as the DOJ decided to pass on criminal penalties against HSBC for laundering drug money and helping to finance terrorists. The behemoth bank was ordered to pay a record civil fine, but no criminal charges were lodged against any HSBC official. A New York Times editorial called the decision a "dark day for the rule of law."

But this time around, the Frontline crew had unparalleled access to Breuer which generated a number of key revelations:

Frontline documented that Breuer/Holder failed to use the tools available to them to really dig.

FRONTLINE: We spoke to a couple of sources from within the Criminal Division, and they reported that when it came to Wall Street, there were no investigations going on. There were no subpoenas, no document reviews, no wiretaps.

LANNY BREUER: Well, I don't know who you spoke with because we have looked hard at the very types of matters that you're talking about.

Frontline documented that Breuer/Holder failed to reach out to key whistle blowers.

FRONTLINE: Another criticism that has been thrown at you is that you've not done enough to go looking for the whistle-blowers that are out there. We have been able to contact a number of people who were inside the banks, doing due diligence work as contractors, who all told us that they were never contacted by the Justice Department.

BREUER: I can't talk in general about nondescript, anonymous whistle-blowers. But here's what I can tell you. Whenever I personally have been in any public setting, I've invited whistle-blowers to come forward.

Frontline documented that Breuer/Holder worried more about the fragility of the banks than cleaning up corruption on Wall Street.

FRONTLINE: You gave a speech before the New York Bar Association. You talked about your use of nonprosecution and deferred prosecution agreements. And in that speech, you made a reference to "losing sleep at night over worrying about what a lawsuit might result in at a large financial institution." Is that really the job of a prosecutor, to worry about anything other than simply pursuing justice?

BREUER: I think I and prosecutors around the country, being responsible, should speak to regulators, should speak to experts, because if I bring a case against institution A, and as a result of bringing that case there's some huge economic effect, it affects the economy so that employees who had nothing to do with the wrongdoing of the company... If it creates a ripple effect so that suddenly counterparties and other financial institutions or other companies that had nothing to do with this are affected badly, it's a factor we need to know and understand.

Just this week Pro Publica put out another blockbuster report about the corruption at Morgan Stanley before the financial meltdown, unveiling documents where employees dubbed the securities they were peddling: "Subprime Meltdown," "Nuclear Holocaust," "Shitbag." This information was garnered not from the federal government prosecutions, but from a private lawsuit against the bank.

Before his appointment at the DOJ, Breuer had worked at the Washington office of Covington & Burling LLP alongside Holder. The firm specializes in helping big name corporations, including tobacco firms, evade taxes and get off the hook for crimes and malfeasance. Breuer is likely to return to that natural perch, unfortunately he will be leaving Holder behind to continue business as usual at the DOJ.

© 2012 Center for Media & Democracy

Mary Bottari

Mary Bottari is the Director of the Center for Media and Democracy's Real Economy Project and editor of their www.BanksterUSA.org site.

Frontline Gets Its Man: Lanny Breuer Leaves DOJ After Exposé

In a testament to the power of independent media, the award-winning public television show Frontline this week helped push a top Department of Justice (DOJ) official out the door.

On Tuesday, Frontline aired a report called "The Untouchables" detailing the DOJ's failure to prosecute the big banks for the 2008 financial meltdown and zeroing in on Lanny Breuer, the former White House legal counsel for Clinton who headed the DOJ's criminal division under Obama.

On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that Breuer was stepping down.

Many had criticized Attorney General Eric Holder and Breuer for failing to take action against the mega banks on Wall Street, and watched with disbelief last December as the DOJ decided to pass on criminal penalties against HSBC for laundering drug money and helping to finance terrorists. The behemoth bank was ordered to pay a record civil fine, but no criminal charges were lodged against any HSBC official. A New York Times editorial called the decision a "dark day for the rule of law."

But this time around, the Frontline crew had unparalleled access to Breuer which generated a number of key revelations:

Frontline documented that Breuer/Holder failed to use the tools available to them to really dig.

FRONTLINE: We spoke to a couple of sources from within the Criminal Division, and they reported that when it came to Wall Street, there were no investigations going on. There were no subpoenas, no document reviews, no wiretaps.

LANNY BREUER: Well, I don't know who you spoke with because we have looked hard at the very types of matters that you're talking about.

Frontline documented that Breuer/Holder failed to reach out to key whistle blowers.

FRONTLINE: Another criticism that has been thrown at you is that you've not done enough to go looking for the whistle-blowers that are out there. We have been able to contact a number of people who were inside the banks, doing due diligence work as contractors, who all told us that they were never contacted by the Justice Department.

BREUER: I can't talk in general about nondescript, anonymous whistle-blowers. But here's what I can tell you. Whenever I personally have been in any public setting, I've invited whistle-blowers to come forward.

Frontline documented that Breuer/Holder worried more about the fragility of the banks than cleaning up corruption on Wall Street.

FRONTLINE: You gave a speech before the New York Bar Association. You talked about your use of nonprosecution and deferred prosecution agreements. And in that speech, you made a reference to "losing sleep at night over worrying about what a lawsuit might result in at a large financial institution." Is that really the job of a prosecutor, to worry about anything other than simply pursuing justice?

BREUER: I think I and prosecutors around the country, being responsible, should speak to regulators, should speak to experts, because if I bring a case against institution A, and as a result of bringing that case there's some huge economic effect, it affects the economy so that employees who had nothing to do with the wrongdoing of the company... If it creates a ripple effect so that suddenly counterparties and other financial institutions or other companies that had nothing to do with this are affected badly, it's a factor we need to know and understand.

Just this week Pro Publica put out another blockbuster report about the corruption at Morgan Stanley before the financial meltdown, unveiling documents where employees dubbed the securities they were peddling: "Subprime Meltdown," "Nuclear Holocaust," "Shitbag." This information was garnered not from the federal government prosecutions, but from a private lawsuit against the bank.

Before his appointment at the DOJ, Breuer had worked at the Washington office of Covington & Burling LLP alongside Holder. The firm specializes in helping big name corporations, including tobacco firms, evade taxes and get off the hook for crimes and malfeasance. Breuer is likely to return to that natural perch, unfortunately he will be leaving Holder behind to continue business as usual at the DOJ.

© 2012 Center for Media & Democracy

Mary Bottari

Mary Bottari is the Director of the Center for Media and Democracy's Real Economy Project and editor of their www.BanksterUSA.org site.

Choice of Mary Jo White to Head SEC Puts Fox In Charge of Hen...

I was shocked when I heard that Mary Jo White, a former U.S. Attorney and a partner for the white-shoe Wall Street defense firm Debevoise and Plimpton, had been named the new head of the SEC.Mary Jo White. "If Barack Obama wanted to send a signal that he's getting tougher on Wall Street, he sure picked a funny way to do it," writes Taibbi. (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

I thought to myself: Couldn't they have found someone who wasn't a key figure in one of the most notorious scandals to hit the SEC in the past two decades? And couldn't they have found someone who isn't a perfect symbol of the revolving-door culture under which regulators go soft on suspected Wall Street criminals, knowing they have million-dollar jobs waiting for them at hotshot defense firms as long as they play nice with the banks while still in office?

I'll leave it to others to chronicle the other highlights and lowlights of Mary Jo White's career, and focus only on the one incident I know very well: her role in the squelching of then-SEC investigator Gary Aguirre's investigation into an insider trading incident involving future Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack. While representing Morgan Stanley at Debevoise and Plimpton, White played a key role in this inexcusable episode.

As I explained a few years ago in my story, "Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?": The attorney Aguirre joined the SEC in 2004, and two days into his job was asked to look into reports of suspicious trading activity involving a hedge fund called Pequot Capital, and specifically its megastar trader, Art Samberg. Samberg had made suspiciously prescient trades ahead of the acquisition of a firm called Heller Financial by General Electric, pocketing about $18 million in a period of weeks by buying up Heller shares before the merger, among other things.

"It was as if Art Samberg woke up one morning and a voice from the heavens told him to start buying Heller," Aguirre recalled. "And he wasn't just buying shares – there were some days when he was trying to buy three times as many shares as were being traded that day."

Aguirre did some digging and found that Samberg had been in contact with his old friend John Mack before making those trades. Mack had just stepped down as president of Morgan Stanley and had just flown to Switzerland, where he'd interviewed for a top job at Credit Suisse First Boston, the company that happened to be the investment banker for . . . Heller Financial.

Now, Mack had been on Samberg's case to cut him in on a deal involving a spinoff of Lucent. "Mack is busting my chops" to let him in on the Lucent deal, Samberg told a co-worker.

So when Mack returned from Switzerland, he called Samberg. Samberg, having done no other research on Heller Financial, suddenly decided to buy every Heller share in sight. Then he cut Mack into the Lucent deal, a favor that was worth $10 million to Mack.

Aguirre thought there was clear reason to investigate the matter further and pressed the SEC for permission to interview Mack. Not arrest the man, mind you, or hand him over to the CIA for rendition to Egypt, but merely to interview the guy. He was denied, his boss telling him that Mack had "powerful political connections" (Mack was a fundraising Ranger for President Bush).

But that wasn't all. Morgan Stanley, which by then was thinking of bringing Mack back as CEO, started trying to backdoor Aguirre and scuttle his investigation by going over his head. Who was doing that exactly? Mary Jo White. This is from the piece I mentioned, :

It didn't take long for Morgan Stanley to work its way up the SEC chain of command. Within three days, another of the firm's lawyers, Mary Jo White, was on the phone with the SEC's director of enforcement. In a shocking move that was later singled out by Senate investigators, the director actually appeared to reassure White, dismissing the case against Mack as "smoke" rather than "fire." White, incidentally, was herself the former U.S. attorney of the Southern District of New York — one of the top cops on Wall Street . . .

Aguirre didn't stand a chance. A month after he complained to his supervisors that he was being blocked from interviewing Mack, he was summarily fired, without notice. The case against Mack was immediately dropped: all depositions canceled, no further subpoenas issued. "It all happened so fast, I needed a seat belt," recalls Aguirre, who had just received a stellar performance review from his bosses. The SEC eventually paid Aguirre a settlement of $755,000 for wrongful dismissal.

It got worse. Not only did the SEC ultimately delay the interview of Mack until after the statute of limitations had expired, and not only did the agency demand an investigation into possible alternative sources for Samberg's tip (what Aguirre jokes was like "O.J.'s search for the real killers"), but the SEC official who had quashed the Mack investigation, Paul Berger, took a lucrative job working for Morgan Stanley's law firm, Debevoise and Plimpton, just nine months after Aguirre was fired.

It later came out that Berger had expressed interest in working for the firm during the exact time that Aguirre was being dismissed and the Mack investigation was being quashed. A Senate investigation later uncovered an email to Berger from another SEC official, Lawrence West, who was also interviewing with Debevoise and Plimpton at the time. This is from the Senate report on the Aguirre affair:

The e-mail was dated September 8, 2005 and addressed to Paul Berger with the subject line, "Debevoise.'' The body of the message read, "Mary Jo [White] just called. I mentioned your interest.''

So Berger was passing notes in class to Mary Jo White about wanting to work for Morgan Stanley's law firm while he was in the middle of quashing an investigation into a major insider trading case involving the C.E.O. of the bank. After the case dies, Berger later gets the multimillion-dollar posting and the circle is closed.

This whole episode highlights everything that's wrong with modern Wall Street. First of all, everybody's buddies with each other – cops and robbers, no adversarial system at all. As Bill Murray would say, it's dogs and cats, living together.

Here, a line investigator gets a good lead, it's quickly taken out of his hands and the whole thing is negotiated at 50,000 feet by friends and former co-workers of the top regulators now working at hotshot firms.

If Barack Obama wanted to send a signal that he's getting tougher on Wall Street, he sure picked a funny way to do it, nominating the woman who helped John Mack get off on the slam-dunkiest insider trading case ever to cross an SEC investigator's desk.

When I contacted Gary today, his take on it was simple. "Obama is not going to clean up financial corruption," he said, "by pinning a sheriff's badge on Wall Street's protector-in-chief."

© 2013 Rolling Stone

Matt Taibbi

As Rolling Stone’s chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the likes of journalistic giants Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi's 2004 campaign journal Spanking the Donkey cemented his status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. His books include Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire.

Choice of Mary Jo White to Head SEC Puts Fox In Charge of Hen...

I was shocked when I heard that Mary Jo White, a former U.S. Attorney and a partner for the white-shoe Wall Street defense firm Debevoise and Plimpton, had been named the new head of the SEC.Mary Jo White. "If Barack Obama wanted to send a signal that he's getting tougher on Wall Street, he sure picked a funny way to do it," writes Taibbi. (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

I thought to myself: Couldn't they have found someone who wasn't a key figure in one of the most notorious scandals to hit the SEC in the past two decades? And couldn't they have found someone who isn't a perfect symbol of the revolving-door culture under which regulators go soft on suspected Wall Street criminals, knowing they have million-dollar jobs waiting for them at hotshot defense firms as long as they play nice with the banks while still in office?

I'll leave it to others to chronicle the other highlights and lowlights of Mary Jo White's career, and focus only on the one incident I know very well: her role in the squelching of then-SEC investigator Gary Aguirre's investigation into an insider trading incident involving future Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack. While representing Morgan Stanley at Debevoise and Plimpton, White played a key role in this inexcusable episode.

As I explained a few years ago in my story, "Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?": The attorney Aguirre joined the SEC in 2004, and two days into his job was asked to look into reports of suspicious trading activity involving a hedge fund called Pequot Capital, and specifically its megastar trader, Art Samberg. Samberg had made suspiciously prescient trades ahead of the acquisition of a firm called Heller Financial by General Electric, pocketing about $18 million in a period of weeks by buying up Heller shares before the merger, among other things.

"It was as if Art Samberg woke up one morning and a voice from the heavens told him to start buying Heller," Aguirre recalled. "And he wasn't just buying shares – there were some days when he was trying to buy three times as many shares as were being traded that day."

Aguirre did some digging and found that Samberg had been in contact with his old friend John Mack before making those trades. Mack had just stepped down as president of Morgan Stanley and had just flown to Switzerland, where he'd interviewed for a top job at Credit Suisse First Boston, the company that happened to be the investment banker for . . . Heller Financial.

Now, Mack had been on Samberg's case to cut him in on a deal involving a spinoff of Lucent. "Mack is busting my chops" to let him in on the Lucent deal, Samberg told a co-worker.

So when Mack returned from Switzerland, he called Samberg. Samberg, having done no other research on Heller Financial, suddenly decided to buy every Heller share in sight. Then he cut Mack into the Lucent deal, a favor that was worth $10 million to Mack.

Aguirre thought there was clear reason to investigate the matter further and pressed the SEC for permission to interview Mack. Not arrest the man, mind you, or hand him over to the CIA for rendition to Egypt, but merely to interview the guy. He was denied, his boss telling him that Mack had "powerful political connections" (Mack was a fundraising Ranger for President Bush).

But that wasn't all. Morgan Stanley, which by then was thinking of bringing Mack back as CEO, started trying to backdoor Aguirre and scuttle his investigation by going over his head. Who was doing that exactly? Mary Jo White. This is from the piece I mentioned, :

It didn't take long for Morgan Stanley to work its way up the SEC chain of command. Within three days, another of the firm's lawyers, Mary Jo White, was on the phone with the SEC's director of enforcement. In a shocking move that was later singled out by Senate investigators, the director actually appeared to reassure White, dismissing the case against Mack as "smoke" rather than "fire." White, incidentally, was herself the former U.S. attorney of the Southern District of New York — one of the top cops on Wall Street . . .

Aguirre didn't stand a chance. A month after he complained to his supervisors that he was being blocked from interviewing Mack, he was summarily fired, without notice. The case against Mack was immediately dropped: all depositions canceled, no further subpoenas issued. "It all happened so fast, I needed a seat belt," recalls Aguirre, who had just received a stellar performance review from his bosses. The SEC eventually paid Aguirre a settlement of $755,000 for wrongful dismissal.

It got worse. Not only did the SEC ultimately delay the interview of Mack until after the statute of limitations had expired, and not only did the agency demand an investigation into possible alternative sources for Samberg's tip (what Aguirre jokes was like "O.J.'s search for the real killers"), but the SEC official who had quashed the Mack investigation, Paul Berger, took a lucrative job working for Morgan Stanley's law firm, Debevoise and Plimpton, just nine months after Aguirre was fired.

It later came out that Berger had expressed interest in working for the firm during the exact time that Aguirre was being dismissed and the Mack investigation was being quashed. A Senate investigation later uncovered an email to Berger from another SEC official, Lawrence West, who was also interviewing with Debevoise and Plimpton at the time. This is from the Senate report on the Aguirre affair:

The e-mail was dated September 8, 2005 and addressed to Paul Berger with the subject line, "Debevoise.'' The body of the message read, "Mary Jo [White] just called. I mentioned your interest.''

So Berger was passing notes in class to Mary Jo White about wanting to work for Morgan Stanley's law firm while he was in the middle of quashing an investigation into a major insider trading case involving the C.E.O. of the bank. After the case dies, Berger later gets the multimillion-dollar posting and the circle is closed.

This whole episode highlights everything that's wrong with modern Wall Street. First of all, everybody's buddies with each other – cops and robbers, no adversarial system at all. As Bill Murray would say, it's dogs and cats, living together.

Here, a line investigator gets a good lead, it's quickly taken out of his hands and the whole thing is negotiated at 50,000 feet by friends and former co-workers of the top regulators now working at hotshot firms.

If Barack Obama wanted to send a signal that he's getting tougher on Wall Street, he sure picked a funny way to do it, nominating the woman who helped John Mack get off on the slam-dunkiest insider trading case ever to cross an SEC investigator's desk.

When I contacted Gary today, his take on it was simple. "Obama is not going to clean up financial corruption," he said, "by pinning a sheriff's badge on Wall Street's protector-in-chief."

© 2013 Rolling Stone

Matt Taibbi

As Rolling Stone’s chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the likes of journalistic giants Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi's 2004 campaign journal Spanking the Donkey cemented his status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. His books include Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire.

Finally, the Republicans Are Afraid

For anyone who has lived through the past several decades of Republican bullying – from Richard Nixon’s anything-goes politics through Karl Rove’s dreams of a “permanent Republican majority” – it had to be startling to hear House Speaker John Boehner complaining that President Barack Obama’s goal was “to annihilate” the GOP.

During a private luncheon of the Republican Ripon Society on Tuesday, Boehner cited Obama’s progressive agenda as outlined in his Second Inaugural Address as representing an existential threat to the GOP.

“It’s pretty clear to me that he knows he can’t do any of that as long as the House is controlled by Republicans,” Boehner said. “So we’re expecting over the next 22 months to be the focus of this administration as they attempt to annihilate the Republican Party.” The Ohio Republican also claimed that it was Obama’s goal “to just shove us into the dustbin of history.”

Of course, Boehner may be wildly exaggerating the Republican plight to shock the party out of its funk, raise more money, and get right-wing activists back to the barricades. Still, his comments marked a remarkable reversal of fortune, like the playground bully getting his nose bloodied and running to the teacher in tears.

Even if hyped from political effect, Boehner’s lament also might force some progressives to rethink their negative views about President Obama. If indeed Obama has gotten the upper hand on America’s swaggering Right, then he might not be the political wimp that many on the Left have pegged him to be.

Without doubt, America’s political landscape has shifted from what it was just eight years ago when President George W. Bush was talking about using his political capital to privatize Social Security and Bush’s political guru, Karl Rove, was contemplating an enduring Republican control of all three branches of the U.S. government.

As part of that Zeitgeist of 2005, as Bush entered his second term, right-wing activist Grover Norquist joked about keeping the Democrats around as neutered farm animals. The president of Americans for Tax Reform – most famous for getting Republicans to pledge never to raise taxes – told the Washington Post that congressional Democrats should grow accustomed to having no power and no reproductive ability.

“Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans,” Norquist said. “Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant. But when they’ve been ‘fixed,’ then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful.”

How We Got There

That moment of right-wing arrogance represented a culmination of decades of hardball Republican politics, a take-no-prisoners style that usually encountered only the softest of responses from the Democrats and progressives.

Arguably the pattern was set in fall 1968 when President Lyndon Johnson learned that GOP presidential nominee Nixon was sabotaging the Vietnam peace talks to ensure his victory over Vice President Hubert Humphrey – but Johnson stayed silent about what he called Nixon’s “treason” out of concern that its exposure would not be “good for the country.” [See Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.]

Nixon’s success in 1968 – and the Democratic silence – contributed to his decision several years later to create an extra-legal intelligence unit to spy on and undermine the Democrats heading into Election 1972. Finally, Nixon’s political chicanery undid him when his team of burglars was arrested inside the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate building. The resulting scandal led to his resignation in 1974.

But the Republican response to Watergate wasn’t to mend the party’s ways but rather to learn how to protect against ever again being held accountable. That reality became the political back story of the next three decades, as the Right built up a fearsome media apparatus and deployed well-funded operatives to shield Republicans and to discredit anyone who presented a threat, whether untamed Democrats, nosy reporters or average citizens.

This Right-Wing Machine showed off its value during the 1980s and early 1990s when President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush were caught up in the Iran-Contra national security scandal but succeeded in skating away with only minimal political damage. Instead of Reagan and Bush being held accountable for their crimes, far worse damage was inflicted on the careers of investigators, journalists and witnesses who tried to expose the wrongdoing.

Within this political/media framework, when Democrats did win elections, Republicans immediately demeaned them as illegitimate interlopers. For instance, Bill Clinton’s electoral victory in 1992 was an opportunity for the Right-Wing Machine to demonstrate that it could play offense as well as defense, tying up Clinton’s presidency endlessly in trivial “scandals” and setting the stage for the GOP congressional comeback in 1994.

Over those decades, the Republicans behaved as if national power was their birthright. In Election 2000, they saw nothing wrong with aggressively disrupting the recount in Florida, both with rioters on the ground and partisan justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. It didn’t matter that Vice President Al Gore had won the nation’s popular vote and would have carried Florida if all legal ballots were counted. What mattered was putting a Republican in the White House by whatever means necessary. [For details, see Neck Deep.]

The Republican Apex

After the 9/11 attacks, even as Democrats set aside partisan concerns to support President George W. Bush’s response to the crisis, Bush and the Republicans painted the Democrats as “soft on terror” and unpatriotic. The GOP did whatever it took to expand and solidify power.

In 2004, the Republicans and the Right went so far as to portray Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry as a fake Vietnam War hero. GOP activists even mocked his war wounds by passing out “Purple Heart Band-Aids” at the Republican National Convention.

Then, after Bush rode his post-9/11 reputation as a “war president” to a second term, Republican operatives like Rove and Norquist saw their moment for making their political power permanent, in effect turning the United States into a one-party state with the Democrats kept around for the necessary cosmetics of a “democracy.” The GOP would use its money, its media and its control of the judicial process to make successful electoral challenges unthinkable.

But 2005 instead turned out to be the GOP’s high-water mark, a time of premature celebration, the last moment of sunlight before the arrival of darkening clouds, or in this case, the American people’s realization that the Right’s anti-government extremism – mixed with the neocons’ imperialist wars – was a recipe for disaster.

Bush’s inept handling of Hurricane Katrina and the devastation that it inflicted along the Gulf of Mexico showed the downside of a hollowed-out federal government. And the bloody stalemate in Iraq revealed the dangers of ill-conceived military adventures.

Bush’s tax-cutting and deregulation produced other harmful consequences, including soaring federal deficits, rising income inequality, an eroding middle class and an unstable “bubble” economy that finally burst in 2008. The electorate’s recognition of Bush’s failures led to Democratic victories, including Obama’s election as President.

Yet, despite the extraordinary national crisis that Bush left behind – millions of Americans losing their jobs and their homes as well as two unfinished wars – the Republicans refused to play the role of “loyal opposition.” They pulled out their successful playbook from the early Clinton years and confronted Obama with unrelenting hostility.

Once again, the obstructionist strategy worked at least in a narrow political sense. By mid-2009, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and other loud voices from the muscular Right-Wing Machine had whipped up a passionate Tea Party opposition to Obama, including crypto-racist allegations that the President was born in Kenya, despite the evidence of birth records in Hawaii.

Meanwhile, America’s weak and disorganized Left mostly complained that Obama hadn’t delivered on everything that he should have. For his part, Obama squandered valuable time reaching out for a bipartisanship that never came, and the mainstream news media faulted him anyway for failing to achieve that bipartisanship.

Getting Obama

So, the Right surged to electoral victories in 2010. Republicans reclaimed the House and seized control of many state governments. Senior Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, openly declared that their top priority would be to ensure Obama’s failure as President and his defeat in 2012. Part of the Republican strategy to reclaim national power was to disenfranchise blacks and other minorities by creating obstacle courses of legal impediments to voting, such as onerous voter ID laws and reduced hours.

Many top GOP operatives, including Rove, remained confident of success as late as Election Night 2012, expecting Mitt Romney to unseat Barack Obama. However, Democrats blocked many of the voter-suppression schemes and Obama marshaled an unprecedented coalition of African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, women and the young to decisively defeat Romney.

In Congress, Democrats strengthened their control of the Senate and narrowed the Republican majority in the House. That GOP majority was retained only because Republicans had gerrymandered districts after the 2010 elections enabling the party to keep most seats despite losing the popular vote nationally.

During his Second Inaugural Address, Obama also made clear that he had finally forsaken the “inside game” of trying to sweet talk the Republicans into cooperation or negotiating from positions of weakness. Instead, Obama delivered a strong defense of American progressivism. He tied that tradition to the ideals of the Framers who wrote the Constitution with the intent of creating a vibrant Republic, a government of, by and for the people.

Obama’s speech and its warm reception apparently unnerved Speaker Boehner who suddenly saw something akin to an existential threat to the GOP. There were the painful election results, the nation’s shifting demographics, the newly assertive President, and hundreds of thousands of Americans again packing the Mall to celebrate Obama’s victory.

After his Inaugural Address as he stepped back into the U.S. Capitol, President Obama paused, turned around and looked back at the throngs of people waving American flags as far as the eye could see. He said wistfully, “I’m not going to see this again.”

From his seat in the Inaugural reviewing stands, Speaker Boehner saw the same impressive scene, and he may have grasped its implicit message. The large and diverse crowd personified the Obama coalition — and the mortal threat that it represents to traditional American politics, always dominated by white men of means.

Of course, the Republicans still have the Right-Wing Machine churning out propaganda to rally the party’s angry white-male base. Plus, the GOP is coming up with more new plans for minimizing the votes of black and brown people and maximizing the political clout of whites, such as a scheme in several states to apportion presidential electors based on the Republicans’ gerrymandered congressional districts.

But Boehner seems to sense that something fundamental has changed. Perhaps he was playacting a bit when he warned fellow Republicans that Obama hoped to “annihilate” the Republican Party. But – overdramatized or not – Boehner’s alarm suggests that finally it is the Republicans who are afraid.

Moscow regrets US pullout from bilateral commission on human rights

RIA Novosti / Maxim Blinov

RIA Novosti / Maxim Blinov

The United States has delivered the latest setback to Russia-US relations by announcing it will no longer participate in the Russian-American Bilateral Presidential Commission on Civil Society.

­“We regret whenever a bilateral format is canceled without an appropriate substitute," presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov told Interfax.

Moscow did not receive the US announcement through official diplomatic channels, but rather via news agencies.

"[The US announcement] has until now reached us verbally; we have not yet received any written official documents on Washington's decision to withdraw from this format of dialogue with Russia," Konstantin Dolgov, the Foreign Ministry's envoy on human rights, democracy and supremacy of law, told reporters on Friday.

The US decision to quit the Working Group on Civil Society of the Russian-American Bilateral Presidential Commission was announced by Thomas Melia, deputy secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, in an interview with Interfax.

Melia said the bilateral working group “is no longer an appropriate or effective forum that would facilitate the development and strengthening of civil society." At the same time, he emphasized that the United States will continue to work “in the field of human rights with the Russian government and civil society."

"We remain firmly committed to working with the Russian civil society in support of its objectives, including by further strengthening the links between the civil societies of Russia and the United States," Melia said. "The US government is prepared to be honest and open dialogue on civil society and human rights with the Russian government and Russian civil society.”

The US–Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission was inaugurated on July 6, 2009 by US President Barack Obama and then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev as part of the so-called ‘reset’ in relations between the two former Cold War foes.

The declared Mission Statement of the Commission is, in part, "identifying areas of cooperation and pursuing joint projects and actions that strengthen strategic stability, international security, economic well-being, and the development of ties between the Russian and American people…"

The US announcement came on the same day that the president of the Russian International Affairs Council, Igor Ivanov, said he expects US foreign policy to be more energetic and even tough during Barack Obama's second presidential term.

“In my recent conversation with John Kerry [who is anticipated to replace Hillary Clinton as the new Secretary of State], he said that now is not the time for loud statements, but a time for specific actions," Ivanov said.

Aside from the group on civil society, the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission has a multitude of other organizations that work in various diverse fields, including agriculture, arms control, counter terrorism, military technology, health and the environment.

Robert Bridge, RT

Malkin Bares Her Fangs: GOP ‘Squandered Opportunity To Really Stick It’ To Clinton On...

Michelle Malkin visited Fox & Friends yesterday to jeer discuss Hillary Clinton's Benghazi testimony in front of Congress Wednesday. The Los Angeles Times noted that the Republicans were so intent on “resurrect(ing) a specious political attack that got them nowhere in the final days of the presidential campaign,” they missed opportunities to get real answers as to how to prevent such tragedies from happening again. And, in the process, made Clinton look “stronger than ever.”

Malkin and her Fox News hosts were so busy following in those footsteps that they failed to consider how they missed the mark in just the same way

Malkin began her “analysis” by sneering that the hearings seemed all about “Hillary 2016.” But that's all the Republicans at both hearings were focused on, too -- getting a sound byte to use against her potential candidacy.

Malkin gave special attention to the widely-seen clip of Clinton responding to Republican Senator Ron Johnson in which he beats the political dead horse alleging that the Obama administration deliberately oversold an anti-Muslim YouTube video as the cause of the attack. Clinton's forceful and persuasive answer: "Was it because of a protest, or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they’d go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make?”

“It makes all the difference in the world,” Malkin said contemptuously. But she never explained why. She became too caught up in attacking Republicans for having “squandered the opportunity to really stick it, not only to Hillary and the State Department, but to this entire lying administration.”

She continued, “Now I understand that there are a lot of staffers and a lot of Republicans on Capitol Hill who have been so steeped in this that they don't realize that the basics still need to get out to the American public and that was the missed opportunity, I think.”

What are those "basics?" Calling the State Department liars, apparently. Her head thrown back and eyes wide with scorn, she ranted, “The key questions about how this administration lied and lied and lied to the American public and used this YouTube video as a ruse really needed to get out there, but I think you could count on the (she started sputtering) number of fingers on your hand how many times Republicans mentioned the video! Hello! Did they take an oath of office not to mention it yesterday?”

Host Alisyn Camerota said, “There were other questions that weren't answered.” She then purported to play a montage of those questions but, as even she acknowledged, the video was all about Republicans speechifying attacks on Clinton and the State Department.

Malkin then disparaged Clinton as out of touch and incompetent for, supposedly, not reading cables requesting more security in Libya. But nobody mentioned what the New York Times reported: “Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that she had been briefed on a series of events that indicated that security in Benghazi was deteriorating in the months before the attack... But she said she had gone along with a recommendation from subordinates that the Benghazi post be kept open and assumed that they would take the necessary steps to protect it."

Nor did “fair and balanced” Fox point out, as the Times did, that Clinton “has committed herself to putting in place all of the recommendations of an independent review that was led by Thomas R. Pickering, a former American ambassador, and Mike Mullen, the retired admiral who served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

Furthermore, the LA Times pointed out that “a productive hearing” would have “also included examining why Congress not only consistently underfunds the State Department, but has blocked expenditure of money that has already been appropriated to shore up American diplomatic efforts in several international trouble spots.” Or explored the facts and procedures that caused the overemphasis on the YouTube video in the first place.

Instead, Congressional Republicans – along with Malkin - chose anti-Clinton/anti-Obama grandstanding that got them face time on Fox News-- and probably very little else.

Grand Theft Election: How Republicans Plan to Steal the White House

If a Republican plan to rig the Electoral College had been in effect in 2012, it is reasonably likely that Mitt Romney would be President.

January 25, 2013  |  

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President Barack Obama won a commanding victory in this November’s elections, defeating Republican candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney by nearly 4 percentage points in the popular vote. In doing so, President Obama became the first president to twice win more than 51 percent of the popular vote since President Dwight D. Eisenhower did so in 1956.

If a Republican plan to rig the Electoral College had been in effect in 2012, however, it is reasonably likely that President Romney would be the one meeting with his new cabinet officials in the Oval Office. Under current law, most states allocate all of their electoral votes to the winner of the state as a whole. This Republican Plan to rig future elections, however, would change this in several blue states where Democrats are likely to carry the state’s full slate of electors. Texas, South Carolina, and other safe red states would therefore continue to deliver every single one of their electoral votes to the Republican candidate, while blue states such as Pennsylvania or Michigan would have to give away half or more of theirs to the Republican ticket. The result is a giant thumb on the scale for Republicans, enabling them to take the White House even when the electorate strongly prefers the Democratic candidate.

How the Republican election-rigging plan works

This Republican Plan would reallocate electoral votes so that a maximum of two electoral votes would go to the overall winner of several key blue states. The lion’s share of the state’s electors would then be allocated one by one to the presidential candidate who won each individual congressional district. (see Figure 1) Thus, in a blue state such as Michigan—which President Obama won by nearly 10 points in 2012—Gov. Romney would have received 9 of the state’s 16 electoral votes because he received more votes than the president did in nine of the state’s congressional districts. In other words, the Republican candidate would receive more than half of the state’s electoral votes despite being overwhelmingly defeated in the state as a whole.

Cashing in on gerrymandering

The Republican Plan does not just apply one set of rules in red states and another set of rules in blue states—it also takes advantage of profoundly gerrymandered congressional maps in order to stack the deck even more for Republican presidential candidates. In 2012 Democratic House candidates received nearly 1.4 million more votes than their Republican counterparts. Yet Republican candidates currently hold a 33-seat majority in the House, due in large part to the fact that Republican state legislatures controlled the redistricting process in several key states. Indeed, Republicans were so successful in their efforts to lock in their control of the House of Representatives through gerrymandering that Democratic House candidates would have needed to win the national popular vote by more than 7 percentage points in order to receive the barest majority in the House. Republicans aren’t particularly shy about touting the success of their gerrymanders either: The Republican State Leadership Committee released an extensive memo boasting about how they used gerrymanders to lock down GOP majorities in the House.

The impact of the current congressional maps is most profound in six key states. As explained above, President Obama did win Michigan by nearly 10 points, but Democratic candidates won only 5 of the state’s 14 congressional seats. Likewise, President Obama won Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin—in some cases by comfortable margins—but Republicans dominate the congressional delegations from these states.

Notably, all six of these states are currently controlled by Republican governors and legislatures, meaning that all six of them could implement the Republican election-rigging plan before the 2016 election.

Sanders Votes Against Weak Filibuster Reform

WASHINGTON - January 25 - Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) issued the following statement tonight after he voted against watered-down changes in Senate rules on filibusters:

“The rule changes adopted today are a step forward in making the operations of the Senate more efficient and expeditious. They are not enough.

“Most Americans grew up believing that in America the majority rules. That is not the case in the Senate. For many years now, especially since President Obama has been in office, it has taken 60 votes to pass any significant piece of legislation. When Lyndon Johnson was majority leader in the 1950s, he filed cloture to end a filibuster only once. Majority Leader Reid has filed cloture 390 times.

“This country faces major crises in terms of the economy and unemployment, the deficit, global warming, health care, campaign finance reform, education and a crumbling infrastructure – to name a few. In my view, none of these problems will be effectively addressed so long as one senator can demand 60 votes to pass legislation.

“The Senate is not the House and the minority party must be treated with respect and given the opportunity to offer amendments and make their case in opposition. A minority must not, however, be allowed to permanently obstruct the wishes of the majority. That is not democracy. That is a perversion of democracy.

“In my view, if a senator or a group of senators are strenuously opposed to legislation they have the right and duty to come to the floor and, for as long as they want, engage in a talking filibuster by explaining to the American people the reasons for their objection. They should not, however, continue to have the right to abuse arcane Senate rules to block a majority of senators from acting on behalf of the American people.”

Sanders Votes Against Weak Filibuster Reform

WASHINGTON - January 25 - Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) issued the following statement tonight after he voted against watered-down changes in Senate rules on filibusters:

“The rule changes adopted today are a step forward in making the operations of the Senate more efficient and expeditious. They are not enough.

“Most Americans grew up believing that in America the majority rules. That is not the case in the Senate. For many years now, especially since President Obama has been in office, it has taken 60 votes to pass any significant piece of legislation. When Lyndon Johnson was majority leader in the 1950s, he filed cloture to end a filibuster only once. Majority Leader Reid has filed cloture 390 times.

“This country faces major crises in terms of the economy and unemployment, the deficit, global warming, health care, campaign finance reform, education and a crumbling infrastructure – to name a few. In my view, none of these problems will be effectively addressed so long as one senator can demand 60 votes to pass legislation.

“The Senate is not the House and the minority party must be treated with respect and given the opportunity to offer amendments and make their case in opposition. A minority must not, however, be allowed to permanently obstruct the wishes of the majority. That is not democracy. That is a perversion of democracy.

“In my view, if a senator or a group of senators are strenuously opposed to legislation they have the right and duty to come to the floor and, for as long as they want, engage in a talking filibuster by explaining to the American people the reasons for their objection. They should not, however, continue to have the right to abuse arcane Senate rules to block a majority of senators from acting on behalf of the American people.”

Funny Tweets Of The Week

What a week! Especially if you love or hate Europe. Or America. Yes, David Cameron announced Tory plans for an EU referendum - despite the risks of the withdrawal method - while across the Pond, Beyonce Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President ...

Progressives Trash Senate’s Failure to Get Meaningful Filibuster Reform

"Most Americans grew up believing that in America the majority rules," said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). "That is not the case in the Senate." (Image: via C-SPAN)Following a final agreement passed in the Senate on Thursday evening, progressives slammed the failure to achieve the necessary and 'meaningful' reforms widely called for to unlock the debilitating hold the filibuster has had on the chamber in recent years.

Abused by a minority Republican party unyielding in its strategy to block any progressive legislation with which they disagree, critics say Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's failure to push through a return of the "talking filibuster" crushes most hope for progress on the nation's most pressing problems.

“This country faces major crises in terms of the economy and unemployment, the deficit, global warming, health care, campaign finance reform, education and a crumbling infrastructure," said Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), explaining why he voted against the measure's weak provisions.

"In my view, none of these problems will be effectively addressed so long as one senator can demand 60 votes to pass legislation. The rule changes adopted today ...  are not enough.”

Democratic Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa went on record to say that the meager reforms will make passage of meaningful legislation in the Senate nearly impossible.

Harkin told reporters: "I said to President Obama back in August ... and I said to him the night before the election, I said to him, 'Look, if you get reelected, if we don't do something significant about filibuster reform, you might as well take a four-year vacation,'" 

"This is not significant," Harkin added.

Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, whose members had pushed for stronger reforms called the Senate's decision one "based on fear." The rules passed, he said, "will ultimately hurt millions of people who would have been helped by progressive bills that Republicans are sure to filibuster.”

A group called Fix the Senate Now, which also rallied behind stronger measures, called the result a "missed an opportunity to restore accountability and deliberation to the Senate, while not raising the costs of obstruction."

"The incremental ‘reforms’ in the agreement do not go nearly far enough to deliver meaningful change,” the group said.

Digby, political blogger at the Campaign for America's Future, summed up the deal by saying: "Better than nothing, but still not much. The story of our time."

And others put the focus directly on Reid, who had once threatened to exert all efforts and use all options at his disposal to see the strong changes enacted.

“My friend Harry Reid, the senator from Searchlight, NV, has gone missing in the fight for filibuster reform,” said Common Cause President Bob Edgar. “The deal he and Sen. McConnell have struck allows individual senators to continue blocking debate and action by the entire body and to do so without explaining themselves to their colleagues or the American people. This is not the Senate of debate and deliberation our founders envisioned."

Senator Sanders seemed to agree with Edgar's last sentiment. In his closing floor statement, Sanders told his fellow Senators and those watching:

Most Americans grew up believing that in America the majority rules. That is not the case in the Senate.

For many years now, especially since President Obama has been in office, it has taken 60 votes to pass any significant piece of legislation. When Lyndon Johnson was majority leader in the 1950s, he filed cloture to end a filibuster only once. Majority Leader Reid has filed cloture 390 times.

The Senate is not the House and the minority party must be treated with respect and given the opportunity to offer amendments and make their case in opposition. A minority must not, however, be allowed to permanently obstruct the wishes of the majority. That is not democracy. That is a perversion of democracy.

In my view, if a senator or a group of senators are strenuously opposed to legislation they have the right and duty to come to the floor and, for as long as they want, engage in a talking filibuster by explaining to the American people the reasons for their objection. They should not, however, continue to have the right to abuse arcane Senate rules to block a majority of senators from acting on behalf of the American people.

And yet, it appears, that is exactly what they'll get the opportunity to do.

Frontrunning: January 25

  • Fed Pushes Into ‘Uncharted Territory’ With Record Assets (BBG)
  • Next up in the currency wars: Korea - Samsung Drops on $2.8 Billion Won Profit-Cut Prediction (BBG)
  • China Warns ‘Hot Money’ Inflows Possible on Easing From Abroad (Bloomberg)
  • BOJ Shirakawa affirms easy policy pledge but warns of costs (Reuters)
  • Merkel Takes a Swipe at Japan Over Yen (WSJ)
  • Wages in way of Abe’s war on deflation (FT)
  • Italian PM under fire over bank crisis (FT)
  • Senior officials urge calm over islands dispute (China Daily)
  • Spain tries to peel back business rules (FT)
  • Rifts Over Cyprus Bailout Feed Broader Fears (WSJ)
  • Soros Says the Euro Is Here to Stay as Currency War Looms (BBG)
  • Deutsche Bank Debt Salesmen Said to Go Amid Pay Overhaul (BBG)
  • Cameron pitches new deal as good for EU (FT)

Overnight Media Digest

WSJ

* U.S. President Barack Obama nominated a former prosecutor turned white-collar criminal defender, Mary Jo White, as his choice for top U.S. securities regulator.

* Microsoft's quarterly earnings slipped 3.7 percent as the software giant reported weaker sales in its business and entertainment divisions, though revenue in its core Windows business strengthened.

* Citigroup Inc's private bank has decided to pull its $187 million investment from SAC Capital Advisors LP, the latest in a string of client defections that have occurred amid scrutiny of the hedge-fund firm.

* JP Morgan will not be trying 'staple financing' in the potential Dell deal, a possible ramification of a court decision criticizing what was once a common practice on Wall Street.

* Samsung Electronics Co on Friday said its fourth-quarter profit rose 76 percent to a record high on strong smartphone sales and higher margins in its chip business.

* Morgan Stanley Chairman and Chief Executive James Gorman is expected to take a second straight annual pay cut for 2012, as the securities firm continues to struggle to get back on track.

* Casino operator Las Vegas Sands Corp has stopped executing international money transfers for its high-rolling customers and is overhauling its compliance procedures as it faces scrutiny from U.S. and international regulators, people familiar with the matter said.

* Bristol-Myers Squibb Co agreed to pay $80 million to settle cases involving 15 patients killed or hurt during company-sponsored testing of an experimental drug for hepatitis C.

FT

BARCLAYS EXECUTIVES FACE MOUNTING LIBOR PRESSURE Top executives at Barclays were aware the bank was manipulating its submissions to Libor rate-setting panel in November 2011, almost a year earlier than previously disclosed, emails suggested. (link.reuters.com/tud55t)

OSBORNE STICKS TO AUSTERITY PLAN Finance minister George Osborne will not be diverted from his austerity plan even if data on the strength of British economy disappoints. (link.reuters.com/xud55t)

GOVERNMENT TO DELIVER CHILDCARE BOOST Britain's coalition government is planning to spend 1.5 billion pounds on a package of measures to help families cope with nursery fees. (link.reuters.com/vud55t)

FEARS RAISED OVER ECB FUNDING SCHEME Senior bankers are becoming increasingly concerned about the European Central Bank's special longer-term funding scheme, saying that it could encourage the creation of a two-tier banking market. (link.reuters.com/dyd55t)

RETAILERS MAKE APPEAL ON TAX AVOIDANCE High street retailers said the government needed to take action to stop tax avoidance by multinational companies. (link.reuters.com/bed55t)

RIM BOOSTED BY LENOVO INTEREST Lenovo has signalled it could be interested in buying Research In Motion, lifting the shares in the troubled Canadian maker of BlackBerry smartphones

NYT

* U.S. President Barack Obama tapped Mary Jo White, a former United States attorney turned white-collar defense lawyer, to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission. He also renominated Richard Cordray as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

* Jill Sommers, a Republican regulator overseeing the investigation into MF Global's collapse, has abruptly decided to depart the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the agency said.

* After a year of mixed financial performance at Morgan Stanley, the firm's chief executive, James Gorman, is expected to take a second annual pay cut.

* AT&T sold a record number of smartphones over the holiday season, but its quarterly earnings took a hit from pension costs and Hurricane Sandy.

* Microsoft's biggest product in decades, Windows 8, helped lift sales of the company's flagship operating system business, but not enough to rejuvenate overall growth.

* Greenhill reported a 4 percent drop in advisory revenue last year, a week after larger rivals JPMorgan Chase & Co and Morgan Stanley posted much larger declines.

* HCA Holdings, the largest profit-making hospital chain in the United States, was ordered to pay $162 million after a judge ruled that it had failed to abide by an agreement to make improvements to dilapidated hospitals that it bought in the Kansas City area several years ago.

* A federal appeals court in the United States tossed out $172 million in damages that Mattel had been ordered to pay MGA Entertainment, the maker of Bratz dolls. It was the latest move in a bitter nine-year legal dis

Canada

THE GLOBE AND MAIL

* An executive from a Quebec engineering firm has testified that many of the province's top engineering companies, including the troubled giant SNC Lavalin Group Inc, colluded to pay political kickbacks and to win fixed construction contracts.

Michel Lalonde, the president of Genius Conseil, told Quebec's construction inquiry on Thursday that a list of top companies were complicit in the scheme to secure road and sewer design and construction surveillance contracts by sending bribes and kickbacks to the political party headed by the city's mayor.

* Shawn Atleo, national chief of Assembly of First Nations, said any divisions in the aboriginal community are trumped by shared objectives, including ending "the status quo", and that many of the community's goals are similar to those of the rest of Canadians.

Reports in the business section:

* Talisman Energy Inc plans to slash its general and administrative (G&A) costs by "at least 20 per cent over all", Helen Wesley, the company's executive vice president of corporate services, told the CIBC Whistler Institutional Investor Conference on Thursday.

* Agrium Inc raised its fourth-quarter earnings estimate based on robust grain and oilseed prices that are helping boost demand for its fertilizers and other products. The Calgary-based company said it expects fourth-quarter earnings to be slightly above C$2 per share, compared with its previous guidance of C$1.50 to C$1.90.

NATIONAL POST

* Facing drastically falling oil revenue, Alberta Premier Alison Redford set the stage for serious spending cuts and possible tax hikes during a televised fireside chat on Thursday.

Redford blamed a "bitumen bubble" and warned Albertans about austere times to come. The government has forecast a deficit in the current fiscal year of C$3 billion.

FINANCIAL POST

* At least one Calgary oil executive is appealing to Canadian pocket books as the U.S. state department decides the fate of TransCanada Corp's Alberta-to-Texas Keystone XL pipeline. Export constraints on Alberta heavy oil production are costing each Canadian C$1,200 per year, Cenovus Energy Inc CEO Brian Ferguson said on Thursday.

* Canadian wireless carriers must make changes to their networks and systems to support 911 emergency text messages from hearing and speech impaired persons, the federal telecom regulator said on Thursday. The service would only be provided to the hearing and speech impaired who have pre-registered for it with their wireless carrier, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) said.

China

CHINA SECURITIES JOURNAL

-- China will build six control standards, including PM2.5, in 113 cities and will release the monitoring data before the end of December this year, Environment Minister Zhou Shengxian said.

-- The number of Chinese mobile phone users reached 1.11 billion as of the end of 2012, according to Ministry of Industry and Information Technology data released on Thursday.

-- China Financial Futures Exchanges has approved the application of account opening from several QFII institutions.

CHINA DAILY (www.chinadaily.com.cn)

-- Alibaba Group Holdings, China's largest e-commerce company, plans to join hands with partners to build a logistics network across China that can support 100 billion yuan worth of transactions a year within the next decade.

-- China is expected to lead emerging economies in spending on consumable products, with an estimated average annual increase in total consumer spending of 15 percent every year to 2016, according to a report released by the Economist Intelligence Unit and U.K. research firm Mintel.

SHANGHAI DAILY

-- Shanghai expects to set up China's first free trade zone in Waigaoqiao in Pudong New Area as the city bids to become a global trade hub by 2020, a senior official said. Unlike a bonded area, a free trade zone offers businesses lower taxes, a more liberal currency exchange and better efficiency due to less supervision.

CHINA BUSINESS NEWS

-- New bank loans in January are expected to reach between 1 trillion yuan and 1.2 trillion yuan as the economy rebounds, according to market participants. Total new loans for 2013 are expected to reach 8.5 trillion yuan to 9 trillion yuan.

Fly On The Wall 7:00 Market Snapshot

ANALYST RESEARCH

Upgrades

AMC Networks (AMCX) upgraded to Equal Weight from Underweight at Morgan Stanley
Autodesk (ADSK) upgraded to Conviction Buy from Sell at Goldman
eBay (EBAY) upgraded to Outperform from Market Perform at Bernstein
EQT Midstream Partners (EQM) upgraded to Outperform from Neutral at Credit Suisse
Horizon Bancorp (HBNC) upgraded to Outperform from Market Perform at Raymond James
JPMorgan (JPM) upgraded to Buy from Hold at Deutsche Bank
KLA-Tencor (KLAC) upgraded to Hold from Sell at Deutsche Bank
NetEase.com (NTES) upgraded to Buy from Neutral at UBS
QLogic (QLGC) upgraded to Equal Weight from Underweight at Morgan Stanley
STMicroelectronics (STM) upgraded to Outperform from Neutral at Exane BNP Paribas
Sony (SNE) upgraded to Buy from Neutral at BofA/Merrill
Tiffany (TIF) upgraded to Overweight from Neutral at HSBC
Union First Market (UBSH) upgraded to Outperform from Neutral at RW Baird

Downgrades

Canadian Pacific (CP) downgraded to Sell from Hold at Canaccord
City National (CYN) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at SunTrust
Dime Community (DCOM) downgraded to Equal Weight from Overweight at Barclays
Flextronics (FLEX) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at UBS
Flowserve (FLS) downgraded to Buy from Strong Buy at CL King
Ford (F) downgraded to Equal Weight from Overweight at Barclays
Goldman Sachs (GS) downgraded to Hold from Buy at Deutsche Bank
Goldman Sachs (GS) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Citigroup
Hanmi Financial (HAFC) downgraded to Market Perform from Outperform at FBR Capital
IAMGOLD (IAG) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at BofA/Merrill
Janus Capital (JNS) downgraded to Sell from Neutral at Citigroup
Janus Capital (JNS) downgraded to Underperform from Neutral at Credit Suisse
Medtronic (MDT) downgraded to Hold from Buy at Wunderlich
Noble Corp. (NE) downgraded to Hold from Buy at Jefferies
Scripps Networks (SNI) downgraded to Underweight from Equal Weight at Morgan Stanley
Select Comfort (SCSS) downgraded to Equal Weight from Overweight at Barclays
Skullcandy (SKUL) downgraded to Neutral from Overweight at Piper Jaffray
United Continental (UAL) downgraded to Underperform from Neutral at BofA/Merrill
Virginia Commerce (VCBI) downgraded to Market Perform from Outperform at FBR Capital

Initiations

Accenture (ACN) initiated with an Overweight at Evercore
Actavis (ACT) initiated with an Overweight at Morgan Stanley
Amazon.com (AMZN) initiated with a Buy at ISI Group
Aon Corp. (AON) initiated with a Market Perform at Wells Fargo
BioMed Realty (BMR) initiated with a Neutral at Goldman
BioScrip (BIOS) initiated with a Buy at SunTrust
Boston Properties (BXP) initiated with an Overweight at Evercore
Brown & Brown (BRO) initiated with a Market Perform at Wells Fargo
Forestar Group (FOR) initiated with a Buy at DA Davidson
Marsh & McLennan (MMC) initiated with an Outperform at Wells Fargo
Park-Ohio (PKOH) initiated with an Outperform at Imperial Capital
Red Hat (RHT) initiated with an Outperform at Northland Securities
Starz (STRZA) initiated with a Sell at Stifel Nicolaus
Starz (STRZA) initiated with an Underweight at Evercore

HOT STOCKS

AT&T (T) sees FY13 EPS growth to be upper-single digits or higher
Consensus for FY13 revenue is $128.3B
Sees FY13 consolidated margins to be stable
Starbucks (SBUX) targets opening of about 1,300 net new stores globally in FY13
Expects to open 1,500 new stores in U.S. over next five years
Said China a ”significant market opportunity,” expects to have 1,500 stores there by 2015
Court of Appeals agreed with Mattel (MAT), verdict, damages on MGA's claims reversed
Belkin to buy Cisco's (CSCO) home networking unit
Juniper (JNPR): Trends driving network investment in cloud/mobility intact
Sees improved momentum in routing in 2013 in Europe and U.S.
Expects to expand FY13 operating margins
City National (CYN) expects net income to grow 'very modestly' in 2013
US Airways (LCC) reached tentative agreement with flight attendants

EARNINGS

Companies that beat consensus earnings expectations last night and today include:
KLA-Tencor (KLAC), Synaptics (SYNA), QLogic (QLGC), ResMed (RMD), Rambus (RMBS), Tempur-Pedic (TPX), Juniper (JNPR), Microsoft (MSFT), Cirrus Logic (CRUS)

Companies that missed consensus earnings expectations include:
Key Technology (KTEC), E-Trade (ETFC), Sterling Financial (STSA), AT&T (T)

Companies that matched consensus earnings expectations include:
Western Alliance (WAL), IBERIABANK (IBKC), Starbucks (SBUX)

NEWSPAPERS/WEBSITES

U.S. electricity producers have increased their use of natural gas now that technological advances have unlocked vast amounts of the fuel in shale rock formations. But executives at some top utilities are wary of relying too heavily on natural gas to make electricity, concerned that its current low price may not last, the Wall Street Journal reports
As Samsung Electronics (SSNLF) and Apple (AAPL) attempt to defend their dominance in the smartphone market, the latest data show China’s Huawei Technologies Co. ranked third in terms of market share for the first time, an indication that a rapid increase of smartphone users in China and other emerging markets may be starting to alter the global landscape, the Wall Street Journal reports
Innovation Network Corp. of Japan, a Japanese state-backed fund, wants a Nissan Motor Co. (NSANY) and NEC Corp. JV to buy Sony’s (SNE) lithium-ion battery unit to prevent rivals in China and Taiwan from getting its technology as the TV maker looks to offload non-core businesses, the Daily Yomiuri said, Reuters reports
Lockheed Martin (LMT) is challenging the U.S. government in court over $13.6M in research tax credits in a case that tests the often unclear line between research and production, with future R&D claims by other companies possibly at stake, Reuters reports
Fed Chairman Bernanke’s unprecedented bond buying pushed the Fed’s balance sheet to a record $3T as he shows no sign of softening his effort to bring down 7.8% unemployment, Bloomberg reports
Over half of the $18T in national daily trading of energy swaps has moved to futures exchanges from the over-the-counter market in response to the U.S. regulatory overhaul aimed at increasing transparency--Dodd-Frank--following the 2008 financial crisis, Bloomberg reports

SYNDICATE

Adecogro (AGRO) files to sell 8.7M shares of common stock for holders
Anthera Pharmaceuticals (ANTH) files to sell common stock
ArrowHead Research (ARWR) files to sell common stock and warrants
BG Medicine (BGMD) enters $12M common stock purchase agreement with Aspire Capital
Bright Horizons (BFAM) 10.1M share IPO priced at $22.00
Chuy's (CHUY) 4.5M share Secondary priced at $25.00

Your rating: None

The President of Perpetual War

Four years into his presidency, Barack Obama’s political formula should be obvious. He gives fabulous speeches teeming with popular liberal ideas, often refuses to take the actions necessary to realize those ideas and then banks on most voters, activists, reporters and pundits never bothering to notice - or care about - his sleight of hand.

Whether railing on financial crime and then refusing to prosecute Wall Street executives or berating health insurance companies and then passing a health care bill bailing out those same companies, Obama embodies a cynical ploy - one that relies on a celebrity-entranced electorate focusing more on TV-packaged rhetoric than on legislative reality.

Never was this formula more apparent than when the president discussed military conflicts during his second inaugural address. Declaring that “a decade of war is now ending,” he insisted that he “still believe(s) that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war.”

The lines generated uncritical applause, much of it from anti-war liberals who protested against the Bush administration. Living up to Obama’s calculation, few seemed to notice that the words came from the same president who is manufacturing a state of “perpetual war.”

Obama, let’s remember, is the president who escalated the Afghanistan War and whose spokesman recently reiterated that U.S. troops are not necessarily leaving that country anytime soon. He is the president who has initiated undeclared wars in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya. He is also the president who, according to data from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, has launched more than 20,000 air strikes—and those assaults show no sign of stopping.

We know that latter point to be the true because just days before Obama’s inaugural address declaring an end to war, the Washington Post reported that the administration’s new manual establishing “clear rules” for counterterrorism operations specifically creates a “carve-out (that) would allow the CIA to continue” the president’s intensifying drone war.

That’s the “perpetual war,” you’ll recall, in which Obama asserts the extra-constitutional right to compile a “kill list” and then order bombing raids of civilian areas in hopes of killing alleged militants - including U.S. citizens.

According to a study by the New America Foundation, roughly one in five of those killed by such strikes are civilians. However, even that troubling number may understate the situation. That’s because, as the New York Times previously reported, the Obama administration “counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants” even though, according to a CIA official, Obama aides “are not really sure who they are.”

Obama partisans’ typical riposte to these horrifying truths is to first and foremost attack the messenger. As just one example, a confidante of Obama’s national security director recently berated war critics as “Cheeto-eating people in the basement working in their underwear.”

These same partisans then typically blurt out two words: national security. But the argument that the president’s drone war is protecting America is as flip as it is inaccurate.

That’s the conclusion of a new analysis by the Council on Foreign Relations - an establishmentarian group that cannot be dismissed with insults about snack food, subterranean dwelling and tighty-whities. Citing a concurrent increase in drone strikes and terrorists in Yemen, CFR says there is a predictable “blowback” effect whereby bombings result in “heightened anger toward the United States and sympathy with or allegiance to al-Qaida” among local populations.

These facts, of course, are a downer for those mesmerized by the president’s soothing inauguration rhetoric. No doubt, he is hoping we simply ignore reality because we so want to believe the anti-war oratory. If we do that, though, we will be aiding and abetting the very state of “perpetual war” that the president has created.

© 2012 Creators Syndicate

David Sirota

David Sirota is a best-selling author whose new book "Back to Our Future" is now available. He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and is a contributing writer at Salon.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.

The Flobots: Reviving the Poetry of Politics

In 2006, Neil Young told the Los Angeles Times that the silence of young songwriters during the Bush era compelled him to retake the stage as a protest singer: “I was waiting for someone to come along, some young singer eighteen-to-twenty-two years old, to write these songs and stand up. I waited a long time. Then I decided that maybe the generation that has to do this is still the ’60s generation.”  

Hats off to the Godfather of Grunge for stepping into the breach during the Bush years but it’s time for him to exit stage left and let a new generation take over. Whether it’s Occupy’s resurgence as an army of first-responders distributing food, clothing, and even bike-powered electricity or the Rolling Jubilee that has pooled enough funds to buy and then cancel over $10 million in homeowners debt -- this is not your father’s protest movement.

To tune into the new poetry of protest, Neil should check out the Flobots. They’re a band out of Denver writing songs that reflect the frustration and anticipation of a new generation of activists navigating the seemingly intractable environmental and economic crises.

What sets the Flobots apart from other contemporary topical songwriters is their keen sense that something new is afoot. They are one the first bands to articulate the sneaking suspicion among activists that a new paradigm with a new storyline is emerging - one that, against all odds, we may have the power to shape.

The Flobots don’t drip with the idealism of the drum-circle crowd, but in songs like “Circle in the Square” they let their hope mingle with fear:

We are the night light bearers for night terrors
we are group dreamers vision seekers and pall bearers
in aftermath of blight errors
blood type and marrow to the bone oaths
and beat hope into plough shares.

They use their music to embrace what co-founder Johnny 5 sees as the “complications, questions, and frustrations” of activism and social change. They celebrate this complexity “as a part of a global transformation, one in which forces of violence, hopelessness and waste will be composted into fertile soil from which new possibility can grow.”

Too many protest songs are uninspired. Like banal picket line chants—"Hey hey, ho ho, Dirty coal has got to go"—songwriters dash off drab lyrics that influence neither heads nor hearts. Neil Young went from writing Ohio in 1970, one of the most pointed, timely and moving political songs of his generation, to the slapped together “Impeach the President For Lying” in 2006. As Truman Capote famously quipped about Jack Kerouac, "That's not writing, that's typing.”

The Flobots are on a quest to return poetry to politics. In songs like “The Rose and the Thistle” they weave images of street clashes and concealed edens:

the shadow cast was like a battle axe
so I grabbed it fast and I smashed the glass
and I crawled through the shards
and i found myself in a beautiful garden
with petals bulbs
nettles mulch hibiscus delphinium ferns christmas bells...

The band tag themselves as “students of illness” and prove it by scattering medical references of surgical procedures and prescription drugs like chondroitin and glucosamine throughout their songs. Once you realize they’re not defending Obamacare, the rhymes becomes less peculiar and more powerful. The Flobots—like many of their generation—are intent on holistic critiques of social ills, not the laundry lists of siloed issue politics.

These are artists diagnosing the disease and disorders of the body politic—and that’s exactly what the doctor ordered. As Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org writes, poets and other artists are the “antibodies of the cultural bloodstream” and key to social movement vitality, because they “sense trouble early, and rally to isolate and expose and defeat it, to bring to bear the human power for love and beauty and meaning against the worst results of carelessness and greed and stupidity.”

Whether it was Picasso’s “Guernica” capturing the horrors of the German bombing of civilians in 1937 or “We Shall Overcome” expressing the optimism and power of the civil rights movement, throughout history artists have joined forces with political movements to battle injustice. Our generation’s fight to build a sustainable future will be long and hard. To prevail we will need a battalion of Flobots to inspire and fortify our wills - and together we will make the world better and more beautiful place.

Brendan Smith

Brendan Smith is an oysterman and green labor activist.  He is co-founder of the Labor Network for Sustainability and Global Labor Strategies, and a consulting partner with the Progressive Technology Project. He has worked previously for Congressman Bernie Sanders (I-VT) — both as campaign director and staff on the U.S. House Banking Committee — as well as a broad range of trade unions, grassroots groups and progressive politicians. He is a graduate of Cornell law school.

UN probing global terror drone warfare

A United Nations official has initiated a formal probe into assassination drone strikes and targeted killings, examining one of the most controversial instruments of US government’s so-called counter terrorism policy.

In a press briefing in British capital of London on Thursday, UN Special Rapporteur Ben Emmerson announced the launching of an investigation by experts to inspect 25 terror drone attacks in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories, The Los Angeles Times reports on Friday.

The UN official further said that the assassination drones are not the only manner of conducting targeted killings, “but the relative ease with which they are used and their devastating effects have spotlighted the legal unease around them,” the report adds.


Emmerson is also cited in the report as emphasizing that the world “urgently needs ways to regulate their use and keep it in line with international law,” which has still not resolved ways to deal with such killings.

“To shine the light of factual truth on some of these very abstract debates,” a team of investigators will look into targeted killings, the UN expert is quoted as saying.

The New America Foundation has published figures, estimating that since 2004 up to 3,279 people have been killed by US assassination drone strikes in Pakistan alone, including as many as 305 civilians and hundreds of others “unknown.”

The United States under the Obama administration has intensified terror drone strikes and its officials have defended the deadly assassination bids as a warranted use of force against what they widely claim as affiliates of the shadowy al-Qaeda terrorist group.

However, the daily points out, the rising use of assassination drones as a form of warfare “has alarmed human rights groups around the world, who argue that the secretive practice of targeted killings runs afoul of international law.”


The US, it notes, has been sued over drone assassination of three American citizens in Yemen, including an alleged al-Qaeda activist and his 16-year-old son.

Additionally, the US has recently escalated its terror drone attacks across Yemen, striking the central part of the country on Wednesday for the fourth time in the previous five days.

“The Obama administration seems to have decided that wherever it conducts a targeted killing, it is by definition engaged in armed conflict, even far from any obvious battlefield,” James Ross of Human Rights Watch is quoted of saying in the report. “What would the US say if Russia or China took the same approach to attack perceived enemies in the streets of New York or Washington?”

According to Emmerson, UN investigators will gather evidence on terror drone strikes until May by visiting a number of targeted countries and would make recommendations to the world body about nation’s duty to probe such attacks.

MFB/MFB

Kerry urges demilitarized US diplomacy

Obama administration’s Secretary of State Nominee Senator John Kerry has called for a US diplomacy that moves away from military deployments and assassination drone attacks "thrust upon us" by September 11.

"President Obama and everyone here knows that American foreign policy is not defined by drones and deployments alone," Kerry said Thursday during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

"American foreign policy is also defined by food security and energy security, humanitarian assistance, the fight against disease and the push for development, as much as it is by any single counter terrorism initiative," he added.

The remarks come despite Obama administration’s drastic escalation of terror drone strikes, also referred to as “targeted killing,” in Muslim countries in the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa as part of its ‘counter terrorism’ policy that has been devised by White House Counterterrorism Advisor John Brennan, who was recently nominated to head the CIA spy agency.


The Senate committee is widely expected to vote as early as next week to confirm the Democratic Massachusetts senator who was his party’s presidential nominee in 2004 that lost to Republican George W. Bush. Reports indicate that Kerry may take over the US State Department in early February, replacing the departing Secretary Hillary Clinton.

On Syria, Kerry appeared to reject the Obama administration policy of regime change and when pressed by hawkish Republican Senator John McCain about intervening directly in the Middle Eastern country in support of anti-Damascus insurgents, Kerry said he needs time to better understand the situation.

Kerry did not outline a major foreign policy agenda for the US in the next four years but emphasized that “more than ever, foreign policy is economic policy,” noting that the United States must do better in the global competition for resources and markets.

MFB/MFB

How Can We Reconcile Freedom-Loving Libertarianism with Tough Prosecution of Fraud?

 

Liberty and Justice Are Not Irreconcilable

I voted for Gary Johnson (and am a huge fan of Ron Paul), and respect and fully-support the libertarian passions for freedom and free markets.

But I am also a tireless crusader for enforcing the rule of law.

You might assume that these are opposite philosophies.  For example, a reader asks:

Your work on the dangers of the American nuclear industry has been really comprehensive, and you have drawn attention to the deception, manipulation, neglect, and willful ignorance of the nuclear industry. For example, I just watched the Al Jazeera video you posted earlier this year (3/12), in which the NRC and the nuclear industry are (rightly) criticized for waiting for harm to happen, instead of preventing it. At the same time, you identify as libertarian, and I believe you supported Gary Johnson in the presidential election. He is opposed to public regulation of industry and has said that post-harm lawsuits -- for example, in medical contexts -- are sufficient to encourage businesses to self-regulate for public safety. Could you please explain how you reconcile the libertarian position against regulation with your clear recognition that too-loose self-regulation of the nuclear industry imperils the public?

Nuclear Power Would Not Exist In a Free Market

Initially, it is undisputed that nuclear power plants would not exist if operators had to obtain funding and insurance through the free market. Private insurers won’t touch nuclear energy. Investors run the other way, because the odds of losing all of their investment are so high.

No private company in the world would operate a nuclear plant unless the government put a very low cap on liability. In many parts of the world, governments cap liability at a mere $13 billion dollars.

This is a little insane, given that “the risk of a nuclear catastrophe … could total trillions of dollars and even bankrupt a country”.

Indeed:

If there was a free market in energy, nuclear power would be over … immediately.

AP notes:

Nuclear power is a viable source for cheap energy only if it goes uninsured.

***

Governments that use nuclear energy are torn between the benefit of low-cost electricity and the risk of a nuclear catastrophe, which could total trillions of dollars and even bankrupt a country.

***

The cost of a worst-case nuclear accident at a plant in Germany, for example, has been estimated to total as much as €7.6 trillion ($11 trillion), while the mandatory reactor insurance is only €2.5 billion.

“The €2.5 billion will be just enough to buy the stamps for the letters of condolence,” said Olav Hohmeyer, an economist at the University of Flensburg who is also a member of the German government’s environmental advisory body.

The situation in the U.S., Japan, China, France and other countries is similar.

***

“Around the globe, nuclear risks — be it damages to power plants or the liability risks resulting from radiation accidents — are covered by the state. The private insurance industry is barely liable,” said Torsten Jeworrek, a board member at Munich Re, one of the world’s biggest reinsurance companies.

***

In financial terms, nuclear incidents can be so devastating that the cost of full insurance would be so high as to make nuclear energy more expensive than fossil fuels.

***

Ultimately, the decision to keep insurance on nuclear plants to a minimum is a way of supporting the industry.

“Capping the insurance was a clear decision to provide a non-negligible subsidy to the technology,” Klaus Toepfer, a former German environment minister and longtime head of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), said.

U.S. News and World Report reports:

The disaster insurance for nuclear power plants in the United States is currently underwritten by the federal government, Cooper says. Without that safeguard, “nuclear power is neither affordable nor worth the risk. If the owners and operators of nuclear reactors had to face the full liability of a Fukushima-style nuclear accident or go head-to-head with alternatives in a truly competitive marketplace, unfettered by subsidies, no one would have built a nuclear reactor in the past, no one would build one today, and anyone who owns a reactor would exit the nuclear business as quickly as possible.”

See this and this.

In other words, this is not a free market.  Instead, the public has funded the nuclear industry.  As such, we - the owners - should get some control over how nuclear plants operate.

Likewise, the government created the mega-banks, big oil and the other mega-corporations.

Free Market Champions Demand Prosecution of Fraud

A strong rule of law is the main determinant of prosperity.  On the other hand, failure to prosecute fraud is destroying our prosperity.

Nuclear meltdowns, the financial crisis and the Gulf oil spill all happened for the same reason:  fraud to make a few more pennies, and a subsequent cover-up to try to protect the wrongdoers and continue "business as usual". And see this.

This is not free market economics.

Indeed, the father of free market economics - Adam Smith  - leading Austrian economists, and other free market advocates are for the prosecution of fraud:

There is a widespread myth that free market supporters are against regulation or prosecuting fraud.

In fact, Adam Smith – the father of free market capitalism – was for regulation of banks, and believed that trust is vital for a healthy economy. Because strong enforcement of laws against fraud is a basic prerequisite for trust, Smith would be disgusted by the lack of prosecution of Wall Street fraudsters today.

Smith railed against monopolies and their corrupting influence. And Smith was pro-regulation, so long as the regulation benefited the little guy, as opposed to the wealthiest:

When the regulation, therefore, is in support of the workman, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters.

Richard Posner – one of the leading proponents over the course of many decades for removing the reach of the law from the economy – has now changed his mind.

So has another leading proponent of deregulation and turning a blind eye towards fraud: Alan Greenspan.

While some promoters of a fake version of Austrian economics are anti-regulation and against prosecuting fraud, the main Austrian economists were unambiguously for them.

William K. Black – professor of economics and law, and the senior regulator during the S&L crisis – notes that leading Austrian free market economists said that fraud must be prosecuted:

Real Austrian economists … hate elite frauds and want them prosecuted vigorously. Ludwig von Mises and Friederich Hayek are the two most famous Austrian economists.

Hayek, F.A. The Road to Serfdom

To create conditions in which competition will be as effective as possible, to prevent fraud and deception, to break up monopolies— these tasks provide a wide and unquestioned field for state activity.

The Constitution of Liberty

There remains, however, one other kind of harmful action that is generally thought desirable to prevent and which at first might seem distinct. This is fraud and deception. Yet, though it would be straining the meaning of words to call them ‘coercion,’ on examination it appears that the reasons why we want to prevent them are the same as those applying to coercion. Deception, like coercion, is a form of manipulating the data on which a person counts, in order to make him do what deceiver wants him to do. Where it is successful, the deceived becomes in the same manner the unwilling tool, serving another man’s ends without advancing his own. Though we have no single word to cover both, all we have said of coercion applies equally to fraud and deception.

With this correction, it seems that freedom demands no more than that coercion and violence, fraud and deception, be prevented, except for the use of coercion by government for the sole purpose of enforcing known rules intended to ensure the best conditions under which the individual may give his activities a coherent, rational pattern…..

Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions…. Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.

Mises, L.

Government ought to protect the individuals within the country against the violent and fraudulent attacks of gangsters, and it should defend the country against foreign enemies.

Black also notes that fraud is a leading cause of financial bubbles and malinvestment – two of the greatest sins which Austrian economists rightly fight against.

Unless financial fraud is prosecuted, bubbles will be blown … and when they burst, the economy will tank. Fraud – along with bad Federal Reserve policy – is what causes bubbles in the first place.

The Proof Is In the Pudding: Fewer Prosecutions Equals a Worse Economy

Obama has prosecuted fewer financial crimes than any president in decades – less than Ronald Reagan, less than George H.W. Bush, less than Bill Clinton, and less than George W. Bush.

The economy is worse than it has been since the Great Depression, if not before.

See the connection? See this and this.

Everyone Supports Laws Protecting Contract and Private Property Rights

Even the most radical free market advocates support laws protecting contract and private property rights. In other words, they support the judicial branch of government and the basic laws Congress passes to support such rights.

There are obviously good, pro-competitive laws and bad, anti-competitive laws.

Paul Craig Roberts – a true conservative, who was a Wall Street Journal editor and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan, and is widely credited with being the “father of supply-side economics” – points out:

Regulation can increase economic efficiency and … without regulation external costs can offset the value of production.

***

 

Thirty-three years ago in an article in the Journal of Monetary Economics (August 1978), “Idealism in Public Choice Theory,” I developed a model to assess the benefits and costs of regulation. I argued that well-thought-out regulation could be a factor of production that increases GNP. For example, regulation that contributed to the quality and safety of food and medicines contributed to specialization in production and lower costs, and regulations enforcing contracts and private property rights add to economic efficiency.

 

On the other hand, bureaucracies build their empires and extend their regulations into the realm of negative returns. Moreover, as regulations increase, economic managers spend more time in red tape and less in productive activity. As rules proliferate, they become contradictory and result in paralysis.

I had hopes that my analysis would result in a more thoughtful approach to regulation, but to no avail. Liberals continued to argue that more regulation was better, and libertarians maintained than none was best.

Do Anti-Law Advocates Really Want Anarchy?

All sports need a referee. Some players will be bigger or more talented than others, which is great. They have a better chance of outcompeting the other guy and winning.

But without basic rules and referees, ruthless players might use a knife or kick the other guy in the knee. Perhaps we could suspend all rules, and maybe everyone would whip out a knife break the other guy’s kneecap. That’s fine … but that’s not the game of football.

Radicals who believe that we should not have any laws against fraud are implicitly arguing for anarchy. They might not use that word, but that is what they’re arguing for.

But the same Founding Father who argued for periodic revolutions to keep the government honest also argued against tearing down something unless you have something better in mind to replace it? Thomas Jefferson, the most vocal advocate of the citizens’ right to revolt to ensure honest government also cautioned against tearing something down unless it was for the express purpose of replacing it with something better.

Real, deep-thinking anarchists (as opposed to those using fake anarchy philosophy in order to promote lawlessness by the super-elite) are not for destroying all organization.  Instead, they argue for self-organization and self-regulation. See this, this and this.

JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs aren’t reining in one another’s fraud.  Bank of America and MF Global didn’t police each other’s fraud.   Tepco and BP didn’t make sure the companies made accurate reports about their safety measures.  Solyndra and Koch Industries didn’t guard against abuse by the other company.

So if one wants to argue that the Federal government should not regulate financial players, fine (perhaps our country is too big and complex to manage, and the federal government has become too corrupt) … but who should?

The states? Cities? Communities? Neighbors?

Human beings have the ability to form social contracts. Our D.C. government has largely breached it social contract with the people.

But we shouldn’t tear down the federal government unless we replace it with something better.

No one wants to tear down the state of organization so completely that we go back to monkeys (without the ability to talk), or one-celled critters . . . so the question is how do we want to organize?

Do you want to live as a “savage”? In reality, the natives had survival skills, cultural traditions, and knowledge developed over many hundreds or thousands of years (including knowledge gained before the migration from Asia to America), stored in the database of oral traditions. The settlers had traditions and knowledge as well. If we tear away all of that organization, life is going to be pretty challenging.

It is easy for a teenager to criticize his parents, but a lot harder to actually create a better adult life for himself. A teenager looks silly and immature when he criticizes everything his parents do without understanding the challenges he’ll face as an adult. But a young person who rebels against his parents and then creates a better adult life is doing important and heroic work.

In other words, anarchy as an economic model could work if economic players organized in such a way as to police against fraud and criminal behavior (the equivalent of pulling out a knife or taking out someone’s kneecap in the middle of a football game).

This is a long-winded way of saying that we should not stop the government from enforcing fraud laws unless we come up with a more effective way to stop fraud.

The Real Problem ...

While liberals tend to distrust big corporations and conservatives tend to distrust the federal government, it is really the malignant, symbiotic relationship between the two is the root problem.

Too much government overreach? Giant unaccountable corporations?

Maybe ... but the root problem is that corrupt government officials and corrupt corporate fatcats have merged into a crime syndicate.

Do you get it?    Before we can have a real free market, we need to burst the bubble of fraud.

Before we can have a functioning government, we need to stand up to corrupt government officials.

We all need to step out of the left-right dichotomy which is distracting us and dumbing us down.

We need liberty and justice.

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‘US should realize that world has changed’ — Venezuelan VP (RT Exclusive)

The US has lots of troubles dealing with other nations as they haven’t come to grips with the new global reality, Venezuelan Vice-President Nicolas Maduro told RT in an exclusive interview. He also spoke about the health of President Chavez.

Speaking to RT Spanish host Eva Golinger in Caracas, Nicolas Maduro shared his views on the political and economic future of Venezuela and Latin America’s fight for independence.

Eva Golinger: We would like to ask you a question that’s on everybody’s mind: how is President Chavez doing? Do you have an update on his present condition? Will he be coming back to Venezuela soon?

Nicolas Мaduro: We’ve already said that President Chavez’s recuperation period is almost over. It has been a long and difficult process. The president was aware of the odds all the way, but his vigor and energy are simply amazing. The surgery was a very difficult. President Chavez suffered internal bleeding, which was a very alarming sign. I should say that Comandante Fidel Castro and his team were with Chavez and his relatives the whole time. We are very grateful for that. For the concern on the part of Comandante Castro, Cuban President Raul Castro, and the doctors.

Now President Chavez feels better than at any other time during his recuperation. I’m flying to Havana to visit the President soon. He will give me necessary instructions and messages to be announced at the summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States. So you could say that President Chavez is in the fight.

EG: Is there any hope that he may return to Venezuela any time soon?

NM: We remain optimistic, but there are too many factors at play. We need to talk to the doctors and President Chavez himself to choose the best moment. As we have repeatedly told Mr. Chavez, and the Venezuelan people know it well, the most important thing now is his recovery. Everybody knows how President Chavez has invested all his efforts and energy into his country, into fighting for the independence of Latin America, how he has persevered in his anti-imperialist struggle for social justice worldwide. It was President Chavez who went vocal about global warming, so that everyone could find out the truth. It was he who championed the struggle against global plunder and the neoliberal policies that are killing Europe.

It was President Chavez who adamantly raised the banner of protecting the Palestinian people, when they were attacked. When so many in the Arab world chose to keep silent out of fear, President Chavez raised that banner and the Arab people cheered him.

So President Chavez was at the helm of great campaigns for the sake of humanity, and today his role in the world is recognized by millions. Here’s why this RT interview is so important for all the viewers in the US, Russia and across the world: we know we are speaking to the hearts of millions on the planet, those who believe in President Chavez, admire him, follow him and love him deeply.

We tell them that the president is fighting the illness; that we, his people, are waiting here for him to come back soon. And one day that will definitely happen.

EG: Speaking of struggle, there is another question I want to ask you. Over the last few days, there has been talk of restoring the relations between Venezuela and the United States, and there has already been a kind of negotiation on the subject between the two governments.

NM: The US is, in fact, an empire that was established as a union of 13 independent colonies located on North America’s East coast. Throughout the 19th century, this nation expanded its territory, asserted its military might and imposed its policies and its trade on neighboring countries, and in the 20th century, it emerged as a global superpower. Ever since the Bolivarian era the US has looked down on Latin America and the Caribbean as its backyard. But President Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement expect that, sooner rather than later, the elite that run that mighty empire will find themselves forced to recognize our region’s independence and respect our leaders.

This is absolutely inevitable. Yet it’s not that they will do us a favor and grant us independence, like we are a former colony of theirs, but as a result of our own efforts. Today, the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean are winning independence once more, just as they did back in the 19th century. In Venezuela, we run our own country, thanks to Hugo Chavez and the victorious people’s revolution. And in tune with the other nations of our continent, our government has conveyed a message to President Obama on behalf of President Chavez during a recent ministerial meeting, saying that we wouldn’t mind improving our relations with the US and restoring mutual respect between our nations as far as possible.

But whenever we would attempt a rapprochement with the Obama administration, we would always face sabotage from the conservatives who build the core of the US military-industrial and media complex, which oppressively controls the entire nation, the same way as it oppresses the rest of the world.

That said, we wouldn’t mind restoring a fully functional relationship with the US based on mutual respect. If it eventually works out, we would be happy with that. But we will not be dominated.

The US is the only country in the world that has that much trouble dealing with other nations, because they haven’t come to grips with the new global reality yet. But they will have to soon. We have been telling them for years, and it’s time they should realize that the world has changed, and they can no longer dominate through air strikes and intimidation.

EG: Mr. Vice-President, not long ago President Chavez appointed a new foreign minister, but you held this position for six years. What are the priorities of Venezuela’s foreign policy now?

: President Chavez has drafted a program that we are calling Our Homeland’s Plan for 2013-2019. It lists five main strategic, or long-term, goals, which are: building a true democracy in Venezuela, achieving independence and establishing a new socialism. The fourth strategic goal has an international dimension. It reflects the vision of Simon Bolivar. He talked about balance in the world, about the need for Latin American countries, which gained independence from Spanish control 200 years ago, to present a strong united front. He wanted our states to create a union that would make aggressive empires with big military clout that dominated in the international arena back then respect our region and our right to development.

President Chavez revived this doctrine and turned it into our foreign policy. It’s very easy to explain. The fourth strategic goal is: to facilitate the creation of a multi-polar world in which there will be no domineering empires. In terms of our region, it means that we need to strengthen the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) and Petrocaribe. These institutions help forge new economic and social models of cooperation and development in our region. We also aim to strengthen the Union of South American Nations – UNASUR – and promote the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (SELAC) that has been set up. It was Bolivar’s dream, and we brought it to life here in Caracas in December 2011.

Internationally, we need to bolster our strategic alliances with the countries that play a key role both locally and globally, in this new multi-polar world that is emerging. So the strategic alliance between our region and Russia, China and India is growing stronger thanks to our active interaction and through economic and political projects with BRICS. We are convinced there are a lot of opportunities to create a new world order, which will be the result of a continuous and arduous struggle against imperialistic views and concepts in world politics.

EG: And now could you tell us a little bit about your domestic policies? The new administration has just got down to work in its 2013-2019 term. What issues are still outstanding?

NM: In the social sector we need to continue our fight against poverty. It’s our curse, a painful legacy of the 500 years under foreign oppression. We should not forget about all that destruction that colonial empires had brought to our land. I am talking about Venezuela specifically. This was a difficult burden that our country had to carry throughout the whole 19th century. Then our region suffered from North American hegemony. Venezuela became an oil rig to them, an oil colony. They destroyed the natural economic foundations that our republic enjoyed in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Our specialty was food production, we had rich agricultural traditions. We were also influenced by the military dictatorship, established in our country by US transnational corporations, the so-called Bermuda Companies. So they basically implemented an oil-dependent model by establishing the military dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez. This has set a course for the whole 20th century. The second half of the 20th century was plagued by terrible corruption, our oil resources were misappropriated. Poverty was at 80 per cent. The goal of our revolution is to bring this number down to zero. This is one of the goals set by Comandante Chavez, our president, for the next six years. And we’ll get it done. We have already brought down the poverty level from 27per cent to 7 per cent.

A large number of our people are still below the poverty line, but we are working on solving this problem. For example, we are implementing a new education plan. Good education, that is also free, is one of the major achievements of the Bolivarian government. We are also implementing reforms for such areas as healthcare, food security and employment. We keep an eye on the wage levels of the working people. By the end of 2012, unemployment dropped from between 20 and 25 per cent to 5 per cent. We have achieved a lot in the social care sector. While in Europe unemployment is at 20-25 per cent and governments cut pensions and salaries, our 21st century revolution is helping us to establish a social model that allows the Venezuelan people to build their own country.

EG: Back in December, prior to his latest surgery, President Chavez explicitly announced that you would be his successor in case he can’t remain in office and at the helm of the Bolivarian Revolution any longer. How would you describe the personality of Nicolas Maduro?

NM: Each of us is first and foremost a fighter, a man of the street. We walk to work, or take the subway. We’ve been engaged in struggle ever since we were kids. Caracas and its various locations have been our battleground, where we engaged in the student movement and the alternative union movement, which dates back to the 1990s, just as Hugo Chavez emerged as a leader. Once he came out in public and made his address to the nation on February 4, 1992, wearing his beret, we told ourselves, “This is the road we shall take.” And ever since that day, there wasn’t a day in my life when I wouldn’t be working for Chavez, because working for him means working for the sake of the country.

That will be the case till our last breath.

We don’t believe in “making a successful career in politics,” as some people’s aspirations are described. That kind of thinking belongs in a bourgeois political culture, which is no longer in our country. The only career we know is one of revolutionary struggle, as soldiers fighting for the cause of Chavez. This is who we are: soldiers who fight for the cause of Chavez, and we’ll go wherever our duty takes us.

EG: Mr. Vice President, thank you so much for the interview and for being with us.

NM: Many thanks to you and the RT channel.

Gun Control and Climate Change Arguments Taking Same Tack As 2009 Health Care Fight

If we want any part of President Obama's initiatives described in his inaugural speech to become reality in the next four years, we'd better gear up and get ready to fight, because they're dog-whistling the troops, particularly on the topics of climate change and gun control, just like they did in 2009 with health care reform.

In 2009, we were caught unawares. That can't happen this time, at least not if we hold any hope of getting things done this time around. Conservatives are already launching the time-honored strategies of lies, inflammatory speech, and exaggeration to push back on any effort whatsoever to make progress on climate change and gun control.

Fox News led the parade Tuesday morning with the theme that climate change isn't real, beginning with Fox and Friends Tuesday morning, and continuing on with Rush Limbaugh pompously pronouncing it a "hoax."

Meanwhile, there's a rising anti-chorus over mild gun control measures which are long overdue, in which the same overarching themes employed in 2009 over health care reform are beginning to emerge. Some examples:

  • In Ohio, state school board president Debe Terhar is defending her decision to share a Facebook photo of Hitler along with a message criticizing Obama's gun control proposals.
  • NRA President Wayne LaPierre gave a fiery speech on Monday night (video above), where he claimed the only reason to maintain a national registry of gun owners is to "tax them or take them," and further claiming that the REAL motive was to leave guns in the hands of the wealthy and criminals.
  • Anonymous has gotten in on the debate, using the Obama to Hitler comparison as well.
  • Juan Williams, writing for Fox News, claims that gun control is now "central to Obama's legacy." That's a clear-cut call for conservatives to mobilize.
  • Sheriffs in right-wing states are vowing to resist any efforts to implement gun control measures passed by Congress or tightened enforcement required by executive order.
  • Now the far right wingers have declared 2/23/2013 a "Day of Resistance" over the proposed gun measures. Anyone remember the call for the "tea party" which supposedly arose from the grassroots? Yeah.

These should raise the hackles on everyone's neck as we're thrust back into the days of death panels and socialism, resplendent with Obama as Hitler images, cries of armed resistance, and more. Indeed, some conservatives have figured out a way to resurrect death panels in the context of gun control, by inventing the myth that Obamacare will require doctors to inquire about guns in the home.

There will be protests at town halls, there will be more astroturf organizations with names like Americans for Constitutional Solutions and the like, and there will be a steady drumbeat on the part of the right wing to systematically tear apart every effort to actually move America toward some semblance of civilization.

Not this time. We won the health care battle and lost the war in 2010. They don't give a damn about climate change and guns as much as they do about firing up their dispirited base in order to win some elections in 2014. The sooner we recognize it and push back, not by dignifying their accusations, but bringing our own arguments forth into the public square, the better.

To that end, the answer to the nonsense about climate change should be strong economic arguments for making the changes that will slow our contribution to climate change while building the economy. President Obama made that argument in his speech, when he said, "We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries. We must claim its promise. That’s how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure, our forests and waterways, our crop lands and snow capped peaks."

With regard to gun control, everyone seems very concerned with the rights of gun owners, and seems to think they trump everyone else's rights. How can the right wing, who claims to stand for the rights of innocents to life, tolerate dead children in a classroom? For those so devoted to the constitution, how can a right to life and liberty be trumped by one person's right to use a gun to take those?

Take the message back and make this an argument about the rights of every American to live in relative safety without the fear that their children and loved ones will be taken from them because there was no balance between the rights of gun owners and the rights of innocents.

Wayne LaPierre speaks for gun manufacturers, not gun owners. When he speaks of rights, he is speaking for the corporate persons who profit from the death and mayhem their products wreak on our society.

The bottom line here is that progressives have to take the offensive on these questions and get the public on our side before the wingers erode the support we've built up for both of these initiatives. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, and Sandy Hook, more Americans are open to reasonable gun control measures and climate change initiatives than ever before. The right wing knows it, and they're going to use it. It's up to us to stop it before it starts.

Kim Dotcom wants to encrypt half of the Internet to end government surveillance (FULL...

In an in-depth interview, Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom discusses the investigation against his now-defunct file-storage site, his possible extradition to the US, the future of Internet freedoms and his latest project Mega with RT’s Andrew Blake.

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom (C) launches his new file sharing site "Mega", surrounded by dancers, in Auckland January 20, 2013. (Reuters/Nigel Marple)
Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom (C) launches his new file sharing site "Mega", surrounded by dancers, in Auckland January 20, 2013. (Reuters/Nigel Marple)

The United States government says that Dotcom, a German millionaire formerly known as Kim Schmitz, masterminded a vast criminal conspiracy by operating the file-storage site Megaupload. Dotcom, on the other hand, begs to differ. One year after the high-profile raid of his home and the shut-down and seizure of one of the most popular sites on the Web, Dotcom hosted a launch party for his latest endeavor, simply called Mega. On the anniversary of the end of Megaupload, Dotcom discusses the year since his arrest and what the future holds in regards to both his court case and the Internet alike. Speaking with RT’s Andrew Blake from his Coatesville, New Zealand mansion, Dotcom weighs in on the US justice system, the death of Aaron Swartz, the growing surveillance state, his own cooperation with the feds and much more.

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom (2nd R) poseswith actors dessed as police after the launch of his new website at a press conference held inside his home in Auckland on January 20, 2013. (AFP Photo/Michael Bradley)
Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom (2nd R) poseswith actors dessed as police after the launch of his new website at a press conference held inside his home in Auckland on January 20, 2013. (AFP Photo/Michael Bradley)

'­Hollywood is a very important contributor to Obama'

RT: You’ve blamed President Obama and the Obama administration for colluding with movie companies in order to orchestrate this giant arrest here in New Zealand. Is this kind of give-and-take relationship between Washington and Hollywood all that you say it is? Or are you just the exception? Does this really exist?

Kim Dotcom: You have to look at the players behind this case, okay? The driving force, of course, is Chris Dodd, the chairman of the MPAA [Motion Picture Association of America]. And he was senator for a long time and he is — according to [US Vice President] Joe Biden — Joe Biden’s best friend. And the state attorney that is in charge of this case has been Joe Biden’s personal counsel, Neil MacBride, and [he] also worked as an anti-piracy manager for the BSA, the Business Software Association, which is basically like the MPAA but for software companies.

And also, the timing is very interesting, you know? Election time. The fundraisers in Hollywood set for February, March [and] April. There had to have some sort of Plan B, an alternative for SOPA [the Stop Online Piracy Act], because the president certainly was aware — and his team at the White House was aware — that if they don’t have anything to give at those fundraisers, to those guys in Hollywood who are eager to have more control over the Internet, they wouldn’t have probably raised too much. And Hollywood is a very important contributor to Obama’s campaign. Not just with money, but also with media support. They control a lot of media: celebrity endorsements and all that.

So I’m sure the election plays an important role. The relationships of the people that are in charge of this case play an important role and, of course, we have facts that we want to present at our extradition hearing that will show some more detail about this and that this is not just some conspiracy theory but that this actually happened.

Local Maori arrive as Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom (unseen) launches his new file sharing site "Mega" in Auckland January 20, 2013. (Reuters/Nigel Marple)
Local Maori arrive as Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom (unseen) launches his new file sharing site "Mega" in Auckland January 20, 2013. (Reuters/Nigel Marple)

'Operation Takedown'

RT: The US Justice Department wants to extradite you, a German citizen living in New Zealand operating a business in Hong Kong. They want to extradite you to the US. Is that even possible?

KD: That is a very interesting question because the extradition law, the extradition treaty in New Zealand, doesn’t really allow extradition for copyright. So what they did, they threw some extra charges on top and one of them is racketeering, where they basically say we are a mafia organization and we set up our Internet business to basically be an organized crime network that was set up and structured the way it was just to do criminal copyright infringement. And anyone who has every used Megaupload and has any idea about how that website worked knows immediately that it was total nonsense. But they needed to chop that on in order to have even a chance for extradition. But in our opinion, you see, all of that was secondary. The primary goal was to take down Megaupload and destroy it completely. That was their mission and that’s why the whole thing in Hong Kong, for example, they called it Operation Takedown. And I think everything that’s happening now, they are trying on the fly to doctor it around, and found a way to find a case. They probably came here and thought, “We will find something; that these guys have done something wrong.” In the indictment, if you actually read that, it’s more like a press release. There’s nothing in there that has any merits.

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom speaks during the launch of his new website at a press conference at his mansion in Auckland on January 20, 2013. (AFP Photo/Michael Bradley)
Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom speaks during the launch of his new website at a press conference at his mansion in Auckland on January 20, 2013. (AFP Photo/Michael Bradley)

RT: When the raid happened one year ago today, it got a lot of people talking both about the Internet and about this character, Kim Dotcom. But it was a lot of talking and not so much action, because here it is one year later and this case is still happening. Back up earlier this month, and we saw Aaron Swartz — an online information activist — pass away, and only in his mid-20s. And it got a lot of people talking, so much so that members of Congress have actually asked for changes to federal computer laws so that this doesn’t happen again. What is it actually going to take to get people to stop just talking and to actually start acting?

KD: Our case is going to be the one that will have much more attention down the road because it is a crucial case for Internet freedom. And I think more and more people realize that and the government is quite exposed here because they really went in with completely prosecutorial abuse and overreach and ignoring due process, ignoring our rights, spying on us, illegal search warrants, illegal restraining orders, illegal spying. The whole picture, when you look at it, shows that this was an urgent mission, done on a rush. “Take them down, I want them to go.” And it was a political decision to do that. And the execution was extremely poor, and the case is extremely poor, because that is something they thought that they could worry about later. It was all about the takedown. “Let’s send a strong message to Hollywood that we are on their side.”

RT:And now it’s been a year and nothing has progressed. At least for them. It seems like the case is falling apart day by day.

KD: Let me give you one example of how crazy this is. We have a judge here who said, “Please show us your evidence about your racketeering allegations. Show us that these guys were setting up some sort of organized crime network,” because that’s what the extradition will focus on primarily. They are using the organized crime treaty to get us extradited. So the US appealed that and said, “We don’t want to show you what we have.” And then they appealed to the high court and the high court then said, “We want to see it.” And they just keep appealing it, all the way to the court of appeals and to the Supreme Court. And what does that tell you? If you don’t even want to show us your cards — show us what you have! If you have such a strong case and are seriously interested about getting someone extradited, why waste all this time? Just show your hand. And they don’t have anything because we haven’t done anything wrong. We were law abiding. We were a good corporate citizen. And they knew that the time they came here to do this. They just wanted to take us down.

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom (C) launches his new file sharing site "Mega", with dancers, in Auckland January 20, 2013. (Reuters/Nigel Marple)
Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom (C) launches his new file sharing site "Mega", with dancers, in Auckland January 20, 2013. (Reuters/Nigel Marple)

'I want to reestablish a balance between a person and the state'

RT :The new program, Mega, is fully encrypted, and you’re touting it as an encrypted program so that people will want to use it. Do you think this is even necessary, right now, that people need encryption on the Internet?

KD: I think it’s important for the Internet that there is more encryption. Because what I have learned since I got dragged into this case is a lot about privacy abuses, about the government spying on people. You know, the US government invests a lot of money in spy clouds: massive data centers with hundreds of thousands of hard drives storing data. And what they are storing is basically any communication that traverses through US networks. And what that means they are not spying on individuals based on a warrant anymore. They just spy on everybody, permanently, all the time. And what that means for you and for anybody is that if you are ever a target of any kind of investigation, or someone has a political agenda against you, or a prosecutor doesn’t like you, or the police wants to interpret something in a way to get you in trouble — they can use all that data, go through it with a comb and find things even though we think we have nothing to hide and have done nothing wrong. They will find something that they can nail you with and that’s why it’s wrong to have these kinds of privacy abuses, and I decided to create a solution that overtime will encrypt more and more of the internet. So we start with files, we will then move to emails, and then move to Voice-Over-IP communication. And our API [Application Programming Interface] is available to any third-party developer to also create their own tools. And my goal is, within the next five years, I want to encrypt half of the Internet. Just reestablish a balance between a person — an individual — and the state. Because right now, we are living very close to this vision of George Orwell and I think it’s not the right way. It’s the wrong path that the government is on, thinking that they can spy on everybody.

Actors in police costume mock-arrest Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom (C), as he launches his new file sharing site "Mega" in Auckland January 20, 2013. (Reuters/Nigel Marple)
Actors in police costume mock-arrest Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom (C), as he launches his new file sharing site "Mega" in Auckland January 20, 2013. (Reuters/Nigel Marple)

RT: Long before Megaupload was ever taken down, the Justice Department was looking into Ninja Video and you actually cooperated with them. People want to know: how is Kim Dotcom, this guy who is incredibly against Washington and hates everything that they’ve done to him, how is this same guy also helping out the Justice Department?

KD: Let me explain to you how this worked, okay? I was a good corporate citizen. My company was abiding to the laws. If we get a search warrant or we get a request by the government to assist in an investigation, we will comply and we have always complied. And that is the right thing to do, because if someone uploads child pornography or someone uploads terrorist stuff or anything that is a serious crime, of course we are there to help. This is our obligation. And I am not for copyright infringement. People need to understand that. I’m against copyright infringement. But I’m also against copyright extremism. And I’m against a business model: the one from Hollywood that encourages piracy. Megaupload is not responsible for the piracy problem, you see? It’s the Hollywood studios that release a movie in the US, and then six months later in other parts of the world. And everyone knows that the movie is out there and fans of a particular actress want to have it right now, but they are not giving them any opportunity to get access to that content even though they are willing to pay. And they are looking for alternatives on the Internet, and then they find them. They are trying to make me responsible for their lack of ability to adapt to a new reality, which is the Internet, where everything happens now. It doesn’t happen three months later. Imagine you go to Wikipedia. You want to find something, research an article, and they tell you to come back in three months, ‘We’ll give it to you then.’ If you find another site where you can get it right now, that’s where you go, right? So it’s really their business model that is responsible for this issue. And if they don’t adopt, they will be left behind on this side of the road of history like many others who haven’t adopted in the past.

Photo by Andrew Blake
Photo by Andrew Blake

'I’m not Aaron Swartz. Aaron Swartz is my hero. He was selfless'

RT: What about your skeptics who point out this big playboy lifestyle and this giant, elaborate house and say ‘He’s not worried about Internet freedoms, he’s just worried about protecting his profits’?

KD: Let me be clear: I am a businessman, okay? I started Megaupload as a business to make money. I wanted to list the company. I am an entrepreneur, alright? I’m not Aaron Swartz. Aaron Swartz is my hero. He was selfless. He is completely the opposite of me, but I’m a businessman. I’m driven by the success of achieving something in the business world. That’s not a crime. There is nothing wrong with that. And if you create something that is popular and that people want to use, you automatically make money. And I’ve always been an innovator. I’ve always created products that people like. And that’s why I’m successful. I’m not successful because people have used Megaupload for copyright infringement. And what everyone needs to understand [is] there have been massive amounts of legitimate users on Megaupload. We don’t believe that 50 million users a day are all just transferring piracy. That’s wrong. A lot of people have used it to back up their data, to send a file quickly to a friend. Young artists have used it to get traction, to get downloads, to get known. There was a lot of legitimate use on Megaupload. It’s a dual-use technology, just like the Internet. You can go to any ISP right now, anyone who connects customers to the Internet. And if they are honest to you and you ask them the question ‘How much of your traffic is peer-to-peer piracy?’ anyone who will tell you less than 50 percent is lying to your face. This is a problem of the Internet and not Megaupload.

RT: If you weren’t doing Mega, or Megaupload, what would you be doing? Here’s this businessman who strives to accomplish success. What would you be doing?

KD: I would probably build spaceships and we would probably already be on Mars.

Photo by Andrew Blake
Photo by Andrew Blake

RT: What happens next, though? What are the chances of Mega being shut down. We already saw that radio stations were pulling ads.

KD: The content industry is still very emotional about us.We bought radio ads with one of the major networks here for eight radio stations. Very funny, very cool ads, promoting our service as a privacy service. And the labels called up the radio station, and one advertiser who is in the movie business called up the radio station, and demanded those adds to be taken down or else they will not buy ads from them anymore. And they were forced because they rely, of course, on that advertisement. My campaign was comparably small to the amount that they are sending. So they used their power to interfere in our right to have a media campaign, an ad campaign. And that just shows you that attitude. It’s against the law. They can’t do that. That’s interfering in our business and they have done that many times in the past. Calling payment processors, calling advertisers, telling them, ‘I don’t want you to work with these guys.’ That’s just wrong. If you have an issue with us, go hire a lawyer, sue us, take us to court and then see if you have anything that will give you a judgment against us. But instead, they use that power and their money to get new laws made for them, to lobby politicians, to get the White House to come here and destroy our lives. Destroy 220 jobs. Hardworking innocent people and they don’t give a damn about that. They had an agenda that is about more control over the Internet. And they made a strategic decision to say ‘Who are we going to take out to send a strong message?’ And I was the one.

Photo by Andrew Blake
Photo by Andrew Blake

"If they come to attack us, it’s just going to backfire"

RT: But what happens if Mega is shut down? You are only on day one right now. How long is it going to take before the government steps up again and what are you going to do if that happens? Are you prepared to just start all over again? It’s been one year and here you are, doing this over again, what happens when Uncle Sam puts his foot down and grinds you into the dirt again? Do you get back up?

KD: Here is the thing. This startup is probably the most scrutinized when it comes to legal advice. Every single aspect of it has been under the looking glass by our legal team. So we are confident that it’s fully compliant with the law, and if they come to attack us it’s just going to backfire. Exactly like the Megaupload case did. The shutdown of our site backfired already, massively. And it’s just going to get worse for them. If they think they can pursue this and get away with this, they are dead wrong. Because the society is not on their side. Everyone who uses the Internet knows what’s going on here. They don’t like what’s going on here. They saw it with SOPA and you will see it with our case. People will come together and fight this kind of aggression against innovation and Internet freedom.

Photo by Andrew Blake
Photo by Andrew Blake

"We are all the little puppets that they think they can kick around"

RT: After Megaupload was shut down by the FBI last year, hacktivist with the movement Anonymous retaliated, so to speak. In response, they went and took down the websites for the FBI, the Motion Picture Association of America, the Department of Justice, the Recording Industry Association of America. All of these organizations were shut down by Anonymous in response to what they did to you. These were people who you never met but were so moved by what happened that they had to stand up and do something. Did you ever thank them, and how did you take it? How did you respond to their reaction?

KD: It’s a kind of virtual protest, you know? I think it’s not a good idea to shut down websites. I’ve been a hacker myself. I understand why they are doing it and how they are doing it, but I think there are better ways to protest. Where you organize yourself in a group and do petitions and actually email congressmen, email your local politicians, let them know about what you don’t like. Organize your movement rather than attacking. I had a sense of understanding for them because everyone had stored so much data on Megaupload, and then all of a sudden a site like that disappears and billions of files are taken offline, the majority of them perfectly legitimate. You need to understand one thing: 50 percent of all files that were ever uploaded to Megaupload have not even been downloaded once. That clearly shows the non-infringing use. People just wanted to store their stuff on our site. And of course they were outraged when that disappeared and the government said, ‘We don’t give a care and we don’t give a damn about you people. We don’t care that you have your personal documents there because we have our agenda and we are going to take over the Internet.’ And you know the White House was supporting SOPA, and only when the masses came together — and Aaron Swartz: he stopped SOPA. With his efforts, he stopped SOPA. And he became a target. A political target, okay? And that’s why all these things happened to him. There is no reasonable cause behind going after a young genius like that in the fashion they did. It’s political. Because the White House wanted SOPA. They promised it to Hollywood and they failed and they couldn’t go ahead because the White House was afraid if they keep pushing hard and they keep pushing it forward, that the people who oppose it are not going to vote for Obama in the reelection campaign. So it’s all a game to them really and we are all the little puppets that they think they can kick around. So we need to organize. There needs to be a movement that identifies these things and fights that. Not with shutting down websites but with real protests. Going out on the streets, writing to politicians and especially, most importantly, don’t vote for the guys that are against Internet freedom. Anyone who voted for SOPA, you should have a close look at that guy. Do I want to give him my vote next time around? Because that’s the only language politicians understand is your vote. And if you can bring all these votes together, somehow pooled for Internet freedom, you will see all these efforts disappear. Because at the end of the day, they represent the public. Politicians represent the public. And when they have enough pressure they can’t move forward. And SOPA was the best example for that.

GOP Budget Violates Boehner’s New Rules on Debt

Credit: Center for American Progress When John Boehner picked up the Speaker's gavel in January 2011, he also laid down some new rules regarding the U.S. national debt. Despite the near-doubling of the red ink and the seven debt limit increases un...

Reacting to Reports of a Schumer Proposal, Campaign for America’s Future Warns Democrats: Do...

WASHINGTON - January 24 - In response to a report in The Hill that Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) may be floating a proposal that includes cuts to Social Security and Medicare, Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future made the following statement:

“If Sen. Schumer's proposal was accurately reported, the senator could not be more wrong. Just as President Obama declared in his inauguration speech that America does not have to cut Social Security or Medicare, Sen. Schumer reportedly offers up cuts to those crucial programs in vain hope of getting Republican support for tax increases. Just as Republican leaders have been forced to back away from threatening to crash the economy to force Democrats to accept cuts to Social Security and Medicare, Sen. Schumer capitulates to the hostage taking that Republicans appear to be abandoning.

“I hope the news reports are wrong because Sen. Schumer has previously been a strong opponent of cuts to Social Security. The Campaign for America’s Future reminds him and all Democrats that the chained CPI would mean an immediate cut to current Social Security benefits. These cuts are very unpopular with all Americans, and Democrats should be leading the fight to protect Social Security and Medicare, not helping Republicans accomplish their harmful goals.”

According to The Hill: “Schumer’s plan to enact tax reform through the budget process would ensure additional tax revenues would be matched by an equal amount in spending cuts.” And, “The joint budget resolution could also call for Medicare reforms and using the chained CPI formula to curb the cost of Social Security benefits.”

The Campaign for America’s Future is the strategy center for the progressive movement. Our goal is to forge the enduring progressive majority needed to realize the America of shared prosperity and equal opportunity that our country was meant to be.

Reacting to Reports of a Schumer Proposal, Campaign for America’s Future Warns Democrats: Do...

WASHINGTON - January 24 - In response to a report in The Hill that Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) may be floating a proposal that includes cuts to Social Security and Medicare, Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future made the following statement:

“If Sen. Schumer's proposal was accurately reported, the senator could not be more wrong. Just as President Obama declared in his inauguration speech that America does not have to cut Social Security or Medicare, Sen. Schumer reportedly offers up cuts to those crucial programs in vain hope of getting Republican support for tax increases. Just as Republican leaders have been forced to back away from threatening to crash the economy to force Democrats to accept cuts to Social Security and Medicare, Sen. Schumer capitulates to the hostage taking that Republicans appear to be abandoning.

“I hope the news reports are wrong because Sen. Schumer has previously been a strong opponent of cuts to Social Security. The Campaign for America’s Future reminds him and all Democrats that the chained CPI would mean an immediate cut to current Social Security benefits. These cuts are very unpopular with all Americans, and Democrats should be leading the fight to protect Social Security and Medicare, not helping Republicans accomplish their harmful goals.”

According to The Hill: “Schumer’s plan to enact tax reform through the budget process would ensure additional tax revenues would be matched by an equal amount in spending cuts.” And, “The joint budget resolution could also call for Medicare reforms and using the chained CPI formula to curb the cost of Social Security benefits.”

The Campaign for America’s Future is the strategy center for the progressive movement. Our goal is to forge the enduring progressive majority needed to realize the America of shared prosperity and equal opportunity that our country was meant to be.

White House Petition for Constitutional Amendment on Campaign Cash Clears Threshold

WASHINGTON - January 24 - Today, a petition on the White House website urging President Obama to “use the State of the Union to call for a constitutional amendment to get big money out of politics” exceeded the 25,000 signatures necessary to guarantee an official White House response. The petition, launched by the groups Free Speech For People, Avaaz, People For the American Way, and Demos on January 8 took less than two weeks to cross the threshold.

The petition can be found here: http://wh.gov/P9j7

Fixing our campaign finance system has long been a cause President Obama supports, though he failed to make progress on it during his first term. During his re-election campaign, President Obama told supporters that: "Over the longer term, I think we need to seriously consider mobilizing a constitutional amendment process to overturn Citizens United . . . . Even if the amendment process falls short, it can shine a spotlight of the super-PAC phenomenon and help apply pressure for change."

The petition calls on the President to reiterate and strengthen this call in the State of the Union, and comes just two days after President Obama delivered an inaugural address that many believe reflected a renewed willingness on his part to fight for core goals he has long supported even in the face of challenges.

"Americans everywhere are asking President Obama to take the lead on the one issue that unlocks all the others: getting big money out of our political system, to restore our government of, by, and for the people," said Peter Schurman, Campaign Director at Free Speech For People. "'We the people' means all the people, not just the wealthy few, and not the corporations."

Ian Bassin, Campaign Director at Avaaz, said: "We the people have spoken and the message is clear: We're sick of oil industry money setting our energy agenda, the Wall Street dollar determining our economic policy, and gun company cash dictating how we protect our kids. We need elections not auctions and we're counting on President Obama to lead us there, starting with his State of the Union."

The petition may also be the last White House petition to garner a response after receiving 25,000 signatures. It also may be the most serious of the latest round. Last week, after responding to petitions to deport Piers Morgan and to build a Death Star, the White House upped the threshold for guaranteeing a response to 100,000. But petitions like this campaign finance one that were launched before the change were grandfathered at the 25,000 threshold.

“This petition provides more evidence for what we already know – that Americans want a solution to the corrupting influence of big money in our democracy,” said Marge Baker, Executive Vice President of People For the American Way. “We saw massive amounts of money pour into last year’s elections, much of which was undisclosed. Using the megaphone provided to them by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, corporate special interests are drowning out the voices of ordinary voters. President Obama calling for a constitutional remedy in the upcoming State of the Union Address would draw attention to this critical situation and mobilize even more Americans into action.”

"This is the moment President Obama should take a strong and decisive step toward ending big money's stranglehold on our politics and our economy, and cement his legacy by leading the effort to finally forge a democracy in which the strength of a citizen's voice does not depend upon the size of her wallet," said Demos Counsel Adam Lioz.

After the coalition involved in launching this petition posted it to the White House website, its growth came from citizens expressing their frustration with the flood of money infecting our political system. Much of this public frustration stems from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC that corporations have a constitutional right to spend unlimited sums to influence elections. In the wake of that decision, more than $6 billion was spent in the 2012 elections, much of it by corporations and anonymous billionaires. Congress responded by proposing amendments to reverse that decision and eleven states and nearly 500 cities and towns have joined this call.

This petition tees up for President Obama the key question of what he’ll do next to deliver on a core, unfulfilled promise of his first campaign: to change the way Washington works. The groups behind the petition will continue to campaign until he does.

Avaaz.org is a new global web movement with a simple democratic mission: to close the gap between the world we have, and the world most people everywhere want. "Avaaz" means "Voice" in many Asian, Middle Eastern and Eastern European languages. Across the world, most people want stronger protections for the environment, greater respect for human rights, and concerted efforts to end poverty, corruption and war. Yet globalization faces a huge democratic deficit as international decisions are shaped by political elites and unaccountable corporations -- not the views and values of the world's people.

White House Petition for Constitutional Amendment on Campaign Cash Clears Threshold

WASHINGTON - January 24 - Today, a petition on the White House website urging President Obama to “use the State of the Union to call for a constitutional amendment to get big money out of politics” exceeded the 25,000 signatures necessary to guarantee an official White House response. The petition, launched by the groups Free Speech For People, Avaaz, People For the American Way, and Demos on January 8 took less than two weeks to cross the threshold.

The petition can be found here: http://wh.gov/P9j7

Fixing our campaign finance system has long been a cause President Obama supports, though he failed to make progress on it during his first term. During his re-election campaign, President Obama told supporters that: "Over the longer term, I think we need to seriously consider mobilizing a constitutional amendment process to overturn Citizens United . . . . Even if the amendment process falls short, it can shine a spotlight of the super-PAC phenomenon and help apply pressure for change."

The petition calls on the President to reiterate and strengthen this call in the State of the Union, and comes just two days after President Obama delivered an inaugural address that many believe reflected a renewed willingness on his part to fight for core goals he has long supported even in the face of challenges.

"Americans everywhere are asking President Obama to take the lead on the one issue that unlocks all the others: getting big money out of our political system, to restore our government of, by, and for the people," said Peter Schurman, Campaign Director at Free Speech For People. "'We the people' means all the people, not just the wealthy few, and not the corporations."

Ian Bassin, Campaign Director at Avaaz, said: "We the people have spoken and the message is clear: We're sick of oil industry money setting our energy agenda, the Wall Street dollar determining our economic policy, and gun company cash dictating how we protect our kids. We need elections not auctions and we're counting on President Obama to lead us there, starting with his State of the Union."

The petition may also be the last White House petition to garner a response after receiving 25,000 signatures. It also may be the most serious of the latest round. Last week, after responding to petitions to deport Piers Morgan and to build a Death Star, the White House upped the threshold for guaranteeing a response to 100,000. But petitions like this campaign finance one that were launched before the change were grandfathered at the 25,000 threshold.

“This petition provides more evidence for what we already know – that Americans want a solution to the corrupting influence of big money in our democracy,” said Marge Baker, Executive Vice President of People For the American Way. “We saw massive amounts of money pour into last year’s elections, much of which was undisclosed. Using the megaphone provided to them by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, corporate special interests are drowning out the voices of ordinary voters. President Obama calling for a constitutional remedy in the upcoming State of the Union Address would draw attention to this critical situation and mobilize even more Americans into action.”

"This is the moment President Obama should take a strong and decisive step toward ending big money's stranglehold on our politics and our economy, and cement his legacy by leading the effort to finally forge a democracy in which the strength of a citizen's voice does not depend upon the size of her wallet," said Demos Counsel Adam Lioz.

After the coalition involved in launching this petition posted it to the White House website, its growth came from citizens expressing their frustration with the flood of money infecting our political system. Much of this public frustration stems from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC that corporations have a constitutional right to spend unlimited sums to influence elections. In the wake of that decision, more than $6 billion was spent in the 2012 elections, much of it by corporations and anonymous billionaires. Congress responded by proposing amendments to reverse that decision and eleven states and nearly 500 cities and towns have joined this call.

This petition tees up for President Obama the key question of what he’ll do next to deliver on a core, unfulfilled promise of his first campaign: to change the way Washington works. The groups behind the petition will continue to campaign until he does.

Avaaz.org is a new global web movement with a simple democratic mission: to close the gap between the world we have, and the world most people everywhere want. "Avaaz" means "Voice" in many Asian, Middle Eastern and Eastern European languages. Across the world, most people want stronger protections for the environment, greater respect for human rights, and concerted efforts to end poverty, corruption and war. Yet globalization faces a huge democratic deficit as international decisions are shaped by political elites and unaccountable corporations -- not the views and values of the world's people.

Public Citizen Welcomes Forthcoming Appointment of Former Prosecutor Mary Jo White to Chair Securities...

WASHINGTON - January 24 - The expected appointment of former prosecutor Mary Jo White to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) could be a sign that the second Obama administration plans to get stronger on financial crime, Public Citizen said today.

For almost 10 years, White was the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, building a reputation as a tough prosecutor with expertise in complex securities and financial fraud cases.

“Failure to hold any significant Wall Street figure accountable for the most massive economic crimes in history demands remedy,” said Bartlett Naylor, financial reform advocate for Public Citizen. “We hope that White’s record as a white-collar crime fighter will lead to strong SEC enforcement under her tenure.”

In addition, the SEC recently put on its agenda a proposal for a new rule that would require public companies to disclose political expenditures. Public Citizen led a petition drive to get the rule considered, garnering more than 320,000 signatures for the petition which was filed by a group of bipartisan academics. The number of public comments is an SEC record.

“White can demonstrate her allegiance to investors and the American public by advancing the political disclosure rule for public companies that is now under consideration,” said Lisa Gilbert, director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division.

“She also can prove her commitment by acting on the many stalled Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform act rules,” added Naylor. “We look to the new chair to protect investors and move these rules forward to protect average investors and Main Street.”

Public Citizen is a national, nonprofit consumer advocacy organization founded in 1971 to represent consumer interests in Congress, the executive branch and the courts.

Public Citizen Welcomes Forthcoming Appointment of Former Prosecutor Mary Jo White to Chair Securities...

WASHINGTON - January 24 - The expected appointment of former prosecutor Mary Jo White to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) could be a sign that the second Obama administration plans to get stronger on financial crime, Public Citizen said today.

For almost 10 years, White was the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, building a reputation as a tough prosecutor with expertise in complex securities and financial fraud cases.

“Failure to hold any significant Wall Street figure accountable for the most massive economic crimes in history demands remedy,” said Bartlett Naylor, financial reform advocate for Public Citizen. “We hope that White’s record as a white-collar crime fighter will lead to strong SEC enforcement under her tenure.”

In addition, the SEC recently put on its agenda a proposal for a new rule that would require public companies to disclose political expenditures. Public Citizen led a petition drive to get the rule considered, garnering more than 320,000 signatures for the petition which was filed by a group of bipartisan academics. The number of public comments is an SEC record.

“White can demonstrate her allegiance to investors and the American public by advancing the political disclosure rule for public companies that is now under consideration,” said Lisa Gilbert, director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division.

“She also can prove her commitment by acting on the many stalled Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform act rules,” added Naylor. “We look to the new chair to protect investors and move these rules forward to protect average investors and Main Street.”

Public Citizen is a national, nonprofit consumer advocacy organization founded in 1971 to represent consumer interests in Congress, the executive branch and the courts.

How the NRA Went From Best Friend of the Nation’s Police to Harsh Enemy...

As it became more unwilling to compromise over even minor gun controls, the NRA is now on the bad side of police.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

January 24, 2013  |  

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For years, the National Rifle Association cultivated a reputation as an unbeatable political powerhouse—a legacy that was challenged on Thursday with the introduction of major new gun control legislation in the U.S. Senate banning more than 100 military-style guns.

But the NRA’s tough reputation unwinds if one delves into the history behind its harshest rhetoric—which began in the 1970s and escalated as former allies, notably America’s police, rejected its increasingly militant demands. What today’s NRA would like to forget is how its unbending extremism led to a losing streak in Congress two decades ago, a period whose gun politics echo today but gun controls nevertheless passed.

Perhaps the best way to understand how the NRA is not the all-powerful lobby it seeks to portray itself as is to look at how the organization went from being a "best friend" of the nation’s police to a political enemy of law enforcement, from federal agents at the top of the ladder to local police chiefs and police unions below. As it became more outspoken and unwilling to compromise over insignificant gun controls, it became the group it remains today, vainly claiming to be the last line against impending government tryanny.

“Once you go down that road, how do you walk that rhetoric back?” said Robert Spitzer, a gun rights historian and SUNY-Cortland’s political science department chairman.

“Obama wants to turn the idea of absolutism into a dirty word,” NRA executive director Wayne LaPierre said in a speech to Nevada hunters on Tuesday, responding to Monday’s inaugural address in which the president chastized groups like the NRA for their unending hyperbole and vitriol. “He wants to put every private, personal firearms transaction right under the thumb of the federal government… And anyone who says that’s excessive, President Obama says that’s an absolutist.”

Pro-Government Before Anti-Government

In the heat of today’s political fights, where excessive emotion, exaggerated threats and hyperbole are routine, it’s easily forgotten that the NRA once stood with government.

For much of its 143-year history, the NRA’s survival depended on a cozy relationship with the government. It relied on state subsidies at its founding and then federal subsidies for marksmanship contests for generations. The U.S. military provided free guns or sold them at cost to NRA members for decades. Thousands of soldiers helped run annual shooting contests. Local police departments turned to the NRA for training.

In the late 1960s, that relationship began to change—and so did the NRA. Democrats in Congress threatened to end a $3 million shooting competition subsidy, asking why it was needed at the height of the Vietnam War. In 1968, Congress increased the regulation of guns sales and dealers in response to that decade’s urban riots and the assassinations of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Sen. Robert Kennedy. By 1977, these perceived slights allowed libertarian hardliners in the NRA to wrest control, ousting old-school sportsmen and claiming that America’s gun owners needed aggressive new defenders.

Today, many people forget how the NRA started calling agents at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, who were charged with enforcing federal gun laws, “Nazis” in the early 1970s and again after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building by NRA member Timothy McVeigh. They forget that when District of Columbia proposed a ban on handguns, an NRA member on its city council said the ban would help revive the Klu Klux Klan in nearby Maryland and Virginia. They forget that the NRA opposed banning bullets that could pierce police vests, opposed banning guns with plastic parts that were not seen by airport x-ray scanners, and launched vicious PR campaigns aimed not just at members of Congress who supported gun controls but likeminded city police chiefs. 

On The News With Thom Hartmann: Virginia Gerrymanders Presidential Votes, Robin Hood Tax Hits...

Thom Hartmann here – on the news...

You need to know this. Virginia is now poised to be the first state to move legislation forward, which will rig the Electoral College to benefit Republican presidential candidates in the future. On Wednesday, legislation to dole out Electoral College votes based on gerrymandered Congressional districts, instead of the current winner-take-all system, advanced out of a state Senate subcommittee. It now heads to full committee, where it will likely be approved, before heading to the full state Senate, which is controlled by Republicans. So, Republicans have actually taken rigging the next presidential election seriously, with efforts also underway in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio to do the same thing. Progressives must counter with an equally aggressive push for a national popular vote. Nine states have already passed National Popular Vote laws, which commit their electors to vote for whichever candidate wins the national popular vote, even if that candidate lost the state Electoral College vote. Those nine states that have passed national popular vote laws - including California, Maryland, and Illinois - account for 132 electoral votes among them, nearly half of the 270 needed in the Electoral College to win the White House. If this trend continues, and enough states sign up to bring their combined Electoral College votes to 270, then the Electoral College, which Republicans are currently trying to rig, dies just like that. Let's get active and fight fire with fire.

In screwed news...Welcome to America, where you have to go to jail to receive the healthcare you need. The Sun-Sentinel, out of Florida, is reporting on a man who threatened to kill President Obama just so he could be arrested, thrown in jail, and receive much-needed medical care. Fifty-seven year old Stephen Espalin told a judge last week that he, "would have no intent to hurt the president", but he knew federal agents would arrive and "take care of [him]." Espalin made the threat against the President after he was kicked out of a hospital for giving a false name, and lying about having health insurance. Florida's Governor Rick Scott is critical of Obamacare, and is unlikely to adopt the provision in the law that expands Medicaid coverage in his state, which would help people like Espalin. But now that Espalin is headed to jail, he will receive the care he needs. He's already receiving chemotherapy, and once he begins his four year prison sentence, he's scheduled to have heart surgery. This is a cautionary tale of what happens to a nation that doesn't provide basic medical care to its citizens. Either we make healthcare a basic human right in America, just like it is elsewhere in the developed world, or we commit ourselves to unrest, desperation, and a sick population.

In the best of the rest of the news...

Robin Hood is coming to Europe. On Tuesday, 11 European nations agreed to put in place a financial transaction tax – also known as a Robin Hood tax – on the banks. Such a tax could generate billions in much needed revenue for the cash-strapped continent. The tax, which will range between .1% and .01%, will be applied to all trading in stocks, bonds, and derivatives. According to a statement from the European Council, the purpose of this new tax is, "for the financial industry to make a fair contribution to tax revenues, whilst also creating a disincentive for transactions that do not enhance the efficiency of financial markets." The participating nations in this Robin Hood tax make up 90% of the EU – and it's estimated the tax will bring in roughly 37 billion euros annually. According to the European Commissioner in charge of tax policy, Tuesday's agreement was "a major milestone in tax history." Now let's kick start the movement here in the United States to create our own Robin Hood tax.

Well, there's at least one place now that women will soon see workplace equality: in the military. Today, the Pentagon officially announced that it's lifting its ban on women in combat, potentially opening up more than 200,000 new combat positions in the military to women. This decision will pave the way for women to serve on the front lines, for the first time in the history of our armed services. The military will have until May to come up with plans to implement these changes – and each branch of the military will have until 2016 to get official exemptions for certain combat roles, which will remain exclusive to men. From allowing gays to openly serve, to now allowing women in combat, President Obama has taken significant steps to bring equality to our military – and he should applauded for his efforts.

Beware of online surveillance. This week, Google released its Transparency Report, revealing a massive increase in government surveillance. According to the report, Google received over 21,000 requests for data from governments and courts worldwide, just in the second half of 2012. That's a 70% increase from 2009. During that same period, the United State government made the most requests – with more than 8,000 demands for online data. Protecting our online privacy from prying government, and corporate eyes, is the new frontier – and "we the people" are currently losing this struggle.

And finally...following reports that a drone stike in Yemen mistakenly killed two children, the United Nations is launching an official investigation into the legality and death toll of drone warfare. The investigation will focus on 25 different drones strikes carried out by US, UK, and Israeli forces in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. According to Benn Emmerson, the UN's special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, this investigation is, "a response to the fact that there's international concern rising exponentially, surrounding the issue of remote targeted killings through the use of unmanned vehicles." This will be President Obama's biggest foreign policy challenge in his second term – winding down our deadly covert drone warfare programs. And it's up to us to push him to do what' right.

And that's the way it is today – Thursday, January 24, 2013. I'm Thom Hartmann – on the news.

US House approves to lift debt ceiling

US House of Representatives lifts temporarily the debt ceiling. (file photo)

The US House of Representatives has approved to temporarily lift the country’s debt ceiling.

The House voted on Wednesday to temporarily suspend the national debt ceiling at USD 16.4 trillion until May 19 and at the same time to urge lawmakers to adopt a budget resolution by April 2015.

The US Congress is headed towards a new stalemate with President Barack Obama wanting to raise taxes to curb the USD-16-trillion-plus debt, while Republicans are opposed to any tax hikes.

Republican Paul D. Ryan said on Wednesday that his party’s budget proposal includes balancing the country’s budget within a 10 years’ time without imposing any new tax revenues.

Obama and the democratic leaders in Congress have proposed reducing spending by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next ten years.

Official figures from September 2012 show that more than 46 million Americans, 15 percent of the US population, are living in poverty, making it the highest rate during the past 40 years.

CAH/HN

Gallup Poll: Americans Most Negative On the Nation And Economy In 30 Years

Via Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

I guess Americans just haven’t heard of a little something called the stock market.  Isn’t that right Bernanke?  Wasn’t the stock market rally you engineered supposed to make everyone feel all nice and confident?  Well the great middle class squeeze continues, as the stock market is for the 1% what food stamps are for the poor.  They are just strategies to keep these groups apathetic and obedient.  The middle class isn’t buying it though, as is evidenced by this recent Gallup Poll conducted January 7-10, 2013.

From Gallup:

PRINCETON, NJ — U.S. President Barack Obama begins his second term at a time when Americans are as negative about the state of the country and its prospects going forward as they have been in more than three decades. Fewer than four in 10 Americans (39%) rate the current status of the U.S. at the positive end of a zero to 10 scale. This is about the same as in 2010, but it is fewer than have said so at any point since 1979. As they usually are, Americans are more upbeat in their predictions of where the U.S. will be in five years (48% positive), but this is also lower than at any time since 1979.

The 39% of Americans who give a six to 10 rating when asked to evaluate the nation’s current status is similar to the 37% who said the same three years ago. Prior to that, however, assessments were generally more positive, including a 73% six to 10 rating in January 2001 — the highest on record. The three previous points in time when ratings were as low as or lower than the 2013 rating were in August 1979 (34%), April 1974 (33%), and January 1971 (39%). The 1979 measure came at a time when the economy was in bad shape and inflation was rampant, while the 1974 measure came in the midst of the Watergate scandal. When Gallup first asked the question in August 1959, 68% of Americans rated the state of the nation in the six to 10 range.

What about the future?

The 48% who give a six to 10 ranking when asked to project the status of the U.S. five years from now is tied with the 1979 measure as the lowest in Gallup’s history of asking the question. Additionally, the 40% who give a negative rating (zero to four) when asked to look ahead is lower than at any point in history. These negative ratings include 10% who say the situation of the country in five years will be zero, the worst they can imagine.

Not so much.  Don’t worry Bernanke, I’m sure another 50 S&P handles will make everything better.

Full Gallup article here.

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We Must Stop the Tyrannical Minority

In the beginning, there were big states and little states. Virginia and Delaware. Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. Georgia and New Hampshire. The little states want to make sure that their voices weren't drowned out by the big states, that they couldn't be marginalized or pushed out of the way altogether, and that they could see themselves as equal parts of the American Government.

So, the Framers of the Constitution put protections for the small states into that document - giving them a little bit more say, actually, on a per-capita basis, than the big states. One was that each state, even if it was so small it only had one representative in the House of Representatives, would get two full senators. And the second was that each small state would also get an additional two votes – representing those senators – in the Electoral College.

For most of our national history, the minority never abused these privileges. Though we have recently seen a series of abuses of the Senate filibuster by the Conservative minority.

But, the Electoral College wasn't created just to protect the minority. It was also, just like the Second Amendment, put in place in part to protect the institution of slavery in the Southern states.

The political problem slave states were facing when the Constitution was written was that there were very few white males – the legal voters of the day – living in those states. There were lots of slaves in those states, but they weren't allowed to vote.

So, if the president was elected by the national popular vote James Madison originally argued for, very few votes would be coming out of slave states to elect the President of the United States.

And the Southern slave-owners lived in constant fear that some northerner President might try to undo slavery – sorta like Lincoln actually did.

So, the slave states and the small states got the Electoral College to select the President, giving them those extra votes they would have lacked if it was just a national popular vote.

Which brings us to today.

Now that the Republican Party has been hijacked by the Billionaire Class, a very small one-percent sliver of our nation, they've taken unprecedented steps to abuse the Electoral College.

In the first election after the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, hundreds of millions of dollars in outside spending by oligarchs like the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson put Republicans in control of the traditionally blue states they'd targeted, including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan.

Once they got charge of the state legislatures, Republicans gerrymandered congressional districts to increase the number of safe Republican seats and fracture safe Democratic seats. That's one reason why House Democratic candidates received more than a million votes more than House Republican candidates around the nation last November, yet Republicans still hold a majority in the House of Representatives.

And Republicans are now using these gerrymandered states to push their boldest step yet to rig the next presidential election. It looks like it's going to happen first in Virginia.

Instead of a winner-take-all system, Republicans want Virginia's Electoral College votes doled out based on which presidential candidate won each congressional district, with an extra two votes going to the state's popular vote winner. Republicans in Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan are considering similar changes. And, RNC Chair Reince Priebus recently threw his support behind the idea.

Just how big of an advantage will Republicans have thanks to these changes? Consider this: President Obama swept the six main battleground states of Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin last election. Since it's a winner-take-all system, the President got 106 Electoral College votes, and Romney got zero.

But had this new scheme been in place before the last election, then the President would have only gotten 47 Electoral College votes, while Mitt Romney would have won those states with 59 votes, even though he got trounced in the popular vote in each of those states. And had all the states in the nation made these changes, then Mitt Romney would be our president today, even though he lost the national vote by millions.

Billionaires and the Republicans they own know they're a minority in America. Their hard-right bigotry toward gays and women turns off young voters. Their xenophobia and mistrust of non-whites have turned off a growing minority electorate. And Reaganomics has been exposed as a scam.

So, today, the majority of us have to do something before the billionaires take over completely. And the best way to do this is to embrace more democracy.

When it comes to the Electoral College, we need to scrap it altogether. Republicans in these states mentioned earlier are trying to pervert the Electoral College so they can steal future Presidential elections.

It should be replaced with more democracy – a national popular vote model that elects our President based on which candidate got the most votes nationwide, plain and simple.

Nine states have already passed National Popular Vote laws, so their electors will vote for whichever candidate wins the national popular vote, even if that candidate lost the state's Electoral College vote. Those nine states that have passed national popular vote laws - including California, Maryland, and Illinois - account for 132 electoral votes among them, nearly half of the 270 needed in the Electoral College to win the White House.

So, if this trend continues, and enough states sign up to bring their combined Electoral College votes to 270, then the Electoral College, which Republicans are currently trying to rig, dies just like that.

This should be the game plan moving forward. Average working people in America are the majority, not the billionaires and their Republican toadies. And it's up to us to aggressively push back against this corrupt Conservative minority that's trying to rig the game.

Coin or Not, Is There a Plan?

KRU 12413 mainMit­ch McCon­nell, the Repub­lican Senat­e minor­ity leade­r, walki­ng with repor­ters in Washi­ngton­. (Photo: T.J. Kirkp­atric­k / The New York Times­)

If I'd spent the past five years living in a monastery or something, I would take the Treasury Department's recent declaration that the trillion-dollar coin option is out as a sign that there's some other plan ready to go. Maybe the 14th Amendment, maybe moral obligation coupons or some other form of scrip, but something.

And maybe there is a plan. But as we all know, the last debt ceiling confrontation crept up on the White House because President Obama refused to believe that Republicans would actually threaten to provoke default. Is the White House being realistic this time, or does it still rely on the sanity of crazies?

The thing is, the coin option sounds silly, but it clearly obeys the letter of the law. As far as I can tell, none of the other options — other than outright surrender — has the same virtue. Failing to pay debt service would be a breach of contract. Paying contractors, and maybe Social Security recipients, in scrip would violate the law, which says that they should be paid, not given I.O.U.'s. A decision that the president has the right to ignore the debt limit after all would avoid these legal breaches at the expense of another breach.

And default in any of these senses would risk a huge collapse of confidence. So is there a plan, or will it just be another case of tough talk followed by a tail-between-the-legs retreat?

As I said, if we didn't have some history here I might be confident that the administration knows what it's doing. But we do have that history, and you have to fear the worst.

Moral Obligation Coupons

Don't like the platinum coin option? Here's a functionally equivalent alternative: have the Treasury sell pieces of paper labeled "moral obligation coupons," which declare the intention of the government to redeem these coupons at face value in one year.

It should be clearly stated on the coupons that the government has no — repeat no — legal obligation to pay anything at all; you see, they're not debt, and therefore don't count against the debt limit. But that shouldn't keep them from having substantial market value. Consider, for example, the fact that the government has no legal responsibility for guaranteeing the debt of mortgage entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; nonetheless, it is widely believed that there is an implicit guarantee (because there is!), and this is very much reflected in the price of that debt.

So the government should have no trouble raising a lot of money by selling Moral Obligation Coupons. It's true that if they're sold on the open market, they would probably sell at a substantial discount from face value, so this would in effect be high-interest-rate financing. But that's better than either default or giving in to blackmail.

And maybe the coupons wouldn't have to be sold on the open market; why not just have the Federal Reserve buy them? Bear in mind that the Fed doesn't always buy safe assets; it's buying a lot of mortgage-backed securities (from Fannie and Freddie; see above), and during the worst of the financial crisis it bought lots of commercial paper. So why not slightly speculative pieces of paper sold by the Treasury?

Again, while this may all seem kind of dodgy, it's important to realize that unless the president does something like this he will be forced to do something illegal: namely, fail to spend money that, by act of Congress, he is legally obliged to spend. Fancy footwork is by far a better alternative, and if it enrages Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, well, that's just an extra bonus.

If there is a legal problem even with selling these coupons, there are still alternatives, such as paying suppliers with these coupons and then having the Fed buy them. The mechanics really don't matter. As long as we're in a liquidity trap, printing money, printing conventional debt securities or printing funny money with no legal standing that nonetheless lets the government pay its bills are all equivalent.

The Ban List: AR-15, AK-47, AR-10, Saiga12, Bushmaster, Ruger, Beretta, HK, Smith & Wesson,...

Mac Slavo
January 24th, 2013
SHTFplan.com

Read by 23,177 people

When rumors emerged about coming assault ban legislation just one day after the re-election of Barack Obama, many scoffed at the notion that the reports were real. As we now know, they were very real, and today the Assault Weapons Ban of 2013, aimed at disarming Americans, has been introduced in Congress.

The list is a veritable who’s who of premier semi-automatic assault rifles that are owned by millions of Americans and include 2nd Amendment staples like the popular AR-15 and AK-47.

In addition to the some 150 semi-automatic rifles, handguns and shotguns on the list, the bill aims to reduce magazine capacities nationwide to 10 rounds or less.

While the new legislation would not force Americans to turn in guns they own that are on the ban list, it would require registration in a national database, which includes a background check even if you already own the gun.

Owners of banned firearms would also need to submit photo identification and a fingerprint for the national registry.

Here is the ban list as it stands now:

Weapons Ban List

(Click for larger image)

Dianne Feinstein explains why you only need 10 rounds to defend yourself (Jan 23, 2013):

The Feinstein show (Jan 24, 2013):

*Related: The Resistance Begins: New York Gun Owners Refuse to Register

Author: Mac Slavo
Views: Read by 23,177 people
Date: January 24th, 2013
Website: www.SHTFplan.com

Copyright Information: Copyright SHTFplan and Mac Slavo. This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to www.shtfplan.com. Please contact us for permission to reproduce this content in other media formats.

Joe ‘You Lie’ Wilson Badgers Clinton About Not Appearing on Sunday Shows

Unlike another former presidential candidate who's showing up on those shows literally every other week because he apparently can't get enough of hearing himself talk in front of the cameras, we found out Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is not quite so fond of them during the hearings on Benghazi this Wednesday.

Apparently Clinton not appearing on the Sunday shows right after the attack in Benghazi was of great concern to wingnut Rep. "You Lie" Joe Wilson and here's how Clinton responded to him when asked about it: Clinton: Going On Sunday Shows ‘Is Not My Favorite Thing To Do’:

Wilson continued his line of questioning, reading from an op-ed written by a retired foreign service officer, William Boudreau last year. Clinton addressed the majority of the concerns addressed in the column and here's more on one of the many right wing memes being pushed in the article, which is that the White House and their national security team were supposedly watching the attacks in real time. They weren't and this article explains where that lie originated before the right wing blogs and Fox picked it up and ran with it: How a Real News Story Became the 'Obama Watched Them Die' Meme.

Clinton also discussed something I hadn't heard before on the issue of why they did not have Marines guarding the compound.

I have no doubt that no matter what Clinton said during these hearings, it won't satisfy the right who was just itching to take her down and who wanted to turn the tragedy in Benghazi into some grand conspiracy theory in the run up to the presidential election. I don't think the right did themselves any favors putting the likes of Wilson and his counterparts in the House, or flame throwers in the Senate like Ron Johnson and Rand Paul on display for all to see.

I will be surprised if we don't see another bump in her popularity ratings once some new polls come out following this fiasco. I'm not a big fan of Hillary Clinton, but I gained some new respect for her after watching the way she handled herself during these hearings. She's got a lot more patience than I would have had for these Republicans throwing every ounce of mud against the wall to see what would stick over this drummed up fake scandal they've been screaming about for months.

WILSON: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

And, Madam Secretary, thank you for being here today.

I particularly appreciate your recognition of AFRICOM, Plan Colombia. Indeed, these have been extraordinary success stories promoting peace throughout the world. The American people always appreciate its American heroes. Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty.

As we begin, I do want to point out, though, for the record, I believe that Congressman Rohrabacher is correct. There was an e-mail from the chief financial officer for diplomatic security following the Benghazi attack. Specific quote, "although diplomatic security has been fiscally prudent, I do not feel that we have ever been in a point where we sacrifice security due to a lack of funding," end of quote.

That actually is an attribute to you. And I have faith in the chief financial officer that it's a correct statement.

As we begin, it's been reported that since you managed the response to the Benghazi attack, why weren't you the person to appear on the Sunday shows immediately following the attack? Ambassador Susan Rice said that you declined. Was that correct?

CLINTON: Well, I -- I have to confess here in public, going on the Sunday shows is not my favorite thing to do. There -- there are other things I'd prefer to do on Sunday mornings. And, you know, I haven't been on a Sunday show in way over a year. So it just isn't something that I normally jump to do.

And I did feel strongly that we had a lot that we had to manage, that I had to respond to, and I thought that should be my priority.

WILSON: And -- and I believe that part of the priority is telling correct information, and you could have done that. And I think it was just very unfortunate, the multiple appearances by Ambassador Rice with information that's been discovered not to be correct.

In the November 21st, 2012, edition of the Charleston Post and Courier, a letter was published by William J. Boudreau, a retired foreign service officer of Seabrook Island. He wrote, "Within the U.S. State Department there's an office known as the OpCenter. It is located in the Office of the Secretary of State. It is staffed around the clock, 24/7 by seasoned foreign service officers. Its function is to be sensitive to any threat to American interests wherever they might arise.

The OpCenter has direct, secure communication lines to the White House Situation Room, the national military command center at the Pentagon, and the CIA's OpCenter.

"Having worked as a watch officer at the OpCenter, I know that any information that indicates a threat to the safety of American citizens overseas is passed to other agencies mentioned above.

If it's a significant message concerning American interest received, it is the watch officer's job to ensure that these other agencies are informed. He goes on. There are many questions that need to be answered, and I'd like to present these questions on his behalf.

First and foremost, what was going on at the Op Center of the State Department, and Washington, while our consulate was under attack for seven hours?

CLINTON: Well, we can certainly give you greater details. But the Op Center is, as you have described, you know, the place where communications goes in and out. They were placing calls. They were receiving calls.

They were, you know, deeply engaged in trying to help us. They don't reach out on their own, but to help us acquire information so that we could respond in real time.

WILSON: And seven hours. I mean, goodness gracious, there should have been a response. Why the delay in labeling the attack as terrorism, when it was immediately known that it was?

CLINTON: Well, you know, again, I would say, Congressman, that we described the attack. I described the attack the next morning. The president called it an act of terror.

There was a -- as you'll find in reading both the unclassified and classified version of the ARB, there was a lot of questions about who was behind it, what motivated it. And the ARB says those questions are still not fully answered today.

WILSON: And he continues. Why weren't Marine guards posted in Benghazi in the first place?

CLINTON: Because historically, Marine guards are at posts where there is classified information. Marine guards have not historically had the responsibility for protecting personnel. Their job is to protect, and if necessary, destroy classified material. At our compound, there was no classified material.

WILSON: And he continues in line with everybody else, pointing out that there were requests to enhance security that were denied. We weren't able to reach all the questions. I appreciate you responding to Mr. Budrow's (ph) questions. I'll submit them for the record for your office for a written response.

CLINTON: Thank you, Congressman.

WILSON: Thank you.

Both Houses of Congress Partner to Address Climate Crisis

WASHINGTON - January 24 - Today Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) announced a partnership between both chambers of Congress to push for and defend stronger federal policies that will address pollution causing climate change.

In his inaugural address President Obama underscored the obligation we have to not just ourselves but to all posterity to respond to the threat of climate change, thereby elevating this vital issue to a top-level priority for his second term.

The following is a statement from Marty Hayden, Earthjustice Vice President for Policy & Legislation:

"In his second inaugural address, the President elevated the need to act on climate change as a clear priority for his administration over the next four years. We commend Rep. Waxman and Sen. Whitehouse for stepping up to support the President and keep our nation focused on this problem and its solutions.

"Ultimately, our nation’s citizens, coasts, forests, waterways and wildlife are all at stake. The longer we wait to meaningfully address the problem, the more the American people and future generations will suffer. Again, we applaud these Congressional leaders for seizing this moment and we look forward to working together with them and the Administration on solutions."

Earthjustice is a non-profit public interest law firm dedicated to protecting the magnificent places, natural resources, and wildlife of this earth, and to defending the right of all people to a healthy environment. We bring about far-reaching change by enforcing and strengthening environmental laws on behalf of hundreds of organizations, coalitions and communities.

Top Ten Republican Myths on Benghazi that Justify Hillary Clinton’s Anger

Here's why Clinton grew frustrated at Benghazi hearings yesterday.

January 24, 2013  |  

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1. Republican senators keep saying that it should have been “easy” to find out what happened on September 11, 2012, by simply debriefing US personnel who had been there. John McCain, Ron Johnson and the others who make this charge are the most cynical and manipulative people in the world. The Benghazi US mission was very clearly an operation of the Central Intelligence Agency, and that is the reason that the Obama administration officials have never been able to speak frankly and publicly about it. McCain and the others know this very well, and they know that their public carping cannot be “simply” answered because the answers would endanger sources and methods. The consulate was amazingly well-guarded by some 40 CIA operatives, many of them ex-special forces, in a nearby safe house. These were viewed by consular officials as “the cavalry.” It is still not clear what Ambassador Chris Stevens and the CIA were doing in Benghazi, and unless we know that we can’t know why they were attacked. (They were not overseeing the shipping of weapons to Syria; the Syrian revolutionaries complain bitterly that the US *prevents* them from getting medium and heavy weapons).

2. Republicans keep posturing that their questions about Benghazi are intended to bolster US security. In fact, they are harming it. Republican hearings in the House of Representative have disgracefully  revealed the names of Libyans talking to the US consulate, thus endangering their lives and harming US efforts to understand the situation in the country, since who would risk talking to the embassy if they know about Darrell Issa’s big mouth?

3. The GOP figures keep saying that it was obvious that there was no demonstration at the Benghazi consulate against the so-called “film,” the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ that attacked the Prophet Muhammad. But in fact Libyan security officials repeatedly told wire services on September 12 that there was such a demonstration, and that the attack issued from those quarters. An American resident in Benghazi at that time  confirms that there were such demonstrations that day. The secular-minded revolutionary militia that guarded the US consulate for the Libyan government kept the demonstrations far enough away from the consulate gates that they would not have shown up in security videos.

4. Benghazi, a city of over a million, is not dominated by “al-Qaeda,” contrary to what Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has repeatedly said or implied. The city had successful municipal elections in May, just before I got there. The number one vote-getter was a woman professor of statistics at the university. While political Islam is a force in Benghazi, only some relatively small groups are militant, and it has to compete with nationalist, tribal and regional ideological currents. In Libya’s parliamentary elections of July, 2012, the Muslim Brotherhood did very poorly and nationalists came to power. Women won 20% of the seats! The elected Speaker of Parliament, Muhammad Magarief,  called for a secular constitution for Libya and a separation of religion and state.

5. Contrary to repeated assertions that it was obvious that terrorist groups were rampaging around in the city,  members of the Benghazi municipal council told then US ambassador Chris Stevens that security in the city was improving in summer, 2012.

In fact,  one Senator John McCain said during a visit to Libya last February, ““We are very happy to be back here in Libya and to note the enormous progress and changes made in the past few months… We know that many challenges lie ahead… but we are encouraged by what we have seen.” Doesn’t sound to me like McCain was running around like Chicken Little warning that the sky was about to fall on US diplomats there. Want to know who else came along on that trip? Lindsey Graham, who likewise didn’t issue any dire warnings in its aftermath.

Greta Van Susteren Allows Former Bush Budget Director to Fearmonger Over Debt

You just gotta love Fox allowing the Budget Director for the administration that blew a mile wide hole in our debt and deficit to come on the air and fearmonger about how we're going to "become Greece" if we don't do something to get our spending un...

Senators Urge Pipeline Approval Amid Groundswell Against Tar Sands

Ignoring warnings from the world's most prominent climate scientists who say that pursuit of mega-carbon projects like development of Alberta's tar sands will lead to 'climate chaos' and irreversible tipping points, 53 US Senators signed a letter on Wednesday urging fast-track approval of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline.

Fryeburg resident Nickie Sekena, left, her son Luke Sekena-Flanders and Porter resident Doug Bowen were among about two dozen people Wednesday protesting the proposed flow of Canadian oil extracted from tar sands into South Portland. The demonstration organized by 350Maine at the headquarters of Portland Pipe Line Corp. on Hill Street opposed a reversal in direction of a pipeline from Montreal that would allow the oil to flow to the city. Another, larger protest is planned Saturday afternoon in Portland. (Photo: David Harry / The Forecaster) The letter, spearheaded by Sens. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) and Max Baucus (D-Mont.), employed what has widely been called a false dichotomy by asserting that protecting the environment and moving away from a fossil fuel dependent energy system was incompatible with job creation or economic prosperity.

“We ask you not to move the goalposts as opponents of this project have pressed you to do," the letter read. "We urge you to choose jobs, economic development and American energy security."

The letter proves that a majority of lawmakers in the upper chamber of Congress have not been swayed by the sizable groundswell of environmental activism around the Keystone XL project and climate change more broadly.

However, as upcoming events seek to show, the climate justice movement—taking aim at several pipeline projects pushed by the world's largest oil companies—appears to be ascendent, with plans to bring their message to elected leaders and the fossil fuel industry directly in the weeks and months ahead.

This weekend, for example, regional allies across the northeast are coming together to protest proposed plans to bring tar sands oil through an existing pipeline system that runs from Montreal, Canada to Portland, Maine.

Billed as the 'largest tar sands protest in the Northeast,' groups from across New England will join campaigners on the Canadian side of the border standing in opposition to a plan by Canada's Enbridge oil company and US-based ExxonMobil to transport Alberta's tar sands eastward via a series of flow reversals in existing pipeline systems controlled by the two companies.

As The Forecaster, a local newspaper in Maine, explains:

The pipeline is currently used to pump light crude oil from the South Portland tanker facility to refineries in Canada. The tar-sands proposal would reverse the flow in one of the pipeline's two underground pipes, sending tar sands from Alberta, Canada, to Maine.

Tar sands, also known as bitumen, is a viscous mix of oil, sand and clay. Because it is heavier and more corrosive than light crude, some experts say, the thick goo could force the pipeline to spring a leak.

“ExxonMobil is gearing up to move dirty tar sands oil east through Ontario and Quebec into New England to reach a shipping port in Portland, Maine,” reads a statement from the coalition organizing the protest. “But the people of eastern Canada and New England have their own plan and are forming a wall of opposition to keep the east tar sands free.”

“We call on the National Energy Board of Canada to deny approval of the Canadian section of this tar sands pipeline, and on the U.S. State Department to conduct a full environmental review which allows complete public input,” said David Stember from 350.org, which is helping to organize the Portland rally along with other national groups including the Sierra Club and National Wildlife Federation, and local groups including 350 MaineEnvironment Maine and the Natural Resources Council of Maine.

“Given his commitment to tackling climate change, we believe President Obama should deny this project a Presidential Permit,” said Stember.

“Maine and the region have everything to lose and nothing to gain from sending toxic tar sands across our state,” said Lisa Pohlmann of the Natural Resources Council of Maine. “Hundreds of people will descend on Portland Saturday to make a point: We cannot afford the risk of tar sands oil oozing across the Northeast in Exxon’s pipeline and we will be calling on the State Department to demand an environmental review of this risky proposal. There is too much at stake.”

The specific action in Maine is designed to build regional resistance to what activists see as a national and international struggle against the fossil fuel industry's stranglehold on the global energy system. With an acute sense that NIMBYism (meaning 'not-in-my-backyard) style-environmentalism has plagued the movement for years, climate justice activists make it a point to say that their objection to one pipeline or another is only part of a deeper strategy whose chief aim is keep toxic fossil fuels like tar sands "in the ground" and undeveloped. 

“This pipeline runs across rivers and streams that include world-class aquatic habitat” said Carol Foss, director of conservation at Audubon New Hampshire. “Between the enormous risk to our wildlife and waterways and the lack of benefit to our communities, opposing this pipeline project seems like a no-brainer. We don’t need tar sands spilled in our waters, and we don’t need its climate impacts, period.”

As Texas landowner Eleanor Fairchild said during a protest against the Keystone XL pipeline said last year: “Tar sands is the dirtiest fuel on the planet, and I want the world to know that Texans do not want this pipeline forced through their homes.”

But, pushing back against the argument that her stance was solely about protecting her own property and water supply, Fairchild added: “From the White House to my house, I don’t want this pipe threatening anyone’s house anywhere in the world!”

The growing revolt around the tar sands seen from New England to Texas, from Vancouver to Montreal and many places in between, will next put its focus back on President Obama—and perhaps the fifty-three Senators who signed the letter yesterday—by planning a large-scale weekend of protest in Washington, DC in February.

Election Reform Should Be a Top Priority for the New Congress

(Photo: Lucy Nicholson/ Reuters)On two major occasions—during his election-night speech and second inaugural address—President Obama has highlighted the need for election reform. “By the way, we have to fix that,” he said on November 6 about the long lines at the polls in states like Florida. Shortly thereafter, the cause of election reform seemed to fall by the wayside, with more pressing events, such as the Sandy Hook shooting and the fiscal cliff, dominating the news. But Obama returned to the issue on January 21, saying “our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote.”

Now the question is whether the Obama administration and Congress will actually do something to fix the shameful way US elections are run. There are smart proposals in Congress to address the issue. The most comprehensive among them is the Voter Empowerment Act, reintroduced today by Democratic leaders in the House, including civil rights icon John Lewis, and Kirsten Gillibrand in Senate.

The bill would add 50 million eligible Americans to the voter rolls by automatically registering consenting adults to vote at government agencies, adopting Election Day voter registration, and allowing citizens to register to vote and update their addresses online. (As Attorney General Eric Holder noted recently, 80 percent of the 75 million eligible citizens who didn’t vote in 2008 were not registered to vote.) It would also guarantee fifteen days of early voting to ease long lines, restore the voting rights of felons after they’ve served their time and ban deceptive ads aimed at suppressing voter turnout. “It’s got almost everything in there that we think is important,” says Eric Marshall of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

The Voter Empowerment Act is supplemented by other worthwhile proposals in Congress. There is Senator Barbara Boxer’s LINE Act, which mandates national standards for a minimum number of voting machines and election workers in each precinct, and Senator Chris Coons’s FAST Act, which gives grants to states that conduct elections efficiently, modeled after Obama’s Race to the Top education initiative. Both Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have designated election reform as a top priority for the new Congress.

“It’s too early to tell what will pass, but there’s a lot of commitment to move these bills from their supporters, including Democratic leaders of both houses of Congress,” says Wendy Weiser, director of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice. Obama has already announced an ambitious legislative agenda focused on gun control, immigration reform and climate change, but supporters of election reform believe the administration is ready to move on this issue as well. “They have stated this as a much bigger priority than it was before,” adds Weiser. “Based on my conversations with people in the administration, I’m convinced they are committed to figuring out how to contribute to a solution.”

The need for a fix is clear. A study conducted for the Orlando Sentinel found that 201,000 Floridians didn’t vote in 2012 because of long lines on Election Day. A separate study found that in-person early voting numbers decreased by 225,000 compared to 2008, when the state had six more days of early voting. Moreover, black and Hispanic voters bore the brunt of the state’s election problems. “African Americans and Hispanic voters were more likely than white voters to cast provisional ballots and nearly twice as likely to have their provisional ballots rejected,” according to University of Florida political scientist Daniel Smith and Dartmouth University professor Michael Herron. Additionally, “the African American absentee ballot rejection rate was nearly twice the absentee ballot rejection rate of white voters.”

In Ohio, another GOP-controlled state that curtailed early voting compared to 2008, large urban counties had wait times of one to four hours during the three days of voting before the election, while smaller counties had wait times of only thirty minutes to an hour, according to a by Norman Robbins of Northeast Ohio Voter Advocates.

The public wants its elected representatives to address these problems. A post-election poll found that 88 percent of 2012 voters support new national voting standards. By nearly two to one, the public is more concerned about “eligible voters being denied the opportunity to vote” rather than “ineligible voters getting to vote.”

“The moment calls for something big,” says Marshall. “There’s a desire for an overhaul. It’s just a question of the will.”

Any election reform deal will require Republican support, which so far hasn’t been forthcoming. “I don’t think it’s the federal government’s role to make sure there are no long lines,” Representative Candice Miller (R-MI), chairman of the House Administration Committee, recently told Politico.

Yet the news from the states shows that GOP resistance to making it easier to vote has cracked a bit. Florida Governor Rick Scott, who presided over a controversial cutback in early voting days, now supports expanding early voting and increasing the number of polling locations. Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell recently voiced his support for automatically restoring the voting rights of ex-felons.

These hopeful signs, however, are offset by a continuation of disturbing trends. GOP-controlled states like North Carolina are planning to pass new voter ID laws, while GOP state legislators in swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin are trying gerrymander the Electoral College to boost the party in future presidential contests.

Such voter suppression efforts backfired on the GOP in 2012, getting blocked in court and motivating a larger turnout among young and minority Obama supporters. “The Republican Party should be a party that says, ‘We want everybody to vote,’ and make it easier for people to vote and give them a reason to vote for the party, and not to find ways to keep them from voting at all,” Colin Powell recently advised the GOP. Supporting sensible election reform efforts would be a good place to start.

© 2013 The Nation

Ari Berman

Ari Berman is a contributing writer for The Nation magazine and an Investigative Journalism Fellow at The Nation Institute. He is the author of Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics,and has written extensively about American politics, foreign policy and the intersection of money and politics. His stories have also appeared in the New York Times, Editor & Publisher and The Guardian, and he is a frequent guest and political commentator on MSNBC, C-Span and NPR.

What’s Next for Palestine?

Bio

Raja Khalidi has spent most of his professional career with UNCTAD, where he is currently Chief, Office of the Director, Division on Globalization and Development Strategies. He holds a B.A. from Oxford University and M.Sc. from University of London SOAS. From 2000-2006, Mr. Khalidi was Coordinator of UNCTAD's Programme of Assistance to the Palestinian people, which combines the analytical and operational expertise of the UNCTAD secretariat in an integrated manner. His assignments at UNCTAD have also dealt with Debt and Development Finance, the global economic crisis and institutional development and strategic management reform. His own publications include a book on the dynamics of Arab regional economic development in Israel and contributions on Palestinian economic development issues to the Palestinian Encyclopedia, the Journal of Palestine Studies, edited volumes, as well as Jadaliya online and Palestinian, Israeli and international media. The views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the United Nations.

Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore.

In the Middle East, moves are afoot, to a large extent led by Qatar and its emir. He was in Gaza recently, and he seems to have made a deal, some people calling it a shotgun marriage, where Hamas and Fatah—Hamas recently moved its head offices to Doha, and now we have a sort of peace agreement between Hamas and Qatar. We're told by our journalist in Gaza, everywhere you see a Palestinian flag, there's a Qatari flag flying next to it. And Hamas is actually allowing people to protest, carrying the portraiture of Abbas, Abbas the head of Fatah and the PA. It's a very interesting development, including the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which seems to have managed the peace agreement with Gaza in a way that has pleased President Obama.Now joining us from Geneva is Raja Khalidi. He's spent most of his professional career with the UN Conference on Trade and Development, UNCTAD, where he's currently chief of the Office of the Director, Division on Globalization and Development Strategies. And I have to point out, the opinions he's about to express are primarily his own; they're not necessarily those of UNCTAD. Thanks for joining us, Raja.RAJA KHALIDI, SENIOR ECONOMIST, UNCTAD, GENEVA: Nice to be with you.JAY: So, first of all, what do you make of what's going on, in terms of the UN recognition of Palestine as a nonmember state? And just what kind of Palestine does Qatar and others who are kind of moving pieces around on the chessboard, what kind of Palestine do you think is going to be built?KHALIDI: Well, I mean, with all of the regional, you know, transformations underway—and I think we haven't seen the end of them—they've started last year in a certain vein, with a largely political, economic, social content. They've been transformed this year into bloody battles around the region, unfortunately. In some places standoffs between demonstrators and the new governments, in other places various protest movements and human rights advocacy campaigns are underway. So I think, you know, the region is certainly in transformation, and we haven't seen the end of it, Arab Spring or not, whether or not we're in an "Arab Winter", as some would say. I think that's the first—you know, and you correctly noted that as the first and most important determinant for the Palestinians in the current circumstances, where things might go. The second important issue, I think, that has changed the discussion in the last month or so is, of course, the recent battle in Gaza between the Israeli military and the Hamas, largely, and other factions who, as we all now, let's say, fought to a standstill. In any case, as was—you know, we saw on Saturday with the huge celebration in Gaza, that's certainly a factor that has now also come into the equation, both the internal Palestinian equation and, I think, the regional equation. The third important issue, of course, is that [crosstalk] mentioned [incompr.] the diplomatic—let's say legal, also, to a certain extent—battle that's been fought by the PLO to upgrade its United Nations status to that of a nonmember state. Hence it's now referred to in the United Nations as the state of Palestine. So we're talking, of course, here about the PLO, which is the representative of the Palestinian people. So that upgrade is largely—so far appears to be a procedural one, in the sense that it allows the Palestinians access to certain things, like maybe instruments and courses of diplomatic, legal recourse that they didn't have, perhaps, before, but most importantly, I think, because it was a successful effort to get the world—large majority of the world to state, you know, very clearly its support for a two-state solution, most importantly for the establishment of the Palestinian state, the Palestinian rights, national rights, and sovereignty, and for the existence of state of Palestine, you know, more or less implicitly, though not so clearly in the resolution, on the '67 border. So that moment of global solidarity, I think this should not be underestimated, and the fact that, you know, both the Hamas as well as the Arab governments supported that effort.And the outcome, I think, is also indicative [incompr.] referred to pictures of Abbas being carried in Gaza, and, you know, to which one could add the presence of a Fatah delegation in Gaza on the celebrations of the 25th anniversary of Hamas. And there's clearly talk in the air of national reconciliation. So, you know, I think the United Nations, whoever, except for, you know, really, some governments, have largely supported the idea of Palestinian reconciliation. And now it's on the cards in a way that is more acceptable to the international community, it would appear, and to the region's main players than it was perhaps a year or less [incompr.] These are all factors which change the regional landscape but don't necessarily change anything on the ground as far as the Palestinians are concerned. So when you ask what sort of state we can expect to come out of this, I don't think any state—I don't think from—I mean, at least from the status of the peace process, I don't think we can expect any state to come out of this. We haven't seen a change in Israel's position. On the contrary, we've seen a hardening of the Israeli position regarding settlement of the West Bank. We haven't really seen anything in the way of a durable ceasefire that could ensure for the people. . . . Yeah. So, I mean, we haven't, I mean, seen in—as a result of the Gaza conflict, we haven't seen a relief of the siege of Gaza. So people in Gaza haven't really felt anything new as a result of a very hard-fought and widely publicized battle. So, I mean, as I said, I think the prospects for a Palestinian state haven't looked good for a long time, and they don't look any better, to me, at least, today as a result of—notwithstanding the diplomatic, military, if you wish, and regional diplomatic sort of pluses that the Palestinians have chalked up in the last few weeks.JAY: A Palestinian friend of mine, his theory of what's happening here is: Qatar, together with Saudi Arabia and in cooperation with the United States, the sort of plan is to develop the economy in Gaza and the West Bank and develop Gaza in a way that it becomes more and more integrated with Egypt, and Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood sort of manages Gaza. And in the West Bank, again, investment from Qatar and others develop the economy there in a way that strengthens the links with Jordan. He saw the whole thing as sort of the—his quote was this is the end of the Palestinian project.KHALIDI: Well, the end of the—the first person to say that was, I think, a Palestinian scholar in 2005, who said that with Arafat's death, the Palestinian national movement would start to come apart. In many ways, the last five years, six years have seen that sort of a disassembling of what was otherwise a fairly united national project now scattered into two regional, you know, political projects, as well, I mean, regional in the sense of Gaza and Ramallah, two different, separate Palestinian political entities, if you wish, political systems. And everything else we've seen in the way of disunity, if one can use that word in the Palestinian political and geographic and economic and international and regional relations sort of map. And now the fact that capital in the region might—I mean—or the idea that capital in the region might flow into Gaza or to the West Bank more readily than it has, let's say, in some better periods, i.e. periods where things were looking up, the Oslo period, for example, or even the last few years in the West Bank, you know, that it's going to somehow transform the economic prospects, I think, is unlikely. You know, there's very little what we call—in Arabic we use the word [incompr.] brave capital, courageous capital that's really willing to put its feet down in Palestinian—in investing in Palestine. So, you know, there's a Palestinian capital out there that could come back. So I don't see a major, you know, resource transfusion. We have this—yesterday we heard about this safety net, financial safety net approved by the Arab League. Basically, it's saying that, you know, if the Israelis cut off the tax revenue that's due for transfer to the PA, the Palestinian Authority, then the Arabs will step in and foot the bill, which is really, you know, almost—you know, which is a good safety net for a short period, but it's not really a sustainable one. In Gaza, you're right, there was this—there were major pledges for infrastructural development projects, and I think from Qatar prior to the last fighting. And those might actually—you know, now, in fact, you know, there's probably even more to reconstruction than there was before.But I don't think that, you know, that's—again, you know, we've had these spurts in Palestinian economic history of either donor-funded or remittance- (in some cases) funded or labor from—you know, wages-from-income-funded growth spurts, which led to, in some cases, some prosperity here and there, what we've called in UNCTAD, you know, individual prosperity and communal impoverishment. And we could see the same sort of—you know, especially in Gaza, because I don't think the West Bank has that, is really—you know, has anywhere to grow, whereas Gaza has a lot, still, to recover from. There's a lot of, you know, major infrastructural and social expenditures that could be envisaged there. And that will—you know, that could delay certain things, but we've always seen—you know, the thing comes back and bites any economic piece or any, you know, prosperity booms in the rear very badly. And it's happened—you know, it happened in 1987 with the First Intifada. It happened again after Oslo twice, both in the mid '90s, and then in 2000. The Second Intifada, we've had it again and again in Gaza. So, I mean, I think that the main issue is mainly occupation, lack of sovereignty, extremely limited, if any, economic policy space, even for the Gaza—government in Gaza, especially for the PA, in terms of its—the nature of its economic agreements and security and Oslo and Paris so-called agreements with Israel. I don't see anything yet that's—you know, with all of the links that might exist between the Hamas, Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood and their other—Egyptian and others, there are other very important forces at play. I mean, you know, the Iranian support for—the military support that has reached Gaza can't be discounted. There's a situation in North Sinai of lawlessness, which the Egyptian government hasn't gotten its handle on, hasn't gotten a handle on. And I think—you know, it worries Israel, and even worries Hamas, because it's a Salafi—sort of armed Salafi—not insurgency, but lawlessness, as I said, in the northwest Sinai. And then you have everything that's happening in Syria and Jordan in terms of regime change or potential, you know, reform, constitutional reform in Jordan. So, you know, I think the key player here in all this, even though I've, you know, made the tour of the Arab world, the key player is really Israel. I mean, the party that has it in its hands to change the prospects for a Palestinian state or a Palestinian economy, or even, you know, some achievement of Palestinian rights, is Israel. And, you know, we haven't seen any moves except, you know, further consolidation. This extraordinarily, you know, sensitive settlement plan in this area east of Jerusalem, E1, is certainly not—not to mention the tax issue, the revenue withholding. I mean, you know, that could go on as a short-term punishment, but I don't think the PA can live with it for very long. And already I think President Abbas, when he addressed the Arab League the other day, unfortunately, I think this has, you know, given us an example of the limitations of the state—status of being a state that the PLO is accorded in the UN is that he announced to them, he says that we're fast approaching becoming a collapsed state, basically, you know, probably the fastest failed state in history, between November 29 and—you know, only because we have one month of Israeli-, you know, channeled tax revenue withheld. And that's problematic. I mean, you know, it's problematic when you talk about state institutions that are supposedly there ready to function, and all that is needed is the magic wand of a political agreement. That's—you know, that's more easier said than done.JAY: So, in the next segment of our interview, let's talk further about just what kind of economy is going to be built in Palestine and Egypt, other countries of the Arab Spring. People were demanding democracy, but not just political democracy. People want something in terms of their economy. So please join us for the next segment of this interview 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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Graphic ‘Graph Search’: New Facebook system reveals too much

Introducing its new search engine, Facebook assured users that the system is strongly privacy aware. However, prank searches made by one of the beta testers have revealed that the system may expose just a bit more people would want.

­The new ‘Graph Search’ system was presented by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his team last week. The engine was designed to search Facebook for specific information, be it a Mexican restaurant your Facebook friends like the most or single people from India in your neighborhood.

The current Graph Search is a beta version still to be tested; it is limited to searches of people, their likes, places, interests and photos. Posts and status messages so far are out of reach, but soon may become searchable as well, Forbes reported.

During the presentation Zuckerberg and his crew devoted a special part to the issue of Facebook privacy. They assured the audience that the engine is only going to process data that has been allowed to be processed by the users themselves.

To demonstrate the system at work the team conducted a number of sample searches including ‘Friends who like Star Wars and Harry Potter’, ‘Languages my friends speak’, ‘Music liked by people who like Mitt Romney’ and ‘Music liked by people who like Obama’.

However, one of the people invited to test the beta version of the engine soon found out that Graph Search can find way more than Star Wars fans and music preferences of Obama supporters.

In his blogpost published on Wednesday, computer programmer and ‘Gadget Geek’ Tom Scott revealed some peculiar searches he conducted using Graph Search. The results turned out to be quite controversial, if not scandalous.

Scott found out that the new search engine will readily find ‘Married people, who like prostitutes’ and ‘Spouses of married people who like Ashley Madison’, a dating website for people who are already in a relationship.

Furthermore, he was able to find ‘Islamic men interested in men who live in Tehran, Iran’, where homosexual relations are prohibited by law and ‘Places where they’ve worked’.

Something corporate America would not like – a search exposing ‘Current employers of people who like Racism’.

These are just some of the searches Scott was able to do using the new Graph Search. When posting the results, he blurred the names and the pictures of those he found.

Commenting on his research, Scott said that although the search does not directly violate Facebook privacy settings, users just need to be aware of the new search engine capabilities and might want to reconsider the information they put on the web.

“If it’d be awkward if it was put on a screen in Times Square, don’t put it on Facebook. Oh, and check your privacy settings again,” he said.

Facebook has repeatedly been accused of violating the privacy of its users. In early January, the EU pressured the world`s most popular social network to provide more data protection. In September, Facebook was forced to stop using its facial recognition software in Europe following an investigation by the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner in Ireland.

Envy and dissatisfaction on Facebook

A recent study conducted by German scientists revealed that envy and dissatisfaction are among most popular feelings Facebook users experience while browsing through their friends’ ‘timelines’.

The survey of some 600 Facebook users showed that one third of them have negative feelings as using the social network mostly because they are envying their ‘Facebook friends’, whose life seems more interesting and wholesome than their own.

“Although respondents were reluctant to admit feeling envious while on Facebook, they often presumed that envy can be the cause behind the frustration of ‘others’ on this platform – a clear indication that envy is a salient phenomenon in the Facebook context,” said project manager Dr. Hanna Krasnova from Humboldt-Universität.

She explained that access to positive news and the profiles of seemingly successful friends bolsters social comparison, which can easily provoke envy.

The survey found that about one-fifth of all recent online and offline events provoking envy among respondents were posted on Facebook. According to the researchers, respondents’ envy often led to “embellishing their Facebook profiles” creating what they called “envy spiral.”

It was also established that the envy provoked by looking through Facebook lead many to “greater life dissatisfaction”.

“Considering the fact that Facebook use is a worldwide phenomenon and envy is a universal feeling, a lot of people are subject to these painful consequences,” Co-author Helena Wenninger of TU-Darmstadt University said.

Frontrunning: January 24

  • When the cash runs out dividends go away: Nokia to Omit Dividend for First Time in 143 Years (BBG)
  • Passing Debt Bill, GOP Pledges End to Deficits (WSJ)
  • Japan logs record trade gap in 2012 as exports struggle (Reuters)
  • so naturally... Yen at 100 Per Dollar Endorsed by Japan Government’s Nishimura (BBG)
  • Japan rejects currency war fears (FT)
  • Investors grow cagey as Italy election nears (Reuters)
  • In Amenas attack brings global jihad home to Algeria (Reuters)
  • Mafia Victim’s Son Holds Key to Bersani Winning Key Region (BBG)
  • Bernanke Seen Pressing On With Stimulus Amid Debate on QE (BBG)
  • U.S. to lift ban on women in front-line combat jobs (Reuters)
  • Red flags revealed in filings of firm linked to Caterpillar fraud (Reuters)
  • Apple Sales Gain Slowest Since ’09 as Competition Climbs (BBG)
  • Spanish Jobless Rate Hits Record After Rajoy’s First Year (BBG)
  • North Korea Threatens Nuclear Test to Derail U.S. Policies (BBG)

Overnight Media Digest

WSJ

* Apple Inc recorded a flat profit despite selling 18 million more iPhones and iPads as it spent heavily to roll out new products to fend off intensifying competition.

* The U.S. House of Representatives defused one potential debt crisis Wednesday, while a top Republican set the stage for a far broader debate over whether it is possible to actually balance the U.S. budget in coming years.

* A government informant has implicated a prominent former trader at SAC Capital Advisors, telling federal investigators the two swapped confidential stock tips for years, according to people briefed on the matter.

* NYSE Euronext has no intention of selling its European unit to a rival following a planned takeover by IntercontinentalExchange Inc, according to NYSE Euronext's chief executive.

* The value of Goldman Sachs Group Inc's investment portfolio doubled last year. Bond underwriting hit a five-year high. The firm's workforce shrank and remaining employees were paid a smaller chunk of overall revenue.

* General Dynamics Corp swung to a fourth-quarter loss, posting a $2 billion write-down in its information-technology business that Chief Executive Phebe Novakovic called a "reset".

* McDonald's Corp's fourth-quarter earnings beat expectations, reversing two quarters of misses, but the world's largest restaurant chain said it expects tough times ahead.

* Netflix Inc capped a turbulent year by posting a surprise fourth-quarter profit and adding more Internet subscribers than expected, news that sent its stock rocketing about 35 percent in after-hours trading.

* As Novartis AG Chairman Daniel Vasella steps down from the company he helped build over 25 years, he leaves behind one of the health-care industry's most admired firms - but also some shareholder resentment and big questions about Novartis's future.

* Loretta Fredy Bush, the high-profile founder of China's Xinhua Finance Ltd who was later indicted over an alleged $50 million fraud, has agreed to a plea deal and appears poised to plead guilty to a reduced charge.

FT

FSA PROBES ICAP OVER LIBOR FIXING ICAP, the world's largest interdealer broker, has become a focus of the UK Libor rate-rigging investigation and is being investigated by the UK financial watchdog for possible breaches of market conduct rules. () CAMERON PUTS EU FUTURE ON THE LINE David Cameron put Britain's future in the EU on the line in an audacious gamble that united his Conservative party but could have profound implications for the country.

UK LABOUR MARKET DEFIES GLOOM The puzzle of Britain's productivity performance grew on Wednesday, with an unexpectedly buoyant set of employment figures ahead of Friday's output data for last year's fourth quarter, which many economists think will show a dip.

GMG ENDS TALKS TO SELL TRADER STAKE Guardian Media Group has called off talks with interested buyers over the sale of its half stake in the car classifieds company Trader Media Group following a failure to agree a price. Apax, its joint venture partner in Trader Media, had been interested in buying out the 50.1 per cent owned by GMG in a deal that would have netted the publisher of the Guardian and the Observer around 300 million pounds in cash.

CHINESE FUND AND SCHMIDT-BACKED BANK UNITE A boutique merchant bank backed by Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt has struck a deal with a Chinese state-owned fund to work together on media, sport and entertainment acquisitions. Raine's partnership with China Media Capital, which manages a Rmb5bn ($805m) fund, is the latest sign that China's nascent but fast-growing media sector is keen to borrow expertise and contacts from established western operators.

NYT

* Investors have come to expect nothing short of perfection from Apple Inc but with the company's stock sinking 11 percent, it is clear there are a range of challenges.

* Avoiding an economic showdown with President Obama, the House on Wednesday passed legislation to eliminate the nation's statutory borrowing limit until May, without including the dollar-for-dollar spending cuts that Republicans once insisted would have to be part of any debt limit bill.

* Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain has added to Europe's malaise, vowing to reduce British entanglement with the European Union - or allow his people to vote in a referendum to leave the bloc altogether.

* Daniel Vasella, the longtime chairman and former chief executive of Novartis, the Swiss drug maker, plans to step down next month, the company said on Wednesday, when it also reported a jump in fourth-quarter profit.

* The International Monetary Fund said on Wednesday that it continued to expect a modest upturn in global growth in 2013, with fewer risks of major policy mistakes and lower levels of financial stress.

* Netflix Inc reported $8 million in net income, surprising analysts who had expected a slight loss. It increased the number of subscribers for its streaming service to 27 million.

* The Boeing 787's difficulties have raised questions about how regulators certify new technology and how they balance advances in design and engineering with safety.

* Japan on Thursday reported a record annual trade deficit in 2012, the second straight year in the red for an exporting nation that has long built its wealth on its vast trading surpluses.

* A survey of manufacturing activity in China on Thursday provided more reassurance that the Chinese economy, buoyed by somewhat improved global trade and a string of government stimulus measures last year, has settled into a muted recovery.

* US Airways Group Inc reported on Wednesday that its net income doubled in the fourth quarter from a year earlier, and its executives said strong passenger demand for the airline could lead to higher fares.

* The long decline in the number of American workers belonging to labor unions accelerated sharply last year, according to data reported on Wednesday, sending the unionization rate to its lowest level in close to a century.

Canada

THE GLOBE AND MAIL

* Nigeria, the leading power in West Africa, wants Canada and other western nations to take on the conflict in Mali as an international problem and provide funding and heavy equipment like helicopters.

* As Canadian finance minister Jim Flaherty prepares the Conservative government's 2013 budget, his main target will be to balance the books by 2015. With that horizon in mind, economists see several reasons for him to be optimistic, including positive signs from the United States and European economies, as well as the country's housing market.

Reports in the business section:

* The Bank of Canada is setting aside worries over a housing bust to double down on a broader concern, the country's sputtering economy.

The central bank surprised Bay Street and Wall Street on Wednesday by dropping from its latest policy statement any hint that it would raise interest rates to deter Canadians from bidding up housing prices and adding to record levels of household debt.

* RBC Dominion Securities raised its price target for Research In Motion Ltd to C$19 from C$11 ahead of the crucial launch of the smartphone maker's BlackBerry 10 devices, but warned that it is "far too early" to call the company's turnaround a success.

NATIONAL POST

* Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he was searching for a "consensus" within Canada and the Parliament on how to contribute to stopping the spread of terrorism in Mali, but he would not allow a direct Canadian military mission into the African country.

* Manitoba chiefs are not poised to cede from the assembly of First Nations, but leaders gathered in Winnipeg on Wednesday raised questions about the national body's mandate to represent aboriginals on treaty issues.

FINANCIAL POST

* Bombardier Inc CEO and President Pierre Beaudoin said he hopes that its CSeries airliners will take its first flight in June, demonstrating that the Quebec transportation giant has learned the lessons from Boeing Co's difficulties with its 787 Dreamliner.

* The Canadian and global economies will continue struggling to maintain momentum this year, but in a relatively hopeful new outlook, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said it saw light at the end of the tunnel.

The IMF now expects Canada's economy to expand by a modest 1.8 percent this year and by 2.3 percent in 2014.

China

CHINA SECURITIES JOURNAL

--The value-added growth of large industrial enterprises is expected to rise 10 percent, said Zhu Hongren, chief engineer at the Ministry of Industry.

--The Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, the world's biggest bank by market value, said the volume of its renminbi cross-border business hit over 1.5 trillion yuan ($241.24 billion) in 2012, rising 70 percent from a year earlier.

SHANGHAI SECURITIES NEWS

- Hong Kong is working closely with Chinese authorities to promote the mutual recognition of investment funds, which would pave the way for these funds to be sold into both sides of the market, said the deputy chief executive of Securities & Futures Commission of Hong Kong.

- Steam coal prices on the Bohai Bay Rim Index fell 2 yuan from week ago to 629 yuan ($100)a tonne this week, marking the sixth consecutive session of falls, which has brought prices down by a total of 11 yuan since mid-December.

SHANGHAI DAILY

--Chinese companies are becoming increasingly confident in venturing overseas to expand trade and cement their prescence on a global scale, a private survey showed. About four in every five international Chinese companies surveyed by HSBC plan to boost overseas expansion, according to the survey.

--China will continue testing and expand the trial run of the new 4G network technology that allows 10-20 times faster internet access, the industry's top regulator said.

CHINA DAILY (www.chinadaily.com.cn)

--The yuan-denominated business of two major Chinese banks - Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Ltd and Bank of China Ltd - surged in 2012 as global demand for the currency increased.

--China's first locally manufactured, battery-powered vehicle has been handed over to its buyer in Shanghai.

Fly On The Wall 7:00 Market Snapshot

ANALYST RESEARCH

Upgrades

ASML (ASML) upgraded to Buy from Neutral at BofA/Merrill
Autodesk (ADSK) upgraded to Outperform from Sector Perform at RBC Capital
Bed Bath & Beyond (BBBY) upgraded to Outperform from Perform at Oppenheimer
CSX (CSX) upgraded to Outperform from Sector Perform at RBC Capital
Cubist (CBST) upgraded to Hold from Sell at Cantor
Dillard's (DDS) upgraded to Outperform from Neutral at Credit Suisse
Emerson (EMR) upgraded to Buy from Hold at Deutsche Bank
Gol Linhas (GOL) upgraded to Buy from Neutral at Goldman
Netflix (NFLX) upgraded to Buy from Neutral at Lazard Capital
Netflix (NFLX) upgraded to Market Perform from Underperform at Raymond James
Netflix (NFLX) upgraded to Neutral from Underperform at Macquarie
Netflix (NFLX) upgraded to Overweight from Neutral at JPMorgan
Ross Stores (ROST) upgraded to Outperform from Neutral at Credit Suisse
Tenet Healthcare (THC) upgraded to Outperform from Market Perform at Raymond James
Torchmark (TMK) upgraded to Buy from Neutral at SunTrust

Downgrades

Albermarle (ALB) downgraded to Hold from Buy at Deutsche Bank
Albermarle (ALB) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Citigroup
Allegheny Technologies (ATI) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Goldman
Altera (ALTR) downgraded to Market Perform from Outperform at William Blair
Apple (AAPL) downgraded to Hold from Buy at Jefferies
Apple (AAPL) downgraded to Sector Perform from Outperform at Scotia Capital
Coach (COH) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at ISI Group
Copa Holdings (CPA) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Goldman
Douglas Dynamics (PLOW) downgraded to Neutral from Outperform at Credit Suisse
Energizer (ENR) downgraded to Market Perform from Outperform at BMO Capital
Magnum Hunter (MHR) downgraded to Hold from Buy at Jefferies
Netflix (NFLX) downgraded to Neutral from Outperform at Credit Suisse
Parkway Properties (PKY) downgraded to Sell from Hold at Cantor
Primerica (PRI) downgraded to Reduce from Neutral at SunTrust
Redwood Trust (RWT) downgraded to Market Perform from Outperform at JMP Securities
Reinsurance Group (RGA) downgraded to Equal Weight from Overweight at Morgan Stanley
Safeway (SWY) downgraded to Underweight from Equal Weight at Barclays
Stillwater Mining (SWC) downgraded to Neutral from Outperform at Credit Suisse
Tiffany (TIF) downgraded to Hold from Buy at Canaccord
Veeco (VECO) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at UBS

Initiations

Atwood Oceanics (ATW) initiated with an Overweight at Barclays
Church & Dwight (CHD) initiated with an Outperform at Credit Suisse
Clorox (CLX) initiated with an Outperform at Credit Suisse
Colgate-Palmolive (CL) initiated with an Outperform at Credit Suisse
Expedia (EXPE) initiated with a Buy at Ascendiant Capital
Kimberly Clark (KMB) initiated with an Underperform at Credit Suisse
Ocean Rig UDW (ORIG) initiated with an Overweight at Barclays
PBF Energy (PBF) initiated with an Overweight at Morgan Stanley
Pacific Drilling (PACD) initiated with an Overweight at Barclays
Procter & Gamble (PG) initiated with a Neutral at Credit Suisse
Splunk (SPLK) initiated with an Outperform at BMO Capital

HOT STOCKS

Apple (AAPL) CEO Cook: Very confident in our product pipeline
Apple said changing approach to guidance
Nokia (NOK) to propose no dividend be paid for 2012
Starwood Property (STWD), Starwood Capital to acquire LNR Property LLC for $1.05B
American Airlines (AAMRQ) signed 12-year capacity purchase agreement with Republic (RJET). Republic signed an agreement with Embraer (ERJ) to purchase 47 new aircraft
Amgen (AMGN) said on track to hit upper end of 2015 revenue guidance
Said no plans to raise additional debt in 2013
SanDisk (SNDK) said positioned for strong profitability in 2013
Netflix (NFLX) said no plans to launch additional international markets in 1H13
Said more and more interested in exclusive content
Symantec (SYMC) reorganized management, will reduce middle-management workforce
United Rentals (URI) sees FY13 increase in rental rates of approximately 4.5%

EARNINGS

Companies that beat consensus earnings expectations last night and today include:
Stanley Black & Decker (SWK), Cash America (CSH), Knight Capital (KCG), Jacobs Engineering (JEC), Teradyne (TER), Hill-Rom (HRC), Apple (AAPL), United Rentals (URI), Western Digital (WDC), Sealy (ZZ), SanDisk (SNDK), Netflix (NFLX), Stryker (SYK)

Companies that missed consensus earnings expectations include:
Cabot Microelectronics (CCMP), Logitech (LOGI), Noble Corp. (NE), F.N.B. Corp. (FNB), Energen (EGN), Hexcel (HXL), Greenhill & Co. (GHL)

Companies that matched consensus earnings expectations include:
KeyCorp (KEY), Susquehanna (SUSQ), Celadon Group (CGI), Cubist (CBST)

NEWSPAPERS/WEBSITES

Last year Japan's trade deficit nearly tripled to a record $78.3B and few expect a drastic improvement anytime soon, leaving Tokyo no choice but to continue with efforts to boost the economy, the Wall Street Journal reports
Citigroup’s (C) U.S. retail and commercial banking has the highest average deposits per branch among top lenders but generates lower profits than the others. The bank is attempting to turn that around, including an upgrade of computer systems, remodel branches and make employees more accountable in what is arguably the biggest internal overhaul at Citibank in decades, the Wall Street Journal reports
Growth in China's factory sector surged to a two-year high in January as manufacturers received more local and foreign orders in an encouraging sign for the country's economic rebound. The HSBC flash purchasing managers' index (PMI) increased to 51.9 in January, the highest since January 2011 and above the 50-point level that shows accelerating growth in the sector from the previous month, Reuters reports
Japanese regulators joined the U.S. in all but ruling out overcharged batteries as the cause of recent fires on the Boeing (BA) 787 Dreamliner, which has been grounded for a week. The FAA said there are still no firm answers as to the cause and no clear timetable yet for returning the plane to flight, Reuters reports
With toxic smog engulfing Beijing and much of the rest of the country for weeks, China is considering tighter vehicle curbs and emissions standards like Europe’s. That could benefit GM (GM), Volkswagen (VLKAY) and Hyundai Motor  in a market where sales are forecast to pass 20M units this year, Bloomberg reports
Building supply stocks such as USG (USG) in which Warren Buffett (BRK.A) holds a 16% stake, and Eagle Materials (EXP) that more than doubled last year look to rise further as the U.S. housing market extends its recovery, Bloomberg reports

SYNDICATE
ARIAD (ARIA) files to sell common stock
American Realty (ARCP) announces public offering of 1.5M shares of common stock
Buckeye Partners (BPL) files to sell 6M common units
KB Home (KBH) 5.5M share Secondary priced at $18.25

Your rating: None

Israel’s Settlements Flout International Law

In mid-December, Israeli officials approved plans for the construction of more than 2,600 new homes to be built on Givat Hamatos, a hill on the outskirts of Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem. This settlement would be the first major new Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem outside of Israel's internationally recognized borders since 1997, effectively completing the encirclement of Arab East Jerusalem by cutting it off from the rest of the West Bank.

Like a number of other new settlements announced by Israel's right-wing government, this latest initiative appears designed to divide up the land in the occupied territory in such a way as to make the establishment of a contiguous Palestinian state impossible.

In face of near-universal international condemnation for this latest Israeli provocation, however, the United States rushed to Israel's defense.

All of the Israeli settlements outside of Israel's internationally recognized borders are illegal. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention -- to which both Israel and the United States are signatories -- prohibits any occupying power from transferring "parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." The United Nations, with such measures as Security Council Resolutions 446, 452, 465 and 471, has repeatedly recognized that Israel is in violation of this critical international treaty.

In addition, a landmark 2004 decision by the International Court of Justice also confirmed the illegality of the settlements.

On Dec. 19, however, the Obama administration blocked a U.N. Security Council vote on a resolution condemning Israel's announcement of the new settlement. The U.S. then blocked an effort for a joint statement by the Security Council president. In response, all 14 other members of the Security Council issued individual statements condemning the illegal Israeli actions.

Obama's efforts to undermine international law in regard to Israeli colonization are not new. In February 2011, a nearly unprecedented majority of U.N. members co-sponsored a Security Council resolution that reaffirmed previous Security Council resolutions acknowledging that Israeli settlements on Palestinian lands occupied since the June 1967 war were illegal and constituted a major obstacle to peace. Unlike these previous resolutions, however, which called on Israel to withdraw from already existing settlements, this resolution simply insisted that Israel cease additional settlement activity in Palestinian areas.

Despite the moderate wording, however, the United States vetoed the resolution. All 14 of the other members of the Security Council voted in favor, situating the United States as an extreme outlier in the international community and placing President Barack Obama to the right of the conservative governments of Great Britain and France.

Given that the 2004 ruling by the International Court of Justice enjoined the United States and other signatories to "ensure compliance by Israel with international humanitarian law," the U.S. veto of a U.N. Security Council resolution attempting to encourage compliance indicates that Obama is willing to have the United States violate the decision by the World Court as well.

The official State Department position, in effect for nearly 33 years and never formally repealed, states categorically, "While Israel may undertake, in the occupied territories, actions necessary to meet its military needs and to provide for orderly government during the occupation, for the reasons indicated above the establishment of the civilian settlements in those territories is inconsistent with international law." Obama, in vetoing this resolution, demonstrated his willingness to undermine even his own State Department.

Refusing to recognize the illegality of Israeli settlements at the United Nations was not always the position of the U.S. president. The Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations were quite willing to do so when Israel's colonization drive began in the 1970s. However, despite his distinguished legal background, Obama has demonstrated -- on this issue, at least -- that he has even less respect for the law than Richard Nixon had.

As late as the presidency of George H.W. Bush, the United States tried to pressure Israel to halt settlement expansion. However, under the Clinton administration -- with the backing of both parties in Congress -- the United States succeeded in blocking efforts by Israeli peace activists and the international community to freeze settlements, which at that time were only half as large as they are now. The United States even used taxpayer dollars to subsidize the settlements' expansion. These policies contributed directly to the collapse of the peace process in 2000 and the rise of extremist Palestinian groups like Hamas.

In 2001, the U.S. Mitchell Report called on Israel to "freeze all settlement activity, including the 'natural growth' of existing settlements," emphasizing that without such a freeze, "a cessation of Palestinian-Israeli violence will be particularly hard to sustain." Neither the Bush administration nor Congress pressured Israel to abide by this recommendation, however.

Similarly, when the George W. Bush administration -- along with Russia, the European Union and the United Nations -- put together a three-part "road map" for Israeli-Palestinian peace two years later, the first phase included a freeze on the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, "including natural growth of settlements." However, while the United States pushed the Palestinian Authority hard -- and largely successfully -- to live up to its obligations under the road map, both the Bush and Obama administrations have refused to go beyond mildly worded expressions of concern about Israel's settlement policy.

It is no secret where U.S. acquiescence to Israel's settlement policy will lead. As Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon once told Secretary of State Colin Powell, "We learn a lot from you Americans. We saw how you moved West using this method."

© 2012 National Catholic Reporter

Stephen Zunes

Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and chair of Middle Eastern studies at the University of San Francisco and serves as a contributing editor of Tikkun. His most recent book, co-authored with Jacob Mundy, is Western Sahara: War, Nationalism, and Conflict Irresolution (Syracuse University Press, 2010.)

The Case Against Kerry

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Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore.

With all the attention on the nomination by President Obama of Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense, there hasn't been quite as much discussion about his nomination of John Kerry for secretary of state. I guess that's partly because he seems rather beloved by the Republicans and is likely to get passed without much issue. But there are issues, according to our next guest, Stephen Zunes.He now joins us where he's a professor of politics. And he is also chair of the Middle Eastern studies at the University of San Francisco. He's also a columnist and senior analyst of Foreign Policy in Focus. I should say he's actually joining us now from North Carolina, where he's traveling. Thanks for joining us, Stephen.STEPHEN ZUNES, CHAIR, MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF SAN FRANCISCO: My pleasure.JAY: So everyone's—generally in the mainstream media seems to like this appointment of John Kerry. But you don't. Why?ZUNES: John Kerry, though he—his earlier Senate career included some bold challenges to U.S. foreign policy, particularly regarding Central America, the nuclear arms race, and his support for various dictators around the world, moved sharply to the right in the past decade or so, including support for the invasion of Iraq, support for the more hardline elements in Israel, and a number of policy statements and initiatives which seem to indicate a pretty serious disdain to basic principles of human rights, international law. In addition, a series of statements ranging from his false claims about Iraq's military potential during the waning days of Saddam Hussein's reign to his attacks on Amnesty International and other reputable human rights organizations for reporting violations of human rights by U.S. allies have also raised questions about his credibility.JAY: So just to track his history a little bit, I mean, he made a name for himself 'cause he came back as this decorated war vet and opposed to the war in Vietnam. And if you listen to the rhetoric at that time, he sounds rather progressive in his foreign policy position.~~~JOHN KERRY, VIETNAM WAR VETERAN: We could come back to this country and we could be quiet, we could hold our silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam. But we feel because of what threatens this country, the fact that the crimes threaten it, not red, not redcoats, but the crimes which we're committing are what threaten it. And we have to speak out.~~~JAY: So give us a bit of the arc of what happened to that John Kerry.ZUNES: Well, it's hard to say. I mean, some people say he did it for political expediency because he had long desired to run for president. Of course, he did in 2004, receiving the Democratic nomination and losing narrowly to President Bush. But in the post-9/11 era, he tended to take a pretty hardline position. He went around claiming that the United States has a right to invade other countries without international support. He attacked the UN secretary-general, he attacked fellow Democrats, he attacked the Spanish prime minister and others who raised questions about this kind of U.S. unilateralism, his claims, for example, that Iraq—that everybody agreed that Iraq had advanced nuclear weapons program. And, in fact, there were very well publicized, even at that time, divisions among national security analysts, even within the government, about those facts. So he claimed that they had biological and chemical weapons even more advanced than they did prior to the Gulf War of 1991 and the subsequent disarmament that was imposed by the international community. These things kind of raised serious, you know, questions [unintel.] the extent he would go to supporting a U.S. intervention in various parts of the world.JAY: And didn't he go so far as to say that if he—knowing what he knows now, he'd still vote for it?ZUNES: Yeah. This is the scary part, actually. When he was running for president in 2004, unlike, say, Chuck Hagel and some other people who immediately regretted their vote for the war and backtracked, Kerry doubled down. He said that even if he knew that Iraq did not have these chemical and biological weapons and nuclear weapons programs, he would have supported the invasion anyway, because they might have the potential [inaud.] some day and Iraq was a repressive dictatorship.But by that criteria, repressive regimes with the potential to make nonconventional weapons, there are at least 30, 40 countries around the world that meet that criteria. And he was essentially saying, we have the right to invade any one of them.JAY: Now, a lot of people breathed a sigh of relief when Susan Rice didn't get nominated, because she is known as a, quote, humanitarian imperialist—in other words, she's known to be very pro-interventionist, using humanitarian framing for the intervention. But is Kerry any different than that?ZUNES: No, not really. And indeed he's been quite supportive of intervention that doesn't even remotely resemble humanitarian initiatives. He's been a big supporter, for example, when—in backing the Bush administration's defense of Israel's wars on Lebanon and Gaza. He basically has taken this position that [unintel.] his attacks against Howard Dean for saying that the United States should work more multilaterally with other countries, saying, oh, that's just an excuse for doing nothing, he would surrender our right of self-defense, and the like. He attacked Spanish Prime Minister, you know, Zapatero as giving in to terrorism when Zapatero said, we are going to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq because the Bush administration refuses to allow the UN to play a stronger role. I mean, again, this guy is pretty hardcore. In many ways, he has embraced some of the very basic assumptions we normally associate with the right-wing Republican neoconservatives.JAY: So this tells us a lot about President Obama's foreign policy outlook, I think, because on the one hand, the reason he always said he opposed the Iraq War is 'cause it was a stupid war, not because he's against those kinds of interventions. He just saw that that particular war would actually weaken America's ability to project power. And those are virtually his words. So you see the appointment of Chuck Hagel—he thinks a war with Iran would be stupid, and he wants someone that could help keep the lid on that. On the other hand, he's not against the use of armed force to project power, and there he has Kerry. So it isn't actually contradictory, these two appointments.ZUNES: No. But in certain ways, though, it does—I do see it as something of a betrayal by Obama, in that when he was running for president, he said he promised not just to end the Iraq War, but to end the mindset which led to the Iraq War in the first place. And he was smart enough—or whether it be for, you know, pragmatic reasons or anything else, recognized that the invasion of Iraq and occupation would be a disaster. And, you know, he should be given at least some credit for that understanding. But at the same time, almost every major appointment he has made dealing with foreign policy and national security—Gates in defense; Hillary Clinton, secretary of state; Dennis Blair at DNI; Napolitano at Homeland Security; Biden as vice president; Emanuel as chief of staff—and all these people were among the right-wing minority of Democrats that supported the Iraq War. Remember, the majority of Democrats on Capitol Hill voted against the authorization. [unintel.] again, virtually every single one of Obama's appointments to these top positions have been among that right-wing minority.JAY: I interviewed Susan Rice during the New Hampshire primary in 2008, and I asked her this question directly, and she was essentially his spokesperson on foreign policy during the election campaign, and I asked her if—what is this new mindset? I said, if you're going to have a new mindset the way he's promised, doesn't that mean you have to question the whole underlying assumption that there has to be—the United States has to be a global military power? I said, you know, what do you think about closing down most or all of the foreign military bases? What is the difference in your strategy in Afghanistan? Is it going to be just troop-based or not? And I asked her essentially that question, and she essentially—not essentially—she took off her microphone and walked out of the interview. She said, I don't have to do this.ZUNES: Really? It's interesting. I think in many ways that these appointments, including Kerry, are exemplary of this idea that somehow the United States is above the law and its allies are above the law. In fact, I remember when the International Court of Justice in a unanimous (save for the U.S. judge) opinion that said that Israel, like all other countries, had to abide by the Fourth Geneva Convention and other principles of international humanitarian law in the occupied territories. In 2004, John Kerry sharply criticized the International Court of Justice for its unanimous ruling (save for the U.S. judge) that said that Israel, like all countries, is bound by provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention, specifically that while they can build a separation barrier on their internationally recognized borders, they cannot build this separation wall deep inside occupied territory in this serpentine fashion as part of a land grab to incorporate all these settlements. Well, John Kerry denounced the World Court as being anti-Israel, as not supporting Israel's right to self-defense, and even said that the World Court should have no jurisdiction whatsoever, that it should simply be a matter of the Israeli courts to decide, and the U.S. should support whatever the Israeli courts say. But when you think about the implications of this, he's basically saying that if a country invades and occupies another country, any legal question regarding international humanitarian law or anything else should be determined by the courts of the occupying power. In other words, that combined with his rationalization for the invasion of Iraq, seems to indicate that a wholesale rejection of the United Nations system, 20th-century international law, and embrace a 19th-century notion of right of conquest.JAY: Alright. Well, I guess this is just the beginning of discussions about John Kerry, 'cause it seems rather sure he's going to be nominated. Thanks for joining us, Stephen.ZUNES: My pleasure.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 military contractor report $2bn loss

Major US military contractor General Dynamics report $2 billion loss (File photo).

One of the biggest US aeronautics corporations and military contractors General Dynamics has reported an annual loss of USD2 billion, blaming on recent cuts to the government’s defense budget.

The company, which is based in the Washington DC suburb of Falls Church in Virginia, announced plans on Wednesday to reduce its information technology (IT) business by USD2 billion amid the declining government demand, The Washington Post reports Thursday.

The announcement, according to the report, prompted major worries within the Washington metropolitan area since government-based IT contracting has served as the “key ingredient” to the region’s economic growth in the past decade.


Information technology, the daily notes, would likely be “the first segments of the private sector to sustain tangible damage from federal budget cuts - because it’s easier for the government to stop rewiring offices than it is to stop building a ship or a tank.”

The area’s dependence on government contracting work, particularly in the field of IT, makes it especially vulnerable to planned budget cuts agreed to over the past couple of years by US President Barack Obama and the nation’s legislators in Congress.

This is while the US Government “procurement spending” in the area steadily climbed by double digits from 2000 to 2010. In 2012, however, it declined by 5.5 percent, the report says.

Meanwhile, the amount of the loss reported by General Dynamics has “stunned” some analysts “accustomed to years of steady profits at the company.”


Defense contractors, moreover, have been getting ready for the planned military budget cuts as the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are winding down.

The Defense Department budget is facing budget cuts of nearly 500 billion dollars over 10 years as part of an agreement reached between the US Congress and the White House in 2011.

The report further cites economist as estimating that the planned spending cuts would “destroy some 450,000 jobs” across the Washington metropolitan area, which includes most densely populated areas in states of Virginia and Maryland near the US capital.

MFB/MFB

UN will probe US terror drone attacks

The United Nations says it will launch an investigation into the impact of the US assassination drone strikes that mainly target civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

The UN special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, Ben Emmerson, is responsible for the inquiry, which will look into the extent of civilian casualties caused by the airstrikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

In October 2012, Emmerson called for effective investigations into the drone attacks, describing them as ‘war crimes.’

“If the relevant states are not willing to establish effective independent monitoring mechanisms… then it may in the last resort be necessary for the UN to act,” Emmerson said at the time.


The UN official denounced as indefensible Washington’s claim that it can carry out assassination drone operations anywhere in the world because it is deemed to be an ‘international conflict.’

“The global war paradigm has done immense damage to a previously shared international consensus on the legal framework underlying both international human rights law and international humanitarian law,” Emmerson stated.

The investigation, which is the result of a request by several nations, including Pakistan and two permanent members of the UN Security Council, will report to the UN General Assembly this autumn.

According to the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, more than 3,300 people, many of them women and children, have lost their lives in drone strikes in Pakistan alone since 2004.

On Wednesday, nine people were killed in two separate US drone strikes in Yemen.

Washington claims that it is targeting terrorists, but the drone attacks have mostly led to massive civilian deaths.

The US assassination drone strikes were initiated under former US President George W. Bush, but have escalated under President Barack Obama.

The United Nations has censured the attacks as targeted killings and says they flout international law.

YH/HSN

Mehdi’s Morning Memo: Warsi’s War On The Islamophobes

The ten things you need to know on Thursday 24th January 2013...

1) WARSI'S WAR ON THE ISLAMOPHOBES

She may have been demoted from the Cabinet but Baroness Warsi still doesn't pull any punches. Tonight, she'll take aim at "certain sections" of Britain's Islamophobia-fuelling media in a speech which will also endorse Lord Justice Leveson's conclusions about anti-Muslim prejudice in the press.

From the Huffington Post:

"In a speech in London this evening, the minister for faith and communities and senior Foreign Office minister will say there is an 'underlying, unfounded mistrust' among many Britons towards Muslims as well as a 'misinformed suspicion of people who follow Islam'.

"Warsi will make the comments at a dinner held by Mama, a new government-backed group dedicated to measuring and monitoring anti-Muslim attacks.

"... 'Sadly, much of this negative narrative is being perpetuated by certain sections of the media,' she will say.

'"Lord Justice Leveson's report event revealed journalists were encouraged to make up stories about Muslims. And concluded that the unbalanced reporting of ethnic minorities was endemic.'

You've got to admire her guts. The former Tory chairman's speech comes almost two years to the day since her now-notorious 'dinner-table test' speech in which she argued that prejudice against Muslims had become socially acceptable in the UK - at the time, she was denounced by right-wing columnists while Downing Street sources distanced themselves from the baroness, claiming she'd not cleared the speech with the PM.

Let's see how Dave responds this time round...

2) TIME FOR PLAN B, GIDEON

Even the chancellor's former bezzy mates think he's got it wrong on austerity. Remember the IMF? Yesterday, they downgraded their growth forecasts for this year and next - ahead of tomorrow's fourth-quarter GDP figures which are expected to be pretty bad.

This morning, their chief economist did his best impression of Ed Balls on the Today programme - from the BBC:

"The IMF chief economist has told the BBC that Chancellor George Osborne should consider toning down austerity in his March budget.

'We think this would be a good time to take stock,' said Olivier Blanchard, speaking to Radio 4's Today programme."

Are you listening, Gideon?

3) THE MORNING AFTER

The prime minister may have won the support of his backbenchers, getting cheered and applauded as he arrives in the Commons chamber for PMQs yesterday after his announcement of an in-out referendum (in, er, 2017...), and he may have even pleased big business (a letter to The Times signed by 56 industry and City leaders says his promise of a negotiation followed by a referendum is "good for business and good for jobs in Britain") but not everyone's pleased with his brazen sop to the eurosceptics. I'm not talking about the French or the Germans - I'm referring here to the Yanks and Dave's BFF, Barry.

As my colleague Ned Simons reports:

"The United States has repeated its warning that the United Kingdom must not leave the European Union, following David Cameron's announcement he wants to hold a referendum.

"President Obama's press secretary Jay Carney said on Wednesday the White House believed the UK was 'stronger' as a member of the EU.

"'We welcome the prime minister's call for Britain to remain in the EU and to retain a leading role in Europe's institutions,' he said.

"'And as the President told the prime minister when they spoke last week, the United States values a strong United Kingdom and a strong European Union.'"

Who does Cameron want to impress more? Barack Obama or Daniel Hannan? His behaviour over the next couple of years will tell us the answer.

On a related note, Europe minister David Lidington told BBC2's Newsnight last night that the next Tory election manifesto will outline exactly how his party would try to renegotiate new and looser ties with the EU.

4) ED'S GAMBLE

In one day Cameron appeared to unite his own party behind him and cause utter confusion in Labour ranks. To the utter delight of Tory backbenchers Ed Milband appeared to rule out holding an in/out referendum during prime minister's questions. Only for other members of his front bench to then walk back the comments later on in the day.

John Denham told the Daily Echo there had been "a bit of over-interpretation" of Miliband's comments. He said: "We do not absolutely rule it out in the future, we do not know what issues will come up in the future. And shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander said the party would "never said never" on the issue. Perhaps we can have a referendum on whether Labour should support a referendum.

5) THE DRONE PRESIDENT

Dave's mate Barry's got his own problems to deal with. Like, y'know, accusations of war crimes. Bit awkward when you're a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

From the Guardian:

"A United Nations investigation into targeted killings will examine drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, according to the British lawyer heading the inquiry.

"Ben Emmerson QC, a UN special rapporteur, will reveal the full scope of his review which will include checks on military use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in UK operations in Afghanistan, US strikes in Pakistan, as well as in the Sahel region of Africa where the conflict in Mali has erupted...

"The inquiry will report to the UN general assembly in New York this autumn... Emmerson has previously suggested some drone attacks - particularly those known as 'double tap' strikes where rescuers going to the aid of a first blast have become victims of a follow-up strike - could possibly constitute a 'war crime'."

Oh, Dubya, come back. All is forgiven. (Not.)

BECAUSE YOU'VE READ THIS FAR...

Watch this video of what happens when tourists try and mess with the Queen's Guard at Windsor Castle.

6) SNP BLUES

Talking of referendums (or is that referenda?), the Times reports:

"Alex Salmond is facing a devastating defeat in next year’s Scottish independence referendum, according to a new opinion survey.

"The survey of more than 1,200 Scots shows that support for independence north of the Border has plummeted to its lowest level since devolution in 1999 — and the decline has gained pace since Mr Salmond’s Nationalist administration came to power in Holyrood in 2007.

"Backing for Scotland leaving the UK now sits at just 23 per cent, a drop of nine points in a year. The annual Scottish Social Attitudes survey shows that Scots are losing any appetite they had for separation, with less than half now believing independence would give their country a stronger voice in the world."

7) 'NOT FIT FOR PURPOSE'

From the Mirror:

"A backlog of 16,000 immigration cases dating back up to a decade has been uncovered by watchdogs.

"Around 14,000 people are waiting for the UK Border Agency to consider appeals against decisions to kick them out - with the list growing by 700 a month."

8) HATTY, DOLLY AND BRIAN

Brian Leveson's report into media ethics and practises is still dividing and provoking politicians.

From the Guardian:

"Harriet Harman, the deputy Labour leader, has said government proposals to create a royal charter for a new press watchdog are akin to Dolly the sheep, the first animal to be cloned from a cell.

"Speaking at the Oxford Media Convention on Wednesday, Harman also said Labour was not ruling out agreeing with the government's plan to introduce a royal charter for the newspaper regulator in conjunction with a statute to ensure the charter cannot be tweaked by a future government.

"But she said the problem was no one knew how a royal charter would work in relation to the press. 'It's a bit like Dolly the sheep, it might look like a sheep, but we do not know if it will do all the thing that a sheep is supposed to do,' she said."

9) MESSY EXIT

Afghanistan is likely to be "messy" after western troops pull out in 2014, Defence Secretary Philip Hammond admitted yesterday.

Hammond said there was little prospect of the Kabul-based government defeating the Taliban "outright", and the most it could hope for was securing key cities and infrastructure. The frank assessment came as Hammond gave evidence to the Commons Defence Committee.

"The ability to see a long-term sustainable peace in Afghanistan fundamentally rests upon a political compromise and political accommodation being made within that country between the different ethnic groups, the government and the Taliban," he told the MPs. "Such an accommodation will require the active support of the neighbours, particularly Pakistan."

10) CLINTON VS CONGRESS

From the Telegraph:

"Hillary Clinton has given an angry and emotional defence of her handling of last year's attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, while warning of the need for a long–term US effort to address the rise of al–Qaeda in north Africa.

"... Mrs Clinton banged the table in frustration as she denied claims of a coverup. She said the issue was "not just a matter of policy, it's personal" and choked back tears as she described comforting the families of the victims.

"...Mrs Clinton faced attacks from several senior Republicans during the hearing... Mrs Clinton banged the table with impatience at the line of questioning, saying: 'Was it because of a protest, or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they'd go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again.'"

You can watch the exchanges here on HuffPost.

Was this a preview of 2016? A couple of those Republican senators, Marco Rubio of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky, will probably run for president in four years time- and could find themselves up against the combative Clinton. Good luck to them...

PUBLIC OPINION WATCH

From today's Sun/YouGov poll:

Labour 43
Conservatives 31
Lib Dems 11
Ukip 10

That would give Labour a majority of 116.

140 CHARACTERS OR LESS

@TimMontgomerie A montage of today's referendum-tastic newspaper headlines http://twitpic.com/bxs7ac

@Slate Since When Is France a Global Military Power? http://slate.me/XAEuO0

900 WORDS OR MORE

Timothy Garton-Ash, writing in the Guardian, says: "From outside, it's clear why Britain has to stay in Europe."

Peter Oborne, writing in the Telegraph, says: "David Cameron may have finished off the Tories - but he had no choice."

Steve Richards in the Independent says: "Cameron's speech on Europe makes it less likely he will be Prime Minister after the next election."

Got something you want to share? Please send any stories/tips/quotes/pix/plugs/gossip to Mehdi Hasan (mehdi.hasan@huffingtonpost.com) or Ned Simons (ned.simons@huffingtonpost.com). You can also follow us on Twitter: @mehdirhasan, @nedsimons and @huffpostukpol

Memeorandum, WTF Is This Beyonce Nonsense?

If you don't know, Memeorandum is a blogger news aggregator. I check it out occasionally even if it does lean right. On Tuesday their top story was some explosive new coverup during Obama's second inaugural speech. Wait for it...Beyoncé lip-synched the Star Spangled Banner at the inauguration — The wingnutosphere went ballistic.

After embarrassing themselves with the Bengahzi/Watergate comparisons, wingnuts have moved on to attack lip-synchers. Aretha Franklin laughs at this idiocy. I don't understand why Memeorandum focuses in on wingnut conspiracy theories so much, but that's their right.

I'm just shocked that Hillary Clinton wasn't questioned on this by Rand Paul.

Hillary Faces Down The Angry Men

From simpleton Ron Johnson to delusional Rand Paul, GOP senators swung at the Secretary of State and hit themselves.

January 23, 2013  |  

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Three weeks after her release from a New York hospital with a blood clot on the brain – a health emergency mocked on the right as “Benghazi flu” — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave Senate Republicans their day of rage over the Sept. 11 Benghazi killings on Wednesday.

From the intellectually underwhelming Ron Johnson of Wisconsin to the ever-angrier John McCain, with cameos by unimpressive 2016 hopefuls Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, Clinton stood up to the raging bulls with grace and fire of her own.

The stature gap between Clinton and those possible 2016 rivals – OK, nobody’s announced they’re running, but I couldn’t help thinking about it – was enormous. When Rand Paul huffed “had I been President at the time and I found that you did not read the cables [from Benghazi] I would have relieved you of your duties,” it wasn’t intimidating but funny. President Rand Paul? Try to say that without laughing.

Steely yet sometimes emotional, Clinton defended the State Department’s handling of the Benghazi story while not denying the underlying Libyan unrest or security troubles that caused it.

“For me, this is not just a matter of policy, it’s personal. I stood next to President Obama as the Marines carried those flag-draped caskets off the plane at Andrews,” she said in her introduction, with her voice breaking. “I put my arms around the mothers and fathers, the sisters and brothers, the sons and daughters, and the wives left alone to raise their children.”

After that, she was lectured and hectored by guys who don’t quite measure up to her and never will. Clinton spent almost as much time answering for Susan Rice’s now world-historical Sunday show appearances Sept. 16 as she did talking about what happened at the compound and her own leadership decisions.

On a morning in which senators vied for the worst moment, Tea Party darling Ron Johnson of Wisconsin stood out. “A very simple phone call to these individuals I think would have ascertained, immediately, that there was no protest prior to this…it was an assault,” he told Clinton condescendingly. The fact that Johnson could envision “a very simple phone call” in the wake of the Benghazi carnage – has he even seen photos of the devastated compound? – shows that he’s a very simple man when it comes to foreign policy.  Johnson’s entire point was to ask, again, about Rice “purposely misleading” the Sunday shows five days after the attack.

Clinton began by pointing to the mayhem in the wake of the devastation, with an agent still recovering at Walter Reed and the FBI moving to gather information in an investigation that’s ongoing. “Senator, when you’re in these positions, the last thing you want to do is interfere with any other process going on,” she told Johnson, to which he replied:

“I realize that’s a good excuse,” but Clinton corrected him.

“Well, no, it’s the fact.” And she went on:

With all due respect the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because there was a protest or was it because there were guys who went out for a walk one night who decided they would kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and to do everything we can to make sure it never happens again.

McCain remained unhappy, calling Clinton’s answers “not satisfactory to me” and harrumphing “The American people deserve to know answers, and they certainly don’t deserve false answers,” McCain said. It sort of sounded like he was calling Clinton a liar. ( On second viewing: Clinton did a great job disarming McCain, a little, with warmth, replying calmly: “I understand your very very strong feelings. You knew Chris [Stevens], you were one of the staunchest supporters of the effort to dislodge [Moammar al-Qadaffi] and try to give the Libyan people a chance. And we just have a disagreement. We have a disagreement about what happened, and when it happened and with respect to explaining the sequence of events.”)

United States ‘Very Clear’, Britain Must Not Leave The EU

The United States has repeated its warning that the United Kingdom must not leave the European Union, following David Cameron’s announcement he wants to hold a referendum.

President Obama’s press secretary Jay Carney said on Wednesday the White House believed the UK was “stronger” as a member of the EU.

“We welcome the prime minister’s call for Britain to remain in the EU and to retain a leading role in Europe’s institutions,” he said.

“And as the President told the prime minister when they spoke last week, the United States values a strong United Kingdom and a strong European Union.

“We value our essential relationship with the UK., as well as our relationship with the European Union, which makes critical contributions to peace, prosperity, and security in Europe and around the world.

“We believe that the United Kingdom is stronger as a result of its European Union membership, and we believe the European Union is stronger as a result of having the United Kingdom in the EU.”

He added: “So that's - our views on this are very clear.”

On Wednesday Tory MPs hailed Cameron’s historic announcement that if he won a majority in 2015 he would hold an in or our referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU.

Earlier this month, before Cameron delivered his speech, US assistant secretary of state for European affairs Phil Gordon warned Britain against turning “inwards” with a referendum.

"We have a growing relationship with the EU as an institution, which has an increasing voice in the world, and we want to see a strong British voice in that EU,” he told journalists during a London briefing.

“That is in America's interests. We welcome an outward-looking EU with Britain in it."

President Obama repeated the sentiment during a phone call with the prime minister last week.

In a statement following the call the White House said: "The president underscored our close alliance with the United Kingdom and said that the United States values a strong UK in a strong European Union, which makes critical contributions to peace, prosperity, and security in Europe and around the world.”

Asked about British plans for an EU referendum during Wednesday’s daily press briefing, Carney said: “The internal processes by which these matters are considered within the UK or any other country are obviously the province of those countries and those governments.”

SEE ALSO:

Paul Ryan Throws A Hissy Fit, Rewrites His Recent History

Paul Ryan haz a sad after President Obama smacked him around in his inaugural speech, saying those programs "do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great."

Rep. Ryan didn't care for the attention, it seems. According to Politico, Ryan denies ever, ever, ever referring to people on Medicare and Social Security as "takers."

Is that a great example of denial in action, or what? Ryan suddenly forgot that he rolled out a plan for Medicare that ends it and substitutes private insurance for the lucky few who could afford it. Speaking to Laura Ingraham, he said he had been "misunderstood"! It wasn't about senior citizens, he claims; it was about some mysterious, undocumented overall slide toward a "dependency society."

Oh, Paul. Let us help you.

Paul Ryan at a 2005 fundraiser, selling the end of Medicare and Social Security:

"In case that wasn't clear enough, Ryan added: "I think if we win a few of these right now -- moving health care to a consumer-based, individualist system, moving Social Security to an individually pre-owned, pre-funded retirement system -- just those two right there will do so much to change the dynamics in this society."

Here's another quote from that same speech:

In almost every fight we are involved in here, on Capitol Hill...it is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict: individualism vs. collectivism...That is why there is no more fight that is more obvious between the differences of these two conflicts than Social Security. Social Security right now is a collectivist system, it’s a welfare transfer system…..

He also mentioned Medicare in that same context.

Paul Ryan, June, 2012:

Do you want the American idea of an opportunity society with a safety net where you can take a risk, start a business, make a difference, succeed and be honored for being successful?," Ryan said at a June 15, 2012 fundraiser. "Or do we go down the path the president is proposing -- a social welfare state, a cradle-to-the-grave society where we have more takers than makers."

Paul Ryan's October, 2012 fundraising remarks:

“With a few exceptions, government’s approach has been to spend lots of money on centralized, bureaucratic, top-down anti-poverty programs,” Ryan said. “ … The problem is, starting in the 1960s, this top-down approach created and perpetuated a debilitating culture of dependency, wrecking families and communities. This was so obvious to everyone by the 1990s that, when a major welfare program was finally reformed, the law was passed by a Republican Congress and signed by a Democratic president.”

Here are more examples, mashed up in one compact video here.

Paul Ryan believes 60 percent of the people in this country are takers. He's said that many, many times. And that category includes Medicare and Social Security recipients, no matter how much lipstickhe puts on that pig.

Always remember, this is a moral issue for Ryan. He can deny it all he wants, but this maker/taker belief rests at the core of his very being.

The only difference between Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney is a number: 13 percent. Romney said 47 percent were takers; Ryan says 60 percent are takers.

Otherwise, there's no daylight between them.

Common Cause Urges Senators to Reject “Handshake Deal” on Filibuster

WASHINGTON - January 23 - A filibuster “compromise” that takes the form of a handshake deal and allows the minority to obstruct action effortlessly would continue the Senate’s march toward irrelevance and deliver another two years of partisan gridlock on Capitol Hill, Common Cause said today.

"At a minimum, Senate rules should require that those seeking to block legislation be required to stand up and explain their position – and keep explaining it until they persuade a majority to join them or run out of things to say," said Common Cause President Bob Edgar.

"It’s distressing to hear that the so-called reform in the works would preserve the 'silent filibuster,' allowing the minority to kill bills simply by sending an email or making a phone call," Edgar added.

Edgar said Common Cause is proceeding "full speed ahead" on its lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the filibuster rule; he urged senators involved in the reform effort to join in the litigation. "We remain convinced that a simple majority – 51 votes – is all that’s required to pass most legislation in the Senate," he said.

A federal judge in Washington dismissed the suit last month, ruling that Common Cause and other plaintiffs, including four members of the House of Representatives, lacked legal standing to pursue the case; the addition of senators to the list of plaintiffs could produce a different result, Edgar asserted.

"We’ve already filed our notice of appeal," Edgar noted. "We believe that in a trial on the merits, we can demonstrate that the filibuster rule violates the Constitution by establishing a 60-vote threshold for the Senate to conduct even routine business. That is emphatically not what the framers of the Constitution intended.

"President Obama outlined an ambitious agenda for the nation on Monday, one that deserves serious consideration by the entire Congress,” Edgar added. “Senators who oppose his initiatives, or any alternatives their colleagues in Congress might propose, should be required to engage in actual debates and then vote to decide the question. The filibuster should not be allowed to continue as the Senate’s silent killer.

Common Cause Urges Senators to Reject “Handshake Deal” on Filibuster

WASHINGTON - January 23 - A filibuster “compromise” that takes the form of a handshake deal and allows the minority to obstruct action effortlessly would continue the Senate’s march toward irrelevance and deliver another two years of partisan gridlock on Capitol Hill, Common Cause said today.

"At a minimum, Senate rules should require that those seeking to block legislation be required to stand up and explain their position – and keep explaining it until they persuade a majority to join them or run out of things to say," said Common Cause President Bob Edgar.

"It’s distressing to hear that the so-called reform in the works would preserve the 'silent filibuster,' allowing the minority to kill bills simply by sending an email or making a phone call," Edgar added.

Edgar said Common Cause is proceeding "full speed ahead" on its lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the filibuster rule; he urged senators involved in the reform effort to join in the litigation. "We remain convinced that a simple majority – 51 votes – is all that’s required to pass most legislation in the Senate," he said.

A federal judge in Washington dismissed the suit last month, ruling that Common Cause and other plaintiffs, including four members of the House of Representatives, lacked legal standing to pursue the case; the addition of senators to the list of plaintiffs could produce a different result, Edgar asserted.

"We’ve already filed our notice of appeal," Edgar noted. "We believe that in a trial on the merits, we can demonstrate that the filibuster rule violates the Constitution by establishing a 60-vote threshold for the Senate to conduct even routine business. That is emphatically not what the framers of the Constitution intended.

"President Obama outlined an ambitious agenda for the nation on Monday, one that deserves serious consideration by the entire Congress,” Edgar added. “Senators who oppose his initiatives, or any alternatives their colleagues in Congress might propose, should be required to engage in actual debates and then vote to decide the question. The filibuster should not be allowed to continue as the Senate’s silent killer.

On the News With Thom Hartmann: We Could Be Just Hours Away From Filibuster...

In today's On the News segment: We could be just hours away from filibuster reform in the Senate; working people aren't going on strike nearly as much as they used to forty years ago; the US Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the Drug Enforcement Agency - and declined to change the official drug classification of marijuana; and more.


TRANSCRIPT:

Thom Hartmann here – on the news...

You need to know this. We could be just hours away from filibuster reform in the Senate. Last night, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he's giving Republicans 24 to 36 hours to come to the table, and agree on some sort of filibuster reform. But, he said, if Republicans don't do it – then he'll proceed on his own. Democrats will fight to change the rules of the Senate, and curb some of the obstructionism we've seen over the last four years in the upper chamber. Reid must choose between two options for filibuster reform. There's an ambitious reform plan, promoted by Senators Jeff Merkley and Tom Udall, which would put in place a "talking filibuster" - requiring the minority to stand on the floor of the Senate, and actually talk the entire time they wish to filibuster legislation. And there's a more moderate reform plan, which preserves the minority's silent filibuster, but cuts down on how many times they can filibuster a particular piece of legislation. While most progressive organizations have endorsed the Merkley-Udall "talking filibuster" reform, it's unlikely Senator Reid has the votes among Democrats to pass such plan – and he will likely settle on a more moderate approach. But, if Democrats want to sweep the midterm elections in two years, and re-take the House of Representatives, then they have to pass legislation out of the Senate, and show the American people their agenda, and how it differs from the agenda of House Republicans. Strong filibuster may be the only way to accomplish this. Call your Senator today – and tell them to support the Merkley-Udall "talking filibuster" reform.

In screwed news...labor strikes are now a thing of the past. As Matt Bruenig has discovered, working people aren't going on strike nearly as much as they used to forty years ago – despite the fact that they've suffered through 30 years of flattening wages and watching their jobs be shipped overseas. Forty years ago, there was an average of nearly 300 work stoppages, involving more than 1,000 workers, every single year. But in 2009, that number dropped all the way down to five. Just five major work stoppages a year. On the flip side, lockouts are on the rise. Lockouts occur when management locks workers out of the job – and they now represent a record percentage of works stoppages around the nation. This is a result of less democracy in the workplace, stemming from Conservatives busting up unions since the time of Reagan. And when unions decline, so too, does the middle class' share of national income. The Billionaire Class has absolutely neutered organized labor. That's why it's so important to support and nurture those few labor strikes we've seen recently – from the Wal-Mart workers, to the fast food workers in New York City, to the Chicago Teachers Union. When working people get organized and get active – progressive change follows.

In the best of the rest of the news...

As much as Republicans want to call the President's inaugural speech "far left" – the reality is, the President is just agreeing with the majority of the American people. The President's speech featured homages to gay civil rights, to a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and to action on climate change. Where do the American people stand on these issues? A USA Today poll showed that 53% of Americans approve of marriage equality. An ABC/Washington Post poll showed that 57% of Americans approve of a pathway to citizenship for immigrants. And an AP poll found that 80% of Americans believe climate change is happening and it's a serious problem. America has been a left-leaning nation all along – it's just been led astray by thirty years of Reaganism. Now, the nation is finally finding itself again, under the leadership of Barack Obama. America is a liberal nation – it has been for a while – and Republicans need to come to terms with that, or their party will go extinct like the Whigs.

On Tuesday – the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the Drug Enforcement Agency – and declined to change the official drug classification of marijuana. Currently, the DEA classifies marijuana as a schedule 1 drug – which is reserved for the most dangerous typed of drugs that have absolutely no medicinal benefit. In fact, drugs like cocaine, opium, and morphine are listed as Schedule 2 drugs – which they say are safer, and have more medicinal value, than marijuana. The plaintiffs in the case presented more than 200 peer-reviewed studies that show the benefits of medicinal marijuana. And Governor Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island, and Governor Christie Gregoire in Washington, both called for marijuana to be rescheduled. But the court wasn't swayed, ultimately ruling that they are "obliged to defer to the agency's interpretation" of controlled substances. It's clear that the battle for sensible drug reform will not be won on a federal level – it will be won in the states, and has already been won in Washington and Colorado.

And finally...the NRA is so full of itself, that it decided to deliver an official response last night to President Obama's inaugural address. The organization's foaming-at-the-mouth CEO, Wayne LaPierre, defended his organization's "absolutism", and called it a virtue. He also spread more lies about the gun control plans coming out of the White House, saying, "There are only two reasons for that federal list of gun owners – to tax them or take them." Of course, neither is true – not once has President Obama called for guns to be taxed, or confiscated. And the real reason for tracking firearms is for law enforcement to be more able to keep track of stolen guns, and to trace guns used in crimes back to their owners. The more Wayne LaPierre and the NRA speak up – the more we see just how out of touch they are with the mainstream in America. The best TV ad for gun control – is to play Wayne LaPierre speeches over and over and over again.

And that's the way it is today – Wednesday, January 23, 2013. I'm Thom Hartmann – on the news.

Conservatives Have Their Worst Week Ever

Have Republicans, and the right wing in general, ever been more disjointed? More confused? More incapable of getting out of their own way?NRA head Wayne LaPierre. (Photo: Bonnie Jo Mount/Getty Images)

Watching America's political conservatives try to counter-maneuver opposite Barack Obama's re-inauguration over the course of the last week has been an incredible comedy – like watching the Three Stooges try to perform a liver transplant on roller skates.

Let's review the basic timeline. First, Political Media, a conservative action group, decided to try to make an appeal to win the hearts and minds of Americans everywhere by declaring January 19th – previously known as Martin Luther King Day, to the rest of us – to be "Gun Appreciation Day."

On Daily Beast: No Winners in Angry Gun Control Debate

They solicited hundreds of sponsors and sought to get 50 million people to sign a goofball petition (written in the style of the Declaration of Independence, with a plethora of "Whereas…"-es... Why do gun people insist on trying to use 18th-century syntax?) against the "tyrannical governments" that were out to take their guns. "Gun Appreciation Day" would also involve gun shows and other local events all over the country, meant as a counter-balance to the candle-toting gun control protests that were springing up over last weekend in anticipation of Obama's inauguration and the rumored plans for new gun legislation.

But even before their excellent idea gets out of the gate, it stalls out, as obnoxious reporters check the list of "Gun Appreciation Day" sponsors and find that the "American Third Position," a group that purports to represent the "unique political interests of White Americans," is one of the event's sponsors.

So now, Political Media has not only decided to hold its Gun Appreciation Event on a holiday meant to celebrate the life of a black leader who was a symbol of nonviolent protest and who was killed by a white man with a gun, it's done so with the financial help of some yahoo white supremacist group. But this doesn't derail the whole thing, as it's of course just an innocent mistake. Political Media kicks "Third Position" out and appropriately issues a statement, saying, "We have removed the group and reiterate this event is not about racial politics, it is about gun politics."

So far, so good, right? Well, then they go and actually hold their "Gun Appreciation Day" rallies all over the country, on Martin Luther King Day. And what happens? Five people get accidentally shot!

You can't make this stuff up. In three separate incidents – one in North Carolina, one in Ohio and one in Indiana – gun-loving real Americans did their darndest to worsen the demographics in the favor of the gun control lobby by blowing themselves away with accidental discharges. They failed, fortunately – all five victims in the three incidents survived – but you literally can't script a worse outcome for a political sideshow meant to highlight Americans' love of the wholesome, safe exercise of gun rights.

In North Carolina, three people – a 50-year-old man, a 54-year-old woman, and a 50-year-old retired sheriff's deputy – were injured when someone pulled a shotgun out of a display case and the 12-gauge accidentally went off, spraying the three people with birdshot.

In Ohio, a gun dealer was "checking out" a semi-automatic handgun he'd brought to a show at the Medina County Fairgrounds when he "accidentally" pulled the trigger, forgetting that, while he'd removed the magazine, he'd left a round in the chamber. According to the local police chief, the bullet "struck the floor, then a longtime friend of the gun dealer. The man was wounded in the arm and leg."

The man was rushed by helicopter to a hospital in Cleveland. I sure hope that dude has private health insurance that he paid for. If it turns out that taxpayers had to foot the bill for a freaking helicopter flight to rescue the friend of some gun-toting conservative who decided to protest the socialist Obama administration by accidentally shooting a pal on Martin Luther King Day, that would be some kind of embarrassing, wouldn't it?

Of course, that would fit right in with the kind of week gun advocates had. In a show at the Indiana State Fairgrounds, one Emory Cozee was loading his .45 while walking back to his car when he accidentally shot himself in the wrist. Once again, the taxpayer had to step in to the man's aid, as state troopers rushed to the scene and transported Cozee to a nearby hospital. No charges were filed, stupidity not yet being against the law in Indiana, or anywhere else.

Beyond those five people getting shot, the other "Gun Appreciation" events went on without incident. Then we had Obama's inauguration, where the president took more than one opportunity to goad the gun lobby in advance of an upcoming heated fight over his proposed gun restrictions, saying among other things, "Being true to our founding documents . . . does not mean we will all define liberty in the same way," and, "We cannot substitute absolutism for principle."

Without even taking a position on Obama or his proposed gun law, let me say this: The president, when he makes his case, does not come across like a drooling maniac, like he's pissed off to the point of reaching back, grabbing a frying pan, and belting you across the forehead if you even think about disagreeing with him. He comes across like what he is – a calm, experienced attorney making a rhetorical argument to adults. That, plus a lot of video of little kids' bodies being hauled out of school rooms in suburban Connecticut, can win you a lot of votes with people on the fence on the gun issue.

Then there's Wayne LaPierre, the head of the NRA. He came out after Obama's speech and gave one of his own at the Weatherby International Hunting and Conservation Awards in Reno, Nevada. In it, LaPierre weaved back and forth like a maniac, his blond forelock heaving, as he blurted out semi-coherent, quasi-grammatical defenses of "absolutism," saying things like "absolutes do exist, it's [sic] the basis of all civilization," and "without those absolutes, democracy decays into nothing more than two wolves and one lamb voting on who to eat for lunch."

He then proceeded to double down on his organization's lunatic decision to inject Obama's daughters into the national gun debate, saying, "If neither criminals nor the political class, with their bodyguards and security people, are limited by magazine capacity, we shouldn't be limited in our capacity, either."

This was clearly a reference to the controversy about the NRA's recent TV buy, in which they blasted Obama for being an "elitist hypocrite" for allowing his daughters to have Secret Service protection while Joe Sixpack has to send his kids to school without paramilitary security experts. "Protection for their kids, and gun-free zones for ours," was the ad's nutty tagline.

The NRA was rightfully blasted for that crazy-ass commercial, which made no sense on any level and mainly painted the NRA as a bunch of disturbed rage-addicts who are completely out of touch with national sentiment after Sandy Hook. (Yes, the president's kids have Secret Service protection – to protect them from your members, you idiots!)

Overall, people like LaPierre have fallen into every single political trap that's been laid for them in the last month, allowing Democrats to paint them as humorless, frustrated and probably dangerous political radicals whose response to Sandy Hook has been to publicly attack the president's minor children and to propose more guns in schools. Even the surge in NRA membership numbers since Sandy Hook is a net minus for the NRA, politically, because it scares the hell out of normal people and will result in increased pressure on pro-NRA congressional members to distance themselves from people whose response to piles of mowed-down children is to buy more guns.

So to recap: The gun lobby's response to Obama's inauguration was to organize a "Gun Appreciation Day" on Martin Luther King Day that left five of their own gun-loving members accidentally shot. Then they responded to Obama's inaugural speech by doubling down on the "elitist hypocrite" ad that earned them near-universal condemnation previously. So how could things get worse?

Well, you could have a spokesman for Political Media, which organized "Gun Appreciation Day," tell the Hollywood Reporter that Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained is the perfect argument in support of gun rights. Political Media's Larry Ward said he's considering a "What Would Django Do?" campaign as part of this new rhetorical line they're thinking of trying to sell, particularly to the black community. The idea is, get this, that there wouldn't have been slavery if slaves had had gun rights.

"Django is perfect for what we're trying to do," said Ward, "which is to promote gun rights to minorities."

Hey, dipshit: Before anyone allowed slaves to have guns, they would have had to have other rights, like for instance being considered human beings. Are you people completely stupid? You'd have to have hoovered more coke than even Quentin Tarantino to imagine a world where white slave owners denied black people freedom of movement, denied them education and freedom of speech and dominion over their own bodies, but then for some reason also allowed them to buy guns. Jesus Christ! The whole point of slavery is that slaves didn't have any rights, much less the right to bear arms.

Now, Django Unchained is a movie that uses the N-word 109 times (breaking the all-time record set by Finding Nemo, as Kamau Bell wittily noted) and was so historically jumbled that it featured scenes of both the Ku Klux Klan and sunglasses before either existed. Can you imagine any white guy going into Bedford-Stuyvestant or Compton or any other place where so many young black people have been killed by guns, and trying to connect with them by telling them you're down with Django Unchained? That's how out-to-lunch these NRA dudes are, that they genuinely think this is their entrée into minority communities.

I'm not naïve enough to think that just being publicly stupid is going to result in political problems for American conservatives. That's never been the case before – hell, there are still people out there who think Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. There's enough popular anger out there toward Barack Obama that someone like Wayne LaPierre could probably shoot skeet on Martin Luther King's grave and public support for the NRA still won't drop below 40 percent.

But the behavior of the gun lobby in the last month will, for sure, have an impact on people who are on the fence about gun control. Moreover, there's bigger game in play here. The Republicans post-2012 have been staring down the barrel of an increasingly desperate demographic problem that will require the party to find some way to market itself to blacks, Hispanics, women, gays and other minorities or else be relegated to permanent minority status.

But after Sandy Hook, the Democrats have skillfully painted the Republicans as the party of scary-looking and scary-sounding white maniacs like Tennessee security-company CEO James Yeager, a shaven-headed, soul-patched anger-sick white loony who posted a video promising to go ape if gun laws are enacted. "If this goes one inch further, I'm going to start killing people," Yeager said.

Conservatives could have dealt with this post-Sandy Hook political curveball in a number of ways, from simply shutting up and working quietly behind the scenes to scuttle gun control efforts (that always worked before) to announcing willingness to engage in some extremely mild compromise (like maybe prohibiting schizophrenics from carrying machine guns near kindergartens).

Instead, they decided to piss all over Martin Luther King Day and then shoot themselves by the half-dozen in the process.

Well done, fellas! You're well on your way to solving your demographic problems.

© 2012 Rolling Stone

Matt Taibbi

As Rolling Stone’s chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the likes of journalistic giants Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi's 2004 campaign journal Spanking the Donkey cemented his status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. His books include Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire.

Conservatives Have Their Worst Week Ever

Have Republicans, and the right wing in general, ever been more disjointed? More confused? More incapable of getting out of their own way?NRA head Wayne LaPierre. (Photo: Bonnie Jo Mount/Getty Images)

Watching America's political conservatives try to counter-maneuver opposite Barack Obama's re-inauguration over the course of the last week has been an incredible comedy – like watching the Three Stooges try to perform a liver transplant on roller skates.

Let's review the basic timeline. First, Political Media, a conservative action group, decided to try to make an appeal to win the hearts and minds of Americans everywhere by declaring January 19th – previously known as Martin Luther King Day, to the rest of us – to be "Gun Appreciation Day."

On Daily Beast: No Winners in Angry Gun Control Debate

They solicited hundreds of sponsors and sought to get 50 million people to sign a goofball petition (written in the style of the Declaration of Independence, with a plethora of "Whereas…"-es... Why do gun people insist on trying to use 18th-century syntax?) against the "tyrannical governments" that were out to take their guns. "Gun Appreciation Day" would also involve gun shows and other local events all over the country, meant as a counter-balance to the candle-toting gun control protests that were springing up over last weekend in anticipation of Obama's inauguration and the rumored plans for new gun legislation.

But even before their excellent idea gets out of the gate, it stalls out, as obnoxious reporters check the list of "Gun Appreciation Day" sponsors and find that the "American Third Position," a group that purports to represent the "unique political interests of White Americans," is one of the event's sponsors.

So now, Political Media has not only decided to hold its Gun Appreciation Event on a holiday meant to celebrate the life of a black leader who was a symbol of nonviolent protest and who was killed by a white man with a gun, it's done so with the financial help of some yahoo white supremacist group. But this doesn't derail the whole thing, as it's of course just an innocent mistake. Political Media kicks "Third Position" out and appropriately issues a statement, saying, "We have removed the group and reiterate this event is not about racial politics, it is about gun politics."

So far, so good, right? Well, then they go and actually hold their "Gun Appreciation Day" rallies all over the country, on Martin Luther King Day. And what happens? Five people get accidentally shot!

You can't make this stuff up. In three separate incidents – one in North Carolina, one in Ohio and one in Indiana – gun-loving real Americans did their darndest to worsen the demographics in the favor of the gun control lobby by blowing themselves away with accidental discharges. They failed, fortunately – all five victims in the three incidents survived – but you literally can't script a worse outcome for a political sideshow meant to highlight Americans' love of the wholesome, safe exercise of gun rights.

In North Carolina, three people – a 50-year-old man, a 54-year-old woman, and a 50-year-old retired sheriff's deputy – were injured when someone pulled a shotgun out of a display case and the 12-gauge accidentally went off, spraying the three people with birdshot.

In Ohio, a gun dealer was "checking out" a semi-automatic handgun he'd brought to a show at the Medina County Fairgrounds when he "accidentally" pulled the trigger, forgetting that, while he'd removed the magazine, he'd left a round in the chamber. According to the local police chief, the bullet "struck the floor, then a longtime friend of the gun dealer. The man was wounded in the arm and leg."

The man was rushed by helicopter to a hospital in Cleveland. I sure hope that dude has private health insurance that he paid for. If it turns out that taxpayers had to foot the bill for a freaking helicopter flight to rescue the friend of some gun-toting conservative who decided to protest the socialist Obama administration by accidentally shooting a pal on Martin Luther King Day, that would be some kind of embarrassing, wouldn't it?

Of course, that would fit right in with the kind of week gun advocates had. In a show at the Indiana State Fairgrounds, one Emory Cozee was loading his .45 while walking back to his car when he accidentally shot himself in the wrist. Once again, the taxpayer had to step in to the man's aid, as state troopers rushed to the scene and transported Cozee to a nearby hospital. No charges were filed, stupidity not yet being against the law in Indiana, or anywhere else.

Beyond those five people getting shot, the other "Gun Appreciation" events went on without incident. Then we had Obama's inauguration, where the president took more than one opportunity to goad the gun lobby in advance of an upcoming heated fight over his proposed gun restrictions, saying among other things, "Being true to our founding documents . . . does not mean we will all define liberty in the same way," and, "We cannot substitute absolutism for principle."

Without even taking a position on Obama or his proposed gun law, let me say this: The president, when he makes his case, does not come across like a drooling maniac, like he's pissed off to the point of reaching back, grabbing a frying pan, and belting you across the forehead if you even think about disagreeing with him. He comes across like what he is – a calm, experienced attorney making a rhetorical argument to adults. That, plus a lot of video of little kids' bodies being hauled out of school rooms in suburban Connecticut, can win you a lot of votes with people on the fence on the gun issue.

Then there's Wayne LaPierre, the head of the NRA. He came out after Obama's speech and gave one of his own at the Weatherby International Hunting and Conservation Awards in Reno, Nevada. In it, LaPierre weaved back and forth like a maniac, his blond forelock heaving, as he blurted out semi-coherent, quasi-grammatical defenses of "absolutism," saying things like "absolutes do exist, it's [sic] the basis of all civilization," and "without those absolutes, democracy decays into nothing more than two wolves and one lamb voting on who to eat for lunch."

He then proceeded to double down on his organization's lunatic decision to inject Obama's daughters into the national gun debate, saying, "If neither criminals nor the political class, with their bodyguards and security people, are limited by magazine capacity, we shouldn't be limited in our capacity, either."

This was clearly a reference to the controversy about the NRA's recent TV buy, in which they blasted Obama for being an "elitist hypocrite" for allowing his daughters to have Secret Service protection while Joe Sixpack has to send his kids to school without paramilitary security experts. "Protection for their kids, and gun-free zones for ours," was the ad's nutty tagline.

The NRA was rightfully blasted for that crazy-ass commercial, which made no sense on any level and mainly painted the NRA as a bunch of disturbed rage-addicts who are completely out of touch with national sentiment after Sandy Hook. (Yes, the president's kids have Secret Service protection – to protect them from your members, you idiots!)

Overall, people like LaPierre have fallen into every single political trap that's been laid for them in the last month, allowing Democrats to paint them as humorless, frustrated and probably dangerous political radicals whose response to Sandy Hook has been to publicly attack the president's minor children and to propose more guns in schools. Even the surge in NRA membership numbers since Sandy Hook is a net minus for the NRA, politically, because it scares the hell out of normal people and will result in increased pressure on pro-NRA congressional members to distance themselves from people whose response to piles of mowed-down children is to buy more guns.

So to recap: The gun lobby's response to Obama's inauguration was to organize a "Gun Appreciation Day" on Martin Luther King Day that left five of their own gun-loving members accidentally shot. Then they responded to Obama's inaugural speech by doubling down on the "elitist hypocrite" ad that earned them near-universal condemnation previously. So how could things get worse?

Well, you could have a spokesman for Political Media, which organized "Gun Appreciation Day," tell the Hollywood Reporter that Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained is the perfect argument in support of gun rights. Political Media's Larry Ward said he's considering a "What Would Django Do?" campaign as part of this new rhetorical line they're thinking of trying to sell, particularly to the black community. The idea is, get this, that there wouldn't have been slavery if slaves had had gun rights.

"Django is perfect for what we're trying to do," said Ward, "which is to promote gun rights to minorities."

Hey, dipshit: Before anyone allowed slaves to have guns, they would have had to have other rights, like for instance being considered human beings. Are you people completely stupid? You'd have to have hoovered more coke than even Quentin Tarantino to imagine a world where white slave owners denied black people freedom of movement, denied them education and freedom of speech and dominion over their own bodies, but then for some reason also allowed them to buy guns. Jesus Christ! The whole point of slavery is that slaves didn't have any rights, much less the right to bear arms.

Now, Django Unchained is a movie that uses the N-word 109 times (breaking the all-time record set by Finding Nemo, as Kamau Bell wittily noted) and was so historically jumbled that it featured scenes of both the Ku Klux Klan and sunglasses before either existed. Can you imagine any white guy going into Bedford-Stuyvestant or Compton or any other place where so many young black people have been killed by guns, and trying to connect with them by telling them you're down with Django Unchained? That's how out-to-lunch these NRA dudes are, that they genuinely think this is their entrée into minority communities.

I'm not naïve enough to think that just being publicly stupid is going to result in political problems for American conservatives. That's never been the case before – hell, there are still people out there who think Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. There's enough popular anger out there toward Barack Obama that someone like Wayne LaPierre could probably shoot skeet on Martin Luther King's grave and public support for the NRA still won't drop below 40 percent.

But the behavior of the gun lobby in the last month will, for sure, have an impact on people who are on the fence about gun control. Moreover, there's bigger game in play here. The Republicans post-2012 have been staring down the barrel of an increasingly desperate demographic problem that will require the party to find some way to market itself to blacks, Hispanics, women, gays and other minorities or else be relegated to permanent minority status.

But after Sandy Hook, the Democrats have skillfully painted the Republicans as the party of scary-looking and scary-sounding white maniacs like Tennessee security-company CEO James Yeager, a shaven-headed, soul-patched anger-sick white loony who posted a video promising to go ape if gun laws are enacted. "If this goes one inch further, I'm going to start killing people," Yeager said.

Conservatives could have dealt with this post-Sandy Hook political curveball in a number of ways, from simply shutting up and working quietly behind the scenes to scuttle gun control efforts (that always worked before) to announcing willingness to engage in some extremely mild compromise (like maybe prohibiting schizophrenics from carrying machine guns near kindergartens).

Instead, they decided to piss all over Martin Luther King Day and then shoot themselves by the half-dozen in the process.

Well done, fellas! You're well on your way to solving your demographic problems.

© 2012 Rolling Stone

Matt Taibbi

As Rolling Stone’s chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the likes of journalistic giants Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi's 2004 campaign journal Spanking the Donkey cemented his status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. His books include Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire.

The Extremist Cult of Capitalism

A 'cult,' according to Merriam-Webster, can be defined as "Great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work..(and)..a usually small group of people characterized by such devotion."

The Institutionalization of Tyranny

Republicans and conservative Americans are still fighting Big Government in its welfare state form. Apparently, they have never heard of the militarized police state form of Big Government, or, if they have, they are comfortable with it and have no objection.

Iraq: A Twenty-Two Year Genocide

Incredibly it is twenty-two years to the day since the telephone rang in the early hours and a friend said, "They are bombing Baghdad."

New Film Exposes Hidden Truths of Covert U.S. Warfare

Premiering this week at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, the new documentary "Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield" follows investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill to Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen as he chases down the hidden truths behind America’s expanding covert wars.

House raises debt ceiling to avoid US default

The opening session of the 113th US House of Representatives at the US Capitol in Washington. (AFP Photo / Saul Loeb)

The opening session of the 113th US House of Representatives at the US Capitol in Washington. (AFP Photo / Saul Loeb)

The House is expected to vote on legislation Wednesday that will raise the debt ceiling for three months and delay a US default. Even though this is just a short term fix, the Obama administration said it supports it.

The legislation would prevent a devastating default of US debt and payments next month and instead give Congress three more months to come up with an agreement on the budget, taxes, spending and the deficit. The move would cause the congressional budget battles to once again take place – but this time in March.

The legislation contains a “no budget, no pay” segment that ensures both House and Senate members will no longer receive their paychecks if a budget isn’t agreed upon by April 15, putting further pressure on legislators to come up with a plan. Although President Obama prefers a long-term solution and said incremental increases in the debt ceiling ultimately harm the economy, continued disagreement in Congress has prompted him to support the extension. While House Democrats appear widely opposed to the measure, Senate Democrats are reluctantly supporting it, AP reports.

The March talks will come at a time when automatic spending cuts are set to go into effect and severely affect the Pentagon budget. The military would face a 30 percent reduction in operating costs for Army posts, while the Pentagon would have to determine how it could come to terms with $500 billion in cuts over the next decade.

“The fiscal situation and outlook are serious. Our funding is in doubt as we support forward-deployed troops, those training and Wounded Warriors," wrote Army Secretaries John McHugh and Gen. Raymond Odierno in a letter to commanders.

The automatic cuts would trim $85 billion from the 2013 budget, which the GOP plans to re-sequester during the next budget battle. Members of Congress who oppose the spending cuts will be forced to come up with an agreement on how to replace them, if they want to come up with an agreement on the deficit. A battle on raising taxes will likely ensue.

“We feel by moving the issue of raising the debt ceiling behind the sequestration … that we reorder things in a way that Democrats will have to work with,” Rep. John Fleming, R-La., told AP. “The cuts are the kind of cuts we want, they’re just not in the places we want. But they’re also not in the places that the Democrats want. So hopefully they’ll be forced to come to the table and work with us on a bipartisan basis to put them where they need to be, where it has the less pain.”

The three-month extension allows Congress to prolong talks about the $16.4 trillion deficit and it has caused stock markets to trade cautiously on Wednesday. By midafternoon in Europe, stock indexes were lacking momentum and Wall Street opened with equally little momentum, as the markets were awaiting the vote in Congress.

The credit agency Fitch Ratings said this month that it would consider downgrading America’s credit score if there is any sort of delay in coming up with a budget plan to raise the debt ceiling by March 1. The agency has not commented on Wednesday's vote, but the move might prompt it to lower the US credit rating, thereby lowering international trust in US borrowing.

With the economy depending on the decision that lawmakers will be forced to come up with to avoid a default, the uncertainty about the US economic future has once again been prolonged with the extension as partisanship continues to rage through Congress.

“The sequester is arbitrary, but the fact is that when the sequester goes into effect… it will have a pretty dramatic effect of people’s attitudes here in Washington, and they may get serious about cuts to the mandatory side of the spending equation,” said Speaker of the House John Boehner.

GOP Stunt on Debt Ceiling Is Total Surrender to White House

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) departs a Republican caucus meeting on Capitol Hill, in Washington, Nov. 14, 2012. (Photo: Jonathan Ernst / The New York Times)House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) departs a Republican caucus meeting on Capitol Hill, in Washington, Nov. 14, 2012. (Photo: Jonathan Ernst / The New York Times)Given what happened in July 2011 when they decided to do the opposite (you remember the anything-but-super committee, right?), we should all be happy House Republicans have agreed that this time they won’t hold hostage the increase in the federal debt ceiling the Treasury says will be needed by the end of February.

We should also be grateful that legislation embodying the House GOP plan will be debated and presumably passed in the House today — about a month before the deadline.

But it’s important to note this moment in federal budget history: The House GOP plan is nothing less than total capitulation to the Obama administration and Senate Democrats.

How much of a surrender? In 2011 Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was saying that a debt ceiling would never again get adopted unless the president agreed to concessions. Eighteen months later the debt ceiling effectively is being raised with no White House concessions and the GOP is struggling to come up with some kind of spin it can use to counteract what everyone can see…that it tucked its tail between its fiscal legs and rolled over.

The exact same plan the Republicans are about to approve would have caused howls of protest had it been suggested to them by the Obama White House. A Democratic version of this plan would have evoked angry criticism by conservative pundits, been the main topic of conversation on right wing radio and resulted in frequent protests by tea partiers outside the Capital. And it definitely would have been a topic for comedy homologues on late-night television.

How much of a surrender is the House GOP plan? Consider the following:

  1. The plan doesn’t just allow the government to borrow more, it requires the existing ceiling to be ignored. The party that supposedly was the darlings of the Tea Party is proposing that the same federal debt ceiling that up-to-now it has likened to a tool of Satan be treated as if it’s not there and doesn’t matter.
  2. The ignoring is allowed to continue until May 15. At that point, the debt ceiling will increase automatically to accommodate the additional borrowing the government has done between now and then. In this GOP-proposed version of the “look ma, no hands” theory of budgeting, House Republicans are voting to raise the amount the government borrows without anyone having to go on record to do it. They don’t even get a campaign issue to use against Democrats in 2014.
  3. The bill includes a provision that requires that the salaries of representatives and senators be withheld if their respective house of Congress doesn’t adopt a budget resolution this year. But the provision doesn’t require that the two houses agree on a budget, just that each pass something of their own. No agreement on the budget resolution means that reconciliation– the procedure used in the Senate to avoid a filibuster on spending cuts and revenue increases and, therefore, makes them more likely to happen — can’t be used because that can only happen pursuant to instructions in a…you guessed it…budget resolution agreement. Therefore, the House GOP forcing the Senate to pass a budget resolution means nothing.

In addition, budget resolutions themselves are largely meaningless because they only include totals rather than specifics. For example, projected lower Medicare spending could be the result of either legislated reductions in benefits or an assumption that the program will be operated more efficiently. Similarly, higher revenues could come from assumed higher economic growth or a legislated increase in rates.

The Senate’s inability to pass a budget the past four years has been a main GOP talking point so it’s not that surprising that this was the price House Republicans decided they should demand in exchange for surrendering on the debt ceiling. But given the reality of what a one-house passed budget resolution means, it’s also not surprising that the White House is okay with the plan and the Senate is likely to go along. In reality, it’s a free pass.

In other words, the House GOP really isn’t getting anything for not fighting on the debt ceiling, and that’s about as complete a surrender as you can imagine.

Originally posted at Capital Gains and Games.

Climate Crisis Pushes Sierra Club to End Civil Disobedience Ban

After 120 years of advocating on behalf of nature, one of the the nation's largest and oldest environmental organizations—The Sierra Club—has at last decided to end its refusal to participate in acts of civil disobedience.

In a letter to the group's membership, which numbers over one million, executive director of Sierra Club, Michael Brune, announced: "For 120 years, we have remained committed to using every 'lawful means' to achieve our objectives. Now, for the first time in our history, we are prepared to go further."

What spawned the decision? As Brune explained—and recognizing that many will comment "what took you so long?"—the change in direction was spurred by recognizing "the possibility that the United States might surrender any hope of stabilizing our planet's climate."

Specifically, Brune said, "the Sierra Club will officially participate in an act of peaceful civil resistance" at the White House next month on President's Day weekend.

Brune continued:

We are watching a global crisis unfold before our eyes, and to stand aside and let it happen -- even though we know how to stop it -- would be unconscionable. As the president said on Monday, "to do so would betray our children and future generations."  It couldn't be simpler: Either we leave at least two-thirds of the known fossil fuel reserves in the ground, or we destroy our planet as we know it. That's our choice, if you can call it that.

The Sierra Club has refused to stand by. We've worked hard and brought all of our traditional tactics of lobbying, electoral work, litigation, grassroots organizing, and public education to bear on this crisis. And we have had great success -- stopping more than 170 coal plants from being built, securing the retirement of another 129 existing plants, and helping grow a clean energy economy. But time is running out, and there is so much more to do. The stakes are enormous. At this point, we can't afford to lose a single major battle. That's why the Sierra Club's Board of Directors has for the first time endorsed an act of peaceful civil disobedience.

That protest, organized by Sierra Club and the climate justice organization 350.org, hopes to see thousands of Americans heading to Washington to create "the largest climate rally in history." The aim will to be to urge President Obama and other political leaders to cancel plans for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline and spawn meaningful climate action.

The organizers for the protest released this on video on Tuesday to urge support for attendance at the rally:

The decision to rescind the long-held ban on civil disobedience was made at the highest levels of the organization.

Allison Chin, board president of Sierra Club, added: “The recent decision made by the Board of Directors is not one we take lightly. As a nation, we are beginning to achieve significant success in the fight against climate disruption. But allowing the production, transport, export and burning of the dirtiest oil on Earth now would be a giant leap backwards in that progress. The Board is answering the urgency of this threat with our decision to engage, for one time, in civil disobedience.”

And the San Francisco Chronicle adds:

This is a major symbol of how The Club — and enviros in general — are jacking up pressure on President Obama. Yeah, they say, he gave a major shout-out Monday in his Inaugural Address to taking on climate change, but now is the time to back up the talk with action, they say.

We know that because major enviro — and major Obama donor — Susie Tompkins Buell told us almost a year ago that she was going to hold up giving Obama more cash unless he showed more “leadership” on climate change issues.

_____________________

Study: Recent Elections Show a Strong Link Between Racism and Political Preference

A Brown University political scientist has tracked the rise of a renewed alignment between political preference and “old-fashioned racism.”

January 23, 2013  |  

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As he looks back on his first term, President Barack Obama can take satisfaction from a series of significant accomplishments. But according to a new analysis by a Brown University political scientist, his rise to power has also produced a less-welcome result: A renewed alignment between political preference and “old-fashioned racism.”

Old-school racist beliefs were “unrelated to white Americans’ partisan preferences throughout the post-civil rights era,” writes Michael Tesler. But his analysis of survey data, recently published in the Journal of Politics, suggests that changed with the 2008 election—and was also a factor in the 2010 mid-terms. “The election of the country’s first black president had the ironic upshot of opening the door for old-fashioned racism to influence partisan preferences after it was long thought to be a spent force in American politics,” Tesler writes. He adds that this “enhanced polarization of white partisanship” may “leave a lasting mark on American politics that endures after he leaves office.” Understanding his argument first requires clarifying his vocabulary. Political scientists define “old-fashioned racism” as belief in the biological inferiority of blacks, and support for racial segregation and discrimination. In contrast, the new racism is characterized by “a moral feeling that blacks violate such traditional American values as invidualism and self-reliance, the work ethic, obedience and discipline,” Tesler notes, quoting a 1981 paper. To measure old-fashioned racism, Tesler looked at a variety of survey results, led by a key measure: the degree to which whites are comfortable with interracial dating. This data was matched with answers to two questions posed in a 2008 Pew Research Center poll: Who respondents would vote for in a matchup of John McCain and Hillary Clinton, and ditto for a race between McCain and Obama. Not surprisingly, increased levels of racism were correlated with a decreased share of the vote for Obama, compared to Clinton. More significantly, perhaps, is Tesler’s analysis of the 2010 midterms, which found that “old-fashioned racism had a noticeably larger impact on white Americans’ vote choices … than it had back in 2006.” Specifically, discomfort with interracial dating decreased support for Democratic Congressional candidates in 2010 to roughly the same degree as it decreased support for Obama in 2008. In contrast, racist beliefs had “relatively little impact on white Americans’ voting behavior in the 2006 midterm elections.” Given this alignment between racist beliefs and partisanship, Tesler would not be surprised to see “an increase in racist political rhetoric, since such messages should be more relevant and resonant now.”  He also frets that it may outlast the Obama presidency, since “partisanship typically persists rather stably” throughout one’s life.While we’ll have to wait to see if that prediction pans out, there’s no question that, for the moment, racist leanings make one more likely to conclude that the Democratic party does not represent you or your interests. “The evidence suggests that Obama simultaneously activates both old-fashioned racism and (21st-century) racial resentment,” Tesler concludes. “The most plausible explanation for that dual activation is that Obama independently taps into both the classic symbolic racism theme that blacks have too much influence in politics, and old-fashioned racists’ concerns about the leadership of a president from a racial group whom they consider to be intellectually and socially inferior.” 

Tom Jacobs is a veteran journalist with more than 20 years experience at daily newspapers. He has served as a staff writer for the Los Angeles Daily News and the Santa Barbara News-Press. His work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Ventura County Star.

Destroying Libya And World Order

boyle

Book Review: Destroying Libya and World Order: The Three-Decade U.S. Campaign to Reverse the Qaddafi Revolution By Francis A. Boyle

It took three decades for the United States government-spanning and working assiduously over five different presidential administrations (Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama)-to overthrow and reverse the 1969 Qaddafi Revolution in order to resubjugate Libya, seize control over its oil fields, and dismantle its Jamahiriya system. This book tells the story of what happened, why it happened, and what was both wrong and illegal with what happened from the perspective of an international law professor and lawyer who tried for over three decades to stop it.

Francis Boyle provides a comprehensive history and critique of American foreign policy toward Libya from when the Reagan administration came to power in January of 1981 up to the 2011 NATO war on Libya that ultimately achieved the US goal of regime change. He deals with the repeated series of military conflicts and crises between the United States and Libya over the Gulf of Sidra and the fraudulent US claims of Libyan instigation of international terrorism during the eight years of the neoconservative Reagan administration. This book sets forth the inside story behind the Lockerbie bombing cases against the United States and the United Kingdom that he filed at the World Court for Colonel Qaddafi acting upon his advice–and the unjust resolution of those disputes. In 2011, under the guise of the UN R2P “responsibility to protect” doctrine newly-contrived to provide legal cover for Western intervention into third world countries, and override the UN Charter commitment to prevention of aggression and state sovereignty, the NATO assault led to 50,000 Libyan casualties and the complete breakdown of law and order. Boyle analyzes and debunks the doctrines of R2P and its immediate predecessor, “humanitarian intervention”, in accordance with the standard recognized criteria of international law. This book provides an excellent case study of the conduct of US foreign policy as it relates to international law. The concluding chapter explains how the US/NATO war against Libya has destabilized the Maghreb and Sahel, including the French military intervention into Mali.

 Professor Francis A. Boyle is an international law expert and served as Legal Advisor to the Palestine Liberation Organization and Yasser Arafat on the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence, as well as to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations from 1991 to 1993, where he drafted the Palestinian counter-offer to the now defunct Oslo Agreement. His books include “ Palestine, Palestinians and International Law” (2003), and “ The Palestinian Right of Return under International Law” (2010).

Disclaimer: The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in this article. The Center of Research on Globalization grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author's copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: publications@globalresearch.ca

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Powder Keg in the Pacific: Will China-Japan-U.S. Tensions Ignite a Conflict and Sink the...

china japan

Don’t look now, but conditions are deteriorating in the western Pacific.  Things are turning ugly, with consequences that could prove deadly and spell catastrophe for the global economy.

In Washington, it is widely assumed that a showdown with Iran over its nuclear ambitions will be the first major crisis to engulf the next secretary of defense — whether it be former Senator Chuck Hagel, as President Obama desires, or someone else if he fails to win Senate confirmation.  With few signs of an imminent breakthrough in talks aimed at peacefully resolving the Iranian nuclear issue, many analysts believe that military action — if not by Israel, then by the United States — could be on this year’s agenda.

Lurking just behind the Iranian imbroglio, however, is a potential crisis of far greater magnitude, and potentially far more imminent than most of us imagine.  China’s determination to assert control over disputed islands in the potentially energy-rich waters of the East and South China Seas, in the face of stiffening resistance from Japan and the Philippines along with greater regional assertiveness by the United States, spells trouble not just regionally, but potentially globally.

Islands, Islands, Everywhere

The possibility of an Iranian crisis remains in the spotlight because of the obvious risk of disorder in the Greater Middle East and its threat to global oil production and shipping.  A crisis in the East or South China Seas (essentially, western extensions of the Pacific Ocean) would, however, pose a greater peril because of the possibility of a U.S.-China military confrontation and the threat to Asian economic stability.

The United States is bound by treaty to come to the assistance of Japan or the Philippines if either country is attacked by a third party, so any armed clash between Chinese and Japanese or Filipino forces could trigger American military intervention.  With so much of the world’s trade focused on Asia, and the American, Chinese, and Japanese economies tied so closely together in ways too essential to ignore, a clash of almost any sort in these vital waterways might paralyze international commerce and trigger a global recession (or worse).

All of this should be painfully obvious and so rule out such a possibility — and yet the likelihood of such a clash occurring has been on the rise in recent months, as China and its neighbors continue to ratchet up the bellicosity of their statements and bolster their military forces in the contested areas.  Washington’s continuing statements about its ongoing plans for a “pivot” to, or “rebalancing” of, its forces in the Pacific have only fueled Chinese intransigence and intensified a rising sense of crisis in the region.  Leaders on all sides continue to affirm their country’s inviolable rights to the contested islands and vow to use any means necessary to resist encroachment by rival claimants.  In the meantime, China has increased the frequency and scale of its naval maneuvers in waters claimed by Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines, further enflaming tensions in the region.

Ostensibly, these disputes revolve around the question of who owns a constellation of largely uninhabited atolls and islets claimed by a variety of nations.  In the East China Sea, the islands in contention are called the Diaoyus by China and the Senkakus by Japan.  At present, they are administered by Japan, but both countries claim sovereignty over them.  In the South China Sea, several island groups are in contention, including the Spratly chain and the Paracel Islands (known in China as the Nansha and Xisha Islands, respectively).  China claims allof these islets, while Vietnam claims some of the Spratlys and Paracels.  Brunei, Malaysia, and the Philippines also claim some of the Spratlys.

Far more is, of course, at stake than just the ownership of a few uninhabited islets.  The seabeds surrounding them are believed to sit atop vast reserves of oil and natural gas.  Ownership of the islands would naturally confer ownership of the reserves — something all of these countries desperately desire.  Powerful forces of nationalism are also at work: with rising popular fervor, the Chinese believe that the islands are part of their national territory and any other claims represent a direct assault on China’s sovereign rights; the fact that Japan — China’s brutal invader and occupier during World War II — is a rival claimant to some of them only adds a powerful tinge of victimhood to Chinese nationalism and intransigence on the issue.  By the same token, the Japanese, Vietnamese, and Filipinos, already feeling threatened by China’s growing wealth and power, believe no less firmly that not bending on the island disputes is an essential expression of their nationhood.

Long ongoing, these disputes have escalated recently.  In May 2011, for instance, the Vietnamese reported that Chinese warships were harassing oil-exploration vessels operated by the state-owned energy company PetroVietnam in the South China Sea.  In two instances, Vietnamese authorities claimed, cables attached to underwater survey equipment were purposely slashed.  In April 2012, armed Chinese marine surveillance ships blocked efforts by Filipino vessels to inspect Chinese boats suspected of illegally fishing off Scarborough Shoal, an islet in the South China Sea claimed by both countries.

The East China Sea has similarly witnessed tense encounters of late.  Last September, for example, Japanese authorities arrested 14 Chinese citizens who had attempted to land on one of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands to press their country’s claims, provoking widespread anti-Japanese protests across China and a series of naval show-of-force operations by both sides in the disputed waters.

Regional diplomacy, that classic way of settling disputes in a peaceful manner, has been under growing strain recently thanks to these maritime disputes and the accompanying military encounters.  In July 2012, at the annual meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Asian leaders were unable to agree on a final communiqué, no matter how anodyne — the first time that had happened in the organization’s 46-year history.  Reportedly, consensus on a final document was thwarted when Cambodia, a close ally of China’s, refused to endorse compromise language on a proposed “code of conduct” for resolving disputes in the South China Sea.  Two months later, when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited Beijing in an attempt to promote negotiations on the disputes, she was reviled in the Chinese press, while officials there refused to cede any ground at all.

As 2012 ended and the New Year began, the situation only deteriorated.  On December 1st, officials in Hainan Province, which administers the Chinese-claimed islands in the South China Sea,announced a new policy for 2013: Chinese warships would now be empowered to stop, search, or simply repel foreign ships that entered the claimed waters and were suspected of conducting illegal activities ranging, assumedly, from fishing to oil drilling.  This move coincided with an increase in the size and frequency of Chinese naval deployments in the disputed areas.

On December 13th, the Japanese militaryscrambled F-15 fighter jets when a Chinese marine surveillance plane flew into airspace near the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands.  Another worrisome incident occurred on January 8th, when four Chinese surveillance ships entered Japanese-controlled waters around those islands for 13 hours.  Two days later, Japanese fighter jets were again scrambled when a Chinese surveillance plane returned to the islands.  Chinese fighters then came in pursuit, the first time supersonic jets from both sides flew over the disputed area. The Chinese clearly have little intention of backing down, having indicated that they will increase their air and naval deployments in the area, just as the Japanese are doing.

Powder Keg in the Pacific

While war clouds gather in the Pacific sky, the question remains: Why, pray tell, is this happening now?

Several factors seem to be conspiring to heighten the risk of confrontation, including leadership changes in China and Japan, and a geopolitical reassessment by the United States.

* In China, a new leadership team is placing renewed emphasis on military strength and on what might be called national assertiveness.  At the 18th Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, held last November in Beijing, Xi Jinping was named both party head and chairman of the Central Military Commission, making him, in effect, the nation’s foremost civilian and military official.  Since then, Xi has made several heavily publicized visits to assorted Chinese military units, all clearly intended to demonstrate the Communist Party’s determination, under his leadership, to boost the capabilities and prestige of the country’s army, navy, and air force.  He has already linked this drive to his belief that his country should play a more vigorous and assertive role in the region and the world.

In a speech to soldiers in the city of Huizhou, for example, Xi spoke of his “dream” of national rejuvenation: “This dream can be said to be a dream of a strong nation; and for the military, it is the dream of a strong military.”  Significantly, he used the trip to visit the Haikou, a destroyer assigned to the fleet responsible for patrolling the disputed waters of the South China Sea.  As he spoke, a Chinese surveillance plane entered disputed air space over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands in the East China Sea, prompting Japan to scramble those F-15 fighter jets.

* In Japan, too, a new leadership team is placing renewed emphasis on military strength and national assertiveness.  On December 16th, arch-nationalist Shinzo Abe returned to power as the nation’s prime minister.  Although he campaignedlargely on economic issues, promising to revive the country’s lagging economy, Abe has made no secret of his intent to bolster the Japanese military and assume a tougher stance on the East China Sea dispute.

In his first few weeks in office, Abe has already announced plans to increase military spending and review an official apology made by a former government official to women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II.  These steps are sure to please Japan’s rightists, but certain to inflame anti-Japanese sentiment in China, Korea, and other countries it once occupied.

Equally worrisome, Abe promptly negotiated an agreement with the Philippines for greater cooperation on enhanced “maritime security” in the western Pacific, a move intended to counter growing Chinese assertiveness in the region.  Inevitably, this will spark a harsh Chinese response — and because the United States has mutual defense treaties with both countries, it will also increase the risk of U.S. involvement in future engagements at sea.

* In the United States, senior officials are debating implementation of the “Pacific pivot” announced by President Obama in a speech before the Australian Parliament a little over a year ago.  In it, he promised that additional U.S. forces would be deployed in the region, even if that meant cutbacks elsewhere.  “My guidance is clear,” he declared.  “As we plan and budget for the future, we will allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in this region.”  While Obama never quite said that his approach was intended to constrain the rise of China, few observers doubt that a policy of “containment” has returned to the Pacific.

Indeed, the U.S. military has taken the first steps in this direction, announcing, for example, that by 2017 all three U.S. stealth planes, the F-22, F-35, and B-2, would be deployed to bases relatively near China and that by 2020 60% of U.S. naval forces will be stationed in the Pacific (compared to 50% today).  However, the nation’s budget woes have led many analysts to question whether the Pentagon is actually capable of fully implementing the military part of any Asian pivot strategy in a meaningful way.  A study conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at the behest of Congress, released last summer,concluded that the Department of Defense “has not adequately articulated the strategy behind its force posture planning [in the Asia-Pacific] nor aligned the strategy with resources in a way that reflects current budget realities.”

This, in turn, has fueled a drive by military hawks to press the administration to spend more on Pacific-oriented forces and to play a more vigorous role in countering China’s “bullying” behavior in the East and South China Seas.  “[America’s Asian allies] are waiting to see whether America will live up to its uncomfortable but necessary role as the true guarantor of stability in East Asia, or whether the region will again be dominated by belligerence and intimidation,” former Secretary of the Navy and former Senator James Webb wrote in the Wall Street Journal.  Although the administration has responded to such taunts by reaffirming its pledge to bolster its forces in the Pacific, this has failed to halt the calls for an even tougher posture by Washington.  Obama has already been chided for failing to provide sufficient backing to Israel in its struggle with Iran over nuclear weapons, and it is safe to assume that he will face even greater pressure to assist America’s allies in Asia were they to be threatened by Chinese forces.

Add these three developments together, and you have the makings of a powder keg — potentially at least as explosive and dangerous to the global economy as any confrontation with Iran.  Right now, given the rising tensions, the first close encounter of the worst kind, in which, say, shots were unexpectedly fired and lives lost, or a ship or plane went down, might be the equivalent of lighting a fuse in a crowded, over-armed room.  Such an incident could occur almost any time.  The Japanese press has reported that government officials there are ready to authorize fighter pilots to fire warning shots if Chinese aircraft penetrate the airspace over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands.  A Chinese general has said that such an act would count as the start of “actual combat.” That the irrationality of such an event will be apparent to anyone who considers the deeply tangled economic relations among all these powers may prove no impediment to the situation — as at the beginning of World War I — simply spinning out of everyone’s control.

Can such a crisis be averted?  Yes, if the leaders of China, Japan, and the United States, the key countries involved, take steps to defuse the belligerent and ultra-nationalistic pronouncements now holding sway and begin talking with one another about practical steps to resolve the disputes.  Similarly, an emotional and unexpected gesture — Prime Minister Abe, for instance, pulling a Nixon and paying a surprise goodwill visit to China — might carry the day and change the atmosphere.  Should these minor disputes in the Pacific get out of hand, however, not just those directly involved but the whole planet will look with sadness and horror on the failure of everyone involved.

Michael Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, ofThe Race for What’s Left, just published in paperback.  A documentary movie based on his book Blood and Oil can be previewed and ordered at www.bloodandoilmovie.com. You can follow Klare on Facebook by clickinghere.

Nugent: ‘If You Want Another Concord Bridge, I’ve Got Some Buddies’

I guess Ted Nugent is itching to get himself another visit from the Secret Service: Nugent At Gun Industry Trade Show: "If You Want Another Concord Bridge, I've Got Some Buddies": National Rifle Association board member and Washington Times columnis...

Russia ready to develop relations with US – Lavrov

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov gives news conference on January 23, 2013. (RIA Novosti / Alexey Philippov)

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov gives news conference on January 23, 2013. (RIA Novosti / Alexey Philippov)

Moscow, determined to salvage strained Russia-US relations, nevertheless says it will continue to respond accordingly to unfriendly US moves.

­Russia is looking for international cooperation with the United States that is based on the principles of equality, mutual respect and non-interference in each other's internal affairs, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at a press conference in Moscow on Wednesday.

Lavrov, addressing “new irritants that have added to the missile defense irritation,” mentioned the passage by US lawmakers of the so-called Magnitsky Act, which has triggered a diplomatic storm between Moscow and Washington.

The Russian minister said the “odious” US legislation “supplanted the anti-Soviet Jackson-Vanik Amendment with an anti-Russian law.”

A human tragedy was utilized to cynically punish Russia, he added.

The Magnitsky Act was drafted by US lawmakers in response to the death of Sergey Magnitsky, a lawyer with Hermitage Capital who died in a Moscow prison while awaiting trial in a massive tax evasion case.

Lavrov reminded that the judicial process in the Magnitsky case "has not been completed,” yet American lawmakers are intent on playing the role of judge.

“This is beyond their jurisdiction,” he said. “One cannot leave these things without response."

The Russian parliament responded by sending to the desk of President Vladimir Putin the Dima Yakovlev bill, named after a Russian boy who died of heatstroke after being left in a car by his adoptive American parents.

Putin signed the bill into law in late December.

Unfortunately, the diplomatic wrangling between Moscow and Washington did not end there.

This month, a US court imposed a fine on Russia for its refusal to return a collection of religious documents to a prominent US-based Jewish organization. According to the verdict, Russia would be required to pay US$50,000 a day to Chabad Lubavitch until it releases the Schneerson Library.

The problem over the Schneerson collection has nothing in common with justice, Lavrov told the press conference.

In fact, even the US Justice Department condemned the decision, arguing that it was not legally possible to introduce sanctions of this type against Russia.

The minister pointed to a “new spiral of confrontation” over a verdict that has “nothing in common with justice,” emphasizing that the collection is the “heritage of the Russian nation."

Despite the surface tensions, Lavrov acknowledged that Russia is still committed to working with the United States as equal partners.

"Of course we will retaliate to unfriendly acts, but at the core of our position is the development of Russian-American links in all fields, including in the international arena," he said.

Lavrov revealed that the newly re-inaugurated President Obama has received an invitation to visit Moscow, and the Kremlin is awaiting a response.

The Foreign Minister then discussed the situation in the Mediterranean region, specifically in Syria, where a militant political opposition is attempting to oust President Bashar Assad. In light of the situation, he advocated on behalf of Russia’s presence in the region.

"Times have changed and our fleets must have training,” Lavrov emphasized. “We cannot afford further destabilization in the Mediterranean region; therefore, (our naval presence there) is a stabilizing factor.”

The Foreign Minister noted that its diplomats in Syria have returned to Russia, adding that he did not anticipate a wide-scale evacuation of Russian civilians from the embattled Arab Republic.

Meanwhile, Lavrov expressed frustration that no real attempts have been made to encourage the Syrian opposition to enter into peace negotiations.

"It has been Russia that has made attempts to convince the Syrian opposition to start talks," he proclaimed. “Presently, the opposition [has avoided negotiations] because it seeks to overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad."

Such policy would stop at nothing, he believes.

Lavrov reiterated that Russia's priority in Syria "is not to achieve any geopolitical goals, but to stabilize the situation and cease the bloodshed in order to save Syrians' lives," adding that the Russian Foreign Ministry welcomes the inaugural statement by President Obama concerning the end of the decade of wars and conflicts.

"I welcome this statement if it really means the end of armed settlement of international problems,” Lavrov said. “I think everyone has realized that these methods create nothing but new problems."

Robert Bridge, RT

Galbraith: Is This the End for the Deficit Drones?

Public opinion is turning on those who seek to cut our social safety net.

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January 23, 2013  |  

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In wars, sometimes there comes a moment when the tide turns. The collapse of Ludendorff's offensive in 1918 presaged the Armistice;  failure in the Ardennes meant the end for Germany in 1944.  

Today we have two drone wars in a similar state. One is mainly in Pakistan. Built on a gee-whiz technology that can't do what it promised, this war has claimed too many victims for too little effect. It is a diplomatic disaster and its days are numbered, almost surely, for that reason.

The other drone war is in Washington. The drones are in groups with names like the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and Campaign to Fix the Debt. They drone on, and on, about the calamities that await unless we cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

That the goal of the deficit drones is to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid has been plain for years to anyone who looks at where the money comes from. It comes largely from Peter G. Peterson, a billionaire former secretary of Commerce under Nixon, who is Captain Ahab to Social Security's Moby Dick. And when one trick, such as privatization, falls flat, his minions always have another, whether it's raising the retirement age or changing the COLA. But a cut by any other name is still, and always, just a cut.

Peterson's influence is vast; practically the entire DC mind-meld has bought his line to some degree.   

The other day I was on CNBC, supposedly to discuss the debt ceiling, but the topic was Social Security all the way. My host, Andrew Ross Sorkin, was very blunt: “If now isn't the time to cut entitlements,” he asked, “when would be?” My answer – in a word, never – is not one he seemed to have thought possible before.

Yet there is no good reason to cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. These are insurance programs. They keep the elderly, their survivors and dependents, and the disabled, out of dire poverty. We can afford this. There is also no financing problem; if there were, investors would not be buying 20-year US bonds at 3 percent. These days when some economists say that cuts are needed, they say it's only for show – to establish “credibility.” Old-timers may remember, that's what DC insiders once said about the war in Vietnam.

And like Vietnam, this war is getting old. We're beginning to realize, we don't need it. If the United States really faced some sort of deficit or debt crisis, something would have happened by now. Simpson and Bowles – those brave men who were going to lead us toward budget balance – who remembers them? The super-committee? The fiscal cliff? All gone. Yet Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are still here. The economy is still stable. And interest rates are still low. The debt ceiling? On that, the president stood up and the Republicans gave way.

It's true that the sequesters and the continuing resolution lie ahead. But if you are going to refuse blackmail over the debt ceiling, why yield to it on anything else? The blackmailers must know by now which side the public will take.

And then on Monday we heard from President Obama. As part of his great speech, which settled so many questions, he gave a little economics lesson. Here's what he said:

“The commitments we make to each other — through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security — these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.”

Six Economic Steps to a Better Life and Real Prosperity for All

Money sprout(Image: Money sprout via Shutterstock)

We've got to break out of the old ways of thinking about the economy.

Most activists tend to approach progressive change from one of two perspectives: First, there’s the “reform” tradition that assumes corporate control is a constant and that “politics” acts to modify practices within that constraint. Liberalism in the United States is representative of this tradition. Then there’s the “revolutionary” tradition, which assumes change can come about only if the major institutions are largely eliminated or transcended, often by violence.

But what if neither revolution nor reform is viable?

Paradoxically, we believe the current stalemating of progressive reform may open up some unique strategic possibilities to transform institutions of the political economy over time. We call this third option evolutionary reconstruction. Like reform, evolutionary reconstruction involves step-by-step nonviolent change. But like revolution, evolutionary reconstruction changes the basic institutions of ownership of the economy, so that the broad public, rather than a narrow band of individuals (i.e., the “one percent”) owns more and more of the nation’s productive assets.

1. A People’s Bank

One area where this logic can be seen at work is in the financial industry. At the height of the financial crisis in early 2009, some kind of nationalization of the banks seemed possible. It was a moment, President Obama told banking CEOs, when his administration was “the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” The president opted for a soft bailout, but that was not the only possible decision.

When the next financial crisis occurs – and many experts think it will —a different resolution may well be possible. One option has already been put on the table. In 2010, 33 senators voted to break up large Wall Street investment banks that were “too big to fail.” Such a policy would not only reduce financial vulnerability, it would alter the structure of institutional power.

Nor is an effort to break up banks, even if successful, likely to be the end of the process. The modern history of anti-trust and finance suggests that the big banks, even if broken up, will ultimately regroup. So what can be done when breaking them up fails?

Traditional reforms have aimed at improved regulation, higher reserve requirements and the channeling of credit to key sectors. But future crises may bring into play a spectrum of sophisticated proposals for more radical change. For instance, a “Limited Purpose Banking” strategy put forward by conservative economist Laurence Kolticoff would impose a 100% reserve requirement on banks. Since banks typically provide loans in amounts many times their reserves, this would transform them into modest institutions with little or no capacity to finance speculation. It would also nationalize the creation of all new money as federal authorities, rather than bankers, directly control system-wide financial flows.

More striking is the argument of Willem Buiter, the chief economist of Citigroup, that if the public underwrites the costs of bailouts, “banks should be in public ownership.” In fact, had the taxpayer funds used to bail out major financial institutions in 2007-2010 been provided on condition that voting stock be issued in return for the investment, one or more major banks would have become essentially public banks. 

Nor is this far from current political tradition. Unknown to most, there have been a large number of small and medium-sized public banking institutions for some time now. In fact, the federal government already operates 140 banks and quasi-banks that provide loans and loan guarantees for an extraordinary range of domestic and international economic activities.

The economic crisis has also produced widespread interest in the Bank of North Dakota, a highly successful state-owned bank founded in 1919. Between 1996 and 2008, the bank returned $340 million in profits to the state. The bank enjoys broad support in the business community, as well as among progressive activists. Legislative proposals to establish banks patterned in whole or in part on the North Dakota model have been put forward by activists and legislators in more than a dozen states.

2. Move to Universal Healthcare

That austerity and failing reform might open the way to "evolutionary reconstructive" institutional change is also suggested by emerging developments in healthcare.

Cost pressures are also building up—and, critically, in ways that will continue to undermine U.S. corporations facing global competitors, forcing them to seek new solutions. The federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services projects that healthcare costs will go up from the 2010 level of 17.5 percent of GDP to 19.6 percent in 2019. It has long been clear that over the long-haul cost pressures are ultimately likely to force development of some form of single-payer system —the only serious way to deal with the underlying problem.  

A national solution may come about either in response to a burst of pain-driven public outrage, or more slowly through a state-by-state build-up. Massachusetts already has a near universal plan. In Hawaii, health coverage (provided mostly by nonprofit insurers) reaches 91.8 percent of adults in part because of a 1970s law mandating low-cost insurance for anyone working 20 hours a week. In Vermont, Governor Peter Shumlin signed legislation in May 2011 creating “Green Mountain Care.” Universal coverage, dependent on a federal waiver, would begin in 2017 and possibly as early as 2014. In Connecticut, the legislature in 2011 authorized a “SustiNet” non-profit public health insurance program, which it aims to launch in 2014. In all, bills to create universal healthcare have been introduced in nearly 20 states.

3.  Build Community Wealth

“Social enterprises” that undertake businesses in order to support specific social missions now increasingly comprise what is sometimes called a "fourth sector” (different from the government, business and non-profit sectors). Roughly 4,500 not-for-profit community development corporations are largely devoted to housing development. There are now also more than 10,000 businesses owned in whole or part by their employees; nearly 3 million more individuals are involved in these enterprises than are members of private sector unions. Another 130 million Americans are members of various urban, agricultural and credit union cooperatives. In many cities, “land trusts” are underway using an institutional form of nonprofit or municipal ownership that develops and maintains low- and moderate-income housing.

In Cleveland, Ohio, an integrated group of worker-owned companies has been developed, supported in part by the purchasing power of large hospitals and universities. The Cleveland effort, which is partly modeled on the 85,000-person Mondragón cooperative network, based in the Basque region of Spain, is on track to create new businesses, year by year, as time goes on. The goal is not simply worker ownership, but the democratization of wealth and community building in general. Linked by a community-serving non-profit corporation and a revolving fund, the companies cannot be sold outside the network; they also return 10 percent of profits to help develop additional worker-owned firms.

A critical element of the strategy points to what is essentially a quasi-public sector planning model: Hospitals and universities in the area currently spend $3 billion on goods and services a year—none, until recently, from the immediately surrounding neighborhoods. The “Cleveland model” is supported in part by decisions of these substantially publically financed institutions to allocate part of their procurement to the worker-co-ops in support of a larger community-building agenda. Numerous other cities are now exploring efforts of this kind, including Atlanta; Pittsburgh; Amarillo, Texas; and Washington, DC. Related institutional work is now underway, too, through the leadership of United Steelworkers, a union that has put forward new proposals for a co-op-union model of ownership.

Another innovative enterprise is Market Creek Plaza in San Diego, a $23.5 million, mixed-use, commercial-retail-residential development. The project was conceived, planned and developed by teams of community members working with the Jacobs Center for Neighborhood Innovation. Market Creek Plaza is also a green project, and aims to expand to become a transit-oriented village with 800 units of affordable housing and extensive facilities for nonprofit organizations. The project has restored 1,400 linear feet of wetlands, while generating 200 permanent jobs (70 percent filled by local residents), provided 415 residents with a 20-percent ownership stake in the project, and generated $42 million in economic activity (in 2008).

4. Leverage City Assets

Yet another arena of institutional growth involves municipal development. By maintaining direct ownership of areas surrounding transit station exits, public agencies in Washington, DC, Atlanta and elsewhere earn millions, capturing the increased land values their transit investments create. The town of Riverview, Michigan has been a national leader in trapping methane from its landfills and using it to fuel electricity generation, thereby providing both revenue and jobs. There are roughly 500 similar projects nationwide. Many cities have established municipally owned hotels. There are also nearly 2,000 publicly owned utilities that provide power (and often broadband) to more than 45 million Americans, generating $50 billion in annual revenue. Significant public institutions are also common at the state level. CalPERS, California’s public pension authority, helps finance local community development needs; in Alaska, state oil revenues provide each citizen with dividends as a matter of right; in Alabama, public pension investing has long focused on state economic development.

5. Organize for the Long Haul

You can think of the slow buildup of democratizing strategies as the pre-historical developmental work needed to clarify new principles for larger scale application. Just as in the decades before the New Deal, state and local experiments in the “laboratories of democracy” may suggest new larger scale approaches. The new direction has four aspects; democratization of wealth; community, both locally and in general; decentralization in general; and substantial but not complete forms of democratic planning. Let’s take a look at each of these.

Democratization of Wealth: Institutions like public banks challenge the idea that private corporate enterprise offers the only possible way forward. They also help open new ways of thinking about how to get meaningful larger scale democratization. Historically, cooperatives and other federations also helped establish institutional and organizational support for explicit political efforts in support of specific policies. Critically, they also help stabilize local community economies, since such institutions tend to be anchored locally by virtue of their democratic ownership structure.

Rethinking Community: If you want to alter larger patterns of wealth and power, you have to build a culture that reconstructs “community.” In economic terms, building community means introducing and emphasizing practical forms of community ownership. In the Cleveland effort, for example, the central institution is a community-wide, neighborhood-encompassing non-profit corporation. The board of the non-profit institution includes representatives both of the worker cooperatives and of key community institutions. Worker co-ops are linked to this (and to a revolving fund at the center), and though independently owned and managed, they cannot be sold without permission from the founding community-wide institution. The basic principle is that the effort should benefit the broader community, not only or simply workers in one or another co-op.

Decentralization: Can there be meaningful democracy in a very large system without far more rigorous decentralization than is commonly assumed in the United States?  It is a commonplace that Washington is “broken.” But part of the problem has to do with scale. We rarely confront the fact that the United States is a very large geographic polity: Germany could easily be tucked into Montana. The United States is also very large in population—currently more than 310 million, likely to reach 500 million shortly after mid-century.

Decentralization in these circumstances is nearly inevitable, and if the continental nation is too large and most states are too small to deal with economic matters, what remains is the intermediate scale we call the region— a unit of scale that is likely to become of increasing importance as time (and population growth) go on. The question is almost certainly how to regionalize, not whether to do so—what powers to maintain at the center and what powers to relegate to various smaller scale units. The principle of subsidiarity—keeping decision-making at the lowest feasible level, and only elevating to higher levels when absolutely necessary—is implicit as a guiding principle.

Democratic Planning: A well-designed planning system can change relationships between firms, the community and the market. Planning also needs to be democratic at all levels.

Take a look at Brazil’s innovations in participatory budgeting, where citizens determine major public expenditures – an idea that is gaining traction in Chicago. So far these experiments have definite limits since they are restricted to municipal budget decisions. But if the practice can be extended in scope and scale over time, it could provide an important mechanism for increasing meaningful democracy.

High-speed rail and mass transit are another area in which we can think about larger scale planning approaches. The United States has limited capacity to build equipment for any of this. But when the next crisis occurs in the auto or other industries, a public bail-out might restructure firms so that we could use public contracts needed to build mass transit and high-speed rail in ways that also help support the development of quasi-public national and community-based firms—both to produce what is needed and simultaneously to help stabilize local communities. 

6. Cut Corporate Power Down to Size

To deal with economic issues, ecological challenges and local community stability, we must also come to terms with corporate power dynamics. Public corporations are subject to Wall Street’s first commandment: Grow or die!” You can’t just wish or regulate that idea away.

In addition to carbon emissions, countless studies have documented growing energy, mineral, water, arable land and other limits to unending growth. Yet the trends continue: The United States, with less than 5 percent of global population, consumes 22 percent of the world’s oil, 13 percent of world coal, and 21 percent of world natural gas. From 1940 to 1976, Americans used up as large a share of the earth’s mineral resources as did everyone in all previous history.

At some point, a society like the United States that already produces the equivalent of over $190,000 for every family of four must ask when enough is enough. As Juliet Schor has argued, one key change is to encourage less consumption and more leisure time. That means reforming unemployment insurance policy to encourage work sharing, changing government labor practices to model shorter working hours, and discouraging excessive overtime. We need to restore balance on a personal level, but we can’t ignore the big systemic challenges. As former presidential adviser James Gustav Speth has observed: “For the most part we have worked within this current system of political economy, but working within the system will not succeed in the end when what is needed is transformative change in the system itself.”

As a matter of cold logic, if some of the most important corporations have a massively disruptive and costly impact on the economy and environment—and if experience suggests that regulation and anti-trust laws are likely to be largely subverted by these corporations—a public takeover becomes the only logical answer. This general argument was put forward most forcefully not by liberals, but by the founders of the Chicago School of economics. Conservative Nobel Laureate George Stigler repeatedly observed that regulatory strategies were “designed and operated primarily for [the corporation’s] benefit.” Henry C. Simons, Milton Friedman’s mentor, was even more forceful. “Turned loose with inordinate powers, corporations have vastly over-organized most industries,” Simons held. The state “should face the necessity of actually taking over, owning, and managing directly…industries in which it is impossible to maintain effectively competitive conditions.”

For many decades, the only choices to many have seemed state socialism, or corporate capitalism. When traditional systems falter and fail, new ideas spring to life. Little noticed by most observers, handholds on processes of potentially important new forms of change have been quietly developing around the country. These changes build upon each other to create an evolutionary process that has the power to transform the way we live – for the better.

If I Were Attorney General

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Bio

Michael Ratner is President Emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York and Chair of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin. He is currently a legal adviser to Wikileaks and Julian Assange. He and CCR brought the first case challenging the Guantanamo detentions and continue in their efforts to close Guantanamo. He taught at Yale Law School, and Columbia Law School, and was President of the National Lawyers Guild. His current books include "Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in the Twenty-First Century America," and “ Who Killed Che? How the CIA Got Away With Murder.” NOTE: Mr. Ratner speaks on his own behalf and not for any organization with which he is affiliated.

Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore. And welcome to this week's edition of The Ratner Report with Michael Ratner, who now joins us from New York City.

Michael is the president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. He's chair of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin. He's a board member of The Real News. Thanks for joining us again, Michael.MICHAEL RATNER, PRESIDENT EMERITUS, CENTER FOR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS: Good to be with you, Paul.JAY: So I'm—let's kick this one off with a question. So President Obama gets inaugurated, and all of a sudden he has this brilliant flash: oh, no, I need Michael Ratner as attorney general. Now, that's as likely to happen as—well, okay, I'm not going to crack any joke, but let's say it happened. What would you do as attorney general?RATNER: Well, you know, it's an interesting question. And I was asked the question by a progressive newspaper called The Indepedent as well, along similar lines. And, of course, you could decide, you could have a different government, a socialist government. But, of course, that's not going to be decided by the attorney general. So what does the attorney general do? Attorney general heads the Department of Justice. In, like, 200 and some years there's been one woman heading the Department of Justice. So you have to assume it's probably going to be a man this time, which is going to be me. And I came up with some ideas, perhaps eight, nine, ten ideas of what I could actually do. So the first one is a nice—for all of us activists out there, 'cause you get social change through activism. And what I said was, handcuff the FBI, not activists. So the first thing that they could do is get the FBI off the backs of political activists, Muslim activists, people who are out in the streets, Occupy Wall Street people, and just get rid of government, political FBI spying, put handcuffs on the FBI, not on all of us, because that's how social change is made.And right now we're in a situation where Obama and the FBI are still operating under the FBI guidelines that were suggested by President Bush's last attorney general, Mukasey. And they're terrible, because they allow spying and surveillance and wiretapping on people who they have never been even accused or even implicated in a crime without reasonable doubt. They can spy on anybody.So number one, handcuff the FBI and not activists.Number two—and this is the power of attorney general. Even if there's laws on the books saying it's illegal for me to smoke marijuana or take cocaine, the attorney general doesn't have to enforce those federal laws. And so the second thing I would do as attorney general, I would just stop all drug prosecutions. That's not the same as passing laws that says they're legal. But as attorney general, the chief law enforcement officer, stop all drug prosecutions. Already you're going to see our jails getting empty, less people going, huge budget cuts that will make a big difference in, of course, people's personal lives.The third is: what do we do about jails, and what can I do as attorney general? Well, I could ask that every single juvenile, every single person convicted as a juvenile in prison, under 18 years old, should be immediately paroled. They had no place in prison to begin with. They should have been treated. They should have been rehabilitated. Get rid of that right away.Then I would ask that all the political prisoners be released—Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal, etc., anybody—. Mumia, I wouldn't have the authority. He's in a state prison. But all the federal prisoners, such as the Indian activist Leonard Peltier. Get them out. And then, out of federal prisons, ask for parole of anybody who's served over 20 years. Europe really has a maximum of 20 years. Let's get rid of those. They're just being in there for punitive reasons.So I have FBI, drugs, prisons. Then I would end the prosecution of any undocumented workers in the United States. No longer would we use a criminal system, such as operation streamline to jail tens and tens of thousands of people. End the prosecution of undocumented.Fifth, I would stop the prosecution of my own client, Julian Assange, the investigation of him as well as WikiLeaks. I would have stopped the prosecution of Aaron Swartz, the young internet activist who committed suicide really in part as a result, if not even in big part, as a result of the government's persecution of Aaron Swartz, the internet activist. I would stop the prosecution of Bradley Manning. I would stop the one of Jeremy Hammond. Those are two people who allegedly uploaded documents to WikiLeaks. So I would just stop with prosecuting whistleblowers, just get rid of that, because they're exposing secrets that we really have to know. That's the sixth thing.The seventh thing—and this is a hard one to get into for the attorney general, because you think, how do I make this country more equal from an economic point of view. So I've thought long and hard about that. I can't change the tax code. But what could I do? I could decide that anyone making under a certain amount will not be prosecuted if they don't pay taxes.So let's set the figure at, let's say, $40,000. Anyone making under $40,000, if they decide not to pay taxes, I will not prosecute them as the Department of Justice, nor will I use civil jurisdiction or civil courts to try and collect those taxes. That would automatically raise the salary levels, raise the levels of income of, you know, probably the majority of the United States. That's the sixth thing.The seventh thing. I don't want to let the bad guys off the hook here. I have two sets of bad guys. The first thing I would do is begin an investigation and hope to get an indictment of President Obama for operating the drone strikes throughout the world. I would particularly go after them for the killing of al-Aulaqi in Yemen or al-Aulaqi's son in Yemen, a 16-year-old boy, and for another U.S. citizen in Yemen. There's a U.S. law—and a federal judge actually just cited it in a recent decision on drones. It says the president is not exempt from a law that prohibits people from killing Americans overseas. So I'd begin an investigation of President Obama because he has killed American citizens with drones.JAY: Now, not only will you never get appointed, but if in the wildest chance you did, you wouldn't hold the job for very long. Go on.RATNER: Well, once I get him indicted, you know, he can't get rid of me. Anyway, anything I would do is I would go after, obviously, the Bush–Cheney torture kill teams—implemented not only indefinite detention at Guantanamo and Bagram, but who actually tortured people all over the world—Guantanamo, Bagram—who rendered people to torture, and I would investigate and prosecute those people. That seems like a no-brainer. It should have been a no-brainer to Obama. It should have been a no-brainer to Eric Holder, the current person who I'm replacing. But apparently even that has been difficult.JAY: Now, you're talking Bush–Cheney themselves?RATNER: Yes, of course. Bush and Cheney have both admitted that they ordered waterboarding, a form of torture, and they would do it again. That's—you don't need much more. They've openly admitted to ordering people to be tortured. And we know that people have been tortured as a result. Materials were released. Various people at black sites, one person 83 times waterboarded, another person well over 100. Torture's completely illegal. We have an obligation to prosecute torturers under the Convention Against Torture. It hasn't been done by Obama. I as attorney general would actually—of the ones I mentioned, I think a number of them are actually realistic. That one certainly should be carried out.Then, you know, how else do we get at the financial crisis? I gave us one way [unintel.] stop people having to pay taxes. I just won't prosecute them. The other way, and what I made up for this, is: too big to fail, too big not to be in jail. So rather than just give all of these big banks civil penalties, or these investment houses, even if they're $10 billion or $5 billion or $500 million, let's actually have investigations where we jail the crooked bankers, jail the crooked investment houses, because that's the way, at least, we can avert not crisis—'cause we're going to have crisis in capitalism for a long time, economic crisis, but maybe we can take some of the really deep edge off the next economic crisis by trying to get our banks, our mortgage fraud people, etc., to operate in a better way. That's number nine. Number ten. This was an interesting one. This was actually suggested by my daughter, modeled after a law in Bolivia called the Rights of Mother Earth, Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra. And what it does is rather than just talk about rights for human beings, talks about rights for the ecosystem and the cultural system that you're in, so that when you do something, you have to not just think about what's going to happen, you know, to me or when you build a dam, but what's going to happen to the whole ecosystem. Bolivia has such a law. And as attorney general, of course, I can't pass that law, but at least I could try and put that law forward. So these are ten real positions that the next attorney general could take. And were I the attorney general, despite the political pushback I could get, these are things that I would actually like to carry out. And while they wouldn't be revolutionary in the sense of overturning this society, what they represent to me are transitional actions, transitional demands and actions that ultimately can lead to a much more equal society.JAY: Well, that's great. I mean, I think if this was an elected position, you could probably get elected to this. Unfortunately, it's not.RATNER: I love you, Paul.JAY: Thanks very much for joining us, Michael.RATNER: Thank you, Paul.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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Worldwide “Jobless Numbers”: Global Unemployment Hits Record High, Declining Living Standards

ilo

World unemployment could hit record levels this year and continue rising until 2017, a United Nations agency reported Monday. In its annual Global Employment Trends report, the International Labour Organization (ILO) forecasts that jobless numbers around the world will rise by 5.1 million in 2013 to 202 million people, topping 2009’s record of 198 million.

Five years after the outbreak of the global financial crisis, world economic growth has decelerated and unemployment has begun to increase again. The ranks of the working poor are also on the rise, while large numbers of “discouraged workers” are dropping out of the labor market altogether.

The trends examined in the ILO report expose the fraudulent claim in Barack Obama’s inaugural address Monday that “an economic recovery has begun”—in the United States or elsewhere. On the contrary, a systemic crisis of the world capitalist economy is destroying jobs, particularly for the world’s youth, and plunging greater numbers of people into poverty. The austerity measures of governments around the world are further exacerbating this process.

Despite predictions of a moderate pick-up in the growth of economic output in 2013-2014, global jobless numbers are expected to rise to record highs in 2013 and hit 205 million in 2014. The ILO report projects the jobless rate to continue to rise until at least 2017. These figures undoubtedly underestimate the real level of unemployment, as they rely on official government figures that do not count those who have run out of jobless benefits or stopped looking for work.

Of the 4 million rise in global unemployment in 2012, a quarter of the increase came in the advanced economies, while three-quarters was in other regions, with East Asia, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa particularly hard hit. The report attributes this to the “spillover effect of the weak growth in advanced economies in 2012, in particular, recession conditions in Europe.”

Growth decelerated by 1.4 percent in East Asia in 2012, largely influenced by activity in China, where growth slowed to 7.8 percent, the slowest rate since 1999. Growth in India slowed sharply to 4.9 percent, the slowest rate of growth in a decade, contributing to a South Asian regional GDP growth rate deceleration of 1.6 percent. Latin America, the Middle East and the Caribbean also saw a substantial deceleration.

Labor force participation has fallen dramatically, particularly in the developed countries and the European Union region, where the rate declined by close to one percentage point. While official unemployment stands at 7.8 percent in the United States and 11.8 percent in the euro zone, even these high figures are misleading since they do not take into account the millions of workers who have stopped looking for work, discouraged by long-term unemployment and bleak job prospects.

The jobs crisis affecting young people is dire. There are currently some 73.8 million young people unemployed worldwide and the ILO predicts that the slowdown in economic activity will likely make another half million youth jobless by 2014. Global youth unemployment stood at 12.6 percent in 2012 and is expected to rise to 12.9 percent by 2017. The youth jobless rate is particularly acute in Europe, where it has surpassed 50 percent in Greece and Spain.

Long-term youth unemployment has also increased dramatically in the wake of the global financial crisis. Some 35 percent of all young people without a job in the advanced countries have been out of work for six months or longer, up from 28.5 percent in 2007. As job prospects dim, increasing numbers of youth are being driven out of the labor market altogether.

In the European countries, 12.7 percent of all young people are neither employed nor in education or training, a rate 2 percentage points higher than before the crisis. The ILO report notes: “The crisis has dramatically diminished the labor market prospects for young people, as many experience long-term unemployment right from the start of their labor market entry, a situation that was never observed during earlier cyclical downturns.”

The global ranks of the working poor are decreasing at a slower pace than before the downturn and remain at staggering levels. According to the ILO, there are currently some 397 million workers living in extreme poverty and an additional 472 million who cannot meet their basic needs on a regular basis. This means that 12 percent of the world’s population lives in families where at least one member is working, but they still struggle to gain access to decent housing, food and other necessities.

Another recent report showed that 47.5 million people in the US live in such low-income working families. (See: “ Ranks of US working poor grow dramatically ”)

Many regions of the world that have not seen a sizeable spike in unemployment have experienced a worsening in the quality of the jobs available, pushing more workers into vulnerable employment and the informal job sector. There are often what the report describes as “mismatches” between the jobs available and the skills required to attain them. In particular, occupations concentrated in exporting industries have been hard hit, and new jobs that become available often require skills that unemployed workers do not possess.

The ruling classes all over the world are seizing on the economic crisis to carry out massive attacks on the living standards of the working class. The ILO report notes that with the drying up of the limited stimulus funds injected into the economy in the immediate aftermath of the financial crash, the austerity measures being imposed by governments—particularly in the US and the euro zone—are deepening the slump. This has “reinforced corporate tendencies to increase cash holdings or pay dividends rather than expand capacity and hire new workers.”

Drones Provoke Growing Controversy in US

As Barack Obama renews his lease on the White House for another four years, his administration is debating how best to respond to a growing internal and public controversy over his first term’s non-battlefield counter-terrorist weapon of choice: armed drones.

Frontrunning: January 23

  • Doubt Greets Bank of Japan's Easing Shift (WSJ)
  • Japan hits back at currency critics (FT)
  • Japan upgrades economic view for first time in eight months (Australian) - only to lower them in a few months again
  • GOP critics get opportunity to grill Secretary Clinton on Benghazi (Hill)
  • Global economy set for ‘slow recovery’ (FT)
  • Obama to back short debt limit extension (FT)
  • Spain economy contracted 1.3% in 2012: Bank of Spain (Presstv)
  • Unfinished Luxury Tower Is Stark Reminder of Las Vegas’s Economic Reversal (NYT)
  • Draghi Says ‘Darkest Clouds’ Over Europe Have Subsided (BBG)
  • High-Speed Dustup Hits a Clubby Corner (WSJ)
  • U.S. Budget Discord Is Top Threat to Global Economy in Poll (BBG)
  • Sir Mervyn King says abandoning inflation target would be 'irresponsible' (Telegraph)
  • Spain Says It May Cover 13% of 2013 Funding in January (BBG)
  • BOE Cites Pound as Rebalancing Obstacle in 8-1 Stimulus Vote (BBG)
  • Riksbank Has Room for More Cuts as Krona Gains, Ekholm Says (BBG)

Overnight Media Digest

WSJ

* Microsoft Corp entered discussions in recent days with private equity firm Silver Lake Partners and Dell Inc founder Michael Dell to help finance a leveraged buyout of the computer maker, according to people familiar with the deliberations. (http://link.reuters.com/vuq45t)

* Google Inc reversed the trend of slowing revenue growth in its core online advertising business, signaling that the internet giant is beginning to get a handle on how the consumer shift toward mobile devices is affecting the online ad industry. (http://link.reuters.com/xuq45t)

* Johnson & Johnson officials learned of problems with a metal hip-replacement implant in 2008, a year before the company stopped making the joints and two years before recalling them, according to documents unsealed in a California state court. (http://link.reuters.com/gyq45t)

* Allergan Inc said it will buy MAP Pharmaceuticals Inc in a $958 million deal that would help the Botox maker expand sales of medical treatments. (http://link.reuters.com/jyq45t)

* IBM Corp got back on track in the fourth quarter after disappointing investors the previous quarter as its software business and sales in emerging markets returned to growth. (http://link.reuters.com/byq45t)

* The White House offered a tacit endorsement of a House Republican plan to defer a fight over the U.S.'s borrowing limit, likely clearing the way for a deal that would forestall a showdown over the country's borrowing limit until late spring. (http://link.reuters.com/tuq45t)

* Prime Minister David Cameron plans to let the British people vote in about five years on whether or not to stay in the European Union, a surprise move critics say will hurt both economies and cast a new shadow over the troubled bloc. (http://link.reuters.com/suq45t)

* Two prominent names in semiconductors, Advanced Micro Devices Inc and Texas Instruments Inc, provided more evidence of soft demand for personal computers and other products. (http://link.reuters.com/myq45t)

* Dish Network Corp plans to close a further 300 Blockbuster stores in the U.S. in the coming weeks, leaving the video chain with less than one-third of the stores acquired by the satellite-television company in 2011. (http://link.reuters.com/nyq45t)

* Banks are fighting an effort by Fannie Mae to cut costs on backup insurance policies often imposed on cash-strapped homeowners, a step that would crimp the lucrative fees the lenders collect on the coverage. (http://link.reuters.com/hyq45t)

* The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission barred Egan-Jones Ratings Co from issuing ratings on certain bonds, an unprecedented step by the regulator and a setback for a small credit-rating firm. (http://link.reuters.com/zuq45t)

* IKEA is poised to embark on a global spending spree, but its departing chief executive says red tape is slowing how fast the home-furnishings retailer can open its pocket book. (http://link.reuters.com/dyq45t)

FT

 CAMERON TO PROMISE IN-OUT EU BALLOT David Cameron will on Wednesday vow to settle Britain's future in the European Union with a straight in-out referendum by 2017, in a high-risk strategy which will test the willingness of Paris and Berlin to cut the UK a better membership deal.

KING STANDS BY INFLATION TARGETING The governor of the Bank of England has called for it to shed some of the burden of reviving Britain's economy, suggesting the UK government should do more to support the "disappointingly slow" recovery.

POSEN ATTACKS BANK OF ENGLAND'S CULTURE A former policy maker at the Bank of England has attacked the management and culture of the bank, saying its directors abdicated responsibility for reining in a governor who had become far too powerful.

BoJ ACTION TRIGGERS CURRENCY WAR FEARS The Bank of Japan bowed to domestic political pressure and pledged to buy government bonds in potentially unlimited quantities as international policy makers aired fresh concern about the possibility of a global currency war.

BARCLAYS REVAMP TO COST UP TO 2,000 JOBS Barclays is cutting up to 2,000 jobs in its investment bank as part of a strategic overhaul by the bank's chief executive Antony Jenkins. BUMI MOVES CLOSER TO TAKING LEGAL ACTION Bumi intends to take legal action to recover lost funds at its Indonesian subsidiary, Berau Coal, as well as considering other claims resulting from a four-month long investigation into "financial irregularities" at its mining businesses.

NYT

* Microsoft Corp is in talks to help finance a takeover bid for Dell Inc that would exceed $20 billion, a person briefed on the matter said. Microsoft is expected to contribute up to several billion dollars. (http://link.reuters.com/gar45t)

* A closer look at Google Inc's results shows that while the company continues to be a moneymaking machine, its most lucrative business, search on desktop computers, is slowing, while it has not yet figured out how to make equivalent profits on mobile devices. (http://link.reuters.com/har45t)

* Allergan Inc has agreed to pay nearly $1 billion to acquire MAP Pharmaceuticals and gain full control of its experimental treatment for migraine headaches, the two companies announced Tuesday night. (http://link.reuters.com/par45t)

* Investigators in the United States and Japan indicated on Tuesday that many questions remained unanswered in their search for the cause of two incidents in which lithium-ion batteries burned on Boeing Co's 787 aircraft. (http://link.reuters.com/var45t)

* An internal analysis conducted by Johnson & Johnson in 2011 not long after it recalled a troubled hip implant estimated that the all-metal device would fail within five years in nearly 40 percent of patients who received it, newly disclosed court records show. (http://link.reuters.com/kar45t)

* Celgene Corp's drug Abraxane prolonged the lives of patients with advanced pancreatic cancer by almost two months in a clinical trial, researchers reported Tuesday, signifying an advance in treating a notoriously difficult disease but not as big a leap as some doctors and investors had hoped. (http://link.reuters.com/nar45t)

* A hotly contested tax on financial trades took a big step forward on Tuesday when European Union finance ministers allowed a vanguard of member states to proceed with the plan. (http://link.reuters.com/qar45t)

* The governor of Nebraska on Tuesday approved a revised route through the state for the Keystone XL pipeline, setting up a decision for President Obama that pipeline opponents say will be a crucial test of his intentions on climate change. (http://link.reuters.com/rar45t)

* Facing criticism for selling garments made at a Bangladesh factory where 112 workers died in a fire last November, Wal-Mart Stores Inc told its worldwide suppliers that it was adopting tougher rules on fire safety at its contractors and would have "zero tolerance" for suppliers that used unauthorized subcontractors.

Canada

THE GLOBE AND MAIL

* British Columbia community minister Bill Bennett said on Tuesday that the final regulatory pieces have fallen in place for a new liquefied natural gas plant to be built on a native reserve near Kitimat.

The massive LNG plant, a joint venture by Apache Canada Ltd and Chevron Canada Ltd, in cooperation with the Haisla First Nation, will process about 700 million cubic feet of gas per day, becoming a key link in the transportation chain between the province's northeast gas fields and off-shore markets.

* Cash-strapped Parks Canada is consulting the public on a long list of proposed fee hikes for the country's national parks and historic sites, pointing out that the rates have been frozen since 2008 and costs are on the rise.

But at the same time as fees are going up, many services are in decline following C$55 million in announced budget cuts and the resultant 600 jobs lost across the system.

Reports in the business section:

* Quebecor Inc may be the next Canadian regional cable company that will strike a deal to eventually sell some of its unused wireless spectrum, predicts a new analyst report.

* The Canadian federal government is ready to offer financial incentives as part of a pitch to get Volkswagen AG to locate some manufacturing facilities in the country.

Industry minister Christian Paradis said he urged senior Volkswagen executives to "look north" during meetings in Berlin this week, offering the prospect of tapping into Ottawa's newly-replenished C$250 million ($252 million) auto innovation fund.

NATIONAL POST

* Calgary energy firm Griffiths Energy International Inc (GEI) pleaded guilty to a bribery charge under the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act and faces fines in excess of C$10.3 million. The company admitted that it paid C$2 million to officials in Chad to get an advantage in two exploration blocks in the oil-rich African country.

* Manitoba chiefs meeting in Winnipeg this week are reportedly slated to consider pulling out of the Assembly of First Nations, highlighting the fragility of a national body that some say needs a reset of its own.

FINANCIAL POST

* Inmet Mining Corp made its long-awaited rejection of First Quantum Minerals Ltd's C$5.1 billion hostile bid on Tuesday.

The Toronto-based miner disputed First Quantum's assertion that it could realize enormous cost savings at Cobre Panama project by using its internal project team and hiring far fewer contractors.

* Supermarket chain Metro Inc will sell about half of its 25-year investment in convenience store operator Alimentation Couche-Tard to three Canadian banks for C$479 million.

The Montreal-based company said on Tuesday that it has agreed to sell 10 million Class B subordinate voting shares to BMO Nesbitt Burns, National Bank Financial and TD Securities for C$47.90 per share.

* Air Canada's Chief Executive Calin Rovinescu said he had faith that Boeing Co will be able to resolve the issues plaguing its 787 Dreamliner and believed in the benefits the plane will bring the country's largest carrier.

China

CHINA SECURITIES JOURNAL

--Analysts expect China's inflation to fall below 2 percent in January due to a high base from last year and as food prices have remained stable.

--China could cut its reserve requirement ratio twice at the beginning of this year with a reduction of 0.5 percent each time, the Bank of Communications said in its outlook report.

SHANGHAI SECURITIES NEWS

--Party Chief Xi Jinping took his campaign against corruption to the petty bureaucracy and minor infractions of low-level officials. Xi said it was just as important to go after junior officials as it was to tackle the seniors in the battle against graft. He called for a "disciplinary prevention and guarantee mechanism" to be set up to prevent corruption.

SHANGHAI DAILY

--Investors who lost money in a wealth management product sold in Hua Xia Bank have recouped their principal amount from the credit guarantee firm, a local TV station reported. Investors recently recovered their principal after Zhongfa Investment Guarantee Co stepped in to acquire the whole investment plan, Shanghai TV station said.

--The national security fund and foreign investors were the two biggest net buyers of Chinese mainland shares last year, the top securities regulator said.

CHINA DAILY (www.chinadaily.com.cn)

--China's State Development and Investment Corp (SDIC), the country's major investment holding company, saw profit grow 16 percent in the first eleven months of 2012 and plans to expand its overseas businesses, its chairman said. SDIC plans to raise the share of its overseas investment business, currently focused on fuel tank manufacturing, to 10 percent in the near future.

PEOPLE'S DAILY

--Turnover in China's land market fell 14 percent in 2012, the finance ministry said.

Fly On The Wall 7:00 am Market Snapshot

ANALYST RESEARCH

Upgrades

Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) upgraded to Neutral from Sell at Citigroup
Costco (COST) upgraded to Market Perform from Underperform at Bernstein
D.R. Horton (DHI) upgraded to Market Perform from Underperform at Raymond James
Honda (HMC) upgraded to Outperform from Neutral at Macquarie
IBM (IBM) upgraded to Hold from Sell at Societe Generale
KB Home (KBH) upgraded to Market Perform from Underperform at Raymond James
Middleby (MIDD) upgraded to Outperform from Neutral at RW Baird
Novartis (NVS) upgraded to Buy from Neutral at Citigroup
Platinum Group (PLG) upgraded to Outperform from Sector Perform at RBC Capital
Questar (STR) upgraded to Buy from Neutral at Citigroup
Spirit Realty (SRC) upgraded to Outperform from Market Perform at Raymond James
Unum Group (UNM) upgraded to Overweight from Equal Weight at Barclays
Verizon (VZ) upgraded to Buy from Hold at Canaccord

Downgrades

Ellie Mae (ELLI) downgraded to Market Perform from Outperform at William Blair
Ford (F) downgraded to Hold from Buy at Deutsche Bank
France Telecom (FTE) downgraded to Underperform from Market Perform at Bernstein
GrafTech (GTI) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Davenport
Grupo Aeroportuario (ASR) downgraded to Equal Weight at Morgan Stanley
Hartford Financial (HIG) downgraded to Market Perform from Outperform at FBR Capital
Incyte (INCY) downgraded to Underweight from Equal Weight at Morgan Stanley
NewBridge (NBBC) downgraded to Market Perform from Outperform at Keefe Bruyette
Synovus (SNV) downgraded to Market Perform from Outperform at Bernstein

Initiations

Allot Communications (ALLT) initiated with an Overweight at Barclays
Avago (AVGO) initiated with an Outperform at RBC Capital
Emulex (ELX) initiated with a Neutral at Piper Jaffray
FIS (FIS) initiated with a Buy at UBS
Fiserv (FISV) initiated with a Neutral at UBS
Global Eagle Acquisition (EAGL) initiated with an Outperform at Imperial Capital
Harbinger Group (HRG) initiated with a Buy at Jefferies
Mellanox (MLNX) initiated with an Overweight at Piper Jaffray
QLogic (QLGC) initiated with a Neutral at Piper Jaffray
Starz (STRZA) initiated with a Neutral at ISI Group
Workday (WDAY) initiated with a Neutral at RW Baird

HOT STOCKS

Allergan (AGN) to acquire MAP Pharmaceuticals (MAPP) for $25 per share
IBM (IBM) said good opportunities to drive profit growth, margin expansion in FY13
Said 1H13 growth rate will be “slightly higher” than 2H13
Texas Instruments (TXN) CEO Templeton said demand environment still weak
Praxair (PX) said backlog will contribute 4%-6% growth in 2013
Reported $2.6B project backlog at FY12-end
Heinz (HNZ) made $60M earn-out payment to China business
First Cash Financial (FCFS) to open 75-85 new stores in 2013, majority in Mexico
Gannett's (GCI) USA TODAY, American Media announced partnership
Choice Hotels (CHH) and Bluegreen (BXG) announced strategic alliance

EARNINGS

Companies that beat consensus earnings expectations last night and today include:
Air Products (APD), Wellpoint (WLP), Novartis (NVS), Texas Instruments (TXN), International Game (IGT), AMD (AMD), IBM (IBM), Celestica (CLS), Norfolk Southern (NSC), CA Technologies (CA), Google (GOOG), Cree (CREE)

Companies that missed consensus earnings expectations include:
Textron (TXT), Southwest Bancorp (OKSB), Praxair (PX), Baker Hughes (BHI), Woodward (WWD), Total System (TSS)

NEWSPAPERS/WEBSITES

The estimated $1.7T that American companies say they have indefinitely invested overseas is actually sitting right here at home. Some companies, including Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and EMC Corp. (EMC), keep over three-quarters of the cash owned by their foreign subsidiaries at U.S. banks, held in U.S. dollars or parked in U.S. government and corporate securities, sources say, the Wall Street Journal reports
U.K. Prime Minister Cameron today pledged to hold a referendum on whether the country should remain a member of the EU within two and a half years of the next general election, due in 2015, the Wall Street Journal reports
Fewer investors are taking corporate America to court for fraud as the number of new federal securities fraud lawsuits seeking class-action status fell to a seven year low in 2012, according to a study by Stanford Law School and Cornerstone Research, Reuters reports
In 2007, the FAA cleared Boeing's (BA) use of a highly flammable battery in the 787 Dreamliner, deciding it was safe to let the lithium-ion battery burn out if it caught fire mid-air as long as the flames were contained, and smoke and fumes vented properly, according to documents reviewed by Reuters.That decision is now coming under scrutiny, Reuters reports
Clients of the largest U.S. banks withdrew funds this month at the fastest weekly pace since the September 11 attacks as a deposit-insurance program ended and customers tapped into a year-end cash hoard. Net withdrawals at the 25 largest U.S. banks totaled $114.1B in the week ended January 9, pushing deposits down to $5.37T, according to Federal Reserve data, Bloomberg reports
Global investors say the state of the U.S. government’s finances is the greatest risk to the world economy and nearly 50% are curbing their investments in response to continuing budget battles, according to a Bloomberg poll

SYNDICATE

Invesco Mortgage (IVR) files to sell 15M shares of common stock
KB Home (KBH) files to sell $100M in common stock; $150M in convertible senior notes
Numerex (NMRX) files to sell common stock
Senior Housing (SNH) files to sell 8M shares of common stock

Your rating: None

Overnight Sentiment: Cautiously Confident With IBM, GOOG Down; AAPL Next

With the market basking in glow of good earnings results yesterday, mostly out of IBM, and to a lesser extent GOOG, which missed on the top line but beat on EPS squeezing some recent inbound shorts, S&P500 futures have yet to post a solid move to the upside. Perhaps a big reason for this is the recent recoupling of risk based on not one but two carry signals: the first is the well-known EURUSD pair, while the second is the recent entrant, the USDJPY, and it is the latter that continues to see a cover of the massive short interest accumulated over the recent 1000 pip move higher on what upon ongoing reflection has been a disappointing announcement out of the BOJ. Needless to say, the Nikkei whose recent surge higher was all due to currency weakness has tumbled overnight despite corporate fundamentals, if not economic data, which continues to post substantially subpar prints.

Europe continues to plough along in limbo with Ken Rogoff telling Bloomberg ealier that the ECB has not solved any of the continent's "fundamental problems." Sure enough, the Bank of Spain announced that Spanish GDP shrunk 1.7% in 2012.

It is a quiet day macroeconomically, with the biggest event today being Apple's results after the closing bell in the US after what, as Deutsche Bank describes, has been a fascinating few months for the company with the stock down 28% from its peak of $702.

Deutsche's Jim Reid recounts the balance of the overnight action:

With all the recent excitement about central banks and the brewing discussions about currency wars, the BoE governor made some interesting remarks last night. He indicated that it would be appropriate to review the BoE’s current inflation targeting regime but warned against abandoning its 2% inflation target in favour of pursuing growth targets - a move suggested by King’s successor, Mark Carney. Speaking in Ireland, King said that high inflation “can be indulged if the costs fall on the dreamers; when the costs fall on others, it is unacceptable”. It looks like such debates are going to continue in 2013. In the near-term the ECB are likely to be the least interventionalist of the major central banks and as such the Euro looks set to edge higher. Indeed with some pre-payments of LTRO money, it could be said that the ECB is slowly exiting. Will this subtle tightening of policy cause problems for the Euro economy over the next few quarters? Our base case is that by the middle of the year it will.

Elsewhere, in Israel, voters delivered a third term to Benjamin Netanyahu overnight, but his Likud party returns with a weaker mandate than four years ago. Early exit polls indicate the combined Likud and Yisrael Beitenu parties captured just 33 seats in the 120-seat Knesset. This was down from pre-election polls projecting 37 seats, and is down from 42 in the outgoing parliament (Bloomberg). Likud remains the biggest party but the centrist Yesh Atuid party managed to secure around 18 seats, becoming the second largest political force. Mr Netanyahu is widely expected to be assigned the task of pulling together 61-seat coalition, potentially needing the support of centrist parties to form a majority. With geopolitical risk bubbling under the surface in the Middle East these are important events to watch.

Returning to markets the S&P500 closed with a gain of 0.44% yesterday, after rallying 0.8% from the morning lows seen after a weaker-than-expected existing home sales print.

Monday’s headline that Republican leaders will bring a House vote on extending the debt ceiling by 4 months helped risk assets retrace some of the early losses. The White House responded that it would not block the bill should it manage to pass Congress although Obama remains in favour of seeking a longer-term debt ceiling solution. Overnight, House Speak John Boehner was quoted as saying that it was time for the House to “come to a plan that will in fact balance the budget over the next 10 years”. The late rally drove S&P futures to new five year highs, helped by a number of positive earnings reports from the likes of AMD, IBM and Google.

Turning to overnight markets and Japanese assets continue to trade heavily following yesterday’s BoJ meeting. The Nikkei is down 1.3% as we type, underperforming other Asian equities which are down about two-tenths to half a percent. The concerns are focusing on the fact that the new BoJ measures don't come into effect until January 2014 and that there is no set date to attain the 2% inflation target. The yen is up 0.4% against the dollar overnight (88.35), adding to gains of 1% yesterday. In light of the recent moves, Japan’s economy minister said that investors “don’t fully appreciate the significance of Tuesday’s monetary policy decision”. Outside of Japan, the Thai finance minister asked the central bank to “take care” of the Baht’s recent strength. He joins a growing chorus of other Asian officials including the Korean finance minister, who have expressed concern over local currency appreciation. Elsewhere, the AUD is 0.3% weaker against the USD following a lower than expected inflation print for November (+0.2% vs +0.4% expected).

In more credit specific issues, I've been away for a couple of days but I wanted to highlight our latest weekly where we looked at the basis between the single-name CDS and cash market. Over the course of the last 12 months or so, and specifically since the middle of last year we have seen a notable swing in the average level of the CDS-cash basis. In fact the majority of EUR corporate bonds from European issuers are now trading with a positive basis.

Looking at the day’s calendar, David Cameron’s speech at 8am (London time) on the future of Britain’s relationship with the EU will be closely watched. Overnight headlines suggest that the PM will propose a referendum sometime after the next election that will give voters a “very simple in or out choice” (BBC). In the US, the House of Reps will meet at 9am (2pm London) to consider the Republican debt ceiling bill that has been rather subtlety named the “No Budget, No Pay Act of 2013”.

In terms of data, French business confidence, Eurozone consumer confidence and BoE minutes are the key data points during the European timezone. Weekly mortgage applications and the FHFA house price reading for November are scheduled in the US. The IMF releases its World Economic Outlook update today and the Bank of Canada’s rate announcement is also scheduled for today.

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Qatar, Sponsor of Islamist Political Movements, Major Ally of America

persiangulf

Qatar and U.S. : Collusion or Conflict of Interests

In his inaugural address on January 21, U.S. President Barak Obama made the historic announcement that “a decade of war is ending” and declared his country’s determination to “show the courage to try and resolve our differences with other nations peacefully,” but his message will remain words that have yet to be translated into deeds and has yet to reach some of the U.S. closest allies in the Middle East who are still beating the drums of war, like Israel against Iran and Qatar against Syria.

In view of the level of “coordination” and “cooperation” since bilateral diplomatic relations were established in 1972 between the U.S. and Qatar , and the concentration of U.S. military power on this tiny peninsula, it seems impossible that Qatar could move independently apart, in parallel with, away or on a collision course with the U.S. strategic and regional plans.

According to the US State department’s online fact sheet, “bilateral relations are strong,” both countries are “coordinating” diplomatically and “cooperating” on regional security, have a “defense pact,” “ Qatar hosts CENTCOM Forward Headquarters,” and supports NATO and U.S. regional “military operations. Qatar is also an active participant in the U.S. – led efforts to set up an integrated missile defense network in the Gulf region. Moreover, it hosts the U.S. Combined Air Operations Center and three American military bases namely Al Udeid Air Base, Assaliyah Army Base and Doha International Air Base, which are manned by approximately 5,000 U.S. forces.

Qatar, which is bound by such a most intimate and closest alliance with the United States , has recently developed into the major sponsor of Islamist political movements. Qatar appears now to be the major sponsor of the international organization of the Muslim Brotherhood, which, reportedly, disbanded in Qatar in 1999 because it stopped to view the ruling family as an adversary.

The Qatar –Brotherhood marriage of convenience has created the natural incubator of Islamist armed fundamentalists against whom the U.S. , since September 11, 2001, has been leading what is labeled as the “global war on terrorism.”

The war in the African nation Mali offers the latest example on how the U.S. and Qatar , seemingly, go on two separate ways. Whereas US Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, was in London on January 18 “commending” the French “leadership of the international effort” in Mali to which his country was pledging logistical, transportation and intelligence support, Qatar appeared to risk its special ties with France, which peaked during the NATO – led war on Libya, and to distrust the U.S. and French judgment.

On January 15, Qatari Prime and Foreign Minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem al-Thani, told reporters he did not believe “power will solve the problem,” advised instead that this problem be “discussed” among the “neighboring countries, the African Union and the (U.N.) Security Council,” and joined the Doha – based ideologue for the Muslim Brotherhood and their Qatari sponsors, Yusuf Abdullah al – Qaradawi — the head of the International Union of Muslim Scholars who was refused entry visa to U.K. in 2008 and to France last year – in calling for “dialogue,” “reconciliation” and “peaceful solution” instead of “military intervention.”

In a relatively older example, according to WikiLeaks , Somalia ’s former president in 2009, Sharif Ahmed, told a U.S. diplomat that Qatar was channeling financial assistance to the al-Qaeda – linked Shabab al-Mujahideen, which the U.S. listed as “terrorist.”

In Syria, for another example, the Brotherhood is the leading “fighting” force against the ruling regime and in alliance with and a culprit in the atrocities of the terrorist bombings of the al-Qaeda – linked Al-Nusra Front, designated by the United States as a terrorist organization last December; while the Brotherhood – led and U.S. and Qatar – sponsored Syrian opposition publicly protested the U.S. designation, the silence of Qatar on the matter could only be interpreted as in support of the protest against the U.S. decision.

Recently, Qatar has, for another example, replaced Syria , which has been on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism since 1979, as the sponsor of Hamas, whose leadership relocated from Damascus to Doha , which the U.S. lists as a “terrorist” group, and which publicly admits being the Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood.

Qatar, in all these examples, seems positioning itself to be qualified as a mediator, with the U.S. blessing, trying to achieve by the country’s financial leverage what the U.S. could not achieve militarily, or could achieve but with a much more expensive cost in money and souls.

In the Mali case, the Qatari PM Sheikh Hamad went on record to declare this ambition: “We will be a part of the solution, (but) not the sole mediator,” he said. The U.S. blessing could not be more explicit than President Obama’s approval of opening the Afghani Taliban office in Doha “to facilitate” a “negotiated peace in Afghanistan ,” according to the Qatari Foreign Ministry on January 16.

However, a unilateral Qatari mediation failed in Yemen, a Qatar – led Arab mediation in Syria has similarly proved a failure two years on the Syrian crisis, the “Doha Declaration” to reconcile Palestinian rival factions is still a paper achievement, the Qatari mediation in Sudan’s Darfur crisis has yet to deliver, the Qatari “mediation” in Libya was condemned as intervention in the country’s internal affairs by the most prominent among the post – Gaddafi leaders, and in post – “Arab Spring” Egypt Qatar dropped its early mediation efforts to align itself publicly to the ruling Brotherhood. But in spite of these failures, Qatar ’s “mediation” efforts were successful in serving the strategy of its U.S. “ally.”

Hence the U.S. blessing. The Soufan Group’s intelligence analysts on last December 10 concluded that “Qatar continues to prove itself to be a pivotal U.S. ally, … Qatar is often able to implement shared U.S.-Qatari objectives that Washington is unable or unwilling to undertake itself.

The first term Obama administration, under the pressure of “fiscal austerity,” blessed the Qatari funding of arming anti – Gaddafi Islamists in Libya, closed its eyes to Qatar’s shipment of Gaddafi’s military arsenal to Syrian and non – Syrian Islamists fighting the regime in Syria, “understood” the visit of Qatar’s Emir to Gaza last October as “a humanitarian mission,” and recently approved to arm the Qatar – backed and Brotherhood – led Egypt with 20 F-16 fighter jets and 200 M1A1 Abrams tanks.

This contradiction raises the question about whether this is a U.S. – Qatari mutual collusion or it is really a conflict of interests; the Obama administration during his second term has to draw the line which would give an explicit answer.

Seemingly nowadays, Doha and Washington do not see eye to eye on Islamic and Islamist movements, but on the battle grounds of the “war on terror” both capitals could hardly argue that in practice their active roles are not coordinated and do not complement each other.

Drawing on the historical experience of an Iranian similar “religious” approach, but on a rival “Shiite” sectarian basis, this Qatari “Sunni” Islamist” connection will inevitably fuel sectarian polarization in the region, regional instability, violence and civil wars.

Given the U.S. – Qatar alliance, the Qatari Islamist connection threatens to embroil the U.S. in more regional strife, or at least to hold the U.S. responsible for the resulting strife, and would sustain a deep – seated regional anti – Americanism, which in turn has become another incubator of extremism and terrorism and which is exacerbated by the past “decade of war,” which President Obama in his inaugural address promised to “end.”

Traditionally, Qatar, which stands in the eye of the storm in the very critical geopolitical volatile Gulf region, the theatre of three major wars during the last three decades, did its best to maintain a critical and fragile balance between the two major powers which determine its survival, namely the decades – old U.S. military presence in the Gulf and the rising regional power of Iran.

In 1992 it signed a comprehensive bilateral defense pact with the United States and in 2010 it signed a military defense agreement with Iran, which explains its warming up to closer ties with the Iran – supported Islamic anti – Israel resistance movements of the Hezbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Israeli – occupied Palestinian territories and explains as well Qatar’s “honey moon” with Iran’s ally in Syria.

However, since the eruption of the bloody Syrian crisis two years ago, the Qatari opening up to regional pro – Iran state and non-state powers was exposed as merely a tactical maneuver to lure such powers away from Iran. In the Syrian and Hezbullah cases, the failure of this tactic has led Qatar to embark on a collision course with both Syria and Iran, which are backed by Russia and China, and is leading the country to a U-turn shift away from its long maintained regional balancing act, a shift that Doha seems unaware of its threat to its very survival under the pressure of the international and regional conflicting interests as bloodily exposed in the Syrian crisis.

During the rise of the massive Pan-Arab, nationalist, socialist and democratic movements in the Arab world early in the second half of the twentieth century, the conservative authoritarian Arab monarchies adopted the Brotherhood, other Islamists and Islamic political ideology and used them against those movements to survive as allies of the United States, which in turn used both, spearheaded by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, against the former Soviet Union and the communist ideology, to their detriment after the collapse of the bipolar world order.

However history seems to repeat itself as the U.S. – backed Arab monarchies, spearheaded by Qatar, are resorting to their old tactic of exploiting the Islamist ideology to undermine and preempt an Arab anti – authoritarian revolution for the rule of law, civil society, democratic institutions and social and economic justice in Arab countries on the periphery of their U.S. protected bastion in the Arabian peninsula, but they seem unaware they are opening a Pandora’s box that would unleash a backlash in comparison to which al – Qaeda’s fall back on the U.S. will prove a minor precedent.

 Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Bir Zeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.

* nassernicola@ymail.com

Mali: The Fastest Blowback Yet in This Disastrous War on Terror

To listen to David Cameron's rhetoric this week, it could be 2001 all over again. Eleven years into the war on terror, it might have been Tony Blair speaking after 9/11. As the bloody siege of the part BP-operated In Amenas gas plant in Algeria came to an end, the British prime minister claimed, like George Bush and Blair before him, that the country faced an "existential" and "global threat" to "our interests and way of life".Diabaly, 21 January 2013. ‘France is the last country to sort out Mali's problems, having created quite a few of them in the first place.' (Photograph: Arnaud Roin/ECPAD/EPA)

While British RAF aircraft backed French military intervention against Islamist rebels in Mali, and troops were reported to be on alert for deployment to the west African state, Cameron promised that a "generational struggle" would be pursued with "iron resolve". The fight over the new front in the terror war in North Africa and the Sahel region, he warned, could go on for decades.

So in austerity-blighted Britain, just as thousands of soldiers are being made redundant, while Barack Obama has declared that "a decade of war is now ending", armed intervention is being ratcheted up in yet another part of the Muslim world. Of course, it's French troops in action this time. But even in Britain the talk is of escalating drone attacks and special forces, and Cameron has refused to rule out troops on the ground.

You'd think the war on terror had been a huge success, the way the western powers keep at it, Groundhog Day-style. In reality, it has been a disastrous failure, even in its own terms – which is why the Obama administration felt it had to change its name to "overseas contingency operations", until US defence secretary Leon Panetta revived the old title this week.

Instead of fighting terror, it has fuelled it everywhere it's been unleashed: from Afghanistan to Pakistan, from Iraq to Yemen, spreading it from Osama bin Laden's Afghan lairs eastwards to central Asia and westwards to North Africa – as US, British and other western forces have invaded, bombed, tortured and kidnapped their way across the Arab and Muslim world for over a decade.

So a violent jihadist movement that grew out of western intervention, occupation and support for dictatorship was countered with more of the same. And the law of unintended consequences has meanwhile been played out in spectacular fashion: from the original incubation of al-Qaida in the mujahideen war against the Soviet Union, to the spread of terror from western-occupied Afghanistan to Pakistan, to the strategic boost to Iran delivered by the US-British invasion of Iraq.

When it came to Libya, the blowback was much faster – and Mali took the impact. Nato's intervention in Libya's civil war nearly two years ago escalated the killing and ethnic cleansing, and played the decisive role in the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime. In the ensuing maelstrom, Tuareg people who had fought for Gaddafi went home to Mali and weapons caches flooded over the border.

Within a couple of months this had tipped longstanding demands for self-determination into armed rebellion – and then the takeover of northern Mali by Islamist fighters, some linked to al-Qaida. Foreign secretary William Hague acknowledged this week that Nato's Libyan intervention had "contributed" to Mali's war, but claimed the problem would have been worse without it.

In fact, the spillover might have been contained if the western powers had supported a negotiated settlement in Libya, just as all-out war in Mali might have been avoided if the Malian government's French and US sponsors had backed a political instead of a military solution to the country's divisions.

The past decade has demonstrated beyond doubt that such interventions don't solve crises, let alone deal with the causes of terrorism, but deepen them and generate new conflicts.

French intervention in Mali has now produced the fastest blowback yet in the war on terror. The groups that seized the In Imenas gas plant last week – reportedly with weapons supplied to Libya by France and Britain – insisted their action was taken in response to France's operation, Algeria's decision to open its airspace to the French and western looting of the country's natural resources.

It may well be that the attack had in fact been planned for months. And the Algerian government has its own history of bloody conflict with Islamist movements. But it clearly can't be separated from the growing western involvement across the region.

France is in any case the last country to sort out Mali's problems, having created quite a few of them in the first place as the former colonial power, including the legacy of ethnic schism within artificial borders – as Britain did elsewhere. The French may have been invited in by the Malian government. But it's a government brought to power by military coup last year, not one elected by Malians – and whose troops are now trading atrocities and human rights abuses with the rebels.

Only a political settlement, guaranteed by regional African forces, can end the conflict. Meanwhile, French president François Hollande says his country will be in Mali as long as it takes to "defeat terrorism in that part of Africa". All the experience of the past decade suggests that could be indefinitely – as western intervention is likely to boost jihadist recruitment and turn groups with a regional focus towards western targets.

All this is anyway about a good deal more than terrorism. Underlying the growing western military involvement in Africa – from the spread of American bases under the US Africa Command to France's resumption of its post-colonial habit of routine armed intervention – is a struggle for resources and strategic control, in the face of China's expanding economic role in the continent. In north and west Africa, that's not just about oil and gas, but also uranium in countries like Niger – and Mali. Terrorism has long since become a catch-all cover for legitimising aggressive war.

The idea that jihadists in Mali, or Somalia for that matter, pose an existential threat to Britain, France, the US or the wider world is utter nonsense. But the opening of a new front in the war on terror in north Africa and the Sahel, accompanied by another murderous drone campaign, is a potential disaster for the region and risks a new blowback beyond it.

The past decade has demonstrated beyond doubt that such interventions don't solve crises, let alone deal with the causes of terrorism, but deepen them and generate new conflicts. More military intervention will bolster authoritarian regimes – and its rhetoric further poison community relations in the intervening states. It seems the price has to be paid over and over again.

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited

Seumas Milne

Seumas Milne is a Guardian columnist and associate editor. His most recent book is The Revenge of History: The Battle for the 21st Century. His previous books include, The Enemy Within and Beyond the Casino Economy (co-authored with Nicholas Costello). He tweets @SeumasMilne

Global Warming is a Domestic Crisis

As President Obama made clear in his inaugural address Monday, failing to confront the threat of climate change in his second term would be a betrayal of future generations. “Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science,” Obama said, “but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought and more powerful storms.” Actually, there are some who can avoid fires, drought and storms, but most of them voted for Mitt Romney.Brian Hajeski, 41, of Brick, N.J., reacts after looking at debris of a home that washed up on to the Mantoloking Bridge the morning after superstorm Sandy rolled through. (Photo: AP/Julio Cortez)

At a time of continued unemployment and Republican assaults on workers’ rights, the climate crisis may not seem like a pressing bread and butter concern. However it is vital for the president and his allies in Congress to remember that those Americans most defenseless against extreme weather and natural disasters form the backbone of the Democratic Party.

That is the only conclusion one can draw from the draft of a new federal study on global warming’s growing impact on the United States. Those who stand for workers and the middle class, and for the rights of minorities, women and the underprivileged in our increasingly unequal society, are facing yet another epochal struggle. The carbon dioxide being spewed into the atmosphere by the coal, oil and gas corporations threatens the well-being of the 99 percent on a whole range of new fronts.

Climate change is provoking more and more drastic weather events. Residents along coastal regions are at risk both from more violent storms and from a projected 3- to 4-foot sea level rise over the next eight decades. The enormous storm surge caused by Hurricane Sandy is an example of these new threats. Hurricanes require warm water to remain active, and Sandy fed off of high Atlantic temperatures in waters that have historically been much colder.

The draft National Climate Assessment notes that people and neighborhoods along the coast were hardest hit, adding, “Many low-to-moderate income residents live in these areas and suffered the damage or loss of their homes, leaving tens of thousands of people displaced or homeless.” We saw with Katrina in New Orleans, as well, how the least well-off are often shunted to low-lying and more vulnerable land. Most of New Orleans will be gone within a century if we go on producing carbon dioxide at our current rate.

The elderly and medical patients faced special difficulties as a result of the storm surge, including the loss of electricity and other services, since they could not as easily flee. The assessment points out that with Sandy, “the elderly and infirm were highly vulnerable, especially those living in the coastal evacuation zone and those on upper floors of apartment buildings left without elevator service.” The rising temperatures and heat waves that global warming is bringing to the U.S. are especially risky for the elderly.

The $300 billion a year in agricultural crops and livestock produced by the United States will be adversely affected by climate change within 30 years, potentially increasing the cost of food and hurting farmworkers. People will see rising food prices if drought and other effects of climate change reduce our agricultural productivity through decreased rainfall and more insect infestations. The annual yield will also fluctuate more, causing prices to spike unpredictably some years.

At the moment, Americans spend only about 6 percent of their income on food, less than most Europeans and far less than is typical in the global south. Workers, the poor and everyone on a budget benefit from our relatively inexpensive groceries, but that boon is likely to change. Already more than one in six Americans is food insecure (i.e., they are sometimes unable to buy enough food to avoid hunger, and are just barely avoiding a nutritional crisis). Their situation will deteriorate further in coming years because of the damage climate change will do to crop yields.

Severe weather particularly endangers city dwellers, because municipal services are interconnected. Electricity is needed to pump water and to run some transportation, including elevators. Roads easily flood, making it difficult to flee rising waters. Oil refineries and pipelines are readily taken offline, producing fuel shortages that also hurt the ability of victims to leave disaster areas. City services, then, can be knocked out together in what scientists call a “cascade” (by which they mean that one disaster causes another, which causes another, on down the line).

About 245 million Americans now live in cities, and the vast majority of them are workers. The homeowners among them most often claim their residence as their major asset. Those homes are threatened by the harsh weather that climate change is generating.

The transportation networks on which people depend to get to work, moreover, could be degraded by the effects of climate change. First of all, a lot of damage could be done to the $4 trillion American transportation infrastructure by warming. Expansion joints on bridges suffer more stress when hot, and rail tracks buckle more often. In the Northern states, there will be less snow and more rain, and spring deluges will take out more bridges than slow-melting snow typically does. The asphalt in roads deteriorates faster in the heat, and drought in the Southeast and Southwest will cause slopes to be unstable and contribute to the pavement buckling. As for workers who live along the Gulf of Mexico, it will be harder to get around. According to the draft report on transportation, “In total, 24% of interstate highway miles and 28% of secondary road miles in the Gulf Coast region are at elevations below 4 feet.” (Sea levels will rise at least 4 feet over the coming 80 years).

And, well, it will be hot. Imagine being a construction worker in Houston where a heat wave is not 107 degrees, but 113. People whose jobs keep them outside in the summer may have to work more hours in the evenings and very early mornings, and will be at greater risk for dehydration, heat stroke and heart attack.

Labor activists and environmentalists need to band together to fight the effects of climate change, which will function as an extra tax on workers. The rich have the resources to get to the high ground. They can afford imported food, and will replace crumbling public infrastructure with toll roads and gated communities. It is the workers and the middle class who will bear the brunt of climate change disasters.

Workers and labor unions can take their own stand by divesting from coal, gas and oil companies in their pension funds, and can lobby for the closing of coal plants and a rapid move to wind and solar energy. The House of Representatives is useless, but municipal and state governments can accomplish a lot with their own energy projects and with tax rebates. Officials often will not offer them, however, unless pressured to do so. Not only unions, but organizations representing women and minorities have a stake in preventing these calamities. There are also expanding opportunities for crowdsourcing the funding of solar and wind projects. Solar panels are increasingly affordable and should be on every roof in the United States, and it is the people who can make that happen.

If carbon emissions are not radically reduced by 2020, we will be doomed to some of the worst effects of the intensified greenhouse gases. President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency has finally enforced mercury pollution limits at coal plants, and is forcing substantial numbers of them to close. But all of them have to be shut in eight years if we are to avoid calamities, and it is not Obama’s instinct to pursue radical change. Nor has he been good about standing in the way of hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”), a method of extracting natural gas that emits a great deal of methane. The president’s constituencies have to hold him to his inaugural promises and let him know that dealing with CO2 emissions and climate change is among their highest priorities for his second term.

© 2012 TruthDig.com

Juan Cole

Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His latest book, Engaging the Muslim World, is just out in a revised paperback edition from Palgrave Macmillan. He is also the author of Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). He has appeared widely on television, radio and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal articles. His weblog on the contemporary Middle East is Informed Comment.

A Letter I Wish Progressive Groups Would Send to Their Members

With President Obama’s second term underway and huge decisions looming on Capitol Hill, consider this statement from Howard Zinn: “When a social movement adopts the compromises of legislators, it has forgotten its role, which is to push and challenge the politicians, not to fall in meekly behind them.”

A Letter I Wish Progressive Groups Would Send to Their Members

Dear Progressives,

With President Obama’s second term underway and huge decisions looming on Capitol Hill, consider this statement from Howard Zinn: “When a social movement adopts the compromises of legislators, it has forgotten its role, which is to push and challenge the politicians, not to fall in meekly behind them.”“When a social movement adopts the compromises of legislators, it has forgotten its role, which is to push and challenge the politicians, not to fall in meekly behind them.” (Photo: HowardZinn.org)

With so much at stake, we can’t afford to forget our role. For starters, it must include public clarity.

Let’s face it: despite often nice-sounding rhetoric from the president, this administration has continued with a wide range of policies antithetical to progressive values.

Corporate power, climate change and perpetual war are running amok while civil liberties and economic fairness take a beating. President Obama has even put Social Security and Medicare on the table for cuts.

Last fall, the vast majority of progressives voted for Obama to prevent the presidency from going to a Republican Party replete with racism, misogyny, anti-gay bigotry and xenophobia. Defeating the right wing was cause for celebration. And now is the time to fight for genuine progressive policies.

But let’s be real about our current situation. Obama has led the Democratic Party -- including, at the end of the legislative day, almost every Democrat on Capitol Hill -- deeper into an abyss of corporate-driven austerity, huge military outlays, normalization of civil-liberties abuses and absence of significant action on climate change. Leverage from the Oval Office is acting as a brake on many -- in Congress and in progressive constituency groups -- who would prefer to be moving legislation in a progressive direction.

Hopefully we’ve learned by now that progressive oratory is no substitute for progressive policies. The soaring rhetoric in Obama’s inaugural address this week offered inspiring words about a compassionate society where everyone is respected and we look out for each other. Unfortunately and routinely, the president’s lofty words have allowed him to slide by many progressives despite policies that often amount to a modern version of “social liberalism, fiscal conservatism.”

The New York Times headline over its front-page coverage, “Obama Offers a Liberal Vision in Inaugural Address,” served up the current presidential recipe: a spoonful of rhetorical sugar to help the worsening austerity go down. But no amount of verbal sweetness can make up for assorted policies aligned with Wall Street and the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us.

“At their inaugurals,” independent journalist I.F. Stone noted long ago, our presidents “make us the dupes of our hopes.”

Unlike four years ago, Obama has a presidential record -- and its contrasts with Monday’s oratorical performance are stark. A president seeking minimally fair economic policies, for instance, would not compound the disaster of four years of Timothy Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury by replacing him with Jack Lew -- arguably even more of a corporate flack.

Superficial “access” has scant impact. The kind of empowered access we need will come from mobilizing grassroots power.

On foreign policy, it was notably disingenuous for Obama to proclaim in his second inaugural speech that “enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war” -- minutes after completing a first term when his administration launched more than 20,000 air strikes, sharply escalated the use of weaponized drones and did so much else to make war perpetual.

Meanwhile, the media hype on the inaugural speech’s passage about climate change has lacked any indication that the White House is ready to push for steps commensurate with the magnitude of the real climate crisis.

The founder of the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network, Daphne Wysham, points out that the inaugural words “will be meaningless unless a) the Obama administration rejects the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline; b) Obama selects a new EPA administrator who is willing to take action under the Clean Air Act to rein in CO2 emissions from all sources; c) he stops pushing for dangerous energy development deep offshore in the Gulf, in the Arctic and via continued fracking for oil and gas; d) he pursues a renewable energy standard for the entire country; and e) he directs our publicly financed development banks and export credit agencies to get out of fossil fuels entirely.”

The leadership we need is certainly not coming from the White House or Congress. “A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus,” Martin Luther King Jr. observed. The leadership we need has to come, first and foremost, from us.

Some members of Congress -- maybe dozens -- have shown commitment to a progressive agenda, and a larger number claim a progressive mantle. In any event, their role is not our role. They adhere to dotted lines that we should cross. They engage in Hill-speak euphemisms that we should bypass. Routinely, they decline to directly confront wrong-headed Obama administration policies. And we must confront those policies.

If certain members of Congress resent being pushed by progressives to challenge the White House, they lack an appreciation for the crucial potential of grassroots social movements. On the other hand, those in Congress who “get” progressive social change will appreciate our efforts to push them and their colleagues to stand progressive ground.

When we’re mere supplicants to members of Congress, the doors that open on Capitol Hill won’t lead very much of anywhere. Superficial “access” has scant impact. The kind of empowered access we need will come from mobilizing grassroots power.

We need to show that we’ll back up members of Congress who are intrepid for our values -- and we can defeat others, including self-described “progressives,” who aren’t. Building electoral muscle should be part of building a progressive movement.

We’re in this for the long haul, but we’re not willing to mimic the verbiage or echo the silences from members of Congress who fail to challenge egregious realities of this administration’s policies. As Howard Zinn said, our role is to challenge, not fall in line.

Norman Solomon

Norman Solomon is founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and co-founder of RootsAction.org. He co-chairs the national Healthcare Not Warfare campaign organized by Progressive Democrats of America. His books includeWar Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” and "Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State".

She’s Not The First: Nine Other Lip Sync Fails

The revelations that Beyoncé lip synced her performance of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' at President Obama's inauguration on Monday left us all shocked, but let's be honest, she's hardly the first popstar to rely on the use of a backing track.

beyonce obama

With her performances on 'The X Factor' and 'The Voice', Cheryl Cole has been a repeat offender, and who could forget when her backing track failed on 'Stand Up To Cancer' last year, exposing her as a mimer?

And then there is the Queen of mime, Britney Spears, who has been known to only sing one song live on her tours before now.

But the difference between them and Beyoncé is that we know the Destiny's Child singer can actually sing live, which makes her decision to lip sync at Obama's swearing in particularly odd. She's not even got the excuse of having to perform an energetic dance routine to defend herself with.

But credit where credit is due, she is blinking good at miming - we were totally fooled. This lot could learn a lot from her...

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  • Cheryl Cole

    We always wondered how Cheryl managed to sing so perfectly whilst throwing some serious shapes to her No.1 single 'Call My Name'. Now, thanks to her performance on 'Stand Up To Cancer', we know.

  • Ashlee Simpson

    Jessica Simpson's little sis, Ashlee, didn't even pretend to mime along to her hit 'Pieces Of Me' on Saturday Night Live back in 2004. She just did it a little jig instead to try and distract us from the fact that she was going to mime along to her single. Yeah, that's do it, Ash.

  • Britney Spears

    Britney made hardly any attempt to hide the fact she was miming when she appeared on 'The X Factor' to perform 'Womanizer' in 2010. As if her out-of-time lip movements weren't enough, Dermot O'Learly gave the game away by handing Brit a mic to talk into after the performance. D'oh!

  • Mariah Carey

    Mariah forgot to put her mic to her mouth in time for her big screechy note when she appearing on 'Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway'. Ooops!

  • All About Eve

    We can't remember any of All About Eve's songs but we DO remember sitting down to watch Top of the Pops back in the day and seeing Julianne Regan and Tim Bricheno sitting there like lemons as their single 'Martha's Harbour' played but they failed to hear it. Despite the epic live telly fail, the single climbed the charts for the next two weeks!

  • Lindsay Lohan

    If the acting work ever dries up for Li-Lo (which can't be that far off) you'd think she'd have her music *ahem* career to fall back on but she's going to need to brush up on her lip-synching skills first.

  • Cheryl Cole (again)

    She may have prepared a backing track with live vocals recorded over the top, but Cheryl was fooling no one when she performed 'Fight For This Love' on 'The X Factor' in 2010.

  • Katy Perry

    Katy Perry: Singer, songwriter, dancer... recorder player? Errrm, no.

  • The 'X Factor' contestants

    The 'X Factor' contestants have long made us cringe with their dreadful mimed group performances, but this particular rendition from 2011 had our toes extra curled.

  • Beyonce

    Beyonce fooled us all with her rendition of 'The Star Spangled Banner' at President Obama's inauguration. And she would have got away with it if it wasn't for some pesky kids who outed her as having mimed.

Mehdi’s Morning Memo: The London Speech

The ten things you need to know on Wednesday 23rd January 2013...

1) THE LONDON SPEECH

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Nope, it's David Cameron's long-awaited, much-anticipated, repeatedly-delayed, 'tantric' speech on Britain's relationship with the European Union. You only need to know two words to understand the main message: "in" and "out".

From the Times splash:

"Voters will have the chance to leave the European Union before the end of 2017, David Cameron will pledge today as he sets Britain on course for a momentous referendum.

"The Prime Minister will commit himself to winning an 'in-out' vote even if the campaign puts him at odds with much of his party or even if the EU remains largely unreformed. But he will seek to give the referendum unstoppable momentum by publishing a draft Bill before 2015 and setting a deadline of November 2017 before which it must be held.

"'It is time for the British people to have their say,' he will declare."

The prime minister is on his feet right now at Bloomberg's HQ in the City of London telling his audience why they shouldn't vote Ukip. Well, not quite.

But to pretend this speech is anything other than an attempt to head off Nigel Farage's gang, and see off the internal threat to his leadership from his eurosceptic backbenchers, is either naive or disingenuous. Remember: Cameron never wanted - or planned - to give this speech and, thanks to a combination of Al Qaeda and Angela Merkel, had to keep putting it off.

To be fair, though, as the Guardian's Patrick Wintour acknowledges: "The prime minister's call for an in-out referendum is a moment of truth for a pragmatic man assumed to be instinctively opposed to political risk."

The morning papers almost all lead on the PM's 'London speech' (why didn't he just go to Bruges and be done with it? Bloomberg? Ed Balls beat him to it in 2010):

"You will get an in or out vote on Europe" (Daily Mail)

"Cameron to pledge an 'in-out' vote on Europe" (Financial Times)

"Cameron: I'll hold an in-out vote on Europe" (Telegraph)

"Cameron pledges in-out referendum on Europe" (Times)

"In or out? PM pledges EU exit vote by 2017" (Independent)

You can read full coverage and analysis of Cameron's EU address at www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/politics

2) BIBI'S BACK

From the BBC:

"Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged to form 'as broad a government as possible' after his alliance won a narrow election victory.

"His right-wing Likud-Beitenu bloc will have 31 seats in parliament - a sharp drop from 42, exit polls suggest.

"In a major surprise, the centrist Yesh Atid (There is a Future) party came second with a predicted 18-19 seats, with Labour next on 17.

"Analysts now predict weeks of political horse-trading to form a new cabinet."

Here are my own two predictions: 1) Bibi will continue to pay no attention to the so-called 'peace process' with the Palestinians, who were barely mentioned in this Israeli election campaign. 2) Bibi will continue to fear-monger about Iran in order try and divert attention away from Israel's ongoing (and illegal) settlement programme in the occupied West Bank.

3) BACK TO THE FUTURE

From the Financial Times:

"A-level grades could be awarded solely on marks for examinations taken and coursework submitted at the end of two years of study, as they once were, under proposals to be unveiled today by the government.

"In a letter to Ofqual, the qualifications regulator, Michael Gove, the education secretary, has said the 'primary purpose of A-levels is to prepare students for degree-level study' and that he wanted to 'restore' the reputation of the A-level with changes to its structure.

"... Stephen Twigg, shadow education secretary, said the government 'is all about turning the clock back. This plan would narrow the options for young people.'"

Meanwhile, the Mirror reports that nearly 100 groups, including the National Theatre, say the Tory-led Coalition is "pushing through [its GCSE] reforms too fast".

4) THE KING'S SPEECH

Watch out, Mark Carney! From the Guardian:

"Sir Mervyn King last night launched a thinly disguised attack on his successor as Bank of England governor, deriding proposals to ditch the central bank's inflation target in favour of a growth target based as 'wishful thinking'.

"King warned that policies designed to meet a growth target - a strategy backed by the incoming governor, Mark Carney - was unrealistic and for 'dreamers', signalling a rift with the man due to take over in Threadneedle Street in the summer after being lured by George Osborne from his post as Canada's central bank chief.

"... King told an audience in Belfast: 'To drop the objective of low inflation would be to forget a lesson from our postwar history... So a long-run target of 2% inflation should be an essential part of our macroeconomic framework.'"

Is Merv perhaps miffed because the 2% inflation target is something that he came up with, as chief economist at the bank, in the 1990s?

5) CAMPAIGNING LIKE IT'S 2005

From the Guardian:

"A coalition of 100 UK development charities and faith groups will today launch a campaign to lobby David Cameron to use Britain's presidency of the G8 to leverage action on ending global hunger. The If campaign is the largest coalition of its kind since Make Poverty History in 2005, the last time Britain held the G8 presidency. This time, organisers are seeking more radical change. Although pegged around hunger and malnutrition, the campaign focuses more on the underlying causes of hunger, such as 'land grabs', tax avoidance and a lack of transparency over investments in poor countries."

Tax avoidance and land grabs? Progressives will be pleased.

BECAUSE YOU'VE READ THIS FAR...

Watch this video of Hollywood actor James Franco's unintentionally hilarious poem on Obama inauguration.

6) GOING, GOING, GONG

The war between ministers and civil servants moves onto a new front. From the Independent:

"Ministers are to be given the power to 'fast-track' nominations for knighthoods and other awards as part of plans to radically shake up Britain's ancient honours system.

"Under proposals, discussed by the Cabinet, ministers would be able to circumvent Civil Service vetting procedures and recommend candidates for awards directly to the independent Honours Committee.

"... The move is facing resistance from some senior officials, who fear it will politicise the honours system and insist that ministers must follow the same procedures as charities and members of the public who want to nominate individuals for awards."

7) BLACKLISTED?

From the Times:

"Trade union officials helped to blacklist their own members from working on some of the most prestigious construction projects of the past 20 years, The Times has learnt.

"The names and personal details of workers deemed 'perennial troublemakers' by unions including Ucatt, the construction union, and Amicus, now part of Unite, were fed to a database run by a secretive vetting company set up and financed by several of Britain's biggest builders.

"In a Commons debate this afternoon, Labour is expected to call for an investigation into allegations that publicly funded construction projects, including the Olympics and Crossrail, consulted the... blacklist."

8) LIAR, LIAR, BENEFITS ON FIRE

The demonisation of welfare claimants continues apace. From the Metro:

"A lie detector test will be used by a council to see if benefits claimants are telling the truth, it emerged yesterday.

"The method called 'voice risk analysis' has been introduced to check details that people have provided about their claims.

"... But numerous academic studies have cast doubt on the accuracy of lie detectors with some claiming they are little better than chance."

The Guardian reports that a Conservative councillor, Fiona Ferguson, has quit the council after claiming that using voice risk analysis wouldn't help the council pursue fraud and would be "extremely damaging to our reputation". Let's hope so...

9) STRIVERS VS SHIRKERS, PART 44

From the Independent:

"A Treasury minister has warned the Conservative Party not to divide the British people into "shirkers and strivers" as it defends the squeeze on the welfare budget.

"Greg Clark, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, appeared to distance himself from the more hardline approach of George Osborne...

"Writing on the ConservativeHome website, he said there is nothing wrong with being a "striver", but argued that not everyone wants to be one... 'Not being a striver doesn't make you a shirker - it's simply a matter of working to live, not living to work.'"

10) BEYONCE'S BLUFF

"Oh, say could you see Beyoncé was just miming," reads the headline on the front of today's Times, which broke the story yesterday of how the first pop star in US inauguration history to be invited to sing the national anthem was, believe it or not, lip-syncing:

"It was the most celebrated rendition of America’s national anthem in a generation, but Beyoncé had left nothing to chance... Unbeknownst to millions of viewers, however, The Times has learned that the perfect note had been struck in advance: in a recording studio on the eve of Inauguration Day."

Uh oh. Then again, as my US colleagues over at HuffPost Hill tweeted last night: "Can't believe someone lip synched... AT THE FAKE INAUGURATION."

(On a side note, Kelly Clarkson's representative was quick to point out that her client "sang live as always". Oooohh...)

QUOTE UNQUOTE

"The fact is that ours is not just an island story – it is also a continental story." David Cameron's throws a bone to the dwindling band of British europhiles during his eurosceptic speech at Bloomberg this morning.

PUBLIC OPINION WATCH

From today's Sun/YouGov poll:

Labour 41
Conservatives 31
Lib Dems 12
Ukip 10

That would give Labour a majority of 110.

140 CHARACTERS OR LESS

@chrisshipitv Farage on #EUspeech: the genie is out of the bottle. Once the "out" word is out there - it's going to be difficult to put it back in

@rafaelbehr So, the big speech, eh. Looks like Cam buying security for himself now in exchange for certain Tory split c.2017

@AliAbunimah Did you hear the scandal about how Beyoncé ordered the extrajudicial murders of Americans and others? Oh wait, sorry, that was Obama.

900 WORDS OR MORE

Mary Riddell, writing in the Telegraph, says: "Fear of the grey vote has turned politicians into cowards."

Daniel Finkelstein, writing in the Times, says: "Obama is far better at hope than at audacity."

Seumas Milne, writing in the Guardian, says: "French intervention in Mali will fuel terrorism, but the west's buildup in Africa is also driven by the struggle for resources."


Got something you want to share? Please send any stories/tips/quotes/pix/plugs/gossip to Mehdi Hasan (mehdi.hasan@huffingtonpost.com) or Ned Simons (ned.simons@huffingtonpost.com). You can also follow us on Twitter: @mehdirhasan, @nedsimons and @huffpostukpol

A Little 2nd Amendment Night Humor

On occasion, truth is stranger than fiction; and in the somewhat surreal world in which we now inhabit, The Onion's perfect parody of where we are headed could have been lifted from any mainstream media front-page with little questioning from the majority of Americans. For your reading pleasure, the 62-year-old with a gun that is the last man standing between the American people and full-scale totalitarian government takeover.

Bailey, the last thing standing between the American people and a totalitarian state.

NORFOLK, VA—According to numerous reports, local 62-year-old Earl Bailey, who owns a shotgun and several boxes of ammunition, is currently the last bastion of defense between the United States of America and the federal government’s plot of a full-scale takeover.

Bailey, a recent retiree and a proud advocate of gun rights, has been confirmed by multiple sources as being a true patriot, and is, at present, the only person capable of preventing top-secret forces within the government from striking and forcefully coercing hundreds of millions of Americans to submit to a fascist and brutal New World Order.

Since the early 1990s, sources estimated the gun owner has staved off innumerable large-scale government threats, all from the center of his 12-acre ranch.

“It is every American’s right to be good and armed, and that’s a right that should always be protected,” said Bailey, now the sole American protecting the nation from the government’s hidden plot of disarming all citizens, gradually gaining control of the mass media, and installing martial law throughout the nation’s streets. “Our Founding Fathers intended for each and every one of us to protect ourselves from tyranny. That’s what America is all about.”

“What happens when the feds show up at your front door and start telling you how much meat you can eat or how to raise your kids?” continued the lifetime NRA member, brandishing the very weapon that now serves as the final hope of staving off a totalitarian state. “Is that the future you want?”

Bailey, who keeps his gun on his person at all times and regularly patrols his property in his truck, has reportedly struck dread into the very highest-ranking members of the U.S. government. According to sources, top government and military officials are fully aware that they remain unable to commence with their oppressive, systematic subjugation of the American populace as long as the 62-year-old owner of a rifle exists.

Additional reports confirmed that Bailey’s frequent practice of shooting his gun at empty bean cans in his backyard has repeatedly forced government officials to reassess both their ground and air strategies for the impending takeover.

“The way I see it, the Second Amendment’s been keeping this nation free and secure for well over 200 years,” Bailey said, valiantly standing in front of his home that is constantly being monitored by CIA agents and elite Special Forces operatives, who are told to maintain a safe distance from the formidable 62-year-old. “First they’ll come for our guns and next…well, shoot, I don’t really plan on ever seeing what the hell happens next.”

While the federal government is more than adequately prepared to begin the first phase of its plan of convoying Second Amendment adherents to newly established FEMA concentration camps, high-level members of the Obama Administration involved in the widespread conspiracy confirmed that they have been forced to resort to alternate methods due solely to Bailey’s heroics.

“As long as there’s someone like Earl out there with a gun and ammunition, we are unable to carry out our attack on America,” said Maxwell Caufield, a covert military leader in charge of the operation to turn the country into an authoritarian, one-party state wherein the basic rights of citizens are stripped away in order to create total government control. “Try as we did to spread our distorted gun control propaganda—claiming that it would protect innocent people across the country from needless deaths—the man just wouldn’t bite. There is simply nothing we can do about Earl and his gun, damn him.”

“You’ve got to hand it to him, really,” Caufield added. “If it weren’t for Earl, you’d be looking at a totally different country.”

This Is What 1,230 Days (And Counting) Of Explicit Market Support By The Federal...

The day Lehman failed saw the launch of the most epic central bank intervention in history with the Fed guaranteeing and funding trillions worth of suddenly underwater capital. However, what Bernanke realized quickly, is that the "emergency, temporary...

Memo to Fareed Zakaria

Dear Fareed, It's so much easier to write this after hearing President Obama's stirring and profound inauguration speech. Had I written it before that, I might have been gentler than I plan to be now. Call it a "We the People" versus the Village Pun...

12 Rational Responses to Irrational Arguments About Guns

January 22, 2013  |  

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In a recent discussion about gun control on Thom Hartmann's program, my opponent suggested that gun control advocates like me really have a cultural aversion to guns. That's a standard ploy for the gun set: when reason isn’t on your side, deploy emotional and personal arguments instead.

"Anti-gun"? I could've brought up my own recreational gun use, or even brought out the firing range pass I carry in my wallet. But I'll admit that I've lost a little of my taste for it as our national killing spree continues unabated. What's more, that would've been disrespectful to the millions of Americans who do have an understandable aversion to guns. Personal habits should have no part in a rational policy discussion.

Now that President Obama has made his initial gun control proposals, the crazy's being ratcheted up to a new level. Rational Americans in all walks of life will be confronted with these kinds of arguments. We're going to need a playbook. Here are 12 responses you can use when you're confronted with some of the standard illogical, irrational and emotionally overheated statements that gun extremists use.

1. I'm not anti-gun, I'm pro-kindergartner.

After Newtown, what person in his right mind thinks it's irrational to propose some common-sense measures to prevent similar tragedies in the future?

2. Saying "If we have gun control only outlaws will have guns" is like saying "If you outlaw drunk driving, only outlaws will drive drunk."

Rush Limbaugh's recent variation on the old "only outlaws will have guns" line went like this: "If you have gun control laws, the law-abiding will be the only people that don’t have guns."

This anti-gun control cliche makes absolutely no sense. We lose our driver's license if we're arrested for drunk driving, or if we commit too many other moving violations. But law-abiding people are free to drive. Gun control laws aren't any different.

3. If dead children are a "distraction," what subjects are important enough to be worthy of your attention?

As Media Matters reports, an increasing number of gun-extremist righties have suggested that attempts to prevent more deaths, including the deaths of young people at Newtown, Aurora, Columbine and elsewhere, are really just a "distraction" from more important matters.

Try convincing the parents of dead kids that their personal tragedies aren't important. And if dead kindergartners don’t deserve your attention, what does?

4. So you've got "Second Amendment" rights? Where's the rest of your militia?

The text of the Second Amendment reads: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

Where are the other soldiers? Who’s in charge? And which state are you protecting?  

5. Oh, and congratulations on keeping the Lanza kid so "well-regulated."

Along with Crazy New York Hermit Dude, the Columbine killers, the Tucson shooter, and all the other members of your "militia."

6. If I can't drive without decent vision, I shouldn't be able to purchase weapons of mass killing after beating my grandmother to death with a hammer.

Maybe I’m off base here, but that just seems like common sense to me.

7. "Freedom to own a gun"? I have the freedom to own a car. But I don't have the freedom to buy an M1A1 Abrams tank, or the many kinds of rounds -- armor-piercing, incendiary, point detonation, delay, airburst, and shotgun-like antipersonnel tungsten balls -- manufactured for its 120mm smoothbore cannon.

And I'm okay with that.

If our laws had permitted that, I'm pretty sure we would’ve wised up the third or fourth time somebody drove one up to a school, parked in the school bus lane, and started lobbing cannon rounds into the gym, music room, cafeteria, and classrooms -- while fending off law enforcement with a rain of fire from its three auxiliary machine guns.

8. The only other country besides the United States that considers unrestricted gun ownership a fundamental human right is Yemen …

... and Yemen's having second thoughts.

From the UN's Small Arms Survey: "Only two—the United States and Yemen—is ownership of firearms a citizen's basic right. Figures published in the Small Arms Survey 2007 show that the USA and Yemen also have the highest rates of firearms per civilian, with an estimated 90 guns per 100 people in the US, and 55 in Yemen."

There's a slogan for you: "More extreme than Yemen."

9. Why is it that the people who think our "freedom to own guns" is absolute and inflexible are always the first ones to attack our other freedoms -- of speech, of assembly, of worship (a religion other than their own), of privacy -- in the name of national security?

We have the data which shows that our supposed "gun freedom" is causing thousands of needless deaths each year. Most "gun rights" advocates don't care -- and are more than eager to sacrifice other fundamental freedoms even when the evidence suggests it's unnecessary and even wasteful.

Unconstitutional surveillance? Check. Unconstitutional suppression of Wikileaks and other information outlets? Check. Unconstitutional suppression of demonstrators’ rights? Check. Constitutional and rational gun control?

Never.

10. You say guns make us safer, but we already have more guns per capita than any other nation on Earth.

We also have the highest gun homicide rate of any developed nation. Our rate is 32 times that of Great Britain's, for example.

Are we safe enough yet?

11. "Recreational gun use"?

Which sports, exactly, require an assault weapon that fires 850 rounds per minute?

And is there any mass-killing capacity that would be too much for your recreational activity? 5,000 rounds per minute? 10,000 rounds per minute? Or is the recreational value of high-speed gunfire infinite and unbounded?

12. Statistics show that states with more guns also have more homicides. Have you considered starting your own state?

That would allow you, for the first time, to use the Second Amendment for its true and stated purpose: to protect the security of a state.

All the other gun extremists could join you there. Wouldn't that be great?

Most of us are getting tired of reading the obituaries of public servants, moviegoers, shoppers, schoolchildren, and other innocent bystanders in our local papers. Now we can be safe, you can be happy -- and Wall Street investors can keep profiting from guns and the misery they cause.

The state of “Guntopia” isn’t a perfect idea. We would worry about your children’s safety -- but then, we already do.

David Cameron Promises In Or Out EU Referendum If Tories Win 2015 Election

David Cameron will promise an in or out referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union if the Conservatives win the next election.

After months of tantric teasing, the prime minister will use a speech in central London early on Wednesday morning to set out his vision to claw back powers from Brussels to Westminster and then put the new relationship to a public vote by October 2017.

In what could be one of the defining speeches of his time in Downing Street, the prime minister is expected to say: "It is time for the British people to have their say".

"I say to the British people: this will be your decision. And when that choice comes, you will have an important choice to make about our country's destiny," he will add.

The offer of an in or out referendum will be seen as a crucial concession to backbench Tory MPs, many of whom would have been happy with nothing less.

Amid concerns in Tory circles that Cameron faces a uphill battle to remain in office, let alone win an outright majority in 2015, the speech will also be used to campaign against Nigel Farage's Ukip.

Tory MP George Eustice, who used to be Cameron's press secretary, told BBC Newsnight: "If you do want a new settlement with Europe and you do want a referendum, you have to get behind the Conservative Party."

A referendum is not guaranteed as both Labour and the Lib Dems are opposed. It is unclear if Nick Clegg would agree to let Cameron hold a referendum if the prime minister fails to win a majority and has to form a second coalition.

Despite offering a referendum, Cameron will say he intends to campaign strongly for Britain to remain part of the bloc.

“I believe something very deeply. That Britain’s national interest is best served in a flexible, adaptable and open European Union. And that such a European Union is best with Britain in it," he will say.

"We can deliver a more flexible, adaptable and open European Union in which the interests and ambitions of all its members can be met.

"Over the coming weeks, months and years, I will not rest until this debate is won. For the future of my country. For the success of the European Union. And for the prosperity of our peoples for generations to come."

SEE ALSO: Peter Kellner: EU Vote: Stay in 40%, Leave 34%

The prime minister had originally planned to deliver the speech in Amsterdam on Friday but cancelled the trip in the wake of the terror attack on an Algerian gas field.

However extracts from the speech had already been briefed to journalists before it was delayed, meaning some of the key lines were still reported.

Cameron had intended to say that while he was in favour Britain being part of the EU, there was a danger the British people will “drift towards the exit” if it is not reformed.

"I do not want that to happen. I want the European Union to be a success and I want a relationship between Britain and the EU that keeps us in it,” he would have said.

"People are increasingly frustrated that decisions taken further and further away from them mean their living standards are slashed through enforced austerity or their taxes are used to bail out governments on the other side of the continent," he was intending to argue.

The prime minister’s position has exposed a deep rift within the coalition, with the Lib Dems rejecting the case for holding a referendum.

In a high profile speech on Thursday, business secretary said a referendum at this time would cause “uncertainty” and severely damage the UK’s fragile economic recovery.

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Cameron has also come under pressure from foreign leaders including President Obama not to take Britain out of the EU.

A White House spokesman said: "The president underscored our close alliance with the United Kingdom and said that the United States values a strong UK in a strong European Union, which makes critical contributions to peace, prosperity, and security in Europe and around the world."

European politicians have also encouraged Cameron to ignore his Eurosceptic MPs. Writing on The Huffington Post UK, the president of the European Parliament said Cameron’s stance could lead to the “disintegration and potentially the break-up of the EU”.

And former Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt told HuffPost UK that Cameron was a “madman, threatening to blow himself up unless he gets his own way”.

On Tuesday evening Ed Miliband savaged Cameron’s speech, saying it would “define him as a weak prime minister, being driven by his party, not by the national economic interest”.

"In October 2011, he opposed committing to an in/out referendum because of the uncertainty it would create for the country. The only thing that has changed since then is he has lost control of his party and is too weak to do what is right for the country,” he said.

Related on HuffPost:

On the News With Thom Hartmann: Filibuster Reform Debate Begins in the Senate Today

In today's On the News segment: Reagan worshippers across America are freaking out after President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address; Republicans in Virginia took an outrageous step Tuesday to rig the next state Senate elections; everyone is watching Majority Leader Harry Reid to see just how bold he is when it comes to ending obstructionism in the upper chamber; and more.

You need to know this. Is the era of small government over? Today – Reagan worshippers across America are freaking out after President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address, because he laid out a vision for America that puts an end to the Reagan Revolution and imagines a nation in which “we the people,” through small-"d" democratic government, take better control of our economy and better care of each other. While Reagan stressed the importance of individualism in his inaugural, President Obama talked about cooperation and collective action. As he said on Tuesday, “preserving individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.” It’s the difference between Reagan's “me” society and the traditional American “we” society the Founders envisioned. Reacting to the speech, Conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer called the President’s words, “historically very important” and said that, “Obama basically is declaring the end of Reaganism in America.” President Obama also defended social insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security – directly calling out people like Paul Ryan by saying that these programs don’t make us a nation of “takers.” And the President called for us to do something about climate change. But now that the speech is over, it’s time for action. With looming deficit reduction talks, entitlement reform, approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, and economic troubles on the horizon in Europe – the time for talking is over. Over the next four years, President Obama must find his inner revolutionary and change the trajectory of America by putting an end to Reaganomics and once again – to quote the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – bend the arc of human history toward justice.

In screwed news…Republicans in Virginia took an outrageous step Tuesday to rig the next state Senate elections. While the nation was focused on the Inauguration, Republicans passed legislation to redraw the state’s districts and increase how many of them are considered safe Republican seats. Currently, the Virginia state senate is split 20-20 between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans were only able to sneak this legislation through because one of the Democratic state senators was in Washington, DC attending the President’s inauguration – thus, giving the Republicans a one-vote advantage. Reacting to passage of the new redistricting scheme, Democratic state senator Creigh Deeds said, “It goes against every tradition. It was a dirty trick.” So, Virginia Republicans have reached the same conclusion as Republicans in Pennsylvania, Florida, Wisconisn, Michigan, and Ohio. If you can’t win elections legitimately, then rig them.

In the best of the rest of the news…

Debate in the Senate on filibuster reform begins today – and everyone is watching Majority Leader Harry Reid to see just how bold he is when it comes to ending obstructionism in the upper chamber. At a Democratic caucus meeting today, Harry Reid will make the case for more moderate filibuster reform that cuts down the number of filibusters that the minority can use – but still allows Republicans to require every piece of legislation to get 60 votes or die in the Senate. But Senators Merkley and Udall will again make a case for their much stronger filibuster reform, which will require the Republicans to speak on the floor of the Senate for the entire time they wish to filibuster. That plan just received another supporter – new Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin, who released a statement saying, “We face big challenges that demand effective government action and solutions, not more of the same standstill that has become the status quo in Washington." Let’s hope stronger voices prevail. The filibuster, as it’s been abused by Republicans, must be scrapped, and democratic majority rule must return to the people’s Senate.

Speaking of the Senate…while Republicans in the House draft yet another budget to cut taxes for the rich and voucherize Medicare, Democrats in the Senate are working on a new budget that will lay out a different vision of America. As the Washington Post reports, “Senate Democrats plan to draft a budget blueprint that calls for significantly higher taxes on the wealthy, oil and gas companies, and corporations doing business overseas.” Unlike most legislation, budgets can be passed by a simple majority in the Senate – meaning Mitch McConnell and the Republicans can’t filibuster it. When both Chambers of Congress come out with their budget proposals – we’ll see two different visions for America. One in the House that takes us backward toward neo-feudalism and rule by the rich. And one in the Senate will moves us toward progress, and a healthy middle class.

And finally…want to end world poverty? Tax the rich! According to a new Oxfam report prepared for the Davos World Economic Forum, just last year's profits of the world’s one hundred wealthiest people alone could end poverty around the planet four times over. In 2012, the richest one hundred billionaires netted $240 billion in income – far more than enough to lift the rest of the world out of poverty. As Oxfam’s chief executive, Barbara Stocking, said, “In a world where even basic resources such as land and water are increasingly scarce, we cannot afford to concentrate assets in the hands of a few and leave the many to struggle over what’s left.” Here in the United States – where wealth inequality is higher than any other developed nation in the world – we can take immediate action to wipe out poverty and get demand back in our economy. And that’s by placing a new wealth tax on the billionaires so any income over $999,million  dollars is taxed at 99% - so that it can be funneled back through our economy rather than just sit in a Swiss bank account. It’s called the #NoBillionaires Campaign. Go to www.NoBillionaires.com.

And that’s the way it is today – Tuesday, January 22nd, 2012. I’m Thom Hartmann – on the news.

On Jobs and Economic Justice, Will We Lead or Be Lulled By the Speech?

The President gave a terrific speech. But if great speeches could heal our economic wounds, if they could repair the ever-increasing gap between the rich and the rest of us, if they could re-open the closing doors of opportunity for the young, the African-American, the Hispanic, and the graying members of our workforce, we’d be living in a different country today.(Carolyn Kaster/AP)

We must never forget that in a democracy it’s the people, not their elected officials, who lead. This speech leaves progressive Americans, and that great American majority that agrees with them on economic issues, with a choice:

Will we be pacified with rhetoric, or will we demand – and take – action? Will we lead?

Words

The speech included stirring, if vague, statements about economic fairness. “Our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it,” said the President. “We believe that America’s prosperity must rest upon the broad shoulders of a rising middle class.”

That’s certainly true, for all the reasons laid out by economist Joseph Stiglitz his New York Times op-ed of last week. But the President offered no specifics about the growing wealth inequality that has allowed the wealthiest to take more and more of the national income while the rest of the nation. That inequality is truly stunning, and (as polls have shown) is far worse than the American people realize.

This was an opportunity to teach the American people. It was an opportunity to make the case for government job creation, to talk about the need for good jobs at good wages.

It was not taken.

The President also said: “We know that America thrives when every person can find independence and pride in their work; when the wages of honest labor liberate families from the brink of hardship.”

But the ranks of the “working poor” continue to increase and wages for most Americans continue to fall. This was an opportunity to tell the American people these things.  It was not taken.

The Sounds of Silence

The speech’s real strengths extended to what it left out. There was no mention, direct or indirect, of the hard-right agenda known as “Simpson Bowles” – or, for that matter, of deficit reduction in general. There was no suggestion that Social Security contributes to the government deficit (it doesn’t). There were no amplifications of right-wing rhetoric about downsizing government.

But not all of the omissions were wise. There was also nothing specific about creating jobs for a nation desperately in need of them. There were no cold facts and figures about the millions of Americans who don’t have a job, of the millions working below their skill level or stuck with part-time employment when they need to work full-time.

Every American family that can’t make ends meet is a tragedy. A very specific tragedy.

Connect the Dots

You could find the outline of a just economic program in the President’s speech by playing connect-the-dots:

“A modern economy requires railroads and highways to speed travel and commerce …” That sounds like a program to rebuild our infrastructure. That would require several hundred billion dollars in government investment, but it would be repaid several times over with economic growth and would create a wave of well-paying jobs in construction and beyond.

But he didn’t say that.

“A modern economy requires … schools and colleges to train our workers.” That sounds like a program to create a new cadre of primary and secondary school teachers a new commitment to higher education, perhaps even a program to make college affordable again.

But he didn’t say that.

“A free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.” That almost sounds he’s saying we need to do more to rein in the job-killing lawlessness and cheating on Wall Street and among our largest corporations.

But he didn’t say that.

The Empire Strikes Back

We shouldn’t have to connect the dots. A Presidential speech shouldn’t be a Rorschach test onto which each listener projects his own desires. This one’s vagueness gives the forces of corporate self-interest an opportunity to connect the dots their way for the President and his team, to whom they have great access, using the self-serving mythologies of the past as a stencil:  

We can “create jobs” through deregulation, Mr. President. We can create those well-paying jobs if you’ll just lower our taxes.

We can be sure that the lobbyists, CEOs, titans, tycoons and campaign contributors are already hard at work doing just that. Time and time again their influence has prevailed upon this President, just as it did upon his Democratic predecessor Bill Clinton, with disastrous economic consequences for the rest of us.

Stars In Our Eyes

It’s time for citizens to fight those forces without discouragement or distraction. Far too often, stirring rhetoric has evaporated in the relentless heat of big-money influence. Only action will prevent that from happening again.

This President’s first term was marred by a shocking refusal to hold Wall Street criminals legally accountable for fraud, or even for laundering drug money for killer cartels. Those same Wall Street criminals destroyed millions of jobs and trillions in middle-class wealth, yet presume to lecture the President and the nation on the need for Social Security and Medicare cuts to fix the economy.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the first Obama Administration, and its core error, was the President’s decision to lean on former President Bill Clinton and his team. Clinton’s a very popular figure personally, but his economic team were the GOP’s co-conspirators and co-architects in the design of our current economic misery.

This week the President proved again that he is a star, every bit Clinton’s media equal. But neither he nor Clinton have reliably acted in the nation’s best interests without pressure from a truly independent, galvanized progressive movement. That means it’s our turn. We must take action in the face of economic injustice: writing to our leaders, supporting activist groups, and taking to the streets when necessary. But we won’t do that if we’re blinded by the stars in our eyes.

The President has issued a declaration of values. It’s to insist that those values be honored with action – his, and ours. Good speeches are the beginning, not the end, of the struggle.

© 2012 Campaign for America's Future

Richard Eskow

Richard (RJ) Eskow is a well-known blogger and writer, a former Wall Street executive, an experienced consultant, and a former musician. He has experience in health insurance and economics, occupational health, benefits, risk management, finance, and information technology. Richard has consulting experience in the US and over 20 countries.

On Jobs and Economic Justice, Will We Lead or Be Lulled By the Speech?

The President gave a terrific speech. But if great speeches could heal our economic wounds, if they could repair the ever-increasing gap between the rich and the rest of us, if they could re-open the closing doors of opportunity for the young, the African-American, the Hispanic, and the graying members of our workforce, we’d be living in a different country today.(Carolyn Kaster/AP)

We must never forget that in a democracy it’s the people, not their elected officials, who lead. This speech leaves progressive Americans, and that great American majority that agrees with them on economic issues, with a choice:

Will we be pacified with rhetoric, or will we demand – and take – action? Will we lead?

Words

The speech included stirring, if vague, statements about economic fairness. “Our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it,” said the President. “We believe that America’s prosperity must rest upon the broad shoulders of a rising middle class.”

That’s certainly true, for all the reasons laid out by economist Joseph Stiglitz his New York Times op-ed of last week. But the President offered no specifics about the growing wealth inequality that has allowed the wealthiest to take more and more of the national income while the rest of the nation. That inequality is truly stunning, and (as polls have shown) is far worse than the American people realize.

This was an opportunity to teach the American people. It was an opportunity to make the case for government job creation, to talk about the need for good jobs at good wages.

It was not taken.

The President also said: “We know that America thrives when every person can find independence and pride in their work; when the wages of honest labor liberate families from the brink of hardship.”

But the ranks of the “working poor” continue to increase and wages for most Americans continue to fall. This was an opportunity to tell the American people these things.  It was not taken.

The Sounds of Silence

The speech’s real strengths extended to what it left out. There was no mention, direct or indirect, of the hard-right agenda known as “Simpson Bowles” – or, for that matter, of deficit reduction in general. There was no suggestion that Social Security contributes to the government deficit (it doesn’t). There were no amplifications of right-wing rhetoric about downsizing government.

But not all of the omissions were wise. There was also nothing specific about creating jobs for a nation desperately in need of them. There were no cold facts and figures about the millions of Americans who don’t have a job, of the millions working below their skill level or stuck with part-time employment when they need to work full-time.

Every American family that can’t make ends meet is a tragedy. A very specific tragedy.

Connect the Dots

You could find the outline of a just economic program in the President’s speech by playing connect-the-dots:

“A modern economy requires railroads and highways to speed travel and commerce …” That sounds like a program to rebuild our infrastructure. That would require several hundred billion dollars in government investment, but it would be repaid several times over with economic growth and would create a wave of well-paying jobs in construction and beyond.

But he didn’t say that.

“A modern economy requires … schools and colleges to train our workers.” That sounds like a program to create a new cadre of primary and secondary school teachers a new commitment to higher education, perhaps even a program to make college affordable again.

But he didn’t say that.

“A free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.” That almost sounds he’s saying we need to do more to rein in the job-killing lawlessness and cheating on Wall Street and among our largest corporations.

But he didn’t say that.

The Empire Strikes Back

We shouldn’t have to connect the dots. A Presidential speech shouldn’t be a Rorschach test onto which each listener projects his own desires. This one’s vagueness gives the forces of corporate self-interest an opportunity to connect the dots their way for the President and his team, to whom they have great access, using the self-serving mythologies of the past as a stencil:  

We can “create jobs” through deregulation, Mr. President. We can create those well-paying jobs if you’ll just lower our taxes.

We can be sure that the lobbyists, CEOs, titans, tycoons and campaign contributors are already hard at work doing just that. Time and time again their influence has prevailed upon this President, just as it did upon his Democratic predecessor Bill Clinton, with disastrous economic consequences for the rest of us.

Stars In Our Eyes

It’s time for citizens to fight those forces without discouragement or distraction. Far too often, stirring rhetoric has evaporated in the relentless heat of big-money influence. Only action will prevent that from happening again.

This President’s first term was marred by a shocking refusal to hold Wall Street criminals legally accountable for fraud, or even for laundering drug money for killer cartels. Those same Wall Street criminals destroyed millions of jobs and trillions in middle-class wealth, yet presume to lecture the President and the nation on the need for Social Security and Medicare cuts to fix the economy.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the first Obama Administration, and its core error, was the President’s decision to lean on former President Bill Clinton and his team. Clinton’s a very popular figure personally, but his economic team were the GOP’s co-conspirators and co-architects in the design of our current economic misery.

This week the President proved again that he is a star, every bit Clinton’s media equal. But neither he nor Clinton have reliably acted in the nation’s best interests without pressure from a truly independent, galvanized progressive movement. That means it’s our turn. We must take action in the face of economic injustice: writing to our leaders, supporting activist groups, and taking to the streets when necessary. But we won’t do that if we’re blinded by the stars in our eyes.

The President has issued a declaration of values. It’s to insist that those values be honored with action – his, and ours. Good speeches are the beginning, not the end, of the struggle.

© 2012 Campaign for America's Future

Richard Eskow

Richard (RJ) Eskow is a well-known blogger and writer, a former Wall Street executive, an experienced consultant, and a former musician. He has experience in health insurance and economics, occupational health, benefits, risk management, finance, and information technology. Richard has consulting experience in the US and over 20 countries.

D.C. Circuit Denies Medical Marijuana Reclassification Challenge, Advocates Vow to Appeal

WASHINGTON - January 22 - The United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued a ruling today in the medical marijuana reclassification case, Americans for Safe Access v. Drug Enforcement Administration. In a 2-1 decision, the Court granted ...

D.C. Circuit Denies Medical Marijuana Reclassification Challenge, Advocates Vow to Appeal

WASHINGTON - January 22 - The United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued a ruling today in the medical marijuana reclassification case, Americans for Safe Access v. Drug Enforcement Administration. In a 2-1 decision, the Court granted ...

Will America’s Next War Be in the Pacific?

Escalating tensions among China, Japan and the U.S. could ignite armed conflict -- and sink the global economy.

January 22, 2013  |  

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Don’t look now, but conditions are deteriorating in the western Pacific.  Things are turning ugly, with consequences that could prove deadly and spell catastrophe for the global economy.

In Washington, it is widely assumed that a showdown with Iran over its nuclear ambitions will be the first major crisis to  engulf the next secretary of defense — whether it be former Senator Chuck Hagel, as President Obama desires, or someone else if he fails to win Senate confirmation.  With few signs of an imminent breakthrough in talks aimed at peacefully resolving the Iranian nuclear issue, many analysts believe that military action — if not by Israel, than by the United States — could be on this year’s agenda.

Lurking just behind the Iranian imbroglio, however, is a potential crisis of far greater magnitude, and potentially far more imminent than most of us imagine.  China’s determination to assert control over disputed islands in the potentially energy-rich waters of the East and South China Seas, in the face of stiffening resistance from Japan and the Philippines along with greater regional assertiveness by the United States, spells trouble not just regionally, but potentially globally.

Islands, Islands, Everywhere

The possibility of an Iranian crisis remains in the spotlight because of the obvious risk of disorder in the Greater Middle East and its threat to global oil production and  shipping.  A crisis in the East or South China Seas (essentially, western extensions of the Pacific Ocean) would, however, pose a  greater perilbecause of the possibility of a U.S.-China military confrontation and the threat to Asian economic stability.

The United States is  bound by treaty to come to the assistance of Japan or the Philippines if either country is attacked by a third party, so any armed clash between Chinese and Japanese or Filipino forces could trigger American military intervention.  With so much of the world’s trade focused on Asia, and the American, Chinese, and Japanese economies tied so closely together in ways too essential to ignore, a clash of almost any sort in these vital waterways might paralyze international commerce and trigger a global recession (or worse).

All of this should be painfully obvious and so rule out such a possibility — and yet the likelihood of such a clash occurring has been on the rise in recent months, as China and its neighbors continue to  ratchet up the bellicosity of their statements and bolster their military forces in the contested areas.  Washington’s continuing statements about its ongoing plans for a “pivot” to, or “rebalancing” of, its forces in the Pacific have only  fueled Chinese intransigence and intensified a rising sense of crisis in the region.  Leaders on all sides continue to affirm their country’s inviolable rights to the contested islands and vow to use any means necessary to resist encroachment by rival claimants.  In the meantime, China has  increased the frequency and scale of its naval maneuvers in waters claimed by Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines, further enflaming tensions in the region.

Ostensibly, these disputes revolve around the question of who owns a constellation of largely uninhabited atolls and islets claimed by a variety of nations.  In the  East China Sea, the islands in contention are called the Diaoyus by China and the Senkakus by Japan.  At present, they are administered by Japan, but both countries claim sovereignty over them.  In the  South China Sea, several island groups are in contention, including the Spratly chain and the Paracel Islands (known in China as the Nansha and Xisha Islands, respectively).  China claims  all of these islets, while Vietnam claims some of the Spratlys and Paracels.  Brunei, Malaysia, and the Philippines also claim some of the Spratlys.

GOP, Thomas Hobbes Rig Elections

Thomas Hobbes17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes. (Image: John Michael Wright)While the nation was hypnotized by the Second Inaugural of Barack Obama on Tuesday, Republicans in Virginia moved America closer to the place envisioned by the 17th century dystopic philosopher Thomas Hobbes. 

What they did is jam a new redistricting plan through the state senate that created more safe seats for Republicans, virtually assuring Republican domination of the state Senate come the next election in two years. It was blatant election rigging.

In an interview with TPM, Democratic state Senator Creigh Deeds blasted the surprise redistricting plan. “It goes against every tradition,” he said. “It was a dirty trick.”            

And get this, the only reason why the measure passed a split state Senate with twenty Republicans and twenty Democrats is because one of those Democrats – civil rights leader Senator Harry Marsh – was in Washington, DC attending the inauguration. So, with a single vote advantage for a single day, Republicans pounced.

Just like Republicans in Pennsylvania pounced last week when they introduced legislation to change how their state allocates Electoral College votes. Rather than a winner-take-all system, which granted President Obama all of the state’s twenty Electoral College votes last November, Republicans want votes handed out based on which Congressional districts were won by each candidate. Why? Because they gerrymandered the congressional districts in 2010. Under this scheme, Mitt Romney would have actually won 13 of 20 Electoral College votes in Pennsylvania despite losing the statewide popular vote by four points. Again, it’s blatant election rigging.

To make matters worse, Republicans state lawmakers in Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin are all considering similar changes that will make it virtually impossible for a Democrat to win the White House in the future.

As Joe Biden would say, “This is a BFD.”

But these efforts around the country aren’t just to secure Republicans political victories over the next two to four years and beyond. They’re also to, in the opinion of Conservatives, save the nation from the “evil-natured masses.” They actually believe that by rigging elections to give them power, they’re saving America from the unwashed masses.

This mistrust of voters reveals the heart of the difference in worldviews between Conservatives and Liberals.

The Conservative line of thinking comes from Thomas Hobbes’ worldview that man is inherently evil. As Hobbes describes the natural state of man, our “state of nature” is a place where, “there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

As such, we cannot be trusted to govern ourselves. Instead, we must be governed by a strong central authority like a King or Pope.

There’s also a strain of Calvinist thinking to this Conservative fear of voters. While Calvinists in centuries past also concluded that the masses are, for the most part, wicked, they also claimed that there’s a small group of individuals who have been pre-chosen by God to rule the rest of us. They’re known as “The Elect.”

How did we know who these special individuals were? Well, they were the ones who were rich and powerful, because God made them so.

This is a very convenient ideology for the rich and powerful to convince us all to buy into. And it stuck for centuries, as people were reduced to mere serfs or servants, ruled by a “benevolent” King or an “enlightened” religious leader.

Today, Kings and Theocrats have been largely pushed aside. But this view that man is best governed by a small, wealthy elite remains alive. It’s the core assumption of the Conservative ideology that is each and every day eroding the power of the electorate in states across America. It’s why people like Grover Norquist would call for drowning American democracy in the bathtubs of oligarchs like the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson – after all, you just can’t trust a government that offers “free stuff” like Social Security or universal healthcare to the rabble.

This is why Liberalism is so important.

It was John Locke in the 18thCentury who first pushed back against Hobbes’ “state of nature” and argued that man is not motivated by malice, but instead by reason. And through reason, “we the people” can actually govern ourselves through laws based on reason.

To Locke, any sort of government that operates without the consent of the people – and without reason – should be overthrown. Needless to say, Hobbes’ absolute Kings and Oligarchs, who derived their consent from God or their riches, and not reason, shouldn’t exist in Locke’s world.

Ultimately, as the Enlightenment moved along, Locke’s idea prevailed over Hobbes. And it was in the tradition of Locke that our Founding Fathers became revolutionaries and overthrew the King of England. And it was in the tradition of Locke that Thomas Jefferson fought with the early royalists to spread democracy to more and more people.

To this day, this issue of how much power voters should have, compared to billionaires, churches, and corporations, remains the fundamental point of cleavage between Conservatives and Liberals.        

For the last thirty years, the Conservative worldview has prevailed in America. It says we cannot trust the people to govern themselves, and so we must trust the wealthy elite and the market to organize society. And with recent democracy-suppressing efforts in Virginia and Pennsylvania, Conservatives use this worldview to rationalize their behavior.

But now, with President Obama saying “we the people” five times in his Second Inaugural, it’s clear he’s trying to put Hobbes and his Conservative ideology back into the dustbin of history. 

And it’s time that we as a nation ask ourselves a fundamental question: Are we capable of governing ourselves as John Locke and Thomas Jefferson believed? Or should we simply let the modern-day kings, the billionaires, run things, as today’s Conservatives believe?

Our Founding Fathers answered that questioned with the Declaration of Independence. We must answer it anew today.

From Green New Deal to New Economy

In a recent article about success in the sharing economy, Van Jones explained the degree to which sharing, crowdfunding, and other similar concepts are fundamentally transforming the economy as we know it. He turned to examples like Zipcar, Solar Mosaic, AirBnB, and Couchsurfing to show this transformation happening on the ground. For the few who don’t know, Jones founded Green For All, one of the central organizations within the growing green economy movement. His tremendously poignant article makes one wonder to what extent this sharing economy is similar to the green economy and how are we to understand their relatedness theoretically and organizationally? One could certainly say they have much in common, from the role the above-mentioned firms play in helping protect the environment by crowdfunding solar panels or reducing people’s need to own their own car. It’s one thing to see what ideas or outcomes they have in common. For the broader purposes of looking towards our collective potential to fundamentally transform the economy, it’s also important to look at how they relate to one another organizationally. This two-part series attempts to do just that. The first part looks at the green economy movement theoretically and organizationally, while the second part looks at the sharing economy, solidarity economy, and new economy to make the case for a New Economy Coalition acting to unite them all.Credit: New Economy Institute

Even though the green economy has been growing in the U.S. for decades, its birth into mainstream social consciousness very much began with the push for a Green New Deal as an immediate solution to a collapsing economy in late 2008. We saw the potential for job creation through public investment with the Green Jobs Act prior to the collapse and the subsequent American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. (1)  The hope behind the push for a Green New Deal is based upon FDR’s New Deal legislation in the 1930s and the works of economist John Maynard Keynes. The focus is a massive reinvestment by the government into the economy. With a Green New Deal that investment would be focused on renewable energy, energy efficiency, public transportation, improvements to the electrical grid, and other carbon-reducing strategies for job creation.

The Great Recession was caused by a combination of two major factors, with the center of it being the overall failure of the decades long strategy of neoliberalism. More specifically, the collapse of the economy was caused by a long process of what French economists Gerard Dumenil and Dominique Levy call, “the quest for high income, financialization, and globalization.” This quest refers to the efforts of the 1% to increase incomes via profits, capital gains, bonuses, stock options, and wages, while using that vast wealth to push for the deregulation (especially of the financial sector) and the expansion of increasingly unwieldy financial instruments. This growing and already colossal financial sector also became an increasingly global movement to expand the so-called “free market,” to deregulate the global economy under the guise of globalization.

The second major factor in their analysis of the cause of The Great Recession is “the macro trajectory of the U.S. Economy.” In this factor they identified three main aspects: the “low and declining accumulation rates, the trade deficit, and the growing dependency on financing from the rest of the world and domestic indebtedness.” This neoliberal strategy failed to correct a decades long trend of declining capital accumulation rates by corporations. The movement of corporations abroad greatly worsened the trade deficit and, when coupled with the concerted effort of the 1% to enhance their wealth at the expense of the other 99%, forced the vast majority into substantial debt. This unsustainable situation triggered a collapse in the housing market, causing the rapid decline of the entire economy in its wake. It is, in turn, this overall failure of the neoliberal strategy that’s beginning to lead to something transformative, new, and green. (1)  It began with a push for a Green New Deal and is now finding its home within diverse movements under different labels including green economy, sharing economy, solidarity economy, new economy, and others.

Keynes believed that in instances of economic crisis significant governmental or public investment was required in order to jumpstart the economy. By investing a considerable amount of money into the economy, he believed the government could offset the overall decline in demand. In doing so, the government could thereby create jobs, rebuild the tax base, and make its investment back without increasing the long-term deficit. The idea behind the Green New Deal has been simple: instead of a New Deal like with FDR back in the 1930s, this would invest in renewable energy, public transportation, energy efficiency, improvements to the electricity grid, etc. This is what makes it a Green New Deal. Unfortunately, even with the funding through ARRA and smaller governmental stimulus measures, the amount of funding has thus fallen far short of levels necessary to jumpstart the economy. (2) On top of that, the lack of adequate funding leaves us far behind on global targets to cap atmospheric carbon levels as well. (3)

Still, Green New Deal policies are a massive shift from the neoliberal orthodoxy of the last few decades. Just like the Republican Party’s almost unanimous support for destructive trade agreements, most Republicans oppose Green New Deal types of policies as well. It doesn’t matter that their opposition is based on flawed or even outright fabricated ‘analyses.’ Their opposition is based on the interests of who pays for their political campaigns. The oil and gas industry alone spent almost $64 Million in the 2012 election cycle, 90% of which went to members of the Republican Party.  Meanwhile, clean energy and low-carbon companies are growing and building a political force of their own. This is growing and will, over time, provide a counterforce to the oil and gas industry and their stranglehold on Capitol Hill. The American Council on Renewable Energy represents many of those clean energy companies and their trade associations. Similarly, the push for an energy efficient economy is finding a new political voice in the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. In many ways the green economy movement is at the forefront of the push to fundamentally transform the economy with other similar movements trailing close behind.

What’s perhaps the most exciting and promising aspect of the movement for a green economy and a Green New Deal is that it’s bringing together a host of different organizations representing communities and constituencies that haven’t often come together over the years. The movement for a green economy and a Green New Deal came to prominence in 2009-2010, as so-called Cap & Trade policies and others were on the verge of passage. The Alliance for Climate Protection, a non-profit organization with Al Gore as its board chair, was leading the charge by acting as a coordinating entity of sorts with numerous member organizations helping provide a degree of direction to the movement in general. Now called The Climate Reality Project, its focus has shifted more towards general public education around climate change. This is likely a result of the inability to pass comprehensive climate change legislation during President Obama’s first term and the drastic decline in public belief around the role of human activity in causing climate change. It seems few expected such a drastic assault by the extreme right in spreading disinformation like the manufactured “Climate Gate” scandal.

Labor unions, manufacturers, and environmental organizations are coming together through organizations like the Apollo Alliance and the Blue-Green Alliance (recently merged). They are made up of both public and private labor unions like the United Steelworkers Union, environmental organizations like the Sierra Club, and even manufacturers of all sizes. Small and medium-sized businesses are part of this movement through the Advanced Energy Economy. Local chambers of commerce have even joined the fight through Chambers for Innovation and Clean Energy. Ceres is bringing together a wide variety of companies and investors small and large to address climate change and build a green economy. Broad umbrella organizations have emerged representing all types of community-based local organizations. 1Sky is the biggest of these organizations and recently merged with 350.org under the 350.org name to create a large advocacy organization made up of hundreds of thousands of members in the U.S. and a still larger global movement. It tackles many of the traditional environmental issues, while also advocating for Green New Deal policies. The Green Economy Coalition recently emerged as a global network to strategically support the expansion of the green economy at a global level in advance of the UN’s Summit on the 20th anniversary of the Earth Summit this past June of 2012.

Low-income communities and communities of color are part in this movement too. Green For All has been pioneering the creation of green jobs, career-track jobs that pay a living wage, have benefits, and address environmental issues at the same time. They lobby Congress on environmental and Green New Deal policies, develop innovative policy research, while assisting coalitions of organizations in cities to implement green job creation strategies and helping green businesses grow. Providing empowering opportunities for traditionally marginalized communities is a vital aspect of this growing movement, which is why Green For All and others similarly working to create and expand opportunities low-income communities, communities of color, and others who have traditionally been passed by when economic opportunities arise.

There are other organizations and efforts within this larger movement for a Green New Deal. The Smart Growth Alliance is pioneering a new national opposition to sprawl and support for public transportation at the same time. There are even signs that working to rebuild our urban cores around public transportation and the remediation of brownfields can be done in ways that empower traditionally marginalized communities. (4) Numerous other organizations are starting sustainability initiatives aimed at involving themselves in one way or another in this movement for a green economy and a Green New Deal. ICLEI, Local Governments for Sustainability, is a network of local governments from around the world focused on the best ways for governments to leverage their resources to best build the green economy. 

Outside of the public policy arena, organizations and institutions all across the country are launching sustainability initiatives as part of a truly massive movement. Colleges and universities and joining this movement through the American Association for Sustainability in Higher Education. Countless think tanks have emerged to focus on renewable energy and clean tech to workforce development, bio-based alternatives to petroleum-based chemicals, and much more.

This movement isn’t the only game in town when it comes to transforming the economy. Alongside the push for a green economy are a few other movements with the goal of fundamentally transforming the economy in one way or another. The green economy movement is much more expansive though, but aside from the work of groups like Green For All, it’s very much a “double bottom line movement.” Unlike traditional economic approaches that stand firmly on the belief that profit should be pursued above all else, that considerations of externalities like the environment only hinder profitability, the green economy movement is based on the belief that profitability and environmental sustainability can go hand in hand. As will be discussed in a subsequent article, the sharing economy, solidarity economy, and new economy take the goals of the green economy one step further, emphasizing a “triple bottom line” of people, planet, and profits. Just like the recognition that environmental sustainability and profit aren’t mutual exclusive, these other movements stress that the well being of communities can go hand in hand with environmental sustainability and the well being of the economy overall.

When the green economy movement first came on the scene with the ascendency of Van Jones to become President Obama’s green jobs advisor, some claimed it was part of a Communist conspiracy. Despite the irrational rantings of Glenn Beck and others, there is a strong push within this movement to more fundamentally transform the economic system as a whole. It just doesn’t have anything to do with traditional or “actually-existing” forms of Communism.

Given the frightening reality of climate change, the manipulative push-back from powerful corporate interests, and the longer-term economic stagnation that stands before us, it is likely that the green economy movement will increasingly take on the task of a more fundamental and structural transformation of the economy. The structural imbalances of power continue to thwart attempts to transform the economy on Capitol Hill. Examples like the Citizens United decision and the corporate assault on our democracy will likely force the green economy movement to fight for a more fundamental transformation of the dominant values and institutions in the U.S. This includes the nature and structure of major corporations as well as the nature of the political system overall. This is why an increasing unity between the green economy movement and other efforts to transform the economy are so important. The broader triple bottom line framework and transformational focus of efforts around sharing, solidarity, and a new economy must increasingly creep into the green economy movement; finding greater ideological and organizational unity.

We can already see the rise of a considerable mistrust of the entire notion of a green economy, evidenced by terms like ‘green washing’ and the decline in belief regarding climate change. A poignant example of this mistrust can be found with criticisms of the recent “Rio +20 Summit.” The 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development was meant to produce a renewed transformational focus on revamping the global economy for the planet and its poor. It showed little signs of achievement though. What’s more, this mistrust was codified into an alternative summit hosted as the “People’s Summit Rio+20.” It concluded that the green economy movement was fundamentally broken. As noted in one of their concluding documents, only by redirecting efforts towards the original goals of an Earth Summit, transforming the global economy into something that benefits the planet and its poorest, could the green economy find salvation.

From the perspective of the planet’s poorest and the organizations working with them, the green economy doesn’t represent opportunity. It represents a friendlier face of a global capitalist economy that has exploited them and their natural resources for decades. And just as the Alliance for Climate Protection became The Climate Reality Project in the face of public mistrust and disbelief in the realities of climate change, if the green economy movement wishes to win the hearts and minds of the American people, it has to not just educate but to create tangible and immediate solutions for individuals and communities struggling in the wake of our broken economy. This is why the other diverse movements to transform the economy have such a vital role to play. Each of them provide unique lessons for creating solutions today.

The green economy has been growing in the U.S. for decades, but if its going to go to the next level to transform the overall economy during these delicate beginning years of the 21st Century, it needs a mass movement behind it. The only way that’s possible, the only way the movement for a green economy becomes an impassioned charge from communities all across the country, the world for that matter, is for it to place the well being of those same communities into the forefront of it’s goals. When the movement to build a green economy transforms itself from a double bottom line to a triple bottom line movement, finding ways equitably support and interact with even the most marginalized communities, it’s firmly on the path to victory.

##

(1) Gerard Dumineil & Dominique Levy, The Crisis of Neoliberalism, (MA, Harvard University Press, 2011), P. 35-40.

(2) For a detailed description for how a Green New Deal could lead to substantial economic development, see Tim Jackson, Prosperity Without Growth, (DC: EarthScan, 2009). P. 113.

(3) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation (SRREN).” Abu Dhabi, May 9th, 2011.

(4) Carlton C. Eley. “Equitable Development: Untangling the Web of Urban Development through Collaborative Problem Solving.” Sustain: A Journal of Environmental and Sustainability Issues. Issue 21, Fall/Winter 2010.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Atlee McFellin

Atlee McFellin is a Co-Founder & Principal of SymCenter. Atlee specializes in the creation of innovative economic development strategies and programs. Prior to founding SymCenter, Atlee worked with The Democracy Collaborative to create comprehensive strategies for cities around the country based on the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland, OH. He is also the board co-chair of the New Economy Network, a national network of diverse organizations building a new economy from the ground up.

From Green New Deal to New Economy

In a recent article about success in the sharing economy, Van Jones explained the degree to which sharing, crowdfunding, and other similar concepts are fundamentally transforming the economy as we know it. He turned to examples like Zipcar, Solar Mosaic, AirBnB, and Couchsurfing to show this transformation happening on the ground. For the few who don’t know, Jones founded Green For All, one of the central organizations within the growing green economy movement. His tremendously poignant article makes one wonder to what extent this sharing economy is similar to the green economy and how are we to understand their relatedness theoretically and organizationally? One could certainly say they have much in common, from the role the above-mentioned firms play in helping protect the environment by crowdfunding solar panels or reducing people’s need to own their own car. It’s one thing to see what ideas or outcomes they have in common. For the broader purposes of looking towards our collective potential to fundamentally transform the economy, it’s also important to look at how they relate to one another organizationally. This two-part series attempts to do just that. The first part looks at the green economy movement theoretically and organizationally, while the second part looks at the sharing economy, solidarity economy, and new economy to make the case for a New Economy Coalition acting to unite them all.Credit: New Economy Institute

Even though the green economy has been growing in the U.S. for decades, its birth into mainstream social consciousness very much began with the push for a Green New Deal as an immediate solution to a collapsing economy in late 2008. We saw the potential for job creation through public investment with the Green Jobs Act prior to the collapse and the subsequent American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. (1)  The hope behind the push for a Green New Deal is based upon FDR’s New Deal legislation in the 1930s and the works of economist John Maynard Keynes. The focus is a massive reinvestment by the government into the economy. With a Green New Deal that investment would be focused on renewable energy, energy efficiency, public transportation, improvements to the electrical grid, and other carbon-reducing strategies for job creation.

The Great Recession was caused by a combination of two major factors, with the center of it being the overall failure of the decades long strategy of neoliberalism. More specifically, the collapse of the economy was caused by a long process of what French economists Gerard Dumenil and Dominique Levy call, “the quest for high income, financialization, and globalization.” This quest refers to the efforts of the 1% to increase incomes via profits, capital gains, bonuses, stock options, and wages, while using that vast wealth to push for the deregulation (especially of the financial sector) and the expansion of increasingly unwieldy financial instruments. This growing and already colossal financial sector also became an increasingly global movement to expand the so-called “free market,” to deregulate the global economy under the guise of globalization.

The second major factor in their analysis of the cause of The Great Recession is “the macro trajectory of the U.S. Economy.” In this factor they identified three main aspects: the “low and declining accumulation rates, the trade deficit, and the growing dependency on financing from the rest of the world and domestic indebtedness.” This neoliberal strategy failed to correct a decades long trend of declining capital accumulation rates by corporations. The movement of corporations abroad greatly worsened the trade deficit and, when coupled with the concerted effort of the 1% to enhance their wealth at the expense of the other 99%, forced the vast majority into substantial debt. This unsustainable situation triggered a collapse in the housing market, causing the rapid decline of the entire economy in its wake. It is, in turn, this overall failure of the neoliberal strategy that’s beginning to lead to something transformative, new, and green. (1)  It began with a push for a Green New Deal and is now finding its home within diverse movements under different labels including green economy, sharing economy, solidarity economy, new economy, and others.

Keynes believed that in instances of economic crisis significant governmental or public investment was required in order to jumpstart the economy. By investing a considerable amount of money into the economy, he believed the government could offset the overall decline in demand. In doing so, the government could thereby create jobs, rebuild the tax base, and make its investment back without increasing the long-term deficit. The idea behind the Green New Deal has been simple: instead of a New Deal like with FDR back in the 1930s, this would invest in renewable energy, public transportation, energy efficiency, improvements to the electricity grid, etc. This is what makes it a Green New Deal. Unfortunately, even with the funding through ARRA and smaller governmental stimulus measures, the amount of funding has thus fallen far short of levels necessary to jumpstart the economy. (2) On top of that, the lack of adequate funding leaves us far behind on global targets to cap atmospheric carbon levels as well. (3)

Still, Green New Deal policies are a massive shift from the neoliberal orthodoxy of the last few decades. Just like the Republican Party’s almost unanimous support for destructive trade agreements, most Republicans oppose Green New Deal types of policies as well. It doesn’t matter that their opposition is based on flawed or even outright fabricated ‘analyses.’ Their opposition is based on the interests of who pays for their political campaigns. The oil and gas industry alone spent almost $64 Million in the 2012 election cycle, 90% of which went to members of the Republican Party.  Meanwhile, clean energy and low-carbon companies are growing and building a political force of their own. This is growing and will, over time, provide a counterforce to the oil and gas industry and their stranglehold on Capitol Hill. The American Council on Renewable Energy represents many of those clean energy companies and their trade associations. Similarly, the push for an energy efficient economy is finding a new political voice in the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. In many ways the green economy movement is at the forefront of the push to fundamentally transform the economy with other similar movements trailing close behind.

What’s perhaps the most exciting and promising aspect of the movement for a green economy and a Green New Deal is that it’s bringing together a host of different organizations representing communities and constituencies that haven’t often come together over the years. The movement for a green economy and a Green New Deal came to prominence in 2009-2010, as so-called Cap & Trade policies and others were on the verge of passage. The Alliance for Climate Protection, a non-profit organization with Al Gore as its board chair, was leading the charge by acting as a coordinating entity of sorts with numerous member organizations helping provide a degree of direction to the movement in general. Now called The Climate Reality Project, its focus has shifted more towards general public education around climate change. This is likely a result of the inability to pass comprehensive climate change legislation during President Obama’s first term and the drastic decline in public belief around the role of human activity in causing climate change. It seems few expected such a drastic assault by the extreme right in spreading disinformation like the manufactured “Climate Gate” scandal.

Labor unions, manufacturers, and environmental organizations are coming together through organizations like the Apollo Alliance and the Blue-Green Alliance (recently merged). They are made up of both public and private labor unions like the United Steelworkers Union, environmental organizations like the Sierra Club, and even manufacturers of all sizes. Small and medium-sized businesses are part of this movement through the Advanced Energy Economy. Local chambers of commerce have even joined the fight through Chambers for Innovation and Clean Energy. Ceres is bringing together a wide variety of companies and investors small and large to address climate change and build a green economy. Broad umbrella organizations have emerged representing all types of community-based local organizations. 1Sky is the biggest of these organizations and recently merged with 350.org under the 350.org name to create a large advocacy organization made up of hundreds of thousands of members in the U.S. and a still larger global movement. It tackles many of the traditional environmental issues, while also advocating for Green New Deal policies. The Green Economy Coalition recently emerged as a global network to strategically support the expansion of the green economy at a global level in advance of the UN’s Summit on the 20th anniversary of the Earth Summit this past June of 2012.

Low-income communities and communities of color are part in this movement too. Green For All has been pioneering the creation of green jobs, career-track jobs that pay a living wage, have benefits, and address environmental issues at the same time. They lobby Congress on environmental and Green New Deal policies, develop innovative policy research, while assisting coalitions of organizations in cities to implement green job creation strategies and helping green businesses grow. Providing empowering opportunities for traditionally marginalized communities is a vital aspect of this growing movement, which is why Green For All and others similarly working to create and expand opportunities low-income communities, communities of color, and others who have traditionally been passed by when economic opportunities arise.

There are other organizations and efforts within this larger movement for a Green New Deal. The Smart Growth Alliance is pioneering a new national opposition to sprawl and support for public transportation at the same time. There are even signs that working to rebuild our urban cores around public transportation and the remediation of brownfields can be done in ways that empower traditionally marginalized communities. (4) Numerous other organizations are starting sustainability initiatives aimed at involving themselves in one way or another in this movement for a green economy and a Green New Deal. ICLEI, Local Governments for Sustainability, is a network of local governments from around the world focused on the best ways for governments to leverage their resources to best build the green economy. 

Outside of the public policy arena, organizations and institutions all across the country are launching sustainability initiatives as part of a truly massive movement. Colleges and universities and joining this movement through the American Association for Sustainability in Higher Education. Countless think tanks have emerged to focus on renewable energy and clean tech to workforce development, bio-based alternatives to petroleum-based chemicals, and much more.

This movement isn’t the only game in town when it comes to transforming the economy. Alongside the push for a green economy are a few other movements with the goal of fundamentally transforming the economy in one way or another. The green economy movement is much more expansive though, but aside from the work of groups like Green For All, it’s very much a “double bottom line movement.” Unlike traditional economic approaches that stand firmly on the belief that profit should be pursued above all else, that considerations of externalities like the environment only hinder profitability, the green economy movement is based on the belief that profitability and environmental sustainability can go hand in hand. As will be discussed in a subsequent article, the sharing economy, solidarity economy, and new economy take the goals of the green economy one step further, emphasizing a “triple bottom line” of people, planet, and profits. Just like the recognition that environmental sustainability and profit aren’t mutual exclusive, these other movements stress that the well being of communities can go hand in hand with environmental sustainability and the well being of the economy overall.

When the green economy movement first came on the scene with the ascendency of Van Jones to become President Obama’s green jobs advisor, some claimed it was part of a Communist conspiracy. Despite the irrational rantings of Glenn Beck and others, there is a strong push within this movement to more fundamentally transform the economic system as a whole. It just doesn’t have anything to do with traditional or “actually-existing” forms of Communism.

Given the frightening reality of climate change, the manipulative push-back from powerful corporate interests, and the longer-term economic stagnation that stands before us, it is likely that the green economy movement will increasingly take on the task of a more fundamental and structural transformation of the economy. The structural imbalances of power continue to thwart attempts to transform the economy on Capitol Hill. Examples like the Citizens United decision and the corporate assault on our democracy will likely force the green economy movement to fight for a more fundamental transformation of the dominant values and institutions in the U.S. This includes the nature and structure of major corporations as well as the nature of the political system overall. This is why an increasing unity between the green economy movement and other efforts to transform the economy are so important. The broader triple bottom line framework and transformational focus of efforts around sharing, solidarity, and a new economy must increasingly creep into the green economy movement; finding greater ideological and organizational unity.

We can already see the rise of a considerable mistrust of the entire notion of a green economy, evidenced by terms like ‘green washing’ and the decline in belief regarding climate change. A poignant example of this mistrust can be found with criticisms of the recent “Rio +20 Summit.” The 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development was meant to produce a renewed transformational focus on revamping the global economy for the planet and its poor. It showed little signs of achievement though. What’s more, this mistrust was codified into an alternative summit hosted as the “People’s Summit Rio+20.” It concluded that the green economy movement was fundamentally broken. As noted in one of their concluding documents, only by redirecting efforts towards the original goals of an Earth Summit, transforming the global economy into something that benefits the planet and its poorest, could the green economy find salvation.

From the perspective of the planet’s poorest and the organizations working with them, the green economy doesn’t represent opportunity. It represents a friendlier face of a global capitalist economy that has exploited them and their natural resources for decades. And just as the Alliance for Climate Protection became The Climate Reality Project in the face of public mistrust and disbelief in the realities of climate change, if the green economy movement wishes to win the hearts and minds of the American people, it has to not just educate but to create tangible and immediate solutions for individuals and communities struggling in the wake of our broken economy. This is why the other diverse movements to transform the economy have such a vital role to play. Each of them provide unique lessons for creating solutions today.

The green economy has been growing in the U.S. for decades, but if its going to go to the next level to transform the overall economy during these delicate beginning years of the 21st Century, it needs a mass movement behind it. The only way that’s possible, the only way the movement for a green economy becomes an impassioned charge from communities all across the country, the world for that matter, is for it to place the well being of those same communities into the forefront of it’s goals. When the movement to build a green economy transforms itself from a double bottom line to a triple bottom line movement, finding ways equitably support and interact with even the most marginalized communities, it’s firmly on the path to victory.

##

(1) Gerard Dumineil & Dominique Levy, The Crisis of Neoliberalism, (MA, Harvard University Press, 2011), P. 35-40.

(2) For a detailed description for how a Green New Deal could lead to substantial economic development, see Tim Jackson, Prosperity Without Growth, (DC: EarthScan, 2009). P. 113.

(3) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation (SRREN).” Abu Dhabi, May 9th, 2011.

(4) Carlton C. Eley. “Equitable Development: Untangling the Web of Urban Development through Collaborative Problem Solving.” Sustain: A Journal of Environmental and Sustainability Issues. Issue 21, Fall/Winter 2010.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Atlee McFellin

Atlee McFellin is a Co-Founder & Principal of SymCenter. Atlee specializes in the creation of innovative economic development strategies and programs. Prior to founding SymCenter, Atlee worked with The Democracy Collaborative to create comprehensive strategies for cities around the country based on the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland, OH. He is also the board co-chair of the New Economy Network, a national network of diverse organizations building a new economy from the ground up.

The Portrait of a Whistleblower: Torture Cannot Be Tolerated

On January 25th, 2013 in Washington, D.C., former CIA agent John Kiriakou will be sentenced to 2 &frac12; years in prison for revealing the name of an undercover CIA agent. On the eve of that sentencing, Americans Who Tell the Truth and the Government Accountability Project are unveiling his portrait as the newest in the AWTT portrait series. Why are AWTT & GAP celebrating and honoring a man whom our president, Justice Department, intelligence agencies, and military are prosecuting as a criminal?  

The first and most important answer to that question is that in Mr. Kiriakou’s indictment and conviction there is no mention about what he really did nor his intent.  As a CIA agent he refused to go along with the Bush administration’s claim that “enhanced interrogation” techniques, such as waterboarding, were not torture. And he pointed out that the decision to use torture was not being made by low level “bad apples” in the military & intelligence communities. Mr Kiriakou wrote in his book The Reluctant Spy ( Bantam Books, 2009)  that the decision to use torture was being made at the very top of our government, by the bad apples at the top of the tree. People in positions of great power decided to employ “enhanced interrogation “ techniques and “extraordinary renditions” and to deny these programs while they were simultaneously re-writing the law to legalize them. John Kiriakou refused to go along and blew the whistle.

He is being prosecuted not by the Bush administration but by Obama´s. President Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other presidents combined. When the  president ran for office the first time he pledged to protect whistleblowers, saying how important they are to maintain integrity in government. He has offered to explanation for his change of heart.

When I was asked to write a statement for the press release about the portrait unveiling event, I wrote, “A state that consistently uses law to subvert justice and to violate human rights has become an enemy of its own defining spirit. It takes great courage to defy the power of such a state and to demand that it adhere to its moral imperatives. John Kiriakou has shown that courage in opposing this country’s flagrant use of torture and its attempt to justify that use. It is my great honor to add his portrait to the Americans Who Tell the Truth project.”

In saying, “A state that consistently uses law to subvert justice…,” I was thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr., writing in 1963  his Letter from the Birmingham Jail condemning the praise that the racist southern sheriff of Birmingham, Bull Connor, was receiving from white ministers for using “nonviolent” techniques to arrest the people protesting for civil rights. King said, “Maybe Mr. Connor and his policemen have been rather publicly nonviolent … but they have used the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral end of flagrant racial injustice.”  And Dr. King continued addressing those ministers, “I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of the most inhuman provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes.” In other words, it was the courageous nonviolence of the protesters that prevented violence.

This portrait is an attempt to recognize a real hero. It is a terrible irony that the people who ordered the use of torture are free and continue to be rewarded for their “service” to this country, while the man who tried to stop torture is going to prison.

I was telling a friend recently about my choice to paint Mr. Kiriakou, and she said she was disappointed that I had chosen to do it. Why, I asked. Well, she said, Code of Honor. She was referring to the notion that an honorable member of an intelligence agency or the military would never speak negatively about another member publicly, never desert a comrade. Her attitude is understandable but fails to see how dangerous this code can be when it is used to hide the breaking of a more serious code. Just as a soldier is required by law to report a war crime, an intelligence officer who tries to stop the use of torture is staying true to the oath he or she took to defend the Constitution. The people who ordered torture, who lied about the fact of its use, who carried it out have made a mockery of any idea of the Code of Honor. For a person to invoke the Code of Honor as a reason for not reporting a crime makes one complicit in the crime. And for a person in a position of power to expect those under his/her jurisdiction to remain silent about a crime because they are respecting a Code of Honor is tantamount to moral bribery. A higher Code of Honor was broken by those political, military, and intelligence leaders who lied to create an unnecessary, illegal war and then denied and justified the use of torture.

Some people defending and supporting John Kiriakou have said that he has been destroyed by this ordeal. Originally he was charged under the Espionage Act and faced 35 years in prison. As a young man ( 48 ) with five children rather than risk conviction, he plea bargained to one count of revealing an agent’s name (even though that name was never revealed publicly and did nothing to expose classified information). Mr. Kiriakou has had his freedom taken away from him. He has lost his job, his house, his income. He has a debt of half a million dollars in lawyers fees. But destroyed? I’d say created. He has discovered a moral fiber that he may not have known that he had. He can, without denial, rationalization or hypocrisy, look at himself in the mirror. It’s hard to say you are on the right side of history when most of your former colleagues are on the other. But he has a new community now -- a community of whistleblowers, truth tellers, and activists for justice and human rights who support his courage. His former colleagues fear him because they know his courage to tell the truth complicates their  Code of Honor and, perhaps, indicts their cowardice.

John Kiriakou’s quote on his portrait says:

“Even if torture works, it cannot be tolerated -- not in one case or a thousand or a million. If their efficacy becomes the measure of abhorrent acts, all sorts of unspeakable crimes somehow become acceptable. I may have found myself on the wrong side of government on torture. But I’m on the right side of history. … There are things we should not do, even in the name of national security. One of them, I now firmly believe, is torture.”

Robert Shetterly

Robert Shetterly [send him mail] is a writer and artist who lives in Brooksville, Maine. He is the author of Americans Who Tell the Truth. See his website.

The Portrait of a Whistleblower: Torture Cannot Be Tolerated

On January 25th, 2013 in Washington, D.C., former CIA agent John Kiriakou will be sentenced to 2 &frac12; years in prison for revealing the name of an undercover CIA agent. On the eve of that sentencing, Americans Who Tell the Truth and the Government Accountability Project are unveiling his portrait as the newest in the AWTT portrait series. Why are AWTT & GAP celebrating and honoring a man whom our president, Justice Department, intelligence agencies, and military are prosecuting as a criminal?  

The first and most important answer to that question is that in Mr. Kiriakou’s indictment and conviction there is no mention about what he really did nor his intent.  As a CIA agent he refused to go along with the Bush administration’s claim that “enhanced interrogation” techniques, such as waterboarding, were not torture. And he pointed out that the decision to use torture was not being made by low level “bad apples” in the military & intelligence communities. Mr Kiriakou wrote in his book The Reluctant Spy ( Bantam Books, 2009)  that the decision to use torture was being made at the very top of our government, by the bad apples at the top of the tree. People in positions of great power decided to employ “enhanced interrogation “ techniques and “extraordinary renditions” and to deny these programs while they were simultaneously re-writing the law to legalize them. John Kiriakou refused to go along and blew the whistle.

He is being prosecuted not by the Bush administration but by Obama´s. President Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other presidents combined. When the  president ran for office the first time he pledged to protect whistleblowers, saying how important they are to maintain integrity in government. He has offered to explanation for his change of heart.

When I was asked to write a statement for the press release about the portrait unveiling event, I wrote, “A state that consistently uses law to subvert justice and to violate human rights has become an enemy of its own defining spirit. It takes great courage to defy the power of such a state and to demand that it adhere to its moral imperatives. John Kiriakou has shown that courage in opposing this country’s flagrant use of torture and its attempt to justify that use. It is my great honor to add his portrait to the Americans Who Tell the Truth project.”

In saying, “A state that consistently uses law to subvert justice…,” I was thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr., writing in 1963  his Letter from the Birmingham Jail condemning the praise that the racist southern sheriff of Birmingham, Bull Connor, was receiving from white ministers for using “nonviolent” techniques to arrest the people protesting for civil rights. King said, “Maybe Mr. Connor and his policemen have been rather publicly nonviolent … but they have used the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral end of flagrant racial injustice.”  And Dr. King continued addressing those ministers, “I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of the most inhuman provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes.” In other words, it was the courageous nonviolence of the protesters that prevented violence.

This portrait is an attempt to recognize a real hero. It is a terrible irony that the people who ordered the use of torture are free and continue to be rewarded for their “service” to this country, while the man who tried to stop torture is going to prison.

I was telling a friend recently about my choice to paint Mr. Kiriakou, and she said she was disappointed that I had chosen to do it. Why, I asked. Well, she said, Code of Honor. She was referring to the notion that an honorable member of an intelligence agency or the military would never speak negatively about another member publicly, never desert a comrade. Her attitude is understandable but fails to see how dangerous this code can be when it is used to hide the breaking of a more serious code. Just as a soldier is required by law to report a war crime, an intelligence officer who tries to stop the use of torture is staying true to the oath he or she took to defend the Constitution. The people who ordered torture, who lied about the fact of its use, who carried it out have made a mockery of any idea of the Code of Honor. For a person to invoke the Code of Honor as a reason for not reporting a crime makes one complicit in the crime. And for a person in a position of power to expect those under his/her jurisdiction to remain silent about a crime because they are respecting a Code of Honor is tantamount to moral bribery. A higher Code of Honor was broken by those political, military, and intelligence leaders who lied to create an unnecessary, illegal war and then denied and justified the use of torture.

Some people defending and supporting John Kiriakou have said that he has been destroyed by this ordeal. Originally he was charged under the Espionage Act and faced 35 years in prison. As a young man ( 48 ) with five children rather than risk conviction, he plea bargained to one count of revealing an agent’s name (even though that name was never revealed publicly and did nothing to expose classified information). Mr. Kiriakou has had his freedom taken away from him. He has lost his job, his house, his income. He has a debt of half a million dollars in lawyers fees. But destroyed? I’d say created. He has discovered a moral fiber that he may not have known that he had. He can, without denial, rationalization or hypocrisy, look at himself in the mirror. It’s hard to say you are on the right side of history when most of your former colleagues are on the other. But he has a new community now -- a community of whistleblowers, truth tellers, and activists for justice and human rights who support his courage. His former colleagues fear him because they know his courage to tell the truth complicates their  Code of Honor and, perhaps, indicts their cowardice.

John Kiriakou’s quote on his portrait says:

“Even if torture works, it cannot be tolerated -- not in one case or a thousand or a million. If their efficacy becomes the measure of abhorrent acts, all sorts of unspeakable crimes somehow become acceptable. I may have found myself on the wrong side of government on torture. But I’m on the right side of history. … There are things we should not do, even in the name of national security. One of them, I now firmly believe, is torture.”

Robert Shetterly

Robert Shetterly [send him mail] is a writer and artist who lives in Brooksville, Maine. He is the author of Americans Who Tell the Truth. See his website.

US seeks to raise retirement age

US President Barack Obama (L) listens to Business Roundtable member and Boeing Chief Executive Officer James McNerney in Washington on December 5, 2012. (File photo)

Top American business executives seek to lobby Washington for increasing the country’s retirement age, while pushing for reforms of the Social Security and Medicare.

An influential group of business executives - dubbed the Business Roundtable - has proposed on Wednesday new reforms of the Social Security and Medicare, aiming to increase the retirement age to 70.

The group will pitch the plan to US President Barack Obama and the Congress amid an upcoming round of deficit-reduction talks.

"We are calling on President Obama and Congress to look at our plan and enact a package of gradual changes that will provide economic and personal security for generations to come," said Gary Loveman, the CEO of Caesars casino and hotel in Las Vegas.


Experts say an aging US population and rising healthcare costs threatens to devastate the budget in coming years, with US politicians seeking a bailout through reforms of the Social Security and Medicare - once considered safe.

However, critics condemn any cuts in entitlement programs, as many Americans will not be able to pay increased costs and more senior citizens falling in poorer health.

Currently, retirees can receive reduced Social Security benefits starting at age 62, with full benefits beginning at 66.

GMA/PKH

Turks protest NATO missiles in Ankara

Turkish students hold a poster with photos of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (L), US President Barack Obama (C) and German Chancellor Angela Merkel looking like Adolf Hitler, during an anti-NATO protest in Ankara on December 21, 2012.

Turkish protesters have rallied in the capital, Ankara, to protest against the deployment of NATO Patriot missiles along their country's border with Syria.

The demonstrators urged the parliament on Tuesday to take action and cancel the deployment of NATO missiles and troops in Turkey.

Anti-Patriot protesters also gathered in front of the German Embassy in Ankara.

The protest comes a day after four batteries of Patriot missiles, two each from Germany and the Netherlands, reached Turkey.


"Germany, take your Patriots and get out of Turkey," the protesters chanted on Tuesday.

A similar anti-Patriot protest was held in front of the US Embassy on Monday, where angry protesters condemned what they called Ankara’s interventionist policies towards Syria.

Also on Monday, a group of Turkish protesters tried to get through the barricades at Incirlik Air Force Base in Adana in protest to the arrival of Patriot anti-missile batteries. About 25 protesters were arrested.

The United States, Germany and the Netherlands have agreed to deploy two batteries of Patriot missiles each, under the command of NATO, along the Turkish-Syria border after the military alliance approved a request by Turkey for the deployment of the surface-to-air missiles in the border region on December 4, 2012.

The three countries will also send nearly 350 troops each to Turkey. A number of American, German and Dutch soldiers are already stationed in the country.

Turkish people have held several protests against the military plan.

The Syrian government has also censured the plan, calling it another act of provocation by the government of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

HM/PKH/SS

Amplifying Voices for Change at This Year’s WEF

No one likes to be "unliked" on Facebook or elsewhere. But, every year for the last 12, I put on a brave face and go where I must -- not where I like -- where the world's most powerful people are: Davos, the World Economic Forum (WEF). Every year, I get a few "WEF WTF" emails and now tweets and comments.Public Eye Awards 2012 Davos Switzerland. Economist and Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz (l.), Amy Horton from World Development Movement (m.), Kumi Naidoo (r.), Executive Director of Greenpeace International at a press conference, close to the World Economic Forum (WEF). The Berne Declaration (BD) and Greenpeace Switzerland denounce the human rights and environmental abuses of some major corporations. 01/27/2012 (Heike Grasser / Greenpeace)

The week of the WEF feels like the most challenging week of my working life because of the "WEF spirit" conveyed by people at the Forum walking around as if they owned the world. The truly frustrating thing is that they actually do own most of it.

Frankly, I'd rather be risking arrest and taking part in an act of peaceful civil disobedience, marching in solidarity for social and economic justice or attempting to build strong civil society alliances together with like-minded people. I would rather be in the company of people who understand that humanity can be so much better than what we have been and what we are: tolerating of dehumanizing poverty, sacrificing our children's very futures by failing to act on climate change when both the science and mother nature itself are speaking with deafening urgency, paying lip service to gender inequality, spending immoral amounts of money on military spending when our public services are straining in rich and poor countries; and the list of injustices is much longer of course.

Yet, here I am again seeking to appeal to the most powerful that they have to move beyond an obsession with preserving a system that drives economic inequality, environmental destruction and violence. What is needed is not system maintenance or system recovery but a substantial system redesign. Indeed, a small but growing number of CEOs are beginning to "get it"; however, the majority of CEOs must unshackle themselves from a business-as-usual mentality since the levels of popular disaffection we are seeing from the Arab world to the Occupy movement, will look like a Sunday morning picnic in years to come if business leaders do not recognize that time is fast running out.

At each WEF I carry the contradiction that many of the people whose views I respect and many of the people whose aspirations I seek to promote are the excluded, while others seek only to promote their own self-interest.

But, if we are going to make it through the unelected, unrepresentative, super-powerful people prowling the corridors of Davos, we will need to be inside. Leaders will need to go beyond "resilient dynamism," protecting themselves from future shocks, and invest their power and money in long-term solutions. Like it or not, we have to win over at least some of the powerful in Davos if we are to avoid climate catastrophe, create decent work, and ensure decent public services, if we are going to have a chance to avert unnecessary conflict and disaster.

This year, I want to take your message to the #WEF @Davos -- please, be specific and to the point through your comments below, your tweets and posts. As the Davos conference unfolds and you follow it, I'd love to hear your thoughts and I will do my best to speak your truth to power.

Voices for change are mounting: earlier this month, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said that the financial costs linked to climate change represent the biggest threat to global economy.

If business took the view of enlightened self-interest, they would act against climate change because it's in their interest, because they could remain viable entities: bearing in mind what Sharan Burrows, the head of the International Trade Union Confederation has said: "There are no jobs on a dead planet" -- and indeed there is no business on a dead planet either. A transition toward an energy sector based on renewables will generate new opportunities, new industries, new forms of business and this would benefit both business and society generally.

As I try to find my thermal long johns to pack for the trip, I take heart in recent speeches from two of the most powerful people on the planet -- two indications that the truth is percolating through to power. Enlightened self-interest and philanthropy were writ large in Barack Obama's inauguration speech, a speech which he rekindled my faith in the fierce audacity of hope:

"We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path toward sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it. We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries - we must claim its promise. That is how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure - our forests and waterways; our croplands and snowcapped peaks. That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That's what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared."

The UN General Secretary addressing a conference in California earlier this month, who joined some of the dots: "The world spends more on the military in one month than it does on development all year." Continuing, " ... four hours of military spending is equal to the total budgets of all international disarmament and non-proliferation organizations combined. The world is over-armed. Peace is under-funded. Bloated military budgets promote proliferation, derail arms control, doom disarmament and detract from social and economic development."

So that is President Barack Obama and UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon covered -- what do you think?

© 2012 Greenpeace

Kumi Naidoo

Kumi Naidoo is Executive Director of Greenpeace International

Shock Claim: “The New Litmus Test Of Leadership In The Military Is If They...

Mac Slavo
January 22nd, 2013
SHTFplan.com

Read by 2,430 people

Had the following comments been made on a fringe corner of the internet most would dismiss them as outright conjecture. However, what you are about to read comes from one of the world’s foremost philanthropists, Jim Garrow, who has spent tens of millions of dollars of his own money to help over 35,000 Chinese baby girls from near certain death under China’s one-child-per-couple policy.

He was one of the 206 nominees for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, which was ultimately awarded to President Barack Obama.

Garrow, who has friends in high places, including the U.S. military, made a startling claim on his Facebook page Sunday, which if true, should leave no doubt about why the Obama administration is moving full force to seize firearms from law abiding Americans and why the US government’s law enforcement and security assets have been making preparations for years in anticipation of social breakdown and widespread civil unrest.

According to Garrow, the Obama administration has been rapidly retiring or re-assigning US military leaders based on a new ‘litmus test’ of their loyalty:

I have just been informed by a former senior military leader that Obama is using a new “litmus test” in determining who will stay and who must go in his military leaders. Get ready to explode folks.

“The new litmus test of leadership in the military is if they will fire on US citizens or not”.

Those who will not are being removed.

Dr. Jim Garrow – January 21, 2013

When pressed for the source of his information and asked why the senior military leader would not reveal his name, Garrow responded by saying, “I believe that the gentleman has done what he should and allowed all of us to sound the alarm.”

He revealed only that the man who shared this information, “is one of America’s foremost military heroes,” suggesting the source is a public figure.

Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars notes that this new ‘litmus test’ comes at a time when millions of Americans are already suspicious of the government’s motives behind a number of actions, including the most recent push to disarm the population:

Garrow’s claim is even more explosive given that the country is in the throes of a national debate about gun control, with gun rights advocates keen to insist that the founders put the second amendment in the Constitution primarily as a defense against government tyranny.

It also follows reports on Sunday that General James Mattis, head of the United States Central Command, “is being told to vacate his office several months earlier than planned.”

Would Jim Garrow put his reputation on the line by spreading a rumor or simply make this up to garner attention?

Or, is it possible that he does in fact have a high level military source who is privy to this information – someone who has himself been removed from his position because he didn’t pass the litmus test?

Should the Obama administration take Executive Actions against Americans in the event of a scenario where gun confiscation becomes reality or a collapse of our economic system leads to a complete meltdown of law and order on the streets of America, the administration would likely deploy military assets under martial law to subdue any uprisings or riots.

The only way this could be done is if military leaders are willing to command their subordinates to deploy against the American people and fire on them if necessary.

If Garrow’s claims are true, one can only shudder at the thought of what the end-game may be.

Author: Mac Slavo
Views: Read by 2,430 people
Date: January 22nd, 2013
Website: www.SHTFplan.com

Copyright Information: Copyright SHTFplan and Mac Slavo. This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to www.shtfplan.com. Please contact us for permission to reproduce this content in other media formats.

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The Amazing Grace of it All

Washington, DC -- President Barack Hussein Obama's second inauguration was every bit as historic as his first -- not because it said so much about the nation's long, bitter, unfinished struggle with issues of race, as was the case four years ago, but ...

Fiscal Footnote: Big Senate Gift to Drug Maker

The language buried in Section 632 of the law delays a set of Medicareprice restraints on a class of drugs that includes Sensipar, a lucrative Amgen pill used by kidney dialysispatients.

The provision gives Amgen an additional two years to sell Sensipar without government controls. The news was so welcome that the company’s chief executive quickly relayed it to investment analysts. But it is projected to cost Medicare up to $500 million over that period.

Amgen, which has a small army of 74 lobbyists in the capital, was the only company to argue aggressively for the delay, according to several Congressional aides of both parties.

Supporters of the delay, primarily leaders of the Senate Finance Committee who have long benefited from Amgen’s political largess, said it was necessary to allow regulators to prepare properly for the pricing change.

But critics, including several Congressional aides who were stunned to find the measure in the final bill, pointed out that Amgen had already won a previous two-year delay, and they depicted a second one as an unnecessary giveaway.

“That is why we are in the trouble we are in,” said Dennis J. Cotter, a health policy researcher who studies the cost and efficacy of dialysis drugs. “Everybody is carving out their own turf and getting it protected, and we pass the bill on to the taxpayer.”

The provision’s inclusion in the legislation to avert the tax increases and spending cuts that made up the so-called fiscal cliff shows the enduring power of special interests in Washington, even as Congress faces a critical test of its ability to balance the budget.

Amgen has deep financial and political ties to lawmakers like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, and Senators Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, and Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, who hold heavy sway over Medicare payment policy as the leaders of the Finance Committee.

It also has worked hard to build close ties with the Obama administration, with its lobbyists showing up more than a dozen times since 2009 on logs of visits to the White House, although a company official said Saturday that it had not appealed to the administration during the debate over the fiscal legislation.

Aides to Mr. Hatch and Mr. Baucus, and a spokeswoman for Amgen, said the delay would give the Medicare system and medical providers the time they needed to accommodate other complicated changes in how federal reimbursements for kidney care were determined.

“Sometimes when you try to do too much and too quickly, you screw up,” said Antonia Ferrier, a spokeswoman for Mr. Hatch. The goal, an Amgen spokeswoman said in a written statement, is “to ensure that quality of care is not compromised for dialysis patients.”

But the measure runs counter to a five-year effort in Washington to control the enormous expense of dialysis for the Medicare program by reversing incentives to overprescribe medication.

Amgen’s success also shows that even a significant federal criminal investigation may pose little threat to a company’s influence on Capitol Hill. On Dec. 19, as Congressional negotiations over the fiscal bill reached a frenzy, Amgen pleaded guilty to marketing one of its anti-anemia drugs, Aranesp, illegally. It agreed to pay criminal and civil penalties totaling $762 million, a record settlement for a biotechnology company, according to the Justice Department.

Amgen, whose headquarters is near Los Angeles and which had $15.6 billion in revenuein 2011, has a deep bench of Washington lobbyists that includes Jeff Forbes, the former chief of staff to Mr. Baucus; Hunter Bates, the former chief of staff for Mr. McConnell; and Tony Podesta, whose fast-growing lobbying firm has unusually close ties to the White House.

Amgen’s employees and political action committee have distributed nearly $5 million in contributions to political candidates and committees since 2007, including $67,750to Mr. Baucus, the Finance Committee chairman, and $59,000 to Mr. Hatch, the committee’s ranking Republican. They gave an additional $73,000 to Mr. McConnell, some of it at a fund-raising event for him that it helped sponsor in December while the debate over the fiscal legislation was under way. More than $141,000 has also gone from Amgen employees to President Obama’s campaigns.

What distinguishes the company’s efforts in Washington is the diversity and intensity of its public policy campaigns. Amgen and its foundation have directed hundreds of thousands of dollars in charitable contributions to influential groups like theCongressional Black Caucus and to lesser-known groups like the Utah Families Foundation, which was founded by Mr. Hatch and brings the senator positive coverage in his state’s news media.

Amgen has sent large donations to Glacier PAC, sponsored by Mr. Baucus in Montana, and OrrinPAC, a political action committee controlled by Mr. Hatch in Utah.

And when Mr. Hatch faced a rare primary challenge last year, a nonprofit group calling itself Freedom Path sponsored advertisements in Utah that attacked his opponent, an effort that tax records released in November show was financed in large part by thePharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a trade group that includes Amgen.

In some cases, the company’s former employees have found important posts inside the Capitol. They include Dan Todd, one of Mr. Hatch’s top Finance Committee staff members on health and Medicare policy, who worked as a health policy analyst for Amgen’s government affairs office from 2005 to 2009. Mr. Todd, who joined Mr. Hatch’s staff in 2011, was directly involved in negotiating the dialysis components of the fiscal bill, and he met with “all the stakeholders,” Mr. Hatch’s spokeswoman said, not disputing when asked that this included Amgen lobbyists.

For years, Amgen used its clout in Washington to lobby for generous Medicare payments for its blockbuster drug, Epogen, which fends off anemia in dialysis patients.

The Medicare program covers most costs associated with treating severe renal disease, regardless of a patient’s age, and the dialysis market continues to grow steadily. In 2010, the government’s kidney program was spending $1.9 billion on injectable anti-anemia drugs like Epogen.

But nearly a decade ago, evidence started to surface that questioned the effectiveness and safety of Epogen at the levels being used.

Researchers found that Medicare’s practice of reimbursing providers with separate payments for the drugs and for dialysis treatments encouraged overprescription because the providers made healthy profits with each dose. They also found that high doses posed cardiovascular risks to patients.

Congress reversed the incentive in 2008 by requiring Medicare to pay a single, bundled rate for a dialysis treatment and related medications starting in 2011. With providers potentially profiting more by prescribing less Epogen, use of dialysis drugs dropped by nearly 25 percent.

But the blow was softened for Amgen and other kidney care companies with a few favors from Congress. Among them was a two-year delay in the inclusion of certain oral drugs, Sensipar among them, in the new bundled payment system. That meant demand for Sensipar would not decline and Amgen would maintain control over pricing.

With that two-year exclusion set to expire in 2014, Amgen’s lobbyists began making rounds again on Capitol Hill last fall. In private meetings with staff members of the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance Committees, they argued for another two-year delay, several Congressional aides said.

Committee staff members had been meeting regularly in Room S-124 of the Capitol to negotiate a package of Medicare cuts needed to prevent a large scheduled reduction in doctors’ fees. The kidney program was on the table because a new report by the Government Accountability Office had found that Medicare had overpaid for dialysis by up to $880 million in 2011.

The discussions about cutting dialysis reimbursement began late last fall with little focus on a delay for oral drugs, but it was eventually endorsed by leading staff members for Mr. Baucus and Mr. Hatch, Congressional aides said.

Aides to the senators said the delay made sense because the Government Accountability Office had warned in early 2011 that federal regulators should take care in setting compensation levels for the drugs.

But others on Capitol Hill saw no justification for further delay.

“It is disappointing,” said a Democratic Congressional aide who declined to be named because of the issue’s sensitivity, “since the status quo encourages prescribing of oral drugs based on financial incentives rather than on best clinical practices.”

Mr. Hatch’s spokeswoman, Ms. Ferrier, said the involvement of Mr. Todd, the former Amgen employee, had not been inappropriate and that dozens of staff members on Capitol Hill handled matters that might benefit former employers.

“They have to leave their previous lives behind,” Ms. Ferrier said. “And Dan has done just that.”

After the House was sidelined late in the fiscal negotiations, the Senate gained control of the final bill-writing process, and the provision requested by Amgen was inserted into the legislation by Senate staff members.

Aides to Mr. Baucus and Mr. Hatch emphasized that the White House and Senate leadership, including Mr. McConnell, had the final word on the bill.

A spokesman for Mr. McConnell praised the parts of the legislation related to Medicare, while a White House spokesman declined to comment, saying the matter was decided by players on Capitol Hill.

Many lobbyists and Congressional aides said they first learned of the language when the final bill was posted publicly, only hours before being approved. It called for cutting $4.9 billion over 10 years by lowering Medicare payments for dialysis, but left hundreds of millions on the table by extending the oral drug delay.

At this point, opponents had no way to challenge the provision, as there was a single vote on the entire fiscal package. Mr. Baucus and Mr. Hatch voted in favor.

Aides to the senators said some heavy donors had won and others had lost in the Medicare negotiations — proof that the legislative outcome was based on the merits. “What is the best policy for Montanans and people across the country lies at the heart of every decision Chairman Baucus makes,” said Meaghan Smith, a spokeswoman for Mr. Baucus. “It’s as simple as that.”

1000 Chinese Workers Stage Revolt Over 2 Minute Bathroom Breaks

If we as a nation, buoyed by Obama's Inauguration preach, expect to compete once again on a global jobs stage (as we noted earlier) then perhaps taking a note from the Chinese employers' handbook will wake a few up to new realities. CTV News reports the Chinese workers are revolting as they demand "the scrapping of the ridiculously strict requirements stipulating that workers only have two minutes to go to the toilet and workers will be fined 50 yuan ($8) if they are late once and fired if they are late twice." Hundreds of Chinese factory orders angry at these policies took labor law into their own hands and held their Japanese and Chinese managers hostage for a day and a half before police broke up the strike. Shanghai Shinmei Electric noted the managers were released unharmed after 300 police officers were called to the factory. As CTV notes, strikes have become more commonplace in China, as factories operating in highly competitive markets try to get more productivity from their labor force; but workers connected by mobile phones and the Internet become more aware of their rights.

Via CTV News:

BEIJING — Hundreds of Chinese factory workers angry about strictly timed bathroom breaks and fines for starting work late held their Japanese and Chinese managers hostage for a day and a half before police broke up the strike.

About 1,000 workers at Shanghai Shinmei Electric Company held the 10 Japanese nationals and eight Chinese managers inside the factory in Shanghai starting Friday morning until 11.50 p.m. Saturday, said a statement from the parent company, Shinmei Electric Co., released Monday. It said the managers were released uninjured after 300 police officers were called to the factory.

A security guard at the Shanghai plant said Tuesday that workers had gone on strike to protest the company's issuing of new work rules, including time limits on bathroom breaks and fines for being late.

"The workers demanded the scrapping of the ridiculously strict requirements stipulating that workers only have two minutes to go to the toilet and workers will be fined 50 yuan ($8) if they are late once and fired if they are late twice," said the security guard, surnamed Feng. "The managers were later freed when police intervened and when they agreed to reconsider the rules."

The plant makes electromagnetic coils and other electronic products. It was closed Tuesday, said a man who answered at the plant but refused to identify himself. He said no workers were on strike and staff would return to work on Wednesday.

Strikes have become commonplace in China, as factories operating in highly competitive markets try to get more productivity from their labor force and workers connected by mobile phones and the Internet become more aware of their rights.

Shinmei Electric's statement didn't say specifically what the workers were protesting, but said management reforms and labor policies were believed to be a cause. It said talks were under way with workers at the plant and that police were questioning staff.

A man who refused to give his name from the press office of the Shanghai police bureau said he had no information about the incident and referred calls to the Shanghai government press office, where calls rang unanswered.

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Powder Keg in the Pacific

Don’t look now, but conditions are deteriorating in the western Pacific.  Things are turning ugly, with consequences that could prove deadly and spell catastrophe for the global economy.Chinese marine surveillance ship Haijian No. 51 (l.) as a Japan Coast Guard ship Ishigaki near disputed islands in East China Sea, September 14, 2012. (Kyodo/Reuters)

In Washington, it is widely assumed that a showdown with Iran over its nuclear ambitions will be the first major crisis to engulf the next secretary of defense -- whether it be former Senator Chuck Hagel, as President Obama desires, or someone else if he fails to win Senate confirmation.  With few signs of an imminent breakthrough in talks aimed at peacefully resolving the Iranian nuclear issue, many analysts believe that military action -- if not by Israel, than by the United States -- could be on this year’s agenda.

Lurking just behind the Iranian imbroglio, however, is a potential crisis of far greater magnitude, and potentially far more imminent than most of us imagine.  China’s determination to assert control over disputed islands in the potentially energy-rich waters of the East and South China Seas, in the face of stiffening resistance from Japan and the Philippines along with greater regional assertiveness by the United States, spells trouble not just regionally, but potentially globally.

Islands, Islands, Everywhere

The possibility of an Iranian crisis remains in the spotlight because of the obvious risk of disorder in the Greater Middle East and its threat to global oil production and shipping.  A crisis in the East or South China Seas (essentially, western extensions of the Pacific Ocean) would, however, pose a greater peril because of the possibility of a U.S.-China military confrontation and the threat to Asian economic stability.

The United States is bound by treaty to come to the assistance of Japan or the Philippines if either country is attacked by a third party, so any armed clash between Chinese and Japanese or Filipino forces could trigger American military intervention.  With so much of the world’s trade focused on Asia, and the American, Chinese, and Japanese economies tied so closely together in ways too essential to ignore, a clash of almost any sort in these vital waterways might paralyze international commerce and trigger a global recession (or worse).

All of this should be painfully obvious and so rule out such a possibility -- and yet the likelihood of such a clash occurring has been on the rise in recent months, as China and its neighbors continue to ratchet up the bellicosity of their statements and bolster their military forces in the contested areas.  Washington’s continuing statements about its ongoing plans for a “pivot” to, or “rebalancing” of, its forces in the Pacific have only fueled Chinese intransigence and intensified a rising sense of crisis in the region.  Leaders on all sides continue to affirm their country’s inviolable rights to the contested islands and vow to use any means necessary to resist encroachment by rival claimants.  In the meantime, China has increased the frequency and scale of its naval maneuvers in waters claimed by Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines, further enflaming tensions in the region.

Ostensibly, these disputes revolve around the question of who owns a constellation of largely uninhabited atolls and islets claimed by a variety of nations.  In the East China Sea, the islands in contention are called the Diaoyus by China and the Senkakus by Japan.  At present, they are administered by Japan, but both countries claim sovereignty over them.  In the South China Sea, several island groups are in contention, including the Spratly chain and the Paracel Islands (known in China as the Nansha and Xisha Islands, respectively).  China claims all of these islets, while Vietnam claims some of the Spratlys and Paracels.  Brunei, Malaysia, and the Philippines also claim some of the Spratlys.

Far more is, of course, at stake than just the ownership of a few uninhabited islets.  The seabeds surrounding them are believed to sit atop vast reserves of oil and natural gas.  Ownership of the islands would naturally confer ownership of the reserves -- something all of these countries desperately desire.  Powerful forces of nationalism are also at work: with rising popular fervor, the Chinese believe that the islands are part of their national territory and any other claims represent a direct assault on China’s sovereign rights; the fact that Japan -- China’s brutal invader and occupier during World War II -- is a rival claimant to some of them only adds a powerful tinge of victimhood to Chinese nationalism and intransigence on the issue.  By the same token, the Japanese, Vietnamese, and Filipinos, already feeling threatened by China’s growing wealth and power, believe no less firmly that not bending on the island disputes is an essential expression of their nationhood.

Long ongoing, these disputes have escalated recently.  In May 2011, for instance, the Vietnamese reported that Chinese warships were harassing oil-exploration vessels operated by the state-owned energy company PetroVietnam in the South China Sea.  In two instances, Vietnamese authorities claimed, cables attached to underwater survey equipment were purposely slashed.  In April 2012, armed Chinese marine surveillance ships blocked efforts by Filipino vessels to inspect Chinese boats suspected of illegally fishing off Scarborough Shoal, an islet in the South China Sea claimed by both countries.

The East China Sea has similarly witnessed tense encounters of late.  Last September, for example, Japanese authorities arrested 14 Chinese citizens who had attempted to land on one of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands to press their country’s claims, provoking widespread anti-Japanese protests across China and a series of naval show-of-force operations by both sides in the disputed waters.

Regional diplomacy, that classic way of settling disputes in a peaceful manner, has been under growing strain recently thanks to these maritime disputes and the accompanying military encounters.  In July 2012, at the annual meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Asian leaders were unable to agree on a final communiqué, no matter how anodyne -- the first time that had happened in the organization’s 46-year history.  Reportedly, consensus on a final document was thwarted when Cambodia, a close ally of China’s, refused to endorse compromise language on a proposed “code of conduct” for resolving disputes in the South China Sea.  Two months later, when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited Beijing in an attempt to promote negotiations on the disputes, she was reviled in the Chinese press, while officials there refused to cede any ground at all.

As 2012 ended and the New Year began, the situation only deteriorated.  On December 1st, officials in Hainan Province, which administers the Chinese-claimed islands in the South China Sea, announced a new policy for 2013: Chinese warships would now be empowered to stop, search, or simply repel foreign ships that entered the claimed waters and were suspected of conducting illegal activities ranging, assumedly, from fishing to oil drilling.  This move coincided with an increase in the size and frequency of Chinese naval deployments in the disputed areas.

On December 13th, the Japanese military scrambled F-15 fighter jets when a Chinese marine surveillance plane flew into airspace near the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands.  Another worrisome incident occurred on January 8th, when four Chinese surveillance ships entered Japanese-controlled waters around those islands for 13 hours.  Two days later, Japanese fighter jets were again scrambled when a Chinese surveillance plane returned to the islands.  Chinese fighters then came in pursuit, the first time supersonic jets from both sides flew over the disputed area. The Chinese clearly have little intention of backing down, having indicated that they will increase their air and naval deployments in the area, just as the Japanese are doing.

Powder Keg in the Pacific

While war clouds gather in the Pacific sky, the question remains: Why, pray tell, is this happening now?

Several factors seem to be conspiring to heighten the risk of confrontation, including leadership changes in China and Japan, and a geopolitical reassessment by the United States.

* In China, a new leadership team is placing renewed emphasis on military strength and on what might be called national assertiveness.  At the 18th Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, held last November in Beijing, Xi Jinping was named both party head and chairman of the Central Military Commission, making him, in effect, the nation’s foremost civilian and military official.  Since then, Xi has made several heavily publicized visits to assorted Chinese military units, all clearly intended to demonstrate the Communist Party’s determination, under his leadership, to boost the capabilities and prestige of the country’s army, navy, and air force.  He has already linked this drive to his belief that his country should play a more vigorous and assertive role in the region and the world.

In a speech to soldiers in the city of Huizhou, for example, Xi spoke of his “dream” of national rejuvenation: “This dream can be said to be a dream of a strong nation; and for the military, it is the dream of a strong military.”  Significantly, he used the trip to visit the Haikou, a destroyer assigned to the fleet responsible for patrolling the disputed waters of the South China Sea.  As he spoke, a Chinese surveillance plane entered disputed air space over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands in the East China Sea, prompting Japan to scramble those F-15 fighter jets.

* In Japan, too, a new leadership team is placing renewed emphasis on military strength and national assertiveness.  On December 16th, arch-nationalist Shinzo Abe returned to power as the nation’s prime minister.  Although he campaigned largely on economic issues, promising to revive the country’s lagging economy, Abe has made no secret of his intent to bolster the Japanese military and assume a tougher stance on the East China Sea dispute.

In his first few weeks in office, Abe has already announced plans to increase military spending and review an official apology made by a former government official to women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II.  These steps are sure to please Japan’s rightists, but certain to inflame anti-Japanese sentiment in China, Korea, and other countries it once occupied.

Equally worrisome, Abe promptly negotiated an agreement with the Philippines for greater cooperation on enhanced “maritime security” in the western Pacific, a move intended to counter growing Chinese assertiveness in the region.  Inevitably, this will spark a harsh Chinese response -- and because the United States has mutual defense treaties with both countries, it will also increase the risk of U.S. involvement in future engagements at sea.

* In the United States, senior officials are debating implementation of the “Pacific pivot” announced by President Obama in a speech before the Australian Parliament a little over a year ago.  In it, he promised that additional U.S. forces would be deployed in the region, even if that meant cutbacks elsewhere.  “My guidance is clear,” he declared.  “As we plan and budget for the future, we will allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in this region.”  While Obama never quite said that his approach was intended to constrain the rise of China, few observers doubt that a policy of “containment” has returned to the Pacific.

Indeed, the U.S. military has taken the first steps in this direction, announcing, for example, that by 2017 all three U.S. stealth planes, the F-22, F-35, and B-2, would be deployed to bases relatively near China and that by 2020 60% of U.S. naval forces will be stationed in the Pacific (compared to 50% today).  However, the nation’s budget woes have led many analysts to question whether the Pentagon is actually capable of fully implementing the military part of any Asian pivot strategy in a meaningful way.  A study conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at the behest of Congress, released last summer, concluded that the Department of Defense “has not adequately articulated the strategy behind its force posture planning [in the Asia-Pacific] nor aligned the strategy with resources in a way that reflects current budget realities.”

This, in turn, has fueled a drive by military hawks to press the administration to spend more on Pacific-oriented forces and to play a more vigorous role in countering China's "bullying" behavior in the East and South China Seas.  “[America’s Asian allies] are waiting to see whether America will live up to its uncomfortable but necessary role as the true guarantor of stability in East Asia, or whether the region will again be dominated by belligerence and intimidation,” former Secretary of the Navy and former Senator James Webb wrote in the Wall Street Journal.  Although the administration has responded to such taunts by reaffirming its pledge to bolster its forces in the Pacific, this has failed to halt the calls for an even tougher posture by Washington.  Obama has already been chided for failing to provide sufficient backing to Israel in its struggle with Iran over nuclear weapons, and it is safe to assume that he will face even greater pressure to assist America’s allies in Asia were they to be threatened by Chinese forces.

Add these three developments together, and you have the makings of a powder keg -- potentially at least as explosive and dangerous to the global economy as any confrontation with Iran.  Right now, given the rising tensions, the first close encounter of the worst kind, in which, say, shots were unexpectedly fired and lives lost, or a ship or plane went down, might be the equivalent of lighting a fuse in a crowded, over-armed room.  Such an incident could occur almost any time.  The Japanese press has reported that government officials there are ready to authorize fighter pilots to fire warning shots ig Chinese aircraft penetrate the airspace over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands.  A Chinese general has said that such an act would count as the start of "actual combat." That the irrationality of such an event will be apparent to anyone who considers the deeply tangled economic relations among all these powers may prove no impediment to the situation -- as at the beginning of World War I -- simply spinning out of everyone’s control.

Can such a crisis be averted?  Yes, if the leaders of China, Japan, and the United States, the key countries involved, take steps to defuse the belligerent and ultra-nationalistic pronouncements now holding sway and begin talking with one another about practical steps to resolve the disputes.  Similarly, an emotional and unexpected gesture -- Prime Minister Abe, for instance, pulling a Nixon and paying a surprise goodwill visit to China -- might carry the day and change the atmosphere.  Should these minor disputes in the Pacific get out of hand, however, not just those directly involved but the whole planet will look with sadness and horror on the failure of everyone involved.

© 2012 Tom Dispatch

Michael T. Klare

Michael T. Klare is the Five College Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. His newest book, The Race for What's Left: The Global Scramble for the World's Last Resources, has just recently been published.  His other books include: Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy and Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum. A documentary version of that book is available from the Media Education Foundation.

Imperialist Powers Escalate War in Mali

natoeu

Amid continuing offensives by French troops in Mali, the imperialist powers are making clear that the assault on Mali is part of a lasting, neo-colonial escalation of military intervention throughout Western Africa and beyond.

“This is a global threat and it will require a global response… that is about years, even decades, rather than months,” British Prime Minister David Cameron said over the weekend.

French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian defined his aim in Mali as “the total re-conquest of the country,” using troops provided by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). France, which is currently spearheading the war in Mali, plans to expel Tuareg and Islamist fighters from Mali to pursue its agenda. Its goal is to stabilize the corrupt regime in Bamako, currently led by the military junta of Captain Amadou Sanogo, as its stooge regime in Mali, where France has significant corporate interests.

Similarly, British Foreign Secretary William Hague held up the current war in Somalia as an example for Mali on how to create space for a “legitimate government” to function. He said, “This has led to a lot of progress in Somalia. What we don’t want in countries like Mali is the twenty years of being a failed state that preceded all of that in Somalia.”

Such a comment could not be more chilling. In fact, Somalia continues to be a deeply impoverished country, torn by civil war, and which Washington regularly targets with drone strikes. Hague’s comment signifies that the NATO powers view such an outcome as perfectly acceptable, even desirable, for Mali.

The broader implications of the escalating war in Mali were laid out in an article yesterday in the New York Times. The Times quotes Rudolph Attala, a former Pentagon counterterrorism official: “To dismantle their [Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb’s] network, the United States and its allies will need a well-thought-out regional strategy.”

The point being made is clear: the war in Mali is not only about Mali, but involves intensive diplomacy and military operations by the imperialists to shape all of Western Africa—including Algeria, Nigeria, and the Libyan regime installed by the 2011 NATO war. The Times notes that Washington and Paris have been “courting Algeria for months,” to get Algiers’ help in Mali.

The Times added: “Forging that strategy will be far from easy, given those involved. The Algerians have an able, if heavy-handed military, but have not been eager to co-operate extensively with their neighbours. Libya’s new government appears willing to cooperate but has little ability. Mali has little military ability, and any enduring solution needs to be crafted with an eye to internal politics.”

Bruce Hoffman, an expert on terrorism at Georgetown University, told the Times that the US should escalate military assistance and drone warfare to help France: “The United States should consider stepping up its support for the French intervention, by providing additional logistical support and perhaps making use of drones, so that the French military can better carry out its operations and hand over the mission as soon as possible to African troops.”

The press is stepping up its criticisms of an alleged “lack of support” for French imperialism’s war in Mali, demanding that their governments rush to help. The former US ambassador to Mali, Vicki Huddleston, criticized the Obama administration for its “inaction” in a recent radio interview.

While US think tanks and intelligence forces are busy deliberating methods of escalating the war, the fighting in Mali has intensified. Over the weekend French Rafale fighter planes and Gazelle helicopter gun ships carried out a dozen operations.

On Monday about 200 French soldiers from the 21st Marine Infantry Regiment, supported by six combat helicopters and reconnaissance planes, seized the towns of Diabaly and Douentza. The infantrymen had set out at dawn from the nearby government-controlled town of Niono, thirty miles south of Diabaly.

Few details about the fighting are known, as reporters have been banned from the combat zone. However, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said that they had received reports of serious abuses, including ethnic killings, committed by French-backed Malian security forces against civilians in Niono.

According to HRW, Tuaregs and Arabs, the ethnic groups most associated with the rebels in northern Mali, are especially targeted. This recalls similar communal attacks by NATO-backed forces on immigrant workers from ethnic groups considered supportive of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, during the NATO war on Libya.

On Saturday French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, attending an ECOWAS emergency summit in the Ivorian capital of Abidjan, told African leaders that it was time for their nations to take over military operations in Mali “as soon as possible”.

The member states pledged to send 5,800 troops into Mali. They endorsed Major General Shehu Usman Abdulkadir of Nigeria and Brigadier General Yaye Garba of Niger as Force Commander and Deputy Force Commander of the African-led International Support Mission in Mali (AFISMA).

AFISMA is expected to cost the impoverished former French and British colonies in West Africa over $500 million. International donors will meet January 29 in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, to discuss funding.

Some 150 troops from Nigeria, Togo, Benin and Chad arrived in Bamako on Sunday.

Nigerian troops were attacked on their way by gunmen in Kogi State, central Nigeria, leaving two officers dead and eight soldiers wounded. An online newspaper said the attack was part of a mission to stop Nigerian troops joining Western powers in their “aim to demolish the Islamic empire of Mali.” A group named Ansaru close to the Islamists of Boko Haram was reportedly behind the attack.

France can firmly count on the support of European imperialism. The European Union (EU) appointed French Brigadier General Francois Lecointre as commander of a mission to send 250 military trainers to Mali in February. It will not only give 50 million euros ($66 million) of funding to Ecowas forces, but has announced it will unblock € 250 million in aid for Mali that was frozen after the military coup in March 2012.

It also offered to host a ministerial meeting of the international support and follow-up group on the situation in Mali on February 5. Following Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Belgium and Denmark, Italy has now also offered logistical support.

According to US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, about 100 American trainers have deployed to Niger, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Togo, Senegal and Ghana to help prepare troops in these countries for combat in Mali.

WATCH: James Franco’s Unintentionally Hilarious Inauguration Poem

Barack Obama President Barack Obama waves to crowd after his Inaugural speech at the ceremonial swearing-in on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol during the 57th Presidential Inauguration in Washington, Monday, Jan. 21, 2013. (AP Photo/Scott Andrews, ...

NOW to Honor 40th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade with Vigil at Supreme Court

WASHINGTON - January 22 - NOW President Terry O'Neill will lead a candlelight vigil on Tuesday, Jan. 22, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that recognized women's fundamental right to abortion.

"NOW affirms that women's access to the full range of reproductive health services -- including safe, legal and affordable abortion care and birth control -- is integral to women's ability to participate equally in our society," said O'Neill. "Roe v. Wade has helped improve women's status in the U.S. and saved countless women's lives."

What: 40th Anniversary Roe v. Wade Candlelight Vigil

Who: Terry O'Neill, president, National Organization for Women; Ellie Smeal, president, Feminist Majority Foundation; Kimberly Inez McGurie, senior policy analyst, National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health; Allison Stouffer, vice president, DC NOW

When: Tuesday, Jan. 22, 5:00 - 6:00 p.m.

Where: U.S. Supreme Court, Washington, D.C.

"For the last two years, abortion and birth control have been under increased attack at both the state and federal level," said O'Neill. "In the face of these attacks, U.S. voters re-elected President Obama, who has worked to defend and advance women's access to reproductive health care services. Coming one day after the president's inauguration, I predict a high level of energy and optimism outside the Supreme Court on Jan. 22."  

NOW to Honor 40th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade with Vigil at Supreme Court

WASHINGTON - January 22 - NOW President Terry O'Neill will lead a candlelight vigil on Tuesday, Jan. 22, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that recognized women's fundamental right to abortion.

"NOW affirms that women's access to the full range of reproductive health services -- including safe, legal and affordable abortion care and birth control -- is integral to women's ability to participate equally in our society," said O'Neill. "Roe v. Wade has helped improve women's status in the U.S. and saved countless women's lives."

What: 40th Anniversary Roe v. Wade Candlelight Vigil

Who: Terry O'Neill, president, National Organization for Women; Ellie Smeal, president, Feminist Majority Foundation; Kimberly Inez McGurie, senior policy analyst, National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health; Allison Stouffer, vice president, DC NOW

When: Tuesday, Jan. 22, 5:00 - 6:00 p.m.

Where: U.S. Supreme Court, Washington, D.C.

"For the last two years, abortion and birth control have been under increased attack at both the state and federal level," said O'Neill. "In the face of these attacks, U.S. voters re-elected President Obama, who has worked to defend and advance women's access to reproductive health care services. Coming one day after the president's inauguration, I predict a high level of energy and optimism outside the Supreme Court on Jan. 22."  

Two Minutes to Spare? Watch This

Barack Obama President Barack Obama waves to crowd after his Inaugural speech at the ceremonial swearing-in on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol during the 57th Presidential Inauguration in Washington, Monday, Jan. 21, 2013. (AP Photo/Scott Andrews, ...

“Free-Market” Outcomes Are Not Fair–and Not Free

“Since 1980, the U.S. government has reduced its intervention in the U.S. economy, which has become much more of a free market. Conservatives applaud this development because they think that free-market outcomes reward talent and hard work; progressives object to the income inequality of free-market outcomes and want to use government tax and transfer policy to reduce inequality.”

Most people, whether conservative or progressive, would probably agree with this statement. This framing of the issue, however, plays into a right-wing story in which conservatives are the defenders of (free) market outcomes, including the success of the rich who have made it “on their own”; meanwhile, the “dependent poor” look to the government for handouts. This has been a basic element of the right-wing playbook for a long time. Then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney was drawing on this narrative when he complained about the 47% of the U.S. population “who are dependent upon government ... who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them.”

This view has two main themes: 1) Because the U.S. free-market economy rewards talent and hard work, the middle class should emulate the wealthy for their success, not vilify them; and 2) those who have been failures in the market want the government to take care of them by redistributing income from those who have been successful. We can see these themes play out on all sorts of political issues. They form, for example, the basis for the attacks on the Affordable Health Care Act (or “Obamacare”). Middle-class Americans, in the conservative view, are being taxed—forced to pay—to provide health insurance for those “unsuccessful” elements of the population who have not earned it themselves.

The conservative argument assumes that the outcomes we observe are the result of a free-market economy. However, the right-wing objective has not been to create a free market; it has been to rig government policy and the market so as to redistribute income towards large corporations and the wealthy.

For example, conservatives themselves want to use government policy to effect a different distribution of income from what we have now—a distribution that is more favorable to corporations and the very rich. A central policy objective for conservatives, ever since the Reagan Administration, has been to cut taxes on the wealthy. And by cutting government revenue, they have been able to make the argument that government programs for the poor and the middle class need to be cut in order to balance the budget.

Also, conservatives have eliminated restrictions on corporations and protections for workers, consumers, and the environment. They have attacked barriers to international capital mobility, deregulated industries, and reduced government regulations to ensure a safe workplace and a healthy environment.

Because conservative policies have often taken the form of reducing government programs and regulations, the ideology of a free market has been useful in rationalizing them. Other conservative interventions, however, have been less able to fit into the free-market mold, and therefore are especially revealing of conservatives’ genuine aims. When the financial crisis of 2008 threatened the survival of the large banks, they were quick to ask for the government to intervene with a large bailout. The “right-to-work” law recently passed in Indiana, designed to deprive unions of financial resources, is an explicit rejection of a market outcome—the private agreement between management and union to require all workers to pay their “fair share” of the costs of union representation. “Free-trade” agreements, ostensibly designed to eliminate restrictions on the movement of goods and capital, have nonetheless continued to restrict the free movement of people. Even the repeal of financial regulations in the 1980s and 1990s, ostensibly a free-market endeavor, created the anti-competitive giant financial firms that demanded to be bailed out in 2008.

The realization that the economy is rigged to benefit the rich and large corporations takes away the force of the right-wing argument that progressives want to use government to “vilify” the “successful” and reward the “slothful and incompetent.” When the game has been rigged, it is wrong to say that the market simply rewards talent and hard work, and the outcomes that result can hardly be called fair. When the market outcomes that we observe are unfair, we need to both change the rules for how the economy works and use the government to restore fairness.

© 2012 Dollars and Sense

Marty Wolfson

Marty Wolfson is a professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame.

“Free-Market” Outcomes Are Not Fair–and Not Free

“Since 1980, the U.S. government has reduced its intervention in the U.S. economy, which has become much more of a free market. Conservatives applaud this development because they think that free-market outcomes reward talent and hard work; progressives object to the income inequality of free-market outcomes and want to use government tax and transfer policy to reduce inequality.”

Most people, whether conservative or progressive, would probably agree with this statement. This framing of the issue, however, plays into a right-wing story in which conservatives are the defenders of (free) market outcomes, including the success of the rich who have made it “on their own”; meanwhile, the “dependent poor” look to the government for handouts. This has been a basic element of the right-wing playbook for a long time. Then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney was drawing on this narrative when he complained about the 47% of the U.S. population “who are dependent upon government ... who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them.”

This view has two main themes: 1) Because the U.S. free-market economy rewards talent and hard work, the middle class should emulate the wealthy for their success, not vilify them; and 2) those who have been failures in the market want the government to take care of them by redistributing income from those who have been successful. We can see these themes play out on all sorts of political issues. They form, for example, the basis for the attacks on the Affordable Health Care Act (or “Obamacare”). Middle-class Americans, in the conservative view, are being taxed—forced to pay—to provide health insurance for those “unsuccessful” elements of the population who have not earned it themselves.

The conservative argument assumes that the outcomes we observe are the result of a free-market economy. However, the right-wing objective has not been to create a free market; it has been to rig government policy and the market so as to redistribute income towards large corporations and the wealthy.

For example, conservatives themselves want to use government policy to effect a different distribution of income from what we have now—a distribution that is more favorable to corporations and the very rich. A central policy objective for conservatives, ever since the Reagan Administration, has been to cut taxes on the wealthy. And by cutting government revenue, they have been able to make the argument that government programs for the poor and the middle class need to be cut in order to balance the budget.

Also, conservatives have eliminated restrictions on corporations and protections for workers, consumers, and the environment. They have attacked barriers to international capital mobility, deregulated industries, and reduced government regulations to ensure a safe workplace and a healthy environment.

Because conservative policies have often taken the form of reducing government programs and regulations, the ideology of a free market has been useful in rationalizing them. Other conservative interventions, however, have been less able to fit into the free-market mold, and therefore are especially revealing of conservatives’ genuine aims. When the financial crisis of 2008 threatened the survival of the large banks, they were quick to ask for the government to intervene with a large bailout. The “right-to-work” law recently passed in Indiana, designed to deprive unions of financial resources, is an explicit rejection of a market outcome—the private agreement between management and union to require all workers to pay their “fair share” of the costs of union representation. “Free-trade” agreements, ostensibly designed to eliminate restrictions on the movement of goods and capital, have nonetheless continued to restrict the free movement of people. Even the repeal of financial regulations in the 1980s and 1990s, ostensibly a free-market endeavor, created the anti-competitive giant financial firms that demanded to be bailed out in 2008.

The realization that the economy is rigged to benefit the rich and large corporations takes away the force of the right-wing argument that progressives want to use government to “vilify” the “successful” and reward the “slothful and incompetent.” When the game has been rigged, it is wrong to say that the market simply rewards talent and hard work, and the outcomes that result can hardly be called fair. When the market outcomes that we observe are unfair, we need to both change the rules for how the economy works and use the government to restore fairness.

© 2012 Dollars and Sense

Marty Wolfson

Marty Wolfson is a professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame.

FLOTUS Reacts To Boehner

Mrs. Boehner was at a Presidential Inaugural Luncheon, for Christ's sake - anyone who was calling her should have known THAT. She should have let that call go to voice mail, but hey, she's married to Orange Julius, who's sole mission has been to make ...

Iran Wants a Nuclear Deal, not War

To stop Iran achieving "critical capability" to produce nuclear weapons in the coming months, President Obama must impose "maximal" sanctions – that is the message of a new report issued in Washington by five senior non-proliferation specialists.Benjamin Netanyahu warns the UN about Iran's nuclear ambitions last September, although 'Israel has not permitted the IAEA even a single inspection and possesses hundreds of nuclear weapons'. Photograph: Richard Drew/AP

They call on Obama to implement a de facto international embargo on all investments in, and trade with, Iran, declaring: "A successful outcome in any negotiations with Iran depends on the immediate implementation of these sanctions, along with simultaneously reinforcing the credibility of President Obama's threat to use military force, if necessary, to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons."

Although the report is the work of The Project on US Middle East Nonproliferation Strategy – and is supposedly about nonproliferation – its authors have concentrated on punitive measures against Iran, and none against Israel. However, Iran has been fairly compliant: it has ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and has given the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) more than 4,000 man-days' worth of inspections in recent years. According to the US National Intelligence Estimate's assessment in 2007 and 2011, Iran does not have an active nuclear-weapons programme.

There is no conclusive evidence that Iran has made any effort to build the bomb since 2003, and Iran's leadership has not yet made a political decision to do so. In contrast, Israel is not a signatory to the NPT, has not permitted the IAEA even a single inspection and possesses hundreds of nuclear weapons. The reasons that international efforts to realise a "nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East" have made no progress since Iran proposed the idea almost 40 years ago must therefore be clear.

Nevertheless, the report states that the US "should offer nuclear sanctions relief to Iran only in response to meaningful concessions by the Iranians that are consistent with the multiple relevant UN security council resolutions, IAEA board of governors resolutions, and US laws".

In order to develop a more realistic approach, we need to assess the status quo in nuclear negotiations between Iran, the P5+1 group (US, UK, France, Russia, China and Germany) and the IAEA, the UN watchdog. The latest round of talks in January between the watchdog and Iran have not resulted in a deal. The IAEA and the P5+1 have a number of major demands, including the implementation of the additional protocol to the non-proliferation treaty, which mandates greater access for inspectors; co-operation on issues related to the "possible military dimension" of Iran's nuclear activities; capping uranium enrichment at 5%; and exporting enriched uranium not consumed domestically.

The demands on capping and exporting go beyond the treaty, and even the additional protocol. More than 70 countries have not yet signed up to the protocol; and certain member states of the IAEA enrich uranium to 96%, with tonnes of uranium stockpiled beyond domestic needs. Moreover, the IAEA requires Iran to give access beyond that required by the additional protocol in order to address the "possible military dimension". Iran cannot accept such demands for free, and the IAEA is not in position to negotiate reciprocations. That is why it was a mistake to have the IAEA's visit to Tehran take place prior to the meeting between P5+1 and Iran.

Nevertheless, those familiar with the realities of nuclear negotiations know very well that Iran has both publicly and in private meetings with the P5+1 indicated its readiness to accept all the above major demands. In return Iran expects recognition of its legitimate right to enrichment under the NPT and the lifting of sanctions – but unfortunately the western powers among the P5+1 have not signed up to such a deal.

The art of negotiation is to frame such a package with a specific timetable, and implemented by a step-by-step plan with appropriate reciprocations at each stage. It would be prudent for President Obama and the world powers to advance such a fair deal in upcoming talks and ignore attempts by warmongers to target advocates of a diplomatic solution.

Promoters of further sanctions, isolation and other punitive measures aim to make war with Iran inevitable. But such a war would make the US war in Iraq look like a walk in a park. Instead we should take the opportunity for diplomacy to prevail and devote the necessary political will to make it succeed.

© 2012 The Guardian

 Hossein Mousavian

Hossein Mousavian is the former spokesperson of Iran's nuclear negotiating team and author of the book Iranian Nuclear Crisis: A Memoir, published by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Iran Wants a Nuclear Deal, not War

To stop Iran achieving "critical capability" to produce nuclear weapons in the coming months, President Obama must impose "maximal" sanctions – that is the message of a new report issued in Washington by five senior non-proliferation specialists.Benjamin Netanyahu warns the UN about Iran's nuclear ambitions last September, although 'Israel has not permitted the IAEA even a single inspection and possesses hundreds of nuclear weapons'. Photograph: Richard Drew/AP

They call on Obama to implement a de facto international embargo on all investments in, and trade with, Iran, declaring: "A successful outcome in any negotiations with Iran depends on the immediate implementation of these sanctions, along with simultaneously reinforcing the credibility of President Obama's threat to use military force, if necessary, to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons."

Although the report is the work of The Project on US Middle East Nonproliferation Strategy – and is supposedly about nonproliferation – its authors have concentrated on punitive measures against Iran, and none against Israel. However, Iran has been fairly compliant: it has ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and has given the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) more than 4,000 man-days' worth of inspections in recent years. According to the US National Intelligence Estimate's assessment in 2007 and 2011, Iran does not have an active nuclear-weapons programme.

There is no conclusive evidence that Iran has made any effort to build the bomb since 2003, and Iran's leadership has not yet made a political decision to do so. In contrast, Israel is not a signatory to the NPT, has not permitted the IAEA even a single inspection and possesses hundreds of nuclear weapons. The reasons that international efforts to realise a "nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East" have made no progress since Iran proposed the idea almost 40 years ago must therefore be clear.

Nevertheless, the report states that the US "should offer nuclear sanctions relief to Iran only in response to meaningful concessions by the Iranians that are consistent with the multiple relevant UN security council resolutions, IAEA board of governors resolutions, and US laws".

In order to develop a more realistic approach, we need to assess the status quo in nuclear negotiations between Iran, the P5+1 group (US, UK, France, Russia, China and Germany) and the IAEA, the UN watchdog. The latest round of talks in January between the watchdog and Iran have not resulted in a deal. The IAEA and the P5+1 have a number of major demands, including the implementation of the additional protocol to the non-proliferation treaty, which mandates greater access for inspectors; co-operation on issues related to the "possible military dimension" of Iran's nuclear activities; capping uranium enrichment at 5%; and exporting enriched uranium not consumed domestically.

The demands on capping and exporting go beyond the treaty, and even the additional protocol. More than 70 countries have not yet signed up to the protocol; and certain member states of the IAEA enrich uranium to 96%, with tonnes of uranium stockpiled beyond domestic needs. Moreover, the IAEA requires Iran to give access beyond that required by the additional protocol in order to address the "possible military dimension". Iran cannot accept such demands for free, and the IAEA is not in position to negotiate reciprocations. That is why it was a mistake to have the IAEA's visit to Tehran take place prior to the meeting between P5+1 and Iran.

Nevertheless, those familiar with the realities of nuclear negotiations know very well that Iran has both publicly and in private meetings with the P5+1 indicated its readiness to accept all the above major demands. In return Iran expects recognition of its legitimate right to enrichment under the NPT and the lifting of sanctions – but unfortunately the western powers among the P5+1 have not signed up to such a deal.

The art of negotiation is to frame such a package with a specific timetable, and implemented by a step-by-step plan with appropriate reciprocations at each stage. It would be prudent for President Obama and the world powers to advance such a fair deal in upcoming talks and ignore attempts by warmongers to target advocates of a diplomatic solution.

Promoters of further sanctions, isolation and other punitive measures aim to make war with Iran inevitable. But such a war would make the US war in Iraq look like a walk in a park. Instead we should take the opportunity for diplomacy to prevail and devote the necessary political will to make it succeed.

© 2012 The Guardian

 Hossein Mousavian

Hossein Mousavian is the former spokesperson of Iran's nuclear negotiating team and author of the book Iranian Nuclear Crisis: A Memoir, published by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Israelis head to polls, Netanyahu projected to win

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara stand with their sons Yair (C) and Avner during voting at a polling station in Jerusalem, on January 22, 2013, as Israel residents started to vote in the 19th Israeli general election (AFP Photo / Uriel Sinai)

(24.9Mb) embed video

Hundreds of thousands of Israeli people are heading to polling stations to cast their vote as the victory of the incumbent PM Benjamin Netanyahu looms. Many however refuse to vote, saying the results are predetermined and will not change much.

­Although the official results of the Tuesday`s parliamentary vote are only due Wednesday, Netanyahu and his Likud party have been widely projected to win the vote.

The opinion polls show that Likud-Beitenu is likely to receive 32 seats in 120-seat Knesset, bringing it necessary majority to form the next government.

If this is the case and Netanyahu secures the third term, the Israeli-Palestinian peace will be out of reach for another four years.

In 2010 Ramallah withdrew from the peace talks with Israel, saying negotiations would only be possible after Tel Aviv halts all construction projects in the disputed areas.

But Netanyahu does not seem to be willing to do so. The PM has recently vowed to build thousands of housing units in the disputed territories of East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Israeli settlement policy has reflected criticism from the Obama administration apparently causing the breach in the relations between previously strong allies Israel and the US.

Public grumble over elections

Over 5 million Israelis are eligible for Tuesday`s vote, but many will abstain from it as they are not satisfied with the candidates and think that Netanyahu`s victory is predetermined.

“I am not going to vote. I see who are the candidates and there is no-one standing who represents me or who can change the general mood in the country,” 28-year-old Moshe Dadoosh told RT`s Paula Slier.

There are also some public doubts as to whether the new parliament can effectively deal with the country`s key issues.

Netanyahu`s second term has been marred by the halt of the peace process, a slowing economy and growing diplomatic isolation as the country continues its aggressive expansion against Palestinian autonomy.

“Many Israelis don`t believe that the present politicians and parties have any really new solutions to the big problems facing Israel, be it security, be it peace, or economic issues,” David Newman, Professor from Ben-Gurion University told RT.

Frontrunning: January 22

  • Geithner allegations beg Fed reform (Reuters)
  • BOJ Adopts Abe’s 2% Target in Commitment to End Deflation (BBG)
  • Bundesbank Head Cautions Japan (WSJ)
  • In speech, Obama pushes activist government and takes on far right (Reuters)
  • Atari’s U.S. Operations File for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy (BBG)
  • Israel goes to polls, set to re-elect Netanyahu (Reuters)
  • Apple May Face First Profit Drop in Decade as IPhone Slows (BBG)
  • EU states get blessing for financial trading tax (Reuters)
  • Indian Jeweler Becomes Billionaire as Gold Price Surges (BBG)
  • Europe Stocks Fall; Deutsche Bank Drops on Bafin Request (BBG)
  • Algeria vows to fight Qaeda after 38 workers killed (Reuters)
  • GS Yuasa Searched After Boeing 787s Are Grounded (BBG)
  • Slumping pigment demand eats into DuPont's profit (Reuters)

Overnight Media Digest

WSJ

* U.S. President Barack Obama began his second term on Monday by setting an agenda for the next four years built on bedrock Democratic social policies, in a provocative speech coming at a time of deep partisanship in the capital and lingering economic uncertainty across the country.

* Jonathan Baum, chairman and chief executive of Bank of New York Mellon Corp's mutual-fund unit, has left the firm, the company said Monday.

* International investigations into the battery malfunctions that grounded Boeing Co's 787 jet are accelerating, with U.S. and Japanese experts pursuing some new and possibly differing leads.

* Wal-Mart Stores Inc is warning suppliers that it is adopting a "zero tolerance policy" for violations of its global sourcing standards, and soon plans to immediately sever ties with anyone who subcontracts work to factories without the retailer's knowledge.

* Japan's central bank agreed to adopt a 2 percent inflation target and strengthened its monetary-easing program in a bid to rid the economy of long-running deflationary pressures.

* Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann warned Japan not to "politicize" its exchange rate by pursuing an overly aggressive monetary policy, reflecting mounting concern in Europe that other central banks may cheapen their currencies as a means of stimulating economic growth.

* Federal officials are expected to slap a Deutsche Bank AG unit with a $1.5 million penalty in coming days after concluding that its energy-trading arm extracted illicit profits from the California electricity marketplace in 2010.

* Mary Jo White, who made her name pursuing terrorists, mobsters and white-collar criminals as a federal prosecutor in New York, is the Obama administration's likely pick to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to people familiar with the administration's search.

* House Republicans on Monday moved to extend U.S. borrowing authority until May 19, setting a timeline for the next phase of budget wrangling between the White House and Congress.

FT

RULES ON OFFICE-FLAT CONVERSION TO EASE Developers will be able to convert office buildings into blocks of flats without asking councils for permission under radical changes to the English planning system. (link.reuters.com/keh45t) WEIDMANN WARNS OF CURRENCY WAR RISK The erosion of central bank independence around the world threatens to unleash a round of competitive exchange rate devaluations, which leading economies have so far avoided during the financial crisis, the president of Germany's Bundesbank warned. (link.reuters.com/qeh45t)

OBAMA DEFENDS ROLE OF STRONG GOVERNMENT Barack Obama mounted a vigorous defence of interventionist government and the role of a social safety net in an uplifting and uncompromising speech that marked the formal opening of his second term as president. (link.reuters.com/seh45t) HEATHROW AND BA DID NOT ACT ON SNOW ALERT The operator of Heathrow and airlines led by British Airways decided against taking pre-emptive measures to deal with snow that could have prevented the airport's descent into chaos on Friday, the Financial Times has learnt. (link.reuters.com/heh45t)

GRADE TO STEP DOWN AS OCADO CHAIRMAN Online grocer Ocado will reveal on Tuesday that Michael Grade will step down as chairman later this year. Grade has been chairman of Ocado for seven years and brought the lossmaking company to market in an 800 million pound float three years ago. (link.reuters.com/geh45t)

HUAWEI IN PLEDGE TO DISCLOSE MORE INFORMATION Huawei has pledged to start disclosing more detailed financial and shareholding information as the Chinese telecoms equipment maker tries to dispel fears over suspected ties to the Chinese military, which are hampering its global expansion. (link.reuters.com/veh45t)

FRUIT FARMERS LOOK TO FOREIGN LABOUR INFLUX British ministers are under pressure to allow migrant workers from Russia, Ukraine and Turkey into the UK to mitigate a predicted shortage of fruit pickers which is threatening the 3 billion pounds a year horticulture industry. (link.reuters.com/duh45t)

NYT

* U.S. President Barack Obama ceremonially opened his second term on
Monday with an assertive Inaugural Address, arguing that "preserving our
individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action."

*
The Bank of Japan set an ambitious 2 percent inflation target and
pledged to ease monetary policy "decisively" by introducing open-ended
asset purchases, following intense pressure from the country's audacious
new prime minister, Shinzo Abe.

* As Facebook and Twitter
become as central to workplace conversation as the company cafeteria,
federal regulators are ordering employers to scale back policies that
limit what workers can say online. The agency has pushed companies
nationwide, including giants like General Motors, Target Corp and
Costco, to rewrite their social media rules.

* Aerospace
represents the latest frontier for China, which is eyeing parts
manufacturers, materials producers, leasing businesses, cargo airlines
and airport operators. The country now rivals the United States as a
market for civilian airliners. And the new leadership named has publicly
emphasized long-range missiles and other aerospace programs in its push
for military modernization.

* Atari's U.S. unit, Atari
Interactive, filed for Chapter 11 protection on Monday as part of an
effort to cleave itself from its French parent.

* After four
months of fierce bidding between two Asian tycoons, a
multibillion-dollar battle for control of Fraser & Neave appears to
have reached its end. A bidding deadline on Monday evening came and
went, meaning the victor will probably be TCC Assets, which is
controlled by Charoen Sirivadhanabhakdi of Thailand.

* The
Maloof family has agreed to sell a controlling stake in the Sacramento
Kings, one of the NBA's most troubled and well-traveled franchises, to
an investment group led by Christopher Hansen, a hedge fund manager who
intends to move the team to Seattle by next season and rename them the
SuperSonics.

* A report from the International Labor
Organization predicted jobless levels to rise to 202 million worldwide
this year, and said government budget-balancing was hurting employment.

*
Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the new president of the group of ministers
overseeing the euro, said on Monday he wanted to heal the rift over
austerity policies that had bred mistrust between southern and northern
nations using the currency

Canada

THE GLOBE AND MAIL

* The demand for university education is not slowing down, as high school students continue to apply to Ontario institutions in record numbers. Preliminary figures released by the Ontario Universities' Application Centre showed that the number of high school students applying to first-year programs in the fall climbed by 2.4 per cent over the previous year.

* Cable sweepers and "hydrophobic" coatings are part of the British Columbia government's new plan to winterize the Port Mann Bridge, where last month vehicles and motorists were pummelled with ice falling from overhead cables. More than 340 insurance claims have been filed since the Dec. 19 snowstorm, according to ICBC spokesman Adam Grossman.

Reports in the business section:

* Rona Inc's two largest shareholders are taking matters into their own hands, installing a turnaround expert who is familiar with reducing costs to lead the board of directors.

The hardware retailer named Robert Chevrier as executive chairman, replacing Robert Paré, a Montreal lawyer who took the chairman's role in May, but who had little retail or operational experience.

* Sun News Network is pinning its hopes for survival on a ruling by Canada's broadcast regulator. Canada's newest and most controversial news channel has argued its signal must be broadcast into every Canadian home if it is ever going to recover from losses that have already reached C$17 million a year.

NATIONAL POST

* Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government said on Monday it will not include Governor General David Johnston in any future policy discussions with First Nations, further clouding its battle of wills with aboriginal leaders.

* Dan Ross, the former assistant deputy minister of defence materiel, has blamed the Stephen Harper government's culture of secrecy and a lack of accountability at all levels for the failure of the F-35 stealth fighter program.

FINANCIAL POST

* Bank of Canada will deliver a one-two punch on Wednesday, combining its latest interest rate decision with the central bank's latest quarterly outlook for the domestic and global economies.

* The Alberta provincial government said on Monday that its March 7 budget for 2013-14 will make a course correction from big spending to big belt tightening as a shortage of pipeline space and competition in oil production in the United States have tempered the surge in global oil prices.

China

CHINA SECURITIES JOURNAL

--A total of 1,271 funds in 70 fund companies made profits of 104.6 billion yuan ($16.81 billion) in the fourth quarter of last year, from a loss of 179.6 billion yuan in the third quarter, data showed.

--China's National Development and Reform Commission said it will reduce credit card comissions next month, with analysts expecting it could help merchants save 4 billion yuan a year.

SHANGHAI SECURITIES NEWS

--A netizen has demanded U.S. fruit distributor Chiquita explain why slices of apples sold in FamilyMart stores in Shanghai fail to turn brown after 80 hours, sparking a debate online whether the steps Chiquita is taking to protect apple slices from oxidizing are unhealthy.

SHANGHAI DAILY (www.chinadaily.com.cn)

--Subsidised license plates for new energy vehicles in Shanghai received a lukewarm welcome, with only one customer applying for the plates on the first day they were made available.

CHINA DAILY (www.chinadaily.com.cn)

--Chinese vehicle exports topped 1 million units for the first time in 2012, up 29.7 percent.

--Shanghai saw a contraction in total trade in 2012, the first time in three years.

PEOPLE'S DAILY

--China's central government will invest 122.2 billion yuan to support the domestic spring ploughing industry, the finance ministry said.

Fly On The Wall 7:00 AM Market Snapshot

ANALYST RESEARCH

Upgrades

ASML (ASML) upgraded to Buy from Hold at ABN Amro
ASML (ASML) upgraded to Hold from Sell at Deutsche Bank
Bank of Kentucky (BKYF) upgraded to Outperform from Neutral at RW Baird
Goodrich Petroleum (GDP) upgraded to Outperform from Market Perform at BMO Capital
Precision Castparts (PCP) upgraded to Buy from Neutral at UBS
Research in Motion (RIMM) upgraded to Outperform from Sector Perform at Scotia Capital
Viacom (VIAB) upgraded to Buy from Neutral at Goldman
VimpelCom (VIP) upgraded to Overweight from Neutral at HSBC
WESCO (WCC) upgraded to Outperform from Neutral at Credit Suisse

Downgrades

ARM Holdings (ARMH) downgraded to Hold from Buy at Benchmark Co.
Amgen (AMGN) downgraded to Neutral from Outperform at Credit Suisse
Becton Dickinson (BDX) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Mizuho
Diamond Offshore (DO) downgraded to Neutral from Outperform at Credit Suisse
F5 Networks (FFIV) downgraded to Hold from Buy at Needham
FirstEnergy (FE) downgraded to Underperform from Hold at Jefferies
Fortinet (FTNT) downgraded to Market Perform from Outperform at JMP Securities
LRR Energy (LRE) downgraded to Neutral from Outperform at RW Baird
Och-Ziff Capital (OZM) downgraded to Market Perform from Outperform at Keefe Bruyette
Open Text (OTEX) downgraded to Hold from Buy at Stifel Nicolaus
Roche (RHHBY) downgraded to Neutral from Outperform at Exane BNP Paribas
Trinity Biotech (TRIB) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Roth Capital
Urban Outfitters (URBN) downgraded to Neutral from Overweight at Atlantic Equities
Uroplasty (UPI) downgraded to Market Perform from Outperform at JMP Securities

Initiations

ExactTarget (ET) initiated with an Outperform at Credit Suisse
LivePerson (LPSN) initiated with a Neutral at Credit Suisse
PBF Energy (PBF) initiated with a Hold at Deutsche Bank
PBF Energy (PBF) initiated with an Outperform at Credit Suisse
S&W Seed (SANW) initiated with an Overweight at Piper Jaffray
Verint Systems (VRNT) initiated with a Neutral at Credit Suisse

HOT STOCKS

Ericsson (ERIC) to acquire IT services capabilities from Devoteam in France
KKR (KKR), Blackstone (BX) said to be among those in talks for Life Technologies (LIFE), Bloomberg reports
Caterpillar (CAT) to record $580M goodwill impairment charge in Q4
Shaw Communications (SJR) reported Shaw family acquired 750,000 class B shares
SeaCube (BOX) to be acquired by Ontario Teachers' Pension for $23 per share
NeoPhotonics (NPTN) subsidiary to acquire OCU unit from LAPIS Seminconductor for $36.8M
BGI-Shenzhen extended tender offer for Complete Genomics (GNOM)
FDA approved Botox (AGN) to treat overactive bladder
FDA approved Mallinckrodt's (COV) Gablofen prefilled syringe
OM Group (OMG) divested Advanced Materials business for up to $435M (FCX)
DaVita (DVA) formed JV with RHC in Taiwan
Daimler AG (DDAIF) created subsidiary for innovative mobility services
Pearson (PSO) sees tough market conditions continuing into 2013

EARNINGS

Companies that beat consensus earnings expectations last night and today include:
DuPont (DD), Signature Bank (SBNY), TAL Education (XRS)

Companies that missed consensus earnings expectations include:
Verizon (VZ), Sierra Bancorp (BSRR)

NEWSPAPERS/WEBSITES

International investigations into the battery troubles that grounded Boeing’s (BA) Dreamliner 787, are growing, with U.S. and Japanese experts pursuing some new and possibly differing leads, the Wall Street Journal reports
Apple’s (AAPL) future is getting harder to read. Their move into new markets and its more complex supply chain are making its growth prospects more difficult to understand and predict, say longtime investors and analysts, the Wall Street Journal reports
Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer is not the right leader for the software company but holds his grip on it by systematically forcing out any rising manager who challenges his authority, claims former senior executive Joachim Kempin, who has written a book about his time at the company, Reuters reports
South Africa's Competition Tribunal today gave the green light to the proposed takeover of global miner Xstrata (XSRAY) by Glencore (GLNCY). But the tribunal attached some conditions to the $33B deal to limit the merger's impact on job losses in the mining sector, Reuters reports
Consumption of high fructose corn syrup, used to sweeten products from Coca-Cola (KO) to H.J. Heinz (HNZ) ketchup and linked to obesity, is falling in the U.S. as health-conscious consumers drink less soda, Bloomberg reports
The world’s biggest investors are moving away from allocating money to government bond markets based on their amount of debt, a strategy that has favored the largest borrowers for three decades, Bloomberg reports

BARRON’S

A $14 per share LBO undervalues Dell (DELL)
Rockwell Automation, ABB provide good opportunities for robotics (ROK, ABB, ADEP, CGNX)
Crocs' (CROX) operational shifts could raise 2013 EPS by 11% to $1.55
Fossil (FOSL) could reach over $120 per share as earnings are reported
Data usage providing return on LTE investment for Verizon (VZ), AT&T (T)
Intel's (INTC) “branch prediction” on hybrid PCs a risky move

SYNDICATE

Performant Financial (PFMT) files to sell 7M shares of common stock

Your rating: None

Our Dumb Democracy: Why the United States of Stupid Still Reins Supreme

Astoundingly, Mr. Obama – the supreme pragmatist and compromiser – gave an inaugural address that was as strong a defense of progressivism as we have seen in thirty years. Yet it will take more than words to make a difference.  As the echoes of his speech fade, we are still faced with ultra-rightwing terrorists threatening to hold the US economy hostage to a set of demands that the majority of Americans disagree with.

These are the same loonies who deny global warming; the same ones who set up a museum showing prehistoric humans walking with dinosaurs; the same ones who think the answer to gun violence is more guns; the same ones who voted against relief for victims of Sandy … the same ones who want to shove ultrasound instruments into women’s vaginas and tell people who they can and cannot marry while simultaneously shouting to the rooftops about freedom and values. 

Yeah. Their freedoms, their beliefs and their values, please.  All others step to the back of the bus, or consult Leviticus.  You know, that font of ancient wisdom that tells us when and how to stone our neighbor’s daughter.

Want to know how our political discourse got so mind-numbingly stupid? 

Well, we can start with this little fact:  The press is so enamored with “balance” that they’ll treat even the most ignorant, shallow, fatuous movement – a movement composed of the selfish, the self-obsessed, the angry, the bigoted, and the blissfully ignorant – as if it were a serious movement. 

Consider the following signs seen at Tea Party protests.

There’s the now infamous: “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.”

Or this gem:  “Don’t steal from Medicare to Support Socialized Medicine.”

Or this: “Get a Brain.  Morans [sic].”

Or this:  “Obama Half Breed Muslin” – or maybe cotton or linen?

Or this: “We came unarmed.  This time.”

Or this:  “Stop Illeagles.”  Yup, gotta hate it when eagles get ill.

There’s absolutely no shortage of these tributes to stupidity – the list could go on and on. 

At one time this kind of foolishness would have been laughed off the national stage. 

Now it dominates one of our major political parties, thanks to the media’s embrace of balance and false equivalence and the Democrats’ silent complicity.

It might be time for a whole new set of “imponderables”.

Imponderables are questions or statements that by their nature expose something that doesn’t make sense. At their best, they’re mildly amusing and instructive. For example, why does Hawaii have an Interstate Highway system? or Why isn’t “phonetic” spelled the way it sounds? or Why do psychics have to ask you for your name?

Yes, today’s political discourse is so thoroughly littered with “conventional wisdom” without an iota of wisdom, that there should be a new category – political imponderables. Here are a few examples:

National “Defense:” If the US was spending more than the next 16 countries combined on defense prior to 911, why did we need to create the Department of Homeland Security to defend ourselves?

Shouldn’t the Defense Department be called the Department of Offense?

Why isn’t every citizen asking why we have tens of thousands of troops scattered around the world to fight the cold war, nearly 25 years after it ended.

If Citizen’s United is about Free Speech, why does it cost so much? Republicans and plutocrats are set to spend far more than $1 billion on the presidential race.

Why did Obama call the Patriot Act shoddy and dangerous then essentially continue Bush’s assault on the Bill of Rights?

Climate Change: Why did candidate Obama call climate change an epochal man-made threat to the planet, while President Obama virtually ignored it his entire first term.  

Why do states which are experiencing the worst climate-related disasters elect Republican governors and congressional representatives who deny its existence?

Deficit Duplicity: Why are Republicans once again threatening to shut down government over extending the debt ceiling, after voting for the Ryan’s first budget, which required multiple and astronomical increases in the debt ceiling until the year 2062?

If Republicans really hate deficits, why did the last three Republican Presidents run up more than 66% of the nation's cumulative deficit  – more than all other Presidents combined?  And why didn’t rank and file Republicans utter a peep against it when they did?

Deregulation, Trickle Down Redux, or Fool me once, shame on you … If thirty years of policies featuring deregulation, tax cuts for the rich and starve the beast policies resulted in the economic crash in 2008 – the worst since the Great Depression, which was also preceded by laissez-faire policies – how can more of the same be the solution?

Small Government that Isn’t: If Republicans like small government, why does it always grow  when they’re in office?

Why does the press mindlessly repeat conservative fear mongers’ debt warnings even as the deficit is disappearing?

There’s no shortage of political imponderables.  Given the absurdity of our political process and the media’s malfeasance, our national well of stupidity is deep and wide.

The answer to all these questions is simple – these absurdities exist, because our media has replaced truth, accuracy and reality with balance, false equivalency, and stenography and Democrats have been silent co-conspirators.

Why?  Because the press is a wholly owned subsidiary of corporations, and too many Democrats feed at the corporate trough.

And that’s not funny, but it is stupid.

John Atcheson

John Atcheson is author of the novel, A Being Darkly Wise, an eco-thriller and Book One of a Trilogy centered on global warming. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the San Jose Mercury News and other major newspapers. Atcheson’s book reviews are featured on Climateprogess.org.

Our Dumb Democracy: Why the United States of Stupid Still Reins Supreme

Astoundingly, Mr. Obama – the supreme pragmatist and compromiser – gave an inaugural address that was as strong a defense of progressivism as we have seen in thirty years. Yet it will take more than words to make a difference.  As the echoes of his speech fade, we are still faced with ultra-rightwing terrorists threatening to hold the US economy hostage to a set of demands that the majority of Americans disagree with.

These are the same loonies who deny global warming; the same ones who set up a museum showing prehistoric humans walking with dinosaurs; the same ones who think the answer to gun violence is more guns; the same ones who voted against relief for victims of Sandy … the same ones who want to shove ultrasound instruments into women’s vaginas and tell people who they can and cannot marry while simultaneously shouting to the rooftops about freedom and values. 

Yeah. Their freedoms, their beliefs and their values, please.  All others step to the back of the bus, or consult Leviticus.  You know, that font of ancient wisdom that tells us when and how to stone our neighbor’s daughter.

Want to know how our political discourse got so mind-numbingly stupid? 

Well, we can start with this little fact:  The press is so enamored with “balance” that they’ll treat even the most ignorant, shallow, fatuous movement – a movement composed of the selfish, the self-obsessed, the angry, the bigoted, and the blissfully ignorant – as if it were a serious movement. 

Consider the following signs seen at Tea Party protests.

There’s the now infamous: “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.”

Or this gem:  “Don’t steal from Medicare to Support Socialized Medicine.”

Or this: “Get a Brain.  Morans [sic].”

Or this:  “Obama Half Breed Muslin” – or maybe cotton or linen?

Or this: “We came unarmed.  This time.”

Or this:  “Stop Illeagles.”  Yup, gotta hate it when eagles get ill.

There’s absolutely no shortage of these tributes to stupidity – the list could go on and on. 

At one time this kind of foolishness would have been laughed off the national stage. 

Now it dominates one of our major political parties, thanks to the media’s embrace of balance and false equivalence and the Democrats’ silent complicity.

It might be time for a whole new set of “imponderables”.

Imponderables are questions or statements that by their nature expose something that doesn’t make sense. At their best, they’re mildly amusing and instructive. For example, why does Hawaii have an Interstate Highway system? or Why isn’t “phonetic” spelled the way it sounds? or Why do psychics have to ask you for your name?

Yes, today’s political discourse is so thoroughly littered with “conventional wisdom” without an iota of wisdom, that there should be a new category – political imponderables. Here are a few examples:

National “Defense:” If the US was spending more than the next 16 countries combined on defense prior to 911, why did we need to create the Department of Homeland Security to defend ourselves?

Shouldn’t the Defense Department be called the Department of Offense?

Why isn’t every citizen asking why we have tens of thousands of troops scattered around the world to fight the cold war, nearly 25 years after it ended.

If Citizen’s United is about Free Speech, why does it cost so much? Republicans and plutocrats are set to spend far more than $1 billion on the presidential race.

Why did Obama call the Patriot Act shoddy and dangerous then essentially continue Bush’s assault on the Bill of Rights?

Climate Change: Why did candidate Obama call climate change an epochal man-made threat to the planet, while President Obama virtually ignored it his entire first term.  

Why do states which are experiencing the worst climate-related disasters elect Republican governors and congressional representatives who deny its existence?

Deficit Duplicity: Why are Republicans once again threatening to shut down government over extending the debt ceiling, after voting for the Ryan’s first budget, which required multiple and astronomical increases in the debt ceiling until the year 2062?

If Republicans really hate deficits, why did the last three Republican Presidents run up more than 66% of the nation's cumulative deficit  – more than all other Presidents combined?  And why didn’t rank and file Republicans utter a peep against it when they did?

Deregulation, Trickle Down Redux, or Fool me once, shame on you … If thirty years of policies featuring deregulation, tax cuts for the rich and starve the beast policies resulted in the economic crash in 2008 – the worst since the Great Depression, which was also preceded by laissez-faire policies – how can more of the same be the solution?

Small Government that Isn’t: If Republicans like small government, why does it always grow  when they’re in office?

Why does the press mindlessly repeat conservative fear mongers’ debt warnings even as the deficit is disappearing?

There’s no shortage of political imponderables.  Given the absurdity of our political process and the media’s malfeasance, our national well of stupidity is deep and wide.

The answer to all these questions is simple – these absurdities exist, because our media has replaced truth, accuracy and reality with balance, false equivalency, and stenography and Democrats have been silent co-conspirators.

Why?  Because the press is a wholly owned subsidiary of corporations, and too many Democrats feed at the corporate trough.

And that’s not funny, but it is stupid.

John Atcheson

John Atcheson is author of the novel, A Being Darkly Wise, an eco-thriller and Book One of a Trilogy centered on global warming. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the San Jose Mercury News and other major newspapers. Atcheson’s book reviews are featured on Climateprogess.org.

Overnight Summary: Market Fades Open-Yended Monetization

The two month wait is over and the most overtelegraphed central bank news since November 2012 finally hit the tape when the BOJ announced last night what everyone knew, namely that it would proceed with open-(y)ended asset purchases and a variety of economic targets, key of which was 2% inflation. However, the response so far has been one of certainly selling the pent up news, especially since as was further detailed, the BOJ will do virtually nothing for 12 months, except to increase the size of its existing QE (is the current episode QE 10 or 11?) by another €10 trillion for the Bills component. The USDJPY dropped as much as 170 pips lower than its overnight kneejerk highs hit just after the news.

Turning to Europe, where the EURUSD so far has been a bigger beneficiary of the BOJ action than the JPY, as apparently news of open-yended purchases are yen positive and dollar negative, a scary episode took place just around 4 am Eastern when the bottom suddenly seemed to fall out of German risk, especially financial stocks, spreading to the EUR, following a report from the Boersen Zeitung that a Bafin model was simulating a split of the largest German banks - Deutsche Bank and Landesbank Baden-Wuertenberg, due to their size relative to German GDP. Why Germany may be contemplating or even modeling a split of DB is unclear - it is likely that the biggest European bank will ever voluntarily split itself into two separate parts. Luckily fears of the scray reality were prmptly forgotten when one hour later the latest German ZEW sentiment index came out at a ridiculous print of 31.5 for January, up from 6.9, and above expectations of 12.0. Whether this is due to the official negative German GDP print, or to sliding German exports, or both, is unknown. It is also unknown how as part of the survey, the majority of the respondents said they did not believe the economy would change and only a minority see improvement, adding that if some banks gave back LTRO money that would be a sign that the crisis is not worsening. What is known is that once again, optimism and outlook is supposed to trump reality, and so it does, as the EURUSD promptly reverts back to its baseline in the mid-1.33 range, where it continues to be a drag on German and Spanish exports as reported yesterday.

And speaking of Spain, the pain for the insolvent country with the 26% unemployment, rages on following a report that in Q4 house prices fell another 9.8% from a year ago, with the Y/Y deteriorating following "only" a -9.3% drop in Q3, a -2.2% sequential drop from Q3 to Q4. Expect this too to be spun somehow.

Below is a quick post-mortem on the BOJ action from Goldman:

BoJ adopts a 2% inflation target - as expected

Today’s BoJ announcement was the most widely anticipated in a long time, as markets waited to see the steps that the BoJ would take in conjunction with the new administration’s desire to overcome deflation.

As widely flagged, the BoJ adopted a 2% inflation target. Ahead of the meeting, the Japanese media had debated the timeframe over which this target would be reached. In the event, the BoJ specified that it would pursue monetary easing and aim to “achieve this target at the earliest possible time”. However, it went on to suggest that this will take ‘a considerable time’. The BoJ’s forecasts, which were refreshed at this meeting, foresee that core CPI excluding the effects of the consumption tax hike will range between +0.5% and +1% in FY2014 (with a median estimate of 0.9%). While this is a move towards positive inflation rates, it is clearly still a long way from its new objective, underscoring that it will take a considerable time to reach inflation at 2%.

The BoJ increased its APP by JPY10trn to JPY111trn, mostly in JGBs and T-bills, and shifted to open-ended purchases (from 2014, there will be monthly purchases of JPY2trn JGBs and JPY10trn T-bills). The BoJ's announcement states that the monthly JPY2trn JGB + JPY10trn T-bill purchase will increase the APP balance by JPY10trn in 2014, and then maintain the balance thereafter from 2015. We think the Bank is committing to at least maintain the balance, with the possibility of increasing the APP program if necessary as it goes along.

By contrast, the Fed has committed to an increase of its balance sheet by USD85bn per month until certain macro conditions are met (the BoJ’s Rinban operations also increase the bank's balance sheet, but the BoJ has not chosen to ease policy by increasing the Rinban program). At this point, the Fed is continuing to ease more aggressively than the BoJ both in word and deed, and this continues to leave us sceptical about the ability of the Yen to weaken significantly further from here. Today’s BoJ announcement is likely to disappoint foreign investors who are holding relatively stretched short Yen positions, according to the IMM data. It will also be interesting to see what the Japanese investors make of today’s decision; they could be positively surprised by the decision to maintain the size of balance sheet.

The BoJ did not cut IOER, neither did it extend the maturity of bonds purchased under the APP, thus the actions taken were relatively muted considering the adoption of the 2% inflation target, but they were probably the most we could expect given limited room for manoeuvre. Ultimately, today’s announcement means that we will need to wait for the new governor to take over at the end of April and show his stripes.

The market reaction was relatively muted. The Yen is a shave stronger at 89.17, compared with the 89.50 levels ahead of the meeting, suggesting that the market was positioned for a modestly more dovish outcome. JGBs are basically flat and the Nikkei has recovered to flat after selling off slightly as the market digested the outcome. Possibly the most interesting market to watch from here is the Japanese inflation market. While this asset class is very illiquid owing to the lack of inflation-linked issuance since 2008, break-even inflation did rise steadily following the introduction of the 1% inflation goal in February 2012 and the introduction of a 2% inflation target may well push this move further after the pause since last summer. Outside of Japanese assets, the BoJ's decision has pushed the Euro stronger, but the reaction elsewhere was fairly muted.

And a complete event recap of the past 24 hours, as is customary, from DB's Jim Reid:

The two-month wait is finally over with the Bank of Japan announcing overnight that it will formally adopt a 2% inflation target and introduce anopen-ended asset purchase program starting from January 2014, after the current purchase program has concluded. In a 12-page announcement, the BoJ said monthly asset purchases will be targeted at 13trn yen from January 2014, consisting of 2trn in JGB purchases and 10trn in t-bills purchases. As a result of these measures, the total size of the asset purchase program will be increased by 10trn yen in 2014 after accounting for maturities.

The announcement also included a highly-anticipated joint statement from the Government and BoJ in which both parties agreed to strengthen policy coordination and work together to “overcome deflation early”. The joint statement also says that the BoJ will pursue monetary easing to achieve the inflation target at the “earliest possible time”. Meanwhile, the government will “promote measures aimed at establishing a sustainable fiscal structure” and formulate measures for “strengthening competitiveness” such as “concentrating resources on innovative research and development, and carrying out bold regulatory and institutional reforms”. As was expected, the overnight call rate was left unchanged at zero to 0.1%. Board members voted to adopt the above measures with a 7-2 majority vote.

In terms of the market reaction, the Nikkei and USDJPY went into the BoJ announcement trading 0.7% and 0.5% higher respectively, steered by widespread pre-empting of the new measures from domestic media in the hours prior to the formal BoJ announcement. Perhaps in a case of “sell the fact”, the Nikkei and USDJPY have more than retraced those moves and are now are sitting on losses of 0.40% and 0.45% for the day respectively. Across other assets, 10yr JGB yields are unchanged on the day after having been 2bp higher prior to the BoJ announcement, the TOPIX is down 0.7% (or a -0.9% move lower post-BoJ) and S&P futures have pared earlier gains to trade 0.2% higher overnight.

Outside of Japan, most Asian equities are trading marginally firmer overnight although earlier gains have been pared. The Hang Seng, ASX200 and KOSPI are 0.15%, +0.03% and 0.3% higher on the day respectively. Responding to the recent appreciation of the KRW against the USD and JPY,  South Korea’s finance minister said that the government would increase support for exporters, citing that gains in the won were causing damage to companies such as automakers.

Returning to yesterday’s session, the EuroStoxx 600 finished with a gain of 0.26% bringing it to just a few points shy of its four-year high of 291. With US markets closed for Martin Luther King Day, there was little news flow or volume to move markets in either direction. In the US, House Republican leaders have scheduled a vote on a near-four-month extension of the debt ceiling for this Wednesday.

In an interesting twist, the House bill is not expected to specify a hard dollar increase in the debt ceiling, but will instead suspend (rather than lift) the debt ceiling until May 19th, after which the debt limit will be automatically increased from $16.4trn to accommodate whatever additional borrowing the Treasury had done during that time frame. According to the Hill, the bill was designed to allow Republicans to avoid having to vote on a specific dollar increase in the debt ceiling that could be used against them in later election campaigns (The Hill).

Elsewhere in Washington, Obama’s inauguration contained no major surprises from a markets point of view, but the President outlined pledges to preserve health-care programs, pressed for gun controls and an overhaul of the tax code (WSJ).

Turning to Europe now and the first Eurogroup meeting of 2013 concluded with Dutch finance minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem confirmed as the new President of the Eurogroup. Other items on the agenda last night included direct ESM bank recaps, to which there appeared to continued disagreement on the treatment of “legacy assets”, and Cyprus where a decision on a bailout has been pushed back to at least March. The Eurogroup did manage to agree on one thing though, authorising the next EUR9.2bn bailout disbursement to Greece. The payment will be broken into a EUR7.2bn for bank recaps and a EUR2bn for government budget needs.

In other headlines, Spain is reportedly planning to issue a new 10yr bond in the next week which would be the first benchmark 10 year bond issue since November 2011. The news perhaps explained some of the weakness in Spanish yields yesterday with the 10yr yield closing 8.5bp higher at 5.163%.

Turning to the day ahead, the highlights on the data front are Germany’s ZEW survey for January and existing home sales in the US. Eurozone finance ministers reconvene today for the ECOFIN meeting in Brussels. On the earnings docket, Unilever will be reporting annual results this morning London time. In the US, Johnson & Johnson and Texas Instruments report before the opening bell while Google and IBM report after the close.

Your rating: None

Four More Years: Institutionalized Hypocrisy.

On January 20, Obama began term two. After all the harm he caused so many, imagine how much more he plans. He broke every major campaign promise made. He mocks legitimate governance. He lawlessly serves powerful monied interests. They own him.

Sectarian Violence and the Plight of Christians in Libya, Palestine, Egypt and Syria: Moscow...

Politics or Religion? Christian Manifesto's Primary Target is President Barack Obama

Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kirill said he was concerned by the plight of Christian communities in the Middle East during a meeting with the Lebanese President Michel Sulayman on Monday.
“We see Christians fleeing Middle Eastern countries, and we consider it a threat to peace and security, especially a threat to inter-religious peace in Lebanon and other states,” the head of the Russian Orthodox Church said.

Lebanon has the largest percentage of Christians among all Middle Eastern nations, though no official figures have been available since the last census in 1926. Many Syrian Christians, who fled the ongoing civil conflict in the country, have settled in Lebanese border towns.

“I would like to assure you that the Russian Orthodox Church is ready to assist in solving the complicated issues that we have just discussed,” the patriarch said.

In the early 20th century, about 20 percent of the Middle East population were Christians, but the figure has now dwindled to around five percent.

According to Terry Waite, a Church of England envoy and a hostage negotiator in Lebanon, many Christians were forced to flee their homes after the Arab Spring, including in Syria, Egypt and Libya. The Christian population is also dwindling in the Palestinian Territories, while in Iraq over 300,000 Christians have fled persecution since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

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Tomorrow Here At Crooks And Liars: Senator Toi Hutchinson

Illinois state Senator Toi Hutchinson is Blue America's first congressional endorsement since the general election. She's running in a special election in IL-02 to replace Jesse Jackson, Jr. Tomorrow she'll be our live guest here at Crooks and Liars at 1pm (CT) and it would be awesome if you could come and meet her live. We have a special ActBlue page set up to help her campaign. Here's the message she sent us this morning, celebrating both the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King and the inauguration of President Barack Obama:

I think it’s wonderful that today is both the day we inaugurate President Obama for his second term in office and the day we commemorate the work of one of our greatest Americans, Martin Luther King, Jr.

For me, my grandfather’s story is how I remind myself of the progress our country has made. He started his career as a door-to-door World Book Encyclopedia salesman. He worked hard and saved his money so he would have something to leave his children. By the time he retired he’d become one of the first African American branch managers in the country. He broke ceilings, and his example inspires me every day.

This anniversary is an important time for Americans to reflect on the great progress we have made, and the great work still before us to create the kind of equal, open society we seek. We must never end our fight for equality and fairness. Over the next years we have to close the achievement gap, the wealth gap, the pay equity gap so that our communities are safe and thriving and everybody gets a chance. No matter what happens, I’m eager to be a part of that conversation.

David Gregory Continues to Advocate for Gutting Social Safety Nets

Looks like Tommy Christopher at Mediaite figured out what we've been saying over here for a long time now... that David Gregory is a right wing tool who's constantly advocating for really bad Republican economic policies along with a bunch of his fellow Villagers in the media: David Gregory Tells Morning Joe That President Obama Must Gut Medicare To Succeed:

On a very special 2nd Quadrennial Barack Obama Day edition of Morning Joe, Meet The Press host David Gregory provided some more evidence against the mythical “liberal media bias” when he endorsed the emerging Beltway media consensus that in order to deal with debt and deficits, President Obama is going to have to gut Medicare. “He’s got to be able to convince his own party, but also to do something that, frankly, Americans don’t want done,” Gregory said of Medicare, “which is to have to give back some things.”

[...] what’s significant is that Gregory wasn’t offering merely pragmatic political advice, but actually endorsing the idea that the way to solve our fiscal problems involves cutting Medicare for beneficiaries.

Unfortunately for America, President Obama has already indicated a willingness to move in that direction, having already placed raising the Medicare eligibility age on the table. Raising the age will only shift those costs, at higher rates, and only partially away from the federal government. Those two extra years will either be paid for by the seniors themselves, who will be charged up to 3 times as much for health insurance on the individual market, or by the government in the form of Medicaid for those who can’t afford private insurance, or by private insurance companies.

What no one is talking about is that Medicare is a huge break for private insurers, who get to lay off their highest-risk patients onto the government. People with retiree group health insurance will be covered by their health insurance for those two extra years, at great expense to those companies. The amount of money they pay out in claims will far outstrip what they can take in in premiums, and the additional premiums will fall on those retirees’ employers.

The other problem is that, relatively speaking, 65 and 66 year-olds are bargains for Medicare, and eliminating them from the program would only succeed at making the overall pool of Medicare recipients older and sicker. If there was a way to eliminate the last 2 years of eligibility, you’d be on to something.

Gregory and his fellow beltway hacks Joe Scarborough and Tom Brokaw have been singing this tune for some time now as we've pointed out here over, and over, and over, and over and over again. And as Christopher rightfully noted out, there are ways to make Medicare solvent without turning it over to the private insurance market:

Imagine the bleating if David Gregory, or any mainstream, “objective” journalist, bothered to point out that you can solve Medicare’s solvency “problem” (which is, at ten years’ solvency, the same as it’s always been) by some combination of raising Medicare taxes, making Medicare available to everyone, and, as Chris Hayes constantly points out, giving Obamacare time to kick in, and see what it does to health care costs.

Neither of those examples represents “bias,” of course. What Gregory did on Morning Joe was analysis, it was just bad analysis, wrong analysis. The problem is that this is what Washington lawmakers listen to.

And we had the hapless Eugene Robinson sitting next to him who didn't give an ounce of push back to Gregory. For anyone who doesn't watch the show, this has really become a daily event on there to be pushing for the social safety nets to be gutted, no matter who the guests are. If someone they have on isn't doing it, Scarborough is. Here's Gregory from this past Friday, telling the audience that cutting "entitlements" (And I hate that word by the way. They're earned benefits.) will lead to growth in the economy. Of course no one asked him how jacking up health care costs for all of us and funneling more money to the private insurance market is going to do that.

Banking Crisis on Wall Street: Wrist Slap for “Too Big to Fail or Jail”...

bankster

With money laundering “lapses” and CEO mea culpas all the rage on Wall Street and the City of London, you would think that Hope and Change™ grifter Barack Obama’s Justice and Treasury Departments would want to send a strong message to banksters who break the law.

You’d be wrong of course.

‘There’s Nothing to See Here…’

While the financial press is all aflutter over news that JPMorgan Chase (JPMC) CEO Jamie Dimon had his annual pay package cut by 50 percent, from $23 million (£14.5m) to $11.5 million (£7.25m) over $6.2 billion (£3.91bn) in losses in the risky derivatives market, you’d almost believe that Dimon was lining up for food stamps or hunting down mittens to stave off New York’s bone-chilling winter.

Despite allusions to what are euphemistically called “bad bets” by JPMC trader Bruno Iksil, the so-called “London Whale” on the hook for proverbial “shitty deals” that cost shareholders billions, Bloomberg News reported that JPMC’s “fourth-quarter profit rose 53 percent, beating analysts’ estimates as mortgage revenue more than doubled on record-low interest rates and government incentives.”

Incentives? Now there’s a polite word for a megabank with more than $2.3 trillion (£1.45tn) in assets handed some $600 billion (£378.24bn) in TARP funds, which included Federal Reserve engineered deals for their buy-out of Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual that wiped out shareholder equity as the capitalist system threatened to implode in 2008.

Adding to the sleaze factor, it emerged in 2011 that JPMC had wrongfully overcharged thousands of military families on their mortgages, including active duty personnel serving in Afghanistan. As a result of a class-action lawsuit, the bank was forced to admit they had illegally overcharged 6,000 active duty military personnel, had seized the homes of 18 military families and then paid out $27 million (£17.05m) in compensation. At a shareholder’s meeting later that year Dimon “apologized” for the “error” and lending chief David Lowman fell on his sword as he was shown the door.

Talk about stand-up guys!

And never mind, as Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi pointed out, “at the same moment that leading banks were taking trillions in secret loans from the Fed, top officials at those firms were buying up stock in their companies, privy to insider info that was not available to the public at large.”

While drug-tainted Citigroup’s former CEO Vikram Pandit “bought nearly $7 million in Citi stock in November 2008, just as his firm was secretly taking out $99.5 billion in Fed loans,” that other paragon of banking virtue, Jamie Dimon, who “respects” the JPMC board’s decision to slice his pay in half “bought more than $11 million in Chase stock in early 2009, at a time when his firm was receiving as much as $60 billion in secret Fed loans.”

Such “stock purchases by America’s top bankers,” Taibbi wrote, “raise serious questions of insider trading.” Yet not a single bankster has been seriously investigated let alone held to account, by the Justice Department.

How sweet a year was it for JPMorgan Chase? Pretty sweet by all accounts.

Overall, Bloomberg reported, “revenue increased 10 percent to $23.7 billion [£14.96bn] from $21.5 billion [£13.57bn] in the fourth quarter of 2011. Annual revenue was $97 billion [£61.23bn], down from $97.2 billion [£61.35bn] the prior year.” This included investment banking fees which jumped 54 percent to $1.7 billion (£1.07bn) and revenue in the commercial banking sector which rose to $1.75 billion (£1.1bn). And with the formation of a new housing bubble due to taxpayer-subsidized record low interest rates, JPMC’s profits in the mortgage writing mill rose to $418 million (£263.5m) in 2012, compared to losses which topped $263 million (£165.8m) a year earlier.

But far from being a sign that the economic black hole opened by 2008′s financial collapse has contracted, there’s bad news on the horizon for distressed homeowners and taxpayers who will be forced to pay the piper for the next round of predatory loans.

As analyst Mike Whitney recently pointed out in CounterPunch a new rule defining a “qualified mortgage” by the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau “creates vast new opportunities for the nation’s biggest banks to engage in predatory lending practices with impunity.”

According to Whitney, while the financial press have described the rule “as an attempt to protect borrowers from the risky types of loans that caused the financial crisis, the opposite is true. The real purpose of the rule is to provide legal protection for the banks from homeowner lawsuits, and to lay the groundwork for more reckless lending that could inflate another housing bubble.”

“In other words,” Whitney noted, “the rule was designed to serve the interests of the banks and the banks alone. This is why bankers everywhere are celebrating the final draft.”

Never mind that leading financial institutions were forced to cough up $25 billion (£15.76bn) in a settlement with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Reserve over shady foreclosure practices and wrongful homeowner evictions that ruined millions of lives.

JPMC’s $2 billion (£1.26bn) portion of the settlement, which included “a one-time pretax charge [write down] of $700 million [£441.77m] in the fourth quarter to cover the costs associated with [the] settlement” according to Bloomberg, was a pittance compared to the trillions of dollars in assets controlled by the bank.

‘A Trillion Here, a Trillion There…’

But as bad as these gift horses are, they pale in comparison with federal government inaction when it comes to policing financial predators who inflate their balance sheets with laundered drug money and loot derived from terrorist financing and organized crime.

As Yury Fedotov, the Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), pointed out in that agency’s 2011 report, Estimating Illicit Financial Flows Resulting from Drug Trafficking and Other Transnational Organized Crime: “Prior to this report, perhaps the most widely quoted figure for the extent of money laundering was the IMF’s ‘consensus range’ of between 2-5 per cent of global GDP, made public in 1998. A study-of-studies, or meta-analysis, conducted for this report, suggests that all criminal proceeds are likely to have amounted to some 3.6 per cent of GDP (2.3-5.5 per cent) or around US$2.1 trillion in 2009.”

The UNODC research team averred: “If only flows related to drug trafficking and other transnational organized crime activities were considered, related proceeds would have been equivalent to around US$650 billion per year in the first decade of the new millennium, equivalent to 1.5% of global GDP or US$870 billion in 2009 assuming that the proportions remained unchanged. The funds available for laundering through the financial system would have been equivalent to some 1% of global GDP or US$580 billion in 2009.”

However you slice these grim estimates, it should be obvious that banks have every incentive to remain key players in the transnational narcotics complex and will continue to do so thanks to the federal government.

Last week, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released their cease-and-desist order against JPMC.

Unlike other drug money laundering banks such as Wells Fargo-owned Wachovia Bank, which agreed to a mere $160 million (£100.86m) settlement in 2010 in a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) after admitting to laundering upwards of $368 billion (£231.99bn) for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels or the recent $1.9 billion (£1.2bn) DPA with Britain’s HSBC global financial empire, the OCC’s consent order didn’t even impose a fine on JPMC for money laundering “lapses.”

Now that’s juice!

Though short on details the order however, is a damning indictment of JPMC “indiscretions” when it comes to drug and other criminal money laundering. Keep in mind this is an institution that was slapped with an $88.3 million (£55.66m) fine less than 18 months ago for shipping a ton of gold bullion to Iran in breach of harsh Treasury Department sanctions. (I neither endorse nor support draconian sanctions imposed by the imperialists on the Islamic Republic, my purpose here is to point out the double standards which would land the average citizen in the slammer under “material support” statutes for trading with Iran). The January 2013 Consent Order stated although the Comptroller found serious “flaws” in their accounting practices, “the Bank neither admits nor denies” the following:

(1) The OCC’s examination findings establish that the Bank has deficiencies in its BSA/AML [Bank Secrecy Act/anti-money laundering] compliance program. These deficiencies have resulted in the failure to correct a previously reported problem and a BSA/AML compliance program violation under 12 U.S.C. § 1818(s) and its implementing regulation, 12 C.F.R. § 21.21 (BSA Compliance Program). In addition, the Bank has violated 12 C.F.R. § 21.11 (Suspicious Activity Report Filings).

(2) The Bank has failed to adopt and implement a compliance program that adequately covers the required BSA/AML program elements due to an inadequate system of internal controls, and ineffective independent testing. The Bank did not develop adequate due diligence on customers, particularly in the Commercial and Business Banking Unit, a repeat problem, and failed to file all necessary Suspicious Activity Reports (“SARs”) related to suspicious customer activity.

(3) The Bank failed to correct previously identified systemic weaknesses in the adequacy of customer due diligence and the effectiveness of monitoring in light of the customers’ cash activity and business type, constituting a deficiency in its BSA/AML compliance program and resulting in a violation of 12 U.S.C. § 1818(s)(3)(B).

Wait a minute, if these were “previously identified systemic weaknesses” and if JPMC “failed to adopt and implement a compliance program” that would shield the American financial system from a tsunami of drug-tainted cash annually washing through the economy, especially “in light of the customers’ cash activity and business type,” why then has OCC issued another toothless Consent Order rather than forcing the bank to comply with the law? Accordingly, federal regulators charge:

(4) Some of the critical deficiencies in the elements of the Bank’s BSA/AML compliance program, resulting in a violation of 12 U.S.C. § 1818(s)(3)(A) and 12 C.F.R. § 21.21, include the following:

(a) The Bank has an inadequate system of internal controls and independent testing.
(b) The Bank has less than satisfactory risk assessment processes that do not provide an adequate foundation for management’s efforts to identify, manage, and control risk.
(c) The Bank has systemic deficiencies in its transaction monitoring systems, due diligence processes, risk management, and quality assurance programs.
(d) The Bank does not have enterprise-wide policies and procedures to ensure that foreign branch suspicious activity involving customers of other bank branches is effectively communicated to other affected branch locations and applicable AML operations staff. The Bank also does not have enterprise-wide policies and procedures to ensure that on a risk basis, customer transactions at foreign branch locations can be assessed, aggregated, and monitored.
(e) The Bank has significant shortcomings in SAR decision-making protocols and an ineffective method for ensuring that referrals and alerts are properly documented, tracked, and resolved.

(5) The Bank failed to identify significant volumes of suspicious activity and file the required SARs concerning suspicious customer activities, in violation of 12 C.F.R. § 21.11. In some of these cases, the Bank self-identified the issues and is engaged in remediation.

(6) The Bank’s internal controls, including filtering processes and independent testing, with respect to Office of Foreign Asset Control (“OFAC”) compliance are inadequate.

How large were the “significant volumes” of “suspicious activity” alluded to opaquely? Where did they originate? Who were the “suspicious customers” and why did JPMC not have “enterprise-wide policies and procedures” after being previously ordered to do so to ensure that said “suspicious customers” at foreign bank branches didn’t include drug lords or terrorist financiers? All of these are unanswered questions for which the Obama administration should be held to account.

In fact, according to OCC’s own regulations, 12 C.F.R. § 21.21 clearly states that the federal government “requires every national bank to have a written, board approved program that is reasonably designed to assure and monitor compliance with the BSA.”

At a minimum, an anti-money laundering program “must” (this is not optional): “1. provide for a system of internal controls to assure ongoing compliance; 2. provide for independent testing for compliance; 3. designate an individual responsible for coordinating and monitoring day-to-day compliance; and 4. provide training for appropriate personnel. In addition, the implementing regulation for section 326 of the PATRIOT Act requires that every bank adopt a customer identification program identification program as part of its BSA compliance program.”

Keep in mind that Wachovia and HSBC under terms of their DPA’s were forced to admit that illegal transactions “ignored the money laundering risks associated with doing business with certain Mexican customers and failed to implement a BSA/AML program that was adequate to monitor suspicious transactions from Mexico.”

Furthermore, those risks were compounded, wilfully in this writer’s opinion, in order to inflate bank balance sheets with drug money, through their failure to correct “systemic deficiencies in its transaction monitoring systems, due diligence processes, risk management, and quality assurance programs.”

On every level, JPMorgan Chase failed to comply with existing rules and regulations that have earned penny-ante offenders terms in federal prison.

In fact, just last week Los Angeles-based “G&A Check Cashing, its manager, Karen Gasparian, and its compliance officer, Humberto Sanchez” were sentenced by US Judge John Walker to stiff prison terms, The Wall Street Journal reported. For violating the Bank Secrecy Act, Gasparian was “ordered to prison for five years and Sanchez for eight months.”

Are you kidding me! The Journal averred, “While it is common for banks to face scrutiny from the U.S. for complying with the Bank Secrecy Act, it is rare for authorities to pursue check-cashing businesses for anti-money laundering compliance issues, as they are often used by the poor, who may not have the funds to maintain a bank account.”

In full clown-car mode, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, Obama’s chieftain over at the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, who last month refused to file criminal charges against drug-money laundering banksters at HSBC said in a statement: “Karen Gasparian, Humberto Sanchez and their company G&A Check Cashing purposefully thwarted the Bank Secrecy Act, making it easier for others to use G&A to commit illegal activity. They knew they were required to report transactions over $10,000, but deliberately failed to do so.”

Although the OCC Consent Order does not spell out who benefited from JPMC’s “systemic weaknesses” when it came to lax drug money laundering controls, the suspicion persists that somewhere fugitive billionaire drug lord Chapo Guzmán is smiling as he enlarges his stable of thoroughbreds.

(Image courtesy of Daniel Hopsicker’s MadCow Morning News)

Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, he is a Contributing Editor with Cyrano’s Journal Today. His articles can be read on Dissident Voice, Pacific Free Press, Uncommon Thought Journal, and the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military “Civil Disturbance” Planning, distributed by AK Press and has contributed to the new book from Global Research, The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century.

On the News With Thom Hartmann: Celebrating MLK Day, and More

In today's On the News segment: a million Americans gathered to watch the inauguration of President Barack Obama; we honored Dr. Martin Luther King; Republicans announced they will approve a short-term increase in the debt limit; the city of Chicago is taking important step to protect workers, and more.

TRANSCRIPT

Thom Hartmann here – on the news…

You need to know this. As many as a million Americans gathered on our National Mall today, to watch Barack Obama be publicly sworn in to serve his second term as President of the United States. And he rides into his second term with a mandate – as the only President since Dwight Eisenhower to be elected twice with 51% of the vote. But if there’s one thing the President learned from his first term, it’s that Republicans will at all costs destroy whatever mandate he’s earned. In fact, on this day, four years ago, Republicans gathered at a fancy steakhouse in Washington, DC, just as President Obama was attending the inaugural balls. The likes of Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan, and Frank Luntz all attended this meeting. And the purpose of the meeting was simple: How to destroy the Obama Presidency and retake the White House in four years. That night – Republicans committed themselves to four years of obstruction and economic sabotage. And that’s exactly what they did – even though it didn’t work out for them in the end. Today, the question is – what are Republicans plotting now? How will they sabotage the President’s second term? Let’s hope the President has learned lessons from the first term, and accepts that he’s facing a loyal opposition in the Republican Party. He’s facing economic terrorists – and the only way he can succeed is by taking the debate to the American people, using his bully pulpit, and shaming the fossils on the Right who serve the Billionaire Class.

Today – we also honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  – a fitting tribute, as the nation’s first African American president is sworn in for the second time.  And while President Obama’s ascendance to the highest office in the land is, without a doubt, a consequence of King’s legacy, the nation would be better served if both President Obama, and the rest of our Democratic leaders, acted a little more like Dr. King. Today we should remember that Dr. King was radical revolutionary, who marched and spoke out against war, against wealth inequality, and against the evils of unfettered capitalism. He was also a strong defender of organized labor. In fact, he was gunned down while supporting the striking public sanitation workers in Memphis. Dr. King wasn’t just focused on racial justice – but economic justice as well. And in a nation plagued by wealth inequality, mired in endless war abroad, and an increasingly hostile war against organized workers at home – the nation desperately needs a voice like Dr. King again.

In the best of the rest of the news…

Are Republicans actually coming to their senses, and caving in on the debt ceiling? Yes and no. House Republicans announced they would approve a short-term increase in the debt-limit next week – giving Congress an extra three months to pass a budget before we bump up against the debt-limit and, again, flirt with economic catastrophe. This is the definition of kicking the can down the road – but it’s an admission on the part of Republicans that their brinksmanship with the debt-limit was not helping them politically. So they’ll push it back three months, and see which way the wind blows. As ThinkProgress blog notes, this is “crisis politics” – and it’s no way a government should be managed. It’s also a direct result of Citizens United. It’s no coincidence that this House Republican majority was largely elected in 2010. That was the first election after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which was three years ago today. And they are now part of he most unpopular Congress in history. Consider the House Republican majority Exhibit A in why money in politics is a bad idea.  This year we need to get active and organized, to fight for a constitutional amendment that says corporations are not people and money is not speech. Go to MoveToAmend.org.

The city of Chicago is taking important steps to protect workers from wage theft. Wage theft complaints around the nation have increased more than 400% over the last decade – as businesses force workers into overtime and don’t compensate them. A study out of the city of Chicago found that over 60% of its workers were underpaid by more than one-dollar an hour. And two-thirds of Chicago workers were not paid the overtime they were entitled to. But now, Chicago is saying enough is enough. The city council approved a measure that will revoke the charter of any business found to be guilty of wage theft. Essentially giving that business the corporate death penalty. This is a positive step forward for workers in that city. But workers all across America need help. The real wage theft that’s taken place over the last thirty years is that workers are no longer being paid for their increased productivity. Over the last thirty years, CEOs have pocketed all the gains from their workers’ increased productivity – so that today corporate profits, as a percentage of GDP, are higher than they’ve ever been – yet working wages, as a percent of GDP, are lower than they’ve ever been. To turn the tide, we have to empower labor unions – and get rid of the Reagan tax cuts, which have incentivized the Billionaire Class to steal more and more of their workers wages.

And finally...Democratic Congressman Ed Markey has declared war on Wall Street’s robots! By robots, I mean high-frequency trading machines that run on complex algorithms, and buy and sell stocks by the millions every single second. High-frequency trading is so prevalent now, that it makes up more than half of the entire stock market’s volume. It’s also extremely dangerous, which is why Congressman Markey is calling on the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate the robots. He argues that the SEC has the power to do this under legislation he cosponsored in 1989 – and he wants the SEC to immediately come up with new rules, to “restrict or eliminate the practice” of high frequency trading. Let’s hope this happens soon, because as bad as the banksters are – their robots are even worse.

And that’s the way it is today – Monday, January 21st, 2013. I’m Thom Hartmann – on the news.

A Second Inaugural, A Second Conspiracy

As soon as the Second Inaugural of Barack Obama was finished, the newly re-elected President walked back into the U.S. Capitol and sat down behind an ornate, oak (at least it looked like oak) desk to sign some papers. It was mostly a photo-op, but there was some rather substantive legislative business to attend to, namely, the nominations to four cabinet posts, which the President had to officially sign his name to.

To his right, he was flanked by Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer. And to his left, Nancy Pelosi and a stiff, awkwardly smiling John Boehner.

The cameras flashed, the papers were signed, and the president rose to embrace his fellow leaders in government. It was a message to the country, “Everything is just fine. Look, we're all cooperating and governing together. See?”

But, Eric Cantor was also in attendance.

And one of the most important things we’ve learned over the last four years watching Eric Cantor lead the insurgent Republican Party is that things aren’t just fine.

Four years ago Inaugural Day, as the new president, Barack Obama, was making the rounds of the inaugural balls, Eric Cantor had gathered powerful members of the Republican Party at an upscale steakhouse in Washington, DC’s Penn Quarter, a private room in a restaurant called the Caucus Room. Their agenda was straightforward.  Sabotage the American economy, blame it on the young President, and then retake the White House in four years.

Paul Ryan, who, four years later, would be chosen to replace the Vice President and, thus, fulfill this agenda, was also in attendance that night. As was Newt Gingrich. And over a dozen prominent Republicans including Kevin McCarthy, Jim DeMint, and John Kyl.

As Robert Draper discloses in his book, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives,” Republicans at that meeting committed themselves to what some would call political treason: an unwavering opposition to the coming Obama Presidency. Every single legislative priority coming out of the White House would be vetoed, obstructed, filibustered, or sabotaged.

This also meant a forcing the American middle class into a suicide pact. Our economy was hemorrhaging 750,000 jobs a month, and was in desperate need of prolonged government intervention and stimulus. By vowing to block these federal lifelines, Republicans knew they were condemning millions of Americans to joblessness, poverty, homelessness, and suicide.

But, the prospect of stopping the “Obama Revolution” in its tracks and reclaiming government on behalf of Reagan's Billionaire Class was worth whatever means were needed to achieve it.

Congressman Kevin McCarthy reportedly told fellow Republicans at the meeting that they must, “Show united unyielding opposition to the president’s economic policies.” Pete Session said that Republicans should take on an “insurgency mindset.” On The Thom Hartmann program, Newt Gingrich confirmed he was at the meeting and justified this insurgent mentality. 

We know the Republican lawmakers followed through on their plot. House Republicans unanimously voted against every noteworthy piece of Democratic legislation. And Senators DeMint, Kyl, Coburn, Ensign, and Corker, combined together to filibuster over 300 bills in the Senate.

Together, these men crippled the economic recovery, and thus won big victories in the House in 2010. But, ultimately, they failed at their number one goal: making Barack Obama a one-term president.

And so, here’s Eric Cantor, four years after plotting the first conspiracy against the President, at another Inaugural Ceremony, and again on the receiving end of an exaggerated handshake from Barack Obama who was still the President.

We know the President has a busy night ahead of him attending inaugural balls and such. But what’s Eric Cantor up to tonight? Which Republican operatives are gathering right now in smoke-filled private dining rooms at upscale DC steakhouses plotting the destruction of the President’s second term?

Who knows?

But we do know that despite the Republican shellacking last November, something is afoot on the Right. Their commitment to achieving one-party rule for the Billionaire Class remains unshaken.

And though President Obama may no longer be the sole target, the American Middle Class still is.


You can see it on a state-level.

There’s Michigan’s shocking descent into becoming a right-to-work-for-less state, which will break up the unionized political base of the Democratic Party.

There’s the attempt of Pennsylvania Republicans to change how their state doles out Electoral College votes, so Republicans presidential candidates will have a huge advantage in future national elections even when the majority of the people of Pennsylvania vote against them.


And, of course, as a result of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, the likes of Karl Rove, Sheldon Adelson, and the Koch brothers are learning from their mistakes last November, and will continue their efforts to steal future elections.

The Billionaire Class and its front men in the Republican Party are hard at work again, just as they were four years ago.

Today we saw the second Democratic President since FDR to have a Second Inaugural. But just underneath the revelry, conspiracies abound. And the Billionaire Class won’t rest until they’re assured that what happened today never happens again.

We, The People

President Obama's 2nd inaugural speech is one for the ages. Jonathan Alter asked via Twitter shortly after what lines from it will be engraved in granite one day.

My answer: "We, the people."

President Obama used the pronoun "we" 88 times in his speech. He spoke of climate change, of health care, of poverty, and of history, and did so in the context of our shared citizenship.

It was as much a call to citizenship as it was a call to unity. Two sections stand out for me. The first is his call to action:

That is our generation’s task -- to make these words, these rights, these values of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness real for every American. Being true to our founding documents does not require us to agree on every contour of life. It does not mean we all define liberty in exactly the same way or follow the same precise path to happiness. Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time, but it does require us to act in our time.

I don't think he could have made clearer the need for Congress to stop obstructing and start acting. But he didn't limit that call to Congress alone. He concluded his speech with a clarion call for every citizen to engage, to act, and to fulfill their duties as citizens, too:

My fellow Americans, the oath I have sworn before you today, like the one recited by others who serve in this Capitol, was an oath to God and country, not party or faction. And we must faithfully execute that pledge during the duration of our service. But the words I spoke today are not so different from the oath that is taken each time a soldier signs up for duty or an immigrant realizes her dream. My oath is not so different from the pledge we all make to the flag that waves above and that fills our hearts with pride.

They are the words of citizens and they represent our greatest hope. You and I, as citizens, have the power to set this country’s course. You and I, as citizens, have the obligation to shape the debates of our time -- not only with the votes we cast, but with the voices we lift in defense of our most ancient values and enduring ideals. (Applause.)

Let us, each of us, now embrace with solemn duty and awesome joy what is our lasting birthright. With common effort and common purpose, with passion and dedication, let us answer the call of history and carry into an uncertain future that precious light of freedom.

There has been so much punditry about what the President has to do and say in his second term, but very little said devoted to what citizens do. This is a real failure on the part of the pundits, in my opinion. They leave viewers thinking that the work of government is something which should take place among elected officials with no real engagement by the citizens.

This is how we failed in 2010. There was a sense that we elected this gifted politician to office and then most people checked out. President Barack Obama has called for that to end, and end now. By tying his own oath of office to the military's oath of duty, the immigrant's oath upon being conferred citizenship, and our own pledge of allegiance which is said at everything from sporting events to elementary schools, he called for us all to look at it as more than mere words, but our own duty to participate in democracy and raise our voices.

I can't think of a better way for him to have begun his second term. It was a speech of unity and tolerance, but also one intended to remind everyone that citizenship carries responsibility with it. While I'm sure there are some exploding wingnut heads, I do think reasonable people should hear what he said for what it is: A reminder that it's not just about Barack Obama, but every one of us.

If Right-Wing Violence is Up 400%, Why is the FBI Targeting Environmentalists?

Between 2007 and 2011, there was a sharp increase in the number of victims of right wing violence, according to the study, to the highest levels documented so far. On a broader timeline, the increase is even more dramatic.

House Votes On Debt Ceiling Suspension Wednesday As Pelosi Calls It “Gimmick Unworthy Of...

While it is not news that the GOP has proposed a temporary debt ceiling extension that would suspend the provisions of the debt ceiling target until May 19, as was reported last week, however which would demand that the Senate do something unthinkable, and something it has not done for 4 years, namely pass a budget by April 15, it is news that as The Hill reports, the vote to suspend the debt ceiling in the House will take place "as soon as Wednesday."

From The Hill: "While past measures to address the debt limit have simply increased the borrowing cap, the House bill would actually suspend the debt limit for three months. Then, on May 19, the debt limit would be automatically increased from $16.4 trillion to accommodate whatever additional borrowing the Treasury had done during that time frame. The House Rules Committee posted the text of legislation as Washington prepared for President Obama’s second inauguration. In addition to preventing default, the bill would withhold members' pay if Congress fails to pass a budget by April 15."

As we explained last week, this is merely a plan to shift fiscal (ir)responsibility into the Democrat camp, as it is virtually impossible that America can have a budget now or ever again. After all with $1 trillion deficits as far as the eye can see, the possibility to bluster and claim one is fiscally responsible while demanding $4 trillion in debt until 2016, will hardly fool the majority of the people any more of the time. Sure enough, Pelosi's response has made it quite clear this entire plan is DOA: "the proposed three-month debt- limit increase does not relieve the uncertainty faced by small businesses, the markets and the middle class. This is a gimmick unworthy of the challenges we face.

That clears it up.

More from The Hill:

House Republican leaders are using the bill to put pressure on Senate Democrats to pass a budget, which they have failed to do for over four years.

“Before there is any long-term debt limit increase, a budget should be passed that cuts spending,” Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) told the Republican conference Friday in remarks to close the party’s three-day retreat in Williamsburg. “The Democratic-controlled Senate has failed to pass a budget for four years. That is a shameful run that needs to end, this year.”

Leading Senate Democrats have said they will produce a budget resolution that will included increased revenues, and will consider the debt limit boost set to come from the House.

House Republican leaders have billed their measure as "no budget, no pay." But the bill would not actually eliminate pay for members of Congress if there is no budget in place by April 15. Rather, if a chamber of Congress, such as the Senate, fails to pass a budget by April 15, all income earned by members of that chamber would be set aside. Members would receive that pay in full once a budget is passed, or on the final day of the 113th Congress at the end of 2014.

This arrangement was struck as a way to avoid running afoul of the 27th Amendment of the Constitution, which states that no law varying the compensation of members of Congress can take effect until a new Congress is in place — members cannot vote to give themselves raises or pay cuts.

Needless to say, the word "budget" to the democratically-controlled senate is like garlic stew to a graveyard of vampires:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s spokesman, Adam Jentleson, said in a statement that the House must pass a “clean” debt-limit increase. He didn’t address Cantor’s statement about requiring members of Congress to forfeit their pay if a budget isn’t adopted.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi’s spokesman, Drew Hammill, said in a statement that the proposed three-month debt- limit increase “does not relieve the uncertainty faced by small businesses, the markets and the middle class. This is a gimmick unworthy of the challenges we face.”

Political divisions in Congress pose limits to the ability of Republicans to achieve their long-term goals of deep cuts in spending, Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin told reporters at the retreat two days ago.

Ryan said Republicans want “a two-way discussion between Democrats and Republicans and out of that hopefully some progress being made on getting this deficit and debt under control.”

The last time the Democratic-led Senate adopted a budget was in April 2009. The Senate and House are supposed to pass budget resolutions early each year to set a spending framework, though there is no enforcement mechanism. Without a budget resolution, appropriations bills allocate money for the federal government.

Leaders said the tactic of short-term debt-limit increases was used in the 1980s during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush as a prelude to broader agreements on spending cuts.

“No one is talking about default, no one wants to default,” South Carolina Republican Mick Mulvaney, who voted against the 2011 debt-ceiling deal, said in an interview yesterday with Bloomberg Television’s “Capitol Gains” program airing tomorrow. There is a “lot of support growing” among the rank and file for a short-term debt limit, he said.

Finally, Obama has been quite clear on the issue:

Obama has said he won’t negotiate the terms of a debt-limit legislation the way he did in 2011, and he is demanding more tax revenue to accompany further spending cuts. House Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, has said that any increase in the debt ceiling would have to be accompanied by commensurate spending cuts.

At the end of the day, the debt ceiling will naturally pass, as otherwise the market's ascent to new all time highs may be hindered.

Recall the sequence of events:

  1. Fed monetizes deficit, issues trillions in debt as collateral for reserves
  2. Banks use reserves, transformed under shadow banking, to boost risk assets, and otherwise invest in the capital markets
  3. The stock markets grinds higher, as the economy does not grow, generating even more deficits
  4. Even more deficits mean even more debt has to be monetized by the Fed, going back to step 1.
  5. Sometimes the market has to plunge just to remind Congress who is in charge and that without a debt ceiling hike, there will be no more under the table pennies on a dollar kickbacks from Wall Street to D.C.

And that, in a nutshell, is the game.

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MLK’s Vehement Condemnations of US Militarism are More Relevant Than Ever

Martin Luther King at Washington DC's Lincoln Memorial in 1968. Barack Obama used the day before his inauguration to honour the spirit of King. (Photograph: Francis Miller/Getty)The civil right achievements of Martin Luther King are quite justly the f...

Glenn Greenwald: MLK’s Vehement Condemnation of American Militarism

By King's own description, his work against US violence and militarism, not only in Vietnam but generally, was central - indispensable - to his worldview and activism, yet it has been almost completely erased from how he is remembered.

Martin Luther King Was a Radical, Not a Saint

Today Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is viewed as something of an American saint. His birthday is a national holiday. His name adorns schools and street signs. Americans from across the political spectrum invoke King's name to justify their beliefs and actions, as President Barack Obama will no doubt do in his second Inaugural speech and as gun fanatic Larry Ward recently did in outrageously claiming that King would have opposed proposals to restrict access to guns.

So it is easy to forget that  in his day, in his own country, King was considered a dangerous troublemaker. He was harassed by the FBI and vilified in the media.

In fact, King was a radical. He believed that America needed a "radical redistribution of economic and political power." He challenged America's class system and its racial caste system.  He was a strong ally of the nation's labor union movement.  He was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis, where he had gone to support a sanitation workers' strike.  He opposed U.S. militarism and imperialism, especially the country's misadventure in Vietnam.

In his critique of American society and his strategy for changing it,  King pushed the country toward more democracy and social justice. 

If he were alive today, he would certainly be standing with Walmart employees and other workers fighting for a living wage and the right to unionize. He would be in the forefront of the battle for strong gun controls and to thwart the influence of the National Rifle Association. He would be calling for dramatic cuts in the military budget in order to reinvest public dollars in jobs, education, and health care.  He would surely be marching with immigrants and their allies in support of the Dream Act and comprehensive reform. Like most Americans in his day, King was homophobic, even though one of his closest advisors, Bayard Rustin, was gay. But today King would undoubtedly stand with advocates of LGBT rights and same-sex marriage.

Indeed, King's views evolved over time. He entered the public stage with some hesitation, reluctantly becoming the spokesperson for the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 at the age of 26.  King began his activism in Montgomery as a crusader against the nation's racial caste system, but the struggle for civil rights radicalized him into a fighter for broader economic and social justice and peace. Still, in reviewing King's life, we can see that the seeds of his later radicalism were planted early. 

King was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1929, the son of a prominent black minister. Despite growing up in a solidly middle-class family, King saw the widespread human suffering caused by the Depression, particularly in the black community. In 1950, while in graduate school, he wrote an essay describing the "anti-capitalistic feelings" he experienced as a result of seeing unemployed people standing in breadlines.

During King's first year at Morehouse College, civil rights and labor activist A. Philip Randolph spoke on campus. Randolph predicted that the near future would witness a global struggle that would end white supremacy and capitalism. He urged the students to link up with "the people in the shacks and the hovels," who, although "poor in property," were "rich in spirit."

After graduating from Morehouse in 1948, King studied theology at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania (where he read both Mohandas Gandhi and Karl Marx), planning to follow in his father's footsteps and join the ministry. In 1955 he earned his doctorate from Boston University, where he studied the works of Reinhold Niebuhr, the influential liberal theologian. While in Boston, he told his girlfriend (and future wife), Coretta Scott, that "a society based on making all the money you can and ignoring people's needs is wrong."

When King moved to Montgomery to take his first pulpit at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, he was full of ideas but had no practical experience in politics or activism. But history sneaked up on him. On Thursday, December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a seamstress and veteran activist with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), decided to resist the city's segregation law by refusing to move to the back of the bus on her way home from work. She was arrested. Two other long-term activists -- E. D. Nixon (leader of the NAACP and of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters) and Jo Ann Robinson (a professor at the all-black Alabama State College and a leader of Montgomery's Women's Political Council) -- determined that Parks' arrest was a ripe opportunity for a one-day boycott of the much-despised segregated bus system. Nixon and Robinson asked black ministers to use their Sunday sermons to spread the word. Some refused, but many others, including King, agreed.

The boycott was very effective. Most black residents stayed off the buses. Within days, the boycott leaders formed a new group, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). At Nixon's urging, they elected a hesitant King as president, in large part because he was new in town and not embroiled in the competition for congregants and visibility among black ministers. He was also well educated and already a brilliant orator, and thus would be a good public face for the protest movement. The ministers differed over whether to call off the boycott after one day but agreed to put the question up to a vote at a mass meeting.

That night, 7,000 blacks crowded into (and stood outside) the Holt Street Baptist Church. Inspired by King's words --"There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression"-- they voted unanimously to continue the boycott. It lasted for 381 days and resulted in the desegregation of the city's buses. During that time, King honed his leadership skills, aided by advice from two veteran pacifist organizers, Bayard Rustin and Rev. Glenn Smiley, who had been sent to Montgomery by the pacifist group, Fellowship of Reconciliation. During the boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, and he was subjected to personal abuse. But -- with the assistance of the new medium of television -- he emerged as a national figure.

In 1957 King launched the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to help spread the civil rights crusade to other cities. He helped lead local campaigns in different cities, including Selma and Birmingham, Alabama, where thousands marched to demand an end to segregation in defiance of court injunctions forbidding any protests. While participating in these protests, King also sought to keep the fractious civil rights movement together, despite the rivalries among the NAACP, the Urban League, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and SCLC. Between 1957 and 1968 King traveled over six million miles, spoke over 2,500 times, and was arrested at least 20 times, always preaching the gospel of nonviolence. King attended workshops at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, which connected him to a network of radicals, pacifists, and union activists from around the country whose ideas helped widen his political horizons.

It is often forgotten that the August 1963 protest rally at the Lincoln Memorial, where King delivered his famous  "I Have a Dream" speech, was called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. King was proud of the civil rights movement's success in winning the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act the following year. But he realized that neither law did much to provide better jobs or housing for the masses of black poor in either the urban cities or the rural South. "What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter," he asked, "if you can't afford to buy a hamburger?"

King had hoped that the bus boycott, sit-ins, and other forms of civil disobedience would stir white southern moderates, led by his fellow clergy, to see the immorality of segregation and racism. His famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," written in 1963, outlines King's strategy of using nonviolent civil disobedience to force a response from the southern white establishment and to generate sympathy and support among white liberals and moderates. "The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation," he wrote, and added, "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."

King eventually realized that many white Americans had at least a psychological stake in perpetuating racism. He began to recognize that racial segregation was devised not only to oppress African Americans but also to keep working-class whites from challenging their own oppression by letting them feel superior to blacks. "The Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow," King said from the Capitol steps in Montgomery, following the 1965 march from Selma. "And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than a black man."

When King launched a civil rights campaign in Chicago in 1965, he was shocked by the hatred and violence expressed by working-class whites as he and his followers marched through the streets of segregated neighborhoods in Chicago and its suburbs. He saw that the problem in Chicago's ghetto was not legal segregation but "economic exploitation" -- slum housing, overpriced food, and low-wage jobs -- "because someone profits from its existence."

These experiences led King to develop a more radical outlook. King supported President Lyndon B. Johnson's declaration of the War on Poverty in 1964, but, like his friend and ally Walter Reuther, the president of the United Auto Workers,  King thought that it did not go nearly far enough. As early as October 1964, he called for a "gigantic Marshall Plan" for the poor -- black and white. Two months later, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, he observed that the United States could learn much from Scandinavian "democratic socialism." He began talking openly about the need to confront "class issues," which he described as "the gulf between the haves and the have nots."

In 1966 King confided to his staff:

“You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can't talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism. There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism."

Given this view, King was dismayed when Malcolm X, SNCC's Stokely Carmichael, and others began advocating "black power," which he warned would alienate white allies and undermine a genuine interracial movement for economic justice.

King became increasingly committed to building bridges between the civil rights and labor movements. Invited to address the AFL-CIO's annual convention in 1961, King observed, "The labor movement did not diminish the strength of the nation but enlarged it. By raising the living standards of millions, labor miraculously created a market for industry and lifted the whole nation to undreamed of levels of production. Those who today attack labor forget these simple truths, but history remembers them." In a 1961 speech to the Negro American Labor Council, King proclaimed, "Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God's children." Speaking to a meeting of Teamsters union shop stewards in 1967, King said, "Negroes are not the only poor in the nation. There are nearly twice as many white poor as Negro, and therefore the struggle against poverty is not involved solely with color or racial discrimination but with elementary economic justice."

King's growing critique of capitalism coincided with his views about American imperialism. By 1965 he had turned against the Vietnam War, viewing it as an economic as well as a moral tragedy. But he was initially reluctant to speak out against the war. He understood that his fragile working alliance with LBJ would be undone if he challenged the president's leadership on the war. Although some of his close advisers tried to discourage him, he nevertheless made the break in April 1967, in a bold and prophetic speech at the Riverside Church in New York City, entitled "Beyond Vietnam--A Time to Break Silence." King called America the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" and linked the struggle for social justice with the struggle against militarism. King argued that Vietnam was stealing precious resources from domestic programs and that the Vietnam War was "an enemy of the poor." In his last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967), King wrote, "The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America."

In early 1968, King told journalist David Halberstam, "For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values."

King kept trying to build a broad movement for economic justice that went beyond civil rights. In January 1968 he announced plans for a Poor People's Campaign, a series of protests to be led by an interracial coalition of poor people and their allies among the middle-class liberals, unions, religious organizations, and other progressive groups, to pressure the White House and Congress to expand the War on Poverty. At King's request, socialist activist Michael Harrington (author of The Other America, which helped inspire Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to declare a war on poverty) drafted a Poor People's Manifesto that outlined the campaign's goals. In April King was in Memphis, Tennessee, to help lend support to striking African American garbage workers and to gain recognition for their union. There he was assassinated at age 39 on April 4, a few months before the first protest action of the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, DC.

President Johnson utilized this national tragedy to urge Congress to quickly enact the Fair Housing Act, legislation to ban racial discrimination in housing that King had strongly supported for two years. He signed the bill a week after King's assassination.

The campaign for a federal holiday in King's honor, spearheaded by Detroit Congressman John Conyers, began soon after his murder, but it did not come up for a vote in Congress until 1979, when it fell five votes short of the number needed for passage. In 1981, with the help of singer Stevie Wonder and other celebrities, supporters collected six million signatures on a petition to Congress on behalf of a King holiday.  Congress finally passed legislation enacting the holiday in 1983, fifteen years after King's death. But even then, 90 members of the House (including then-Congressmen John McCain of Arizona and Richard Shelby of Alabama, both now in the Senate) voted against it. Senator Jesse Helms, a North Carolina Republican, led an unsuccessful effort -- supported by 21 other senators, including current Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) --  to block its passage in the Senate.

The holiday was first observed on January 20, 1986. In 1987 Arizona governor Evan Mecham rescinded King Day as his first act in office, setting off a national boycott of the state. Some states (including New Hampshire, which called it "Civil Rights Day" from 1991 to 1999) insisted on calling the holiday by other names.   In 2000 South Carolina became the last state to make King Day a paid holiday for all state employees.

In his final speech in Memphis the night before he was killed, King told the crowd about a bomb threat on his plane from Atlanta that morning, saying he knew that his life was constantly in danger because of his political activism.

"I would like to live a long life," he said. "Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And he's allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land."

We haven't gotten there yet. But Dr. King is still with us in spirit. The best way to honor his memory is to continue the struggle for human dignity, workers' rights, racial equality, peace, and social justice.

Peter Dreier

Peter Dreier is E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy program, at Occidental College. His most recent book is The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (2012, Nation Books). Other books include: Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century and The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City. He writes regularly for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and American Prospect. 

The Real Reasons Why Germany Is Demanding that the U.S. Return Its Gold

gold_bars_7_200

The German’s are demanding that the U.S. return all of the 374 tons of gold held by the Bank of France, and 300 tons of the 1500 tons of bullion held by the New York Federal Reserve.

Some say that Germany is only demanding repatriation of its gold due to internal political pressures, and that no other countries will do so.

But Pimco co-CEO El Erian says:

In the first instance, it could translate into pressures on other countries to also repatriate part of their gold holdings. After all, if you can safely store your gold at home — a big if for some countries — no government would wish to be seen as one of the last to outsource all of this activity to foreign central banks.

As we noted last November:

Romania has demanded for many years that Russia return its gold.

Last year, Venezuela demanded the return of 90 tons of gold from the Bank of England.

***

As Zero Hedge notes (quoting Bloomberg):

Ecuador’s government wants the nation’s banks to repatriate about one third of their foreign holdings to support national growth, the head of the country’s tax agency said.

Carlos Carrasco, director of the tax agency known as the SRI, said today that Ecuador’s lenders could repatriate about $1.7 billion and still fulfill obligations to international clients. Carrasco spoke at a congressional hearing in Quito on a government proposal to raise taxes on banks to finance cash subsidies to the South American nation’s poor.

Four members of the Swiss Parliament want Switzerland to reclaim its gold.

Some people in the Netherlands want their gold back as well.

(Forbes notes that Iran and Libya have recently repatriated their gold as well).

The Telegraph’s lead economics writer – Ambrose Evans Pritchard – argues that the German repatriation demand shows that we’re switching to a de facto gold standard:

Central banks around the world bought more bullion last year in terms of tonnage than at any time in almost half a century.

They added a net 536 tonnes in 2012 as they diversified fresh reserves away from the four fiat suspects: dollar, euro, sterling, and yen.

The Washington Accord, where Britain, Spain, Holland, South Africa, Switzerland, and others sold a chunk of their gold each year, already seems another era – the Gordon Brown era, you might call it.

That was the illusionary period when investors thought the euro would take its place as the twin pillar of a new G2 condominium alongside the dollar. That hope has faded. Central bank holdings of euro bonds have fallen back to 26pc, where they were almost a decade ago.

Neither the euro nor the dollar can inspire full confidence, although for different reasons. EMU is a dysfunctional construct, covering two incompatible economies, prone to lurching from crisis to crisis, without a unified treasury to back it up. The dollar stands on a pyramid of debt. We all know that this debt will be inflated away over time – for better or worse. The only real disagreement is over the speed.

***

My guess is that any new Gold Standard will be sui generis, and better for it. Let gold will take its place as a third reserve currency, one that cannot be devalued, and one that holds the others to account, but not so dominant that it hitches our collective destinies to the inflationary ups (yes, gold was highly inflationary after the Conquista) and the deflationary downs of global mine supply.

***

A third reserve currency is just what America needs. As Prof Micheal Pettis from Beijing University has argued, holding the world’s reserve currency is an “exorbitant burden” that the US could do without.

The Triffin Dilemma – advanced by the Belgian economist Robert Triffin in the 1960s – suggests that the holder of the paramount currency faces an inherent contradiction. It must run a structural trade deficit over time to keep the system afloat, but this will undermine its own economy. The system self-destructs.

A partial Gold Standard – created by the global market, and beholden to nobody – is the best of all worlds. It offers a store of value (though no yield). It acts a balancing force. It is not dominant enough to smother the system.

Let us have three world currencies, a tripod with a golden leg. It might even be stable.

How Much Gold Is There?

It’s not confidence-inspiring that CNBC’s senior editor John Carney argues that it doesn’t matter whether or not the U.S. has the physical gold it claims to hold.

In fact, many allege that the gold is gone:

Cheviot Asset Management’s Ned Naylor-Leyland says that the Fed and Bank of England will never return gold to its foreign owners.

Jim Willie says that the gold is gone.

***

Others allege that the gold has not been sold outright, but has been leased or encumbered, so that the U.S. does not own it outright.

$10 billion dollar fund manager Eric Sprott writes – in an article entitled “Do Western Central Banks Have Any Gold Left???“:

If the Western central banks are indeed leasing out their physical reserves, they would not actually have to disclose the specific amounts of gold that leave their respective vaults. According to a document on the European Central Bank’s (ECB) website regarding the statistical treatment of the Eurosystem’s International Reserves, current reporting guidelines do not require central banks to differentiate between gold owned outright versus gold lent out or swapped with another party. The document states that, “reversible transactions in gold do not have any effect on the level of monetary gold regardless of the type of transaction (i.e. gold swaps, repos, deposits or loans), in line with the recommendations contained in the IMF guidelines.”6 (Emphasis theirs). Under current reporting guidelines, therefore, central banks are permitted to continue carrying the entry of physical gold on their balance sheet even if they’ve swapped it or lent it out entirely. You can see this in the way Western central banks refer to their gold reserves.

Indeed, it is now well-documented that the Fed has leased out a large chunk of its gold reserves, and that big banks borrow gold from central banks and then to multiple parties.

As such, it might not entirely surprising that the Fed needs 7 years to give Germany back its 300 tons of gold … even though the Fed claims to hold 6,720 tons at the New York Federal Reserve Bank alone:

Even Pimco co-CEO Bill Gross says:

When the Fed now writes $85 billion of checks to buy Treasuries and mortgages every month, they really have nothing in the “bank” to back them. Supposedly they own a few billion dollars of “gold certificates” that represent a fairy-tale claim on Ft. Knox’s secret stash, but there’s essentially nothing there but trust..  When a primary dealer such as J.P. Morgan or Bank of America sells its Treasuries to the Fed, it gets a “credit” in its account with the Fed, known as “reserves.” It can spend those reserves for something else, but then another bank gets a credit for its reserves and so on and so on. The Fed has told its member banks “Trust me, we will always honor your reserves,” and so the banks do, and corporations and ordinary citizens trust the banks, and “the beat goes on,” as Sonny and Cher sang. $54 trillion of credit in the U.S. financial system based upon trusting a central bank with nothing in the vault to back it up. Amazing!

And given that gold-plated tungsten has turned up all over the world, and that a top German gold expert found fake gold bars imprinted with official U.S. markings, Germans may have lost confidence in the trustworthiness of the Fed.  See this, this, this and this.

This may especially be true since the Fed refused to allow Germans to inspect their own gold stored at the Fed.

Currency War?

The gold repatriation is – without doubt- related to currency.

As Forbes notes:

Officials at the Bundesbank … acknowledged the move is “preemptive” in case a “currency crisis” hits the European Monetary Union.

***

“No, we have no intention to sell gold,” a Bundesbank spokesman said on the phone Wednesday, “[the relocation] is in case of a currency crisis.”

Reggie Middleton thinks that Germany’s demand for its gold is part of a currency war.

Jim Rickards has previously said that the Fed had plans to grab Germany gold:

Jim Rickards has outlined possible plans by the Federal Reserve to commandeer Germany’s and all foreign depositors of sovereign gold at the New York Federal Reserve in the event of a dollar and monetary crisis leading to intensified “currency wars” and the ‘nuclear option’ of a drastic upward revision of the price of gold and a return to a quasi gold standard is contemplated by embattled central banks to prevent debt deflation.

Is that one reason that Germany is demanding its gold back now?

China is quietly becoming a gold superpower, and China has long been rumored to be converting the Yuan to a gold-backed currency.

The Telegraph’s James Delingpole points out:

Back in the mid-1920s, the head of the German Central Bank, Herr Hjalmar Schacht, went to New York to see Germany’s gold. However the NY Fed officials were unable to find the palette of Germany’s gold bullion. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Benjamin Strong was mortified, but to put him at ease Herr Schacht turned to him and said ‘Never mind, I believe you when you when you say the gold is there. Even if it weren’t you are good for its replacement.’ (H/T The Real Asset Company)

But that was then and this is now. In the eyes of the Germans – and who can blame them? – America has lost its mojo to such a degree that it can no longer be trusted honour its debts, even in the unlikely event that it were financially capable of doing so. Which is why, following in the footsteps of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez (who may be an idiot but is definitely no fool), Germany is repatriatriating its gold from the US federal reserve.  It will now be stored in Frankfurt.

***

[Things] may look calm on the surface, but this latest move by the Bundesbank gives us a pretty good indication that beneath the surface that serene-seeming swan is paddling for dear life.

If you want a full analysis I recommend this excellent summary by Jan Skoyles. The scary part is this bit:

Every few months there is a discussion regarding what China are planning on doing with the gold they both mine and import every year, with many believing they are hoarding the metal as an insurance against the billions of US Treasury bonds, notes and bills they hold. Many believe they will issue some kind of gold-backed currency in the short-term and dump its one trillion dollars’ worth of US Treasury securities. Whilst, at the moment the US seem to take their monopoly currency for granted, should the Chinese or anyone else behave in such a manner, the US will need to respond – most likely with gold, which on its own it does not have enough of.

Anyone who thinks this isn’t going to happen eventually should read Peter Schiff’s parable How An Economy Grows And Why It Crashes. If something can’t go on forever, it won’t.

In other words, Rickards and Skoyles appear to argue that Germany may be repatriating gold in the first round of musical chairs in which China is preparing to roll out a gold-backed Yuan.   Under this theory, the rest of the world’s currencies will sink unless their nations’ can scramble to get their hands on enough gold to lend credibility to their paper.

Postscript: Michael Rivero thinks that the war in Mali is connected:

Mali is one of the world’s largest gold producers. Together with neighboring Ghana they account for 7-8% of world gold output. That makes them a rich prize for nations desperate for real physical gold. So, even as Germany started demanding their gold back from the Bank of France and the New York Federal Reserve, France (aided by the US) decided to invade Mali to fight “Islamists” working for “Al Qaeda.” Of course, “Islamists” has become the catch-all label for people that need to be killed to get them out of the way of the path to riches, and the people being bombed by France (aided by the US) are not “Al Qaeda” but Tawariqs, who have been fighting for their independence for 150 years, long before the CIA created “Al Qaeda”. Left to themselves, the Tawariqs could sell gold to whoever they want for whatever they want, and right now China can outbid the US and France.

The Black Elite and the Legacy of Martin Luther King

Context: As yet there are no context links for this item.

Bio

Glen Ford is a distinguished radio-show host and commentator. In 1977, Ford co-launched, produced and hosted America's Black Forum, the first nationally syndicated Black news interview program on commercial television. In 1987, Ford launched Rap It Up, the first nationally syndicated Hip Hop music show, broadcast on 65 radio stations. Ford co-founded the Black Commentator in 2002 and in 2006 he launched the Black Agenda Report. Ford is also the author of The Big Lie: An Analysis of U.S. Media Coverage of the Grenada Invasion.

Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore.

Martin Luther King, when he was alive, was a representative and leader of African Americans, but of the working class, the black working class in particular. Now he seems to have become an icon, a symbol for the elite in general, some symbol of giving service to your community, but also of the black elite in particular.Now joining us to talk about Martin Luther King and his significance today and how his memory is dealt with is Glen Ford. He's the cofounder and current executive editor of Black Agenda Report. He also colaunched, produced, and hosted America's Black Forum, the first nationally syndicated black news interview program on commercial TV.Thanks for joining us, Glen.GLEN FORD, EXECUTIVE EDITOR, BLACKAGENDAREPORT.COM: Thanks for having me, Paul.JAY: So what do you make of what's been done with the memory of Martin Luther King, but particularly the role of the black elite in this?FORD: You seem to be talking about the emergence of what we call the black misleadership class. And I think we have to go back to 1968, the year that Martin was assassinated.By '68, almost all of the civil rights legal—narrow legal victories had been won. And in fact there was only one more major civil rights bill to pass, the Fair Housing Act, which would pass shortly after Martin's death. This demolition of legal Jim Crow was very useful to a class of black folks who could make use of this new mobility, that had certain educational and money resources, etc. They were equipped to use the civil rights revolution as a kind of launching board for their own careers and aspirations. And they did.And although the civil rights movement or the broad black movement was certainly damaged by federal repression, the COINTEL program, and at state and local levels, in a sense the movement was also shut down from within by these elements of the upper classes of black folks who decided that it was their time, it was their time to enter the corporate world, it was their time to run for political office, it was their time to cash in on the death of legalized Jim Crow. And they didn't want the continuation of a mass movement, the stirring up of stuff in the streets. Those who were going to run for political office, we know that the last thing that a mayor or an aspiring mayor wants is a people's movement in his city. The only kind of movement that a local public official wants is people moving towards the ballot box once every two or four years, and they want them quiet the rest of the time. So it was in the interest—or they saw it in the interests of this upwardly mobile, very acquisitive class, to shut down the movement and to preach a kind of gospel of sophisticated politics, which basically ruled out the kind of mass political activity that Dr. King had led.JAY: So talk a bit about the message of King, especially during the sort of last few years of his life, and the sort of things we're hearing from this sort of what you're calling black misleadership or black elite.FORD: Well, if we're going to describe King, I think he's aptly described as a left social democrat. Some people, like Dr. Tony Monteiro, who I know you've had on your show recently, calls Dr. King a revolutionary Democrat. He was—he did not think of himself as a nationalist. But he did refer to himself as a socialist. His staff always discouraged him from using that word.He differed from the social democrats that we know today in that he opposed U.S. imperialism, because he was a man of peace.~~~MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle upon Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create a hell for the poor.~~~FORD: So he was an antiwar activist before 1967, when he made the formal break with his speech at Riverside Church and broke with the president, with whom the movement that Dr. King was a leader in had made a kind of alliance, the president who had introduced and then signed these civil rights bills. Martin Luther King felt that he had to break with this sometimes ally because of the Vietnam War, and not just because of the immorality of the war, but because of the way militarism affects domestic policy as well.So, yeah, he was a left social democrat, a person who believed that politics should not be confined to the ballot box. He resisted all the entreaties from folks on the left who wanted him to run for office, because he saw politics as setting people in motion, and a ballot box is only one destination.JAY: And the way they're going to celebrate Martin Luther King is to—you know, you should do service, I think, for one—particularly on the Saturday, you should do a day's service for your community, or if you want to do more, that's the way to remember Martin Luther King, sort of doing this volunteer work. But you mentioned that King considered himself a socialist. And there was quite an anticapitalist character to his speeches in the last while of his life.FORD: Well, he talked about the triple evils of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.~~~KING: I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.~~~FORD: And by extreme materialism, I think he was talking about the rule of the rich. And he got pretty explicit in terms of the rule of the masses of people by one moneyed class of people. He advocated back in 1967 a guaranteed national minimum income. He certainly preached a kind ofsocial gospel. And I also believe that politically we should call him a socialist, yes. He called himself that.JAY: So we've talked many times before about President Obama, and sort of some people have tried to give him the mantel of King. And I know you've been very critical of that. You wrote something recently about that. Do you think that's still going on? And if so, what do you make of it?FORD: It's insane. And what we wrote in our current article was that if King were alive, he would be celebrating his birthday week by organizing a massive disruption of the inauguration. And we didn't say that in fun. I really believe that would be the case. He would be appalled at this president, who has at one time bombed simultaneously five countries, has a kill list, and every Tuesday decides who's going to be on it, introduced and shepherded through our legislature a bill for preventive detention. This is a warmonger who surpasses in his militarism even George Bush. So how could anyone imagine that our prince of peace, as some folks refer to him, would not be dedicating all of his organizing efforts to disrupting this administration's warlike strategies in the world?FORD: In terms of people trying to say that there is some seamless line, a straight line between Dr. King and Barack Obama, that somehow Dr. King would think that his dream had truly been fulfilled if he could see this family in the White House today, it is so dishonest, especially for people who are public intellectuals, to encourage that kind of thinking.Dr. King, of all of our great leaders—I'm talking about great black leaders—was probably the leader who explained to the people all the facets of his thinking. He wrote books. He gave speeches not just as a movement leader, but as a public intellectual and as a statesman. He was a public figure who was as well known in his day as Mandela is today. He also knew the art of speaking to the corporate media. He knew how to speak in soundbites as well. So the workings of King's mind through his writings and his speeches and his interviews is no secret. And nowhere is there any evidence in these hundreds of thousands, millions of words, that Dr. King would be anything other than an opponent of this regime, this president, in terms of his domestic policies and his foreign policies.JAY: Alright. Thanks for joining us, Glen.FORD: Thank you.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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Frontrunning: January 21

With array of challenges, Obama kicks off second term at public inauguration (Reuters) Uneasy in the Political Climate, Mickelson Talks Like Someone Ready to Step Away (NYT) BOJ Should Slow Easing If Yen Weakens Too Much, Hamada Says (BBG) Spain Reces...

The Extremist Cult of Capitalism

A 'cult,' according to Merriam-Webster, can be defined as "Great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work..(and)..a usually small group of people characterized by such devotion."Capitalism has been defined by adherents and detractors: Mil...

US Markets Closed On Fifth Anniversary Of Jerome Kerviel Day

To some, today is Martin Luther King day and as a result the US markets are closed, especially since today is also the day when Obama celebrates his second inauguration with Beyonce, Kelly Clarkson and James Taylor at his side (hopefully not on the taxpayers' dime). To others, January 21 is nothing more than the anniversary of the real beginning of the end, when five years ago a little known SocGen trader named Jerome Kerviel could no longer hide his massive futures positions and was forced to unwind them, sending global indices plunging resulting in the biggest single day drop in the Dax (-7.2%), and punking the Fed into an unannounced 75 bps cut. Luckily, today such cataclysmic unwinds are impossible as the market is priced perfectly efficiently, without central bank intervention, price transparency is ubiquitous and the Volcker rule has made prop trading by banks, funded by Fed reserves (which are nothing more than the monetization of excess budget deficits) and excess deposits, impossible.

Sarcasm aside, and hoping nobody will blow up forcing the Fed to cut rates by another 75 bps as a precaution to keeping markets float, as Deustche Bank summarizes we can expect a rather eventful calendar ahead for global macro despite the shortened trading week in the US. In Asia the much anticipated Bank of Japan 2-day meeting will conclude tomorrow where markets are expecting the central bank to embark on a more aggressive easing programme that could include inflation targeting. These hopes are somewhat dampened by the weekend comments from the government’s economic advisor Mr Hamada who said that the BoJ may need to slow the pace of easing if the effect on inflation and Yen “goes too far”. Overnight the Nikkei is about 1% lower while the JPY is off its 2.5 year low at 89.53 against the USD as we type.

In Europe, we have the Eurogroup/ECOFIN meetings on Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday sees the start of the five-day World Economic Forum in Davos where global leaders from Ms Merkel to Mr Dimon are set to speak/interact under the official theme of “Resilient Dynamism”. The same day will also see the IMF publish its updated outlook on the global economy. The Washington based group slashed its 2013 global GDP forecast to 3.6% from 3.9% in October so it’ll be interesting to see where they go from there. On the data front, flash PMIs from Europe, China and the US on Thursday will be the week’s highlights. The US earnings season shifts up a gear with 84 S&P 500 companies expected to report this week. Apple’s results on Wednesday will be a prime focus as market consensus is looking for its first year-on-year earnings decline since 2003. On that note, we also include our oft-updated earnings beat/miss tracker below as well as a recap of the stats for previous reporting season. The current earnings season is tracking rather well relative to the previous one.

Before we get to all that let’s recap the Asian session overnight. Equities are mixed despite the stronger finish to the US session on Friday. Gains in equities are being paced by the Hang Seng (+0.05%) and Shanghai Comp (+0.16%), while the KOSPI (-0.1%) is lagging but there aren’t too many catalysts in what has been a light session in terms of data. In credit markets, Asian bonds are quoted slightly tighter amidst better new issue performance and the Australian and Asian IG indices are marked flat to 1bp tighter.

It was a rather quiet weekend in terms of news flow, but one of the more interesting developments was the outcome of state elections in Lower Saxony on Sunday where the centre-left coalition scored what was described by the Spiegel as an “upset” victory. Early exit polls suggested that Angela Merkel’s CDU and its allies, the FDP, would manage to cling on to a one-seat majority, but that turned later in the evening after preliminary results gave the “red-green” alliance of the opposition SPD and Greens Party a total of 69 seats in the state parliament, against 68 for the CDU-FDP. Perhaps the silver lining for Merkel is that her allies, the FDP, polled much stronger than expected, after previously being in danger of falling below the 5% support threshold needed to retain seats in the state parliament.

The FDP ended up winning almost 10% of votes, however most of the gains came at the expense of Merkel’s CDU.

In other headlines, Bundesbank chief Jens Weidmann reiterated his opposition to the ECB’s OMT program. Weidmann added that it was “wrong and dangerous” to think of the ECB as the only able “crisis manager”. The IMF warned that the EU will need to come up with an additional EU10bn in funds for Greece even if the current programme stays on track, in a 260 page report issued on Friday (FT). In the UK, PM David Cameron’s office is expected to announce a date for his highly anticipated speech on the future of the UK’s relations with  the EU this week.

Briefly recapping the US session on Friday, the S&P500 rallied from the early lows to close moderately higher (+0.34%). Gains were broad-based with nine out of 10 industry sectors posting gains. The sole laggard was the tech sector (-0.36%) which was weighed by a  mixed result from Intel (-6.3%) which reported weak sales in the PC market and disappointed with its Q1 outlook. On the earnings front we had encouraging news as Morgan Stanley and GE both beat top and bottom line expectations. More broadly, the catalyst for the  midday turnaround in risk sentiment was a report that House Republicans are considering extending the US debt ceiling by three months in a bill to be considered next week. According to the Washington Post, the move is a retreat from earlier GOP demand that a debt  ceiling increase is matched by spending cuts. However in exchange for the concession, Republicans are expected to demand that a longer-term budget is passed by both houses of Congress by April 15th. The move was described as a means of forcing the Democrat-controlled Senate to pass a budget, which it hasn’t done in about four years. Over the weekend, Democrat Senator Charles Schumer responded that the Senate was working on a budget anyway which will include an overhaul to the tax code that is intended to raise  significant revenue over the next decade (NY Times).

Last but not least previewing the data calendar for the week we’ll have the German ZEW survey on Tuesday, Japanese trade data on Thursday, German IFO and Japanese inflation both on Friday. US existing and new home sales are out this Tuesday and Friday,  respectively. BoE minutes are out on Wednesday followed by the UK's advance Q4 GDP estimate on Friday.

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CIA’s free reign on targeted killing: Pakistan exempted from agency’s drone ‘playbook’

A new CIA manual that limits the agency’s ability to use drones and creates strict guidelines for targeted killings is being finalized. Pakistan was exempted from these restrictions in a compromise between the CIA, State Department and the Pentagon.

The Washington Post has revealed that John Brennan, the counter-terrorism adviser nominated by President Obama to be the next head of the CIA, has agreed to temporarily exempt the spy agency from the new manual's guidelines, which attempt to codify the use of drones to kill Al-Qaeda members, other terrorist organizations and even US citizens.

The manual sets out stricter standards and rigid rules for the use of US drones. Some of the guidelines include requirements for White House approval of drone strikes and the involvement of multiple agencies, such as the State Department, in adding new names to kill lists.

However, none of these stringent rules apply to US drone attacks in Pakistan, which started under President George W. Bush.

The CIA is currently required to give advance warning to the US ambassador to Pakistan on upcoming strikes, but that rule is rarely followed, the Washington Post reported; the agency effectively has total control over both the drone strikes and what names are added to assassination lists.

This exemption would allow the US to continue its most controversial drone strikes in Pakistan without oversight for over a year, or longer.

According to reports, the completed 'playbook,' work on which began last summer, will be submitted to Obama for final approval within weeks, and will guide Washington’s targeted killing program during Obama’s second term.

This would be the first document of its kind to legalize and institutionalize targeted killings. It includes a process for adding names to kill lists, sets out rules for when US citizens can be targeted overseas, and specifies procedures for when the CIA or US military can carry out drone strikes outside war zones.

The exemption for Pakistan was the result of a disagreement between the State Department, CIA and the Pentagon on the criteria for lethal strikes. The argument threatened to disrupt the competion of the drone playbook, according to the Washington Post. Eventually, the CIA was granted the temporary exemption for its operations in Pakistan as a compromise.

The director of the American Civil Liberty Union’s National Security Project told the Washington Post that the playbook is “a step in exactly the wrong direction, a further bureaucratization of the CIA’s paramilitary killing program.”

US intensifies its drone war in Pakistan

The US has stepped up the use of targeted killings in Pakistan in the past few years. Since 2004, an estimated 310 out of 362 drone strikes in the country were launched under Obama, according to the UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism. The strikes have killed up to 3,461 people, 891 of whom were identified as civilians.

The Pakistani government has criticized the Obama administration for the drone strikes, arguing the attacks are a violation of their sovereignty.

The CIA has escalated its use of drones in Pakistan in the first weeks of 2013, launching seven deadly strikes during the first 10 days of the new year, which killed at least 40 people, 11 of whom may have been civilians.

This has raised speculation that the Obama administration is accelerating attacks in the run-up to the planned 2014 withdrawal from Afghanistan, over fears of losing the capacity to carry them out.

These strikes “may be a signal to groups that include not just Al-Qaeda that the US will still present a threat” after most American forces have left, counterterrorism expert Seth Jones of Rand Corp. told the Washington Post. “With the drawdown in US forces, the drone may be, over time, the most important weapon against militant groups.”

With less than 6,000 troops planned to remain in Afghanistan after 2014, the CIA’s network of bases will be reduced from more than 15 to five, due in large part to a lack of security for its outposts.

The White House has defended the killing of civilians in its drone strikes overseas, even as the number of casualties continues to soar. The United Nations said in October 2012 that it would soon launch an investigation into the US drone program.

Ben Emmerson, the UN special rapporteur on counter-terror operations, told an audience at Harvard law school this week that a sub-section of the international organization will begin focusing next year on the Obama administration’s extrajudicial assassination of suspected insurgents, and the innocent civilians all too often killed in the process.

‘US drone strikes amounts to war crime’

Financial editor for Veterans Today, Mike Harris.

US assassination drone attacks amount to “war crime” against innocent civilians by a government that claims moral leadership of the world, a political analyst tells Press TV.

In an interview with Press TV, Mike Harris, financial editor of Veterans Today, said that the US drone attacks, which have killed thousands of innocent people in various countries should be considered a war crime.

“These drone attacks are a war crime. It is murder. There is no other word for it. It is plain and simple murder. And it should not be allowed,” said Harris.

While Washington claims the drone attacks target al-Qaeda militants, witnesses and local officials maintain that civilians are the main victims of the assaults.

“This is murder. It is plain and simple murder of innocent civilians. And even if they are military adversaries, it is indiscriminate, it is not the way you fight a war. There is too much collateral damage on this. It is not worth it. I mean it is heartbreaking,” said Harris.


Targets are chosen from Obama’s so called “kill list”, a list of individuals who the US suspects are terrorists, named to be assassinated after final approval by the president.

“This is [an] extremely dangerous situation. The NDAA (The National Defense Authorization Act) needs to be repealed. The Patriot Act needs to be repealed. This ‘kill list’ needs to be stopped. Anyone who puts together a kill list to assassinate, and this includes American citizens who are being deprived of due process, this is absolutely illegal against the US Constitution,” said Harris.

He concluded by saying, “We need to bring these people to justice. They need to be tried and if convicted, they need to be punished accordingly but this needs to stop. This is absolutely illegal.”

CAH/SZH

These Should be on Your Radar Screen

The US dollar begins the week mostly firmer.  The notable exception is the Japanese yen, which has seen some position adjustment ahead of the outcome of the BOJ meeting tomorrow.  In Asia, and Europe thus far, the dollar has found support near its five day moving average and the 38.2% retracement of its latest leg up (from Jan 16), both of which come in near JPY89.30.  The recovery of the yen took a toll on Japanese stocks.  The Nikkei lost 1.5% and posted an outside down day (trading on both sides of Friday's ranges and finishing below Friday's low).

The euro has been confined to an exception narrow range of about 15 ticks on either side of $1.3315.  A break of support in the $1.3260-80 area would lend credence to our argument that a top of some import is being carved out, with a potential double top at $1.34.   Sterling saw follow through selling on top of the pre-weekend losses.  The euro traded at 10-month highs against sterling above GBP0.8400, but is reversing lower near midday in London.  A modest bounce in cable seen in the European morning ran out of steam near $1.5900, which likely now marks the upper end of the new range.

Equity markets are mixed, with the MSCI Asia-Pacific seeing a 0.2% decline, dragged down by Japanese shares, and to a lesser extent Taiwan, Korea and Malaysia.  European bourses are higher with the Dow Jones Stoxx 600 advancing almost 0.5%, led by utilities, basic materials and technology.  While the US market is closed today, before the weekend the three main gauges, Dow, NASDAQ, and S&P 500 closed at 5-year highs.  This week's earnings feature technology giants Apple, Google, IBM, and United Technologies.

There was a potentially important development in the US fiscal drama.  Some Republicans in the House of Representatives are proposing a three-month extension on the debt ceiling to give more time to negotiate a long-term deal.  It is not yet immediately clear if the measure has sufficient Republican support--remember Bohener's Plan B?--or if Obama will agree to it, after having the lack of interest in a short-term fix.  Still it shows some fluidity of the situation and should ease what little concern that had really been that the US would default.

In a very tight election in Lower Saxony, the real winner, regardless of the formation of the new state government is the Free Democrat Party, and by extension German Chancellor Merkel.  Merkel's CDU party depends on a coalition with the FDP, but over the past year, the FDP has been trounced in most state elections.  The conventional view that the national election later with year would result in another grand coalition was predicated on the inability of the FDP to deliver.  Some feared it would not even meet the 5% threshold to secure parliamentary membership.  In Lower Saxony, the FDP defied expectations and received almost 10% of the vote, more than twice what the opinion polls suggested.  Yet, FDP party head and Economics Minister Roesler offered to resign and threw his support toward Bruederle, the head of the party's parliament caucus, who is regarded as more dynamic and with some hope he can revive the party's fortunes.  A formal leadership decision in May.    The SPD and Greens eked out a surprise victory, but  Steinbrueck, the SPD candidate for Chancellor,  apologized for his gaffes in the national campaign, which may have cost the SPD votes in the local contest.     

The most anticipated event of the week is tomorrow's conclusion of the BOJ meeting.  The pressure on the BOJ from the new Abe government is widely recognized and with its recent economy assessment, in which most regions were downgraded, the BOJ cannot be content either.  There is, therefore, little doubt the BOJ will take action.  However, the impact of some of the measures that have been discussed like open-ended QE or a 2% inflation goal is questionable.  What does open-ended QE mean when the BOJ has increased the amount of assets it is buying repeatedly ?  How is a 2% inflation goal credible when it has failed to achieve its 1% goal?    Similarly, a cut in the interest paid on reserves is possible, but it is not clear how that would be inflationary or stimulative.   Our fundamental and technical analysis warns that the market is vulnerable to disappointment or a "sell the rumor buy the fact" type of activity. There has been some position adjustment today as the dollar still has not been able to sustain a move above JPY90. In terms of intent, the imagery we still think apropos is blowing (hot) air underneath the (yen's) parachute to increase the likelihood of a soft landing and reduce the antagonism that its strategy engenders.  

There are two aspects of the technical condition of that are worth underscoring.  First, we think there was significant deterioration of the major foreign currencies, with sterling convincingly violating a 7-month uptrend line, the dramatic weakness of the Swiss franc, and new multi-week lows for the Australian and Canadian dollars.  The euro has fared best, but technically appears vulnerable.  Second, we note that implied volatility in the currency markets has trended higher in recent weeks. Before the weekend, 3-month euro vol reached its highest level since Oct.  It reached a low in late Nov near 6.4% and now is near 8.6%.  3-month yen vol is at its highest level since Sept 2011 near 11.2%.  On the eve of the election announcement in mid-Nov, it was near 7%, having bottomed a month earlier near 6.55%.  Sterling vol is at its highest level in four months near 7.3%.  It bottomed in middle of last month near 5.25%.

The euro area finance minister meet today.  Cyprus aid package is not ready and it won't be for at least a couple more months.  Greece is progressing towards another tranche amid fresh call from the IMF than even if the country stays on track, it will need another 9 bln euros of assistance (perhaps in the form of further official sector concessions, Merkel has hinted in the latter years of its current program).  There may also be some discussion of Spain.  Perhaps the one notable action from the Eurogroup is that Juncker who has been the leader, with mixed reviews, including last week's gaffe about the euro, is stepping down.  His likely replacement, the new Dutch Finance Minister Dijsselbloem, has been widely tipped.  

A more pressing issue for investors is the implication of the repayment of LTRO funds by the banks starting next week.  Speculation that it would tighten financial conditions saw euribor yields rise sharply.    ECB's Coeure tried to calm market anxiety by indicating that he did not expect an impact on Eonia from the settlement.    The implied yield of the  March 13 Euribor futures contract has been trending higher since early December. The backing up in money market rates in Europe did not coincide with a stronger euro. We anticipate some stabilization in euribor in the days ahead, awaiting indications of the size of the repayments.  Forecasts generally seem to range between 100-200 bln euros of the roughly trillion euros outstanding.

In addition, we draw your attention to the following events and data:  Australia's Q4 CPI on Tuesday could sway expectations for the RBA meeting in early February.  Presently there is about a 40% chance of a 25 bp rate cut discounted.  Although the headline pace of inflation likely accelerated, the core rate appears stable and has not been an obstacle to easier RBA policy.  The release of the BOE minutes will likely reaffirm market expectations that a resumption of QE is not imminent, even though the economy appears to have contracted in Q4 (first estimate released on Friday, Jan 25).  Europe reports the flash PMI readings in Thurs.   A critical issue is if Germany, which appears to have contracted in Q4, is in a recession (as defined by two consecutive quarters of contracting GDP (though note that technically, a recession in the US is determined by National Bureau of Economic Research and it uses a broader definition).   I

In emerging markets, we note that the tone of Mexico's central bank statement was more dovish than expected before the weekend.    It effectively removed any lingering threat of a hike, though we do not expect a rate cut either.  Israel goes to the polls and barring a significant surprise, we do not expect much of a market reaction, though note that the dollar has found bids ahead of 1-year lows near ILS3.70.   Three emerging market central banks meet this week, Turkey, the Philippines and South Africa.   The only action we expect is a 25 bp rate cut by South Africa.  The rand has been the weakest since the start of the year, losing 4.5% against the dollar, but many have their sights on the ZAR9.0, the high from October and again in November.

Your rating: None

‘Rogue CIA elements killed Swartz’

An American analyst says the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is responsible for the recent murder of the American dissident blogger Aaron Swartz, Press TV reports.

“There is no coverage in the mainstream media at all and we have found no possible excuse to this death…. We believe rogue elements within the Central Intelligence Agency are responsible,” Gordon Duff said in an interview with Press TV on Saturday.

Swartz, who was an outspoken critic of Obama’s policies, was found dead in his apartment in Brooklyn, New York City, on January 11.

Swartz was critical of Obama’s “kill list,” a list of individuals who are suspected of terrorism by the US and are listed for targeted killing after final approval by the US president himself.

He was also critical of the monopoly of information by corporate cartels and believed that information should be shared and available for the benefit of the society.

“There is no other possibility and that is a place that I go very reluctantly but I can think of no other responsible party. It has to be them [the CIA elements]. No one has this kind of power. No one would do something so obvious. There is no question that this was a murder,” Duff noted.


He further pointed out that the United States government has made the mainstream media turn a blind eye to Swartz’s death to cover up the issues which have caused dissent in the American society.

“The Swartz's issue has been pushed off the newspapers. Our government is very good at burying new stories. And this is what they have done with this one. They are not allowing us to have any voice in this controversy,” the analyst added.

Duff concluded that 90 percent of the Americans are not aware of the issue linked to Swartz’s death as “it has not been reported on mainstream news, newspapers, television and not one word has come to the American public.”

TNP/SS

Fox Pretends Romney’s Jeeps-In-China ‘Lie Of The Year’ Was True

It’s déjà vu all over again at Fox News. Just a few hours before President Obama was sworn in for his second term, Fox took the same news that formed the basis for PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year” – Mitt Romney’s false claim that Chrysler’s decision to build Jeeps in China would cost U.S. jobs – re-distorted the facts, declared Romney a truth teller and suggested President Obama had won re-election based on a lie. Oh, and while they were at it, attacked PolitiFact as leftist liars.

In case you’ve forgotten, Romney’s big lie was based on a truth – that Chrysler planned to produce Jeeps in China – but twisted to give the misimpression that the company would outsource American jobs there. Now that Chrysler has announced specific plans to do what it said it was going to do in the first place, Fox crowed that Romney was right all along.

As Karoli pointed out last month, Fox News and Karl Rove were equally responsible for spreading that lie and giving it so much traction. Here they go again.

In a Fox & Friends Weekend segment so laden with distortions and disingenuousness I can't name them all, Steve Doocy began with a false description of what made Romney’s lie a lie, saying that Romney’s campaign ad claimed Chrysler was “going to build Jeeps in China.” Doocy added, “But now it seems the joke is on them. Chrysler just announced that a hundred thousand Jeeps will actually be made in China starting next year. Just like Mitt Romney said.”

Um, not really.

In its original article rating Romney’s ad a “pants on fire” lie, PolitiFact wrote:

The ad ignores the return of American jobs to Chrysler Jeep plants in the United States, and it presents the manufacture of Jeeps in China as a threat, rather than an opportunity to sell cars made in China to Chinese consumers. It strings together facts in a way that presents an wholly inaccurate picture.

Furthermore, Romney originally said outright that Jeep planned to move all production to China. Rather than correct the lie, he doubled down with his campaign ad. As Jon Perr noted, this was all part of Romney's strategy to attack the auto bailout. The backfire was considered at least partially responsible for Romney's loss in November. Meanwhile, Chrysler has added 1,100 workers on a Jeep assembly line in Michigan in October and will add another 1,100 in Ohio in the fall. Not that any of that inconvenient truth came out during this segment.

To pile on to Fox’s lie about Romney's lie, Doocy introduced Seton Motley who, among other roles, is a columnist for Breitbart.com – which has its own issues with the truth. Not that Doocy mentioned that, either.

Instead, Doocy opened the discussion by saying Romney “knows a lot about the car companies” and that when he said, “Chrysler, they’re gonna wind up making Jeeps in China, the left-wing media just exploded, didn’t they?”

Seton came out of the gate with a falsehood, saying it was The Washington Post (instead of Tampa Bay Times’ PolitiFact) that had ruled this the Lie of the Year – as Doocy nodded in agreement.

Doocy feigned puzzlement as he “asked,” “So, you’ve got this fact-checking organization came in and said that that’s the ‘Lie of the Year.’ Why would a fact-checking organization say something like that? You, you would think that they would be non-political but in fact, sometimes they are a little political, aren’t they?” As if he didn’t know what Motley would say.

And sure enough, Motley said it: “I think the fact-checking movement is the latest in the ‘unbiased journalists’ movement which, prior to 1965 didn’t really exist… We created unbiased journalism to say, ‘Let’s pretend to be unbiased when we’re actually promoting leftism.’ I think the fact checkers is another advancement of that cause. And at the end of the day, they’re just leftists as they always have been.”

Now that Fox viewers had been warned that facts have a stinkin’ liberal bias, Doocy, more than three minutes into the segment, got around to reading a January 14 statement from Chrysler’s CEO that included these sentences: "We will keep the pillar cars of Jeep in the U.S. …Wrangler is one, The Grand Cherokee is another.”

Still, they ignored the significance. Fox posted a banner reading, “Chrysler backpedals.” And Motley made the completely unsubstantiated claim that $26.5 billion of the bailout was “a direct check written to the United Auto Workers union.”

Doocy closed the segment by saying, “Mitt Romney was right. Ironically, we find that out today, on the day the president’s sworn in for a second term.”

By the way, there’s reason to suspect Fox knows this was a bunch of baloney. Despite banners saying “PANTS ON FIRE” and “WHOOPS” (about PolitiFact) during the segment, FoxNews.com casts doubt on that by making the title of its video of the segment a question: PolitiFact's 'Lie of the Year' actually true?

Fox News: The network where lying liars lie about true lies.

Mehdi’s Morning Memo: A ‘Jinxed’ Speech

The ten things you need to know on Monday 21 January 2013...

1) A 'JINXED' SPEECH

So, it seems the long-awaited, much-delayed, 'tantric' speech from the prime minister on Britain and Europe will be delivered on... drum roll... Wednesday! Or will it? As the Times points out, the speech seems to be "jinxed':

"It was delayed by the Algerian hostage crisis. It clashed with a celebration of Franco-German friendship. But David Cameron’s speech on the EU will finally be delivered this week — snow permitting.

"William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, said yesterday that it would go ahead 'in the coming week', with details released today.

"The most likely day is Wednesday, before the Prime Minister leaves for the World Economic Forum in Davos.

"Downing Street had hoped that the speech, which is expected to propose the repatriation of powers from Brussels followed by a referendum on Britain’s membership, could be made on the Continent. Given the weather, it will probably settle for Britain.

"It can hardly be blamed for such pessimism. “The Speech” seems jinxed."

There is, however, a bit of 'good' news for the Tory leader on the Europe front: arch-Eurosceptic Liam Fox has given the speech his seal of approval. From the Guardian:

"Liam Fox, the former defence secretary and one of the party's most vocal critics of Brussels, said he had been briefed on the contents of the speech and was 'broadly satisfied' with what Cameron was intending to say. 'If that is the speech that is finally delivered, a great many of us will think that it's a speech that we've been waiting a long time for any prime minister to deliver,' Fox said."

2) THE SNOW ATE MY GROWTH

If we do enter an unprecedented 'triple-dip' recession later this year, Gideon now has a(nother) ready-made excuse.

From the Financial Times:

"Economists have warned that heavy snowfall sweeping across the country could increase the chances that the UK enters a triple-dip recession, as commuters brace for another week of bad weather.

"High-street spending is expected to be badly affected by the snow, which has caused widespread disruption across the transport system.

"... The warnings come as figures due out on Friday are expected to show that the economy shrunk in the fourth quarter of last year... Peter Spencer, chief economic adviser to the Ernst & Young ITEM club, an economic forecasting group, said the snow increased the probability of a negative number in the first quarter and the prospect of two consecutive quarters of negative growth, a widely used measure of recession."

3) WAR ON TERROR - THE SEQUEL

Both the EU and the state of the economy take a backseat on the front pages of most broadsheets this morning. They're more worried about David Cameron's comments yesterday about the (new) war against al Qaeda, in the wake of the horrific massacre in Algeria:

"New front opens in war against al-Qaeda," proclaims the Times.

"West faces 'decades' of conflict in N Africa," says the FT.

"North Africa terror could last decades - PM," reports the Guardian.

"War against al-Qaeda in Africa could last decades," declares the Telegraph.

The paper reports:

"Britain faces a battle against Islamic extremism in North Africa and the Sahara that could last for decades, David Cameron warned on Sunday.

"The Prime Minister said that countering the rise of al-Qaeda-affiliated groups in the Sahel region will require an 'iron resolve' and greater military, diplomatic and economic engagement with the region.

"He spoke as it was confirmed that six British citizens had died after extremists took scores of hostages at a gas plant in eastern Algeria.

"... Speaking at Chequers on Sunday, Mr Cameron acknowledged that the terrorist threat in North Africa had grown and he predicted a prolonged struggle to meet it.

“'It will require a response that is about years, even decades, rather than months and it requires a response that is patient, that is painstaking, that is tough but also intelligent, but above all has an absolutely iron resolve; and that is what we will deliver over these coming years,' he said.

"William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, signalled that could mean directing more of Britain’s growing aid budget to countries in the region.

"There is 'no all-military solution' to the problem, he said."

Hague is 100% correct. Violence, as they say, begets violence. The past 12 years of the so-called 'war on terror' should have taught us that..

4) 'I DID IT'

From the Guardian:

"Barack Obama was officially sworn in at noon yesterday as president for a second term, in which he has mapped out a programme of economic, social and cultural change that includes new gun control legislation and immigration reform.

"Obama, smiling throughout, delivered the oath in the Blue Room with first lady Michelle holding her family bible and their two daughters, Sasha and Malia, watching.

"Afterwards, he kissed his wife and daughters, telling them: "I did it."

The paper adds:

"The main public events will be held today, with Obama being sworn in again on the steps of Congress, in front of a crowd expected to be between 500,000 to 800,000."

Will we see a more aggressive, more confident president in the second term? A leader less likely to back away from confrontation with irreconcilable Republicans? The Huffington Post in the US is running a series of specially-commissioned articles on 'The Road Forward: Obama's Second-Term Challenges' which you can read here.

I've done a piece on how both Conservative and Labour parties here in the UK are keeping a close eye on the path that Obama is trying to chart between austerity and stimulus, in the hope of proving that their own fiscal policies will be vindicated by the public as the right ones: "To be economically credible in Westminster, it seems, is to be aligned with Barack Obama."

5) PLEBGATE, PART 118

From the Guardian:

"David Cameron and his most senior civil servant, Sir Jeremy Heywood, have been criticised by an all-party committee of MPs over the way they handled the Andrew Mitchell "plebgate" controversy.

"The public administration committee said Heywood, the cabinet secretary, should have challenged the claim in a leaked police log that Mitchell called officers at the gates of No 10 "plebs" after Cameron asked Heywood to investigate what happened.

But, in a report published on Monday, the committee also said Cameron himself should have ordered a much more thorough investigation. Heywood was 'not the appropriate person to investigate allegations of ministerial misconduct', they said, and instead Cameron should have involved Sir Alex Allan, the independent adviser on ministers' interests."

And so it goes on.

BECAUSE YOU'VE READ THIS FAR...

Watch this video of a dad making a ponytail for his daughter in five seconds (hint: it involves a vacuum cleaner!).


6) TARGETING TAX DODGERS

The FT splashes on a tax evasion story:

"Middle-class professionals are to be targeted in a crackdown on tax evasion promised by the chief prosecutor of England and Wales.

"The Crown Prosecution Service will dramatically ramp up the number of tax evasion cases it takes on - with a view to prosecution - in the next two years, Keir Starmer, director of public prosecutions, has told the Financial Times. The CPS will increase fivefold the number of tax files it handles to 1,500 a year by 2014-15.

"... The CPS's tougher stance matches that of HM Revenue & Customs, which investigates cases before referring criminal files to the CPS. Both organisations are trying to rein in the £14bn a year the UK economy loses from tax evasion. HMRC's prosecution office was merged into the CPS in 2010."

7) HEY PENSIONERS, HOSPITALS ARE BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH

Some pretty dire warnings about the NHS from a couple of pretty influential figures.

From the Independent:

"Hospitals are 'very bad places" to care for frail, elderly patients and new ways must be found to treat them in the community, the new independent head of the NHS has warned. In his first newspaper interview since being appointed head of the NHS Commissioning Board, Sir David Nicholson told The Independent that a revolution was needed in the way the health service cared for Britain's ageing population."

And from the Guardian:

"The kind of neglect that disgraced Stafford hospital, where patients were left in soiled sheets, sitting on commodes for hours at a time and often denied pain relief, exists across the NHS, the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has said."

8) MILLIONS STARVE, GOLDMAN PROFITS

A new angle on bank-bashing - from the front of the Independent:

"Goldman Sachs made more than a quarter of a billion pounds last year by speculating on food staples, reigniting the controversy over banks profiting from the global food crisis.

"Less than a week after the Bank of England Governor, Sir Mervyn King, slapped Goldman Sachs on the wrist for attempting to save its UK employees millions of pounds in tax by delaying bonus payments, the investment bank faces fresh accusations that it is contributing to rising food prices."

9) DON'T BLAME US FOR FUEL POVERTY

From the Times:

"More than 100 energy companies, charities and businesses have joined forces to warn David Cameron that Britain is heading for a fuel poverty crisis owing to a failure of government policy.

"In a letter to the Prime Minister, seen by The Times, they argue that ministers are not doing enough to tackle soaring gas and electricity bills that leave a growing number of people unable to heat their homes.

"An unprecedented alliance, including Npower, the Co-operative, Age UK and Barnardo’s, urges Mr Cameron to use money raised from the “carbon tax” to be levied from April to tackle the 'national disgrace' of cold homes."

So let me get this straight: the same 'profiteering' energy companies that are responsible for much of the fuel poverty in Britain are attacking the government for no tdoing enough to...tackle fuel poverty. Really?

10) PRIVACY FOR KIDS? DON'T. BE. SILLY.

The Daily Mail splashes on a rather interesting 'snooping' story:

"Parents should insist on seeing their children’s texts and internet exchanges, David Cameron’s new adviser on childhood urged last night.

"Claire Perry said that in a world where youngsters are surrounded by online dangers, parents should challenge the ‘bizarre’ idea that their children have the right to keep their messages private.

"... The Tory MP for Devizes added that parents had to take clearer responsibility for internet access on their children’s laptops and mobile phones.

"‘So many people say “I have got children on their laptop at 2am – what do I do?” Well, turn the router off when you go to bed,’ she said."

As the father of two young children myself, I'm with Perry.

PUBLIC OPINION WATCH

From yesterday's Sunday Times/YouGov poll:

Labour 42
Conservatives 33
Lib Dems 11
Ukip 7

That would give Labour a majority of 96.

140 CHARACTERS OR LESS

@BarackObama President Obama has been sworn in for a second term as President of the United States.

@samhaqitv PM to chair a final session of COBRA this morning on the Algerian hostage sit. This time, the priority is bringing British nationals home

‏@sturdyAlex I can never hear William Hague's monotone without thinking of a Rotherham auctioneer "going once... anyone? going twice..."

900 WORDS OR MORE

Paul Collier, writing in the Financial Times, says: "The west has let negligence in the Sahel turn into a nightmare."

Tim Montgomerie, writing in the Times, says: "Devastation in Syria, Islamist terror in North Africa — there is a bloody cost to when the US fails to intervene."

David Owen, writing in the Guardian, says: "[EU] Treaty amendment should not wait until 2015 – and Labour should co-operate, in the spirit of one-nation politics."


Got something you want to share? Please send any stories/tips/quotes/pix/plugs/gossip to Mehdi Hasan (mehdi.hasan@huffingtonpost.com) or Ned Simons (ned.simons@huffingtonpost.com). You can also follow us on Twitter: @mehdirhasan, @nedsimons and @huffpostukpol

Martin Luther King Jr. Was a Radical, Not a Saint

It is easy to forget that in his day King was considered a dangerous troublemaker. He was harassed by the FBI and vilified in the media.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

January 20, 2013  |  

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Today Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is viewed as something of an American saint. His birthday is a national holiday. His name adorns schools and street signs. Americans from across the political spectrum invoke King's name to justify their beliefs and actions, as President Barack Obama will no doubt do in his second Inaugural speech and as gun fanatic Larry Ward recently did in outrageously claiming that King would have opposed proposals to restrict access to guns.

So it is easy to forget that  in his day, in his own country, King was considered a dangerous troublemaker. He was harassed by the FBI and vilified in the media.

In fact, King was a radical. He believed that America needed a "radical redistribution of economic and political power." He challenged America's class system and its racial caste system.  He was a strong ally of the nation's labor union movement.  He was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis, where he had gone to support a sanitation workers' strike.  He opposed U.S. militarism and imperialism, especially the country's misadventure in Vietnam.

In his critique of American society and his strategy for changing it,  King pushed the country toward more democracy and social justice. 

If  he were alive today, he would certainly be standing with Walmart employees and other workers fighting for a living wage and the right to unionize. He would be in the forefront of the battle for strong gun controls and to thwart the influence of the National Rifle Association. He would be calling for dramatic cuts in the military budget in order to reinvest public dollars in jobs, education, and health care.  He would surely be marching with immigrants and their allies in support of the Dream Act and comprehensive reform. Like most Americans in his day, King was homophobic, even though one of his closest advisors, Bayard Rustin, was gay. But today King would undoubtedly stand with advocates of LGBT rights and same-sex marriage.

Indeed, King's views evolved over time. He entered the public stage with some hesitation, reluctantly becoming the spokesperson for the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 at the age of 26.  King began his activism in Montgomery as a crusader against the nation's racial caste system, but the struggle for civil rights radicalized him into a fighter for broader economic and social justice and peace. Still, in reviewing King's life, we can see that the seeds of his later radicalism were planted early. 

King was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1929, the son of a prominent black minister. Despite growing up in a solidly middle-class family, King saw the widespread human suffering caused by the Depression, particularly in the black community. In 1950, while in graduate school, he wrote an essay describing the "anti-capitalistic feelings" he experienced as a result of seeing unemployed people standing in breadlines.

During King's first year at Morehouse College, civil rights and labor activist A. Philip Randolph spoke on campus. Randolph predicted that the near future would witness a global struggle that would end white supremacy and capitalism. He urged the students to link up with "the people in the shacks and the hovels," who, although "poor in property," were "rich in spirit."

After graduating from Morehouse in 1948, King studied theology at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania (where he read both Mohandas Gandhi and Karl Marx), planning to follow in his father's footsteps and join the ministry. In 1955 he earned his doctorate from Boston University, where he studied the works of Reinhold Niebuhr, the influential liberal theologian. While in Boston, he told his girlfriend (and future wife), Coretta Scott, that "a society based on making all the money you can and ignoring people's needs is wrong."

The Radicalization of Martin Luther King

Context: As yet there are no context links for this item.

Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore.

The revolutionary leader the governing elites would render harmless they name streets after. The number of streets named after Martin Luther King is increasing every year, and about 70 percent of those streets are in southern states. King's home state of Georgia has the most, with over 105 streets. At least 730 cities have named streets after Martin Luther King—only 11 states in the country without a street named after him. Now joining us from Philadelphia to talk about the radical Martin Luther King and the real significance of his life is professor of African-American studies Anthony Monteiro. He's at Temple University in Philadelphia.Thanks for joining us, Anthony.MONTEIRO: Thank you, Paul, for having me.JAY: So talk about the memory of Martin Luther King. When I go on the internet and I look at Martin Luther King Day, the first thing I see is you should volunteer on that day, do some service for your community for the day. MONTEIRO: Yeah. Well, that seems to be the way a lot of people think that you celebrate the life of King, by having a day——and the emphasis being on a day of service, rather than a week of service and a month of service, and maybe a year or a lifetime of service, to the causes of peace, antiwar, the fight against racism, and the overcoming of this deepening poverty in our society.JAY: Now, Martin Lutherc King, certainly near the end of his life, and perhaps earlier, but he was not shy about using words like imperialism and capitalism, and his language became increasingly radical as he became older. What was this process of the radicalization of King?MONTEIRO: Well, you know, Paul, I contend that King's radicalization goes back to his time at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia. And, you know, this was right after World War II and Christian theologians and public intellectuals in general were asking questions about the German churches, Protestant and Lutheran, and their going along with Hitler except for a few people. And one of those people was a pastor, Lutheran pastor, by the name of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who along with others set up an underground church called the anti-Nazi church of Germany. And King encounters Bonhoeffer through his studies at Crozer. And I am of the opinion that when we look at King's writings, in particular let us say the Letter from a Birmingham Jail and his last really great speech, which was the one at Riverside Church on the war in Vietnam, we hear him using phrases like "the fierce urgency of Now," "procrastination is still the thief of time." In the Letter from Birmingham Jail he talks about "the tragic misconception of time." So he's always talking about this urgent need for Christians to act. And I think he comes to that position after examining, among other things, the situation in Germany, where Christians espouse their beliefs, but when it came to action, they were either intimidated or felt that time would resolve all of these problems. So I think King begins a radical trajectory pretty much in his years at Crozer Theological Seminary. And, of course, we see the same thing when he goes to Boston University and he studies systematic theology, which is really a radical turn for that day in the study of theology, where reason is not seen as the opposite and a competitor with faith. But he was trying—as others were doing—synthesize reason with faith, the world with Christian belief, and that the Christians, as King would conclude, are defined not by what they say, but ultimately by what they do in the struggles for justice.JAY: And this trajectory takes him to a place where he doesn't—if you look at the language of his, you know, last speeches, he doesn't define the struggle as one between good and evil, really, and he certainly doesn't define it as one between white and black. He talks about imperialism as a system. He talks about U.S. imperialism. And he talks about capitalism. He talks about class.MONTEIRO: Yeah. Well, he never defined the struggle as a struggle between white and black. And good and evil were metaphors, ultimately, for social forces in the society. And he would become more concrete in defining good and evil. Well, evil, of course, was the system of segregation, of the oppression of black people that went back, of course, to slavery. But then, of course, evil ultimately became the system that produces war and produces and reproduces poverty and the exploitation of working people. So you're absolutely right. That kind of moral framing of the issue was not disconnected from a deep political and economic understanding of, as you put it, the capitalist system. And that's precisely where he was going.His life is ended in Memphis, Tennessee, where he is organizing workers. Now, we have to take a step back, perhaps, to really understand the significance of that. First of all, the South was even viewed by most trade unionists as unorganizable because of the existence of racism and because of the fact that the political and economic establishments of the South not only oppressed black people but prevented workers from organizing. But even deeper than that, if we go back to W. E. B. Du Bois's great work, Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois begins that work—the first chapter is entitled "The Black Worker". And Du Bois is talking about the southern black worker. So it seems to me that King ends his life in this great campaign to organize the unorganized and to organize the poor. And to me that is a great legacy. And it is a 21st-century legacy. And that is the legacy that we have to celebrate. But more than celebrate, we have to defend it.JAY: So if you look at how Martin Luther King Day is celebrated now, Michelle Obama, you know, calling on people to volunteer for the day, people get the day off in governments and banks—I don't know about other workplaces; I guess some do—the reason for doing this is because the man had such impact that they have to do something with his historical memory. Speak a bit about that.MONTEIRO: Oh, yeah. Yeah. That legacy is too powerful for the elites. They have to minimize it. They have to distort it. They have to eviscerate it. They have to cheapen it. Besides, you know, First Lady Obama calling for people to do service, I am particularly offended by the fact that the president will be sworn in using Martin Luther King's Bible. To me it's a cheap PR trick. This president has nothing in common with King the man, and his presidency is the opposite of the great legacy of Martin Luther King. You know, King's legacy is a gift not only to black Americans or to America but to humanity. And here we have a president who in many ways is George Bush on steroids—wars in every part of the world, preparation for war, economic wars against nations like Iran, actual wars in Africa, and so on and so forth. This is the very opposite of what Martin Luther King represents. And therefore, you know, we've got to defend that legacy. And that's part of the battle of ideas that we're involved in at this time.JAY: Now, Martin Luther King led a civil rights movement. He didn't call it, I don't think, a black civil rights movement. It may have been majority African Americans that were in it, African Americans may have led it, but it was a people's movement. In a lot of cities—and I have to talk a bit about my experience here in Baltimore—there's a great divide between the white left and the black left. You see, you hear young black militants talking about, well, you know, blacks need to just organize blacks first, and there's a kind of unease about working or allying with whites. I mean, what's the lesson for King in terms of dealing with this kind of a question?MONTEIRO: Well, of course, you're hitting on the current realities that grow out of the great and evil legacy that is the United States of America and slavery and the wounds and the fact that too often—you mention the white left—has been less than effective in the mobilization and organization of white working people to join in solidarity with black working people. So, you know, while we can point to black nationalism as a problem—.JAY: Can I just jump in for one sec on this?MONTEIRO: Go ahead. Yes.JAY: Do you not think that what you're describing is post-Cold War? Like, in the 1930s, '20s, do you not think there was far more mobilization of white workers in solidarity with black workers? But when they kind of cleanse the trade unions of militants and the left and communists and such, they also got rid of those people that would do such things.MONTEIRO: Well, there's no question about that. I mean, you know, when you have a communist party of over 100,000 members who are activists and who are committed to the fight against racism, that can make a profound difference.Now, at the same time, even while that was going on in these great campaigns of the CIO and the Scottsboro case and, you know, the Southern Negro Youth Congress and the National Negro Congress and all of these things going on and headway was being made against racism and there were campaigns to get anti-lynching laws, a federal anti-lynching law, the fact of the matter is the job was only partially completed. And you're absolutely right. After World War II, as we enter the Cold War, we have a frontal attack, beginning with the Truman administration, with, ultimately, the collaboration of George Meany and that leadership of the AFL-CIO, which said that even the fight against racism was an act promoted by subversives and communists.So I don't know whether I'm making myself perfectly clear, but I would agree with you that these 60-some, almost 70 years of the Cold War and Cold War ideology has severely damaged the struggle for unity of blacks and whites in the country. And you're absolutely right about the fact that, you know, there's damage on both sides of the color line. But the overarching problem remains the problem of racism and white supremacy and its influence upon vast numbers of white Americans, and the lack of leadership, either coming from the trade union movement or other progressive civil society organizations, or for that matter from the left, that can effectively reverse that tide.JAY: So in terms of the kind of momentum and such mass mobilization that took place under King, why do we see so little of it now?MONTEIRO: Oh, boy. That is—. Well, you know, I would say that, as you mentioned, the assassination of Martin Luther King could be considered a Cold War imperative. King threatened not just the domestic arrangements of race and class, but King's leadership threatened the capacity of the United States government to impose its will and to become, as King said, the policemen of the whole world, and thus impose its empire, its military, upon the rest of the world. And so I consider the assassination of King to have been a Cold War imperative.JAY: Well, this is just the beginning of a discussion. And we won't wait for another Martin Luther King Day to come around, because we believe in voluntary service more than one day a year. Thanks very much for joining us.MONTEIRO: Thank you, Paul.JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

End

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US AFRICOM Operation Underway in Mali. “Keeping China out of Africa”.

africa

As we predicted this past week, the theatrical upheaval in Mali was merely a nudging exercise to move forward the stated objectives laid down in US AFRICOM policy.

With no debate or questioning in foreign policy circles, and with Obama’s coronation and ceremonial pop concert in Washington DC keeping American eyes and ears glued to the corporate media punditry, NATO allies, led by the US, are carefully carving out a comprehensive military footprint in Africa in order to further evict Chinese influence from the continent.

A convenient excuse in the short-term will be to ‘stop the spread of Islamic extremist, but as history has witnessed, this is merely a superficial justification for a comprehensive military and economic colonization of the region over the next two decades. Ironic that it would be America’s first ‘black’ President who would reside over the takeover of Africa. Expect more US bases to come in the near future, as well as more violent civil wars popping up regularly in the region.

Cameron’s Tantric Europe Speech To Come ‘This Week’

David Cameron will deliver his long-awaited speech on Britain's relations with the European Union later this week, Foreign Secretary William Hague has confirmed, insisting there is a 'strong case' for a referendum.

The Prime Minister had been due to make the speech in the Netherlands on Friday but it was postponed due to the Algeria hostage crisis.

"It will happen this week," Mr Hague told BBC1's The Andrew Marr Show. "We will make an announcement on when and where tomorrow."

william hague

Hague has said there is a strong case for a referendum

Cameron has been under pressure from eurosceptic Tories to set out his position on whether he will promise a referendum on EU membership after the next election.

The PM's reticence on the subject has been a source of frustration to many, with the emotive policy threatening to tear a divide in the coalition.

Hague said on Sunday there was a 'strong case' for holding a vote, telling the BBC "fresh consent" would be needed to make Britain's EU Membership a success.

"We want to succeed in the European Union - we want an outward-looking EU to succeed in the world, and for the United Kingdom to succeed in that," he said.

"But we have to recognise that the European Union has changed a lot since the referendum of 1975 and that there have been not only great achievements to the EU's name but some things that have gone badly wrong, such as the euro."

farage

Nigel Farage, of Ukip, has been revelling in increased support for an independent Britain

Extracts from Mr Cameron's Netherlands speech showed the Prime Minister intended to make clear that he wanted the UK to play a "committed and active" part in the EU in future.

But he was also planning to warn that, if changes are not made to address the three key challenges of eurozone crisis, economic competitiveness and dramatically declining public support, "the danger is that Europe will fail and the British people will drift towards the exit".

The extracts released by Downing Street did not reveal whether the Prime Minister intended to commit himself to an in/out referendum on British membership of the EU following the renegotiation of its terms which he has already said he plans to undertake after the 2015 general election.

The US ambassador to London, Louis Susman, became the latest senior figure to make clear that the Obama administration did not want the UK to break away.

"We believe in a strong EU. We cannot imagine a strong EU without a vibrant partner in the UK," he told Sky News's Murnaghan programme.

"That is what we hope will come about but it is up to the British people to decide what they want."

obama

The Obama administration have added their voices to the debate

In December the PM poked fun at himself for delaying the speech, saying "This is a tantric approach to policy-making. It'll be even better when it does eventually come."

Michello Portillo, who served as the Conservative Defence Secretary under John Major and was notoriously eurosceptic during his time in power, said the PM must tread carefully over whether he offers an in or out vote.

“To commit himself to an in-out referendum in the mid term of his next government seems to me to be extraordinarily dangerous,” Mr Portillo told Sky's Murnaghan programme.

“People like to kick their government in the teeth."


James Kirkup
So far today William Hague attacked on #marr as pro-European and Michael Portillo on #murnaghan opposed EU referendum. How times change.

Vince Cable has sided with Labour leader Ed Miliband in warning David Cameron that any pledge to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership on the EU would damage the British economy.

Cable’s intervention signals a ratcheting up up of the Lib Dem attack on Cameron’s increasingly eurosceptic position.

Former defence secretary Liam Fox said he would prefer to have a renegotiated relationship with Europe and that ultimately he would like to leave the union.

Dr Fox told BBC One's Sunday Politics programme: "I think ultimately there has to be an in-out referendum because otherwise we're going to have our politics in Britain constantly undermined by this debate and I think it's very important that we settle one way or another the European argument for a generation."

liam fox

Liam Fox said his personal preference was to leave

He added that if the choice was between going in the current direction with an ultimately greater and greater loss of British sovereignty, "my personal preference would be to leave".

He said: "I don't want to have ever closer union, I don't want to be a European first and British second."

Eurosceptic Dr Fox added he had been "broadly satisfied" with what he saw that Mr Cameron was intending to say on Europe.

Asked if he was going to return to the Cabinet, he replied: "No I wouldn't say that was true, I've got a lot of things that I'm doing at the moment, but most of us, if asked would you like to be in the Cabinet, would say yes of course we would."

Shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander told the same programme Mr Cameron's speech had "more to do with the politics of the Conservative Party...than actually to do with the national interest."

He said: "Why has the speech been delayed for more than a year? David Cameron I would suggest was actually rendered speechless because of the gap between what his backbenchers will tolerate and what European partners will give him."

An alliance between the Conservatives and Ukip is "virtually impossible to even contemplate" with David Cameron as Prime Minister, Nigel Farage said on the Andrew Marr show on Sunday.

Mr Farage claimed pressure from Ukip and its supporters had contributed to a shift in public attitude towards the Europe Union.

He said: "The first thing to say is that 10 years ago you couldn't even discuss the question of leaving the EU in polite society, it was considered completely beyond the pale to even talk about.

"So the very fact that the Prime Minister is making a speech on this issue is actually a tribute to the thousands of people that have worked and helped get Ukip established as a political party."

Mehdi’s ‘Sunday Lunchtime’ Memo: ‘A Vicious and Cowardly Attack’

The ten things you need to know on Sunday 20 January 2013...

1) 'A VICIOUS AND COWARDLY ATTACK'

From the Press Association:

"David Cameron has confirmed that three British nationals have been killed in Algeria, a further three are believed to be dead and a British resident has also died.

"The remaining 22 British survivors have returned to the UK and been reunited with their loved-ones, the Foreign Secretary has confirmed.

"Mr Cameron said: 'I know the whole country will want to join me in sending our sympathies and condolences to the families who have undergone an absolutely dreadful ordeal and who now face life without these very precious loved ones.'

"Speaking from Chequers, the PM echoed President Barack Obama and blamed the terrorists for the deaths, saying 'of course people will ask questions about the Algerian response to these events, but I would just say that the responsibility for these deaths lies squarely with the terrorists who launched a vicious and cowardly attack.'"

NOTE: For reasons I won't bore you with, this Memo was delayed today, hence it's 'Sunday Lunchtime', rather than 'Morning', title. Normal service will resume tomorrow morning. Fingers crossed.

2) 'RED MEAT'

Forget the horse meat, it's all about red meat when it comes to the PM and Europe.

From the Observer:

"David Cameron will deliver a 'redmeat announcement' on Britain's future in the EU, which he believes will satisfy all but a hard core of Conservative MPs, when he makes his much-delayed keynote speech on Europe in the next few days.

"Amid uncertainty over the exact timing of the jinxed address, senior government sources told the Observer that the prime minister intends to make the speech this week - possibly tomorrow - if a resolution has been found to the Algerian hostage crisis.

"'He wants to go ahead as soon as possible. There will be something in it which will pacify all but the hard core,' said the source. 'But he could deliver the same kind of speech that Margaret Thatcher gave in Bruges in 1988 and around 25 MPs would not be happy. It is not possible to please everyone.'"

Speaking on the Andrew Marr programme, foreign secretary William Hague confirmed that the PM's 'tantric' speech on Europe would take place in the coming week.

Hague told stand-in presenter Jeremy Vine that an announcement on the location and timing of the speech would happen tomorrow, and said the British public "need their say" on the UK's relationship with Brussels - suggesting that was what his boss, the prime minister, would offer. Watch this space.

3) COUP AGAINST CAMERON?

Remember the letters to Graham Brady and the 1922 Committee? The ones from Tory backbenchers that could trigger a vote of no-confidence in Dave's leadership of the Conservative Party? There's now 17 of them, apparently.

From the Sunday Times:

"An increasing number of backbenchers are privately discussing the possibility of attempting to unseat the prime minister before the poll in 2015 if the party continues to trail in the polls.

"While there is no immediate threat to his position, a well-placed source said that up to 17 MPs had now written letters of 'no confidence', and there are rumours that at least one list of MPs willing to back a coup is being gathered.

"For the first time, discussions about ousting Cameron before 2015 appear to be spreading beyond the so-called 'usual suspects' — a hard core of about 20 backbenchers who are hostile to his leadership."

Oh dear.

On a side note, Nigel Farage still isn't happy with the Ukip-abusing Tory leader. This morning, on the Andrew Marr programme, Ukip leader Nigel Farage ruled out a post-2015 "deal" with a Cameron-led Conservative Party:

“I think with David Cameron as leader, that is virtually impossible to even contemplate."

4) PLEBGATE, PART 99

Uh-oh. It's not looking so good for Sir Jeremy Heywood. From the Mail on Sunday:

"Britain’s most powerful mandarin faces public humiliation after MPs claimed his bungled investigation cost ‘plebgate’ ex-Tory Minister Andrew Mitchell his job.

"A report by a powerful Commons committee will tomorrow accuse Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood of failing to give the former Chief Whip a chance to prove he was the victim of a police conspiracy.

"A copy of an explosive report by the Commons Public Administration Select Committee, obtained by The Mail on Sunday, shows that MPs lambast Sir Jeremy’s handling of a Downing Street investigation into Mr Mitchell."

5) TAXING TIMES

Last Sunday, this Memo noted how the two Eds had were keen to position the Labour Party behind an anti-tax-avoidance campaign; this Sunday, it's the turn of the Liberal Democrats.

From the Sunday Telegraph:

"Senior Liberal Democrats are drawing up plans for a new levy on Starbucks, Amazon and other global businesses that pay low levels of tax on their British operations.

"As part of preparation for this year’s Budget negotiations, Lib Dems are looking to introduce a minimum tax charge on multinationals based on their global profits.

"Tim Farron, the party’s president, said the charge would address the 'natural outrage' many British people have felt at how little some multinationals contribute to the public finances."

I guess dealing with the 'national outrage' over tax avoidance helps the Lib Dems deal with some of the 'national outrage' over... the Lib Dems themselves.

BECAUSE YOU'VE READ THIS FAR...

In honour of yesterday's 'National Gun Appreciation Day' in the United States, watch this amusing video of US gun owners making idiots of themselves.

6) 'WAR ON BENEFIT CHEATS' ANNOUNCED. UGH.

Remember how Iain Duncan Smith, saviour of the poor, claimed in a recent Today programme interview that he and his department never demonised people on benefits? Remember that?

Well, check out some of today's headlines and news reports. The Sun on Sunday ("£5bn benefiddle") says:

"Ministers will this week step up the war on benefit cheats after false claims hit a record £5.3billion.

Hit squads will be sent into welfare hot spots to target suspect claimants."

The Sunday Express quotes IDS as saying: “The welfare state has over the years become so complex and confusing that fraudsters basically have been given the green light to pick the pockets of hard working taxpayers.

Green light? Hit squads? 'Benefiddle'? I wonder how many papers IDS/the DWP briefed about illegal tax evasion, which is estimated to cost the exchequer tens of billions of pounds compared to illegal benefit fraud which costs just over £1bn (or around 0.7% of the benefits bill).

7) HERE COMES THE TRIPLE DIP?

From the Observer:

"The Office for National Statistics will publish its first estimate of GDP growth for the final quarter of 2012 on Friday and many experts, including at the Bank, expect it to show that the economy contracted. A second negative quarter, from January to March, would mark the onset of Britain's third recession in five years."

The paper says the "Ernst and Young Item Club forecasting group joins those calling on the government to abandon the 2% inflation target, forcing the Bank of England to take more drastic action to lift the economy out of its slump".

No pressure then on Mark Carney, the new bank governor from Canada who takes over Sir Mervyn King in the summer...

8) LIVING WAGE 'ZONES'

Triple-dip or no triple-dip, wages will continue to stagnate over the next few years - and have been in decline since around 2003. Would a living wage help? Ed Miliband thinks so - from the Observer:

"The first detailed blueprint for boosting the wages of millions of low-paid private and public sector workers, while saving the Treasury billions of pounds a year, is released today by two leading thinktanks as support for the living wage grows at Westminster.

"Labour welcomed the radical ideas from the independent Resolution Foundation and the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) as an "extremely valuable contribution" to the living wage debate, amid signs they could be taken up by Ed Miliband's party for inclusion in its next general election manifesto."

9) KENNETH BAKER VS MICHAEL GOVE

My former New Statesman colleague George Eaton has done a rather interesting interview with former Thatcher cabinet minister and Tory grandee Kenneth Baker - 'the most transformative education secretary in recent history' - which Michael Gove won't be too pleased with.

The top lines:

1) He describes Gove's English Baccalaureate (EBacc), which will replace GCSEs from 2015, as "a throwback", comparing it to the School Certificate he sat as a 16-year-old in 1951.
2) He says the "jury's out" on free schools and says he doesn't think "allowing them to be run for profit would necessarily change very much, quite frankly. I really don’t think it would".
3) He says "the jump [in tuition fees] to £9,000 was just too much, quite frankly".

10) OBAMA 2.0

It's time for the second term. From the BBC:

"Barack Obama is due to be officially sworn in for his second term as US president in a small ceremony at the White House.

Although the US Constitution requires the oath of office to be taken by noon on 20 January, as that falls on a Sunday the public inauguration will take place on Monday."

The president wants the Almighty on his side. From the Huffington Post:

"When President Obama rests his hand on two historic Bibles to take his second-term oath of office Monday (Jan. 21), he'll add a phrase not mentioned in the Constitution: 'So help me God.'

"... Although the phrase was used in federal courtrooms since 1789, the first proof it was used in a presidential oath of office came with Chester Arthur's inauguration in September 1881.

"Every president since, including Obama, has followed suit."

The Huffington Post has commissioned a series of special pieces on 'Obama's second-term challenges' which you can read here.

PUBLIC OPINION WATCH

From the Sunday Times/YouGov poll:

Labour 42
Conservatives 33
Ukip 11
Lib Dems 7

That would give Labour a majority of 96.

140 CHARACTERS OR LESS

‏@TimMontgomerie Never seen Cameron looking so tired, making his Algeria statement. Doesn't look like he's been to bed. Must have been v challenging few days

@OllyGrender Prob remains if PM does go for "in/out referendum" I know precisely where my party stands on that but his party will be chronically divided

@campbellclaret Success of Borgen (currently trending) and West Wing (which I have not seen) a sign of gap in market for essentially pro politics TV?

900 WORDS OR MORE

Liam Fox, writing in the Mail on Sunday, says: "Lethal force, not rational argument, must be our response to these violent fanatics."

Andrew Rawnsley, writing in the Observer, says: "Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg's relationship is starting to thaw."

Lord Wolfson, writing in the Sunday Telegraph, says: "I back the single market – but not at any cost."


Got something you want to share? Please send any stories/tips/quotes/pix/plugs/gossip to Mehdi Hasan (mehdi.hasan@huffingtonpost.com) or Ned Simons (ned.simons@huffingtonpost.com). You can also follow us on Twitter: @mehdirhasan, @nedsimons and @huffpostukpol

Dear Whole Foods CEO, This Is What a Fascist Looks Like

John Mackey of Whole Foods had a major media gaffe, but it’s about time someone injected the word fascism back into our political debate.

Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco gives a speech in Bilbao in 1939. A top judge, Baltasar Garzon, is charged with exceeding his powers on the grounds that the alleged crimes committted by the Franco regime were covered by an amnesty agreed in 1977 as Spain moved towards democracy two years after Franco's death.

January 19, 2013  |  

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Whole Foods CEO, John Mackey, doesn’t know what a fascist is.

Speaking with NPR this week, multimillionaire Mackey  tried to express how much he hates Obamacare. Back in 2009, he hated Obamacare so much that he called it “socialism.” But now, in 2013, Mackey thinks Obamacare is “fascism.”

“Technically speaking, [Obamacare] is more like fascism,” he said. “Socialism is where the government owns the means of production. In fascism, the government doesn’t own the means of production, but they do control it, and that’s what’s happening with our healthcare programs and these reforms.”

Mackey has since  walked back this description saying he “regrets using that word now” because there’s “so much baggage attached to it.”

But, whether Mackey meant to or not, it’s about time someone injected the word fascism back into our political debate. Especially now that corporations wield more power today than they have in America since the Robber Baron Era.

First, let’s take on Mackey’s definitions of socialism and fascism, which he likely procured from the Google machine after typing in, “What are the differences between socialism and fascism?”

Yes, socialism encourages more democratic control of the economy. Or, if Mackey insists, more government ownership of the economy – in particular, ownership of the commons and natural resources.   

Fascism, on the other hand, is something completely different. Reporter Sy Mukherjee, who blogged about this story over at  ThinkProgress.org notes, “Although fascist nations do often control their ‘means of production,’ Mackey seems to have forgotten that they usually utilize warfare, forced mass mobilization of the public, and politically-motivated violence against their own peoples to achieve their ends.”

The 1983 American Heritage Dictionary defined fascism as: "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism." Fascism originated in Italy, and Mussolini claims to have invented the word itself. It was actually his ghostwriter, Giovanni Gentile, who invented it and defined it in the Encyclopedia Italiana in this way: "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."

In other words, fascism is corporate government – a Libertarian’s wet dream. It’s a government in which the Atlas’s of industry are given free rein to control the economy, just how they’re regulated, how much they pay in taxes, how much they pay their workers. It should be noted here that, ironically, John Mackey describes himself as a Libertarian.  

In 1938, Mussolini finally got his chance to bring fascism to fruition. He dissolved Parliament and replaced it with the "Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni" - the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations. Members of the Chamber were not selected to represent particular regional constituencies, but instead to represent various aspects of Italian industry and trade. They were the corporate leaders of Italy.

Imagine if the House of Representatives was dissolved and replaced by a Council of America’s most powerful CEOs – the Kochs, the Waltons, the Blankfeins, the Dimons, the Mackeys, you get the picture.

Actually, that’s not too difficult to imagine, huh? But, that’d be similar to what Mussolini defined as fascism.

As we know, fascism was eventually defeated in World War 2. But just before the end of the war, with the fascists on the ropes, the Vice President of the United States at the time, Henry Wallace,  penned an op-ed for the New York Times warning Americans about the creeping dangers of fascism – or corporate government.

He defined a fascist as, “those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion.”

NRA Ad Dead Wrong, Thanks to Breitbart False Report


[h/t Scarce]

By now everyone has seen this propaganda piece put out by the NRA claiming that the Obama girls have armed guards at their school. There's only one problem: That claim isn't true. Shame, shame, NRA, for living in such a deep silo you actually relied on a Breitbart.com report without any fact checking.

Buzzfeed:

"[The] school Obama's daughters attend has 11 armed guards," the longer ad's narrator says, citing an article from Breitbart.com.

But a fact-check by the Washington Post found that not to be the case. The Postcalled the school, Sidwell Friends, where Obama's daughters attend and asked if the school had armed guards. The school responded that none of their 11 security members carry any firearms.

But where did the myth of armed guards at Obama's school come from?

A quick search found that the first post about it came from the Weekly Standard's blog. A post by Daniel Halper said that the school — attended by both Obama's and David Gregory's children — had 11 armed guards on staff, citing the 11 members of the security team. The error by the site presuming the security at the Quaker school was armed led to the NRA's two incorrect ads.

Well, yes, it led to them. But the NRA cited an article at Breitbart.com in their longer propaganda piece. Here's the screenshot:

nra-screenshot.jpg

J.K. Trotter at The Atlantic picked this up late Friday:

You can see what's going on here. An erroneous report on Breitbart.com, the conservative activist news website, led NRA officials to believe that Sidwell Friends employs armed guards. (Breitbartseems to have misread a job posting for a security officer.) The NRA even appropriated Breitbart's argument: that the existence of such guards at an elite private school reveals Obama as an out-of-touch elitist, unaware of his own hypocrisy. From Breitbart reporter A.W.R. Hawkins:

Shame on President Obama for seeking more gun control and for trying to prevent the parents of other school children from doing what he has clearly done for his own. His children sit under the protection guns afford, while the children of regular Americans are sacrificed.

Hawkins adds:

If you dismiss this by saying, "Of course they have armed guards — they get Secret Service protection," then you've missed the larger point [...] that this is standard operating procedure for [Sidwell Friends], period.

It's worth noting here that Breitbart is not an underground website, and the report the NRA ads refer to is not obscure: it currently boasts over a thousand comments, and was shared on Facebook or Twitter by over 143,000 people.

Color me shocked -- SHOCKED -- that Breitbart News advanced a false story in order to feed the NRA's paranoia. Why, I'm sure they've never done anything like that before, have they?

Sanctions: Weapons of Mass Death and Destruction

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Iran hasn’t been in the headlines in recent months, but there’s a lot of talk that 2013 will be the year of decision on Iran—whether a deal will be struck between the U.S. and its allies and Iran on ending or restricting Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, or whether the U.S., Israel and other big powers will attack Iran.

The debate about confirming former Sen. Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, revolves around whether he’s “tough enough” on Iran, while leading think-tank strategists are calling for overt preparations for attacking Iran, tougher economic sanctions and “more explicit threats to destroy its nuclear programme by military means.” (Jim Lobe, January 16)

“In 2013, perhaps in the next few months, President Obama will face a crisis on Iran. He has categorically ruled out living with a nuclear-armed Iran under a Cold War—style policy of containment,” Fareed Zakaria writes. “That means either Iran will capitulate to U.S. demands or the U.S. will go to war with Iran. Since the first option is extremely unlikely and the second extremely unattractive, the Obama administration needs to find a negotiated solution. That means using sticks and carrots—or what is often called coercive diplomacy—to get a deal that Washington and Tehran can live with….Otherwise, 2013 will be the year that we accepted a nuclear Iran or went to war.” (“The Year We Reckon With Iran,” January 21, Time)

In short, tough sanctions are being promoted as a kinder, gentler alternative to war. And perhaps some people voted for Obama in part because they perceived him as less likely to start a war with Iran than Romney.

But let’s get clear: Stiffening sanctions is a form of war against an entire population—a real weapon of mass destruction that is already imposing enormous suffering and death on the Iranian population. The U.S. is literally murdering babies and other vulnerable sections of the populations, but this fact is rarely mentioned by the cheerleaders of empire—aka the U.S. media—and there is no debate about it within the U.S. ruling class.

“Targeted” Sanctions Target the Iranian People

The U.S. claims that its sanctions are “smart” or “targeted” and only aimed at Iran’s government—the Islamic Republic—and its top leaders. But because the U.S. and its big power allies (Germany, France, Britain and other European countries) are sanctioning and embargoing Iranian banks, they have crippled Iran’s ability to pay for urgently needed imports—including medicines—and halted many shipments. In addition, many drugs and needed chemicals aren’t getting into Iran thanks to the banning under the sanctions of “dual-use” chemicals with possible military applications.

Here are some of the impacts being felt, just in terms of drugs and medicines:

“Hundreds of thousands of Iranians with serious illnesses have been put at imminent risk by the unintended consequences of international sanctions, which have led to dire shortages of life-saving medicines such as chemotherapy drugs for cancer and blood-clotting agents for haemophiliacs,” Guardian UK reports.

Iran produces most of its medicines internally, but sanctions have crippled domestic production making many Iranian-made drugs unavailable or very costly. This past October, two pharmaceutical companies closed and others are facing closure or bankruptcy.

The director general of Iran’s largest biggest pharmaceutical firm told the Guardian, “There are patients for whom a medicine is the different between life and death. What is the world doing about this? Are Britain, Germany, and France thinking about what they are doing? If you have cancer and you can’t find your chemotherapy drug, your death will come soon. It is as simple as that.”

His firm can no longer buy medical equipment including sterilizing machines essential for making many drugs, and some of the biggest western pharmaceutical companies refuse to have anything to do with Iran. “The west lies when it says it hasn’t imposed sanctions on our medical sector. Many medical firms have sanctioned us,” he said.

According to the Guardian, there’s a “looming” health crisis in Iran. Each year 85,000 new cancer patients are diagnosed who need chemotherapy and radiotherapy, now in short supply.

“Iranian health experts say that annual figure has nearly doubled in five years, referring to a ‘cancer tsunami’ most likely caused by air, water and soil pollution and possibly cheap low-quality imported food and other products….An estimated 23,000 Iranians with HIV/Aids have had their access to the drugs they need to keep them alive severely restricted. The society representing the 8,000 Iranians suffering from thalassaemia, an inherited blood disorder, has said its members are beginning to die because of a lack of an essential drug, deferoxamine, used to control the iron content in the blood.”

Iran’s over 8,000 hemophiliacs are in grave peril. It’s more and more difficult for them to get blood clotting agents, and operations on hemophiliacs “have been virtually suspended because of the risks created by the shortages,” the Guardian reports. At the end of October 2012, a 15-year-old child died for lack of coagulant medication. The head of Iran’s Hemophilia Society said, “This is a blatant hostage-taking of the most vulnerable people by countries which claim they care about human rights. Even a few days of delay can have serious consequences like haemorrhage and disability.” (See, Mehrnaz Shahabi, “The unfolding humanitarian catastrophe of economic sanctions on the people of Iran.”)

Last year, Iran’s Hemophilia Society told the World Federation of Hemophilia that tens of thousands of children’s lives were being threatened by shortages of medicines.

Again, this is just the sanctions’ impact on Iran’s healthcare—it is also devastating the population in a hundred other ways big and small.

They Know…And They’re Killing Babies Anyway

The Obama administration and its allies know full well how sanctions are impacting the people of Iran—including helpless babies. In fact, they’ve admitted in rare moments of truth-telling (mainly within their own ranks in discussions of strategy and tactics) that the whole point of sanctions is to cause suffering and discontent among Iran’s population, in order to pressure or collapse the Islamic Republic. An article last year in an article titled, “Public ire one goal of Iran sanctions, U.S. official says, the Washington Post reported, “The Obama administration sees economic sanctions against Iran as building public discontent that will help compel the government to abandon an alleged nuclear weapons program, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official.”

A column in the rightwing Wall Street Journal – “What Iran Sanctions Can and Can’t Do,” — was more explicit:  sanctions were a “tool to precipitate the regime’s collapse.”

Too many people see sanctions as a thoughtful, peaceful, or diplomatic alternative to war. Bullshit.

It’s nonsensical as well as criminal because sanctions are already in effect killing people, but it’s also because sanctions can be part of the preparations or strategy for war. This is what the U.S. did to Iraq before the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. Between these two wars and the intervening 13 years of sanctions, well over a million—probably over 2 million—Iraqis were killed. And did those sanctions prevent war? No. Because one goal of imperialist sanctions is to win political support for war if that’s deemed necessary: “We tried sanctions and had to resort to war,” they’ll claim.

Another goal is to soften an enemy up so waging war will prove easier—again, if the imperialists deem it necessary.

Sanctions or War = Imperialist Aggression

Neither imperialist war, nor imperialist sanctions, nor imperialist “diplomacy” are anything other than different forms of imperialist aggression. None of them are moral, or just. All must be opposed. It’s unconscionable for people in the U.S. to sit passively and silently by as these crimes are being carried out in our names, resulting in the suffering and deaths of thousands of people, thousands of miles away.

We can’t accept the terms that it’s either sanctions or war – either slow death or fast death. The U.S. is killing Iranian civilians in the interests of an unjust empire, and this is something that everyone with a conscience and a basic sense of right and wrong should oppose and protest.

Larry Everest is a correspondent for Revolution newspaper (revcom.us), where this article first appeared, and author of Oil, Power & Empire: Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda (Common Courage 2004).  In 1991 he traveled to Iraq and documented the impact of the Persian Gulf War and sanctions in his film: Iraq: War Against the People.  He can be reached at larryeverest@hotmail.com.

Three Popular Delusions for 2013

Three popular delusions to be aware of for 2013:

Popular Delusion #1: The investment world believes China will engage in another massive round of stimulus.

This will not be the case. China’s new ruling party has stated point blank that the country will not be engaging in rampant stimulus (for the obvious reasons of rising inflation):

This may sound like an oxymoron, but China‘s new Communist government is turning away from financial stimulus to help its slow-­?moving economy.

During the party’s two-­?day Central Economic Work Conference this weekend, party leader Xi Jinping said the country would essentially not be pursuing high growth rates through stimulus. That doesn’t mean that Beijing has turned sour on fixed asset investments on things like roads, bridges and subways. They’re still going through with major urbanization projects. But whenever the economy is slowing, the new leaders say they will be less likely to prime the pump.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2012/12/17/reform-­?minded-­?chi...? shuns-­?stimulus/

China’s market has rallied over 16% in the last month on the belief that China will engage in another large-­?scale stimulus plan... despite China’s leaders stating they will not. This has the makings of a very nasty correction. We’ll be on the lookout for when it hits and will issue a trade alert when it’s time to go short.

Popular Delusion #2: Japan’s new leadership will be able to kick of even more aggressive monetary intervention.

Truth be told, Japan is on the cusp of the mother of all debt implosions. Case in point, Japan’s Yen is thought to be a safe haven. With that in mind, it’s critical to note that when the EU Crisis hit in mid-­?2012, the Yen fell.

Popular Delusion #3: The US bond bubble will not burst in 2013.

It’s become increasingly common to see calls for the US bond bubble and economy to implode this year. To be clear, the US’s financial situation is terrible. But it is nothing compared to the financial situation in Europe, Japan, and China.

Europe has not recapitalized its banks. Many of its countries’ entire banking systems are insolvent. The EU banking system as a whole is leveraged at 26 to 1 (Lehman was at 30 to 1 when it went bust). Even Germany’s banking system is in worse shape than the US’s (the US recapitalized its banks following the 2008 crisis. Europe. including Germany, has not).

China’s true Debt to GDP is over 200%. Already in a hard landing, the country is now facing several major problems, namely looming water and agriculture crises, food inflation and accompanying civil unrest, and the potential of armed conflict with Japan.

Moreover, the belief that China will shift over to a consumer economy is misguided. Consumption has increased by 9% per year in China for 30 years now. The China consumer is not somehow dormant. And as more and more manufacturing firms leave China for more stable markets (Apple, Ford, GE, Bridgestone, have all announced they are moving facilities back to the US), China will be facing rising unemployment.

Finally, and most critically, financial institutions are desperate for high-­?grade collateral in the form of quality sovereign bonds. Say what you will about the US, it remains the most liquid market for debt in the world. And if you had a choice between lending money to the US, Japanese, any European, or the Chinese Government, the US is the obvious answer.

This is not to say the US is in great shape. Instead, we would argue that the US is the least ugly of the major debt markets. The US bond bubble will burst at some point. But it will likely not do so in 2013.

Buckle up, 2013 is going to be an “interesting” year.

With that in mind, smart investors are taking advantage of the market rally to position themselves for what’s coming… much as they did in late 2007.

We offer several FREE Special Reports designed to help them do this. They include:

Preparing Your Portfolio For Obama’s Economic Nightmare

What Europe’s Crisis Means For You and Your Savings

How to Protect Yourself From Inflation

And last but not least…

Bullion 101: Everything You Need to Know About Investing in Gold and Silver Bullion…

You can pick up FREE copies of all of the above at:

http://gainspainscapital.com/

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Phoenix Capital Research

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The World Is In Trouble

Via Mark J. Grant, author of Out of the Box,

The United States is in Trouble
 
We make more than we’ve ever made, we owe more than we’ve ever owed, and we have less than we've had in decades which is distributed to those that did not earn the money. This is a working definition of Trouble. The stock market is at an all-time high while the financial condition of the country has seriously deteriorated. We are printing $90 billion a month of little green pieces of paper while the Democrats yell at the Republicans to up the debt ceiling as they want to spend even more money to promote social welfare programs. We cannot afford the bills that we have now and we are being asked to add more to them. This is a recipe for disaster and I am reminded of those months right before the financial crisis of 2008/2009 where no documentation loans for Real Estate flourished and easy money was the normal course of things.

Perhaps the landscape has shifted from “money for nothing” for property to “money for nothing” for our national debt. Fiscal responsibility has evaporated in a grand scheme to get voters and Obama has put the Chavez Plan in place which appeals to the poorest of citizens, hands them money and expects their support at the polls. Hard work and earning a living are the ethics of past generations that are slowly being ground to dust in the flurry to socialize America and re-distribute wealth and having succeeded and having money is now thought of as a crime not far behind rape and arson. The White Knight is walking backwards and the Red Queen has lost her head and the Mad Hatter is in charge of the tea party.
 
“The trouble with practical jokes is that they very often get elected.”
 
                        -Will Rogers
 
Europe is in Trouble
 
The sovereign debt accounting is a fraud. Liabilities are not counted, contingent liabilities are not recognized and the balance sheet of the ECB is worse than America’s. Collateral considerations are a joke and loans are disguised, hidden and placed in various locked drawers and central bank vaults. The economies of Spain, Italy, Portugal, Cyprus, Greece, Ireland continue to deteriorate as their sovereign yields fall due to the Draghi put and the creation of their little pieces of blue paper which must be used somewhere for something. There is, once again, easy money in the United States but easier money in Europe and so the game continues as anyone with any common sense begins to wonder how it all will blow up and when. Is it to be Inflation or Valuation and will Gold be the next currency or are there going to be other answers.
 
Asia is in Trouble
 
Japan, once thought to be an ascending power, has drifted into a nightmare of insolvency and no growth where Deflation rules and the debts of the country now exceed the ability of their citizens and institutions to own them. The push is on for Inflation as the only way out as they argue with China over some islands that might have some oil reserves. In China growth is slowing, their one party system will not allow outside investment past a certain point, their banks are a shadow of the demands of the country and in disarray as political/economic scapegoats and the numbers that China provides for growth make no sense and so are discounted as maybe-maybe statistics. The central banks of both nations follow the tendrils of the American and European ones and the entire globe is encased in a soap bubble of our own making as some may see the fire but no one knows how to get safely out of the theatre.
 
Find two elephants, two zebras and two giraffes and start building the boat.
 
The World is in Trouble
 
The scheme has worked because there is no place to go, no place to run; no place to hide. The collusion is past anything we have ever seen in history. The central banks of the world are supporting intervention and massive protection of the State and we are witnessing the results while all of the newly created paper must be put somewhere and so bonds rise in price, absolute yields on sovereign debt will fall more, compression will continue and the equity markets will rise. All of this is not the result of fundamentals or of economics but solely the result of little pieces of paper being printed, distributed and having to find a home.
 
“God didn't make the little green apples, and it don't rain in Indianapolis in the summer time. And there's no such thing as Dr. Seuss or Disneyland and Mother Goose, no nursery rhymes.”
 
                -Roger Williams, Little Green Apples
 
Pricked
 
The world is in a gigantic bubble and it is going to get pricked. Now it takes certain magical incantations and special spells to determine all of this but we learned a few things from our last go round so the crystal ball is less cloudy and my wand is at hand. Our last fiasco whacked the banks on the backside as the valuation of their holdings, most noticeably their ownership of subprime mortgages and of mortgage securitizations raised the specter of default and of systemic carnage. This time it will be certain sovereign nations that will be the catalyst. It may be the mundane running out of cash that will cause the torrent to flow as Greece, Cyprus, Spain, Italy, Ireland or Portugal that lines up for more money and is refused by various governments on the Continent. It may be a refusal by a sovereign nation to accede to the demands of the IMF/EU/ECB for funding or it may be social unrest in the spring that unseats some government as nationalism overcomes the grand European experiment. The giant central bank slosh of money has lowered yields but it has not improved the financial condition of any nation on the Continent and so push will come to shove once again. It may be that Germany refuses to waste anymore of their citizen’s money or that Britain will have had enough of being run out of Berlin or it could even be a refusal to fund America’s debt which comes from China and other Asian countries as our creditworthiness deteriorates. There are many pressure points pressing against the Bubble and one of them will give just as the subprime mess was where the prick took place last time. It was all the cause of “money for nothing and chicks for free” and while I am unsure about the chicks I am quite sure that the incredible amount of easy money will take its toll once again. Money, you know, ceases to be money when all that anyone sees is paper and not the guarantee that is imprinted on it. It could be Inflation on a grand scale or worse, Valuation that determines the charade and calls it for what it is and neither result will be pleasant.
 
You cannot keep printing money without consequences and when absolute and intrinsic valuations replace relative valuations then the game is afoot. Lower and lower yields also eventually have a serious impact on the people of a nation, pension funds, insurance companies and backlashes are certainly possible as the lives of people and institutions are put at financial risk. When the survival of the State puts its people in dire straits then, eventually, the citizens will rebel as the nation has forgotten just who composes its constituents. The people and institutions that have the capital will only go along quietly for so long when nations try to take what they have earned and dispossess it for others. The rich will become poorer and the poor will become poorer and when those with the capital have been deprived of it so that everyone is worse off then the Lords of Chaos will be in control once again. Look for securities that float, States that have no debt in Municipals, the few countries in the world that are still fiscally responsible and get ready to hold on to your hat. The charade goes on a little longer but it will not go on indefinitely and the time for preparation is now. When one plus one no longer equals two then something will give. Make sure you are not the one crying “Uncle.”
 
The trouble with going with the flow is that you might be the one that is sucked down the drain!

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Corporate Party Favors at the Inaugural Shindig

President Obama's 2013 Inauguration store website. (Image: Whitehouse.gov)President Obama's 2013 Inauguration store website. (Image: Whitehouse.gov)If you’re one of those who equate the worlds of Washington and Hollywood — the standard joke: “Politics is show business for ugly people” — then a presidential inauguration is the Oscars, Golden Globes and Emmy Awards combined, right down to the parties, balls, extravagant wardrobes and goody bags stuffed with swag.

Just check out the online “57th Presidential Inauguration Store“, peddling more tchotchkes than the vendors outside a Justin Bieber concert — from shot glasses, T-shirts and tube socks to an Obama portrait by the artist Chuck Close and a $7500 set of official medallions.

The company behind this marketing behemoth — as it was during the 2012 campaign, when at times it appeared the Obama team was running a big box store rather than a presidential race — is Financial Innovations, Inc., which also happens to be one of a handful of corporations donating money to underwrite this year’s inaugural celebration. Its owner, Democratic fundraiser Mark Weiner, was an Obama bundler, raising as much as half a million dollars for the president’s re-election. According to Matea Gold at the Los Angeles Times, analyzing data from the Federal Election Commission, Financial Innovations “was paid more than $15.7 million by two Obama campaign committees to produce and mail campaign merchandise.”

Four years ago, the committee for President Obama’s first swearing-in proudly announced that no corporate cash would be accepted for the festivities, presenting the decision as “a commitment to change business as usual in Washington.” Nor was money taken from registered lobbyists and foreign agents, non-U.S. citizens or political action committees. What’s more, individual contributions were capped at $50,000.

This year, there’s a new attitude and a new push for dollars — the goal is set at $50 million. The rules against lobbyists, PACs and non-citizens are still in effect, but now, contributions of as much as a million are being solicited from individuals as well as businesses (although you’re banned from giving if you received taxpayer bailout money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program – TARP — and haven’t paid it back!).

“Sources close to the planning said the decision was born out of pragmatism,” Politico reported in December. There were just a few weeks post-election “to raise tens of millions of dollars to celebrate a victory that Democratic supporters already spent hundreds of millions of dollars to win thanks to the rise of unlimited outside money in campaigns this year.” Nonetheless, as the Associated Press noted, “The changes are part of a continuing erosion of Obama’s pledge to keep donors and special interests at arm’s length of his presidency.”

According to records released by the official Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC), so far, fewer than a thousand individuals and only eight corporations have contributed money for the long weekend of parties, balls and ceremonies (On January 17, ExxonMobil announced that it, too, was chipping in, to the tune of $250,000.)

Most of these companies have ties to the federal government. Restrictions on government contractors giving money to politicians don’t apply to the inaugural. They should.

Fredreka Schouten at USA Today writes that among them are:

Telecom giant AT&T, which spent more than $14 million lobbying Congress and federal agencies during the first nine months of 2012, [and] has been awarded more than $101 million in federal contracts in the current fiscal year, federal contracting data show. Microsoft, which spent nearly $5.7 million on lobbying, has been awarded nearly $4.6 million in technology contracts with Homeland Security, the White House and several other agencies so far during this fiscal year…

“Another corporate donor, Centene Corporation, manages health insurance programs for more than a dozen states. Those programs include Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance system for the poor, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. The Congressional Budget Office estimates insurance coverage will be expanded to 7 million more Americans in both programs next year as the new federal health care law takes effect.”

The other five businesses on PIC’s official list are the aforementioned Financial Innovations, the electric utility Southern Company Services, biotech companies Genentech and United Therapeutics, and Stream Line Circle, which the Los Angeles Times said was “an entity tied to philanthropist and gay rights activist Jon Stryker.”

Southern Company Services, described by the watchdog Sunlight Foundation as “a major lobbying powerhouse,” received stimulus money under the Obama administration’s Recovery Act –a $165 million Smart Grid Investment Grant to modernize electrical infrastructure.

Genentech is an active health care lobbyist in Washington and regularly seeks Food and Drug Administration approval of drugs (just last month the FDA okayed the use of Genentech’s Tamiflu influenza medication for the treatment of infants.)

United Therapeutics seeks FDA approval for an oral version of an injectable drug used to treat pulmonary arterial hypertension, a lung disorder. Sunlight’s Keenan Steiner reported, “The company faced a setback in October when the FDA did not approve the new drug. Its CEO vowed at the time to continue seeking approval ‘within the next four years.’”

The next four years? What a coincidence. All the more reason to seize every opportunity to glad hand at inaugural events where there might be a moment or two to slip in a good word as the price for your generosity. United Therapeutics covers its bases. Steiner continued: “The company does not have a political action committee but emerged as a surprising major donor to the Democratic National Convention in September, when it gave $600,000 to the effort, the fifth-biggest donor behind the likes of Bank of America and AT&T.”

But for all this, we only know the names of donors and nothing else — not their location or, most important, how much they’ve given (although Southern Company did tell the Sunlight Foundation that its donation was $100,000). In another departure from four years ago, the committee won’t reveal that information until reports are filed with the Federal Election Commission in late April.

This secrecy had led to speculation as to what the Presidential Inaugural Committee plans to do with any money left over after all the confetti is thrown and the last dance danced. The Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call reports , “Theories range from the claim that Obama is getting a jump-start on funding his presidential library to conjecture that leftover campaign cash will prop up his grass-roots organizing operation, reportedly to be renamed Organizing for Action. Some say that it may even line the pockets of loyal campaign consultants.”

In a recent op-ed, Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, wrote of inaugural fundraising, “Obama’s policy in 2009 bested those of all recent occupants of the Oval Office and went way beyond the law’s requirements. It appeared he’d set a new precedent for higher standards in transparency. That makes the backsliding this year especially disheartening. In fact, by comparison, this year’s process feels like a snub.”

But those with money to buy nice things — or exclusive government access — won’t feel snubbed at the inauguration. Despite reports of corporate and other high rollers offended at alleged aloofness and a lack of perks from the White House during the first term, this time, they’ll be welcomed with open arms. The president said it himself — he likes a good party.

Exposed! How the Billionaires Class Is Destroying Democracy

Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, center, arrives at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Dec. 4, 2012. (Photo: Stephen Crowley / The New York Times)Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, center, arrives at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Dec. 4, 2012. (Photo: Stephen Crowley / The New York Times)Out of the guts of the internet, we find an endless stream of misattributed quotes and made-up stories that end up in chain emails that you eventually receive from your loopy uncle in Texas who's trying to justify right-wing economics or anti-Obama conspiracy theories.

It's just one of the headaches of the Internet Age.

But, there's one quote in particular that's always attributed to an obscure Scottish historian, Sir Alexander Frasier Tytler (as if that gave it great credibility), and it seemed to both make sense and prophecy the end of the American Republic.

Tytler was supposed to have said: "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess of the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship."

Tyltler goes on to talk about the process by which democracies fail as a result of this "voter selfishness."

The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years," he was rumored to have said. "These nations have progressed through this sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from great courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependency back again to bondage."

Now, here's the reality: Tytler never said any of these words. They can all be tracked back to right-wing American businessmen in the early decades of the twentieth century. And why would right-wing businessmen say such things? Because, in actual point of fact, the thing that corrupts democracies is not "the voters" demanding "free stuff" (to paraphrase Romney), but, instead, its businessmen buying off politicians.

It's not the powerless who corrupt democracies, as that viral right-wing quote would suggest; it's the powerful who corrupt democracies. And money is the source of that power.

Yes, over the last hundred years, average American people have voted themselves benefits like Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare, and Medicaid. But at the same time, they've also supported tax increases to pay for all of these things. Remember, the Social Security tax only applies to the first $113,000 of wages - earned income. People like Paris Hilton and Mitt Romney, when they get all their money from capital gains, dividends, and carried interest, don't pay a penny of Social Security taxes on their millions of income. And the average top CEO in America, with an income of $13.7 million a year, over a million a month, only pays Social Security taxes on his first few days of income every year - every other day is Social Security tax-free. Quite literally, as Leona Helmsley famously said, only the "little people" pay such taxes. The safety net program for working class people is exclusively paid for by working class people.

On the other hand, when the Billionaire Class extracts benefits from the government for themselves, the generally don't pay higher taxes. The billions in taxpayer subsidies for Big Oil, trillions in bailouts and bonuses for Wall Street banksters, and hundreds of billions for war profiteers are always accompanied by demands for more tax cuts at the top.

And, truth be told, billionaires aren't even receiving these benefits by voting for them. Instead, they always get them through the simple process of buying politicians. For example, Sheldon Adelson spent $150 million in the last election. That's more than any American spent in any election in American history. And he spent all that money to give himself the "benefits" of derailing an Obama Justice Department investigation into his casino in China and to get his taxes cut even further.

Billionaires also corrupt democracy to get their benefits through billionaire-funded think tanks, like the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council that writes legislation to benefit Corporate America, and then has Republicans state lawmakers introduce and pass laws in state after state, across the nation.

But despite this very clear reality of who is demanding largesse from our government, it's still working people and average voters who are targeted by right-wingers and their viral emails as the selfish "takers." That's the reason why the Business Roundtable is saying the best way to fix insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare is to raise the retirement age to 70 and voucherize Medicare.

Of course, the average CEO for an S&P 500 company doesn't need Social Security. But they know that by raising the retirement age, they're shielding themselves from any tax increases that may come with raising that payroll tax cap, so even billionaires pay into Social Security, which will quickly and easily make that insurance program solvent forever.

America's fiscal problems have nothing to do with voters. In fact, the Billionaire Class is trying to make it harder and harder for people to vote by pushing for voter suppression ID laws and restrictions on early voting.

America's fiscal problems are a direct result of the Billionaire Class working behind the scenes of our democracy and syphoning off massive amounts of wealth for themselves while paying lower taxes than they've paid in a half-century. As Senator Bernie Sanders points out, a quarter of all profitable corporations in America pay zero federal taxes. And Mitt Romney and Paris Hilton's income tax rates top out at 20 percent.

Tytler didn't really say those words that the Billionaire Class think-tanks and email shills attribute to him. But, had he said them, he probably would have something more along the lines of this: "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the billionaires discover that they can steal for themselves largess of the public treasury through buying politicians. From that time on the billionaires will always buy candidates promising them the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship."

If we are concerned about the future of our American democratic republic, the way to preserve it isn't to protect it from greedy Social Security recipients by pushing the retirement age back to 70. It's to get money out of government, thus neutering the political power of the Billionaire Class. And that means reversing two core doctrines that the US Supreme Court has created out of thin air (at the request of big business and billionaires): that corporations are people, and that money is speech.

The best way to do that is through a constitutional amendment that says corporations are not people, and money is property and not speech.

Go to MoveToAmend.org to join the fight for the survival of our democratic republic.

In Reversal, House GOP Agrees to Lift Debt Limit

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) walks to the House floor on the first day of the 113th Congress in Washington, Jan. 3, 2013. (Photo: Luke Sharrett / The New York Times)House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) walks to the House floor on the first day of the 113th Congress in Washington, Jan. 3, 2013. (Photo: Luke Sharrett / The New York Times)Washington - Backing down from their hard-line stance, House Republicans said Friday that they would agree to lift the federal government’s statutory borrowing limit for three months, with a requirement that both chambers of Congress pass a budget in that time to clear the way for negotiations on long-term deficit reduction.

The new proposal, which came out of closed-door party negotiations at a retreat in Williamsburg, Va., seemed to significantly reduce the threat of a default by the federal government in coming weeks. The White House press secretary, Jay Carney, said he was encouraged by the offer; Senate Democrats, while bristling at the demand for a budget, were also reassured and viewed it as a de-escalation of the debt fight.

The change in tack represented a retreat for House Republicans, who were increasingly isolated in their refusal to lift the debt ceiling. Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio had previously said he would raise it only if it were paired with immediate spending cuts of equivalent value. The new strategy is designed to start a more orderly negotiation with President Obama and Senate Democrats on ways to shrink the trillion-dollar deficit.

To add muscle to their efforts to bring Senate Democrats to the table, House Republicans will include a provision in the debt ceiling legislation that says lawmakers will not be paid if they do not pass a budget blueprint, though questions have been raised whether that provision is constitutional.

That “no budget, no pay” provision offered Republicans a face-saving way out of a corner they had painted themselves into — and an effort to shift blame for any default onto the Senate if it balks. The House Republicans’ campaign arm quickly moved from taunting Democrats about raising the government’s borrowing limit to demanding that they sacrifice their paychecks if they fail to pass a budget.

“The Democratic-controlled Senate has failed to pass a budget for four years. That is a shameful run that needs to end, this year,” Mr. Boehner said in a statement from Williamsburg. “We are going to pursue strategies that will obligate the Senate to finally join the House in confronting the government’s spending problem.”

House Democrats met the deal with scorn, indicating they would inflict maximum political pain by making Republicans either break a campaign promise to carry it to passage or defy their leaders. But other Democrats were more sanguine. The president had said he would not sign a short-term debt ceiling increase, but a senior administration official said that as long as there were no surprises, the White House was likely to accept the House’s offer. Most important, the official said, Republicans had broken from the “Boehner rule” imposed in 2011: any debt ceiling increase was to include a dollar-for-dollar spending reduction.

The decision represents a victory — at least for now — for Mr. Obama, who has said for months that he will not negotiate budget cuts under the threat of a debt default. By punting that threat into the spring, budget negotiations instead will center on two earlier points of leverage: March 1, when $1 trillion in across-the-board military and domestic cuts are set to begin, and March 27, when a stopgap law financing the government will expire.

Reordering the sequences of those hurdles was central to the delicate Republican deliberations that resulted in the new plan. In the days leading to the Williamsburg retreat, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the House Budget Committee chairman and former vice-presidential nominee, had been meeting with the leader and three past chairmen of the conservative House Republican Study Committee to discuss a way through the debt ceiling morass.

Those conversations led into Thursday morning, when Mr. Boehner and Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the No. 2 House Republican, opened the retreat by going through the timeline for the coming budget fights, according to aides who were there.

They turned the floor over to Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, the House Ways and Means chairman, who delivered a blow-by-blow description of the economic disaster that could be wrought by a government default. Mr. Camp also talked through the notion held by some Republicans that the Treasury Department could manage a debt ceiling breach by channeling the daily in-flow of tax dollars to the most pressing needs, paying government creditors, sending out Social Security checks and financing the military. His message was that it would not work, the aides said.

Then Mr. Ryan stood to talk over the options he had developed with the House conservative leaders. They could do a longer-term debt ceiling extension with specific demands, like converting Medicare into a voucherlike program. Or they could lower expectations, reorder the budget hurdles with a three-month punt, and add the “no budget, no pay” provision.

Persuading Republicans who adamantly oppose raising the debt ceiling took some time, and the ensuing discussion stretched on and on, breaking at noon for lunch on Thursday, resuming at 2:30, until 4 p.m., then concluding Friday.

Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House majority whip, met with freshmen early Friday to make sure they were on board. Mr. Boehner and Mr. Cantor joined Mr. Ryan for one last meeting with conservative leaders — Representatives Steve Scalise of Louisiana, Jim Jordan of Ohio, Jeb Hensarling of Texas and Tom Price of Georgia — to make sure they were on board. Then the top four leaders sealed the agreement midmorning.

Mr. Obama will unveil his own 10-year budget plan in February, laying out his tax and spending plans for his second term. But Senate Democrats, for the past four years, have refused to move a budget blueprint to the Senate floor, in violation of the Budget Act of 1974, which laid out new rules for controlling deficits.

For the past two years, House Republicans have approved sweeping budget plans that would fundamentally remake Medicare and Medicaid, sharply reduce domestic spending, increase military spending and order a wholesale rewriting of the federal tax code. But without Senate negotiating partners, those plans, written by Mr. Ryan, have been more political statement than legislative program.

“This is the first step to get on the right track, reduce our deficit and get focused on creating better living conditions for our families and children,” Mr. Cantor said. “It’s time to come together and get to work.”

Ashley Parker contributed reporting from Williamsburg, Va.

‘Kindergarten terrorist’: 5-year-old girl suspended over bubble-gun ‘threat’

A 5-year-old girl was suspended from a Pennsylvania kindergarten after telling another girl that she was going to shoot her. The weapon she was going to use was a pink toy gun that blows soapy bubbles.

Mount Carmel Area School District officials questioned the student without her parents present, deemed the girl a “terrorist threat” and suspended her for 10 days, according to attorney Robin Ficker, who was hired by the family to fight the suspension.

The incident happened on January 10 as the preschoolers were waiting in line for a schoolbus, Ficker told news website PennLive.com.

The girl, who has not been identified, said something like “I’m going to shoot you and I will shoot myself,” referring to the toy. She did not have the bubble gun on her person at the time.

School officials learned of the conversation and questioned the girl for over 30 minutes the next day, Ficker said. After the talk, she was suspended for 10 days, branded a threat and required to be evaluated by a psychologist, he added.

"This little girl is the least terroristic person in Pennsylvania,” he said.

The punishment has since been reduced to two-day suspension, the attorney said. He also argued that the girl’s permanent record should be expunged, and that she should be offered an apology.

Ficker said he was hired because the girl’s mother read that he had handled a similar case in Maryland. In that case, he represented a 6-year-old boy who was suspended by an elementary school for pointing at another student with his fingers folded like a gun and saying “pow.”

School authorities called it a “serious incident,” and said the boy “threatened to shoot” the other student.

Gun-related violence at schools is a painful issue in the US after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The shooting claimed 26 lives, including 20 children, shocking the nation and triggering a heated debate over tighter gun control.

The Currency Wars: Now US Automakers Are Squealing

Wolf Richter   www.testosteronepit.com   www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter

Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party went all out late last year to re-grab the power it had held for 50 years before getting booted out in 2009. Its platform: print and borrow with utter abandon to create asset bubbles and inflation, and to weaken the yen. It even threatened to wrest control over the printing press away from the Bank of Japan. That verbiage has been phenomenally successful: the stock market is surging, and the yen is crashing from historic—under normal circumstances, inexplicable—highs.

But now, US automakers are squealing. They want the government to fight back in the currency war. The American Automotive Policy Council (AAPC), a lobbying organization that represents only Ford, GM, and Chrysler, sent President Obama a letter, demanding retaliation against Japan’s NO EXIT strategy. Then it went public with it grievances.

“Here we go again,” said Matt Blunt, AAPC president and former Republican governor of Missouri. “Japan’s Liberal Democratic party is back in power and determined to repeat the ‘beggar thy neighbor’ policies that distort trade by cheapening the value of the yen to promote economic growth in Japan at the expense of its trading partners.”

He claimed that “these types of policies” had “inflicted tremendous harm” on manufacturing in the US. “We urge the Obama Administration to make it clear to Japan that such policies are unacceptable and will be met by reciprocal measures.”

The AAPC has been lambasting Japan, and rightfully so, for having “the most closed auto market in the developed world,” protected by “non-tariff barriers” that keep US automotive products out. But now it accused Japan of manipulating its currency “to boost its own exports at the expense of other nations, especially the United States.”

Alas, the biggest currency manipulator in the world is the Fed, not only with its verbiage but also with its endless and escalating waves of quantitative easing, to the point where it currently prints $85 billion a month to debase and demolish the dollar, or what is left of it, which isn’t much. It makes US wages more competitive with those in Mexico and China. It also makes imports more expensive for American consumers and exports cheaper for consumers elsewhere. Meanwhile, Japan’s infamous trade surplus has given way to a ballooning trade deficit (graph).

The automakers were whining to President Obama, ironically, as another announcement was made and received with hoopla: GM would invest $1.5 billion in plants in North America in 2013. While no further details emerged, hopes were swirling that this manna would rain down on Michigan.

Yet North America, in addition to Michigan, also includes among other places Canada and Mexico, and how much of this money will land in the US is uncertain. Embarrassingly, the $1.5 billion was just a fraction of GM’s planned investments of $8 billion for 2013, of which $6.5 billion will be sent to countries outside North America—not Europe where GM is bleeding to death, but Asia.

That has been the paradigm in manufacturing for decades. US corporations have invested prodigiously in China and other countries where labor is cheap and have thus contributed to their enormous economic growth, while only crumbs have fallen on US soil. In this manner, much of the US auto component industry has moved offshore.

Exhibit A: Delphi, formerly GM’s component division. GM spun it off in 1999. Two years later, Delphi axed 11,500 workers. In 2004, it got into hot water over its accounting practices. In 2005, it went bankrupt and closed 45 plants in the US, with much of the production moving to China. In 2009, it sold its chassis division to state-owned BeijingWest Industries, which now develops and manufactures brake and chassis components for US and European automakers.

Exhibit B: Visteon, formerly Ford’s component division. Always the laggard, Ford spun it off in 2000. In 2009, it went bankrupt, shuttered all but one of its 33 plants in the US, let go 25,000 workers, and shifted its center of gravity to Shanghai. It now has 171 plants and facilities in other countries. Its headquarters building in Van Buren Township, Michigan, was sold last year, though its headquarters is still officially located there.

Visteon is still “a US company at this point,” CEO Tim Leuliette said at the Automotive News World Congress on Wednesday. Yet globally, he added, only “about 4%, 5% of our employees are in the United States,” most of them supporting customers in North America. So, if the headquarters shifted to Asia, he said, it wouldn’t change much, jobs-wise.

Bitter irony: American automakers, after having sent their investments and manufacturing overseas, are using a Republican ex-governor to pressure the Obama administration to stop the Japanese from defending themselves in the currency war that the Fed has been waging relentlessly for years.

Meanwhile, Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher is waging his own war—against TBTF banks. “Repression” is what he calls “the injustice of being held hostage to large financial institutions,” whose investors, executives, counterparties, and customers “believe themselves to be exempt from the processes of bankruptcy and creative destruction.” These banks “capture the financial upside” of their bets but are bailed out when things go wrong, he says, “in violation of one of the basic tenets of market capitalism.” Read.... How Big Is ”BIG”?

And for an easy, fun guy read, if you like cars and the rambunctious process of selling them, check out TESTOSTERONE PIT, the novel.

Your rating: None

House Republicans Caving On Debt Ceiling?

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I'm still a little skeptical, but whether it's three months, or three years, a House Republican cave on the debt ceiling bodes well for our economy and dealings with Congress, wingnuts or no wingnuts.

According to The Hill, House Republicans are going to propose a three-month raise to the debt ceiling with some contingencies attached:

House Republican leaders on Friday announced a plan to condition a three-month increase in the debt limit on the Senate committing to pass a budget by the April 15 statutory deadline.

“Before there is any long-term debt limit increase, a budget should be passed that cuts spending,” Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) told the Republican conference in remarks to close the party’s three-day retreat in Williamsburg. “The Democratic-controlled Senate has failed to pass a budget for four years. That is a shameful run that needs to end, this year.”

The House will also seek to prevent members of Congress from being paid if the two chambers do not pass a budget resolution.“We are going to pursue strategies that will obligate the Senate to finally join the House in confronting the government’s spending problem,” Boehner said. “The principle is simple: no budget, no pay.”

The "no budget, no pay" piece of their proposal appears to be unconstitutional, according to ThinkProgress, but that's a small thing compared to the fact that it looks as though they're prepared to release the hostage, and once they do that, there's no turning back.

Steve Benen points out that releasing the debt ceiling hostage simply exchanges one for another:

That said, it also appears the congressional GOP hopes to trade one hostage for another.

Even if Republicans now seem to realize they can't follow through on their debt-ceiling threats -- they really should have thought this through beforehand -- GOP policymakers still appear committed to aggressive confrontations on automatic sequestration cuts and funding levels for the government itself.

To be sure, these threats carry a punch. The sequester includes deep cuts that neither side wants and a fight over spending levels may very well lead to a government shutdown, but neither pose the catastrophic dangers associated with a genuine debt-ceiling crisis -- and even House Republicans seem aware of this, which is why they have no intention of shooting this hostage.

There's apparently growing GOP support for a clean, short-term extension of the debt ceiling -- which, as we discussed yesterday, doesn't seem to make any sense at all -- which would presumably set the stage for additional talks. This will play out soon enough, but at a certain level its impact is limited. Once everyone in Washington -- Democrats and Republicans, the White House and Congress -- realizes that GOP leaders aren't prepared to allow a default on our obligations, the game is effectively over.

Greg Sargent:

Here’s why this matters: This increases the debt ceiling to authorize borrowing to pay the country’s bills well into April. That punts the debt limit deadline until after the deadline for funding for the government to run out, which is on March 27th. In other words, Republicans will now use the threat of a government shutdown along with the coming expiration of the sequester to extract the spending cuts it wants. Presuming this all gets resolved by then, or soon after, it means the threat of default is no longer a factor. This will all but certainly get resolved in advance of this three month deadline, and a long term debt limit hike will get attached to that agreement.

It's that last bit that has me skeptical, though Krauthammer was pretty specific in his column about what the GOP will not get while this President is in office and while the Senate majority is a Democratic one. In that column, he's blunt:

The party establishment is coming around to the view that if you try to govern from one house — e.g., force spending cuts with cliffhanging brinkmanship — you lose. You not only don’t get the cuts. You get the blame for rattled markets and economic uncertainty. You get humiliated by having to cave in the end. And you get opinion polls ranking you below head lice and colonoscopies in popularity.

There is history here. The Gingrich Revolution ran aground when it tried to govern from Congress, losing badly to President Clinton over government shutdowns. Nor did the modern insurgents do any better in the 2011 debt-ceiling and 2012 fiscal-cliff showdowns with Obama.

Obama’s postelection arrogance and intransigence can put you in a fighting mood. I sympathize. But I’m tending toward the realist view: Don’t force the issue when you don’t have the power.

Releasing the hostage is good, but it isn't the end of the line by any means. It does, however, allow some breathing room to actually work through some kind of deal that ends the standoff over budget cuts and if Krauthammer's words carry any weight, it seems that he's signaling to Republicans that they take on more modest challenges and win smaller battles rather than trying to take on unwinnable large battles.

Jonathan Chait argues that a short-term debt ceiling increase seems somewhat pointless, and has similar concerns to mine:

Will it work? You have to ask yourself what the point is. If Republicans can’t threaten to shoot the hostage, what do they gain by holding new debt ceiling votes every few months? It’s either leverage or it isn’t. If it isn’t, then a new vote every few months won’t do anything for the GOP. Indeed, it will annoy Republicans, who will be forced to take more and more “he voted to increase the debt ceiling fourteen times!” votes.

Still. I don't trust Republicans enough to call this a win. At best, it's a stabilizing move, assuming it can pass the House without some Democrats tossing in their votes too. Or maybe they have come to the conclusion that holding the debt ceiling hostage is simply a losing strategy that would undo any hope of getting anything passed that is on their agenda, in which case they'd be better off doing one clean, long-term raise of the ceiling and moving on to the budget battles.

Stay tuned. They still have to vote on it.

Counterpoint: After writing this, I've seen more people weigh in. Nancy Pelosi will not accept a debt ceiling bill with contingencies, according to Greg Sargent. Jason Easley at PoliticusUSA weighs in with a warning that this is just an Eric Cantor bait and switch to force the Senate to pass the House budget without any changes.

Eric Cantor’s offer is totally bogus. Rep. Cantor was proposing that as long as the Senate will agree with the House on budget, the House will raise the debt ceiling for 90 days. Cantor expects the Senate to trade three months of debt ceiling for one year of spending cuts. Look carefully at what Cantor proposed. He didn’t propose that the Senate has to pass a budget. He said that the House and Senate both have to pass a budget. Rep. Cantor was referring to a budget that both the House and Senate agree to, not just a Senate budget.

It's unclear right now whether the actual bill would be a clean raise for three months, or one with contingencies attached. If the latter, then yes, it's simply a bait-and-switch.

Week in Review: Scramble for Africa

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Mali Conflict Could Refuel Algeria’s Civil WarAbayomi Azikiwe, January 18, 2013

Interview with Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of Pan-African News Wire

In regard to the situation in Algeria, there has been over the last two decades insurgencies led by Islamist forces there and it appeared as if these difficulties and conflicts had…

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2013 and the New Scramble for AfricaChris Marsden, January 17, 2013

France’s military aggression in Mali is only the latest expression of a renewed Scramble for Africa being undertaken by all of the continent’s former imperialist overlords. This involves not only those powers that directly ruled Africa from the late nineteenth…

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By Design: French Mali Invasion Spills into AlgeriaTony Cartalucci, January 17, 2013

Al Qaeda is both a casus belli and mercenary force, deployed by the West against targeted nations. French operations seek to trigger armed conflict in Algeria as well as a possible Western military intervention there as well, with the Mali conflict serving as a pretense.

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Congo’s M23 Conflict: Rebellion or Resource War?Nile Bowie, January 16, 2013

M23 rebels in DR Congo have threatened to march to the capital and depose the government. UN reports confirm that rebels receive support from key US allies in the region, and Washington’s role in the conflict has become difficult to…

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The Geopolitical Reordering of Africa: US Covert Support to Al Qaeda in Northern Mali, France “Comes to the Rescue”Tony Cartalucci, January 15, 2013

NATO is funding, arming, while simultaneously fighting Al Qaeda from Mali to Syria. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) is allied to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) supported by France during NATO’s 2011 proxy-invasion of Libya

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The War on Mali. What you Should Know: An Eldorado of Uranium, Gold, Petroleum, Strategic Minerals …R. Teichman, January 15, 2013

Whatever is announced by France or the US, reported by the mainstream media, the goal of this new war is no other than stripping yet another country of its natural resources

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Obama in Africa: Somalia, Mali and the War Powers Resolution, Steve Breyman, January 15, 2013

Critics of President Obama’s 2011 aerial intervention in Libya may recall one of that conflict’s most striking features: the administration’s failure to invoke the 1973 War Powers Resolution(WPR). The War Powers Resolution is that tasteless congressional fruit of the late…

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Mali and the Scramble for Africa, Ben Schreiner, January 14, 2013

The French military intervention into Mali on Friday — France’s second in as many years into a former African colony — was reportedly “seconded” by the United States. This ought to come as no great surprise, given the Pentagon’s deepening…

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Military Intervention in Mali: Special Operation to Recolonize Africa, Alexander Mezyaev, January 14, 2013

The military operation in Mali launched on January 11 is another vivid example of special activities aimed at recolonization of the African continent. It’s an orderly and consistent capture of new African territories by Western powers. They have got hold…

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Mali's Tuareg-Uranium Conspiracy

Mali’s Tuareg-Uranium Conspiracy, Moeen Raoof, January 13, 2013

Global Research Editor’s Note In the light of recent events in Northern Mali, we bring the following April 2012 Global Research article to the attention of our readers.

The recent Coup in Mali by a Army Officer Captain while all…

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Jon Stewart Takes Wingnuts Apart for Cries of Tyranny Over Gun Control

Jon Stewart took the hypocrites over at Fox apart again for their cries of tyranny over President Obama's executive orders on gun violence in America -- which, as Stewart pointed out, somehow the likes of Sean Hannity or Dana Perino had absolutely n...

American CEOs want to raise retirement age to 70

Gary Loveman, CEO of Caesars Entertainment. (Reuters / Brian Snyder)

Gary Loveman, CEO of Caesars Entertainment. (Reuters / Brian Snyder)

A group of CEOs is attempting to push the official US retirement age to 70, thereby making fewer Americans eligible to receive benefits such as Social Security and Medicare.

The Business Roundtable (BRT), a group of influential CEOs, on Wednesday unveiled its plan to partially privatize the health insurance program for older Americans and gradually reduce the benefits they currently receive by cutting entitlements. The plan calls for smaller annual Social Security increases, as well as reduced benefits for wealthy retirees.

“America can preserve the health and retirement safety net and rein in long-term spending growth by modernizing Medicare and Social Security in a way that addresses America’s new fiscal and demographic realities,” Gary Loveman, chairman, president and chief executive of Caesars Entertainment, told CBS News. Loveman is head of the Business Roundtable, which came up with the plan. The millionaire businessman hopes to convince Congress to enact the new measures in an attempt to cut US spending.

The BRT believes the eligibility age for both Medicare and Social Security should increase to 70. Some legislators have already proposed raising it to 67, but congressional Democrats have fought hard to prevent such an increase. Retirees can currently get reduced Social Security benefits starting at age 62, full Social Security benefits at age 66, and Medicare at age 65.

While the proposed changes would impact the younger generations, anyone who is currently over 55 would not be affected by those measures and could continue to receive their government benefits, regardless of the outcome of the decision.

The BRT believes that raising the age would help reduce the deficit. Its members also believe that the changes would cause traditional Medicare programs to compete with private insurance plans – something that Rep. Paul Ryan, chair of the House Budget Committee, has long advocated for.

But while raising the eligibility age would save the federal government money, it would also cause Americans’ expenses to increase dramatically, which would particularly devastate low-income individuals dependent on government assistance. CNNMoney reports that medical expenses would increase by $11.4 billion, even though federal spending would only drop by $5.7 billion.

“Raising the age doesn’t address the larger concern of reducing health care spending overall,” said Juliette Cubanski, associate director of Kaiser’s Program on Medicare Policy. “It just shifts costs from the federal government to other payers in the system.

As Democrats and Republicans attempt to come up with a budget plan to avoid causing the country to fall into default, Medicare reform continues to be heavily debated. Although President Obama said he would support minor changes to Medicare, he would not support a plan as radical as that proposed by the BRT.

Increasing the eligibility age to 68 would put 435,000 seniors at risk of being uninsured – a number that would be higher if the eligibility age was set at 70.

“These ideas were soundly rejected in the last election only a few months ago,” said Max Richtman, president and CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.

But the US could soon be struggling to pay its bills, and the CEOS of the BRT believe their proposal could gain congressional support among those most adamant about cutting spending.

Guest Post: Fiscal Farce, Failure, Fantasy, & Fornication

Submitted by Jim Quinn of The Burning Platform blog,

I’ve put off writing an article about what is likely to happen in 2013 so I could peruse the thousands of other articles by reputable bloggers, paid pundits, Wall Street shills and captured charlatans to gather their wisdom. It’s essential that I make predictions for 2013 so I can write another article in December rationalizing why 90% of my predictions failed to materialize. Reading all of these 2013 prediction articles made things much clearer for me. I now know for sure:

  • The stock market will reach an all-time high.
  • The stock market will fall 42%.
  • The economy will strengthen as the year progresses.
  • The economy will descend into a depression.
  • The USD will strengthen.
  • The USD will collapse.
  • Gas prices will set new highs.
  • Gas prices will fall below 2012 levels.
  • Gold will rise to $10,000 per ounce.
  • Gold will drop below $1,000 per ounce.
  • We will experience hyperinflation.
  • We will experience horrific deflation.
  • Obama will compromise with the Republicans and put the country on a path to prosperity.
  • Obama will create a debt ceiling crisis and assume dictatorial powers as a result.
  • Snooki will be a better mother than Kim Kardashian.
  • Honey Boo Boo will beat I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant in the Neilson ratings.

The majority of 2013 prediction articles are written to support the agenda of the writer. Many are trying to sell newsletter subscriptions or investment services. Their predictions will match the theme of their newsletter. Others are Wall Street paid shills who will predict what they are paid to predict by their owners. Then there are the political hacks who tow the party line with their predictions. But no one can top the predictive powers of the CBO. They just put out their ten year updated forecast reflecting the fabulous fiscal cliff deal that saved the country. According to the CBO, the “compromise” to reduce our deficits will add a mere $4 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years. I’m sure this will prove to be accurate. Just take a look at their 2002 projection, after passage of the Bush tax cuts:

The CBO predicted the FY2012 surplus would be $641 billion, the national debt would total $3.5 trillion, the debt held by the public would total $1.273 trillion, and GDP would total $17.2 trillion. They missed by that much.

 

The actual FY12 results were:

  • The true deficit was $1.37 trillion (amount national debt increased – not the phony deficit number reported by the mainstream media).
  • The national debt was $16.1 trillion.
  • The debt held by the public was $11.3 trillion.
  • GDP was $15.8 trillion.

Based on these results, I won’t be asking the CBO for help with my Super Bowl bet. Making ten year predictions is beyond worthless, but public policy in Washington DC is based on these useless CBO projections. The entire fiscal cliff kabuki theater fictitious crisis reveals the politicians and mainstream media pundits to be liars, fools and frauds. The tax the rich to cut the deficit storyline was sold to the public and won the day. Of course, the highly accurate CBO immediately revealed that the Orwellian named American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 adds $4 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years. Based on the accuracy of their previous predictions, it’s a guarantee the national debt goes up by $8 trillion, as the rich take advantage of the thousands of loopholes in the IRS code they paid for to avoid paying the taxes expected by the CBO.

Hypocrisy abounds on both sides of the aisle in Washington DC and on the media company propaganda channels. As the national debt soared from $10.6 trillion on the day Obama took office to $16.4 trillion today, I heard shrieking liberal talking heads on MSNBC, CNN, and the rest of the liberal media blame the debt on the Bush tax cuts and the Bush wars. If the Bush tax cuts were so horrific, why did Obama and his minions just make 98% of these tax cuts permanent? Liberals held protest marches across the country against Bush’s wars and burned him in effigy. Obama’s defense budgets have been larger than Bush’s and he doubled down on our miserable failure in Afghanistan. You don’t hear a peep from the liberals about the warmongering Barack Obama who has kill lists and unleashes predator drones, killing women and children across the globe. Liberals pretend to be concerned about the welfare of the citizens, but continue to support a President that uses executive orders to imprison citizens indefinitely without charges, has expanded surveillance on citizens, has kept Guantanamo open, signs the continuation of the Patriot Act, and proposes overturning the Second Amendment by executive order. Liberals shriek about the evils of an unregulated Wall Street, while remaining silent as Obama hasn’t prosecuted a single banker for the greatest financial fraud in world history. You don’t hear a peep about Jon Corzine, who stole $1.2 billion from the accounts of farmers and ranchers. Liberals talk about regulation and then stand idly by while Wall Street lobbyists wrote the Dodd Frank law and insurance and drug company lobbyists wrote the Obamacare law. Liberal hypocrisy knows no bounds and is only matched by Neo-Con hypocrisy.

The Neo-Con controlled Republican Party is a pathetic joke. They have the guts to declare themselves the party of fiscal responsibility, after Bush’s eight year reign of error. He and his fiscally responsible party were handed a budget in surplus and managed to add $4.9 trillion to the national debt by waging undeclared wars, encouraging Wall Street to create the biggest fraudulent financial bubble in history, creating a new $16 trillion unfunded entitlement (Medicare Part D), cutting taxes without paying for them, and creating a massive new government agency (DHS) to take away our liberties and freedom. Federal government spending grew from $1.9 trillion to $3.0 trillion under Bush and the Republicans. Does that sound fiscally responsible?

Does anyone believe the Republican Party is serious about cutting anything? Tough guy Republicans like Big Chris Christie preach fiscal responsibility when going to war with teachers’ unions, but he squeals  like a stuck pig when a $60 billion pork filled, unpaid for, Sandy Relief bill is held up in Congress. The courageous fiscally responsible Congress critters passed the entire pork filled, unfunded, bloated, vote buying joke. It included $28 billion to mitigate future disasters, $3 billion to repair or replace Federal assets, and $6 billion for transportation projects completely unrelated to Sandy damage.   The hypocrisy of politicians who proclaim the $50 billion of 2013 fiscal cliff tax revenue as deficit cutting, and then immediately piss it away by paying people to rebuild their houses yards from the Atlantic Ocean while funding billions of non-disaster related projects is disgusting to behold. There is nothing like compromise to add another $60 billion to the national debt.

Our entire economic and political system is a farce. The American people are being played by the powerful interests that provide them with an illusion of choice. Both parties serve the interests of their masters and the fiscal cliff show and debt ceiling show are a form of reality TV to keep the masses alarmed, fearful, and believing there is actually a difference between the policies of the ruling class. The charade has played out in its full glory in the last few weeks with Obama convincing the masses he had stuck it to the rich, while in reality the working middle class got it good and hard when they got their January paychecks. This chart details the tax changes that went into effect on January 1.          

 taxbill

The funniest part this fiscal fiasco farce is watching the reaction of the sheep who believed Obama and the mainstream media storyline. Obama was able to raise the published top rate on people making over $400,000. The newly defined “rich” laughed heartily as they know only fools pay anywhere near the top rate. The rich just call their tax advisor and instruct them to use one of the thousands of tax loopholes in the 75,000 page IRS tax code to “legally” avoid the new Obama rates. Meanwhile, both parties and their mainstream media mouthpieces downplayed the 2% payroll tax increase on every working American. This tax increase has been a complete surprise to the reality TV zombies and Facebook aficionados. Even college educated professionals in my office had no idea their next monthly paycheck was going to be $150 to $200 lighter. This will wipe out most, or all, of the annual raise they received. The tax will fall heavily on the 75% of households that make less than the $113,700 Social Security cutoff. For a struggling family of four earning the median income of $50,000, the $1,000 less in their paychecks will mean less food, putting off trips to the doctor, driving on bald tires, or not taking the family on a vacation to the Jersey shore. The $2,274 increase in taxes (.57%) for the Wall Street banker making $400,000 probably won’t put too much of a crimp in his Hamptons lifestyle.

The joke is on the American people as the rich will ante up maybe $50 billion of taxes in 2013, while the working middle class will be skewered for $125 billion. How’s that “Tax the Rich” slogan working out for you?     

 

Only in the Orwellian capital of Washington DC would a bill that was supposed to provide tax relief to the middle class and spending cuts to reduce the deficit, actually increase the tax burden of a median household by $1,000 and perpetuate the pork spending payoffs to campaign contributors and friends of the slimy politicians that slither through the halls of Congress. The list of pork and bribes should be nauseating to hard working Americans across the country:

$30 billion extension of the 99 weeks of unemployment benefits, even though we are supposedly in the 3rd year of economic recovery. Continuing to pay people to not work for two years will surely boost employment.

$14.3 billion for a two-year extension of the corporate research credit benefiting large technology companies like IBM and Hewlett Packard.

$12.2 billion one-year extension of the production tax credit for wind power.

$11.2 billion two- year extension of the active financing exception, which lets GE, Caterpillar Inc. (CAT) and Citigroup Inc. (C), among others, defer taxes on financing income they earn outside the U.S.

$1.9 billion extension of the Work Opportunity Tax Credit for hiring workers from disadvantaged groups, benefitting mega-restaurant chains like McDonalds.

$1.8 billion extension of the New Markets Tax Credit for investments in low- income areas, benefitting JP Morgan and other Wall Street shyster banks.

$650 million tax credit for manufacturing energy-efficient appliances, benefitting mega-corps like Whirlpool.

$430 million for Hollywood through “special expensing rules” to encourage TV and film production in the United States. Producers can expense up to $15 million of costs for their projects. NBC thanks you.

$331 million for railroads by allowing short-line and regional operators to claim a tax credit up to 50% of the cost to maintain tracks that they own or lease.

$248 million in special expensing rules for films and television programs.

$222 million for Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands through returned excise taxes collected by the federal government on rum produced in the islands and imported to the mainland.

$78 million for NASCAR by extending a “7-year cost recovery period for certain motorsports racing track facilities.”

$59 million for algae growers through tax credits to encourage production of “cellulosic biofuel” at up to $1.01 per gallon.

$4 million for electric motorcycle makers by expanding an existing green-energy tax credit for buyers of plug-in vehicles to include electric motorbikes.

So when you see the cut in your take home pay, just comfort yourself knowing that JP Morgan, Citigroup, GE and hundreds of mega-corporations were able to retain their tax breaks. As they have done for decades, Congress and the President agreed to address spending cuts at a future date. Of course, a government spending cut isn’t actually a cut. It’s a lower increase than their previous projection. Nothing is ever cut in Washington DC. The austerity storyline is a lie. Not a dime has been cut from the Federal budget. Intellectually dishonest ideologues try to peddle the wind down of the Obama $800 billion porkulus program as a cut in Federal spending. They sold this Keynesian “shovel ready” crap to a gullible public as stimulus to jumpstart the economy. Federal spending was $3.0 trillion before the Obama stimulus. After the two year stimulus was pissed away without helping the economy one iota, the baseline should have been back in the $3.2 trillion range. Instead, FY13 Federal spending will be $3.8 trillion. This hasn’t kept liberal ideologues like Krugman and his minions in the mainstream media from blaming crazy Tea Party Republicans for inflicting horrendous austerity measures on the poor and disadvantaged.

 

The chart above reveals a few truths:

  • The country has been blessed with two of the worst presidents in U.S. history over the last twelve years.
  • When Federal spending as a percentage of GDP is beyond two standard deviations over the normal range during the last sixty years, your problem is not lack of tax revenue.
  • Obama and the current Congress are spending at a level of 24% of GDP versus the 18% of GDP when Clinton left office. This amounts to a nose bleed altitude $950 billion higher than the level Clinton was spending in his final year in office.

The Op-eds in liberal rags across the land decry the lack of civility in Washington DC and plead for politicians on both sides of the aisle to come together and compromise for the good of the country. This line of bullshit would be laughable if it wasn’t so wretched in its falsity. Compromise is what has left this country with a $16.4 trillion national debt, $200 trillion of unfunded liabilities, and $1 trillion deficits as far as the eye can see. Democrats have compromised and let the Republicans create a warfare state. Republicans have compromised and let Democrats create a welfare state. The two headed monster living in the swamps of Washington DC just voted to increase taxes on all Americans. They voted to hand criminal Wall Street banks $700 billion. They voted to pass the Patriot Act. They voted to pass the NDAA. They’ve allowed the President to wage undeclared wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and now Iran. They voted for a $663 billion Defense bill that includes tens of billions the Secretary of Defense doesn’t even want. They will vote to raise the debt ceiling in the next two months. The last thing this country needs is more compromise. We can’t afford any more compromise. The chart above proves what can happen when gridlock ensues, spending restrictions are enforced, and confrontation displaces compromise. After the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, gridlock ensued for the next six years. PAYGO restrictions in the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 didn’t allow unfettered spending increases. The result was Federal spending falling from 22% of GDP to 18% of GDP and a budget surplus. The Pay-Go restrictions expired in 2002 and Democrats and Republicans have compromised to the tune of a $10.2 trillion increase in the national debt in ten years. The hypocrisy of pandering deceitful politicians is boundless and shows utter contempt for the intelligence of the American populace.  

“Raising the debt ceiling does not authorize more spending. It simply allows the country to pay for spending that Congress has already committed to. If congressional Republicans refuse to pay America’s bills on time, Social Security checks, and veterans benefits will be delayed. We might not be able to pay our troops, or honor our contracts with small business owners. Food inspectors, air traffic controllers, specialist who track down loose nuclear materials wouldn’t get their paychecks. Investors around the world will ask if the United States of America is in fact a safe bet. Markets could go haywire, interest rates would spike for anybody who borrows money – Every homeowner with a mortgage, every student with a college loan, every small business owner who wants to grow and hire. We are not a deadbeat nation.

It would be a self-inflicted wound on the economy. It would slow down our growth, might tip us into recession. And ironically it would probably increase our deficit. So to even entertain the idea of this happening, of the United States of America not paying its bills, is irresponsible. It’s absurd. Republicans in Congress have two choices here. They can act responsibly, and pay America’s bills, or they can act irresponsibly and put America through another economic crisis. But they will not collect a ransom in exchange for not crashing the American economy.” – President Barack Obama – January 14, 2013

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. The Senate continues to reject a return to the common sense Pay-go rules that used to apply. Previously, Pay-go rules applied both to increases in mandatory spending and to tax cuts.

The Senate had to abide by the common sense budgeting principle of balancing expenses and revenues. But we must remember that the more we depend on foreign nations to lend us money, the more our economic security is tied to the whims of foreign leaders whose interests might not be aligned with ours. Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘‘the buck stops here.’’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.” – Senator Barack Obama – March 16, 2006

I could have shown quotes from George W. Bush during the 2000 Presidential campaign talking about a non-interventionist foreign policy and no need for the U.S. to get involved in nation building and then proceeding to pre-emptively attack sovereign countries while wasting trillions and impoverishing unborn generations trying to create “democracy” in the Middle East at the point of a gun as a cover to protect “our” oil. The point is that we are being given the illusion of choice. Everyone knows the debt ceiling will be raised after another episode of Washington DC Kabuki Theater, presented by the corporate mainstream media in breathtaking detail, because the politicians are beholden to their owners and those owners want more of our money. That is why spending will never be willingly cut by the spineless puppet congressmen, as their strings are pulled by the corporate puppet masters and they dance to the tune of the banking oligarchs that own this country.

After witnessing the fighting of undeclared never ending wars, passage of freedom destroying legislation like the Patriot Act & NDAA, approval of pork barrel spending to the tune of hundreds of billions, rule by Executive Order, using ZIRP to extract hundreds of billions from senior citizen savers and give it to criminal Wall Street banks, forcing the American people at gunpoint to replenish the Wall Street banks with $700 billion after they had committed the greatest financial fraud in history, and a continuing trampling of the U.S. Constitution, the American people continue to remain willfully ignorant of the truth. The American Dream is dead. We’ve allowed a rich, privileged, elite few to achieve hegemony over our economic and political system with their control of the media and manipulation of our financial markets. They will collapse the country because they will never be satisfied with the amount of wealth and power they’ve accumulated. Their voracious greed will be their downfall. The sooner we can channel the anger of George Carlin, the sooner we can put an end to this corporate fascist reign of terror.         

“Politicians are put there to give you that idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations, and they’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the State Houses, and the City Halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear. They’ve got you by the balls.

They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want—they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interest. You know something, they don’t want people that are smart enough to sit around their kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.

It’s a big club and you ain’t in it! You and I are not in the Big Club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you in the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks, the game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on, the fact that Americans are and will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white, and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes every day. Because the owners of this country know the truth, it’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.” George Carlin

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New Proposal Will Force Gun Owners to Store Assault Weapons At Government Authorized Storage...

Mac Slavo
January 18th, 2013
SHTFplan.com

Read by 19,913 people

Because you can never have too many laws, regulations and mandates, Massachusetts State Representative David Linsky has filed a new bill that would, among other things, force gun owners to undergo mental health background checks, acquire liability insurance, pay an additional 25% tax on all forms of ammunition, and require firearms categorized as “assault weapons” to be stored outside of their homes and only at government approved storage depots.

“This bill is a comprehensive effort to reduce all types of gun violence – murders, intentional shootings, accidental shootings and suicides.  There is not one solution to reducing gun violence – we can’t eliminate it – but there are a lot of common-sense steps that we can take to significantly reduce the everyday tragedy of gun violence and deaths,” said Linsky.

“I have spoken with hundreds of people over the past few weeks in developing this legislation – victims, police officers, criminologists, physicians, and yes – gun owners and sportsmen,” stated Linsky. “There are a lot of good ideas out there. We should all have one goal – reducing gun violence and trying to keep more tragedies from happening.”

Provisions in the bill include:

  • Having one standard of the issuance of all gun licenses, giving local police chiefs the ability to evaluate all aspects of an application for a gun license.
  • Requires proof of liability insurance for possession of a firearm, rifle or shotgun.
  • Requires that all large capacity weapons and grandfathered assault weapons must be stored at gun clubs or target ranges.
  • Requires live shooting as part of the curriculum for a basic firearms safety course; this is not a current requirement.
  • Requires all applicants for gun licenses and FID cards to sign a waiver of mental health records for review to be destroyed after decision.
  • Imposes 25% sales tax on ammunition, firearms, shotguns, and rifles; dedicates funds towards firearms licensing, police training, mental health services, and victim’s services.
  •  Brings Massachusetts into compliance with the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).
  • Limits gun buyers to one firearm purchase per month.

Source: Natick Patch

Bills such as this one are being filed by irrationally driven anti-gunners all over the country.

They are targeting every aspect of firearms in an effort to first reduce ownership, and then to ultimately ban it altogether.

They’ll expand the definitions for mental health to include basic forms of stress and normal human mood fluctuations and designate these as mental health conditions that would disqualify you from owning a gun.

They’ll tax gun purchases and ammunition like they’ve done with cigarettes (tripling the cost over a decade) and require huge insurance premiums, making ownership unaffordable for most Americans.

They’ll track the sale and transfer of all firearms through registration, with unjust punishments for anyone engaging in black-market trading.

And, eventually, another crisis – likely one that purports to threaten the very security and stability of the government of the United States – will be used in an attempt institute a complete roundup of the majority of modern firearms.

A full out assault on the Second Amendment is underway.

Author: Mac Slavo
Views: Read by 19,913 people
Date: January 18th, 2013
Website: www.SHTFplan.com

Copyright Information: Copyright SHTFplan and Mac Slavo. This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to www.shtfplan.com. Please contact us for permission to reproduce this content in other media formats.

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

New Proposal Will Force Gun Owners to Store Assault Weapons At Government Authorized Storage...

Mac Slavo
January 18th, 2013
SHTFplan.com

Read by 12,941 people

Because you can never have too many laws, regulations and mandates, Massachusetts State Representative David Linsky has filed a new bill that would, among other things, force gun owners to undergo mental health background checks, acquire liability insurance, pay an additional 25% tax on all forms of ammunition, and require firearms categorized as “assault weapons” to be stored outside of their homes and only at government approved storage depots.

“This bill is a comprehensive effort to reduce all types of gun violence – murders, intentional shootings, accidental shootings and suicides.  There is not one solution to reducing gun violence – we can’t eliminate it – but there are a lot of common-sense steps that we can take to significantly reduce the everyday tragedy of gun violence and deaths,” said Linsky.

“I have spoken with hundreds of people over the past few weeks in developing this legislation – victims, police officers, criminologists, physicians, and yes – gun owners and sportsmen,” stated Linsky. “There are a lot of good ideas out there. We should all have one goal – reducing gun violence and trying to keep more tragedies from happening.”

Provisions in the bill include:

  • Having one standard of the issuance of all gun licenses, giving local police chiefs the ability to evaluate all aspects of an application for a gun license.
  • Requires proof of liability insurance for possession of a firearm, rifle or shotgun.
  • Requires that all large capacity weapons and grandfathered assault weapons must be stored at gun clubs or target ranges.
  • Requires live shooting as part of the curriculum for a basic firearms safety course; this is not a current requirement.
  • Requires all applicants for gun licenses and FID cards to sign a waiver of mental health records for review to be destroyed after decision.
  • Imposes 25% sales tax on ammunition, firearms, shotguns, and rifles; dedicates funds towards firearms licensing, police training, mental health services, and victim’s services.
  •  Brings Massachusetts into compliance with the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).
  • Limits gun buyers to one firearm purchase per month.

Source: Natick Patch

Bills such as this one are being filed by irrationally driven anti-gunners all over the country.

They are targeting every aspect of firearms in an effort to first reduce ownership, and then to ultimately ban it altogether.

They’ll expand the definitions for mental health to include basic forms of stress and normal human mood fluctuations and designate these as mental health conditions that would disqualify you from owning a gun.

They’ll tax gun purchases and ammunition like they’ve done with cigarettes (tripling the cost over a decade) and require huge insurance premiums, making ownership unaffordable for most Americans.

They’ll track the sale and transfer of all firearms through registration, with unjust punishments for anyone engaging in black-market trading.

And, eventually, another crisis – likely one that purports to threaten the very security and stability of the government of the United States – will be used in an attempt institute a complete roundup of the majority of modern firearms.

A full out assault on the Second Amendment is underway.

Author: Mac Slavo
Views: Read by 12,941 people
Date: January 18th, 2013
Website: www.SHTFplan.com

Copyright Information: Copyright SHTFplan and Mac Slavo. This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to www.shtfplan.com. Please contact us for permission to reproduce this content in other media formats.

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

Malkin: ACA Has Deputized Gun-Grabbing Doctors to Pursue ‘Nanny State’ Agenda

As expected, as soon as the Obama administration released their list of executive orders to help curb gun violence, the right wing went into full blown hissy fit mode. It seems Michelle Malkin took a page straight out of Limbaugh and Drudge's book on Fox this Thursday afternoon during this interview with Megyn Kelly.

Drudge And Limbaugh Misrepresent What Obama And The Affordable Care Act Say About Doctors And Guns:

As soon as President Obama's new recommendations for gun violence prevention became public, right-wing media immediately claimed the president was issuing an executive action requiring doctors to ask patients about their guns. This is false. The president's released proposals only clarify that nothing in the Affordable Care Act changes longstanding law: doctors are still free (but not required) to discuss with their patients any health hazards, including a lack of gun safety at home or elsewhere.

Among the White House proposals for gun violence reduction, the president announced that the administration will "[c]larify that the Affordable Care Act does not prohibit doctors asking their patients about guns in their homes." Nowhere in his proposal did he instead require doctors to ask about guns. The Drudge Report, however, immediately splashed across its website this graphic:

drudge ACA gun.jpg

Rush Limbaugh picked up on this flatly inaccurate claim that the president required doctors to ask their patients about "gun ownership." Rather than explain the president's executive action only indicated future orders, regulations, or guidance will clarify that no law - including the ACA - prohibits them from discussing gun safety with their patients, Limbaugh reported it as a new directive that "deputizes gun-snitch doctors": [...]

Limbaugh concedes that the executive action doesn't literally say that doctors are required to ask about gun safety, but rather, in his interpretation, "the executive action today is almost essentially requiring it." The president's proposal was likely a direct response to these types of wildly erroneous interpretations of the health care reform law and executive orders that were already floating around the right-wing blogosphere, before Limbaugh added his analysis.

Go read the rest for more on how the right is lying about the language in the law. Malkin did the exact same thing during the interview above with Megyn Kelly and in a post at her blog the previous day. (Warning, link goes to Malkin's site.)

The anti-gun doctors’ lobby has a friend in Obama:

Anyone with kids knows that the invasive, anti-gun doctors’ lobby has been around a long time.

Flashback October 2007: Is your pediatrician using your kid to spy on you?

Flashback July 2008: More nosy doctors who don’t like guns

The liberal leadership of the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have long been filled with notorious gun-grabbers — and they’ve promoted years of junk science to pursue their Nanny State agenda.

Now comes President Obama, who has deputized doctors to “help” snoop on law-abiding, gun-owning patients even further. Moreover, the White House has now lent federal support to doctors’ groups trying to fight state efforts to protect gun owners’ privacy: [...]

Political malpractice plus medical malpractice in the name of saving the children is a recipe for authoritarianism. The Hippocratic Oath has been turned on its head.

Malkin seems to have a little trouble understanding the difference between "does not prohibit" and mandates. Who knew we had all of those evil liberal doctors out there who are more worried about taking away everyone's guns than doing their job and providing health care to their patients. Be afraid... be very afraid!

Mali: Fragile Democracy and Clumsy US Policy

The Algeria hostage siege debacle, coming hard on the heels of France's intervention in neighbouring Mali, has heightened fears that a "third generation" of al-Qaida-affiliated jihadis is creating a new front in the war against US and western interests in the vast, ungoverned spaces of the Sahel and Saharan regions of north and west Africa.'Captain Amadou Sanogo used the skills he was taught by the US to wreck years of careful American and European nurturing of Mali’s fragile democracy.' (Photograph: Reuters)

But the crisis has also focused attention on unsuccessful and at times shambolic American efforts to counter the growing Islamist challenge there, and on the danger that military intervention will only make matters worse. Fearful of more Algeria-style attacks, US and European officials hold differing views about what to do next, ranging from direct engagement via special forces and drone strikes to enhanced regional diplomacy and alliance building.

Recent experience is chastening. US attempts to build up Mali's military as a bulwark against the extremists, by training army officers and providing equipment including brand-new Land Cruisers and expensive communications equipment, backfired spectacularly last year after a rebellion in the north provoked a coup that unseated the elected government in Bamako.

When push came to shove, a senior officer said the Tuareg commanders of three of the four Malian units fighting in the north defected to the insurrection "at the crucial moment", taking fighters, weapons and equipment with them. They were joined by about 1,600 other defectors from the Malian army, shattering the government's hope of crushing the uprising.

"The aid of the Americans turned out not to be useful," another officer said. "They made the wrong choice," by relying on commanders from a group that had been conducting a 50-year rebellion against the Malian state.

The coup was a particular embarrassment to Washington as it was led by an army officer, Captain Amadou Sanogo, on whom it had lavished special favour. "Sanogo represents something of a US failure," said veteran commentator Walter Pincus.

"He [Sanogo] had participated in the Pentagon's international military education and training programmes, with basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia; English-language training at Lackland air force base, Texas; an intelligence course at Fort Huachuca, Arizona; and study at Quantico, Virginia, with the Marine Corps," Pincus reported. The ungrateful Sanogo used his new skills to wreck years of careful American and European nurturing of Mali's fragile democracy.

The multimillion dollar pre-coup assistance to Mali was part of an ambitious but flawed US regional policy embracing Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and several west African states, intended to strengthen defences against al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb and like-minded groups. In 2002, the state department unveiled the so-called Pan-Sahel Initiative "to protect borders ... combat terrorism, and enhance regional cooperation and stability". This was replaced in 2005 by the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Partnership, overseen by the grandly named but ineffectual US Africa Command.

In recent years the Pentagon and other US agencies have run annual joint military exercises called Operation Flintlock involving Mali, Algeria, Chad, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Tunisia, Burkina Faso, Morocco and Nigeria. Imaginary war scenarios involved a terrorist group being chased across national borders from Mauritania all the way east to Chad. The war games proved to be prescient, except now it is the terrorists who are doing the chasing, and in the other direction.

If Americans are confirmed among the Algeria casualties, pressure will grow on the Obama administration to get more directly involved. The Joint Special Operations Command is already operating covert, region-wide surveillance flights under a classified programme know as Creek Sand. Analysts say the next step may be to use existing bases in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia and elsewhere to launch drone strikes and targeted assassinations, as in Somalia and Yemen. Since the Mali coup, the US has also upped military assistance to Niger and Mauritania.

Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt reported for the New York Times: "Some Pentagon officials have long taken a more hawkish stance, and they cite intelligence reports that fighters with ties to al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb ... played a role in the deadly attack in September on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. They have pushed for targeted strikes against Islamist leaders in northern Mali, arguing that killing the leadership could permanently cripple the strength of the militants."

At the same time there is a clear danger that an expanding war in Mali could start a wave of new attacks on "soft" western targets similar to that in southern Algeria, and that increased western intervention in the region will transform extremist groups that had only local importance into potent trans-national threats.

"While Pentagon lawyers claim al-Qaida is tipping into defeat, in fact we are seeing the emergence of the third generation of the terrorist movement," said analyst Bruce Riedel. "Under siege by drones in Pakistan and Yemen, al-Qaida 3.0 has exploited the 'Arab Awakening' to create its largest safe havens and operational bases in more than a decade across the Arab world. This may prove to be the most deadly al-Qaida yet."

Mali: Fragile Democracy and Clumsy US Policy

The Algeria hostage siege debacle, coming hard on the heels of France's intervention in neighbouring Mali, has heightened fears that a "third generation" of al-Qaida-affiliated jihadis is creating a new front in the war against US and western interests in the vast, ungoverned spaces of the Sahel and Saharan regions of north and west Africa.'Captain Amadou Sanogo used the skills he was taught by the US to wreck years of careful American and European nurturing of Mali’s fragile democracy.' (Photograph: Reuters)

But the crisis has also focused attention on unsuccessful and at times shambolic American efforts to counter the growing Islamist challenge there, and on the danger that military intervention will only make matters worse. Fearful of more Algeria-style attacks, US and European officials hold differing views about what to do next, ranging from direct engagement via special forces and drone strikes to enhanced regional diplomacy and alliance building.

Recent experience is chastening. US attempts to build up Mali's military as a bulwark against the extremists, by training army officers and providing equipment including brand-new Land Cruisers and expensive communications equipment, backfired spectacularly last year after a rebellion in the north provoked a coup that unseated the elected government in Bamako.

When push came to shove, a senior officer said the Tuareg commanders of three of the four Malian units fighting in the north defected to the insurrection "at the crucial moment", taking fighters, weapons and equipment with them. They were joined by about 1,600 other defectors from the Malian army, shattering the government's hope of crushing the uprising.

"The aid of the Americans turned out not to be useful," another officer said. "They made the wrong choice," by relying on commanders from a group that had been conducting a 50-year rebellion against the Malian state.

The coup was a particular embarrassment to Washington as it was led by an army officer, Captain Amadou Sanogo, on whom it had lavished special favour. "Sanogo represents something of a US failure," said veteran commentator Walter Pincus.

"He [Sanogo] had participated in the Pentagon's international military education and training programmes, with basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia; English-language training at Lackland air force base, Texas; an intelligence course at Fort Huachuca, Arizona; and study at Quantico, Virginia, with the Marine Corps," Pincus reported. The ungrateful Sanogo used his new skills to wreck years of careful American and European nurturing of Mali's fragile democracy.

The multimillion dollar pre-coup assistance to Mali was part of an ambitious but flawed US regional policy embracing Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and several west African states, intended to strengthen defences against al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb and like-minded groups. In 2002, the state department unveiled the so-called Pan-Sahel Initiative "to protect borders ... combat terrorism, and enhance regional cooperation and stability". This was replaced in 2005 by the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Partnership, overseen by the grandly named but ineffectual US Africa Command.

In recent years the Pentagon and other US agencies have run annual joint military exercises called Operation Flintlock involving Mali, Algeria, Chad, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Tunisia, Burkina Faso, Morocco and Nigeria. Imaginary war scenarios involved a terrorist group being chased across national borders from Mauritania all the way east to Chad. The war games proved to be prescient, except now it is the terrorists who are doing the chasing, and in the other direction.

If Americans are confirmed among the Algeria casualties, pressure will grow on the Obama administration to get more directly involved. The Joint Special Operations Command is already operating covert, region-wide surveillance flights under a classified programme know as Creek Sand. Analysts say the next step may be to use existing bases in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia and elsewhere to launch drone strikes and targeted assassinations, as in Somalia and Yemen. Since the Mali coup, the US has also upped military assistance to Niger and Mauritania.

Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt reported for the New York Times: "Some Pentagon officials have long taken a more hawkish stance, and they cite intelligence reports that fighters with ties to al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb ... played a role in the deadly attack in September on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. They have pushed for targeted strikes against Islamist leaders in northern Mali, arguing that killing the leadership could permanently cripple the strength of the militants."

At the same time there is a clear danger that an expanding war in Mali could start a wave of new attacks on "soft" western targets similar to that in southern Algeria, and that increased western intervention in the region will transform extremist groups that had only local importance into potent trans-national threats.

"While Pentagon lawyers claim al-Qaida is tipping into defeat, in fact we are seeing the emergence of the third generation of the terrorist movement," said analyst Bruce Riedel. "Under siege by drones in Pakistan and Yemen, al-Qaida 3.0 has exploited the 'Arab Awakening' to create its largest safe havens and operational bases in more than a decade across the Arab world. This may prove to be the most deadly al-Qaida yet."

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A Modest Proposal for Jacob Lew: Acknowledge Three Simple Facts about U.S. Fiscal Reality

In a reasonable world, in which we recognized the culpability of big-time D.C. politicians and bureaucrats who allowed Wall Street hyper-speculation to run wild and eventually cause the 2008-09 crash and Great Recession, Jacob Lew would be understood as a terrible choice as President Obama’s second-term Treasury Secretary, replacing Timothy Geithner. The outstanding journalist Robert Sheer gives us the basic background in a recent Nation article. Sheer writes:

I suppose that he can’t be much worse than Timothy Geithner, but that should be scant cause for cheer over the news that the president has nominated Jack Lew as Treasury secretary. Both championed the financial deregulation craze of the Clinton administration, and both are acolytes of Robert Rubin, the former Clinton Treasury secretary who unfettered Wall Street greed and then took his own considerable cut of the action.

But because we are not living in a reasonable world, at least in terms of D.C.-insider debates on economic policy, Lew’s nomination apparently faces opposition from Republicans because he appears insufficiently committed to an austerity budget that could push the economy back into recession while also devastating spending for Social Security, education, health care, family support, and unemployment insurance.

It is clear that debate over the fiscal deficit and austerity will dominate Lew’s confirmation hearings and at least his initial period in office, if he ends up getting confirmed. But without pursuing any deep explorations about who should be taxed more or less, or whether 47 percent of U.S. citizens are indeed freeloaders, I would just propose that Lew be willing to recognize three sets of very simple, irrefutable facts about the current U.S. fiscal condition. Here they are:

Fact #1: The U.S. government is not facing a fiscal crisis.

In any common sense meaning of the term “fiscal crisis,” we would be referring to the government’s inability to make its forthcoming payments to its creditors. By that common sense definition, the U.S. federal government is in just about the best shape it has ever been. Figure 1 below tells the story.

According to the most recent data from the third quarter of 2012 (which we term “2012.3”), the federal government spent 7.7 percent of its total expenditures on interest to its creditors. As the figure shows, that figure is less than half of the average figure under the full 12 years of Republican Presidents Reagan and Bush, when the government paid, on average, 16.8 percent of the total budget to cover interest payments. Right now, as we see, government interest payments are at near historic lows, not highs. As Treasury Secretary-designate, Lew needs to just state this obvious, and highly relevant point. To my knowledge, it has been heretofore completely left out of the insider-D.C. fiscal cliff debates, by Lew, Obama, and Geithner, to say nothing of the Republicans.

Fact #2: Interest rates on government bonds are at historic lows.

Figure 2 tells this story, which is well-known, but is not being given proper recognition in the deficit debates. As the figure shows, at the end of 2012, the U.S. government was borrowing at 0.7 percent on its 5-year Treasury Bonds.

It is precisely because the federal government can borrow so cheaply that our interest payments are corresponding low. Deficit hawks—economists and politicians alike—have been insisting for years that the rates are about to spike back up. Of course, interest rates will rise back up, at some point. We need to be vigilant about that. But this hasn’t happened over the full four year period since the onset of the Great Recession. This enables the U.S. government to maintain stimulus levels of spending, to get the economy onto a healthy growth trajectory. In other words, we have no reason to submit to an austerity agenda now. We should expect Jacob Lew to at least state the obvious here: that the deficit hawks have been wrong about an impending interest rate spike for four years running.

Fact #3: Current large government deficits are due to the recession, not out-of-control spending.

This is so obvious it should be barely worth mentioning. But simple facts are ignored repeatedly in the fiscal deficit debates. No doubt during the Lew hearings, there will be more discussion about the current crisis being due to the 47 percent freeloading population who, as Mitt Romney put it after his defeat, “want stuff” from the government. As we see in Figure 3, the government’s fiscal deficit spiked at 10.1 percent of GDP in 2009, immediately after the onset of the recession.

But does anybody want to seriously claim that the pattern of fiscal deficits that we see in Figure 3 is due to the fact that people didn’t want too much stuff as of 2007 or 2008, then all of the sudden, that demand for stuff soared in 2009, which was just coincidentally exactly when the Wall Street crash brought the economy to its knees?

The deficit has fallen modestly since 2009, to 8.5 percent of GDP in 2012. But the single most important thing we can do to lower the fiscal deficit further is to push unemployment down. This will generate increased government revenues with people paying more in income and sales taxes, and it will reduce government payments on unemployment insurance and supplemental aid for health care and family support. The U.S. has the capacity to pursue a stimulus agenda now quite easily, precisely because interest rates and interest payments to creditors remain historically low.

It shouldn’t be any stretch at all for Jacob Lew to acknowledge these three simple, irrefutable points. But will he do it? My guess is that he will not. If I am right in this guess, it will provide only further evidence as to the dismal state of the economic policy debate in official Washington, including Democrats like Lew here as well as Republicans.

© 2013 Political Economy Research Institute (PERI)

Robert Pollin, a professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, is co-author of Green Recovery: A Program to Create Good Jobs and Start Building a Low-Carbon Economy.

A Modest Proposal for Jacob Lew: Acknowledge Three Simple Facts about U.S. Fiscal Reality

In a reasonable world, in which we recognized the culpability of big-time D.C. politicians and bureaucrats who allowed Wall Street hyper-speculation to run wild and eventually cause the 2008-09 crash and Great Recession, Jacob Lew would be understood as a terrible choice as President Obama’s second-term Treasury Secretary, replacing Timothy Geithner. The outstanding journalist Robert Sheer gives us the basic background in a recent Nation article. Sheer writes:

I suppose that he can’t be much worse than Timothy Geithner, but that should be scant cause for cheer over the news that the president has nominated Jack Lew as Treasury secretary. Both championed the financial deregulation craze of the Clinton administration, and both are acolytes of Robert Rubin, the former Clinton Treasury secretary who unfettered Wall Street greed and then took his own considerable cut of the action.

But because we are not living in a reasonable world, at least in terms of D.C.-insider debates on economic policy, Lew’s nomination apparently faces opposition from Republicans because he appears insufficiently committed to an austerity budget that could push the economy back into recession while also devastating spending for Social Security, education, health care, family support, and unemployment insurance.

It is clear that debate over the fiscal deficit and austerity will dominate Lew’s confirmation hearings and at least his initial period in office, if he ends up getting confirmed. But without pursuing any deep explorations about who should be taxed more or less, or whether 47 percent of U.S. citizens are indeed freeloaders, I would just propose that Lew be willing to recognize three sets of very simple, irrefutable facts about the current U.S. fiscal condition. Here they are:

Fact #1: The U.S. government is not facing a fiscal crisis.

In any common sense meaning of the term “fiscal crisis,” we would be referring to the government’s inability to make its forthcoming payments to its creditors. By that common sense definition, the U.S. federal government is in just about the best shape it has ever been. Figure 1 below tells the story.

According to the most recent data from the third quarter of 2012 (which we term “2012.3”), the federal government spent 7.7 percent of its total expenditures on interest to its creditors. As the figure shows, that figure is less than half of the average figure under the full 12 years of Republican Presidents Reagan and Bush, when the government paid, on average, 16.8 percent of the total budget to cover interest payments. Right now, as we see, government interest payments are at near historic lows, not highs. As Treasury Secretary-designate, Lew needs to just state this obvious, and highly relevant point. To my knowledge, it has been heretofore completely left out of the insider-D.C. fiscal cliff debates, by Lew, Obama, and Geithner, to say nothing of the Republicans.

Fact #2: Interest rates on government bonds are at historic lows.

Figure 2 tells this story, which is well-known, but is not being given proper recognition in the deficit debates. As the figure shows, at the end of 2012, the U.S. government was borrowing at 0.7 percent on its 5-year Treasury Bonds.

It is precisely because the federal government can borrow so cheaply that our interest payments are corresponding low. Deficit hawks—economists and politicians alike—have been insisting for years that the rates are about to spike back up. Of course, interest rates will rise back up, at some point. We need to be vigilant about that. But this hasn’t happened over the full four year period since the onset of the Great Recession. This enables the U.S. government to maintain stimulus levels of spending, to get the economy onto a healthy growth trajectory. In other words, we have no reason to submit to an austerity agenda now. We should expect Jacob Lew to at least state the obvious here: that the deficit hawks have been wrong about an impending interest rate spike for four years running.

Fact #3: Current large government deficits are due to the recession, not out-of-control spending.

This is so obvious it should be barely worth mentioning. But simple facts are ignored repeatedly in the fiscal deficit debates. No doubt during the Lew hearings, there will be more discussion about the current crisis being due to the 47 percent freeloading population who, as Mitt Romney put it after his defeat, “want stuff” from the government. As we see in Figure 3, the government’s fiscal deficit spiked at 10.1 percent of GDP in 2009, immediately after the onset of the recession.

But does anybody want to seriously claim that the pattern of fiscal deficits that we see in Figure 3 is due to the fact that people didn’t want too much stuff as of 2007 or 2008, then all of the sudden, that demand for stuff soared in 2009, which was just coincidentally exactly when the Wall Street crash brought the economy to its knees?

The deficit has fallen modestly since 2009, to 8.5 percent of GDP in 2012. But the single most important thing we can do to lower the fiscal deficit further is to push unemployment down. This will generate increased government revenues with people paying more in income and sales taxes, and it will reduce government payments on unemployment insurance and supplemental aid for health care and family support. The U.S. has the capacity to pursue a stimulus agenda now quite easily, precisely because interest rates and interest payments to creditors remain historically low.

It shouldn’t be any stretch at all for Jacob Lew to acknowledge these three simple, irrefutable points. But will he do it? My guess is that he will not. If I am right in this guess, it will provide only further evidence as to the dismal state of the economic policy debate in official Washington, including Democrats like Lew here as well as Republicans.

© 2013 Political Economy Research Institute (PERI)

Robert Pollin

Robert Pollin, a professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, is co-author of Green Recovery: A Program to Create Good Jobs and Start Building a Low-Carbon Economy.

Stewart vs Krugman and the Religion of Austerity

Context: As yet there are no context links for this item.

Bio

William K. Black, author of THE BEST WAY TO ROB A BANK IS TO OWN ONE, teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC). He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007. He has taught previously at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University, where he was also the distinguished scholar in residence for insurance law and a visiting scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Black was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the FSLIC, SVP and general counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and senior deputy chief counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement. Black developed the concept of "control fraud" frauds in which the CEO or head of state uses the entity as a "weapon." Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined. He recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives and served as an expert for OFHEO in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae's former senior management.

Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore. And welcome to this week's edition of The Black Financial and Fraud Report with Bill Black, who now joins us from Kansas City.

Bill is an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. He's a white-collar criminologist, a former financial regulator, and author of the book The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One. Thanks for joining us, Bill.BILL BLACK, ASSOC. PROF. ECONOMICS AND LAW, UMKC: Thank you.JAY: So you've been talking in many of our interviews and you've been writing about what you thought was the likelihood of a coming grand betrayal, in other words, President Obama making deals for cuts to the social safety net and various other kinds of austerity measures, as part of a deal dealing to get the fiscal cliff done, and then to get the debt ceiling deal done. But President Obama recently has been saying he's not going to, he says, negotiate under the gun of the debt ceiling. So isn't that what you want to hear?BLACK: Well, it may be. I certainly agree that you certainly shouldn't make concessions to people who engage in extortion, 'cause if you do, they'll simply extend the debt limit for only a very short time period, and they'll keep coming back, and it'll be the death of 1,000 cuts. So Obama, if he has any competence as a negotiator, should be refusing to give in to the extortion.Problem is that he's been engaged in unilateral disarmament as a negotiator leading up to these talks. He had a couple of ways, clear ways, that he could have completely defused what Donald Trump called his "nuclear weapon" of threatening to use the debt limit to extort concessions from Obama. One is the requirement under the Fourteenth Amendment to pay U.S. debt, and the second was the idea of minting this $1 trillion platinum coin.JAY: Okay. Let me just ask you about the coin thing, 'cause John Stewart on The Daily Show went after Paul Krugman—~~~JOHN STEWART, HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: If somebody's ruining their brand with a $1 trillion coin idea, I don't think it's the non-economist. [snip] So I stand by our research on the topic, the due diligence, and my ignorant conclusion that a $1 trillion coin minted to allow the president to circumvent the debt ceiling, however arbitrary that may be, is a stupid [bleep] idea.~~~JAY: —'cause Krugman apparently in one of his articles took this as a serious idea that he could do this, and Stewart was kind of ridiculing him about it. I mean, this is a serious thing he could do. I mean, do you think it's a legitimate policy alternative? And let's explain to everybody this is the idea the Treasury mints a $1 trillion coin, deposit it—the Fed mints it, is that it? Who mints this coin, anyway?BLACK: The Mint mints the coin.JAY: The Mint mints the coin. Under whose direction? Treasury Department.BLACK: Under the Treasury, and which is to say the president's direction. And they could—and the law expressly says you can make it in whatever denomination you want. So if people are trying to extort you using the debt limit, make it a $1 trillion coin, or $2 trillion, $4 trillion. It doesn't matter. And then you deposit it at the Federal reserve, and, poof!, all of the leverage goes away by the House Republicans and the Tea Party in particular that's trying to use this nuclear weapon of extortion where they hold hostage the U.S. economy. So it was actually a very good idea. And, you know, it would have required all of about $0.80 worth of platinum—that's literally how much platinum would have been required, because you just make it a clad, you know, coin. And for reasons that, you know, make perfect sense as a humorist, you know, John Stewart's had a lot of fun with this. And then Paul Krugman, I think, made the tactical mistake of playing in John Stewart's garden by saying, hey, this is, you know, a serious idea, and you didn't research it at all; it just sounded funny to you, so you made fun of it. And, you know, John Stewart says, yes, that's what we do; we make fun of ideas. But then Stewart added: and obviously it's a stupid idea. Well, no, obviously it isn't a stupid idea. And if Stewart knew more about economics, he wouldn't think it was a silly idea. But, you know, he is a humorist.JAY: But that being said, President Obama, I think, has said he won't do it.BLACK: Well, Obama has said he won't do either of these things that would remove the leverage of the Tea Party to extort America and threaten to destroy our economy. So that's really completely imprudent on Obama's part. When you have somebody like the Tea Party threatening the U.S. economy and you have the ready ability to defuse that nuclear weapon, you should use that authority. And so this is at best an irresponsible action.JAY: Now, is this partly because Obama knows that the corporate backers of the Tea Party, for example, the Koch brothers, don't want this to happen, in the sense they don't want another paralyzed economy, they don't want the debt ceiling legislation not to be enacted, and so that Obama's kind of calling their bluff?BLACK: I wish that were true. I mean, you can certainly see a much harder politician saying this is just going to hurt the Republican brand, that they're going to threaten to ruin the U.S. economy, and if they ever did it, in fact it would cause such economic devastation that it might destroy the Republican Party. So that, of course, is a possibility, that Obama is that, you know, strategic and trying to bait the Republicans into doing their worst, with the idea that it will hurt the Republican brand.Another possibility, though, of course, is that he wants the excuse to give in. And remember, we just had him propose to make concessions to the Republicans in which he was going to make very sharp cuts in social spending, and sharp cuts in the safety net as well. And we were saved only by Harry Reid, who took the Obama instrument of surrender and literally threw it in the fireplace and burned it up rather than to make that proposal. And before that, in the broader discussions in the fiscal cliff, Obama was very much in favor of an austerity package—back in July 2011 and November 2011, Obama was very much in terms of an austerity package. And even now, Obama is saying, once we get past this extension of the debt limit, we're open to doing the grand betrayal. So I think all he's saying is, I'm going to fight you on the debt extension, but then I'll give you the deal anyway. The Republicans, of course, are saying that they are going to demand austerity as the price of doing anything on the debt limit.And so the column I just did today looked at what were the—you know, how did we get here? How did this austerity idea that has repeatedly caused recessions and depressions, where did it come from in recent times? And it turns out it's the Pete Peterson Institute. And Pete Peterson, of course, is the Republican billionaire who's said that he's going to spend his fortune trying to unwind the safety net in America, that he wants a combination of lower taxes and dramatically reduced social spending, and then, you know, to really go after—his ultimately goal, he has said, is to privatize Social Security. And, of course, this is the great dream of Wall Street in terms of their fees.So I look back, and the Pete Peterson Institute is the place—and it still employs the senior fellow, an economist named John Williamson, a Brit, at least originally, who proposed the Washington consensus. So I went and looked at the original document, which he published in 1990—it was a speech he actually gave in 1989—in which he coined the phrase Washington consensus, 'cause, of course, there'd been a lot of reinventing history in his writing since. The original piece is entirely in the context of the Latin American debt crisis, and it starts out right at the first paragraph and says, hey, here's the deal: we're going to give some delay in the South American debt, Latin American debt, and in return we're going to require them to agree to strong conditionality, which is code for whatever we tell them to do, right? And the very first thing on his list—and he called it central to the whole idea of the Washington consensus was austerity.So austerity, deregulation, privatization, the whole neoliberal agenda—although he objects to that term—is there in the first document as a way of forcing Latin American nations to agree to a completely new governance structure imposed by Washington, D.C., for the benefit of American banks and the IMF to collect debts from Latin America.Now, that of course was a terrible experience in much of Latin America and accounts for why we have so many Latin American leaders elected over the last ten years on a platform of rejecting the Washington consensus—in other words, elect me 'cause I am going to fight against the Washington consensus. Go forward in time and this is the same mindset that caused Europe to adopt austerity. And I have another recent column about, you know, Germany has just announced that in the fourth quarter, growth went sharply negative, probably by 0.5 percent, which is a lot. That would be, like, the equivalent, if you straight-lined it out, of -2 percent growth for a year. And the Eurozone has been as a whole forced into recession. This news on Germany means that that recession is getting far worse in the Eurozone. And as I've stressed before, places like Spain, Italy, and Greece have Great Depression levels of unemployment. And so we have an idea, a terrible idea, austerity, that makes recessions worse, that creates Great Depression levels of unemployment in many countries, that will not die, no matter how much damage it causes to the world. And, of course, when really bad ideas refuse to die, even though they're proven to be bad ideas time after time, then you know you're dealing with dogma, not with science. So that which is called neoliberal economics is one of the only areas that I know of that purports to be a science in which we have gone dramatically downhill in the science content over the last 50 years, such that it isn't a science at all anymore, it's a weird religion of austerity that actually takes pleasure in causing suffering in other nations.JAY: Alright. Thanks a lot for joining us, Bill.BLACK: Thank you.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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An Antipoverty Contract for 2013?

This past year I’ve had the opportunity to cover the antipoverty movement—and I do believe it’s a movement—it’s just a little too much of a well-kept secret right now. (Photo via equityblog.org)

But I think in 2013, the people and groups at the forefront of antipoverty thinking and action are poised to reach a much wider audience, and gain far greater popular support.

That’s in part because the movement is led by organizations and individuals who have been fighting poverty for decades, and they offer solutions that are grounded in empirical data and the every day experiences of millions of working Americans and families.

In contrast, the opposition to antipoverty reform relies largely on tired stereotypes, myths, and prejudices—that low-income people are lazy and don’t want to work; that they only want handouts, or to live off of welfare; that antipoverty policies have failed; and, most recently, that we can’t afford these investments. 

But an economy that is short on opportunity and concentrates wealth in the hands of a few is coming into focus. The interests of low-income people and a shrinking middle-class are converging—everyone wants fair pay, a shot at a good education, and an economy defined by opportunity and upward mobility.

People are beginning to recognize that we have a proliferation of low wage work— over 25 percent of the jobs in the nation pay less than the poverty line for a family of four, and 50 percent pay less than $34,000 a year.  It’s no wonder that 28 percent of all workers last year earned wages below the poverty line, and that more than 70 percent of low-income families and half of all families in poverty were working in 2011.  (Low-income defined as living on less than 200 percent of the poverty line, or less than approximately $36,000 annually for a family of three—which now constitutes 106 million people, more than 1 in 3 Americans; poverty defined as living on less than $18,000 annually for a family of three, which now describes more than 46 million Americans.)  People are looking for answers.

Currently, the antipoverty movement is largely in sync as it tries to protect programs that are vital to basic human needs during the fiscal debate.  But I think there are things it can do in 2013—after the budget debate—to reach a wider audience and bring more people into its fold.

One possible change—or more like a tweak: many seem to focus on the lack of will in our political leadership to fight poverty; instead the primary focus might be on what the movement itself is doing to create political will. 

What is it doing to make itself more visible?  How is it creating new relationships between low-income and higher-income people? At any given conference on poverty-related issues, are the people who know poverty first hand presenting, leading, educating, and organizing?  At a Congressional or local hearing on food stamps, TANF, SSI, or childcare—is the movement doing whatever it can to ensure that the people who have actually experienced the system are testifying?  Are the more “white collar” organizations in the movement going into low-income communities to join people and groups who are organizing on the ground?  Are these organizations showing up and also providing resources to protect homes, strengthen schools and neighborhoods, and stand with low-wage workers for better jobs?  How are we coming together—rich, poor, and in between—and how are we working in silos?  How are we speaking—or failing to speak—with a unified voice? 

I also believe if the movement can coalesce around a simple, clear and concise antipoverty agenda—an Antipoverty Contract for 2013—it can engage new audiences and grow significantly.  Choose four or five key policies that are easily grasped and in sync with most people’s values, and forge new alliances around them.  Whether or not the contract includes a group’s particular issue, hopefully groups will take a leap of faith and help push it forward, knowing that it might lead to a stronger movement and broader and deeper reforms down the road.

Below is one possible Antipoverty Contract for 2013.  I have no idea if these are the right choices—and there are some notable absences—on full employment, housing and education, to name a few.

But I hope this draft serves as a conversation starter among organizations, community groups, and people at the forefront of these fights—and that a core might emerge to coalesce and organize around a clear, focused antipoverty contract this year that might serve as a compelling organizing tool.

Raise the Minimum Wage

Americans generally believe that people who work hard should be able to pay for the basics, including food, housing, healthcare, and education.

As Peter Edelman notes in his book, So Rich, So Poor, for most of the 1960s and 70s the minimum wage paid enough to lift a family of three above the poverty line, about $18,000 today.  Not so anymore.   It has been raised only three times in the past thirty years and now stands at $7.25 per hour, which results in sub-poverty earnings of approximately $15,000 for a year-round, full-time employee.

The minimum wage for tipped workers is even worse—a stunning $2.13 per hour, and it’s been locked there since 1991.  As a result, food industry servers in the US are three times more likely than the general workforce to be paid sub-poverty wages and twice as likely to need food stamps.

If Congress had indexed the minimum wage to inflation—as they did for, say, individual campaign contribution limits or the new estate tax threshold—it would be $10.58 per hour today. 

Of course, any attempt to raise the wage floor is met with claims from opponents that it will result in massive job losses.  This has been shown repeatedly to be complete bunk.  Further, a recent report by the National Employment Law Project found that 66 percent of low-wage employees work for large companies, not small businesses, and that more than 70 percent of the biggest low-wage employers have fully recovered from the recession and are enjoying strong profits.

The Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2012, introduced by Senator Tom Harkin and Representative George Miller, would raise the federal minimum wage to $9.80 by 2014, index it to inflation, and boost annual earnings to $19,600—above the poverty line for a family of three. It would also raise the tipped minimum wage to $6.85 over five years, and it would be fixed to 70 percent of the full minimum wage.

The Economic Policy Institute estimates the Harkin-Miller proposal would generate more than $25 billion in new consumer spending, which would lead to the creation of more than 100,000 new full-time jobs. It would also increase wages for nearly 30 million Americans—roughly one-fifth of the workforce—because raising the wage floor improves pay for workers who earn at or just above the minimum wage.

Paid sick and family leave for all workers

Americans know that someone should not have to choose between their own health—or caring for a sick child or relative—and a job.  They believe that paid sick days are “a basic worker’s right.”

More than 40 percent of people in the private sector workforce—including 81 percent of low-wage workers—don’t receive a single paid sick day.  Millions more lack paid leave to care for a sick child or family member. Nearly 25 percent of workers polled said that they have lost a job or were told they would lose a job for taking time off to deal with a personal or family illness.

The US is virtually alone among other high-income countries in not setting a minimal standard for paid sick days, and is in the minority in not providing paid leave to care for a family member. For families in or near poverty, this is especially critical, since a few days’ lost pay makes the struggle to provide the basics—like food—that much harder.

Across demographic and political backgrounds, 75 percent of Americans favor a law providing a “minimum number” of paid sick days for all workers, including 69 percent who strongly favor providing workers with 7 paid sick days per year.

The Healthy Families Act would allow workers in businesses with 15 or more employees to earn up to seven job-protected paid sick days each year—to recover from their own illnesses, access preventative care, or provide care for a sick family member. 

This would be a significant leap forward in protecting all workers and their families.

Affordable Child Care for Working Families

Americans believe that parents should be able to work without spending exorbitant amounts on childcare. 

Half in Ten recently reported that the average cost of full-time child care ranges from $3,600 to $18,200 annually per child.  Since there are 7.8 million families with children under age 6 that live below 200 percent of the poverty line—on less than about $36,000 annually for a family of three—that’s just unacceptable (and it’s unacceptable for the middle-class too). 

Edelman reports that federal child care assistance currently reaches about one in seven children who qualify for it, the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) puts the number at one in six—either way it’s bleak.  Last year, only 1.7 million children received a federal child care subsidy, and Helen Blank, director of Childcare and Early Learning at NWLC, predicted that the number would fall to 1.5 million—the fewest children served since 1998.

The economy can’t afford this lack of investment in working people and children.

“Child care plays two critical roles that support our economy,” said Blank.  “It helps children access the high-quality early learning environments they need to succeed, and it helps parents work.”

In fact, in 2010 poverty rates for families headed by a single mother dropped from 40.7 percent to 14 percent when the mother had full-time, year-round employment—and child care is key to that equation.   Research shows that low-income mothers who receive childcare subsidies are more likely to be employed, work more hours, and work standard schedules compared to mothers without subsidies.

But instead of bolstering childcare assistance we are moving in the opposite direction.  It’s funded primarily through the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBC)—a fixed federal block grant so funding hasn’t risen with increased demand—and it now faces serious cuts.  Blank points to growing waiting lists—75,000 children in Florida, over 20,000 in Maryland, and 36,000 in Massachusetts.  She said that in North Carolina, about one out of four families on the state’s waiting list had lost or needed to quit their jobs while waiting for child care assistance.

Blank said child care needs a reauthorization with “significant new funds” so that children are in the kind of early-learning settings they need and deserve, and parents are able to work.  Peer countries are able to provide affordable childcare, why can’t we?  

End Childhood Hunger

Americans intuitively recognize that there is no excuse for any child to go hungry in the wealthiest nation in the history of forever.

In a 2011 poll commissioned by Tyson Foods and the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), 80 percent of respondents said they “strongly agree” with the statement that “in the United States of America, no one should go hungry.”

And yet it is our most vulnerable population—children— that are particularly suffering from hunger.  More than 16 million live in food insecure households, including nearly 25 percent of all children under age 6, despite the fact that the parents of hungry children typically have full-time jobs. Hunger has a tremendous impact on young children’s health, future potential, and cognitive, social and emotional development.

“There are lifelong implications,” says Dr. Mariana Chilton, associate professor at Drexel University School of Public Health and co-principal investigator for Children’s HealthWatch.  “Children in food insecure households have more health problems, are more likely to be hospitalized, and have developmental delays.  Young kids who are food insecure may arrive at kindergarten unprepared and never catch up with their peers.”

In 2009, FRAC laid out seven steps to ending childhood hunger by 2015 that are still relevant today.  They include a range of measures such as: raising the minimum wage; creating jobs with better wages for lower-income workers; improving the SNAP benefit (which averaged $4.30 per person per day in 2010); increasing participation in the school lunch, breakfast, after school and summer meal programs; improving WIC; engaging all federal agencies that interact with low-income children—whether it’s the DOJ which funds afterschool programs, Treasury which does outreach to families regarding the Earned Income Tax Credit, or others; and creating a national stream of grants and loans to make sure there are decent grocery stores in low-income communities. 

TANF: a path to good jobs for those who can work, assistance for those who can’t

Americans are told TANF is a program that leads to self-sufficiency.  It isn’t.

The Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program created in 1996 was touted as assistance that would help families on a path towards self-sufficiency.  It’s tough to overstate what a bill of goods the American people are being sold when both parties claim it has been a success.

If success means reducing the number of families with children in poverty that receive cash assistance—from 68 for every 100 families in poverty, to 27 for every 100 over the past 16 years—then, yeah it was successful.  But then why not just throw everyone off?

If it means not indexing TANF assistance to inflation, so that the benefit is now less than 30 percent of the poverty level in most states (less than $6000 annually for a family of three)… then it was successful. 

If it means keeping TANF recipients in any kind of job in order to receive this meager TANF benefit and no actual wage—whether it’s cleaning toilets, working in a cemetery, sweeping a county garage, or filing folders at an office—rather than helping people acquire the education and skills needed to secure family-supporting wages… then it was successful.

If it means cutting people with significant barriers to employment off of assistance because they reached an arbitrary, state-determined time limit or failed to meet a work requirement (no matter their individual circumstances)—then indeed the program has been successful.  It has directly contributed to the fact that 20.4 million people are now living in deep poverty—at less than half of the poverty line, or less than $9,000 for a family of three—up from 12.6 million people in 2000.  This number includes over 15 million women and children (nearly 10 percent of all children). 

If success means virtually 50 different welfare systems—for the purpose of “state flexibility”—so that Wyoming provides assistance to just 4 families for every 100 with children in poverty, Mississippi reaches 10, and California 66… then it was successful.

The antipoverty community should fight for a TANF that meets some basic standards regarding who should receive it; supports people in work or education programs that lead to family-supporting rather than dead-end jobs (including through a vehicle like the TANF Emergency Fund that placed 260,000 unemployed low-income parents and young adults in subsidized jobs during the recession and enjoyed bipartisan support from governors); and that addresses the needs of families living in deep poverty—which are usually headed by people with the most significant barriers to employment, including mental and physical health challenges, lack of a high school diploma, caring for a child with special needs, or living with domestic violence—rather than simply throwing families off of assistance.

One possible piece of legislation to rally around is Wisconsin Congresswoman Gwen Moore’s RISE Act.  Among the changes it calls for are adjusting each state’s block grant for inflation so it’s no longer frozen at 1996 funding levels; allowing education to count towards work requirements; providing childcare for all work-eligible parents; and prohibiting time limits of less than 60 months. 

Even if the antipoverty community were to win on subsidized jobs alone that would be a significant victory.

Conclusion

An Antipoverty Contract for 2013 wouldn’t guarantee a win on one or any of these five issues this year.  But it could engage people who currently aren’t being reached by the antipoverty movement; demonstrate why the movement’s policies are good for the entire nation; and offer an opportunity for people to work together for these and deeper reforms moving forward.  I would be interested in constructive comments below, as well as in emails to weekinpoverty@me.com.

© 2012 The Nation

Greg Kaufmann
Greg Kaufmann is a Nation contributor covering poverty in America.  He has been a guest on NPR, including Here & Now and Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane, and various local radio programs including the Matthew Filipowicz Show.  His work has also appeared on Common Dreams, Alternet, Tikkun.org, NPR.org, CBSNews.com, and MichaelMoore.com.  He previously worked as a staffer for the Kerry campaign, a copywriter and speechwriter for various Democrats in national and local politics, and as a screenwriter.  He serves as an advisor for the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

‘Unintended Consequences of Military Intervention’: Roots of Mali, Algeria Crisis Tied to US-Led War...

(Photograph by Issouf Sanogo/AFP/Getty)In Algeria, at least 22 foreign hostages remained unaccounted for in what has been described as one of the biggest international hostage crises in decades. Islamist militants opposed to the French air strikes in neighboring Mali seized a gas facility near the Libyan border. It remains unclear how many people died on Thursday when Algerian forces stormed the desert gas complex to free the workers. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has acknowledged it is now directly aiding France’s military operation in Mali.

In the interview below, Democracy Now! speaks with Emira Woods, co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, for insight and perspective:

© 2012 Democracy Now!

No, Actually, This Is What a Fascist Looks Like

(Image: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/truthout/4664344949/sizes/l/in/photostream/" target="_blank">Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: Thomas Hawk, Rob Shenk / flickr</a>)(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: Thomas Hawk, Rob Shenk / flickr)Whole Foods CEO, John Mackey, doesn’t know what a fascist is.

Speaking with NPR this week, multimillionaire Mackey tried to express how much he hates Obamacare. Back in 2009, he hated Obamacare so much that he called it “socialism.” But now, in 2013, Mackey thinks Obamacare is “fascism.”

“Technically speaking, [Obamacare] is more like fascism,” he said. “Socialism is where the government owns the means of production. In fascism, the government doesn’t own the means of production, but they do control it, and that’s what’s happening with our healthcare programs and these reforms.”

Mackey has since walked back this description saying he “regrets using that word now” because there’s “so much baggage attached to it.”

But, whether Mackey meant to or not, it’s about time someone injected the word fascism back into our political debate. Especially now that corporations wield more power today than they have in America since the Robber Baron Era.

First, let’s take on Mackey’s definitions of socialism and fascism, which he likely procured from the Google machine after typing in, “What are the differences between socialism and fascism?”

Yes, socialism encourages more democratic control of the economy. Or, if Mackey insists, more government ownership of the economy – in particular, ownership of the commons and natural resources.   

Fascism, on the other hand, is something completely different. Reporter Sy Mukherjee, who blogged about this story over at ThinkProgress.org notes, “Although fascist nations do often control their ‘means of production,’ Mackey seems to have forgotten that they usually utilize warfare, forced mass mobilization of the public, and politically-motivated violence against their own peoples to achieve their ends.”

The 1983 American Heritage Dictionary defined fascism as: "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."
Fascism originated in Italy, and Mussolini claims to have invented the word itself. It was actually his ghostwriter, Giovanni Gentile, who invented it and defined it in the Encyclopedia Italiana in this way: "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."

In other words, fascism is corporate government – a Libertarian’s wet dream. It’s a government in which the Atlas’s of industry are given free rein to control the economy, just how they’re regulated, how much they pay in taxes, how much they pay their workers. It should be noted here that, ironically, John Mackey describes himself as a Libertarian.  

In 1938, Mussolini finally got his chance to bring fascism to fruition. He dissolved Parliament and replaced it with the "Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni" - the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations. Members of the Chamber were not selected to represent particular regional constituencies, but instead to represent various aspects of Italian industry and trade. They were the corporate leaders of Italy.

Imagine if the House of Representatives was dissolved and replaced by a Council of America’s most powerful CEOs – the Kochs, the Waltons, the Blankfeins, the Dimons, the Mackeys, you get the picture.

Actually, that’s not too difficult to imagine, huh? But, that’d be similar to what Mussolini defined as fascism.

As we know, fascism was eventually defeated in World War 2. But just before the end of the war, with the fascists on the ropes, the Vice President of the United States at the time, Henry Wallace, penned an op-ed for the New York Times warning Americans about the creeping dangers of fascism – or corporate government.

He defined a fascist as, “those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion.”

Under that definition we can throw those CEOs who’ve decided to evade Obamacare’s mandate to provide health insurance to their employees, like New York City Applebee’s franchise owner Zane Terkel, Papa John’s CEO John Schnatter, and executives at Darden Restaurants.

Or, perhaps, Wallace is referring to the banksters at Goldman Sachs who knowingly evaded laws and sold investors “shitty deals” or scammed entire cities into bankruptcy or illegally foreclosed on thousands of Americans through fraudulently robo-signing all in the name of short term profits and all in the name of preserving their monopolistic, too-big-to-fail status.

Either way, evading laws meant to protect the public in order to pad your own pockets has become the name of the game in Corporate America today.

Wallace goes on to write, “The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism.”

Can anyone say Fox News, or the rest of the Conservative media complex? Or, those on the Right who divide working people and turn them against each other: makers versus takes, public sector workers versus private sector workers, and white people versus brown people.  

“They use every opportunity to impugn democracy,” wrote Wallace. Does that sound familiar after months of Republican efforts to disenfranchise large swaths of the electorate with voter suppression ID laws, as well as restrictions on early voting and voter registration in largely Democratic areas?

Or what about what Republicans in Pennsylvania are doing right now to rig the next Presidential election by changing how Electoral votes are counted in the state?

Wallace continues, “They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”

We often hear of free enterprise from the likes of Wall Street, Big Oil, and the defense industry. Yet these are the same corporations that also lobby to keep generous taxpayer subsidies, bailouts, and no-bid contracts in place that allow them to reign supreme over the markets and crush their smaller, more independent competition.

And the common man suffers as a result. Wages as a percentage of GDP are lower than they’ve ever been. Unionization rates are lower than they’ve ever been in more than a half-century. And yet, corporate profits as a percent of GDP are higher than they’ve ever been in American history.

At the time Wallace was writing this op-ed, he was confident that the fascists had been adequately held in check in America by the Roosevelt Administration. As he wrote, “Happily, it can be said that as yet fascism has not captured a predominant place in the outlook of any American section, class or religion.”

But, he went on to warn that in the future, “[Fascism] may be encountered in Wall Street, Main Street or Tobacco Road. Some even suspect that they can detect incipient traces of it along the Potomac.”

Sure enough, the bastions of fascism can be found on Wall Street. Main Street, which used to be lined with local independent businesses, is now lined with predatory, transnational giants. And along the Potomac, we find politicians who are more than happy to do the bidding of their corporate overlords.

Today in America, we are dangerously close to seeing Wallace’s fascistic, dystopic America come into fruition. We see the traces of it everywhere.

Unfortunately, too many Americans just didn’t have a word to define what’s happening. But, thanks to John Mackey, and thanks to the foresight of Vice President Henry Wallace, we do have the right word now: Fascism.

America’s “Lili-Pads” in Afghanistan and Central Asia: Pentagon to Increase the Number of “Small...

by  J. Nasibova

US have many small military bases in Central Asia and can add to them more, Professor of Anthropology, Central Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Indiana University, USA, Nazif M. Shahrani, told Trend.

“Since the first Gulf War of the 1990′s US security policy has been one described as the “Lily-Pad” policy of keeping small military presence in very large numbers of places around the world, but no large military bases in any particular area. The land based Lily-Pads are complemented by the US navy on the high Seas. Yes, US already has many small military contingents in Central Asia and may add to them, but will not ask for establishing long-term military bases in the region including in Afghanistan. With the widespread use of drones, long-range missiles and extremely mobile US military force, establishing large military bases are not cost effective, so small lily pads-i.e., a military foothold in various places in Central Asia will suffice”, Shahrani said.

Expert: US may extend number of small military bases in Central Asia after 2014

As he mentioned, most but not all of US troops will leave Afghanistan by 2014 for a number of reasons. First of all, the cost of keeping every American service men in Afghanistan is very high-estimated now at $1.2 million a year per soldier – and President Obama is searching for ways to reduce the cost to the US tax payers who are getting tired of the longest US war, especially in light of very unpromising accomplishment in Afghanistan during the last eleven years. More importantly the country is facing trillions of dollars budget deficit in the midst of economic crises.

According to Shahrani, the second reason is increasing cost of the Afghan war in blood-over 3000 dead so far in battle and some are killed by the so called “Blue on Green” (Afghan soldiers killing their US trainers). More importantly it is reported today that in 2012 suicide among US military personnel in Afghanistan has surged to the record number with some 349 US army personnel taking their own lives in Afghanistan. This number far exceeds American combat deaths according to Associated Press in Afghanistan during last year.

“The numbers of seriously injured, both physically and mentally, among the Afghan war casualties are also very high and they require long term care and there are estimates that the long-term cost of US-Afghan war may run more than two trillion dollars in decades to come,” the professor said.

“The third reason is that US want to Afghanize the war and that is why they have established security force of more than 350,000.00 for the Kabul regime. Now they have to take over from the US. Some Afghans, especially President Karzai wants reduction in the US troops because he will not be the President after 2014. If the conditions should deteriorate under his successor, he could then argue that his role as leader of the country was and is indispensable. He has always thought of himself and hardly ever of the country or the nation,” the professor mentioned.

According to Shahrani, in Afghanistan there are a range of reactions to the talk about US ending combat role for the US-ISAF/NATO forces and pulling out by the end of 2014. The range includes-denial by some that US will never completely leave the country or the region because of her own interest in CA; extreme anxiety by many that after US withdrawal Afghanistan government will fold and another round of regional proxy wars may return to Afghanistan and the region.

As he mentioned, these include women and the non-Pashtun ethnic groups in western central and northern parts of the country.

“However, the US and Europeans are unlikely to allow such a disaster from happening; and great many in Afghanistan whose expectation of the international community bringing better and more effective governance and economic reconstruction have been thoroughly crushed, they are disappointed and no longer see the presence of US and European armies and promises of any consequence to them,” Shahrani mentioned.

Currently, there are 50,000 U.S. servicemen in Afghanistan. In early May of last year, U.S. President Barack Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai signed a long-term strategic partnership between the two countries. The document provides for the signing of an agreement on safety, better known in diplomatic circles as the “protocol on troops.” It is this agreement that will govern the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan after 2014.

The author can be contacted at agency@trend.az

What’s the Cure for Shorter Lives and Poorer Health in America? Can You Say...

Harold Myerson, over at the Washington Post, points out a new report by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine contains some bad news about about the America’s health. The title pretty much says it all: “U.S. Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health.”  The summary of the report goes into more detail. 

The United States is among the wealthiest nations in the world, but it is far from the healthiest. Although life expectancy and survival rates in the United States have improved dramatically over the past century, Americans live shorter lives and experience more injuries and illnesses than people in other high-income countries. A growing body of research is call- ing attention to this problem, with a 2011 report by the National Research Council confirming a large and rising international “mortality gap” among adults age 50 and older. The U.S. health disadvantage cannot be attributed solely to the adverse health status of racial or ethnic minorities or poor people, since recent studies suggest that even highly advantaged Americans may be in worse health than their counterparts in other countries.

Either Billy Joel was onto something when he sang “Only the good die young,” or America’s health care system still has some serious problems. 

Compared to 16 other high-income “peer” countries America is almost always dead last (no pun intended). Every single one of these countries —  Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom — get more bang for their health care bucks than we do. We’re only tops in how much we spend on health care. (Well, that and violent deaths. We’re number one in that category too.)

What gives? Meyerson hones in on a likely factor.

But a funny thing happens to Americans’ life expectancy when they age. The U.S. mortality rate is the highest of the 17 nations until Americans hit 50 and the second-highest until they hit 70. Then our mortality ranking precipitously shifts: By the time American seniors hit 80, they have some of the longest life expectancies in the world.

 

What gives? Have seniors discovered the Fountain of Youth? Do U.S. geriatricians outpace all our other physicians?

 

Part of the answer is Darwinian: Those Americans who have been less able to access reliable medical care, maintain good diets and live in neighborhoods that are not prey to gun violence have disproportionately died off before age 80. That isn’t natural selection but social selection — the survival of the economically fittest in a nation that rations longevity by wealth.

 

But the larger part of the answer is that at age 65, Americans enter a health-care system that ceases to be exceptional when compared with the systems in the other 16 nations studied. They leave behind the private provision of medical coverage, forsake the genius of the market and avail themselves of universal medical insurance. For the first time, they are beneficiaries of the same kind of social policy that their counterparts in other lands enjoy. And presto, change-o: Their life expectancy catches up with and eventually surpasses those of the French, Germans, Britons and Canadians.

 That, as Meyerson points out, puts the defenders of private health insurance in a bit of a bind. That bind may get even tighter. Thanks to a bill introduced by Reps. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the “public option” is back in the mix.

 A group of House Democrats are surfacing the health care public option as a way of reducing the deficit, revisiting an approach suggested by President Obama’s debt commission in 2010.

 

According to a Tuesday statement from Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s (D-Ill.) office, Schakowsky, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), and 43 other House members have introduced the Public Option Deficit Reduction Act, which would “would offer the choice of a publicly-run health insurance plan, an option that would save more than $100 billion over 10 years.”

 

“As Congress looks to reduce the deficit, it is important to remember the one policy that could save billions of dollars is the public option. I hope that my colleagues will take a fresh look at this in the months ahead,” Waxman said in the statement.

 

The public option, hotly debated during negotiations over Obama’s health care reform law, was left out of the legislation after it repeatedly failed to gain enough traction in Congress.

The statement from Shakowsky’s office points out that a public option would cut the country’s health care spending by more than $100 million, and lower health care costs for families by putting pressure on private insurers to lower their rates in order to compete. Not only would it save money, but according to this report, it would also save lives.

Let’s face it, we weren’t really done with health care after the Affordable Care Act, and this report tells us that we’ve still got a long way to go. 

Nixon Went to China, Who Will Go to Iran?

Iranians are now beginning to die for lack of medicines kept out by U.S.-imposed sanctions.  I recently questioned (and videoed) former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright about her notorious defense of sanctions that killed over a half million young Iraqi children.  She said she'd been wrong to say what she'd said.  She did not comment on the appropriateness of what she'd done.  I asked her if what we were doing to Iran was also wrong, and she replied, "No, absolutely not."

So, somehow it is good and proper for us to be killing Iranian children -- although perhaps not to be talking about it.

I suspect that some of the reasons why we imagine there is a greater good being served by such actions are the same reasons no U.S. president will go to Iran in the manner in which Nixon went to China.  Of course, the common political wisdom in the United States holds that the president who went to China had to be a Republican.  By the same logic, the president who goes to Iran must be a militarist power-mad servant of the corporate oligarchy from the Republican party and not a militarist power-mad servant of the corporate oligarchy from the Democratic party.  That wouldn't do at all.  And yet, U.S. conduct toward Iran has varied little from Bush to Clinton to Bush Jr. to Obama/Clinton, H.  A hopeless spiral of delusional counter-productive approaches toward the Islamic Republic of Iran needs to be broken by a 180 degree turn, and it won't make much substantive difference who does it, as long as it doesn't come too late.

Whether the authors intended exactly that or not, the above is the lesson I take away from an excellent new book by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett called "Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran."

It has been U.S. policy for decades not to engage with Iran, and -- misleading rhetoric notwithstanding -- it still is.  "More than any of his predecessors, in fact, Obama has given engagement a bad name, by claiming to have reached out to Tehran and failed when the truth is he never really tried." 

The Leveretts trace official U.S. policy on Iran to a trio of myths: the myths of irrationality, illegitimacy, and isolation. 

IRRATIONALITY:

The evidence of irrationality on the part of the Iranian people or the Iranian government is very slim.  I can find much more irrationality in the U.S. public and government.  Iranians, in fact, are better at distinguishing between our people and our government than we seem to be at making that distinction on their side.  Iran has funded Hizballah and HAMAS, and we call those groups terrorists.  But we call any militants opposing Pentagon interests terrorists.  Iranian leaders have made comments verging on anti-Semitic (and routinely distorted into outrageous anti-Semitism), but nothing approaching the things Anwar Sadat or Mahmoud Abbas said or wrote before they were deemed rational actors with whom the U.S. and Israel could (and did) work. 

Iran's policies have been defensive, not aggressive.  Iran has not threatened to attack or attacked others.  Iran has refused to retaliate against chemical weapons attacks or terrorism or our shooting down a commercial jet or our funding efforts within Iran to manipulate its elections or our training of militants seeking to overthrow Iran's government.  Iran has refused to develop chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.  Unlike Britain, Russia, or the United States, when provoked Iran has refused to invade Afghanistan, choosing wise reflection over hot-tempered anger.  Look at the polling across the Middle East: people fear the United States and Israel, not Iran. 

Iran's approach to the United States over the years has been rational and forbearant.  In 1995 the Islamic Republic of Iran offered its first foreign oil development contract to the United States, which turned it down.  Iran aided President Clinton by shipping arms to Bosnia, which Clinton turned around and condemned Iran for when the story became public.  In 2001, the President of Iran requested permission to pray for 911 victims at the site of the World Trade Center and offered to assist in counterterrorism plans, but was turned down.  Iran assisted the United States with its invasion of Afghanistan and was labeled "evil" in return.  The current president of Iran wrote long friendly letters to President Bush and President Obama, both of whom ignored them except to allow their staffs to publicly mock them.  The Iranian government repeatedly proposed substantive dialogue, offering to put everything on the table, including its nuclear energy program, and was turned down.  The Obama administration gave Turkey and Brazil terms it was sure Iran wouldn't agree to; Iran agreed to them; and the White House rejected them, choosing instead to grow outraged at Brazil and Turkey.

Iran tried to believe in the change in Obama's (no doubt domestically intended) rhetoric, but never encountered any substance, only fraud and hostility.  That Iran attempts civil relations with a nation surrounding and threatening it, imposing deadly sanctions on it, funding terrorism within its borders, and publicly mocking its sincere approaches is indication of either rationality or something almost Christ-like (I'm inclined to go with rationality).

ILLEGITIMACY:

War is immoral, illegal, and counter-productive.  That doesn't change if the people bombed are living or suffering under an illegitimate government.  Here in the United States an unaccountable Supreme Court rewrites our basic laws, unverifiable privately owned and operated machines count our votes, candidates are chosen by wealth, media coverage is dolled out by a corporate cartel, presidents disregard the legislature, and high crimes and misdemeanors are not prosecuted.  And yet, nonetheless -- amazing to tell -- we'd rather not be bombed.  I don't give a damn whether this scholar or that scholar believes the Iranian government is legitimate or not; I don't want any human beings killed in my name with my money.

That being said, common claims of illegitimacy for Iran's government are myths.  Western experts have predicted its imminent collapse (as well as its imminent development of nukes) for decades.  Iranian elections are far more credible than U.S. ones.  A government need not be secular to be legitimate.  I might favor secular governments, but I'm not an Iranian.  I'm a citizen of a government that has been seeking to control Iran's government for over a half century since overthrowing it in 1953; I don't get to have a voice.  Iranians are gaining in rights, in education, in health, in life expectancy (the opposite in many ways of the course we are on in the United States).  Iranian women used to be permitted to dress as they liked but not to pursue the education and career they liked.  Now that has largely been reversed.  Iranian women are guaranteed paid maternity leave that outstrips our standards.  Iran's approach to drugs is more rational than our own, its approach to homosexuality more mixed than we suspect, its investment in science cutting edge. 

All of that being said, the Iranian government abuses its people in ways that need to be addressed by its people and should have been directly addressed by the Leveretts' book.

I also want to quibble with the Leveretts' account of the 1979 revolution in light of the views of some who were there at the time.  I'm not convinced that Khomeini led and directed the revolution from the start.  I'm willing to believe that secular pro-democracy activists did not represent the views of all Iranians.  There's no question that significant support swung to Khomeini and the mullahs who claimed power.  But Khomeini's supposed leadership was news in the West before it was ever heard of in Tehran.  The Shah was not opposed for his secularism, but for his surveillance, imprisonment, torture, murder, greed, expropriation of wealth, and subservience to foreigners.  The Leveretts admit that Khomeini originally proposed a government with less power for himself and then revised his plans, but they claim that he only did so in response to secularists' insistence that he hold no power at all.  Not the strongest defense of tyranny I've ever encountered. 

The authors then cite a public referendum of December 2-3, 1979, in which, they say, "the new constitution was approved by 98 percent of participating voters."  Sounds impressive, right?  Guess what choices the voters were offered: an Islamic republic or the Shah!  Of course they chose the Islamic republic! But to turn around and claim that 98% voted against a secular republic is misleading.  During the 2003-2013 U.S. war on Iraq, a U.S. Democratic-Party group called MoveOn.org polled its membership.  Did they support House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's plan for more war or President George W. Bush's?  Of course, they overwhelmingly chose Pelosi's.  MoveOn then turned around and claimed that their people opposed Congresswoman Barbara Lee's proposal to end the war.  Such votes should be given no more dignity than they deserve.

How the government of the 1980s came to be does not tell us everything we should know about today's government, but nothing you could tell me about today's government would have any relevance to the morality of bombing the people of Iran.

ISOLATION:

The United States has sought to isolate Iran and failed dramatically, with Iran now chairing the Nonaligned Movement.  It has sought to use economic and other pressures to overthrow the government, and instead strengthened it.  In 2011, Obama opened a "virtual embassy" to propagandize the Iranian people for "regime change."  In 2012 it removed the terrorist designation for an opposition terrorist group called the MEK.  Imagine if Iran did such things to us, rather than just being Muslim or whatever it is that it's actually done to us.  The Leveretts present a long and unrelenting history of incompetence and irrationality . . . from the U.S. side.  They have been reduced, reasonably enough, to something that sounds ridiculous: longing for Richard Nixon.

Matalin: President Needs to be Less ‘Self-Reverential’ to Make Progress With Republicans

What is it with these Republicans who just can't stop themselves from coming just a hair shy of calling the President of the United States "uppity?" Last week, Bill-O was calling him "cocky" during his Talking Points Memo segment on Fox. Now we've got Lady McCheney Mary Matalin on Mrs. Greenspan's show calling him too "self-reverential" and "self-righteous" and that he wants Republicans to go along with him and pretend they care about doing their jobs and legislating, he'd better start acting nicer to them.

Andrea Mitchell reminded her that he didn't exactly have much good will from the other side, what with them immediately plotting on how to obstruct everything he tried to do from the day he got elected --during that now-famous meeting with Frank Luntz and Newt Gingrich. We also had Mitch McConnell out there just stating openly that his "single most important" goal was to make Barack Obama a one-term president. Matalin feigned ignorance and pretended she had no idea what Mitchell was talking about. She said the GOP leadership didn't attend meetings and the last time she checked, neither Luntz nor Gingrich were in office at the time of that meeting.

Thankfully, Mitchell did remind her that a good deal of the leadership was there, but that didn't stop her from going right back after President Obama and complaining that he wasn't talking nicely enough to those poor sensitive Republicans.

Here's a little reminder of just what went on during that meeting from James Wolcott: The Conspiracy to Commit Legislative Constipation:

In a scene reminiscent of the summit meeting of mob bosses in The Godfather, Republican House leaders were summoned by evil marshmallow and message-crafter Frank Luntz to hash out a strategy to cope with the defeat of their party in 2008 and the election of the newly inaugurated President Obama, according to Robert Draper's just published book Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives.

From a report on Draper's revelation by Ewen MacAskill in the Guardian UK (the bolding is mine):

During a lengthy discussion, the senior GOP members worked out a plan to repeatedly block Obama over the coming four years to try to ensure he would not be re-elected.

In his book, Draper opens with the heady atmosphere in Washington on the days running up to the inauguration and the day itself, which attracted 1.8 million to the mall to witness Obama being sworn in as America's first black president.

Those numbers contributed to a growing sense of unease among Republicans as much the defeat in the White House race the previous November. The 15 Republicans were in a sombre mood as they gathered at the Caucus Room in Washington, an upscale restaurant where a New York strip steak costs $51.

Attending the dinner were House members Eric Cantor, Jeb Hensarling, Pete Hoekstra, Dan Lungren, Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan and Pete Sessions. From the Senate were Tom Coburn, Bob Corker, Jim DeMint, John Ensign and Jon Kyl. Others present were former House Speaker and future – and failed – presidential candidate Newt Gingrich and the Republican strategist Frank Luntz, who organised the dinner and sent out the invitations.

The dinner table was set in a square at Luntz's request so everyone could see one another and talk freely. The session lasted four hours and by the end the sombre mood had lifted: they had conceived a plan. They would take back the House in November 2010, which they did, and use it as a spear to mortally wound Obama in 2011 and take back the Senate and White House in 2012, Draper writes.

"If you act like you're the minority, you're going to stay in the minority," said Keven McCarthy, quoted by Draper. "We've gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign."

The Republicans have done that, bringing Washington to a near standstill several times during Obama's first term over debt and other issues.

Their locked-shut buttocks will unclench of course should Mitt Romney be elected, at which point they'll be passing legislation like street hawkers handing out strip-club flyers. Every bill will be named after Reagan or some other sentimental favorite.

I don't know about anyone else, but I've about had it up to here with these Republicans and their supposed hurt feelings as an excuse for obstruction when they've disrespected President Obama and called him every name in the book for years. Matalin's pearl clutching is growing tiresome --to put it mildly.

Paul Krugman Explains the Keys to Our Recovery

Bill Moyers: Welcome. Just before the holidays, we asked you, our viewers, to recommend the one book you thought President Obama should read as he prepares himself for his second term in office. As ever, your suggestions were thoughtful, provocative and eclectic – from books by authors who have appeared as guests on this broadcast, to works by the late John Steinbeck and A. A. Milne, the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh. You can see a list at our website, BillMoyers.com.

Many of you asked for my choice, too. This is it – Paul Krugman's End This Depression Now! It's both prescription and warning: our current obsession with slashing the deficit and avoiding that well-known and worn fiscal cliff is killing us, Krugman writes, getting in the way of what really needs to be done – which is dedicating government to creating jobs and getting us back to full employment. He blames not only Congress but the White House.

Paul Krugman is professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University. Since 1999, he's been an op-ed columnist at The New York Times and now also writes a blog for the paper titled "The Conscience of a Liberal." According to the search engine Technorati, it's the most popular blog by an individual on the internet. Author or editor of some twenty books and more than 200 professional papers, Krugman is a thinker so esteemed and widely known in his field he's become an icon. Not only has he won the Nobel Prize in Economics, he's also the subject of this song by the balladeer Loudon Wainwright III...

Loudon Wainwright III: I read the New York Times that's where I get my news Paul Krugman's on the op-ed page that's where I get the blues 'Cause Paul always tells it like it is we get it blow by blow...

Bill Moyers: As if being immortalized by the blues isn't enough, there was even an unofficial campaign and petition in the last few days urging President Obama to make Paul Krugman the next Secretary of the Treasury. It was an honor, as Shakespeare would say, that Mr. Krugman dreams not of.

Paul Krugman, welcome.

Paul Krugman: Hi there.

Bill Moyers: So, like William Tecumseh Sherman you refuse to be drafted.

Paul Krugman: Well, you know, fortunately it hasn't come to that point. But I think I probably would.

Bill Moyers: But you remember what General Sherman said when there was a movement to run him for president. "I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected." That was the Sherman like statement you issued.

Paul Krugman: That's, well, I'm not quite up to Sherman's standards and I don't think I'm quite ready to lay waste to Georgia either. But a good, good man I admire actually.

Bill Moyers: But the grassroots campaign in your behalf, unofficial, was serious. I mean, over 235,000 people signed on. You broke their hearts. Any regrets?

Paul Krugman: No, because I probably have more influence than I, doing what I do now than I would if I were inside trying to, you know, do the court power games that come with any White House, even the best, which I don't think I'd be any good at. So no, this is fine. And what the president needs right now is he needs a hardnosed negotiator. And rumor has it that's what he's got, so.

Bill Moyers: In Jack Lew?

Paul Krugman: That's right. The president can't pass major new legislation. He can't formulate major new programs right now. What he has to do now is bargain down or ride over these crazy people in the Republican Party. And we what we need now is not deep thinking from the treasury secretary. If the president wants deep thinkers, he can call Joe Stiglitz, he can call other people. What he needs from the Treasury secretary is somebody who's going to be very effective at dealing with these wild men and making sure that nothing terrible happens.

Bill Moyers: I understand that Jack Lew has Depression art on his, the wall of his office, art done by the Works Progress Administration. Which would be a good sign for someone like you who believes the Depression is back.

Paul Krugman: That's, I have to say, the most reassuring thing I've heard about him. WPA, you know, they produced a lot of art, which I think it's almost inconceivable now. But also the WPA was one of the really good moments in American policy. In a time of economic disaster, hiring people, giving them jobs to do things that are good, much of which survives and is an important part of our physical planet today. This is great. And the fact that he thinks well of and admires what the WPA did, that's a very hopeful sign.

Bill Moyers: What could Jack Lew do as Treasury secretary that would make you think he's a kindred spirit?

Paul Krugman: Campaign against this austerity obsession. We're not going to get a big new stimulus package, much as I would like to see it. No, we're not going to get it this year, anyway. But I'd like to see him saying when somebody says, "Well, we need to slash here, we need to slash there." And he would say "Why would we want to be doing that now? That's actually going to hurt the economy."

Bill Moyers: But hasn't our economy changed so much since Franklin Roosevelt simply put people on the government payroll?

Paul Krugman: It's, economics, the underlying rules change a lot more slowly than people imagine. People look and they say, "Oh, you know, back then they were taking ocean liners and now we fly jet airplanes." Or, "Back then we didn't have a global economy." Actually, we did. It's a little bit fancier now. But the basic rules are not are not much changed. It takes hundreds of years for those to change a whole lot. And this is, I can pretty easily assemble a bunch of headlines from the 1930s and they will sound like they're right out of today's headlines. This is the same kind of animal that we confronted in the '30s. This is depression economics. And the nature of the solution is not really very different now from what it was then.

Bill Moyers: What do you mean, depression economics?

Paul Krugman: Well, two things really. One is, a recession is when the economy's going down. A depression is when the economy is down. So, you know, the U.S. economy was actually expanding through most of the 1930s, after a terrible big slump at the beginning and another slump later in the '30s. And then it was expanding in between. But we call that whole episode the Great Depression because it was all a period of high unemployment and a lot of suffering.

And, of course, we're in that now. It's not as bad as the Great Depression. You know, it's a great recommendation. Not as bad as the Great Depression. It's terrible. We have a persistently depressed economy, persistent lack of jobs. So in that sense, it's a depression. And there's also a more technical meaning. Depression economics is when the normal things you do to boost the economy, have the Federal Reserve cut interest rates a little bit, are no longer available or effective. It's a situation where the normal rules of what you-- of economic policy, have to be put on hold, and you really need to do extraordinary stuff.

Bill Moyers: Well, the Fed has kept the interest late very low. And it has made a big difference, has it?

Paul Krugman: I think it actually has. If they hadn't kept the interest rate low, things would be much, much worse. Meaning--

Bill Moyers: More people out to work.

Paul Krugman: That's right. We, you know, this is not as bad as the Great Depression. Again, our famous last words. But part of the reason is that the Fed did learn something from the 1930s. It's learned that raising interest rates to stabilize the price of gold is a really bad idea in times like this. But the trouble is that zero, which is as low as it can get, is not low enough. And we actually know pretty well what you need to do.

Bill Moyers: The other side of it is that people have been told so long, "Save money. Save money. Americans were not saving." Now if they save money, they make no money from their savings.

Paul Krugman: That's right. And, actually the truth is right now saving hurts us. It's because what, another way, yet another way to think about depression economics, depression economics is a situation where the total amount that people want to save is less than the amount that businesses are willing to invest. You can think of that as being the result, a lot of it is because of this overhang of personal household debt from the past.

We had a housing bubble that burst, leaving us with too much construction. We have a financial system that's disrupted. But all of that leads to the fact that there's, the amount that businesses are willing to invest is less than the amount that collectively we all want to save, including corporations that are trying to retain earnings.

Which means that we're awash in excess savings. And if you decide to save more, it's not actually going to help society. I mean, things add up. If there's a crucial, one crucial thing to understand about all this it is that the global economy, money moves around in a circle. And my spending is your income, and your spending is my income. And if all of us try to spend less because we want to save more, we don't succeed. All we end up doing is creating a global depression.

Bill Moyers: So your prescription in this book, and the book is an argument for the prescription, is that the government should spend more so that people can buy more. In other words, creating demand that will drive the economy. That's the chief argument in here.

Paul Krugman: That's right. There are some other things you can do. Debt relief, where you can do it, will help because it will make people able to spend more. There're some things that the, maybe the Federal Reserve can do, even though interest rates are zero. But the core thing, the thing that we know works, the thing that all the evidence of history says works in a situation like this is the private sector won't spend, government can step in and provide the spending that we need in order to keep this economy afloat.

Bill Moyers: As you know, there is an argument on the other side that says that Roosevelt, in spending in the '30s, did not really bring us out of the Depression. It was, and you acknowledge this in the book, the war, in which so much money was spent, you couldn't help but put people to work.

Paul Krugman: That's right. But the fact that it was a war that finally got the U.S. government to spend enough is not an argument against spending. It's an argument about politics. It's saying that then, as now, lots of people were saying, "Oh, it would be irresponsible to spend," and it wasn't until something external came along that the political restraints were released.

And then, we didn't, we actually were, we had recovered from the Great Depression before Pearl Harbor, because the U.S. economy really went to war in 1940. And presto. I mean, lots of people said, "Oh, spending more can't produce recovery." And then we started our military buildup because war had broken out in Europe. And suddenly, we had recovery.

I made it as a joke, but if we discovered a threat from space aliens and decided that to deal with that threat, we needed to actually, somehow or other we needed to do a lot of infrastructure spending. We needed to build roads and high-speed rail. We would have full employment.

Bill Moyers: By full employment, you mean?

Paul Krugman: Something like 5 percent unemployment.

Bill Moyers: There essentially will always be a certain number of people who are not working for one reason or another.

Paul Krugman: Yeah. It's a dynamic economy. There's always going to be companies failing. There's always going to be people quitting a job and taking some time to find a new one. There's a lot of friction in the economy. So the fact of the matter is that normal, a normally pretty full employment economy is still going to have 5 percent measured unemployment. That's okay. But there's a world of difference between that and right now the official number is in the high sevens. But a lot of measures suggest it's a lot worse than that. I mean, and most important, we have four million who've been out of work for more than a year, which is unprecedented since the 1930s.

Bill Moyers: Yeah, you write that we are in a depression that is essentially gratuitous. We don't need to be suffering so much pain and destroying so many lives.

Paul Krugman: Gratuitous in the sense that there's nothing, the only obstacles to putting people to work, to having those lives restored, to producing hundreds of billions, probably 900 billion a year or so of extra valuable stuff in our economy, is in our minds.

If I could somehow convince the members of Congress and the usual suspects that deficit spending, for the time being, is okay, and that what we really need is a big job creation program. And let's worry about the deficit after we've had a solid recovery, it would all be over. It would be no problem at all, which is what, that's the lesson of 1940, 1941.

Bill Moyers: Which is?

Paul Krugman: You can find all kinds of people explaining what was fundamentally wrong with the U.S. economy in 1940, that technology makes it impossible, workers don't have the right skill. Then along came a war in Europe and we started spending. Actually, at that point, spending a lot on infrastructure because we were getting ready for a war. And all of a sudden--

Bill Moyers: Building harbors, building all kinds of--

Paul Krugman: And camps, training camps, there are a lot--

Bill Moyers: --training--

Paul Krugman: The first thing that happened actually was a lot of construction spending on the giant new camps that the Army was going need. And all of a sudden, all of those unemployable workers turned out to be extremely productive, if you gave them a job. All of those, you know, total inability to get the economy moving turned out to be totally easy to get the economy moving. And we're basically in that situation right now. All the productive capacity is there. All that's lacking is the intellectual clarity and the political will.

Bill Moyers: You make this so clear in the book, that's why I recommended that President Obama read this book as the one book I would like to see him read before the inauguration next week. If he read it, what would you hope he would fasten on?

Paul Krugman: I would hope that he would fasten on the notion, you know, he faces real political constraint. So we understand, he can't just pass legislation. But that the most important thing, his policy priority right now should be doing whatever he can to at least move in the direction of the kinds of policies that we want for full employment, that we need for full employment. And that the obsessions of Washington about a grand bargain on the deficit are really pretty much beside the point right now. That, if given a choice between doing something that will help the economy in the next two years, and something that will allegedly settle our budget problems for all, you know, for all time, which is wouldn't, that he should go for the stuff that will help the economy now. That he should not bend on that point.

Bill Moyers: I can imagine that if you were sitting across the table with him, he might reply, "Look, Krugman, we've got a recovery coming on. Jobs are being created more steadily than ever. Measured unemployment is falling. Households are shaking off their burden of debt. I can see light at the end of the tunnel. I don't think this is the time to do what you're saying."

Paul Krugman: I think he might have said that two, three years ago. I don't think that president, you know, we happen to have a very intelligent man as president. He's for real. And he does understand. You can have real discussions with him. And I think he understands that, although things have improved some. We actually have had some progress on the economy in the past year. It's a glacial pace, compared with the way we should be. You can do this various ways. But if you think about the plunge that we took and you look at measures like the labor force, a fraction of prime age workers employed, whatever, we have maybe made up a quarter of the ground we lost in that great plunge in 2008, 2009. And it'll take years and years to get back to anything that looks like prosperity at this rate.

Bill Moyers: What makes this a depression? You know, my generation remembers the photographs of those long lines of people looking for jobs, men and women both. Remembers the sad eyes, the hungry stomachs. Remembers that men were becoming so desperate they were becoming militant. But today, even though you say the situation, in terms of joblessness, is like the 1930s, you can't obviously, you can't transparently look around and see the evidence of a depression.

Paul Krugman: That's right. It's, and partly that it's not as bad. So by modern concepts the Great Depression had unemployment rates that were as high as 20something percent by modern measures. And even in 1937, when things had improved, before we went into the second leg of the Great Depression, it was still probably about a nine percent unemployment rate by modern standards. And we've got a seven point something, eight percent, whatever. So things are not as bad. But I think a lot of it is just that the optics have changed.

Bill Moyers: Optics?

Paul Krugman: The optic, the misery is there. I mean, is there anybody, I guess if you live in very rarified circles you don't know people who are desperate right now. But I live in pretty rarified circles and I do. I know, I have relatives, friends people I know who have, men my age who've lost jobs and see no prospect of getting another job and are just desperately trying to hang in there until they can collect their social security and get on Medicare. There are young people whose lives have collapsed. You know, they graduate and there's nothing there.

Bill Moyers: Yeah, you make a very powerful point in here of the impact of being out of work now on the lifetime career of a young person who has no job at the moment.

Paul Krugman: We have pretty good evidence on, you know, how long does it take to make up for the fact that you happen to graduate from college into a bad labor market. And the answer is forever. You will never recover.

Bill Moyers: How so, what do you mean?

Paul Krugman: You will never get, you'll miss years getting onto the career ladder. By the time you get a chance to get a job that makes any sense, you know, that makes any use of your skills, you will already be tarred as somebody, "Well, you're 28 years old and you haven't held a responsible position?" "Well, yeah, I couldn't because there were no jobs." It just shadows your whole life. And it's very clear in the evidence from past recessions, which have been nowhere near as bad as this one.

The other thing I think I want to say here is that we have, in some ways, made things more civilized but also more invisible. Somebody said that food stamps are the soup kitchens of the modern depression. That there're a lot of people who would be standing in line to get that soup, who are instead, and it's a good thing, who are instead getting, I guess it's now called SNAP, Supplementary Nutritional Assistance Program, but who are getting those debit cards, and are getting essential food stuffs. And they're at the grocery store and they look like anybody else. But the fact of the matter is they are still as desperate, they're getting by day to day with the aid of a trickle of government aid, just like the people who were on, standing in line at the soup kitchens in the '30s, but they're not visible. They, we don't have guys selling apples in street corners partly because, you know, the city licensing wouldn't allow that anymore.

But we do have, again, we've got four million people who've been out of work for more than a year. The U.S. social system is not designed to take care of somebody who's been out of work. We have unemployment insurance that's intended to deal with short spells of unemployment. So there's an enormous amount of misery, but it is mostly hidden.

Bill Moyers: So that's why you refer to it, even though the optics have changed, as a quote "Vast, unnecessary catastrophe"?

Paul Krugman: Yeah. The amount of damage that's being done is enormous. The amount of suffering of people is enormous. And if it isn't out there, visible on the streets, if it's dispersed across a suburban you know, if you see a house with a for sale sign that's been sitting there for a while, you may not know the story about the family that was driven from its house because they, one or both spouses lost jobs and couldn't find others. Or, and they were foreclosed on. But it's a real story, all the same. And there's lots of that going around. And none of this needs to be happening.

Bill Moyers: And you argue that this could actually be solved in two years?

Paul Krugman: That's right. And that's not a number plucked out of thin air. That's a guess at how long it would take to get a serious spending program going. And we could actually make a lot of difference in it even quicker than that because the fact of the matter is, far from having effective job creation program, we've actually been pulling back. We've seen state and local governments lay off hundreds of thousands of school teachers. We've seen public investment in basic stuff like road repair cut way back. If we just went back to normal rates of filling potholes and normal rates of employment of school teachers, that could be done in months.

Bill Moyers: You wonder why, given the suffering, Congress and the White House haven't acted.

Paul Krugman: Well, there are I think two, two levels of opposition. And one of them is just raw politics. We have a powerful political movement in this country that has a longstanding goal of rolling back all of the social programs, all the safety net that we've created. They want smaller government. They want reduced public services. Even the idea of public schools is very much under attack. They want it all to be switched to a system of vouchers. And they see this, you and I see a disaster, they see an opportunity. Here we have cash strapped state and local government. Good. Forced to cut back in government. They don't want to do anything that will make it easier for them to, for government as we know it to continue. That movement controls one political party. And that political party controls one house of Congress. And that is enough to stand in the way of a lot of things we ought to be doing. Then there's the second level, which is this odd coalescence of, I picked up the phrase from other people. Actually, from the blogger Duncan Black. "Very Serious People," capital V, capital S, capital P.

Bill Moyers: You're always writing that these Very Serious People. Who are they?

Paul Krugman: Yeah. The notion that someone, well, you can look are your random set of, you know Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson would be the quintessential Very Serious People. The editorial, practically the whole op-ed page, not all of them, but most of "The Washington Post." People for whom this, it's axiomatic that the budget deficit is the most important problem. And that what we really, really need to do right now at a time of mass unemployment is worry about the debt to GDP ratio ten years from now. And it's a very hard thing to crack, partly because it's not actually a rational argument. You very rarely, very rarely see on the Sunday talk shows, people asking, "Why exactly are you so concerned about the deficit right now?" That's sort of a given. That's a starting point. Everybody serious understands that, except that if you ask them why exactly, they can't give you a very good answer.

Bill Moyers: What is the answer?

Paul Krugman: It's partly that this is, it sounds serious. Never you know, never underestimate the importance of just plain what comes across. Start so it's partly just it sounds serious, it's the kind of thing that people who wear good suits are likely to talk about. Partly it is actually, of course, a deliberate pressure campaign.

Bill Moyers: For example, Pete Peterson, Nixon's Secretary of the Commerce, billionaire several times over has set up this Fix the Debt campaign and is said to be putting half a billion dollars into trying to influence the public.

Paul Krugman: Yeah, actually it's not just Fix the Debt, that's just the latest incarnation. There's also the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, there's the newspaper "The Fiscal Times," there's several others. It's a whole portfolio. They all are Peterson Foundation money at the roots, but they're all out there. And yeah, serious attempts to influence public debate are not, by and large, a very lavishly funded enterprise.

Bill Moyers: But in this case?

Paul Krugman: But in this case, you've got so half a billion dollars, $500 million of spending with one agenda is going to have a huge impact. You know, policy intellectuals, by and large come cheap. A few hundred thousand in consulting contracts could do a lot there.

Bill Moyers: Do you think some of them are serious about the debt leading to a loss of confidence on the part of investors in foreign governments? I mean, even three years ago Barack Obama expressed concern about the long term debt and the confidence of people in the U.S. government. Take a listen.

Barack Obama: There may be some tax provisions that can encourage businesses to hire sooner rather than sitting on the sidelines. So we're taking a look at those. I think it is important, though, to recognize that if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the US economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession.

Paul Krugman: I remember that well. And at the time it was going on, I do occasionally find myself in meetings with Very Serious People myself. I guess I am personally one now and then. There was this widespread view among people, and not all of it venal, not all of it self-interested, that somehow things were hanging by a thread. That any day now we could have a run on U.S. government debt, which was wrong.

But, okay, I can see how people could for a while have believed that. But a lot of time has gone by since then. And I hope that at least some people have learned better. But it's amazing how little the continued failure of these warnings to actually be vindicated by anything has...how little of that's actually affected the debate.

And there's a special issue here, which I've actually tried to get across now, and I find that I get resistance even from people who are, I would've hoped were more flexible. It's even very hard to tell the story about how this loss of confidence is supposed to work. I mean, it's the United States is not like a European country that doesn't have its own currency.

The U.S. government cannot run out of cash unless Congress prevents it, you know creates an entirely self-inflicted shortage through the debt ceiling. How is it exactly that we're supposed to have this crisis that leads to a double dip recession? It really doesn't even make sense as a story. And yet it is one of those things that people say and by and large, are not contradicted on.

Bill Moyers: We keep hearing from the right that we're here on the path to becoming Greece, and you say that that's impossible?

Paul Krugman: Yeah. We, even if, suppose that people decided, investors decided they don't like U.S. government debt, it can't cause a funding crisis because the U.S. government prints money. It's even hard to see how it can drive up interest rates because the Fed sets interest rates at the short end, and why exactly would the long run rates go up if you don't expect the Fed to raise rates? It could lead to a weakening of the U.S. dollar against other currencies.

But that's actually a good thing. That would make U.S. exports more competitive. That would actually boost our economy. So it's, actually impossible to tell that story, as far as I can tell. And yet, it's not, again we're mostly not in the realm of rational discourse here. It's one of those things where people say it, they hear other people saying it. And they don't actually try to work it through.

And it plays a big role, I'm sorry, in influencing our public discussion. Interestingly, people who actually have money on the line, that is people who are buying bonds, just keep on driving U.S. interest rates ever lower. So actual investors don't care about this stuff. But our political class does.

Bill Moyers: Why don't they care?

Paul Krugman: Because first of all, because I think at some level investors understand what I'm saying. That it's very difficult to see any reason why the Fed would raise short term rates, which is controls for years to come. And in that case, long term debt even at a pretty low interest rate is a reasonable investment. Hard to see how a financial crisis actually develops against the United States, U.S. government, which is in this you know, has all the luxury of printing its own currency.

And investments are always about compared to what, right? If you if you say, "Well, the U.S. is a dangerous place to invest," I don't think it is, but particularly where is the safe place that people are going to invest? You know, what is this other asset that they're going to buy? And it doesn't really exist.

Bill Moyers: You say we're in a liquidity trap. I don't understand that.

Paul Krugman: Basically, a liquidity trap is we're, back up for a second. How do we normally deal with a recession? How do we deal with a garden variety recession like the 2001 after the dot com bubble burst, or 1991? The answer is that basically the Fed, the Federal Reserve goes out there and prints money.

Or strictly speaking credits banks, you know, credit banks with that extra reserves and buys treasury bills. And that normally starts a chain of events where, okay, the banks have got extra reserves, they lend them out. They, that drives down interest rates, leads to a whole series of events, which ends up with the economy picking up some steam. And what the Fed is doing in that case, it's supplying extra liquidity to the system.

Paul Krugman: But now we're in a situation, we're awash in liquidity. We've already got, I mean, interest rates are zero. And so anybody you say, "Well, we're going to give you some more cash and you're going to go lend it out," and banks, everybody's going to say, "Well, why would I want to do that? I mean, interest rates are zero. It's, there's no particular incentive for me not to just sit on this cash."

So you pour this extra liquidity into the economy and it just sits there. And that's the liquidity trap. It's a situation in which the ordinary monetary policy thing doesn't work.

A side consequence of that is it also means that if the government goes out and borrows more, it's not going to drive up interest rates because there's all this cash sitting out there looking for a place to go.

So the rules change. And liquidity traps are really rare. I mean, we had one in the 1930s and we've had another one since 2008. And aside from that, we had one in Japan in the 1990s, and that's about it. But when they happen, boy, they change all the rules. You find yourself in a different universe for economics.

Bill Moyers: And they're not putting people to work.

Paul Krugman: That's right. A liquidity trap is a situation where the economy can stay depressed and there's no natural, certainly no fast natural route to recovery.

Bill Moyers: So why would you be calling for more spending, given that reality?

Paul Krugman: Oh, but that's the point, then the equation, what we're looking for always, the problem...Basically all recessions are a problem of not enough spending in the economy. There are a few exceptions, basically, what we call a recession is, a case where there's not enough spending, and so there's not enough jobs. Normally, however, you can deal with that in a very narrow technocratic fashion, which is that the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates and stuff happens.

Now that doesn't work because we're in a liquidity trap. And so, this is where you say, "Okay, we need something else that's going to work, and it's very hard to come up with anything that is clearly effective, other than having the government go out and spend the money that the private sector won't." And this is why it, you know, this is, monetary policy is the aspirin of economic ailments. Take a couple whenever you're feeling that you have a headache. Now we had the over the counter remedy doesn't work and we need the, the heavy duty prescription medicine, and that's what I'm arguing for.

Bill Moyers: Interesting you say that because I tried to condense to one sentence the message and argument of your book. And I wrote down, "The answer is simple. Increase spending and boost consumption because the fundamental problem at the root of this crisis is a lack of demand."

Paul Krugman: That's it. Now you can say that all crises', or most crises' anyway, most recessions are a lack of demand. But this is an intractable lack of demand. And so, we, we need we need government action of a type that most, at any point during the past 70 years, except this one, I would have said, "No, let's leave it up to my former colleague, Ben Bernanke." But he can't do the job right now. And so, we need the government.

Bill Moyers: And if the president were sitting across the table from you and asking, "Where would you spend this money, Paul?" What would your answer be?

Paul Krugman: Right now it's easy because right now we can do it very quickly simply by restoring the spending cuts that have already happened. If you gave me unlimited carte blanche in terms of spending, I would want to go beyond that. I'd want to talk about and pretty straightforward things, even so. We have you know, fix the sewer lines. I mean, we have, we have a lot of, a lot of basic infrastructure needs that are worth doing in any case.

But right now you can get a quick boost just by rehiring those school teachers and filling those potholes. We are something like $300 billion a year short of the spending that we should be undertaking just for the normal business of government. And that extra $300 billion a year would be a really big deal for the economy if we could do it right now.

Bill Moyers: Would it bring us to what you call full employment?

Paul Krugman: Probably not. Probably bring us down to an unemployment rate that was more in the 6 to 6.5 percent.

Bill Moyers: How much would it add to the long term deficit?

Paul Krugman: Actually, nothing to the long term deficit, or almost nothing because this would not be a permanent set of measures. This would be something we'd do now. It would add headline suppose we spend $300 billion a year right now, additional. That's not $300 billion a year in extra debt because it's, the economy will be stronger, which means more revenue, which means less spending on unemployment benefits.

So it's probably under $200 billion a year in immediate borrowing. And there's a lot of reason to think that would actually, having a stronger economy now would actually strengthen the economy in the long run as well. Or put it this way, the other way, that having a really weak economy now is damaging our future and not just our present. Think about all college graduates who will never get the job they all should get.

That's not just harm for them, that's a future economy that is weaker than it should've been because it's wasting a lot of our talent. And there's a pretty good case, actually a pretty strong case, that if you think about the long run fiscal impact, spending more right now is actually positive even in terms of the long run budget situation because a stronger future economy will mean stronger revenue down the pike.

And the debt we incur right now, well, you know, the interest rate on U.S. long term debt is under 2 percent. Inflation protected U.S. long term debt has a negative interest rate. There's almost no, there's even, on purely fiscal terms, it's arguable that we should be spending more just to strengthen our long run budget position.

Bill Moyers: Is there a limit to how much we can keep borrowing?

Paul Krugman: There may be, although all that we know, all of the evidence says it's a lot further away than conventional wisdom has it. I mean, like a lot of people, including Ben Bernanke, I got into all of these things by looking at Japan in the '90s. And Japan famously has run deficits year after year. And it has a level of debt that is about twice what we've got as a share of GDP.

And people have been predicting financial catastrophe for Japan year after year for ten years or more. They've had downgrades. Their debt was downgraded in 2002 by the major rating agencies. And everybody who believed those warnings and everybody -- has lost a lot of money. So it turns out that if you're an advanced country with its own currency and a reasonably stable government, you have a lot of running room on these things.

So am I worried? Yeah, I mean, I am worried about the U.S. fiscal situation 20 years from now. We do have a problem of health care costs and so on. But, you know, I'm worried about a lot of other things 20 years as well. I'm not sure that even if you take that long term perspective, that the budget should be at the top of your list of things to be afraid of.

I'm a lot more afraid, actually, of the great -- the entire southwest of the United States turning into a dustbowl because of climate change, right? So sure, by all means, let's think about it. But it should not be dominating our policy discussion now.

Bill Moyers: As you know, we're heading toward another knockdown, drag out, shoot it out at the O.K. Corral fight over raising the debt ceiling in a few weeks. President Obama has already said he will not negotiate on raising the debt ceiling. Here's what he said.

Barack Obama: I will not have another debate with this Congress over whether or not they should pay the bills that they've already racked up through the laws that they passed. Let me repeat. We can't not pay bills that we've already incurred.

Bill Moyers: And here's the response he got the next day from Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania.

Pat Toomey: Our opportunity here is on the debt ceiling. The president's made it very clear; he doesn't even want to have a discussion about it, because he knows this is where we have leverage. We Republicans need to be willing to tolerate a temporary partial government shutdown, which is what that could mean, and insist that we get off the road to Greece, because that's the road we're on right now. We only can solve this problem by getting spending under control and restructuring the entitlement programs. There is no tax solution to this; it's a spending solution. And if this president doesn't want to go there, we're going to have to force it and we're going to have to force it over the debt ceiling.

Paul Krugman: This is a guy walking into a crowded room and saying, "I have a bomb strapped to my chest, and if you don't give me what I want, I'm going to blow up everybody, including myself." And is that a credible threat? Well, there're some pretty crazy people there. And it might be that they're willing to do it.

But by the same token, Obama cannot get into this because then you have government in the hands of -- never mind the Constitution, the government is run by whoever is most willing to wreak havoc with our whole system of -- with the nation. We cannot allow ourselves to be blackmailed into spending cuts, partly because blackmail should not be part of how the U.S. operates, and partly because spending cuts would be disastrous right now. So Obama's right to say he doesn't negotiate. I'd like to know exactly what he will do if it turns out that there is not a quorum of sane people in the Republican party.

Bill Moyers: If you were Secretary of the Treasury, what would you recommend he do?

Paul Krugman: I'm for whatever gimmick works. So the most dignified is to say, "Look, this is ridiculous. You are giving the president -- effectively Congress is giving the president inconsistent instructions. It's passed bills mandating spending. It's passed bills that give us inadequate revenue to cover that spending which requires that we borrow. And then you're saying, 'I can't borrow.' Well, you know.

And my reading of the Constitution is I have to obey the due legislative process and go ahead and do this borrowing to meet the bills that we've already incurred, as the president said." That's sort of what people are calling the Fourteenth Amendment solution, that basically it's unconstitutional to give into this debt limit thing. I guess that's your best solution. They don't think that that's workable then you go for anything at hand. And there is this wonderful bit about the platinum coin.

Bill Moyers: I don't understand that.

Paul Krugman: In a 1997 act amended in 2000 which covers issuance of coins and stuff like that. There's one clause that says that the Secretary of the Treasury shall have the right to mint and issue platinum coins in any denomination that he so chooses. Clearly, the intent was commemorative coins. You're going to strike a coin to commemorate whatever, Mother's Day.

But it doesn't say that. And as far as legal scholars have been able to make out, there's no reason why the Secretary of the Treasury can't order the minting of a coin that says this coin is worth $1 trillion, which need bear no relationship to the actual value of the platinum in it. It has to be platinum, however. And walk that coin over to the Federal Reserve.

Deposit it in and have the Federal Reserve create a bank account for the federal government based on that coin of whatever. It could be one coin for $1 trillion, it could be a thousand coins of a billion each, whatever. And then the government can pay its bills by drawing on that bank account. And it's crazy, it's an accounting gimmick, but then this whole thing is crazy. And if that lets you bypass this nonsense about the debt limit, fine.

There are other routes. I mean, it's possible the government could issue coupons that look like debt and function like debt, but says, "No, they're not debt." They could say, "This -- we have no legal obligation to pay this. We are, in fact, going to pay it, but we have no legal obligation to pay it." That's another alternative. They could--

Bill Moyers: This is what you'd call--

Paul Krugman: I'd call it moral obligation coupons.

Bill Moyers: Moral obligation because the government is morally obligated to pay that at some point, right? That's what--

Paul Krugman: That's right.

Bill Moyers: --you mean by that?

Paul Krugman: Yeah. So, but it's a moral obligation. We can say it's not a legal obligation so that -- you know, all of this is of course, this is all word games. But then that's not to play games would be irresponsible at this point.

Bill Moyers: So you would encourage, if you were Secretary of the Treasury, the president to call the Republican bluff?

Paul Krugman: Yes. I think, now, I think you probably don't commit to doing that until we actually hit the limit. You say what the president is now saying. There is no alternative but for Congress to do the responsible thing and raise this debt limit.

But you don't rule out these alternatives and you make sure that the Republicans know you haven't ruled it out so that it stands ready, and in fact it's what you do. Hostage negotiations, you have to -- you have to have some credible alternative to giving into the hostage takers demands, and that's where we are right now.

Bill Moyers: You've confessed before to an occasional sinking feeling that you can count on President Obama to wimp out. And that's your term, "to wimp out" when it matters.

Paul Krugman: Yeah. The 2011 debt ceiling fight was deeply disheartening because he should not have negotiated on the debt ceiling at all. Same argument as now. This is not how you do it. It is not a legitimate tactic of politics to threaten to destroy the country if you don't get what you want. And people who make that demand have no standing. You should not give them anything.

But he did. He actually did, in fact, make some significant concessions on spending, in order to get a rise in the debt limit. He blinked a little bit on the fiscal cliff. Not as badly as some of us feared, but he did not, in fact, hold out for the full revenue package. And so, some of us are worried. Now, I have to say, I mean, I'm reading my own stage directions here.

People like me are, in part, going after him, warning about the wimping out thing in order to turn that into a self-denying prophesy. That the idea is to make a situation where the president will be aware what people will say about him if he does give in here so it doesn't happen.

Bill Moyers: More than many economists I read, you keep politics at center stage in writing about the economy. Those are two different narratives in one sense. And yet, you intertwine them as you keep writing and analyzing our situation today. Why is that?

Paul Krugman: I think we've reached a moment in our history where the extreme nature of our politics and the extreme nature of the economic situation has converged. You know, here we are, on one side we have a once-in-three-generations economic crisis. Right, this is -- starting in 2008, we've been experiencing the crisis that has haunted the nightmares of macro economists since the 1930s. And here it is again.

And this is as dramatic as it gets. It's a situation where you really have to throw out the business as usual. And on the other side, you have this extreme political situation, where a radical movement has taken over one of our two great political parties. And does not-- does not practice politics as usual. Anyone who talks about, "Well, we should make deals the way we used to. What about the Tax Reform of 1986? Why can't we do that again?" And the answer is, well, that might make sense to you if you've been in a Buddhist monastery for the past 20 years.

But that's not today's Republican party. You can't make that kind of deal with them. And so, how can you write about the economics? If you write about economics right now and implicitly adopt the perspective, "Well, let's get reasonable people together in Washington and reach a solution here," you know, you're paying no attention to reality. And, of course, if you talk about the politics without talking about the economics, you're also missing everything. So how could I not be writing about both?

Bill Moyers: You begin one chapter of your book with a quote from your intellectual mentor, John Maynard Keynes, who writes in his masterpiece The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, "The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live--" and this was the '20s and '30s, "are its failure to provide for full employment. And its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes." Well, we don't have full employment today and we have gross inequality in income. So which is failing us, capitalism or democracy or both?

Paul Krugman: I guess I have a -- here's where I guess I am an optimist, which is that I believe that you can fix both capitalism and democracy. Not to produce a utopia, but to produce a workable solution. And the reason I believe that is we did that for a pretty long stretch.

Western economies in 1933 and western societies in 1933 were in a pretty horrible state. Mass unemployment, gross inequality, collapse of democracy in a number of places. And in the end, by the time 1950 had rolled around, we had managed to create a more equitable, not totally equal, but a more equitable society, with reasonably full employment.

And that solution lasted for half a century, which is all you can ever expect in human affairs. Nothing is permanent. So I do believe that we can do that again. So it's not that we have to ditch capitalism. I think a market economy is -- this is probably Churchill, right, it's the worst solution except for all the others. And democracy is the worst system, except for all the others.

But it's going to take some work. It's not -- the idea that you can just let markets rip and that you don't need to worry about the state of your democracy, that's wrong. But I'm actually, in a way, a conservative on these things. But a conservative, not -- what we now call conservatives are actually radicals who want to tear down the structure that we built, starting with FDR. And I want to rebuild something like that, a modernized, a twenty-first century version of that system. But it's not out of reach. It's not something that can't be done.

Bill Moyers: Paul Krugman, "End This Depression Now." Thank you very much for this conversation.

Paul Krugman: Thank you.

Money Out… Voters In

It’s time to stop moneyed conservative interests from trying to buy or steal our democracy. We know the problem—let’s get to the solutions.

Since the 1880s we’ve seen how money shouts, and since the 1980s we’ve watched regressives seek to restrict the freedom to vote, culminating last year in the explosion of Super PAC spending and voting rights restrictions. This time, the efforts of the Adelsons, Kochs and Roves largely failed (at the federal level). But the economic elites will be back to attempt their hostile takeover of our democracy with even more money and sophistication.

Hence MoneyOut/VotersIn Day in some sixty cities on January 19. That’s when a large coalition of public interest, labor, voting rights and faith groups are aspiring to a “more perfect union” on the confluence of the third anniversary of Citizens United, the weekend celebration of MLK and the Presidential Inauguration.

Generations of traditional campaign finance groups have worked against a democracy-for-sale. And heroic voting rights groups have long sought to fulfill Dr. King’s plea at the Washington Monument in 1957: “Give us the ballot! Give us the ballot!” But rarely have these two communities worked together to stop the rigging of the political system. Until we ensure that popular majorities become public law, it will be hard to accomplish so much of what is urgent—a more progressive tax code, immigration reform, climate change legislation, a living wage, labor reform and gun violence reduction.

So on January 19, scores of groups and thousands of people around the country will organize around a three-part Democracy-for-All program: a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United; public funding of public elections, in Washington and state capitols; and guaranteed voting rights so potentially 50 million more Americans can vote before or on a National Holiday in November.

First, reverse Citizens United. A momentary five-justice majority in this case tried to assure that a plutocracy of donors supplant a democracy of voters. As for the view that, well, both capital and labor will now be able to spend without limit in elections, the reality is that capital has 3,000 times more wealth than labor, the Koch brothers alone with a net worth more than all unions in America. Senator John McCain is right when he calls the decision the worst in a century. How can “originalists” like Justices Scalia and Thomas ignore the historical reality that the founders intended the First Amendment apply to actual people, not corporations, which never appear in the Constitution? How can Justice Kennedy make believe that “the appearance of influence or access…will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy” if Sheldon Adelson spends, say, $40 million on someone’s behalf and then calls the winning candidate with his ideas on lowered capital gains rates? How can big interests and their apologists hide behind the First Amendment when money is literally property, not speech?

But then, like segregationists who hid behind “property rights” and “states rights,” today’s powerbrokers pretend that they are merely the modern equivalent of silenced minorities. Walmart is not Tom Paine or Fannie Lou Hamer.

It’s one thing for money to buy companies in a system of capitalism based on the private pursuit of profit—but quite another for money to buy congressmen with trillions in shareholder wealth collected for commercial, not political, purposes.

There is an almost comical irony in the law creating corporate charters to raise private capital for business purposes…and then allowing these creations to use that privilege to privatize democracy itself. Surely the Supreme Court can figure out how to condition a privilege, so that corporations can contract and enjoy police protection, but not vote, marry or drown out other voices with an ocean of paid political commercials.

By lopsided margins, the public opposes the current system of purchased politicians and supports overturning Citizens United by amendment or a new Court decision. (Eighty percent favor one and 70 percent would make Super PACs illegal.) While the exact language of an amendment might vary, one version could simply state that money isn’t speech and can, in the electoral context, be regulated like excessive decibels and pollution are by sound/place/manner laws and environmental rules.

There are currently 125 members of Congress, eleven states and 350 cities and towns that have called for a constitutional amendment. Obviously, no state resolution can force a constitutional conclusion, but together they can help create a climate for change, the way hundreds of local referenda for a nuclear freeze in the early 1980s spurred nuclear arms reductions in later Reagan-Gorbachev summits.

True, it’s not feasible today to get a two-thirds majority of each chamber and three-fourths of state legislatures to vote for an amendment—which has happened seventeen times since the Bill of Rights—but a growing movement has taken the idea from pipe dream to mainstream. President Obama told one of the authors in the spring that it was something he wanted to consider in a second term. In his Reddit AMA in October, Obama said, “Even if the amendment process falls short, it can shine a spotlight of the super-PAC phenomenon and help apply pressure for change.”

Next, enact “Democracy Funding.” There are successful versions in New York City, Maine and Arizona. Essentially, either a critical mass of small donations generate a multiple of public matching funding (in New York City, donations from city voters of $175 or under are matched six to one) or candidates can voluntarily opt in to a system where, if they reach a minimum threshold of donors, they receive a fixed amount of public funds to run for office.

Compare the New York City system with matching “democracy funding” and the New York State system without it. Small donations (under $250) account for 55 percent of campaign funds raised in City races but only six percent of State races. Forget 1 percent vs. 99 percent. Given the ethic that you don’t bite the hand that funds you, who is in charge when .5 percent of eligible voters comprise 100 percent of all campaign treasuries in NYS? That’s why a Fair Elections Act creating publicly financed state elections is about to be debated in Albany.

Yes, public funds are involved. But either we have a system of the private funding of public elections—with the hundreds of billions in corporate welfare that result—or we have the public funding for public elections just as we now pay for voting machines and election personnel to administer that Tuesday. New York State has learned that two dollars a voter would pay for a program covering statewide races. Is not our democracy more valuable than one aircraft carrier?

Then there’s Universal Voter Registration. Voter fraud is essentially nonexistent. Meanwhile, some state laws have seven-hour lines for people to exercise their right to vote. As used successfully in many Western European countries and as prominently advocated by the Brennan Center for Legal Justice at NYU, a system of universal registration based on various data bases, like Social Security at birth, could automatically enroll people at 18, creating some 50 million more voters.

Many states—led by Oregon and Washington—have shown that a mix of voting-by-mail, early voting, and same day registration can boost participation by 20 percent points or more. As part of a federal Voter Empowerment Act, it would be also ideal if Congress could create a National Democracy Day on a Saturday in November rather than a working day.

* * *

There are many important steps to save our democracy, from filibuster and gerrymander reforms to the DISCLOSE Act, from the IRS finally investigating tax-deductible groups spending massively in political campaigns, to requiring shareholder resolutions before a company politically spends over a certain amount. But if the three essential elements of a Democracy-for-All Act were enacted, they would fundamentally forever alter who runs, who wins and whom they respond to once in office.

But the only way any or all of this can occur is for candidates to fear and hear from voters more than donors. That’s precisely what happened right after the Watergate scandal, when Congress enacted strong new laws limiting spending and corruption. Now is another opportune moment. After the recent backlash to secret Super PACs and to voter suppression laws—and the election of Obama, who denounced Citizens United to the justices at this 2010 State of the Union and who election night 2012 said of long lines of voters, “We have to fix that”—we demand democracy! If not January 19, then when…and if not us, then who?"

Learn more about MoneyOut/VotersIn Day here.

© 2012 The Nation

Robert Weissman

Robert Weissman is the president of Public Citizen.

Mark Green

Mark Green is the former Public Advocate for New York City and author/editor of a couple dozen books, including Who Runs Congress and Losing Our Democracy. He's the host of the nationally syndicated radio show, Both Sides Now.

Frontrunning: January 18

  • Foreign Hostages Die in Algeria’s Battle With Terrorists (Bloomberg)
  • The latest bank to soon join the currency wars: McCafferty Says BOE Must Keep Open Mind on New Policy Tools (Bloomberg)
  • US debt talks complicated by timing (FT)
  • BOJ eyes open-ended asset buying, agrees new inflation goal (Reuters)
  • AmEx Says U.S. Card Income Fell 42% as Loss Provisions Increased (BBG)
  • Call to raise age for US’s Medicare (FT)
  • Obama Promise to Raise Middle Class Living Already Seen in Peril (BBG)
  • China Exits Slowdown as Quarterly Growth Tops Forecasts (BBG) - actually, as new Politburo says to make it appear that way
  • Britain to drift out of European Union without reforms (Reuters)
  • Republicans weigh interim debt-limit hike (FT)
  • Abe's aide says Japan shouldn't fret if yen falls to 100 vs dlr (Reuters) ... and it was 90 just a few days ago
  • PBOC May Seek More Liquidity Operations (Dow Jones)

Overnight Media Digest

WSJ

* Former professional cyclist Lance Armstrong told the world Thursday
evening that he used performance-enhancing drugs to win seven Tour de
France titles.

* Algeria's military launched a raid on Thursday
to free about 40 foreigners held by militants at a remote natural-gas
complex, leaving some hostages dead, surprising and angering several
governments and putting leaders across the world at a loss to determine
the fate of their citizens.

* In his final days as U.S. Treasury
secretary, Timothy Geithner reflected on the financial crisis and the
response he helped craft, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
Among other things, he said the government's rescue of the financial
system was doomed to be unpopular.

* In approving Boeing Co's
787 Deamliner to start carrying passengers in 2011, the Federal Aviation
Administration relied extensively on data generated by Boeing that
indicated the plane's advanced lithium-ion battery systems -- never used
before on a big jetliner -- featured redundant safeguards that were
essentially foolproof.

* Rio Tinto Chief Executive Tom Albanese
agreed to step down on Thursday, the latest in a string of leaders
toppled by shifting fortunes at the world's biggest mining companies.

*
Quarterly earnings reports released on Thursday underscore the
lingering illnesses afflicting some of the largest, best-known U.S.
banks and the comparatively ruddy health of some smaller regional
lenders.

* Sony Corp has reached a deal to sell its U.S.
headquarters at 550 Madison Avenue for $1.1 billion, the company said on
Thursday, a strong price that shows how investors are bidding
aggressively for top Manhattan properties.

* Toyota Motor Corp
has settled what was to be the first in a group of hundreds of pending
wrongful death and injury lawsuits involving sudden, unintended
acceleration by Toyota vehicles.

FT

In a drive for transparency, authorities in the Cayman Islands are planning on creating a public database of funds domiciled in the British territory for the first time.

Videogames seller Game Group is interested in acquiring stores from collapsed music retailer HMV, the CEO said.
 
As their mega-merger continues to go through regulatory clearance, Glencore and Xstrata are set to extend the deadline for the deal for a third time.

The British banking industry wants a deadline of May 2014 to be imposed for claims from customers who say they were mis-sold payment protection insurance, says one senior executive.

Barclays is considering whether it should recoup some or all of the 290 million pounds it was fined for Libor-rate rigging from the bonuses it is due to pay investment bankers in 2012.

NYT

* Hours after Algerian forces raided a gas facility, there was still no official word on the number of hostages freed, killed or still held by their Islamist kidnappers.

* In a televised interview with Oprah Winfrey, Lance Armstrong admitted to using banned substances but did not say how he did it or who helped him.

Thomas Weisel, who bankrolled Lance Armstrong through seven Tour de France wins, said in his first public comment on the matter that he never personally saw an instance of doping on the team.

* Most banks have recovered from the recent financial collapse, but two companies, Bank of America and Citigroup have reported continuing effects on earnings.

* AT&T warned that it would take a fourth-quarter charge of about $10 billion because of bigger-than-expected pension obligations.

* The Chinese economy picked up steam during the last few months of 2012, closely watched data from Beijing on Friday confirmed. But at the same time the figures underlined the view that the pace of future growth is likely to remain well below that seen in recent years.

* E*Trade Financial named Paul Idzik, a former executive at Barclays, as its new chief, ending a five-month search for a new leader.

* Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings has sold shares in itself at $19 apiece, a person briefed on the matter said, reaping about $446.5 million in proceeds.

Canada

CHINA SECURITIES JOURNAL

--The State Electricity Regulatory Commission of China (SERC) said China's power consumption could reach above 9 percent in 2013 from 5.5 percent in 2012.

CHINA DAILY (www.chinadaily.com.cn)

--Fears over intellectual property lawsuits by foreign train technology companies will not derail exports of Chinese bullet trains, Vice Minister of Science and Technology Cao Jianlin said in an interview, dismissing copycat claims by Japan's Kawasaki as "nonsense."

--A former Japanese leader visited a memorial site to victims of Japanese wartime aggression, but analysts were quick to reject ay suggestion that Tokyo will change its policies toward China.

PEOPLE'S DAILY

--China's Railway Ministry said investment in railway could hit 650 billion yuan and that it will set a National Railway Development Fund as soon as possible.

China

THE GLOBE AND MAIL

* Two class action lawsuits were filed against the federal government in Canada after the human resources and skills development department lost a portable hard drive containing personal information about more than half a million people who took out student loans.

The department said last week the device contained data on 583,000 Canada Student Loans Program borrowers from 2000 to 2006.

* The federal ethics commissioner wants to talk to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty about his letter to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) after it was revealed that he wrote to the arm's-length broadcast regulator in support of a constituent's bid for a radio licence.

Reports in the business section:

* More Canadians went online to do their Christmas shopping this year, according to a new report by MasterCard Advisors.

Canadian consumers spent C$2.8 billion ($2.84 billion) shopping online in December, up 26 percent over the previous year and representing about 6.6 per cent of the month's total retail sales.

NATIONAL POST

* Three Quebec City teens have been arrested over charges of planning a shootout at their high school.

The three teens, two boys aged 14 and 15 and a 16 year old girl, who have pleaded not guilty, face charges of conspiracy to commit murder and will remain detained until a bail hearing on Monday.

FINANCIAL POST

* The blowout in price between Alberta's heavy oil and the North American benchmark price is a "longer term issue" with no quick fix, Alberta Investment Management Corp (AIMCo) CEO Leo de Bever said.

Fly On The Wall 7:00 Market Snapshot

ANALYST RESEARCH

Upgrades

Amazon.com (AMZN) upgraded to Outperform from Sector Perform at Pacific Crest
Cornerstone OnDemand (CSOD) upgraded to Buy from Neutral at Goldman
Credit Suisse (CS) upgraded to Overweight from Equal Weight at Morgan Stanley
Expeditors (EXPD) upgraded to Outperform from Neutral at Credit Suisse
Fabrinet (FN) upgraded to Overweight from Neutral at JPMorgan
Las Vegas Sands (LVS) upgraded to Outperform from Market Perform at Wells Fargo
Movado (MOV) upgraded to Buy from Neutral at Citigroup
Netflix (NFLX) upgraded to Buy from Neutral at Janney Capital
Qlik Technologies (QLIK) upgraded to Buy from Neutral at Goldman
Research in Motion (RIMM) upgraded to Buy from Hold at Jefferies
Tyson Foods (TSN) upgraded to Outperform from Market Perform at BMO Capital
Wynn Resorts (WYNN) upgraded to Outperform from Market Perform at Wells Fargo

Downgrades

Alterra Capital (ALTE) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Sterne Agee
Ball Corp. (BLL) downgraded to Hold from Buy at Jefferies
CSX (CSX) downgraded to Neutral from Outperform at Credit Suisse
Capital One (COF) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Janney Capital
Carrizo Oil & Gas (CRZO) downgraded to Underperform from Neutral at Credit Suisse
Clarcor (CLC) downgraded to Market Perform from Outperform at William Blair
Finisar (FNSR) downgraded to Underperform from Hold at Jefferies
MGM Resorts (MGM) downgraded to Market Perform from Outperform at Wells Fargo
NetSuite (N) downgraded to Neutral from Conviction Buy at Goldman
Ultimate Software (ULTI) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Goldman
Visa (V) downgraded to Neutral from Outperform at RW Baird
Westamerica (WABC) downgraded to Underperform from Market Perform at BMO Capital

Initiations

Geron (GERN) initiated with an Overweight at Piper Jaffray
Halcon Resources (HK) initiated with a Hold at Stifel Nicolaus
Harry Winston (HWD) initiated with a Buy at Nomura
Inovio Pharma (INO) initiated with an Overweight at Piper Jaffray
Intuitive Surgical (ISRG) initiated with a Buy at Janney Capital
Marathon Oil (MRO) initiated with a Buy at Stifel Nicolaus
Oncothyreon (ONTY) initiated with an Underweight at Piper Jaffray
Threshold Pharmaceuticals (THLD) initiated with a Neutral at Piper Jaffray
Tronox (TROX) initiated with a Buy at B. Riley Caris
Ziopharm (ZIOP) initiated with a Neutral at Piper Jaffray

HOT STOCKS

GE (GE) on target to achieve dougle-digit earnings growth in 2013
Said outlook for developed markets remain uncertain
Sees growth in China, resource rich countries
Weiss family raised American Greetings (AM) offer to $17.50 from $17.18 per share
Moody's changed Rite Aid (RAD) outlook to positive from stable
Schlumberger (SLB) said global macroeconomic environment remains uncertain
Sees 2013 global oil demand similar to 2012
Liberty Media (LMCA) bought 50M shares of Sirius XM (SIRI), control above 50%
Intel (INTC) ”excited about strong pipeline of products coming to market”
Sees little growth in wireless in 2013
Capital One (COF) sees average quarterly revenue levels in 2013 like Q412
Sees reduction in loan balances in 2013
Sony Corporation of America (SNE) sold 550 Madison Avenue building for $1.1B
AZZ Inc. (AZZ) sees FY14 margins remaining strong
ONEOK Partners (OKS) announced $465M-$500M project investments through 2015
NuPathe's (PATH) Zecuity approved by FDA

EARNINGS

Companies that beat consensus earnings expectations last night and today include:
General Electric (GE), Schlumberger (SLB), Xilinx (XLNX), Bank Mutual (BKMU), Intel (INTC), Wintrust Financial (WTFC)

Companies that missed consensus earnings expectations include:
Matthews (MATW), People's United (PBCT), Capital One (COF)

Companies that matched consensus earnings expectations include:
Wipro (WIT), Associated Banc-Corp (ASBC), American Express (AXP)

NEWSPAPERS/WEBSITES

GE (GE) is the world's top producer of aircraft engines and medical-imaging equipment, but as far as its profits are concerned, it’s very much a bank. GE Capital is expected to account for nearly half the company's 2012 profit, the Wall Street Journal reports
Dell’s (DELL) potential $23B leveraged buyout could also be the deal that finally gets the leveraged-buyout machine going again, showering financiers in fees and potentially yielding big returns for investors, the Wall Street Journal reports
Americans are more confident in the future and are increasingly striking out to set up their own homes, a move that is helping propel the housing recovery, Reuters reports
When U.S. natural gas producers release their 2012 annual reports, many companies may have to significantly reduce a key indicator of their financial health: reserves. The SEC
requires companies to calculate and report year-end oil and gas reserves using 12-month average prices, Reuters reports
With the worst flu outbreak since 2009 gripping the U.S., vaccine makers (GSK, AZN) are determined to do better next season. They’re developing powerful vaccines that hold the promise of cutting incidences of flu by the thousands, Bloomberg reports
Franklin Templeton Investments (BEN) reduced its holdings of Apple (AAPL) last year to 4.2% from 7% in 2011 on concern the maker of the iPhone lacks a strategy to sell cheaper smartphones in emerging markets such as China and India, Bloomberg reports

SYNDICATE

CyrusOne (CONE) 16.5M share IPO priced at $19.00
Northern Tier (NTI) Energy 10.7M share Secondary priced at $24.46
Norwegian Cruise Line (NCLH) 23.529M share IPO priced at $19.00
SunCoke Energy (SXCP) 13.5M share IPO priced at $19.00
Trius Therapeutics (TSRX) files to sell common stock

Your rating: None

Can National Grassroots Push Depose the ‘Billion Dollar Democracy’?

A new report released Thursday puts an exclamation point on the outlandish and outweighed influence that wealthy individuals and corporations have in a post-Citizens United world by showing that a mere 32 wealthy donors—with an average gift of almost $10 million each—gave as much money to largely unregulated Super PACs in 2012 than all the country's individual small donors gave to the Obama and Romney campaigns combined.

And though the 2012 election is behind us, many activists—now equipped with the experience of what a modern democracy controlled by millionaires and billionaires looks like—are hoping that fundamental changes can be made to correct the corrosive impact of shadow money and undue influence.

As the new report by U.S. PIRG and Demos, “Billion-Dollar Democracy,” shows, those 32 multi-million dollar gifts, in essence, outweighed the collective voice of 3.7 million individuals who gave individual and transparent campaign contributions to the candidate of their choice. Moreover, most did so under a veil of secrecy using shadow non-profit groups and shell corporations created specifically to launder political giving by masking the identities of financial sources.

“Americans who are wondering why it seems tougher to get ahead or even get a fair shake in today’s economy should look to big money politics for answers,” said Adam Lioz, report co-author and Counsel for Demos. “When a tiny group of wealthy donors fuels political campaigns, they get to set the agenda in Washington, and the rest of us are left to argue over that agenda.”

And U.S. PIRG's Blair Bowie, the report's other co-author adds: “The first post-Citizens United presidential election confirmed our fears that the new unlimited-money regime allows well-heeled special interests and secret spenders to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens.”

Thanks in large part to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v FEC, the 2012 election was the most expensive in the history of the world.

But now, the reality of this new world of campaign giving, coupled with nationwide attempts in 2012 making it hard for many poor and vulnerable people to vote, has prompted many to demand an end to such preferential treatment of the wealthiest in a democracy engulfed in cash and renewed calls for broader and more equitable poll access.

“At the same time we’ve seen record amounts of unaccountable corporate money spent on elections, we’ve also seen a deliberate attack on the rights of voters to participate in our democracy,” said Aquene Freechild, senior organizer for Public Citizen, which is hosting nationwide events this weekend for its ongoing Democracy Is For People campaign.

According to the group, concerned citizens and voters will gather across the country in the coming week to demand an end to the combined threat of unlimited corporate spending and resurgent voter suppression tactics found in many states.

To voice their outrage and demand fundamental change, progressive groups—including Public Citizen, NAACP, U.S. PIRG, Common Cause, MoveOn, Organic Consumers Association, League of United Latin American Citizens, Hip Hop Caucus and others—have planned nationwide days of action called Money Out/Voters In taking place this coming weekend.

As Public Citizen's president Robert Weissman, along with advocate Mark Green, wrote regarding the events that will bring "public interest, labor, voting rights and faith groups" together under one banner and cause:

Generations of traditional campaign finance groups have worked against a democracy-for-sale. And heroic voting rights groups have long sought to fulfill Dr. King’s plea at the Washington Monument in 1957: “Give us the ballot! Give us the ballot!” But rarely have these two communities worked together to stop the rigging of the political system. Until we ensure that popular majorities become public law, it will be hard to accomplish so much of what is urgent—a more progressive tax code, immigration reform, climate change legislation, a living wage, labor reform and gun violence reduction.

So on January 19, scores of groups and thousands of people around the country will organize around a three-part Democracy-for-All program: a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United; public funding of public elections, in Washington and state capitols; and guaranteed voting rights so potentially 50 million more Americans can vote [in the next election].

Such events seem prove what the authors of the 'Billion Dollar Democracy' concluded as well.

In an op-ed published alongside their new report, Lioz and Bowie write: "The outsized role of money in our elections is a dark cloud over our democracy—but there is a silver lining. Not since Watergate has there been so much energy behind finally building a democracy in which the strength of a citizen’s voice does not depend upon the size of her wallet."

Russia extends blacklist of American citizens

No longer limited to US citizens suspected of human rights abuses at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, the updated list of Americans prohibited from entering Russia now includes new categories of individuals.

­In December, the number of US citizens declared persona non grata in Russia stood at 11; now this number has been increased by 49 more people as new categories of individuals are added to the list, Aleksey Pushkov, the chairman of the State Duma Committee on Foreign Affairs, told reporters on Friday.

The new names, which contain both government officials and ordinary Americans, can be divided into three categories, Pushkov said.

The first category is comprised of “judges, investigators, secret service agents and Justice Department members” who are believed to be connected with the criminal prosecution and sentencing of Viktor Bout and Konstantin Yaroshenko, Russian nationals who were arrested by US officials, tried on American soil, and are now serving their prison sentences in the US.

Bout, a former Soviet officer who became the owner of an air transport company, was arrested in 2008 by US agents in Thailand. In November 2011, he was convicted by a jury in a New York federal court of intending to provide military weapons to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), which the United States ranks as a terrorist organization, and conspiracy to kill US citizens. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Bout has pleaded his innocent to all charges.

Yaroshenko was arrested in May 2010 in an undercover operation in Liberia. He was taken to the United States and sentenced to 20 years in prison for alleged drug trafficking.

 The second category of individuals prohibited from entering the Russian Federation include US Senators who were responsible for initiating the so-called Magnitsky Act, which was signed into law by US President Barack Obama in December.

The new US legislation attempts to punish Russian nationals who Washington believes are responsible for the death of Sergey Magnitsky, who died in a detention facility in Moscow in 2009 awaiting a tax evasion investigation. 

The final category of persona non grata individuals include American adoptive parents who were found guilty of abusing their adopted Russian children or guilty of their deaths. 

On December 28, 2012, President Putin signed the Dima Yakovlev bill, named after a Russian orphan who died of heat stroke after being left in a car for an extended period by his American adoptive parents. 

Judges who delivered “inadequate” verdicts on such cases, as well as psychiatrists who claimed that those children allegedly had congenital deficiencies that supposedly caused their deaths are also prohibited from entering Russia.

Robert Bridge, RT

Guns and Mental Illness: A Second Look

On the day of the mass murder in Newtown I wrote a column, too quickly. That’s how I deal with overwhelming, unbearable feelings. Some people cry. Some call their friends. Some go to vigils. I write, fast. To get at least a tiny illusion of closure, I had to finish the piece and post it right away.

I did have an important point to make: “Mental health reform is as important as gun reform.” And I came up with what I thought was a clever slogan to reinforce the point: Guns, all by themselves, don’t kill people. Mentally or emotionally disturbed people with guns kill people.

But after the piece was posted I had time to think more carefully. And the more I thought the more I regretted such a hasty, sweeping generalization. A few of the commenters on my piece pointed out the error, and the danger, of linking mental/emotional disturbance to violence in such a simplistic way. I thank them for that.

Now I can say more precisely what I should have said then: A gun, all by itself, doesn’t walk into a public place and start shooting at strangers. There’s a high likelihood -- though no certainty -- that it’s a mentally ill or emotionally disturbed person with a gun who has killed those people.

Although even one such event is one too many, it’s important to recognize that mass murders are a tiny, almost infinitesimal portion of all the incidents of gun violence in America. The large majority of gun violence is perpetrated by people that the professionals would deem sane.

Those are just two of the points made in a fine article by Dr. Richard Friedman, who took his time and did his homework before he wrote. He cites the research to show that “only about 4 percent of violence in the United States can be attributed to people with mental illness.”

That’s because “the vast majority of people with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts.” Though young psychotic male who are intoxicated with alcohol are at a high risk of doing violence, “most individuals who fit this profile are harmless.” Even those who are harmful are driven mostly by drink: “Alcohol and drug abuse are far more likely to result in violent behavior than mental illness by itself.”

 So my earlier column was an unintended example of a huge problem facing those with mental/emotional disturbance. Even among those of us trying to improve public behavioral health services, it’s too easy to fall prey to false stereotypes that create fear and misunderstanding.

That’s one big reason we, as a society, are failing so badly in helping those with  mental/emotional disturbance. The old-fashioned impulse to isolate them, to keep them away from the rest of us who are deemed “normal,” is still far too common. We don’t isolate them physically as much as we used to (though physical isolation is still a problem). But emotionally and culturally the distancing may be as great as ever. It happens, in a word, by stigmatizing.

Huge amounts of money flow to research on cancer, heart disease, and many other physical illnesses because they do not carry any stigma. But there is still enormous stigma attached to mental and emotional conditions, because they are met with so much unnecessary, unjustified fear. So we still know far too little about those conditions. More knowledge would dispel some of the fear. Yet it’s hard to get adequate funding for the urgently needed research.

In fact it’s hard to get much public attention at all for the ongoing social crisis in mental/emotional health. Only an act of unimaginable violence, it seems, can get the nation thinking about taking some action. If that’s the only way to get public attention to the issue, it’s better than not raising the issue at all. I’ve been glad to see the public spotlight begin to shine, at least a bit, on this problem. Hopefully the president’s call for public dialogue will be taken seriously and make that light shine brighter.

But if we pay attention to the behavioral health crisis only in the context of violence, it’s far too easy to reinforce the stereotype that the mentally ill and emotionally disturbed are all potentially violent or dangerous.

That prejudice is, unfortunately, driving the newly energized public debate about mental illness and legal access to guns. There’s a growing clamor for tighter restrictions. Many people simply say that anyone with a history of mental illness should be barred from having a gun. Perhaps they don’t stop to think how that would carve irrational stigma into the stone of law.

Perhaps they don’t know that it’s already carved into the laws of many states -- and of the federal government, which prohibits selling or giving a gun to anyone who “has been adjudicated as a mental defective [whatever that means!] or has been committed to any mental institution.”   

In the wake of the Aurora shooting, the head of the National Alliance on Mental Illness made a more reasonable suggestion: “Change the law -- thoughtfully and carefully -- in a way that is not only overly broad, but also avoids unfair, damaging discrimination.” One good example is a report just released by a panel in Maryland, advising that a judge should have to find clear evidence that someone with behavioral health problems is dangerous before they can be barred from getting a gun. 

Of course we need tighter restrictions on legal gun access for everyone. But no one should be singled out merely because they’ve had, or perhaps still have, mental or emotional health problems. Discrimination is just as wrong in gun laws as it is in jobs, housing, or anywhere else.

Discrimination is especially dangerous in gun laws because it reinforces the prejudice that anyone who has mental or emotional difficulties is inherently dangerous and ought to be avoided. As long as that prejudice prevails, we are likely to go on ignoring this enormous social problem. 

If we ever have a truly humane, comprehensive, well-funded public program for helping everyone with mental/emotional problems, we probably will reduce mass killings and, to a lesser degree, all forms of violence. But that will be a very small piece of the much larger gain for our whole society. When the most seriously troubled people among us have their troubles eased, we all benefit.

Ira Chernus

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Mythic America: Essays and American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea. He blogs at MythicAmerica.us.

Guns and Mental Illness: A Second Look

On the day of the mass murder in Newtown I wrote a column, too quickly. That’s how I deal with overwhelming, unbearable feelings. Some people cry. Some call their friends. Some go to vigils. I write, fast. To get at least a tiny illusion of closure, I had to finish the piece and post it right away.

I did have an important point to make: “Mental health reform is as important as gun reform.” And I came up with what I thought was a clever slogan to reinforce the point: Guns, all by themselves, don’t kill people. Mentally or emotionally disturbed people with guns kill people.

But after the piece was posted I had time to think more carefully. And the more I thought the more I regretted such a hasty, sweeping generalization. A few of the commenters on my piece pointed out the error, and the danger, of linking mental/emotional disturbance to violence in such a simplistic way. I thank them for that.

Now I can say more precisely what I should have said then: A gun, all by itself, doesn’t walk into a public place and start shooting at strangers. There’s a high likelihood -- though no certainty -- that it’s a mentally ill or emotionally disturbed person with a gun who has killed those people.

Although even one such event is one too many, it’s important to recognize that mass murders are a tiny, almost infinitesimal portion of all the incidents of gun violence in America. The large majority of gun violence is perpetrated by people that the professionals would deem sane.

Those are just two of the points made in a fine article by Dr. Richard Friedman, who took his time and did his homework before he wrote. He cites the research to show that “only about 4 percent of violence in the United States can be attributed to people with mental illness.”

That’s because “the vast majority of people with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts.” Though young psychotic male who are intoxicated with alcohol are at a high risk of doing violence, “most individuals who fit this profile are harmless.” Even those who are harmful are driven mostly by drink: “Alcohol and drug abuse are far more likely to result in violent behavior than mental illness by itself.”

 So my earlier column was an unintended example of a huge problem facing those with mental/emotional disturbance. Even among those of us trying to improve public behavioral health services, it’s too easy to fall prey to false stereotypes that create fear and misunderstanding.

That’s one big reason we, as a society, are failing so badly in helping those with  mental/emotional disturbance. The old-fashioned impulse to isolate them, to keep them away from the rest of us who are deemed “normal,” is still far too common. We don’t isolate them physically as much as we used to (though physical isolation is still a problem). But emotionally and culturally the distancing may be as great as ever. It happens, in a word, by stigmatizing.

Huge amounts of money flow to research on cancer, heart disease, and many other physical illnesses because they do not carry any stigma. But there is still enormous stigma attached to mental and emotional conditions, because they are met with so much unnecessary, unjustified fear. So we still know far too little about those conditions. More knowledge would dispel some of the fear. Yet it’s hard to get adequate funding for the urgently needed research.

In fact it’s hard to get much public attention at all for the ongoing social crisis in mental/emotional health. Only an act of unimaginable violence, it seems, can get the nation thinking about taking some action. If that’s the only way to get public attention to the issue, it’s better than not raising the issue at all. I’ve been glad to see the public spotlight begin to shine, at least a bit, on this problem. Hopefully the president’s call for public dialogue will be taken seriously and make that light shine brighter.

But if we pay attention to the behavioral health crisis only in the context of violence, it’s far too easy to reinforce the stereotype that the mentally ill and emotionally disturbed are all potentially violent or dangerous.

That prejudice is, unfortunately, driving the newly energized public debate about mental illness and legal access to guns. There’s a growing clamor for tighter restrictions. Many people simply say that anyone with a history of mental illness should be barred from having a gun. Perhaps they don’t stop to think how that would carve irrational stigma into the stone of law.

Perhaps they don’t know that it’s already carved into the laws of many states -- and of the federal government, which prohibits selling or giving a gun to anyone who “has been adjudicated as a mental defective [whatever that means!] or has been committed to any mental institution.”   

In the wake of the Aurora shooting, the head of the National Alliance on Mental Illness made a more reasonable suggestion: “Change the law -- thoughtfully and carefully -- in a way that is not only overly broad, but also avoids unfair, damaging discrimination.” One good example is a report just released by a panel in Maryland, advising that a judge should have to find clear evidence that someone with behavioral health problems is dangerous before they can be barred from getting a gun. 

Of course we need tighter restrictions on legal gun access for everyone. But no one should be singled out merely because they’ve had, or perhaps still have, mental or emotional health problems. Discrimination is just as wrong in gun laws as it is in jobs, housing, or anywhere else.

Discrimination is especially dangerous in gun laws because it reinforces the prejudice that anyone who has mental or emotional difficulties is inherently dangerous and ought to be avoided. As long as that prejudice prevails, we are likely to go on ignoring this enormous social problem. 

If we ever have a truly humane, comprehensive, well-funded public program for helping everyone with mental/emotional problems, we probably will reduce mass killings and, to a lesser degree, all forms of violence. But that will be a very small piece of the much larger gain for our whole society. When the most seriously troubled people among us have their troubles eased, we all benefit.

Ira Chernus

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Mythic America: Essays and American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea. He blogs at MythicAmerica.us.

Guns and Mental Illness: A Second Look

On the day of the mass murder in Newtown I wrote a column, too quickly. That’s how I deal with overwhelming, unbearable feelings. Some people cry. Some call their friends. Some go to vigils. I write, fast. To get at least a tiny illusion of closure, I had to finish the piece and post it right away.

I did have an important point to make: “Mental health reform is as important as gun reform.” And I came up with what I thought was a clever slogan to reinforce the point: Guns, all by themselves, don’t kill people. Mentally or emotionally disturbed people with guns kill people.

But after the piece was posted I had time to think more carefully. And the more I thought the more I regretted such a hasty, sweeping generalization. A few of the commenters on my piece pointed out the error, and the danger, of linking mental/emotional disturbance to violence in such a simplistic way. I thank them for that.

Now I can say more precisely what I should have said then: A gun, all by itself, doesn’t walk into a public place and start shooting at strangers. There’s a high likelihood -- though no certainty -- that it’s a mentally ill or emotionally disturbed person with a gun who has killed those people.

Although even one such event is one too many, it’s important to recognize that mass murders are a tiny, almost infinitesimal portion of all the incidents of gun violence in America. The large majority of gun violence is perpetrated by people that the professionals would deem sane.

Those are just two of the points made in a fine article by Dr. Richard Friedman, who took his time and did his homework before he wrote. He cites the research to show that “only about 4 percent of violence in the United States can be attributed to people with mental illness.”

That’s because “the vast majority of people with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts.” Though young psychotic male who are intoxicated with alcohol are at a high risk of doing violence, “most individuals who fit this profile are harmless.” Even those who are harmful are driven mostly by drink: “Alcohol and drug abuse are far more likely to result in violent behavior than mental illness by itself.”

 So my earlier column was an unintended example of a huge problem facing those with mental/emotional disturbance. Even among those of us trying to improve public behavioral health services, it’s too easy to fall prey to false stereotypes that create fear and misunderstanding.

That’s one big reason we, as a society, are failing so badly in helping those with  mental/emotional disturbance. The old-fashioned impulse to isolate them, to keep them away from the rest of us who are deemed “normal,” is still far too common. We don’t isolate them physically as much as we used to (though physical isolation is still a problem). But emotionally and culturally the distancing may be as great as ever. It happens, in a word, by stigmatizing.

Huge amounts of money flow to research on cancer, heart disease, and many other physical illnesses because they do not carry any stigma. But there is still enormous stigma attached to mental and emotional conditions, because they are met with so much unnecessary, unjustified fear. So we still know far too little about those conditions. More knowledge would dispel some of the fear. Yet it’s hard to get adequate funding for the urgently needed research.

In fact it’s hard to get much public attention at all for the ongoing social crisis in mental/emotional health. Only an act of unimaginable violence, it seems, can get the nation thinking about taking some action. If that’s the only way to get public attention to the issue, it’s better than not raising the issue at all. I’ve been glad to see the public spotlight begin to shine, at least a bit, on this problem. Hopefully the president’s call for public dialogue will be taken seriously and make that light shine brighter.

But if we pay attention to the behavioral health crisis only in the context of violence, it’s far too easy to reinforce the stereotype that the mentally ill and emotionally disturbed are all potentially violent or dangerous.

That prejudice is, unfortunately, driving the newly energized public debate about mental illness and legal access to guns. There’s a growing clamor for tighter restrictions. Many people simply say that anyone with a history of mental illness should be barred from having a gun. Perhaps they don’t stop to think how that would carve irrational stigma into the stone of law.

Perhaps they don’t know that it’s already carved into the laws of many states -- and of the federal government, which prohibits selling or giving a gun to anyone who “has been adjudicated as a mental defective [whatever that means!] or has been committed to any mental institution.”   

In the wake of the Aurora shooting, the head of the National Alliance on Mental Illness made a more reasonable suggestion: “Change the law -- thoughtfully and carefully -- in a way that is not only overly broad, but also avoids unfair, damaging discrimination.” One good example is a report just released by a panel in Maryland, advising that a judge should have to find clear evidence that someone with behavioral health problems is dangerous before they can be barred from getting a gun. 

Of course we need tighter restrictions on legal gun access for everyone. But no one should be singled out merely because they’ve had, or perhaps still have, mental or emotional health problems. Discrimination is just as wrong in gun laws as it is in jobs, housing, or anywhere else.

Discrimination is especially dangerous in gun laws because it reinforces the prejudice that anyone who has mental or emotional difficulties is inherently dangerous and ought to be avoided. As long as that prejudice prevails, we are likely to go on ignoring this enormous social problem. 

If we ever have a truly humane, comprehensive, well-funded public program for helping everyone with mental/emotional problems, we probably will reduce mass killings and, to a lesser degree, all forms of violence. But that will be a very small piece of the much larger gain for our whole society. When the most seriously troubled people among us have their troubles eased, we all benefit.

Ira Chernus

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Mythic America: Essays and American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea. He blogs at MythicAmerica.us.

1,000 shot in US since school carnage

US President Barack Obama signing 23 executive orders on gun-control in a Wednesday event.

More than 1,000 Americans have been killed in gun-related violence since last month’s elementary school shooting carnage in Connecticut that killed 20 young pupils and six staff members, new data show.

According to the new data, collected through an interactive project conducted by Slate.com, the tally of those killed in gun violence across the US since the Connecticut massacre has surpassed the 1,000 mark, showing that as of 5 a.m. GMT on January 18, the figure has reached 1013.

The Connecticut school massacre was carried out by a lone 20-year-old gunman on December 14, 2012, using a semi-automatic assault rifle. The incident was reportedly the deadliest carnage at an elementary school in the US history.

Amid growing calls across the US for meaningful government and legislative action to control the free access to guns, especially assault weapons, US President Barack Obama finally delivered on his vow to offer a far-reaching gun-control plan on Wednesday.

While calling on the US Congress to do its part in legislating better gun-control laws, Obama also signed 23 executive orders to facilitate better measures to control purchase and tracking of firearms.

The move, however, has angered pro-gun conservative and Republican politicians and activists, led by the powerful gun lobby, the National Rifle Association (NRA), prompting some to call for Obama’s impeachment and other describing the newly reelected president as an “elitist hypocrite.”


A group called the “Project of Policy Issues Institute” manages a website that urges for Obama’s impeachment, asking visitors to sign a petition to impeach the US president and to receive updates on the campaign to remove him from office.

Although a real effort to impeach Obama appears highly unlikely, the emerging movement supporting the bid stems from a surge of public attention to the US gun debate following the Connecticut school carnage and the persisting divide in the nation’s Congress on enacting any gun-control legislations.

This is while US Vice President Joseph Biden vowed in a Thursday address to the United States Conference of Mayors in Washington that the Obama administration would vigorously press its bid to enact more gun-control legislations.

“We’re going to take it to the American people,” he said. “We’re going to go around the country making our case, and we’re going to let the voices, the voices of the American people be heard.”

MFB/MFB

David Cameron: UK Could ‘Drift Towards’ EU Exit

David Cameron served notice today that Britain could leave the European Union if its concerns about its membership are not resolved. Extracts from a speech that Cameron was planning to make this morning show that the Prime Minister intended to make cl...

Gun found in 7-year-old schoolboy’s backpack in NYC

A ..22 caliber handgun, its magazine and a flare gun seized by police from a seven-year-old boy at Wave Preparatory Elementary School in New York are pictured in this handout photo released by the NYPD January 17, 2013.(Reuters / Handout)

A ..22 caliber handgun, its magazine and a flare gun seized by police from a seven-year-old boy at Wave Preparatory Elementary School in New York are pictured in this handout photo released by the NYPD January 17, 2013.(Reuters / Handout)

A handgun was discovered in the backpack of a second grade student at a public elementary school in New York City, just two days after state Governor Andrew Cuomo signed post-Newton gun restrictions into law.

­The .22-caliber weapon was unearthed from the 7-year-old boy’s bag on Thursday morning at Wave Preparatory Elementary School in the Queens borough of New York City. The school was then placed on lockdown, just after 10:00am local time.

Alongside the semiautomatic pistol, police also seized ammunition and a flare gun from the young boy’s satchel. The horrifying incident took place amid heightened concern regarding gun violence in US schools, following the December tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in which 20 children and six educators were massacred.

Two hours after the boy arrived at Wave Preparatory, his mother learned that he had the gun and attempted to apprehend him at the school, telling administrators that he had a dentist appointment. The boy told his mother that he had given the gun to a second grade classmate, leading her to alert the principal.

Students were then instructed to remain in their classrooms after the principal announced the school was in ‘lockdown’ status. Javier Ferrufino, an 11-year-old in fifth grade, told the New York Times, “I thought we were going to get killed… we went to the back of the classroom. I hid with my friend behind some computers.”

It remains unknown how a boy so young came to be in possession of the handgun. However, he reportedly has two older brothers aged 21 and 27 – the question of whether the young boy was aware of the weapon’s presence in his bag is under investigation.

Heightened fears following the Sandy Hook shooting massacre have led to intense discussions regarding gun control measures in the US. On Wednesday, President Barack Obama urged Congress to approve a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and institute thorough background checks on all gun buyers. However, on Thursday, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) derided the President’s attempts to exert power in this arena, comparing his actions to those of a monarch.

Obama’s skepticism over placing armed guards in schools was criticized as hypocritical by the NRA on Tuesday, on the grounds that his children have secret service protection. A Reuters poll on Thursday found that 72 percent of Americans favored the proposal to station armed guards in the nation’s schools.

 However, the same Reuters poll found that 74 percent of Americans are in favor of a ban on assault weapons, and 86 percent approve of expanded background checks on all gun buyers.

Mehdi’s Morning Memo: The Waiting Game

The ten things you need to know on Friday 18 January 2013...

1) THE WAITING GAME

What on earth were the Algerians thinking?

From the BBC:

"The fate of a number of British hostages held in a desert gas complex remains unknown in the wake of an Algerian military attempt to free them.

"They were among foreign nationals held near In Amenas who the Algerian forces attempted to free from militants.

"... David Cameron has warned of further possible "bad news".

"The prime minister postponed a major speech on Europe scheduled for Friday, and Foreign Secretary William Hague has cut short a trip to Australia to return to the UK.

"The BBC's Nick Robinson said sources had told him officials were prepared for 'multiple' British casualties."

The Guardian reports:

"The British government complained it had not been informed before the military operation was launched. Cameron was only told once it was under way and immediately demanded an explanation from Algiers. Washington and Paris indicated they too had been left in the dark."

According to the Beeb:

"Another meeting of the government's emergency response committee, Cobra, will be held later, chaired by Mr Cameron. Ministers are also planning to make a statement to Parliament.

"Mr Cameron said on Thursday night that the country faced 'a very bad situation'.

"'A number of British citizens have been taken hostage. Already we know of one who has died,' Mr Cameron said.

"'It is a very dangerous... a very fluid situation and I think we have to prepare ourselves for the possibility of bad news ahead.'"

2) WHO IS 'MR MARLBORO'?

The papers are full of profiles of Mokhtar Belmokhtar, head of the al-Qaeda-affiliated brigade that claims to have captured the Western hostages in Algeria.

He is, as the Times notes, a "jihadist straight out of central casting. Trained in Afghanistan, he has a long record of smuggling arms, kidnapping and violence, a death sentence passed in absentia, premature reports of his demise and a string of nicknames including One-Eyed, The Uncatchable and Mr Marlboro".

The latter nickname was acquired, says the Guardian, "for his involvement in cigarette smuggling".

The Telegraph calls Belmokhtar a "veteran, one-eyed jihadist-cum-gangster" who has "been reported dead at least twice": "Like other warlords in the region, he operates under the umbrella of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, a group descended from the radical Islamists that waged war against the Algerian state in the 1990s. Belmokhtar was a key member of the most violent group, the GSPC."

So what's driving him this time? What's his goal? According to the Guardian:

"The reality is the operation is probably as much about his own credentials as a jihadi warlord as it is about the French military operation in Mali, and a reminder to those who sidelined him in AQIM [Al Qaeda in the Maghreb] that he remains a well connected and powerful figure to be reckoned with."

3) 'AMSTERDOOM'

That's the headline in the Sun which, like other papers, goes quite big on extracts from the PM's postponed Europe speech that were briefed out last night - before the decision was taken to delay it at 6:30pm:

"The EU 'will fail' in a doomsday meltdown and Britain will LEAVE unless its deep problems are tackled, David Cameron is set to declare.

"... [I]t emerged the landmark speech will represent the strongest attack on the EU yet made by a serving British Prime Minister.

"When it comes — probably next week — Mr Cameron will claim the EU faces a perfect storm of the eurozone crisis, a lack of competitiveness and a collapse in public support.

"He will say: 'If we don’t address these challenges, the danger is Europe will fail and the British people will drift towards the exit.'"

The Telegraph says the postponement of the speech "represents another setback for Mr Cameron involving the speech, which has been expected since last summer" but it also reports:

"The Prime Minister was backed last night by Boris Johnson, the London Mayor, who said Mr Cameron had to 'put a renegotiated membership to the British people'. In a speech to London government leaders, Mr Johnson said it was 'inevitable' that there would be a referendum and that an exit from the EU was 'neither particularly necessary, nor particularly desirable, nor particularly likely'."

However, the Americans have yet again reiterated their fears about a British exit from the EU, or 'Brexit, with President Obama using a phone call to Cameron to tell our PM, according to a White House spokesman, that "the United States values a strong UK in a strong European Union, which makes critical contributions to peace, prosperity, and security in Europe and around the world".

Meanwhile, writing exclusively for the Huffington Post UK, the president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, has warned Cameron that his attempt to negotiate a new relationship with the Europe could lead "to the break-up of the EU". Also writing for HuffPost UK, the former Belgian PM and now MEP, Guy Verhofstadt, says: "If Cameron fails to show leadership now and allows Britain to drift away from continental Europe, he will guarantee his place in the history books - but for all the wrong reasons."

4) DIVERSE DAVE

Nick's about to get a telling off from Dave, it seems. As my colleague Ned Simons reports:

"David Cameron has said Nick Clegg needs increase the number of female Lib Dem MPs, as he promised to appoint more women to his cabinet.

"In an interview with the parliamentary House magazine published today, the prime minister said he was committed to honouring a pledge to make at least one third of Conservative ministers women.

"But he noted that he could not speak on behalf of his Lib Dem colleagues in government. 'Obviously I can’t apply my pledge to the Lib Dems and obviously they need to improve their diversity and I’ll be having a word with the deputy prime minister about that,' he said."

All of the Lib Dems' five cabinet ministers are men, just seven out of 57 Lib Dem MPs are women and none of them are from an ethnic minority background. Liberalism in the 21st century, eh?

5) 'GETTING OUT OF THE CAGE'

The Telegraph has some other details from the House magazine interview with the PM:

"Recalling the couple's most recent 'date night', he said: 'Last night, we went out for supper, dinner, quite early actually, I was tucked up in bed nice and early last night. But we try and get out of the cage on a regular basis.'

"... Mr Cameron credited his wife with improving the flat. 'It's lovely living here, it's a wonderful flat that she's created, the children are very happy. And she's very happy and family life is good.' Mr Cameron said his wife had given him a DVD of the last season of the Danish crime thriller The Killing for Christmas, which the couple had watched.

"... The Prime Minister said he was reading A Short History of England by Sir Simon Jenkins, which he bought for himself while Christmas shopping. 'I'm on Vikings at the moment,' he added."

BECAUSE YOU'VE READ THIS FAR...

Watch this amusing video of an epic spider-slaying mission going wrong.

6) 200,000 EXTRA POOR KIDS?

From the Independent:

"On Monday, MPs will vote on measures contained in the Welfare Benefits Uprating Bill. The Coalition has previously avoided predicting its impact on poverty, but in a parliamentary answer it let slip that 200,000 children would be affected...

"Ministers seem to be in denial that, under current policies, their legacy threatens to be the worst poverty record of any government for a generation," said the Child Poverty Action Group.

The government's evasive response - via work and pensions minister Esther McVey - was to point that "people will still see benefits go up year on year" and to question the official poverty measure: "Looking at relative income in isolation is not a helpful measure to track progress towards our target of eradicating child poverty."

But back in 2006, David Cameron used a major speech to concede: "We need to think of poverty in relative terms... I want this message to go out loud and clear: the Conservative Party recognises, will measure and will act on relative poverty."

How times change, I guess.

7) 'POTTY' PAY

From the Sun:

"Nick Clegg has slammed 'potty' MPs who demanded a huge pay rise — even though his own Lib Dem backbenchers want a 20 per cent hike.

"The Deputy PM hit out after a survey revealed MPs wanted wages raised from £65,738 to more than £86,000 — a staggering 32 PER CENT increase.

"... Despite his MPs' call, Mr Clegg told LBC radio: 'I think it's potty and it's not going to happen.'"

8) BORIS HIRES BFF

Astonishing - from the Guardian:

"Boris Johnson has triggered a new row over alleged cronyism after it emerged that he has offered the post of cycling adviser to Andrew Gilligan, the journalist who did more than any other to topple the London mayor's main rival, Ken Livingstone.

"Gilligan is expected to take up the post part-time while retaining his current staff position at the Daily Telegraph, but will curtail his coverage of London issues. It is understood he will be paid the normal adviser rate on a pro-rata basis. Most of the mayor's advisers are paid more than £90,000."

Can you imagine what Gilligan's hysterical reaction would have been like if the situation had been reversed and it was Livingstone who had made such an appointment?

9) TWEETS AND TWITS

The perils of Twitter. From the BBC:

"Lib Dem MEP Sir Graham Watson has been reprimanded by his own party for responding to the PM's decision to postpone a speech on Europe with the tweet: 'Al Qaeda 1, @David_Cameron 0'."

Oh dear.

10) SERVANTGATE

Forget Plebgate, welcome to Servantgate. From the HuffPost UK:

"Tory MP Christopher Chope has sparked a minor class war by referring to catering staff in the House of Commons as 'servants' and suggesting MPs should get cheaper meals.

"Speaking in the Commons on Thursday morning, the Christchurch MP said he had eaten in Commons restaurants for three nights last week but 'almost nobody else was present'.

"'The service was absolutely fantastic because there was three-to-one service - three servants for each person sitting down,' he said."

You couldn't make it up. Watch the video of his comments in the Commons here.

PUBLIC OPINION WATCH

From the latest Sun/YouGov poll:

Labour 44
Conservatives 34
Lib Dems 9
Ukip 8

That would give Labour a majority of 118.

140 CHARACTERS OR LESS

@LiamFoxMP PM has made entirely the right decision to postpone speech in light of Algerian hostage crisis.

@joeyjonessky Right decision to postpone speech in such circumstances. More immediate priorities, but the euro headache will return, magnified

@paulwaugh I asked PM if he watched Borgen: “God, no! It’s just whether Morgen Shmorgen is Health Minister or is Education..it’s too much like work!”

900 WORDS OR MORE

Ed Balls, writing in the Guardian, says: "Britain needs reform in Europe, not an exit."

Philip Collins, writing in the Times, says: "The Labour leader should seize his chance to appeal to British business and voters. He must offer an in-out vote now."

Fraser Nelson, writing in the Telegraph, says: "It’s too early for the Tories to assume defeat is inevitable in 2015."


Got something you want to share? Please send any stories/tips/quotes/pix/plugs/gossip to Mehdi Hasan (mehdi.hasan@huffingtonpost.com) or Ned Simons (ned.simons@huffingtonpost.com). You can also follow us on Twitter: @mehdirhasan, @nedsimons and @huffpostukpol

Hard-Hitting Gun Violence Ads Go After NRA-Loving Democrats

I was on Mark Thompson's "Make It Plain" on Sirius XM last night (I'm on every Wednesday night), and we were talking about how urban people and rural people have such different opinions on guns because they have different experiences of guns. Urban gun violence is so random, and so interwoven with the drug trade (that's a whole other discussion), that city dwellers just want to make it stop. (Although the only time I've had a loaded gun pointed at me was in the suburbs, by an Iraqi vet having a PTSD episode. A little unnerving!)

So no, it's not that we want to take away your guns. We just want gun violence against other human beings to stop. We want better odds against being a victim, and against our children being victims. We love living in the city, but we don't want to be so afraid of guns.

I lived in this one apartment on a main city artery, with an iron gate across the front entrance, and I don't know that I would have moved in without it. Shortly after I moved in, a neighborhood woman was shot in the head from a stray bullet -- while she was asleep in her bed. (This was a few blocks from me.) I said to myself, "Well, my bedroom is in the back of the building, so I'm less likely to get hit." Because that's how you think when you live in the city.

Because I live in the city, there's part of me that still can't believe we even have to call our representatives and push for such a "controversial" idea as protecting children from gun violence. That the discussion in our country is so very slanted toward fear and paranoia, keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and the severely mentally ill is what passes for radical.

That's why I'm happy that we have these outside groups to turn up the political heat. Check out this hard-hitting ad from the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. They're now going after conservative Dems who support the NRA in opposing gun controls, and they're linking Rep. John Barrow's stance to the recent slaughter at Newtown:

One week ago, Barrow declared that “no new [gun] laws will have a big chance of passing in the House.” Yesterday, he commented on President Obama’s reform package, saying, “We need to find practical solutions to gun violence that are consistent with the Second Amendment, rather than having another political debate in Washington that divides Americans."

According to CSGV executive director Josh Horwitz, “Representative John Barrow has decided to put his love of the NRA above his concern for his fellow Americans. That is not acceptable.”

Noting that Barrow has received $27,250 in NRA campaign contributions over his eight-year congressional career, Horwitz added, “Rep. Barrow has been bought for the price of a new truck. It would be laughable if his lack of regard for our families’ safety wasn’t so dangerous.”

[...] The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence is encouraging concerned citizens to call Representative Barrow at (202) 225-2823 to tell him to support the President’s gun policy proposals.

The CSGV also went after the newly-elected Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) for calling the White House's effort to reform our gun laws "extreme."

The Heitkamp ads, signed by four parents who lost their children in mass shootings, stated "SHAME ON YOU." They urged Americans to call Senator Heitkamp to express their disgust, and enough of them did that Heitkamp changed her position, saying, "We have a responsibility to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill."

My point is, we can stop gun violence. Finally, the tide of public opinion is overwhelmingly with us. Call your reps, call your senators, write letters to the editor. Call talk radio. Get involved.

The time is now.

PA GOP Introduces Bill To Rig 2016 Electoral Votes

Pennsylvania_state_seal.jpeg
Just like clockwork, it begins. Via ThinkProgress:

On Monday, seven Pennsylvania Republican state representatives introduced a bill to make this vote-rigging scheme a reality in their state. Under their bill, the winner of Pennsylvania as a whole will receive only 2 of the state’s 20 electoral votes, while “[e]ach of the remaining presidential electors shall be elected in the presidential elector’s congressional district.”

Pennsylvania is a blue state that voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in every single presidential race for the last two decades, so implementing the GOP election-rigging plan in Pennsylvania would make it much harder for a Democrat to be elected to the White House. Moreover, because of gerrymandering, it is overwhelmingly likely that the Republican candidate will win a majority of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes even if the Democrat wins the state by a very comfortable margin. Despite the fact that President Obama won Pennsylvania by more than 5 points last November, Democrats carried only 5 of the state’s 18 congressional seats. Accordingly, Obama would have likely won only 7 of the state’s 20 electoral votes if the GOP vote rigging plan had been in effect last year.

ThinkProgress notes that the bill has fewer sponsors this time than last, which might indicate that they're not going to prioritize it. I think it's just a case of political cover. The less fingerprints on the effort to subvert the will of the people, the better.

More folks are starting to get shrill. Good. The more voices the better. Republicans should not be allowed to steal what they cannot win.

Citizens Rally This Week to Demand End to Dual Threat of Money in Politics...

WASHINGTON - January 17 - Citizens will gather across the country this week to demand an end to the combined threat to our democracy of unlimited corporate spending in elections and voter suppression.

These events are part of a nationwide day of action called Money Out/Voters In taking place on and around the weekend of Jan. 19. Activists in more than 75 towns and cities will rally to demand that lawmakers pass measures that limit the corrosive influence of money in politics and expand democratic participation at the polls. Money Out/Voters In is made up of a broad coalition of groups including Public Citizen, NAACP, U.S. PIRG, Common Cause, MoveOn, Organic Consumers Association, League of United Latin American Citizens, Hip Hop Caucus and many more.

“At the same time we’ve seen record amounts of unaccountable corporate money spent on elections, we’ve also seen a deliberate attack on the rights of voters to participate in our democracy,” said Aquene Freechild, senior organizer for Public Citizen’s Democracy Is For People campaign. “Having so many diverse groups involved in this week’s events shows how crucial this fight is.”

In addition to being on the eve of the presidential inauguration, the weekend of Jan. 19 precedes the third anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision and Martin Luther King Jr. Day – both on Jan. 21.

Events include:

- Annapolis, Md. – U.S. Reps. John Sarbanes and Chris Van Hollen will attend a rally and address local advocates who worked to make Maryland one of the first states to call for a constitutional amendment.

- Richmond, Calif. – Community members will hold a rally with speakers and entertainment outside the Chevron refinery, and will make a human billboard. The rally is to protest more than $3.5 million in political spending by Chevron, including $1 million injected into the local city council race.

- Chicago, Ill. – Elected officials will join members of the labor, democracy and civil rights communities at a rally to call for transparency and limits on spending in elections and voting rights for all citizens. Illinois PIRG also will release a report on spending in the last election.

- New York City – Mark Green, former New York City public advocate, will speak at a rally with the Rev. James Forbes; Jeff Clements, author of “Corporations Are Not People”; and Shirley Adelbo, executive vice president of SEIU 32BJ Hospital Workers Union at NYU’s Kimmel Center. The rally will be followed by a “holy matrimony” ceremony between a person and a corporation.

- Austin, Texas – Tom “Smitty” Smith, director of Public Citizen’s Texas office, will join leaders from the NAACP, AFL-CIO, Common Cause and Occupy at a rally on the south steps of the Capitol.

These actions come as the country is witnessing a groundswell of grassroots support for improving our democracy. On Election Day, voters in Montana, Colorado, Chicago, San Francisco and dozens of towns in Massachusetts overwhelmingly backed initiatives that called on Congress to pass a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. So far, 11 states and more than 350 communities have formally called for an amendment. In addition, nearly 100 current members of Congress have expressed support for an amendment, as has President Barack Obama.

“The 2012 election – only the second post-Citizens United election – was the most expensive ever, saw more outside money spent than ever, had more secret, Dark Money spent than ever, and subjected voters to unprecedented negative, attack advertising. We can’t keep going in this direction and maintain a functioning democracy,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen. “As this week’s actions demonstrate, the good news is the American people are in an uproar, and demanding fundamental reform, including a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and related decisions.”

“We are facing a dual attack on our democracy – everyday voters are being disenfranchised while corporations are being hyper-enfranchised,” stated NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous. “We need to fix the fundamentals of our political system if we want to get down to solving our long-term problems.”

“Since the Citizens United decision three years ago, voters have been clear in their disdain for this decision,” said Common Cause President Bob Edgar. “The big question is whether our elected representatives will listen to those voices. Our goal is to build a wave of grassroots support so strong that they cannot ignore it.”

Added Marge Baker, executive vice president for People For the American Way, “Voter suppression and unlimited corporate and special interest money in politics serve as barriers to full civic participation, transparency, and accountability. We are excited to come together with our allies on this important weekend to signal our intentions to confront the multi-faceted assault on the voices of everyday Americans in our political system.”

Since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, super PACs and other independent groups – many of which can hide the identities of their donors – have spent huge amounts, in some cases outspending individual campaigns by a ratio of 2-to-1. Citizens United-enabled outside group spending is devoted overwhelmingly to negative attack ads.

Information about the nationwide action can be found at www.moneyout-votersin.org.

Follow this issue on Twitter at #MoneyOutVotersIn.

Public Citizen is a national, nonprofit consumer advocacy organization founded in 1971 to represent consumer interests in Congress, the executive branch and the courts.

Citizens Rally This Week to Demand End to Dual Threat of Money in Politics...

WASHINGTON - January 17 - Citizens will gather across the country this week to demand an end to the combined threat to our democracy of unlimited corporate spending in elections and voter suppression.

These events are part of a nationwide day of action called Money Out/Voters In taking place on and around the weekend of Jan. 19. Activists in more than 75 towns and cities will rally to demand that lawmakers pass measures that limit the corrosive influence of money in politics and expand democratic participation at the polls. Money Out/Voters In is made up of a broad coalition of groups including Public Citizen, NAACP, U.S. PIRG, Common Cause, MoveOn, Organic Consumers Association, League of United Latin American Citizens, Hip Hop Caucus and many more.

“At the same time we’ve seen record amounts of unaccountable corporate money spent on elections, we’ve also seen a deliberate attack on the rights of voters to participate in our democracy,” said Aquene Freechild, senior organizer for Public Citizen’s Democracy Is For People campaign. “Having so many diverse groups involved in this week’s events shows how crucial this fight is.”

In addition to being on the eve of the presidential inauguration, the weekend of Jan. 19 precedes the third anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision and Martin Luther King Jr. Day – both on Jan. 21.

Events include:

- Annapolis, Md. – U.S. Reps. John Sarbanes and Chris Van Hollen will attend a rally and address local advocates who worked to make Maryland one of the first states to call for a constitutional amendment.

- Richmond, Calif. – Community members will hold a rally with speakers and entertainment outside the Chevron refinery, and will make a human billboard. The rally is to protest more than $3.5 million in political spending by Chevron, including $1 million injected into the local city council race.

- Chicago, Ill. – Elected officials will join members of the labor, democracy and civil rights communities at a rally to call for transparency and limits on spending in elections and voting rights for all citizens. Illinois PIRG also will release a report on spending in the last election.

- New York City – Mark Green, former New York City public advocate, will speak at a rally with the Rev. James Forbes; Jeff Clements, author of “Corporations Are Not People”; and Shirley Adelbo, executive vice president of SEIU 32BJ Hospital Workers Union at NYU’s Kimmel Center. The rally will be followed by a “holy matrimony” ceremony between a person and a corporation.

- Austin, Texas – Tom “Smitty” Smith, director of Public Citizen’s Texas office, will join leaders from the NAACP, AFL-CIO, Common Cause and Occupy at a rally on the south steps of the Capitol.

These actions come as the country is witnessing a groundswell of grassroots support for improving our democracy. On Election Day, voters in Montana, Colorado, Chicago, San Francisco and dozens of towns in Massachusetts overwhelmingly backed initiatives that called on Congress to pass a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. So far, 11 states and more than 350 communities have formally called for an amendment. In addition, nearly 100 current members of Congress have expressed support for an amendment, as has President Barack Obama.

“The 2012 election – only the second post-Citizens United election – was the most expensive ever, saw more outside money spent than ever, had more secret, Dark Money spent than ever, and subjected voters to unprecedented negative, attack advertising. We can’t keep going in this direction and maintain a functioning democracy,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen. “As this week’s actions demonstrate, the good news is the American people are in an uproar, and demanding fundamental reform, including a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and related decisions.”

“We are facing a dual attack on our democracy – everyday voters are being disenfranchised while corporations are being hyper-enfranchised,” stated NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous. “We need to fix the fundamentals of our political system if we want to get down to solving our long-term problems.”

“Since the Citizens United decision three years ago, voters have been clear in their disdain for this decision,” said Common Cause President Bob Edgar. “The big question is whether our elected representatives will listen to those voices. Our goal is to build a wave of grassroots support so strong that they cannot ignore it.”

Added Marge Baker, executive vice president for People For the American Way, “Voter suppression and unlimited corporate and special interest money in politics serve as barriers to full civic participation, transparency, and accountability. We are excited to come together with our allies on this important weekend to signal our intentions to confront the multi-faceted assault on the voices of everyday Americans in our political system.”

Since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, super PACs and other independent groups – many of which can hide the identities of their donors – have spent huge amounts, in some cases outspending individual campaigns by a ratio of 2-to-1. Citizens United-enabled outside group spending is devoted overwhelmingly to negative attack ads.

Information about the nationwide action can be found at www.moneyout-votersin.org.

Follow this issue on Twitter at #MoneyOutVotersIn.

Public Citizen is a national, nonprofit consumer advocacy organization founded in 1971 to represent consumer interests in Congress, the executive branch and the courts.

Floridians Stand Up for Clean Water at EPA Meetings in Tampa

WASHINGTON - January 17 - Concerned Floridians told the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today that the continued slime outbreaks in the state’s public waterways are harming Florida’s tourism business, contaminating drinking water, killing wildlife, and repeatedly threatening public health. They joined together in a public demonstration and urged the EPA to stay strong and enforce the Clean Water Act, despite pressure from polluting industries.

Protesters gathered at the Tampa Hotel, where the EPA is holding the first of two public information meetings (January 17 from 1–7 pm and January 18 from 9 am–1 pm).

"EPA officials say they are prepared to withdraw their proposed strong rules and transfer Clean Water Act authority to Florida DEP. That would be disastrous," said Frank Jackalone, Sierra Club's Florida staff director.

"Governor Scott and DEP Secretary Vinyard are neither willing nor able to stop the flow of manure, sewage, and fertilizer into Florida's springs, lakes, rivers and bays. They are crippling clean water enforcement and doing the dirty work of polluters. Theirs is the reign of red tides and green slime," Jackalone said.

“The joke that DEP stands for ‘Don’t Expect Protection’ has never been more true,” said Earthjustice attorney David Guest.

Gov. Rick Scott’s administration is firing experienced DEP staffers and replacing them with people who come from polluting industries. Records show that enforcement cases against environmental lawbreakers have plummeted at the DEP.

“This is a critical time for us to get a handle on the sewage, manure and fertilizer pollution that’s causing these repeated algae outbreaks which devastate rivers like the St. Johns,” said St. Johns Riverkeeper Lisa Rinaman. “The St. Johns River is at the center of the northeast Florida economy. Green slime and massive piles of dead fish along the banks hurt us all. We want EPA to stand strong and do its job enforcing the Clean Water Act.”

Andrew McElwaine, President of the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, noted that Sarasota County had to remove 4.5 tons of rotting fish from its public beaches due to red tide, which is worsened by this pollution. In addition, Sanibel Island had to cancel a youth fishing tournament, green slimy algae keeps shutting down a drinking water plant for 30,000 people, and the state has banned shell fishing in some areas.

“We were encouraged in November when the EPA announced it is setting enforceable, numeric limits on the amount of pollutants allowed in our waters,” McElwaine said. “The EPA’s number limits apply to about 85 percent of Florida waters. Unfortunately, the EPA allowed Florida to impose ineffective state rules for 15 percent of streams, canals and estuaries.”

“Now EPA is signaling that it is might withdraw its proposed rules for 85 percent of Florida's waters and transfer that authority to the DEP,” McElwaine said. “That’s the wrong way to go.”

“We need EPA’s enforceable numbers for 100 percent of the state’s waters,” said Earthjustice attorney Guest. “We’ve seen that the Scott administration is far more interested in coddling polluter lobbyists than it is in cleaning up our public waterways. We know that polluted water is a job killer for everyone who relies on the tourism industry here in Florida—and that’s pretty much all of us.”

Florida Wildlife Federation President Fuller added: “The DEP rules are ineffective, convoluted and never result in enforcement. Meanwhile, pollution of Florida's waterways continues to worsen.”

The EPA began working to set pollution limits for Florida in 2009—part of a settlement in a 2008 Clean Water Act suit filed by Earthjustice in the Northern District of Florida on behalf of the Florida Wildlife Federation, the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, the Environmental Confederation of Southwest Florida, St. John’s Riverkeeper, and the Sierra Club. The suit challenged the decade-long delay by the state and federal governments in setting limits for the pollution.

The public supports the EPA pollution limits. In response to a call for action, more than 40,000 citizens wrote the White House in 2012, urging the Obama administration to stand firm on imposing effective federal standards for Florida waters.

Floridians Stand Up for Clean Water at EPA Meetings in Tampa

WASHINGTON - January 17 - Concerned Floridians told the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today that the continued slime outbreaks in the state’s public waterways are harming Florida’s tourism business, contaminating drinking water, killing wildlife, and repeatedly threatening public health. They joined together in a public demonstration and urged the EPA to stay strong and enforce the Clean Water Act, despite pressure from polluting industries.

Protesters gathered at the Tampa Hotel, where the EPA is holding the first of two public information meetings (January 17 from 1–7 pm and January 18 from 9 am–1 pm).

"EPA officials say they are prepared to withdraw their proposed strong rules and transfer Clean Water Act authority to Florida DEP. That would be disastrous," said Frank Jackalone, Sierra Club's Florida staff director.

"Governor Scott and DEP Secretary Vinyard are neither willing nor able to stop the flow of manure, sewage, and fertilizer into Florida's springs, lakes, rivers and bays. They are crippling clean water enforcement and doing the dirty work of polluters. Theirs is the reign of red tides and green slime," Jackalone said.

“The joke that DEP stands for ‘Don’t Expect Protection’ has never been more true,” said Earthjustice attorney David Guest.

Gov. Rick Scott’s administration is firing experienced DEP staffers and replacing them with people who come from polluting industries. Records show that enforcement cases against environmental lawbreakers have plummeted at the DEP.

“This is a critical time for us to get a handle on the sewage, manure and fertilizer pollution that’s causing these repeated algae outbreaks which devastate rivers like the St. Johns,” said St. Johns Riverkeeper Lisa Rinaman. “The St. Johns River is at the center of the northeast Florida economy. Green slime and massive piles of dead fish along the banks hurt us all. We want EPA to stand strong and do its job enforcing the Clean Water Act.”

Andrew McElwaine, President of the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, noted that Sarasota County had to remove 4.5 tons of rotting fish from its public beaches due to red tide, which is worsened by this pollution. In addition, Sanibel Island had to cancel a youth fishing tournament, green slimy algae keeps shutting down a drinking water plant for 30,000 people, and the state has banned shell fishing in some areas.

“We were encouraged in November when the EPA announced it is setting enforceable, numeric limits on the amount of pollutants allowed in our waters,” McElwaine said. “The EPA’s number limits apply to about 85 percent of Florida waters. Unfortunately, the EPA allowed Florida to impose ineffective state rules for 15 percent of streams, canals and estuaries.”

“Now EPA is signaling that it is might withdraw its proposed rules for 85 percent of Florida's waters and transfer that authority to the DEP,” McElwaine said. “That’s the wrong way to go.”

“We need EPA’s enforceable numbers for 100 percent of the state’s waters,” said Earthjustice attorney Guest. “We’ve seen that the Scott administration is far more interested in coddling polluter lobbyists than it is in cleaning up our public waterways. We know that polluted water is a job killer for everyone who relies on the tourism industry here in Florida—and that’s pretty much all of us.”

Florida Wildlife Federation President Fuller added: “The DEP rules are ineffective, convoluted and never result in enforcement. Meanwhile, pollution of Florida's waterways continues to worsen.”

The EPA began working to set pollution limits for Florida in 2009—part of a settlement in a 2008 Clean Water Act suit filed by Earthjustice in the Northern District of Florida on behalf of the Florida Wildlife Federation, the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, the Environmental Confederation of Southwest Florida, St. John’s Riverkeeper, and the Sierra Club. The suit challenged the decade-long delay by the state and federal governments in setting limits for the pollution.

The public supports the EPA pollution limits. In response to a call for action, more than 40,000 citizens wrote the White House in 2012, urging the Obama administration to stand firm on imposing effective federal standards for Florida waters.

New World Order – Attack On Sovereignty

Those concerned about “The New World Order” speak as if the United States is coming under the control of an outside conspiratorial force. In fact, it is the US that is the New World Order.

New Report “Billion-Dollar Democracy” Shows Unprecedented Impact of Big Money in 2012 Elections

WASHINGTON - January 17 - It took just 32 billionaires and corporations giving Super PACs an average of $9.9 million apiece to match every single dollar given by small donors to Romney and Obama in the 2012 election cycle, according to “Billion-Dollar Democracy,” a new report by U.S. PIRG and Demos. Those small donations amounted to over $313 million from more than 3.7 million individuals.

READ Billion-Dollar Democracy

“Americans who are wondering why it seems tougher to get ahead or even get a fair shake in today’s economy should look to big money politics for answers,” said Adam Lioz, report co-author and Counsel for Demos. “When a tiny group of wealthy donors fuels political campaigns, they get to set the agenda in Washington, and the rest of us are left to argue over that agenda.”

The report provides a full and detailed analysis of all 2012 federal election spending and fundraising by campaigns and Super PACs. The data shows the undue influence of large donors, business interests and secret spenders in 2012:

  • Nearly 60% of Super PAC funding came from just 159 donors contributing at least $1 million.
  • Candidates for both House and Senate raised the majority of their funds from gifts of $1,000 or more; and 40 percent of all contributions to Senate candidates came from donors who gave at least $2,500. (Those donors are just 0.02 percent of the American population.)
  • Corporate donations accounted for a large portion of the funds of two of top ten most active Super PACs, including 18 percent of Restore Our Future’s total contributions and 52.6 percent of those of FreedomWorks for America.

“The first post-Citizens United presidential election confirmed our fears that the new unlimited-money regime allows well-heeled special interests and secret spenders to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens,” said Blair Bowie, U.S. PIRG Democracy Advocate and report co-author.

Billion-Dollar Democracy” also found that groups that do not disclose the source of their funds paid for well more than half of television advertising in the 2012 presidential race not sponsored by candidates or parties.

”These dark money groups hide key information about where they get their money from voters,” added Bowie. “Furthermore, because there’s no one to hold responsible for the content of their advertising, studies show they are far more likely to be misleading or just downright lying.”

Data in “Billion Dollar Democracy” also demonstrate to extent to which our big money system determines winners and losers, distorting our democratic process. Incumbents, for example, are big winners—outraising major challengers by 443% in the House and 316% in the Senate.

The report documents how vastly disproportionate influence by the “donor class” skews public policy, and concludes with specific solutions for every level of government to ensure that ordinary Americans can make their voices heard in financing electoral campaigns. These recommendations include amending the constitution, matching small political contributions with public funds, and requiring corporations to disclose political giving, among others.

READ “DOLLAR DEMOCRACY” HERE: http://demos.io/billions2012

GRAPHICS AVAILABLE HERE: http://demos.io/11A14wM

A multi-issue national organization, Demos combines research, policy development, and advocacy to influence public debates and catalyze change. We publish books, reports, and briefing papers that illuminate critical problems and advance innovative solutions; work at both the national and state level with advocates and policymakers to promote reforms; help to build the capacity and skills of key progressive constituencies; project our values into the media by promoting Demos Fellows and staff in print, broadcast, and Internet venues; and host public events that showcase new ideas and leading progressive voices.

New Report “Billion-Dollar Democracy” Shows Unprecedented Impact of Big Money in 2012 Elections

WASHINGTON - January 17 - It took just 32 billionaires and corporations giving Super PACs an average of $9.9 million apiece to match every single dollar given by small donors to Romney and Obama in the 2012 election cycle, according to “Billion-Dollar Democracy,” a new report by U.S. PIRG and Demos. Those small donations amounted to over $313 million from more than 3.7 million individuals.

READ Billion-Dollar Democracy

“Americans who are wondering why it seems tougher to get ahead or even get a fair shake in today’s economy should look to big money politics for answers,” said Adam Lioz, report co-author and Counsel for Demos. “When a tiny group of wealthy donors fuels political campaigns, they get to set the agenda in Washington, and the rest of us are left to argue over that agenda.”

The report provides a full and detailed analysis of all 2012 federal election spending and fundraising by campaigns and Super PACs. The data shows the undue influence of large donors, business interests and secret spenders in 2012:

  • Nearly 60% of Super PAC funding came from just 159 donors contributing at least $1 million.
  • Candidates for both House and Senate raised the majority of their funds from gifts of $1,000 or more; and 40 percent of all contributions to Senate candidates came from donors who gave at least $2,500. (Those donors are just 0.02 percent of the American population.)
  • Corporate donations accounted for a large portion of the funds of two of top ten most active Super PACs, including 18 percent of Restore Our Future’s total contributions and 52.6 percent of those of FreedomWorks for America.

“The first post-Citizens United presidential election confirmed our fears that the new unlimited-money regime allows well-heeled special interests and secret spenders to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens,” said Blair Bowie, U.S. PIRG Democracy Advocate and report co-author.

Billion-Dollar Democracy” also found that groups that do not disclose the source of their funds paid for well more than half of television advertising in the 2012 presidential race not sponsored by candidates or parties.

”These dark money groups hide key information about where they get their money from voters,” added Bowie. “Furthermore, because there’s no one to hold responsible for the content of their advertising, studies show they are far more likely to be misleading or just downright lying.”

Data in “Billion Dollar Democracy” also demonstrate to extent to which our big money system determines winners and losers, distorting our democratic process. Incumbents, for example, are big winners—outraising major challengers by 443% in the House and 316% in the Senate.

The report documents how vastly disproportionate influence by the “donor class” skews public policy, and concludes with specific solutions for every level of government to ensure that ordinary Americans can make their voices heard in financing electoral campaigns. These recommendations include amending the constitution, matching small political contributions with public funds, and requiring corporations to disclose political giving, among others.

READ “DOLLAR DEMOCRACY” HERE: http://demos.io/billions2012

GRAPHICS AVAILABLE HERE: http://demos.io/11A14wM

A multi-issue national organization, Demos combines research, policy development, and advocacy to influence public debates and catalyze change. We publish books, reports, and briefing papers that illuminate critical problems and advance innovative solutions; work at both the national and state level with advocates and policymakers to promote reforms; help to build the capacity and skills of key progressive constituencies; project our values into the media by promoting Demos Fellows and staff in print, broadcast, and Internet venues; and host public events that showcase new ideas and leading progressive voices.

Republicans Considering “Temporary” Debt-Ceiling Increase

In what is sure to be a complete non-starter with the Obama administration, WSJ reports that Paul Ryan said that "Republicans are discussing whether to support a short-term increase in the nation's borrowing authority, possibly linking the debt ceilin...

The Great Systemic Rig of 2012 is Now Ending

Europe's banking system has been on the ropes for years.

It's a little known fact that  the largest recipients of US bailouts were in fact foreign banks based in Europe. Also bear in mind that the biggest beneficiaries of QE 2 were European banks. Things got so bad in mid-2012 that the whole system lurched towards collapse. The only thing that pulled the EU back from the brink was Mario Draghi's promise of unlimited bond buying (a promise and nothing more as the EU has yet to do any of this).

However, these efforts, like all cover?ups, will not last. Indeed, by the look of things, Europe’s banking system is breaking down again....

Greece’s four largest banks need to boost their capital by 27.5 billion euros ($36.3 billion) after taking losses from the country’s debt swap earlier this year, the largest sovereign restructuring in history.

National Bank of Greece SA, the country’s biggest lender, needs to raise 9.8 billion euros, according to an e-­?mailed report by the Athens-­?based Bank of Greece (TELL) today. Eurobank Ergasias SA (EUROB) needs 5.8 billion euros, Alpha Bank (ALPHA) needs 4.6 billion euros and Piraeus Bank SA (TPEIR) needs 7.3 billion euros, according to the report. Total recapitalization needs for the country’s banking sector amount to 40.5 billion euros, the report said.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-­?12-­?27/greek-­?bank-­?capital-...? at-­?eu27-­?5-­?billion-­?bank-­?of-­?greece-­?says.html

The above articles tell us point blank that Europe’s banking crisis is neither fixed nor even close to over. However, the numbers need some perspective: sure, €27.5 billion sounds like a lot of money, but just how big is it relative to Greece’s banks.

The entire capital base of the Greek banking system is only €22 billion.

By saying that Greek banks need €27.5 billion Greece is essentially admitting that is needs to recapitalize its entire banking system. Also, you should know that Greek banks are still sitting on €46.8 billion in bad loans.

There is a word for a banking system with a capital base of €22 billion and bad loans of €46.8. It’s INSOLVENT.

We get other signs that Europe is ready to fall back into the abyss from recent revelations concerning Spain’s sovereign bonds.

In July 2012, Spain’s ten year bond yield hit 8% even though Spain had already been granted a €100 billion bailout by the EU and the ECB had also promised to provide unlimited bond buying.

As a point of reference, remember that any yield over 7% is GAME OVER as far as funding your debt.

Then, starting in August 2012, Spain’s ten-­?year bond yields magically began to fall. Since that time, they’ve plunged to just 5%.

The reason for this drop in yields?

It’s not that Spain’s finances improved (its Debt to GDP ratio hit 85% this year and is on track to reach 90% by the end of 2013). Nor is it that Spain’s economy is recovering (unemployment reached a new record in 3Q12).

It’s not also that investors are less worried about Spain and have decided to buy Spanish debt (Spain just staged a terrible bond rally in early December).

So why were Spanish yields falling?

Spain has been using up its Social Security fund to buy its own debt.

Spain has been quietly tapping the country's richest piggy bank, the Social Security Reserve Fund, as a buyer of last resort for Spanish government bonds, raising questions about the fund's role as guarantor of future pension payouts.

Now the scarcely noticed borrowing spree, carried out amid a prolonged economic crisis, is about to end, because there is little left to take. At least 90% of the €65 billion ($85.7 billion) fund has been invested in increasingly risky Spanish debt, according to official figures, and the government has begun withdrawing cash for emergency payments.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014241278873233745045782173840 62120520.html

This is precisely what we mean when we say the system was rigged in the second half of 2012. Spain, a country that is totally bankrupt and likely heading for its own version of the Arab Spring (things are so bad that Spaniards have begun self-­? immolating just as they did in Tunisia right before that country suffered a societal breakdown) managed to fool the world into believing that things had improved by raiding its social security fund to buy its own debt.

As we said at the beginning of this issue, the rigging that occurred in the second half of 2012 was simply staggering. But it will end. Our view is that we have perhaps another month or so left at the most before things begin to get ugly again.

With that in mind, smart investors are taking advantage of the lull in the markets to position themselves for what’s coming.

We offer several FREE Special Reports designed to help them do this. They include:

Preparing Your Portfolio For Obama’s Economic Nightmare

What Europe’s Crisis Means For You and Your Savings

How to Protect Yourself From Inflation

And last but not least…

Bullion 101: Everything You Need to Know About Investing in Gold and Silver Bullion…

You can pick up FREE copies of all of the above at:

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Behind the NRA’s Money: Gun Lobby Deepens Financial Ties to $12 Billion Firearms Industry

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We conclude today’s show with a look at the connection between the firearms industry and the National Rifle Association. Throughout its history, the NRA has portrayed itself as an advocate for individual gun owners’ Second Amendment rights. But a new investigation finds the group has come to rely on the support of the $12-billion-a-year gun industry, made up of firearms and ammunition manufacturers and sellers.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we go to Washington, D.C. We’re joined by investigative reporter Peter Stone, who has covered money and politics and lobbying for 20 years for the National Journal , the Center for Public Integrity. His latest piece is for The Huffington Post; it’s called "NRA Gun Control Crusade Reflects Firearms Industry Financial Ties."

Peter, welcome to Democracy Now! Just what are those ties?

PETER STONE: Well, the ties have become extensive in recent years. They date back principally to 2005, when the gun industry was facing a major crisis. It had been hit by dozens of suits from cities in recent years prior to that, and they were facing significant financial costs from this litigation. Litigation was aimed at recouping healthcare and other costs from gun violence in major cities. And the gun industry turned to the NRA for its lobbying muscle, which is legendary in Congress. They needed help. And they came up with a plan to obtain a liability shield for gun manufacturers and distributors. It’s the only industry in the country that was able to secure such a shield from most litigation. The NRA pushed it very hard for a few years, and it passed Congress in 2005, providing unique protection to gun manufacturers.

At the same time, that very same year, the NRA launched a new fundraising program aimed at corporate donors, most of whom have been firearms companies, ammunitions makers. And that program has boomed since it started in 2005. There are no precise numbers, but the NRA posts data about the range of contributions from firearms industry firms. And according to a report in 2011 from the Violence Policy Center, between $14 million and $39 million came into NRA coffers in that period. This is probably a conservative estimate. Most of the NRA’s money is still from other sources, the bulk of the money, but the firearms industry has formed a kind of symbiotic relationship with the NRA in recent years—it benefits both.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Peter Stone, can you say a little about who the executives are who serve on the board of the NRA?

PETER STONE: Well, the NRA has a very large board, about 76 members, many of whom are prominent conservatives, including Grover Norquist, Ollie North, film star Chuck Norris and many others. They have a small number of industry executives, as well, who are on the board. And at least a few of these are from fairly large donors; Brownells, Barrett Firearms, their top executives are on the NRA board. Interestingly, both of these companies are distributors or makers of these high-capacity magazines, which are now facing significant criticism and legislative threats because of concerns that they have been linked to many of the mass shootings in the last couple of years. So it probably gives them a little more input and influence at the NRA as they fight these bans.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about how the NRA’s positions increased gun sales for the NRA’s patrons, the weapons manufacturers?

PETER STONE: Well, it’s anecdotal, but there’s obviously evidence in recent years that one of the major pushes of the NRA over the last decade has been to pass laws in states called "concealed carry laws," which are now existing in almost every state. The president of one of the big companies, Sturm, Ruger, in Connecticut, in a conference call with analysts back in 2011, said that they were looking for a nice uptick in sales in Wisconsin after the—that state passed a concealed carry law. These are ones that, you know, the NRA has pushed in Second Amendment grounds, self-defense grounds, but they obviously have been good for the firearms industry, too.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Peter Stone, could you say what you think the NRA’s influence will be on the gun control legislation or discussion that’s now going on?

PETER STONE: Well, the NRA still has, you know, huge influence in Congress. It tried to defeat President Obama in 2012. It spent over $10 million in that effort. It didn’t succeed. But it also has upped its contributions significantly in recent years and tilted toward the Republican Party. And in the House, it’s going to be very tough to get enough Republican votes to support some of the legislation which the administration seems likely to push: the assault weapons ban and the limits on high-capacity magazines. I think the latter may have a little more possibility. There have been some statements from—isolated statements in recent days from Republicans indicating that they seem to be—there’s some openness, in a handful of Republicans, to such a ban. It will be very interesting to see if the NRA can twist those arms and block the legislation. I think that’s more likely at this stage than the assault weapons ban. But obviously, popular sentiment and support for gun control has increased. It’s a period of great flux. More momentum seems to exist now than has existed in a long time for increased gun control measures, tougher gun laws. And I think this is a volatile situation where the NRA is facing, you know, new challenges. It may find that it can’t, you know, rely on all the members it’s relied on in the past. But it’s going to be—

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Stone, we’re going to have to leave it there, but I thank you for being with us, longtime investigative reporter. We’ll link to your piece at The Huffington Post called "NRA Gun Control Crusade Reflects Firearms Industry Financial Ties."

And I want to encourage people to tune into our inauguration special Monday from 8:00 in the morning 'til 1:00 in the afternoon. And Tuesday to Friday, we'll be at Sundance.

MUST SEE: Citizens Against Senseless Violence: “Join Us! Tell Everyone Your House Is Completely...

Mac Slavo
January 17th, 2013
SHTFplan.com

Read by 16,072 people

This is one you don’t want to miss.

Citizens Against Senseless Violence goes door-to-door and asks supporters of gun control legislation to join the movement by putting signs in front of their homes letting everyone know that they proudly live in a gun free zone.

The group visits a host of key anti-gun proponents including the publishing team at the Journal News, which recently posted a public map of homeowners with registered weapons. They also visit the home of our very own Attorney General Eric Holder who has said we need to “brainwash” people about gun ownership, yet ironically, was the lead law enforcement officer in charge of an operation that transferred (without a background check or registration, no less!) military style assault rifles with high capacity magazines to the Los Zetas Mexican drug cartel.

All have called on President Obama and Congress to disarm Americans.

While they’ve been quite vocal about ensuring that Americans give up their guns through reeducation, intimidation and policy, as you’ll see, they are not exactly receptive to the idea of letting everyone else in their neighborhood know how proud they are to be gun-free.

Since these reporters and editors did not consider it a violation of the privacy and safety of others to reveal which homes have guns and which homes don’t, we went to see which of them would be willing to put up a sign publicly declaring their homes to be gun free zones.

While we didn’t find any members of the media with the strength of their convictions, we did find quite a few guns and some good explanations for why they might be necessary.

Video by Project Veritas via Activist Post

Their hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Author: Mac Slavo
Views: Read by 16,072 people
Date: January 17th, 2013
Website: www.SHTFplan.com

Copyright Information: Copyright SHTFplan and Mac Slavo. This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to www.shtfplan.com. Please contact us for permission to reproduce this content in other media formats.

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

MUST SEE: Citizens Against Senseless Violence: “Join Us! Tell Everyone Your House Is Completely...

Mac Slavo
January 17th, 2013
SHTFplan.com

Read by 13,922 people

This is one you don’t want to miss.

Citizens Against Senseless Violence goes door-to-door and asks supporters of gun control legislation to join the movement by putting signs in front of their homes letting everyone know that they proudly live in a gun free zone.

The group visits a host of key anti-gun proponents including the publishing team at the Journal News, which recently posted a public map of homeowners with registered weapons. They also visit the home of our very own Attorney General Eric Holder who has said we need to “brainwash” people about gun ownership, yet ironically, was the lead law enforcement officer in charge of an operation that transferred (without a background check or registration, no less!) military style assault rifles with high capacity magazines to the Los Zetas Mexican drug cartel.

All have called on President Obama and Congress to disarm Americans.

While they’ve been quite vocal about ensuring that Americans give up their guns through reeducation, intimidation and policy, as you’ll see, they are not exactly receptive to the idea of letting everyone else in their neighborhood know how proud they are to be gun-free.

Since these reporters and editors did not consider it a violation of the privacy and safety of others to reveal which homes have guns and which homes don’t, we went to see which of them would be willing to put up a sign publicly declaring their homes to be gun free zones.

While we didn’t find any members of the media with the strength of their convictions, we did find quite a few guns and some good explanations for why they might be necessary.

Video by Project Veritas via Activist Post

Their hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Author: Mac Slavo
Views: Read by 13,922 people
Date: January 17th, 2013
Website: www.SHTFplan.com

Copyright Information: Copyright SHTFplan and Mac Slavo. This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to www.shtfplan.com. Please contact us for permission to reproduce this content in other media formats.

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

We’re Energy Workers and We Oppose the Keystone XL Pipeline

The following speech was delivered to a City University of New York forum called “Confronting the Climate Crisis: Can Labor Help Shape an Effective Strategy?” on Thursday, January 17th:

The obvious answer to the question is yes and the voice of energy workers is a particularly important one to hear while talking about labour’s role in reducing green-house gas emissions. As Canada's largest energy union, the CEP represents 35,000 members employed in oil and gas extraction, transportation, refining, and conversion in the petrochemical and plastics sectors.

CEP believes that it is necessary to transition away from fossil fuels by reducing consumption and investing in green energies while ensuring a just transition for energy workers and their communities.

My union believes we need to pause further development of Alberta’s bitumen sands. Additionally, the bevy of export pipelines being proposed need to be put on hold until we develop a national consensus around a sustainable energy strategy.

Corporations and their sycophants in the media and academia tell us that we have to choose between jobs and the environment. But we reject this dichotomy.

We oppose the proposed Keystone XL pipeline and call on President Obama to reject the project. Climate pollution from the bitumen sands industry is already considerable and will only get worse by approving Keystone XL. The Canadian government’s aggressive lobbying in the US in favor of the pipeline is an embarrassment.

I have been arrested in the fight against Keystone XL because our union understands that this pipeline is bad for both the environment and Canadian workers. The pipeline will take potential upgrading and refining jobs away from Canadians and put our country's energy security at risk.

Fighting for economic equality and climate justice are at the base of our everyday work. The CEP understands that the same government that wants to extract as much oil (should I say profits) as quickly as possible from Alberta’s bitumen sands has repeatedly legislated workers back to work and attacked unions’ political independence.

The CEP is active in numerous initiatives to fight the climate crisis. We recently supported PowerShift, a skills sharing conference that brought together 1000 youth fighting for climate justice.

When the leader of the official opposition Thomas Mulcair sparked a controversy by saying the Canadian dollar is “artificially high” because we’re “allowing [the oil companies] a bit of a free ride in using the air, the soil and the water in an unlimited way” the right wing accused him of causing regional tensions between the manufacturing-focused east of the country and the more resource dependent west. In response, CEP local 707 hosted Mulcair’s tour of the bitumen sands. This helped undercut the right wing’s attacks by showing that many of those working in Fort McMurray’s energy extraction sector are also concerned about unbridled oil expansion.

The CEP is part of Blue Green Canada, an alliance of labour, environmental and civil society organizations. A recent Blue Green report shows that six to eight times more jobs could be created by investing the $1.3 billion in federal subsidies that currently go to oil and gas subsidies into energy efficiency, renewable energy and public transit.

For science the threat of global warming is beyond sane dispute. But, capitalists whose wealth and power depends on existing enterprises deny there is a problem. Our current economic system is dependent on endless growth even though it’s clear as day that unrestrained growth is environmentally unsustainable.

Our current economic system is dependent on endless growth even though it’s clear as day that unrestrained growth is environmentally unsustainable.

Corporations and their sycophants in the media and academia tell us that we have to choose between jobs and the environment. But we reject this dichotomy.

It’s possible to build an economic system that provides people with good and fulfilling work all the while respecting Mother Earth. If we don’t seek that balance there may be no good jobs for our great grandchildren.

To deal with the unfolding ecological crisis we must jettison corporation-centric economic policies in favor of ones that actually address our world’s many social and ecological concerns.

In conclusion, the main spokesperson for the largely successful student strike that rocked Quebec last spring, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, told Powershift in October: “The problem is not [personal] consumption, it is our economy and production. Our system is broken on a systemic level. The destruction of our environment is a natural and inevitable result.

“Without radical change we will be faced with extinction. Resistance in these times is not an option. It is a duty.”

David Coles

Are School Children Taking Gun Control Into Their Own Hands?

BoNeSxxx's picture

Found on the net...

In Plain English

So Obama released his Executive Orders to Prevent Maniacs From Being Maniacs today. I’ve taken the time to translate the summaries into plain English below:

1. Issue a Presidential Memorandum to require federal agencies to make relevant data available to the federal background check system.

Tell the government to follow the law.

2. Address unnecessary legal barriers, particularly relating to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, that may prevent states from making information available to the background check system.

Tell the regulators to stop the stupid and useless regulations.

3. Improve incentives for states to share information with the background check system.

Pay the states back for the unfunded mandates that the Feds keeps making.

4. Direct the Attorney General to review categories of individuals prohibited from having a gun to make sure dangerous people are not slipping through the cracks.

Tell the Attorney General to do his job.

5. Propose rulemaking to give law enforcement the ability to run a full background check on an individual before returning a seized gun.

Start another unfunded mandate. (See #3.)

6. Publish a letter from ATF to federally licensed gun dealers providing guidance on how to run background checks for private sellers.

Tell FDLs how to do something no one is ever going to bother to do.

7. Launch a national safe and responsible gun ownership campaign.

Do the same thing the NRA already does, only half as well at twice the cost.

8. Review safety standards for gun locks and gun safes (Consumer Product Safety Commission).

Do what Underwriters Laboratories already does, only half as well at twice the cost.

9. Issue a Presidential Memorandum to require federal law enforcement to trace guns recovered in criminal investigations.

Tell the Feds to do their jobs.

10. Release a DOJ report analyzing information on lost and stolen guns and make it widely available to law enforcement.

Tell the DOJ to do its job.

11. Nominate an ATF director.

Tell myself to do my job.

12. Provide law enforcement, first responders, and school officials with proper training for active shooter situations.

Spend more money.

13. Maximize enforcement efforts to prevent gun violence and prosecute gun crime.

Tell everyone to do their goddamned jobs.

14. Issue a Presidential Memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence.

Tell the doctors to figure out why it isn’t the feds’ fault that they aren’t doing their jobs.

15. Direct the Attorney General to issue a report on the availability and most effective use of new gun safety technologies and challenge the private sector to develop innovative technologies.

Figure out a way to push “smart guns” that don’t exist and wouldn’t be useful as guns if they did.

16. Clarify that the Affordable Care Act does not prohibit doctors asking their patients about guns in their homes.

Tell everyone that Obamacare doesn’t actually mean what it says.

17. Release a letter to health care providers clarifying that no federal law prohibits them from reporting threats of violence to law enforcement authorities.

Tell everyone that, seriously, Obamacare doesn’t actually mean that. We had to pass it to find out what was in it, after all.

18. Provide incentives for schools to hire school resource officers.

Tell everyone that I’ve been a partisan hack for the last month every time I said the NRA was crazy to want to post more cops in schools.

19. Develop model emergency response plans for schools, houses of worship and institutions of higher education.

Do the same thing that every police agency in the country has already done, only half as well and at ten times the cost.

20. Release a letter to state health officials clarifying the scope of mental health services that Medicaid plans must cover.

Tell doctors what they already know.

21. Finalize regulations clarifying essential health benefits and parity requirements within ACA exchanges.

Tell people what the parts of Obamacare don’t say anything.

22. Commit to finalizing mental health parity regulations.

Tell HHS to do their job.

23. Launch a national dialogue led by Secretaries Sebelius and Duncan on mental health.

Hand the rest of the job of telling everyone to do their jobs off to someone else so it is no longer my job.

Aaron Swartz: Suicide or Murder?

Advocates of online openness and freedom lost a committed champion. The Economist said to call him "gifted would be to miss the point. As far as the internet was concerned, he was the gift."

Gitmo – America’s Legal Black Hole

What is of particular concern is the fact that many of these prisoners are not even charged on anything. Is not 11 years too long a period to charge them or let them go free?

Prosecutors defend charges against Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz (Reuters/Noah Berger)

Aaron Swartz (Reuters/Noah Berger)

US Attorney Carmen Ortiz has released a statement defending her prosecution of Aaron Swartz, calling it an appropriate handling of the case, even though it may have prompted the 26-year-old’s suicide.

Although Ortiz expressed her condolences to friends and family of Swartz, she proceeded by defending her office’s conduct and claimed she would have sought out a much lighter penalty than Swartz was expecting.

“At no time did this office ever seek – or ever tell Mr. Swartz’s attorneys that it intended to see – maximum penalties under the law,” Ortiz said. The Internet activist and Reddit co-founder was facing the possibility of more than 50 years in prison and $4 million in fines if convicted, but Ortiz claims she would have recommended that the judge offer a deal that came with six-month prison sentence in a low-security setting.

Elliot Peters, Swartz’s lawyer, told the Huffington Post that prosecutors planned to argue for a seven to eight year prison sentence if their client had rejected the six-month offer.

“This office’s conduct was appropriate in bringing and handling this case,” Ortiz said. “The career prosecutors handling this matter took on the difficult task of enforcing a law they had taken an oath to uphold, and did so reasonably.”

But Forbes writer Tim Lee believes that plea bargains are a disgrace and force defendants into pleading guilty without going to trial and having the opportunity to defend themselves. Lee also claims that Ortiz used the maximum penalty threats to force the young man into pleading guilty.

“If Ortiz thought Swartz only deserved to spend six months in jail, why did she charge him with crimes carrying a maximum penalty of 50 years? It’s a common way to gaining leverage during plea bargaining,” Lee writes. “Had Swartz chosen to plead not guilty, the offer of six months in jail would have evaporated. Upon conviction, prosecutors likely would have sought the maximum penalty available under the law. And while the judge would have been unlikely to sentence him to the full 50 years, it’s not hard to imagine him being sentenced to 10 years. “

Ortiz’s statement was the first time she publicly commented on the Swartz case since he took his own life on Jan. 11. The young man’s friends and family have blamed the government’s heavy pursuit of the young man for his death. Swartz’s father said his son was “killed by the government”.

The US attorney’s office in Boston has so far declined to discuss the controversy surrounding the prosecution and Swartz’s suicide, but opposition to the US attorney’s actions is growing. A White House petition calling for the removal of Ortiz from office has generated more than 40,000 signatures, thereby requiring an official response from the Obama administration.

Ortiz is now facing further criticism for using her statement to defend her actions, rather than apologizing for her harsh pursuit of Swartz.

“As federal prosecutors, our mission includes protecting the use of computers and the Internet by enforcing the law as fairly and responsibly as possible,” she said. “We strive to do our best to fulfill this mission every day.”

And in relaying her mission, the attorney’s condolences have done little to protect her from further scrutiny as Swartz supporters continue to blame the prosecution for their heavy pursuit.

GOP Rep. Stockman Threatens Impeachment Over Use of Executive Orders on Guns

You gotta love it. These wingnuts can't even wait to see what executive orders end up being issued on gun control before they start with the impeachment threats. I'm not quite sure what else remains on the list that Congressional Republicans can do to make themselves less popular than they are right now, but I'm pretty sure impeachment hearings would work out about as well for them as they did back in Clinton's days, which is not well at all.

GOP Rep. Threatens Impeachment If Obama Uses Executive Order On Guns:

The conservative discord in the wake of the Newtown, Conn. massacre went up another octave on Monday when Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX) threatened to file articles of impeachment if President Obama uses an executive order to try to reduce gun violence.

“The White House’s recent announcement they will use executive orders and executive actions to infringe on our constitutionally-protected right to keep and bear arms is an unconstitutional and unconscionable attack on the very founding principles of this republic,” Stockman said in a statement. “I will seek to thwart this action by any means necessary, including but not limited to eliminating funding for implementation, defunding the White House, and even filing articles of impeachment.”

Stockman showed up on Greta Van Susteren's show on Fox Tuesday night and reiterated his statement about impeachment being an option on the table and he threw this stink-bomb out there: Republican freshman to Fox News host: Obama reminds me of Saddam Hussein:

Republican Rep. Steve Stockman of Texas unfavorably compared President Barack Obama to Abraham Lincoln and Saddam Hussein on Tuesday night.

The Republican freshman appeared on Fox News’ On The Record with Greta Van Susteren to discuss how he would try impeach Obama if the President attempted to use an executive order to enact new gun control laws.

“He is saying he is going to issue 19 executive orders,” Stockman explained to Greta Van Susteren. “If it breaches his authority into legislation which impedes on the Constitution, we have the right to take different steps to counter that. A lot of people are frustrated with Republicans not fighting back, and I was too when I was on the sidelines. I got involved with Congress, I said enough is enough, and we need to stand up and fight. I said these kinds of tools are available to us, and we’re going to use every tool possible to fight an administration which wants to abrogate the Constitution.” [...]

At the end of the interview, Stockman awkwardly interjected that Obama was “even using children.”

“Reminds me of Saddam Hussein, when he used kids,” he said with a laugh.

“Well, I think that is just a little bit of a stretch,” Van Susteren replied.

I think this turd just figured out how to make sure he gets himself lots of airtime on Fox. Every time we get rid of one of these flamethrowers, another one comes along and takes their place.

GOP Rep. Stockman Threatens Impeachment Over Use of Executive Orders on Guns

You gotta love it. These wingnuts can't even wait to see what executive orders end up being issued on gun control before they start with the impeachment threats. I'm not quite sure what else remains on the list that Congressional Republicans can do to make themselves less popular than they are right now, but I'm pretty sure impeachment hearings would work out about as well for them as they did back in Clinton's days, which is not well at all.

GOP Rep. Threatens Impeachment If Obama Uses Executive Order On Guns:

The conservative discord in the wake of the Newtown, Conn. massacre went up another octave on Monday when Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX) threatened to file articles of impeachment if President Obama uses an executive order to try to reduce gun violence.

“The White House’s recent announcement they will use executive orders and executive actions to infringe on our constitutionally-protected right to keep and bear arms is an unconstitutional and unconscionable attack on the very founding principles of this republic,” Stockman said in a statement. “I will seek to thwart this action by any means necessary, including but not limited to eliminating funding for implementation, defunding the White House, and even filing articles of impeachment.”

Stockman showed up on Greta Van Susteren's show on Fox Tuesday night and reiterated his statement about impeachment being an option on the table and he threw this stink-bomb out there: Republican freshman to Fox News host: Obama reminds me of Saddam Hussein:

Republican Rep. Steve Stockman of Texas unfavorably compared President Barack Obama to Abraham Lincoln and Saddam Hussein on Tuesday night.

The Republican freshman appeared on Fox News’ On The Record with Greta Van Susteren to discuss how he would try impeach Obama if the President attempted to use an executive order to enact new gun control laws.

“He is saying he is going to issue 19 executive orders,” Stockman explained to Greta Van Susteren. “If it breaches his authority into legislation which impedes on the Constitution, we have the right to take different steps to counter that. A lot of people are frustrated with Republicans not fighting back, and I was too when I was on the sidelines. I got involved with Congress, I said enough is enough, and we need to stand up and fight. I said these kinds of tools are available to us, and we’re going to use every tool possible to fight an administration which wants to abrogate the Constitution.” [...]

At the end of the interview, Stockman awkwardly interjected that Obama was “even using children.”

“Reminds me of Saddam Hussein, when he used kids,” he said with a laugh.

“Well, I think that is just a little bit of a stretch,” Van Susteren replied.

I think this turd just figured out how to make sure he gets himself lots of airtime on Fox. Every time we get rid of one of these flamethrowers, another one comes along and takes their place.

Cameron Left In Dark About Algeria Rescue Mission

The Algerian government kept David Cameron in the dark about plans to launch a military rescue mission for the hostages held captive by militants, it has emerged.

Downing Street confirmed on Thursday afternoon that the prime minister had asked his Algerian counterpart to consult Britain before any military moves were made, given the presence of "several" British hostages.

However despite the request to be kept informed, Cameron was only formally told of the military action after it had begun on Thursday morning.

The PM called Abdelmalek Sellal, the Algerian prime minister, at 11.30am today to find out the latest development.

During the 10-15 minute conversation Sellal told Cameron it had been his judgment that he had needed to act "immediately".

According to the prime minister’s official spokesperson, Algeria was aware Britain would have “preferred to have been consulted in advance” but chose to ignore that request.

"The prime minister is extremely concerned. It is a very grave and serious situation," the spokesman said.

However the spokesperson refused to be drawn on whether Cameron only became aware of the military action during the phone call, or had learned of it prior to placing the call.

“We are in constant contact with them [Algeria], it’s a fast moving, ongoing situation and we are doing as much as we can to establish what is going on," he said.

The spokesperson would also not be drawn on reports that between six and 35 hostages and between eight and 15 of the rebels had been killed in the fighting.

The British government has offered to provide assistance if asked – but such as request has yet to be made by Algeria.

It is understood that Algeria did not inform other foreign governments about its decision to launch an operation.

Cameron has also had phone conversations with French president Francois Hollande and US president Obama to discuss the situation in Algeria.

The prime minister was due to chair another meeting of the emergency Cobra cabinet committee later on Thursday to assess the situation.

The prime minister has now cancelled his trip to the Netherlands, where he was due to deliver a speech on the European Union, in light of the escalating crisis.

locator map algeria

Related on HuffPost:

New Report: “Billion-Dollar Democracy” Shows Unprecedented Impact of Big Money in 2012 Elections

WASHINGTON - January 17 - It took just 32 billionaires and corporations giving Super PACs an average of $9.9 million apiece to match every single dollar given by small donors to Romney and Obama in the 2012 election cycle, according to “Billion-Dollar Democracy,” a new report by U.S. PIRG and Demos. Those small donations amounted to over $313 million from more than 3.7 million individuals.

“Americans who are wondering why it seems tougher to get ahead or even get a fair shake in today’s economy should look to big money politics for answers,” said Adam Lioz, report co-author and Counsel for Demos. “When a tiny group of wealthy donors fuels political campaigns, they get to set the agenda in Washington, and the rest of us are left to argue over that agenda.”

The report provides a full and detailed analysis of all 2012 federal election spending and fundraising by campaigns and Super PACs. The data shows the undue influence of large donors, business interests and secret spenders in 2012:

  • Nearly 60% of Super PAC funding came from just 159 donors contributing at least $1 million.
  • Candidates for both House and Senate raised the majority of their funds from gifts of $1,000 or more; and 40 percent of all contributions to Senate candidates came from donors gave at least $2,500. (Those donors are just 0.02 percent of the American population.)
  • Corporate donations accounted for a large portion of the funds of two of top ten most active Super PACs, including 18 percent of Restore Our Future’s total contributions and 52.6 percent of those of FreedomWorks for America.

“The first post-Citizens United presidential election confirmed our fears that the new unlimited-money regime allows well-heeled special interests and secret spenders to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens,” said Blair Bowie, U.S. PIRG Democracy Advocate and report co-author.

“Billion-Dollar Democracy” also found that groups that do not disclose the source of their funds paid for well more than half of television advertising in the 2012 presidential race not sponsored by candidates or parties.

”These dark money groups hide key information about where they get their money from voters,” added Bowie. “Furthermore, because there’s no one to hold responsible for the content of their advertising, studies show they are far more likely to be misleading or just downright lying.”

Data in “Billion Dollar Democracy” also demonstrates to extent to which our big money system determines winners and losers, distorting our democratic process. Incumbents, for example, are big winners—outraising major challengers by 443% in the House and 316% in the Senate.

The report documents how vastly disproportionate influence by the “donor class” skews public policy, and concludes with specific solutions for every level of government to ensure that ordinary Americans can make their voices heard in financing electoral campaigns. These recommendations including amending the constitution, matching small political contributions with public funds, and requiring corporations to disclose political giving, among others.

READ “BILLION-DOLLAR DEMOCRACY” HERE: http://bit.ly/Wah17c

U.S. PIRG, the federation of state Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), stands up to powerful special interests on behalf of the American public, working to win concrete results for our health and our well-being. With a strong network of researchers, advocates, organizers and students in state capitols across the country, we take on the special interests on issues, such as product safety,political corruption, prescription drugs and voting rights,where these interests stand in the way of reform and progress.

New Research Shows Climate Emissions from Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline Much Worse Than...

WASHINGTON - January 17 - Scientists and advocates today unveiled new research showing that the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline would damage the climate much more than previously thought, by dramatically expanding tar sands production and because it will lead to increased combustion of a particularly dirty form of oil.

Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, experts and advocates said the new information gives the Obama Administration further evidence to reject the controversial pipeline, especially since the president has in recent months put addressing climate change on the nation’s agenda.

“With climate change chaos sweeping the nation, this new research shows why the Obama Administration should stop the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline in its tracks,” said Danielle Droitsch, Canada Project Director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Approving Keystone would open the gateway to dramatic new development of tar sands oil and far more harm to our climate.”

Oil Change International’s new report “Petroleum Coke: The Coal Hiding in the Tar Sands reveals that current analyses of the impacts of tar sands fail to account for a high-carbon byproduct of the refining process that is a major source of climate change causing carbon emissions: petroleum coke—known as petcoke. Because it is considered a refinery byproduct, petcoke emissions are not included in most assessments of the climate impact of tar sands. Thus, the climate impact of oil production is being consistently undercounted.

Petcoke is commonly used as a cheaper, more carbon-intensive substitute to coal—and the petcoke in tar sands is turning American refineries into coal factories. The petcoke produced from the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline would fuel 5 coal plants and produce 16.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, thus emitting 13% more carbon dioxide than the U.S. State Department has previously considered.

“What we’ve uncovered is something industry doesn’t want you to hear: exploiting the tar sands and building the Keystone XL pipeline is even more damaging to the climate than has been previously reported,” said Lorne Stockman, Research Director at Oil Change International and author of the report. “Factored into the equation, petcoke puts another strong nail in the coffin of any rational argument for the further exploitation of the tar sands.”

While the new report makes clear that petcoke emissions should be included, EPA’s existing figures, which do not include petcoke-related emissions, already paint a troubling picture. They suggest that simply replacing 830,000 bpd of conventional crude with the tar sands in the Keystone XL pipeline would increase US carbon dioxide emissions by 27.6 million metric tons per year, or the equivalent of adding nearly 6 million cars on the road.

Nathan Lemphers from the Pembina Institute, a Canadian environmental think tank, explained that the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline would accelerate expansion of the tar sands and significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions. Keystone XL is an integral part of the industry’s plan to nearly triple tar sands production by 2030. In order to meet its expansion goals, the tar sands industry needs all proposed transportation options to move forward. As the largest of these projects, Keystone XL has the greatest independent impact on the rate of tar sands expansion. 

“Filling the Keystone XL pipeline with oilsands crude will create significant greenhouse gases regardless of whether other transport options move forward,” said Lemphers. “Because Canada does not have a credible plan for responsibly developing the oilsands, including reducing emissions so Canada can meet its climate commitments, the pipeline should not go ahead.”

The Pembina Institute’s backgrounder, “The climate implications of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline”, shows that pipelines are a key determinant of tar sands expansion, and argues that the increase in greenhouse gas emissions associated with supplying the Keystone XL pipeline with tar sands bitumen represents a significant barrier to Canada meeting its domestic and international climate commitments.  A corresponding blog titled “Climate concerns are key in Keystone XL pipeline debate” can be accessed at http://www.pembina.org/blog/682.

The decision to reject or approve the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline will be one of the most important climate issues facing the Obama administration. The environmental review for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, anticipated any day from the State Department, will be one of the first major decisions on climate from the Obama Administration since the election.  

Keystone XL would expand dirty tar sands practices and lock the U.S. into a long-term commitment to an energy infrastructure that relies on extra-dirty oil. For example, building Keystone XL would wipe out the benefits of new standards that would have cut greenhouse gas emissions from medium to heavy duty trucks announced by the Obama administration.

Given the global market for oil and the surplus of oil in the United States, it is conventional wisdom among industry experts that the tar sand contents of the Keystone XL pipeline will be exported to China, Venezuela, and other countries. Members of Congress requested that TransCanada give assurance that the oil would remain in the country, but that request was rebuffed.

With carbon emissions worse than previously estimated and the national security arguments nullified, the Obama administration has every reason to deny the pipeline application.

The Natural Resources Defense Council is a national, nonprofit organization of scientists, lawyers and environmental specialists dedicated to protecting public health and the environment. Founded in 1970, NRDC has 1.2 million members and online activists, served from offices in New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Beijing.

Worldwide Political and Financial Tensions, Spiralling Debt Crisis in America

recession

Until now the course of the crisis has been accurately described according to the five phases identified by our team from May 2006 (GEAB n°5) and completed in February 2009 (GEAB n°32): release, acceleration, impact, decanting and global geopolitical dislocation, the last two stages developing simultaneously. In the last issues and in particular the GEAB n°70 (December 2012), we commented extensively on the ongoing processes of the two last phases, a decantation from which the world-after painfully emerges on the rubble of world geopolitical dislocation.

But we had underestimated the decanting period’s duration which we have gone through for more than four years, a period during which all the crisis’ players have worked to a common goal, to gain time: the United States, whilst making every effort to prevent the appearance of alternative solutions to the dollar, in spite of the catastrophic situation of all its systemic fundamentals, to prevent its creditors from abandoning it (discrediting other currencies including the Yen from now on, tenacity against the attempts to disconnect oil from the dollar, etc…); the rest of the world, in setting up skilful strategies consisting of maintaining its assistance towards the United States to avoid a sudden collapse from which it would be the first to suffer, and at the same time constructing alternative and of decoupling solutions.At the end of this long period of the system’s apparent “anaesthesia”, we consider it necessary to add a sixth phase to our description of the crisis: the last impact phase which will occur in 2013.

The United States certainly believed that the rest of the world would have an interest in keeping its economy on artificial respiratory assistance ad infinitum but it is likely that they don’t believe it any more today. As regards the rest of the world, the final chapters of the US crisis (major political crisis, decisional paralysis, near miss of the fiscal cliff, perspective of a payment default in March, and always the incapacity to implement the least structural solution) convinced it of the imminence of a collapse, and all the players are on the look-out for the least sign of a swing to extricate themselves, conscious that by doing so they will precipitate the final collapse.

Our team considers that in the context of the extreme tensions – both domestic political and world financial tensions – induced by the next raising of the US debt ceiling in March 2013, the signs will not be lacking to cause the disappearance of US treasury bonds’ last purchasers, a disappearance which the Fed will no longer be able to compensate for, resulting in an increase in interest rates which will propel American indebtedness to astronomical levels, leaving no hope of ever being repaid to creditors who will prefer to throw in the towel and let the dollar collapse… a collapse of the dollar which will de facto correspond to the first genuine solution, painful certainly but real, for US indebtedness.

It’s for this reason also that our team anticipates that 2013, the first year of the World-Afterwards, will see a setting up of this “purifying” of US and world accounts. All the players are tending towards this step whose consequences are very difficult to predict but which is also an unavoidable solution to the crisis taking into account the United States structural incapacity to set up genuine debt-reduction strategies.But in order to take the measure of the causes and consequences of this last impact phase, let’s reconsider the reasons for which the system lasted for so long. Our team will then analyze the reasons for which the shock will take place in 2013 afterwards.

Saving time: When the world rejoices at the US status-quo

Since 2009 and the temporary measures to save the global economy, the world has been waiting for the famous “double dip”, the relapse, as the situation continues to worsen day by day for the United States: breathtakingly high national debt, mass unemployment and poverty, political paralysis, loss of influence, etc. However, this relapse still hasn’t arrived. Admittedly, the “exceptional measures” of assistance to the economy (lowest interest rates, public expenditure, debt repurchase, etc.) are still in force. But against all expectations and contrary to any objective and rational judgment, the markets still seem to have confidence in the United States.

Actually, the system isn’t based on confidence any more but on calculating the best moment to extricate themselves and the means of hanging on until then.The time has passed when China challenged the United States to implement a second round of quantitative easing (1): the world seems to have adapted itself to the fact that this country is still growing its debt and is inescapably turning towards a payment default, provided that it’s still standing and doesn’t make too many waves again. Why don’t the other countries press the United States to reduce its deficit, but on the contrary are delighted (2) when agreement on the fiscal cliff keeps the status-quo? However nobody is fooled, the situation cannot last indefinitely, and the world economy’s main problem is really the United States and its dollar (3).

Countries’ public debt by the number of months tax receipts (4) - Source: LEAP / European Commission, ONS, FRB

Countries’ public debt by the number of months tax receipts (4) – Source: LEAP / European Commission, ONS, FRB

According to the LEAP/E2020 team, the various players are seeking to gain time. For the markets, it is a question of gaining maximum benefit from the Fed and the US government’s largesse in order to make easy money; for the foreign countries, it’s a question of extracting their economies to the maximum from that of the United States in order to be able to shelter themselves at the time of the coming shock. Thus, for example, it’s how Euroland makes the most of it in order to strengthen itself and China takes advantage of it to sink its dollars in foreign infrastructures (5) which will always be better value than dollars when that currency is on the floor.

Acceleration of the tempo and a build-up of challenges

But this period of complicit leniency is coming to an end because of intense pressures. It is interesting to note that the pressures don’t really come from abroad, confirming our analysis above; those are rather of two sorts, internal and financial-economic.On the one hand, it’s the internal political battle which threatens the house of cards. If Obama appears to be traversing a period of political grace facing a seemingly subjugated republican camp, the battle will begin again even more violently than ever starting from March. Indeed, if the republican representatives will be undoubtedly obliged to vote the increase in the debt ceiling, they will make Obama pay dearly for this “capitulation”, pushed here by their electoral base half of which in fact wants a US default considered by them as the only solution to free them from the country’s pathological debt (6). The republicans thus hope to do battle on the many issues and challenges which are shaping up: on the social side, firearms regulation (7), taking a new look at immigration and the legalization of 11 million illegal immigrants (8), health care reform, and more generally questioning the Federal state’s role; on the economic side, lowering expenditure, debt settlement (9), fiscal cliff « redux » (10), etc… All these issues are on the next few months’ agenda and the least hitch can prove to be fatal. Given the republicans’ pugnacity and their supporters’ even more so, it’s rather the hope that there is no hitch which is utopian.On the other hand, it’s the international markets, Wall Street at the forefront, which threaten not to extend their confidence in the US economy. Since Hurricane Sandy and especially since the episode of the fiscal cliff which hasn’t fixed any problems, the pessimistic analyses and doubts are becoming increasingly strong (11). It’s necessary to keep in mind that the stock markets are stateless and, even domiciled in New York, have only one goal, profits. In 2013, the world is sufficiently extensive so that investors and their capital, just like a flight of sparrows, slip away to other skies on the slightest warning (12).Whereas agreement on the debt ceiling in 2011 settled the question for 18 months (13), that on the fiscal cliff defers the problem for only two months. Whilst one felt the effects of QE1 for a year, QE3 had an effect for only a few weeks (14). Besides, with a diary loaded with negotiations to come, one sees the tempo accelerate significantly, a sign that the abyss is approaching and players’ nervousness along with it.

S&P performance during each quantitative easing action - Source: ZeroHedge/SocGen

S&P performance during each quantitative easing action – Source: ZeroHedge/SocGen

March-June 2013, extreme tension: the least spark lights the blue touch-paper

In addition to these US challenges, the whole world also has many tests to pass, here again its economic challenges above all. In particular it’s Japan and the United Kingdom, key elements in the US sphere of influence, which are fighting for their survival, both in recession, with insupportable debts, household savings on the deck and with no prospect of a short-term solution. We will examine these two countries in detail later in this issue. But it’s also a Brazilian economy which is just ticking over (15); difficulty to manage inflation rates in the emerging powers; the deflation of the Canadian, Chinese and European real estate bubbles (16), etc…

The challenges are also of a geopolitical nature: to quote only three examples, African conflicts among which of course France’s intervention in Mali, conflicts and indirect confrontation of the Middle Eastern powers around Syria, Israel and Iran, as well as the territorial tensions around China which we will examine during our following analysis on Japan.All these factors, economic, geopolitical, American, global, are coming together at the same moment in time: the second quarter of 2013.

Our team has identified the period running from March to June 2013 as being explosive, in particular at the conclusion of the negotiations in the United States on the debt ceiling and the fiscal cliff. The least spark will light the blue touch-paper, unleashing the second impact phase of the global systemic crisis. \

And there are many opportunities to create sparks, as we have seen.So what are the consequences of and the calendar for this second impact phase? On the markets initially, a significant fall will spread out until the end of 2013. All economies being inter-connected, the impact will spread throughout the whole planet and will drag the global economy into recession. Nevertheless, thanks to other countries’ decoupling which we mentioned previously, all countries won’t be affected in the same way. Because, more so than in 2008, opportunities exist for capital in Asia, Europe and Latin America, in particular.

In addition to the United States, the countries the most affected will be those in the US sphere, namely the United Kingdom and Japan primarily. And, while these countries will still struggle in 2014 with the social and political consequences of the impact, the other regions, BRICS and Euroland at the forefront, will finally see the end of the tunnel at that time.In order to understand the formation of this second impact phase, we next review the “suicidal tendencies” of four powers of the world before: the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan and Israel.

Then we will present the traditional January “Ups & Downs”, rising and falling trends for 2013, also serving as recommendations for this New Year. Finally, as in each month, our readers will also find the GlobalEurometre.

Notes:

(1) One can refresh one’s memory here (Wall Street Journal, 18/10/2010) or here (US News, 29/10/2010).

(2) « Relief after the happy epilogue of the fiscal cliff » headline ForexPros.fr (02/01/2013); « Relief at fiscal cliff crisis deal » headline BBC (03/01/2013)…

(3) As identified by LEAP/E2020 since 2006 from the GEAB n°2.

(4) The banks’ public reflation is included in the United Kingdom’s debt.

(5) The Chinese being very active in this arena; one has numerous examples such as the port of Piraeus in Greece, Heathrow airport in the UK, in Africa, but also the takeover of industrial jewels (Volvo for example) etc. See, for example Emerging Money (China to invest in Western infrastructure, 28/11/2011).

(6) Read, for example, ZeroHedge, 14/01/2013.

(7) Source: Fox News, 30/12/2012.

(8) Source: New York Times, 12/01/2013.

(9) Source: New York Times, 15/01/2013.

(10) The budgetary cuts debate has simply been pushed back two months. Source: New Statesman, 02/01/2013.

(11) Like here (CNBC, 11/01/2013), here (MarketWatch, 14/01/2013) or here (CNBC, 08/01/2013).

(12) The United States will in their turn taste the irony of history: the financial market deregulation and globalisation which they promoted so much is going to turn round dramatically against them.

(13) It’s as at this point in time that the automatic cuts of 01/01/2013 were enacted to force a bipartisan agreement. Source: CNN Money (02/08/2011) or Wikipedia.

(14) For a reminder on these quantitative easing operations, one can refer to BankRate.com, Financial crisis timeline.

(15) Source: Les Échos, 05/12/2012.(16) See previous GEAB issues.

Militants Seize Americans and Other Hostages in Algeria

The French military assault on Islamist extremists in Mali escalated into a potentially much broader North African conflict on Wednesday when, in retribution, armed attackers in unmarked trucks seized an internationally managed natural gas field in neighboring Algeria and took at least 20 foreign hostages, including Americans.

Algerian officials said at least two people, including a Briton, were killed in the assault, which began with a predawn ambush on a bus trying to ferry gas-field workers to an airport. Hundreds of Algerian security forces were sent to surround the gas-field compound, creating a tense standoff, and the country's interior minister said there would be no negotiations.

Algeria's official news agency said at least 20 fighters had carried out the attack and mass abduction. There were unconfirmed reports late on Wednesday that the security forces had tried to storm the compound and had retreated under gunfire from the hostage takers.

Many details of the assault on the gas field in a barren desert site near Libya's border remained murky, including the precise number of hostages, which could be as high as 41, according to claims by the attackers quoted by regional news agencies. American, French, British, Japanese and Norwegian citizens who worked at the field were known to be among them, officials said.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta called the gas-field attack a terrorist act and said the United States was weighing a response. His statement suggested that the Obama administration could be drawn into a military entanglement in North Africa that it had been seeking to keep at arm's length — even as it has conceded that the region has become a new haven for extremists who threaten Western security and vital interests.

"I want to assure the American people that the United States will take all necessary and proper steps that are required to deal with this situation," Mr. Panetta said during a visit to Italy.

The gas-field attack, which seemed to take foreign governments and the British and Norwegian companies that help run the facility completely by surprise, appeared to make good on a pledge by the Islamist militants who seized northern Mali last year to sharply expand their struggle against the West in response to France's military intervention that began last week.

The hostage taking potentially broadened the conflict beyond Mali's borders and raised the possibility of drawing an increasing number of foreign countries into direct involvement, particularly if expatriates working in the vast energy extraction industries of North Africa become targets. It also doubled, at least, the number of non-African hostages that Islamist militants in northern and western Africa have been using as bargaining chips to finance themselves in recent years through ransoms that have totaled millions of dollars.

But there was no indication that the gas-field attackers wanted money, and no other demands or ultimatums were issued. In a statement sent to ANI, a Mauritanian news agency, they demanded the "immediate halt of the aggression against our own in Mali."

The statement, made by a group called Al Mulathameen, which has links to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the North African affiliate of Al Qaeda, claimed it was holding more than 40 "crusaders" — apparently a reference to non-Muslims — "including seven Americans, two French, two British as well as other citizens of various European nationalities."

Algeria's interior minister, Daho Ould Kablia, said, according to Reuters, that the raid was led by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who fought Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s and recently set up his own group in the Sahara after falling out with other local Qaeda leaders.

Mr. Belmokhtar is known to French intelligence officials as "the Uncatchable" and to some locals as "Mister Marlboro" for his illicit cigarette-running business, the news agency said. His ties to Islamist extremists who seized towns across northern Mali last year are unclear.

The gas-field attack coincided with an escalation of the fight inside Mali, according to Western and Malian officials, as French ground troops, joined by soldiers of the Malian Army, engaged in combat with Islamist fighters. The officials said the French-Malian units had begun to beat back the Islamist militant advance southward from northern Mali, a move that had provoked the intervention ordered by President François Hollande of France.

The attackers seemed particularly incensed that Algeria's government had permitted the French to use Algerian airspace to fly warplanes and military equipment into Mali, according to their statement, which may explain why they chose Algeria for retaliation. Some Algerian military experts said the Algerian public also was unhappy about the government's decision.

"The setting in motion of a military machine in north Mali was going to have definite repercussions in Algeria," said Mohamed Chafik Mesbah, a former Algerian Army officer and political scientist, adding, . "There are going to be much worse consequences. There will be more attacks."

A senior Algerian official said the militants, who claimed to have come from Mali, had used three unmarked trucks to breach the gas-field compound, outside the town of In Amenas. An oil company official who had knowledge of the attack said the militants had shut down production at the site, an indication of carefully planning. But how and why they chose In Amenas, which is more than 700 miles from the Malian border and is much closer to Libya, were among the unknowns.

The facility is the fourth-largest gas development in Algeria, a major oil producer and OPEC member. The In Amenas gas compression plant is operated by BP of Britain, the Norwegian company Statoil and the Algerian national oil company Sonatrach.

Bard Glad Pedersen, a Statoil spokesman, said that of 17 Statoil employees who had been working in the field, four escaped to a nearby Algerian military camp, but he would not say how. The Sahara Media Agency of Mauritania, quoting what it described as a spokesman for the militants, said that they were holding five hostages in a production facility on the site and 36 others in a housing area, and that there were as many as 400 Algerian soldiers surrounding the operation. But that information could not be confirmed.

Islamist groups and bandits have long operated in the deserts of western and northern Africa, and a collection of Islamists have occupied the vast expanse of northern Mali since a government crisis in that country last March. Those groups, including Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, had pledged to strike against France's interests on the continent and abroad, as well as those of nations backing the French operations. In France, security has been reinforced at airports, train stations and other public spaces.

The militant groups are financed in large part through ransoms paid for the freeing of Western hostages, and regular kidnappings have occurred in the West African desert in recent years. At least seven French citizens are presently being held there, officials say.

Oil and gas are central to the Algerian economy, accounting for more than a third of the country's gross domestic product, over 95 percent of its export earnings and 60 percent of government financial receipts. Algeria is an important gas supplier to France, Spain, Turkey, Italy and Britain.

Algeria has also historically been known as a relatively secure place for foreign companies to work and invest. Sonatrach and the security forces had put tight security around oil and gas facilities during the struggle with Islamic militants in the 1990s, when energy infrastructure was never a major insurgent target.

Energy experts expressed concern that the Algerian raid could signal a new strategy by Islamic militants to attack the West by focusing on Western-operated oil and gas facilities in the region.

Helima Croft, a Barclays Capital senior geopolitical strategist,said if groups like Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb "decide as a change in tactic they go after Western energy interests, then you have to look at a threat in all these countries, including Libya, Nigeria and Morocco."

She added: "This type of attack had to have advanced planning. It's not an easy target of opportunity."

Adam Nossiter reported from Bamako, and Scott Sayare from Paris. Reporting was contributed by Clifford Krauss from Houston, Rick Gladstone from New York, Elisabeth Bumiller from Rome, and Alan Cowell and Steven Erlanger from Paris.

© 2013 The New York Times Company Truthout has licensed this content. It may not be reproduced by any other source and is not covered by our Creative Commons license.

Gun Owners of America Spokesman: Reagan Only Supported Gun Control in ‘Later Years’

I'm not sure why MSNBC thinks that anyone from an organization that makes the NRA look like moderates deserves to get some air time or to be treated as someone the public should take seriously, but they brought Gun Owners of America's Erich Pratt (son of Larry Pratt) on to bash President Obama after his press conference today calling for sweeping new gun laws.

As Think Progress noted, he decided to dish out a bit of revisionist history on just when St. Ronnie was in support of gun control and as I noted this week, it was before he was president and well before he started exhibiting symptoms of Alzheimer's disease: Reagan Only Supported Gun Control Because He Was Senile, Prominent Gun Advocate Suggests:

As he unveiled his comprehensive package of gun safety regulations on Wednesday afternoon, President Obama urged Americans to stand up to irrational opponents of restrictions on military-style weapons, noting that even President Ronald Reagan supported sensible restrictions on assault weapons. “And by the way, so did Ronald Reagan, one of the staunchest defenders of the Second Amendment, who wrote to Congress in 1994 urging them — this is Ronald Reagan speaking — urging them to listen to the American public and to the law enforcement community and support a ban on the further manufacture of military-style assault weapons,” Obama said.

Asked about Reagan’s position during an appearance on MSNBC shortly after Obama’s remarks, Erich Pratt of Gun Owners of America, suggested that Reagan only supported greater restrictions because he was senile:

ANDREA MITCHELL (HOST): What’s the problem with registering a gun? If you have a bushmaster, first of all, why would you have one?

PRATT: President Reagan owned an AR-15.

MITCHELL: And he supported gun control. He advocated…

PRATT: In his later years. We have to keep that in account.

MITCHELL: In his later years he was almost killed by John Hinckley.

PRATT: But all through his presidency he opposed gun control, that’s my point.

Read on...

Pratt was also defending the NRA's new ad that they decided to double down on today, even though, as Andrea Mitchell noted, it's generally considered off limits to be going after the children of presidents. These groups don't care how low they have to go if it gets their base whipped into a frenzy and protects the gun manufacturers who are funding them.

Human Rights Watch, US Reject Report That Syria Used Chemical Weapons

Syria RebelsA front line, where rebels have made slow gains against the entrenched Syrian Army, in Aleppo, Syria, December 12, 2012. (Photo: Tyler Hicks / The New York Times) Employees of the advocacy group Human Rights Watch expressed skepticism Wednesday over a report that a State Department cable had concluded that the Syrian government used chemical weapons last month against rebel-held neighborhoods in the city of Homs.

The group, which has been at the forefront of documenting human rights violations perpetrated during Syria's civil war, said it had received reports of suspected chemical-weapons use in Homs but had been unable to confirm that the incident had taken place.

"I shared these with our arms experts at HRW at the time, but based on the information available to us we have not been able to confirm that the government did in fact use chemical weapons," Lama Fakih, a researcher for Human Rights Watch based in Lebanon, said in an email.

In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland also rejected the report, saying U.S. authorities had investigated a tip that arrived in late December about a possible chemical-weapons attack in Homs but found "no credible evidence to corroborate or confirm chemical weapons."

The issue of chemical weapons in Syria's civil war is a sensitive one. President Barack Obama has said that the use of such weapons by the government of President Bashar Assad would trigger a so-far undefined American military response, and U.S. officials have used diplomatic and other channels repeatedly to warn the Syrian government not to use its chemical weapons.

The issue was raised again Tuesday, however, when a blog on the website of the journal Foreign Policy reported that a classified diplomatic cable from the U.S. consulate in Istanbul had concluded that chemical weapons had been used.

The report didn't quote the cable itself. But it said an Obama administration official who'd read the cable said an investigation by a company hired by the United States had determined that Syrian doctors in Homs had made a "strong case" that the Syrian military had deployed a chemical agent. But the story also quoted the unnamed administration official as saying that U.S. officials weren't "100 percent certain" that chemical weapons had been deployed.

Rami Abdurrahman, the head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based group that tracks the fighting and casualties on both sides of Syria's war, said he was familiar with the incident the cable referred to and that he too didn't believe that chemical weapons had been involved. He noted that rebels frequently report the use of chemical weapons but that to date no such report has been confirmed.

"It's not chemical weapons, but they used some kind of gas," Abdurrahman said, noting that some of the people who'd been exposed to the gas had made full recoveries.

"If you have evidence I will report it, but I will not participate in propaganda," Abdurrahman said.

Outside groups have documented the Syrian government's use of other kinds of weapons that have been confused with chemical weapons, including incendiary cluster bombs, which cause fires that are difficult to extinguish and can cause severe burns, as well as skin and lung damage and death from inhaling the smoke they produce.

© 2013 McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. Truthout has licensed this content. It may not be reproduced by any other source and is not covered by our Creative Commons license.

Government Pushes Propaganda Through Video Games

war is fun

We documented yesterday that American movies, television and news are dominated by the CIA and other government agencies.

The government also spreads propaganda through video games.

By way of example, former CIA director William Colby went to work for a video game company after he retired, and a former United States marine allegedly confessed to working at a video game company which was really a CIA front to create a game to drum up support for war against Iran.

The Guardian reports:

“For decades the military has been using video-game technology,” says Nina Huntemann, associate professor of communication and journalism at Suffolk University in Boston and a computer games specialist. “Every branch of the US armed forces and many, many police departments are using retooled video games to train their personnel.”

Like much of early computing, nascent digital gaming benefited from military spending. The prototype for the first home video games console, the 1972 Magnavox Odyssey, was developed by Sanders Associates, a US defence contractor. Meanwhile, pre-digital electronic flight simulators, for use in both military and civilian training, date back to at least the second world war.

Later, the games industry began to repay its debts. Many insiders note how instruments in British Challenger 2 tanks, introduced in 1994, look uncannily like the PlayStation’s controllers, one of the most popular consoles of that year. Indeed, warfare’s use of digital war games soared towards the end of the 20th century.

“By the late 1990s,” says Nick Turse, an American journalist, historian and author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, “the [US] army was pouring tens of millions of dollars into a centre at the University of Southern California – the Institute of Creative Technologies – specifically to build partnerships with the gaming industry and Hollywood.” [The Washington Times reports on the link as well.]

It’s a toxic relationship in Turse’s opinion, since gaming leads to a reliance on remote-controlled warfare, and this in turn makes combat more palatable.

“Last year,” says Turse, “the US conducted combat missions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. There are a great many factors that led to this astonishing number of simultaneous wars, but the increasing use of drones, and thus a lower number of US military casualties that result, no doubt contributed to it.”

The Christian Science Monitor noted in 2009:

In 1999, the military had its worst recruiting year in 30, and Congress called for “aggressive, innovative” new approaches. Private-sector specialists were brought in, including the top advertising agency Leo Burnett, and the Army Marketing Brand Group was formed. A key aim of the new recruitment strategy was to ensure long-term success by cultivating the allegiance of teenage Americans.

Part of the new campaign, helping the post-9/11 recruiting bump, was the free video game America’s Army. Since its release, different versions of the war game have been downloaded more than 40 million times, enough to put it in the Guinness book of world records. According to a 2008 study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “the game had more impact on recruits than all other forms of Army advertising combined.”

***

That these efforts are unfaithful to war’s reality has not gone unnoticed. Protesting the Army Experience Center in Philadelphia, Sgt. Jesse Hamilton, who served two tours inIraq and nine total in the military, expressed disgust that the Army has “resorted to such a deceiving recruitment strategy.”

It’s an approach that could have detrimental long-term effects. “The video game generation is worse at distorting the reality” of war, according to one Air Force colonel. Although they may be more talented at operating predator drones, the colonel told theBrookings Institution, “They don’t have that sense of what [is] really going on.”

NBC News reported in 2003:

Video games are increasingly viewed by top brass as a way to get teenagers interested in enlisting.

Games such as “America’s Army,” developed and published by the Army, and “Guard Force,” which the Army National Guard developed with Alexandria, Va.-based Rival Interactive, can be downloaded or picked up at recruitment offices.

“America’s Army” has been a hit online since its July 2002 release, attaining 1.5 million registered users who endure a basic training regiment complete with barbed-wire obstacle courses and target practice.

“Guard Force” has been less successful. Released last year, it features bland synth-rock music that blares in the background. Between video commercials touting the thrills of enlisting in the Army National Guard, gamers pluck flood victims from rooftops or defend a snowy base. In the training mission, gamers deploy helicopters, even tanks, to rescue skiers trapped in an avalanche.

Foreign Policy argued last year:

Video games would seem to be ideal propaganda tools. Where comic books and newsreels once enthralled the Greatest Generation, today’s millennials are in love with video games. American consumers, for example, spent $25 billion on games in 2010, while gamers worldwide play 3 billion hours a week. Games also offer advantages over traditional propaganda mediums like television or newspapers: They are interactive and immersive, they and deliver challenge, competition, and the hands-on triumph of personally gunning down enemies.

***

Who could blame a CIA spymaster for pondering whether games could be used to demonize Iran or vilify Venezuela?

Michael Bauch writes:

Governments are increasingly trying to twist the [video game] business into a brainwashing machine to promote their agendas, just as has been done with the movie industry.

Why are video games such a perfect tool for governments and why are governments stepping up their usage of them? Because the Internet generation now have easy access to all information and points of view. Governments don’t want kids using the Internet to learn about these things. So governments need to keep kids distracted and under constant brainwashing. A typical American kid might go to school all morning learning about how great America is and how dangerous the rest of the world is, then come home and play some video games like Strategy 2012.

This game was free during the Presidential campaign and tells you who you should vote for and how political campaigns are run (or at least how the government would like you to think it’s done). This is the official game description: “Help Mitt Romney win the Nomination by beating his conservative rivals. Then choose Romney or Obama and fight for the presidency in Ohio.”

***

Not only are government-developed games spreading propaganda. Game developers are now accepting the norms set by the government like in Scribblenaughts where the game set’s a puzzle for you to solve by conjuring items. In one puzzle you get a mission called “Peacefully break up the Rioters!” What would a sane person try first? Well, I tried “Diplomat” and “Peacekeeper”. Neither had any effect. So I tried “Tear Gas” and had the crowd crying and disbursing in seconds, immediately earning a gold star just as you would in school when you have done something right! You can watch the video … of me playing the mission.

***

Now that the gaming industry have been infected by government propaganda they are now constantly sending the information they want to your kids.

You might assume that only foreigners are depicted as enemy targets in the propaganda video games.  But remember that peaceful protest and any criticism of the government is now considered potential terrorism.

As such, it should not be entirely surprising that the enemy target in the most popular video game series,Call of Duty – which is more popular than virtually any movie or musical album – is a Julian Assange like character who is the “leader of the 99%”.

And see this and this.  

Who Says You Can Kill Americans, Mr. President?

President Obama has refused to tell Congress or the American people why he believes the Constitution gives, or fails to deny, him the authority to secretly target and kill American citizens who he suspects are involved in terrorist activities overseas. So far he has killed three that we know of.

Presidents had never before, to our knowledge, targeted specific Americans for military strikes. There are no court decisions that tell us if he is acting lawfully. Mr. Obama tells us not to worry, though, because his lawyers say it is fine, because experts guide the decisions and because his advisers have set up a careful process to help him decide whom he should kill.

He must think we should be relieved.

The three Americans known to have been killed, in two drone strikes in Yemen in the fall of 2011, are Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric who was born in New Mexico; Samir Khan, a naturalized American citizen who had lived in New York and North Carolina, and was killed alongside Mr. Awlaki; and, in a strike two weeks later, Mr. Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was born in Colorado.

Most of us think these people were probably terrorists anyway. So the president’s reassurances have been enough to keep criticism at an acceptable level for the White House. Democrats in Congress and in the press have only gingerly questioned the claims by a Democratic president that he is right about the law and careful when he orders drone attacks on our citizens. And Republicans, who favor aggressive national security powers for the executive branch, look forward to the day when one of their own can wield them again.

But a few of our representatives have spoken up — sort of. Several months ago, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, began limply requesting the Department of Justice memorandums that justify the targeted killing program. At a committee hearing, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., reminded of the request, demurred and shared a rueful chuckle with the senator. Mr. Leahy did not want to be rude, it seems — though some of us remember him being harder on former President George W. Bush’s attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales, in 2005.

So, even though Congress has the absolute power under the Constitution to receive these documents, the Democratic-controlled Senate has not fought this president to get them. If the senators did, and the president held fast to his refusal, they could go to court and demand them, and I believe they would win. Perhaps even better, they could skip getting the legal memos and go right to the meat of the matter — using oversight and perhaps legislating to control the president’s killing powers. That isn’t happening either.

Thank goodness we have another branch of government to step into the fray. It is the job of the federal courts to interpret the Constitution and laws, and thus to define the boundaries of the powers of the branches of government, including their own.

In reining in the branches, the courts have been toughest on themselves, however. A long line of Supreme Court cases require that judges wait for cases to come to them. They can take cases only from plaintiffs who have a personal stake in the outcome; they cannot decide political questions; they cannot rule on an issue not squarely before them.

Because of these and other limitations, no case has made it far enough in federal court for a judge to rule on the merits of the basic constitutional questions at stake here. A pending case filed in July by the families of the three dead Americans does raise Fourth and Fifth Amendment challenges to the president’s killings of their relatives. We will see if the judge agrees to consider the constitutional questions or dismisses the case, citing limitations on his own power.

In another case, decided two weeks ago, a federal judge in Manhattan, Colleen McMahon, ruled, grudgingly, that the American Civil Liberties Union and two New York Times reporters could not get access, under the Freedom of Information Act, to classified legal memorandums that were relied on to justify the targeted killing program. In her opinion, she expressed serious reservations about the president’s interpretation of the constitutional questions. But the merits of the program were not before her, just access to the Justice Department memos, so her opinion was, in effect, nothing but an interesting read.

So at the moment, the legislature and the courts are flummoxed by, or don’t care about, how or whether to take on this aggressive program. But Mr. Obama, a former constitutional law professor, should know, of all people, what needs to be done. He was highly critical when Mr. Bush applied new constitutional theories to justify warrantless wiretapping and “enhanced interrogation.” In his 2008 campaign, Mr. Obama demanded transparency, and after taking office, he released legal memos that the Bush administration had kept secret. Once the self-serving constitutional analysis that the Bush team had used was revealed, legal scholars from across the spectrum studied and denounced it.

While Mr. Obama has criticized his predecessor, he has also worried about his successors. Last fall, when the election’s outcome was still in doubt, Mr. Obama talked about drone strikes in general and said Congress and the courts should in some manner “rein in” presidents by putting a “legal architecture in place.” His comments seemed to reflect concern that future presidents should perhaps not wield alone such awesome and unchecked power over life and death — of anyone, not just Americans. Oddly, under current law, Congress and the courts are involved when presidents eavesdrop on Americans, detain them or harshly interrogate them — but not when they kill them.

It is not just the most recent president, this one and the next whom we need to worry about when it comes to improper exercise of power. It is every president. Mr. Obama should declassify and release, to Congress, the press and the public, documents that set forth the detailed constitutional and statutory analysis he relies on for targeting and killing American citizens.

Perhaps Mr. Obama still believes that, in a democracy, the people have a right to know the legal theories upon which the president executes his great powers. Certainly, we can hope so. After all, his interpretation might be wrong.

© 2012 The New York Times

Vicki Divoll is a former general counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and former deputy legal adviser to the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center.

Frontrunning: January 17

  • Obama's Gun Curbs Face a Slog in Congress (BBG)
  • Euro Area Seen Stalling as Draghi’s Pessimism Shared (BBG)
  • China Begins to Lose Edge as World's Factory Floor (WSJ)
  • EU Car Sales Slump (WSJ)
  • Fed Concerned About Overheated Markets Amid Record Bond-Buying (BBG)
  • Australia Posts Worst Back-to-Back Job Growth Since ’97 (BBG)
  • Abe Currency Policy Stokes Gaffe Risk as Amari Roils Yen (BBG)
  • Japan Opposition Party Won’t Back BOJ Officials for Governor (BBG)
  • Fed Reports Point to Subdued Economic Growth (WSJ)
  • China Set to Exit Slowdown by Boosting Infrastructure (BBG)
  • Greece not out of woods, must stick to reforms: finance minister (Reuters)
  • Russian Rate Debate Flares Up as Cabinet Seeks Growth (BBG)

Overnight Media Digest

WSJ

* The Federal Aviation Administration on Wednesday ordered a halt to flights of Boeing Co's 787 Dreamliner, an unprecedented rebuke to the plane maker after two major battery malfunctions on its flagship jets.

* JPMorgan Chase & Co's directors cut Chief Executive James Dimon's pay by 50 percent for 2012, as the board took management to task for a trading debacle that cost the nation's largest bank more than $6 billion.

* Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Morgan Stanley agreed to pay a combined $560 million to settle allegations of foreclosure abuses, the latest setback in the banks' costly foray into subprime mortgages.

* Citigroup Inc has asked regulators for permission to repurchase just enough stock to counter dilution from routine share issuance, according to people familiar with the company's plans.

* Two bidders have emerged as leading contenders for ThyssenKrupp AG's steel operations in the Americas. ArcelorMittal SA submitted a $1.5 billion bid for a plant in Alabama, while Brazil's Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional submitted a $3.8 billion bid for that plant and a majority stake in a Brazilian mill, people familiar with the matter said.

* Hewlett-Packard Co has received expressions of interest from potential suitors for its Autonomy Corp business, the division that the technology giant has alleged engaged in accounting improprieties before HP acquired it in 2011, according to people familiar with the discussions.

* EBay Inc's revenue rose 18 percent in the latest quarter as business in the company's online marketplace and PayPal units continued to improve.

* Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc expects higher food costs to dampen fourth-quarter earnings, despite continued strength in its underlying sales trends.

* European retailer Metro AG said it is pulling out of the Chinese consumer-electronics business after two years of testing.

* China is losing its competitive edge as a low-cost manufacturing base, new data suggest, with makers of everything from handbags to shirts to basic electronic components relocating to cheaper locales like Southeast Asia.

FT

Dozens of expatriate workers have been kidnapped from an Algerian natural gas facility operated by BP and Statoil .

Business Secretary Vince Cable will say in a speech that the debate over Britain's EU membership and a possible referendum is terrible timing, creating uncertainty for investors.

Opposition leader Ed Miliband said in an interview that Cameron's inability to guarantee that Britain will be in the EU in five years' time would be destabilising for investment.

Goldman Sachs cut its bonuses in the fourth quarter, boosting it to its highest profit level in three years.

Germany's Bundesbank is planning to repatriate 54,000 gold bars worth 27 billion euros from Paris and New York between now and 2020.

New rules that force British banks to hold more capital against loans secured on commercial property are resulting in higher costs and scrapped projects for developers.

NYT

* Long seen as one of the most careful banks on Wall Street, JPMorgan Chase & Co on Wednesday drew back a curtain on a rare breakdown, showing traders acting on their own and concealing losses while managers seemingly turned a blind eye. In a 129-page internal report dissecting a bad bet on credit derivatives that cost the bank more than $6 billion, the bank confessed, in painstaking detail, to widespread "failures."

* The Federal Aviation Administration said on Wednesday it was grounding all Boeing Co 787s operated by United States carriers until it can determine what caused a new type of battery to catch fire on two planes in nine days.

* Hewlett-Packard Co has received a number of inquiries from would-be buyers for its Autonomy and Electronic Data Systems units in recent weeks, though the technology company isn't interested in selling at the moment, a person briefed on the matter said.

* Goldman Sachs Group Inc on Wednesday released financial results that demonstrated it was not only benefiting from cost-cutting, but it also finally had a significant rebound in its core businesses. It reported a fourth-quarter profit of $2.89 billion, or $5.60 a share.

* To combat a rise in cybercrime, the European Commission is considering a plan to require companies that store data on the Internet - like Microsoft Corp, Apple Inc, Google Inc and International Business Machines Corp - to report the loss or theft of personal information in the 27-nation bloc or risk sanctions and fines.

* A new type of flu vaccine won regulatory approval on Wednesday, and its manufacturer said that limited supplies are expected to be available this winter.

* After an estimated 500,000 patients in the United States have received a type of artificial hip that is failing early in many cases, the Food and Drug Administration is proposing rules that could stop manufacturers from selling such implants.

* Robert Wolf, a top Wall Street rainmaker who left UBS AG last summer, has hired Austan Goolsbee as a "strategic partner" for his new firm, 32 Advisors, the two men have told friends in recent weeks, according to people briefed on the matter.

* Nearly half of Germany's gold reserves are held in a vault at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York - billions of dollars worth of postwar geopolitical history squirreled away for safe keeping below the streets of Lower Manhattan. Now the German central bank wants to make a big withdrawal - 300 tons in all.

Canada

THE GLOBE AND MAIL

* Canada's energy and mining companies are facing new challenges from First Nations that are demanding the right to approve all resource projects on traditional territories and to participate in the revenues.

* French President François Hollande has personally asked Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to extend Canada's contribution of a heavy-lift cargo plane for Mali, and to offer more transport help, testing Harper's efforts to set strict limits on Canada's military assistance.

Reports in the business section:

* Air Transat will cut $20 million in annual operating cost as part of its parent company's efforts to restore profitability in the face of toughening competition.

Executives told employees on Wednesday that the airline needs to realize the savings in order to operate a fleet of Boeing 737 aircraft and replace those flown under subcontract by Nova Scotia-based Canjet since 2009.

* H&R Real Estate Investment Trust on Wednesday offered to buy Primaris Retail Real Estate Investment Trust for nearly C$3 billion ($3.04 billion), or C$28 a share, just above a hostile C$26 per share bid put forward in December by a consortium led by KingSett Capital.

NATIONAL POST

* An Ontario bodyguard who worked for Saadi Gaddafi -- the son of slain Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi -- provided "invaluable assistance" to the Libyan dictatorship as it attempted to brutally crush an anti-regime uprising in 2011, the Canada Border Services Agency said.

* A new study has indicated that overdose deaths have risen in close parallel with Canada's soaring consumption of prescription narcotics and the painkillers have become the country's most dangerous drugs after tobacco and alcohol, a leading addiction researcher of Simon Fraser University said.

FINANCIAL POST

* Calgary-based Sunshine Oil Sands Ltd has agreed to share oil sands exploration technology with a division of China's CNOOC Ltd.

The one-year "cooperation" agreement comes roughly one month after the federal government approved the sale of oil sands producer Nexen Inc to CNOOC for $15.1 billion.

* Lululemon Athletica Inc has its sights on growing its share in menswear, CEO Christine Day said at the ICR XChange investor conference in Miami on Wednesday, a rare bright spot in last year's apparel market.

A little over a year and a half ago, menswear represented 8 percent of sales at the Vancouver-based retailer. while on a year to date basis the category has hit 12 percent with the holiday season peaking at 15 percent, Day said.

China

CHINA SECURITIES JOURNAL

--The yuan's real effective exchange rate (REER), which measures the currency's value against a trade-weighted basket after adjustments based on inflation, hit a record high of 110.16 in December, Bank for International Settlements (BIS) data showed.

SHANGHAI SECURITIES NEWS

--In the first two weeks of January, new loans from China's "big four" banks hit 270 billion yuan ($43.43 billion), with industry insiders expecting that the total new loans are likely to hit one trillion yuan in January.

PEOPLE'S DAILY

--China's tax revenue rose 11.2 percent to 11.7 trillion yuan in 2012, data from the state administration of taxation showed.

Fly on the Wall 7:00 AM Market Snapshot

ANALYST RESEARCH

Upgrades

Adtran (ADTN) upgraded to Neutral from Sell at Citigroup
Bio-Rad (BIO) upgraded to Outperform from Underperform at CLSA
GT Advanced (GTAT) upgraded to Hold from Underperform at Jefferies
Infinera (INFN) upgraded to Overweight from Neutral at JPMorgan
Juniper (JNPR) upgraded to Overweight from Neutral at JPMorgan
Medtronic (MDT) upgraded to Outperform from Neutral at Credit Suisse
Mercury General (MCY) upgraded to Outperform from Neutral at Macquarie
Mohawk (MHK) upgraded to Outperform from Underperform at Macquarie
PerkinElmer (PKI) upgraded to Buy from Outperform at CLSA
Rio Tinto (RIO) upgraded to Buy from Neutral at Citigroup

Downgrades

Adtran (ADTN) downgraded to Sell from Neutral at UBS
Agilent (A) downgraded to Outperform from Buy at CLSA
BNY Mellon (BK) downgraded to Sector Perform from Outperform at RBC Capital
Boeing (BA) downgraded to Underweight from Hold at BB&T
Celsion (CLSN) downgraded to Sell from Hold at Brean Capital
Cisco (CSCO) downgraded to Underweight from Neutral at JPMorgan
Columbia Sportswear (COLM) downgraded to Underperform from Buy at BofA/Merrill
Corning (GLW) downgraded to Sector Perform from Outperform at RBC Capital
Cree (CREE) downgraded to Underperform from Buy at Jefferies
Itron (ITRI) downgraded to Hold from Buy at Jefferies
Leap Wireless (LEAP) downgraded to Underperform from Hold at Jefferies
RBC Bearings (ROLL) downgraded to Market Perform from Outperform at William Blair
Regal-Beloit (RBC) downgraded to Perform from Outperform at Oppenheimer
Regeneron (REGN) downgraded to Hold from Buy at Brean Capital
SAP (SAP) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Citigroup
VIVUS (VVUS) downgraded to Sell from Hold at Brean Capital
Waters (WAT) downgraded to Market Perform from Outperform at Wells Fargo
Williams-Sonoma (WSM) downgraded to Market Perform from Strong Buy at Raymond James
Williams-Sonoma (WSM) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Goldman

Initiations

Alkermes (ALKS) initiated with a Neutral at Credit Suisse
Approach Resources (AREX) initiated with an In-Line at Imperial Capital
Asset Acceptance (AACC) initiated with a Neutral at Janney Capital
Concho Resources (CXO) initiated with an Outperform at Imperial Capital
Eli Lilly (LLY) initiated with a Sell at CLSA
Encore Capital (ECPG) initiated with a Buy at Janney Capital
Portfolio Recovery (PRAA) initiated with a Neutral at Janney Capital
Stillwater Mining (SWC) initiated with an Outperform at Wells Fargo
U.S. Silica (SLCA) initiated with a Sector Perform at RBC Capital
Vanda Pharmaceuticals (VNDA) initiated with an Outperform at JMP Securities

HOT STOCKS

FAA ordered Boeing (BA) to temporary cease operations of all U.S. 787 Dreamliners jets, Bloomberg reports
Rio Tinto (RIO) said CEO Albanese stepped down after charges
Expects non-cash impairment charge of $14B
Stryker (SYK) acquired Trauson Holdings for $764M in cash
Sun Life Financial (SLF), Khazanah Nasional Berhad to purchase CIMB Aviva for C$586M
Treasury Department hired Citigroup (C), JPMorgan (JPM) to sell General Motors (GM)  shares, Bloomberg reports
Nokia (NOK) to cut 300 jobs, transfer 820 others amid changes in IT
AT&T (T) to enable FaceTime over Cellular (AAPL) for all iOS devices at no extra charge
CBS (CBS) began converting its Outdoor Americas division into a REIT, and will pursue a divestiture of its Outdoor operations in Europe and Asia
A. M. Castle (CAS) announced restructuring plan, will reduce workforce by 10%
eBay (EBAY) said Europe still “sluggish,” said Latin America an “important growth opportunity”
Said PayPal-Discover partnership to go live at end of Q2
K-Swiss (KSWS) to be acquired by E.Land World for $4.75 per share in cash

EARNINGS

Companies that beat consensus earnings expectations last night and today include: Fifth Third Bancorp (FITB), Insteel (IIIN), BlackRock (BLK), Huntington Bancshares (HBAN), Virginia Commerce (VCBI), BB&T (BBT), H.B. Fuller (FUL), Bank of the Ozarks (OZRK), Clarcor (CLC), SLM Corp. (SLM), eBay (EBAY), Nautilus (NLS)

Companies that missed consensus earnings expectations include:
CVB Financial (CVBF), Plexus (PLXS), Kinder Morgan Energy (KMP), Kinder Morgan (KMI), Boston Private Financial (BPFH)

Companies that matched consensus earnings expectations include:
UnitedHealth (UNH), Pacific Continental (PCBK)

NEWSPAPERS/WEBSITES
Investors are grappling with what could be a watershed moment for Apple (AAPL). In many fund managers' eyes, the recent decline could mark Apple's transformation from a growth stock—one that is seen as risky but whose growth prospects could lead to big gains—to a more plodding value stock—one that trades at a low price relative to earnings and offers regular payments such as dividends, the Wall Street Journal reports
The power that U.S. baby boomers have exercised for some 50 years over the auto industry is starting to wane. Auto industry executives at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit this week made it clear with their designs for coming models that they are pivoting their attention—and their product strategies—toward the 20, 30 and 40-something consumers collectively known as Generations X and Y, the Wall Street Journal reports
PC makers, trying to beat back a tablet mania that's hurting their sales, are making what may be a last attempt to sway customers by mimicking the competition, Reuters reports
Airbus (EADSY) reported a 43% drop in orders and lost its title as the world's largest plane maker to Boeing (BA) in 2012, as it predicted improvements in orders and deliveries for 2013 as airlines look to reduce fuel costs. Adjusted for cancellations, Airbus had 833 net orders, while Boeing led on net orders with 921 aircraft, Reuters reports
Fed officials are increasingly concerned that record-low interest rates are overheating markets for assets from farmland to junk bonds, which could heighten risks when they reverse their bond purchases, Bloomberg reports
Treasuries fell, as 10-year notes halted a four-day advance, before Commerce Department data forecast to show U.S. housing starts rose last month, adding to signs the U.S. economy is improving, Bloomberg reports

SYNDICATE
Aveo Pharmaceuticals (AVEO) commences offering of common stock
CVR Refining (CVRR) 24M share IPO priced at $25.00
Imation (IMN) files to sell 3.32M shares of common stock for holders
Northern Tier (NTI) commences offering of 9M common units by holders

Your rating: None

Frontrunning: January 17

  • Obama's Gun Curbs Face a Slog in Congress (BBG)
  • Euro Area Seen Stalling as Draghi’s Pessimism Shared (BBG)
  • China Begins to Lose Edge as World's Factory Floor (WSJ)
  • EU Car Sales Slump (WSJ)
  • Fed Concerned About Overheated Markets Amid Record Bond-Buying (BBG)
  • Australia Posts Worst Back-to-Back Job Growth Since ’97 (BBG)
  • Abe Currency Policy Stokes Gaffe Risk as Amari Roils Yen (BBG)
  • Japan Opposition Party Won’t Back BOJ Officials for Governor (BBG)
  • Fed Reports Point to Subdued Economic Growth (WSJ)
  • China Set to Exit Slowdown by Boosting Infrastructure (BBG)
  • Greece not out of woods, must stick to reforms: finance minister (Reuters)
  • Russian Rate Debate Flares Up as Cabinet Seeks Growth (BBG)

Overnight Media Digest

WSJ

* The Federal Aviation Administration on Wednesday ordered a halt to flights of Boeing Co's 787 Dreamliner, an unprecedented rebuke to the plane maker after two major battery malfunctions on its flagship jets.

* JPMorgan Chase & Co's directors cut Chief Executive James Dimon's pay by 50 percent for 2012, as the board took management to task for a trading debacle that cost the nation's largest bank more than $6 billion.

* Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Morgan Stanley agreed to pay a combined $560 million to settle allegations of foreclosure abuses, the latest setback in the banks' costly foray into subprime mortgages.

* Citigroup Inc has asked regulators for permission to repurchase just enough stock to counter dilution from routine share issuance, according to people familiar with the company's plans.

* Two bidders have emerged as leading contenders for ThyssenKrupp AG's steel operations in the Americas. ArcelorMittal SA submitted a $1.5 billion bid for a plant in Alabama, while Brazil's Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional submitted a $3.8 billion bid for that plant and a majority stake in a Brazilian mill, people familiar with the matter said.

* Hewlett-Packard Co has received expressions of interest from potential suitors for its Autonomy Corp business, the division that the technology giant has alleged engaged in accounting improprieties before HP acquired it in 2011, according to people familiar with the discussions.

* EBay Inc's revenue rose 18 percent in the latest quarter as business in the company's online marketplace and PayPal units continued to improve.

* Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc expects higher food costs to dampen fourth-quarter earnings, despite continued strength in its underlying sales trends.

* European retailer Metro AG said it is pulling out of the Chinese consumer-electronics business after two years of testing.

* China is losing its competitive edge as a low-cost manufacturing base, new data suggest, with makers of everything from handbags to shirts to basic electronic components relocating to cheaper locales like Southeast Asia.

FT

Dozens of expatriate workers have been kidnapped from an Algerian natural gas facility operated by BP and Statoil .

Business Secretary Vince Cable will say in a speech that the debate over Britain's EU membership and a possible referendum is terrible timing, creating uncertainty for investors.

Opposition leader Ed Miliband said in an interview that Cameron's inability to guarantee that Britain will be in the EU in five years' time would be destabilising for investment.

Goldman Sachs cut its bonuses in the fourth quarter, boosting it to its highest profit level in three years.

Germany's Bundesbank is planning to repatriate 54,000 gold bars worth 27 billion euros from Paris and New York between now and 2020.

New rules that force British banks to hold more capital against loans secured on commercial property are resulting in higher costs and scrapped projects for developers.

NYT

* Long seen as one of the most careful banks on Wall Street, JPMorgan Chase & Co on Wednesday drew back a curtain on a rare breakdown, showing traders acting on their own and concealing losses while managers seemingly turned a blind eye. In a 129-page internal report dissecting a bad bet on credit derivatives that cost the bank more than $6 billion, the bank confessed, in painstaking detail, to widespread "failures."

* The Federal Aviation Administration said on Wednesday it was grounding all Boeing Co 787s operated by United States carriers until it can determine what caused a new type of battery to catch fire on two planes in nine days.

* Hewlett-Packard Co has received a number of inquiries from would-be buyers for its Autonomy and Electronic Data Systems units in recent weeks, though the technology company isn't interested in selling at the moment, a person briefed on the matter said.

* Goldman Sachs Group Inc on Wednesday released financial results that demonstrated it was not only benefiting from cost-cutting, but it also finally had a significant rebound in its core businesses. It reported a fourth-quarter profit of $2.89 billion, or $5.60 a share.

* To combat a rise in cybercrime, the European Commission is considering a plan to require companies that store data on the Internet - like Microsoft Corp, Apple Inc, Google Inc and International Business Machines Corp - to report the loss or theft of personal information in the 27-nation bloc or risk sanctions and fines.

* A new type of flu vaccine won regulatory approval on Wednesday, and its manufacturer said that limited supplies are expected to be available this winter.

* After an estimated 500,000 patients in the United States have received a type of artificial hip that is failing early in many cases, the Food and Drug Administration is proposing rules that could stop manufacturers from selling such implants.

* Robert Wolf, a top Wall Street rainmaker who left UBS AG last summer, has hired Austan Goolsbee as a "strategic partner" for his new firm, 32 Advisors, the two men have told friends in recent weeks, according to people briefed on the matter.

* Nearly half of Germany's gold reserves are held in a vault at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York - billions of dollars worth of postwar geopolitical history squirreled away for safe keeping below the streets of Lower Manhattan. Now the German central bank wants to make a big withdrawal - 300 tons in all.

Canada

THE GLOBE AND MAIL

* Canada's energy and mining companies are facing new challenges from First Nations that are demanding the right to approve all resource projects on traditional territories and to participate in the revenues.

* French President François Hollande has personally asked Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to extend Canada's contribution of a heavy-lift cargo plane for Mali, and to offer more transport help, testing Harper's efforts to set strict limits on Canada's military assistance.

Reports in the business section:

* Air Transat will cut $20 million in annual operating cost as part of its parent company's efforts to restore profitability in the face of toughening competition.

Executives told employees on Wednesday that the airline needs to realize the savings in order to operate a fleet of Boeing 737 aircraft and replace those flown under subcontract by Nova Scotia-based Canjet since 2009.

* H&R Real Estate Investment Trust on Wednesday offered to buy Primaris Retail Real Estate Investment Trust for nearly C$3 billion ($3.04 billion), or C$28 a share, just above a hostile C$26 per share bid put forward in December by a consortium led by KingSett Capital.

NATIONAL POST

* An Ontario bodyguard who worked for Saadi Gaddafi -- the son of slain Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi -- provided "invaluable assistance" to the Libyan dictatorship as it attempted to brutally crush an anti-regime uprising in 2011, the Canada Border Services Agency said.

* A new study has indicated that overdose deaths have risen in close parallel with Canada's soaring consumption of prescription narcotics and the painkillers have become the country's most dangerous drugs after tobacco and alcohol, a leading addiction researcher of Simon Fraser University said.

FINANCIAL POST

* Calgary-based Sunshine Oil Sands Ltd has agreed to share oil sands exploration technology with a division of China's CNOOC Ltd.

The one-year "cooperation" agreement comes roughly one month after the federal government approved the sale of oil sands producer Nexen Inc to CNOOC for $15.1 billion.

* Lululemon Athletica Inc has its sights on growing its share in menswear, CEO Christine Day said at the ICR XChange investor conference in Miami on Wednesday, a rare bright spot in last year's apparel market.

A little over a year and a half ago, menswear represented 8 percent of sales at the Vancouver-based retailer. while on a year to date basis the category has hit 12 percent with the holiday season peaking at 15 percent, Day said.

China

CHINA SECURITIES JOURNAL

--The yuan's real effective exchange rate (REER), which measures the currency's value against a trade-weighted basket after adjustments based on inflation, hit a record high of 110.16 in December, Bank for International Settlements (BIS) data showed.

SHANGHAI SECURITIES NEWS

--In the first two weeks of January, new loans from China's "big four" banks hit 270 billion yuan ($43.43 billion), with industry insiders expecting that the total new loans are likely to hit one trillion yuan in January.

PEOPLE'S DAILY

--China's tax revenue rose 11.2 percent to 11.7 trillion yuan in 2012, data from the state administration of taxation showed.

Fly on the Wall 7:00 AM Market Snapshot

ANALYST RESEARCH

Upgrades

Adtran (ADTN) upgraded to Neutral from Sell at Citigroup
Bio-Rad (BIO) upgraded to Outperform from Underperform at CLSA
GT Advanced (GTAT) upgraded to Hold from Underperform at Jefferies
Infinera (INFN) upgraded to Overweight from Neutral at JPMorgan
Juniper (JNPR) upgraded to Overweight from Neutral at JPMorgan
Medtronic (MDT) upgraded to Outperform from Neutral at Credit Suisse
Mercury General (MCY) upgraded to Outperform from Neutral at Macquarie
Mohawk (MHK) upgraded to Outperform from Underperform at Macquarie
PerkinElmer (PKI) upgraded to Buy from Outperform at CLSA
Rio Tinto (RIO) upgraded to Buy from Neutral at Citigroup

Downgrades

Adtran (ADTN) downgraded to Sell from Neutral at UBS
Agilent (A) downgraded to Outperform from Buy at CLSA
BNY Mellon (BK) downgraded to Sector Perform from Outperform at RBC Capital
Boeing (BA) downgraded to Underweight from Hold at BB&T
Celsion (CLSN) downgraded to Sell from Hold at Brean Capital
Cisco (CSCO) downgraded to Underweight from Neutral at JPMorgan
Columbia Sportswear (COLM) downgraded to Underperform from Buy at BofA/Merrill
Corning (GLW) downgraded to Sector Perform from Outperform at RBC Capital
Cree (CREE) downgraded to Underperform from Buy at Jefferies
Itron (ITRI) downgraded to Hold from Buy at Jefferies
Leap Wireless (LEAP) downgraded to Underperform from Hold at Jefferies
RBC Bearings (ROLL) downgraded to Market Perform from Outperform at William Blair
Regal-Beloit (RBC) downgraded to Perform from Outperform at Oppenheimer
Regeneron (REGN) downgraded to Hold from Buy at Brean Capital
SAP (SAP) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Citigroup
VIVUS (VVUS) downgraded to Sell from Hold at Brean Capital
Waters (WAT) downgraded to Market Perform from Outperform at Wells Fargo
Williams-Sonoma (WSM) downgraded to Market Perform from Strong Buy at Raymond James
Williams-Sonoma (WSM) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Goldman

Initiations

Alkermes (ALKS) initiated with a Neutral at Credit Suisse
Approach Resources (AREX) initiated with an In-Line at Imperial Capital
Asset Acceptance (AACC) initiated with a Neutral at Janney Capital
Concho Resources (CXO) initiated with an Outperform at Imperial Capital
Eli Lilly (LLY) initiated with a Sell at CLSA
Encore Capital (ECPG) initiated with a Buy at Janney Capital
Portfolio Recovery (PRAA) initiated with a Neutral at Janney Capital
Stillwater Mining (SWC) initiated with an Outperform at Wells Fargo
U.S. Silica (SLCA) initiated with a Sector Perform at RBC Capital
Vanda Pharmaceuticals (VNDA) initiated with an Outperform at JMP Securities

HOT STOCKS

FAA ordered Boeing (BA) to temporary cease operations of all U.S. 787 Dreamliners jets, Bloomberg reports
Rio Tinto (RIO) said CEO Albanese stepped down after charges
Expects non-cash impairment charge of $14B
Stryker (SYK) acquired Trauson Holdings for $764M in cash
Sun Life Financial (SLF), Khazanah Nasional Berhad to purchase CIMB Aviva for C$586M
Treasury Department hired Citigroup (C), JPMorgan (JPM) to sell General Motors (GM)  shares, Bloomberg reports
Nokia (NOK) to cut 300 jobs, transfer 820 others amid changes in IT
AT&T (T) to enable FaceTime over Cellular (AAPL) for all iOS devices at no extra charge
CBS (CBS) began converting its Outdoor Americas division into a REIT, and will pursue a divestiture of its Outdoor operations in Europe and Asia
A. M. Castle (CAS) announced restructuring plan, will reduce workforce by 10%
eBay (EBAY) said Europe still “sluggish,” said Latin America an “important growth opportunity”
Said PayPal-Discover partnership to go live at end of Q2
K-Swiss (KSWS) to be acquired by E.Land World for $4.75 per share in cash

EARNINGS

Companies that beat consensus earnings expectations last night and today include: Fifth Third Bancorp (FITB), Insteel (IIIN), BlackRock (BLK), Huntington Bancshares (HBAN), Virginia Commerce (VCBI), BB&T (BBT), H.B. Fuller (FUL), Bank of the Ozarks (OZRK), Clarcor (CLC), SLM Corp. (SLM), eBay (EBAY), Nautilus (NLS)

Companies that missed consensus earnings expectations include:
CVB Financial (CVBF), Plexus (PLXS), Kinder Morgan Energy (KMP), Kinder Morgan (KMI), Boston Private Financial (BPFH)

Companies that matched consensus earnings expectations include:
UnitedHealth (UNH), Pacific Continental (PCBK)

NEWSPAPERS/WEBSITES
Investors are grappling with what could be a watershed moment for Apple (AAPL). In many fund managers' eyes, the recent decline could mark Apple's transformation from a growth stock—one that is seen as risky but whose growth prospects could lead to big gains—to a more plodding value stock—one that trades at a low price relative to earnings and offers regular payments such as dividends, the Wall Street Journal reports
The power that U.S. baby boomers have exercised for some 50 years over the auto industry is starting to wane. Auto industry executives at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit this week made it clear with their designs for coming models that they are pivoting their attention—and their product strategies—toward the 20, 30 and 40-something consumers collectively known as Generations X and Y, the Wall Street Journal reports
PC makers, trying to beat back a tablet mania that's hurting their sales, are making what may be a last attempt to sway customers by mimicking the competition, Reuters reports
Airbus (EADSY) reported a 43% drop in orders and lost its title as the world's largest plane maker to Boeing (BA) in 2012, as it predicted improvements in orders and deliveries for 2013 as airlines look to reduce fuel costs. Adjusted for cancellations, Airbus had 833 net orders, while Boeing led on net orders with 921 aircraft, Reuters reports
Fed officials are increasingly concerned that record-low interest rates are overheating markets for assets from farmland to junk bonds, which could heighten risks when they reverse their bond purchases, Bloomberg reports
Treasuries fell, as 10-year notes halted a four-day advance, before Commerce Department data forecast to show U.S. housing starts rose last month, adding to signs the U.S. economy is improving, Bloomberg reports

SYNDICATE
Aveo Pharmaceuticals (AVEO) commences offering of common stock
CVR Refining (CVRR) 24M share IPO priced at $25.00
Imation (IMN) files to sell 3.32M shares of common stock for holders
Northern Tier (NTI) commences offering of 9M common units by holders

Your rating: None

3D Printed Guns Render Gun Control Moot

guncontrol

Forbes has recently published an article about New York Congressman Steve Israel’s promise to ban 3D printed high capacity ammunition magazines. The congressman’s comments come after Defense Distributed, an open source DIY gunsmith group working to manufacture both guns and their accessories using 3D printing technology, successfully printed and tested a 30-round AR-15 magazine.

Congressman Israel stated:

“Background checks and gun regulations will do little good if criminals can print high-capacity magazines at home. 3-D printing is a new technology that shows great promise, but also requires new guidelines. Law enforcement officials should have the power to stop high-capacity magazines from proliferating with a Google search.”

It seems that Congressman Israel doesn’t realize that background checks and gun regulations both in the United States and just over America’s border with Mexico, already don’t work – without advanced manufacturing and open source paradigms even playing a role. Criminals intent on breaking laws have existed since laws themselves. Additionally, technology like 3D printing, as Forbes correctly points out, will pose a serious challenge to gun control advocates in terms of enforcement. Forbes stated specifically:

“But for either [Congresswoman Diane] Feinstein or Israel’s bill, the same problem arises: How to enforce that prohibition in every garage and workshop in America that houses a 3D printer?”

Of course, without becoming Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union, or something far worse, there is no way to enforce these gun regulations. Criminals in particular will continue trumping the law, and because of the government’s refusal to actually tackle the socioeconomic factors driving violence and its insistence on instead punishing law abiding citizens, their authority, legitimacy, and ability to enforce even sensible legislation will be compromised.

And 3D manufacturing isn’t the only way to build your own gun. As a matter of fact, around the world where criminals are unable to buy guns, they do indeed already make their own – and then, as criminals are wanton to do, commit crimes with them, including, murder.

In Thailand, vocational schools are plagued by fierce gang-style rivalries. With standard tools, these students construct homemade guns which they frequently murder each other with. And just this New Year’s Eve, a British tourist was killed when a fight broke out at a party, and a homemade gun was fired. The difference between a Thai vocational education, and say a German or Japanese vocational education is one of culture and socioeconomics – not access to tools.

Image: This homemade handgun was made by an unruly Thai party-goer who claimed the life of a British tourist this New Year’s Eve. Despite the ubiquitous nature of guns, both homemade and manufactured in Thailand, and nearly no means of enforcing whatever legislation may or may not be on the books, gun violence (and violence overall) is still less than in the United States.

….

Preventing people from manufacturing guns, or worse yet, from possessing or using tools that can be used to create guns, is both ludicrous and impossible. Like with cars or anything else, laws are there to ensure we don’t harm others by abusing any given right or implement – not preventing us from having those rights or implements responsibly in the first place. In the end, one must address the factors in any given society that drive large numbers of people to commit violent crimes in the first place – regardless of their chosen means or method.

In reality, an honest public representative would already be far too busy improving education, infrastructure, and the economic prospects of their people to waste time on banning every conceivable implement that could be used in a crime, directly or indirectly. The goal of Congress members like Feinstein or Israel, is not to prevent violence – but to simply disarm the population as the corporate-financier interests they represent seek to be further unhindered as they loot people and nations both abroad and at home.

The fact that the White House is taking such bold actions against “guns,” citing “mass shootings” which account for a fraction of 1% of all homicides, indicates a far more insidious agenda – and one based not on real priorities, but built upon a carefully exploited, emotional campaign to exact an obvious but not forthcoming final goal.

Get Involved.

Defense Distributed has a website – DefCAD.org – and the files for building their various designs available for downloading and use – for free. The files are in .IGS format and require a computer aided design program (CAD) to view them. FreeCAD is an open source, free to download program that works well. This is where, again, a local hackerspace pooling people’s resources together would help infinitely, especially when most hackerspaces come equipped with 3D printers and people capable of operating them and more importantly, capable of teaching you how to use them.

Image: Distributed Defense’s 30 round magazine opened in FreeCAD.

….

Right now, there seems to be only Distributed Defense pursuing this project in any meaningful manner – which should be a cause of concern for anyone who thinks this is a good idea. One group of people working on this alone is a giant, slow-moving target prone to failure from both within and beyond. Many people working on this in parallel, however, presents the same problem the movie and music industry face with file sharing – impossible victory/inevitable defeat.

Starting your own open source “distributed defense” group would be a good way to hedge the risk of having just one group coordinating efforts toward developing open source firearms accessible to all. DefCAD could be infiltrated, co-opted, or derailed in so many conceivable ways considering the implications the work it is doing have, it would be foolish not to hedge such risk.

The lack of direct participation in preserving our rights, and instead depending on lobbyists and protesters alone to to do it for us is one problem. Another problem is the purposeful polarization of the “gun debate” – of gun advocates and their critics along predictable political lines. The Washington Post, which is ironically run by a right-wing Neo-Con editorial board, recently celebrated President Obama’s “clever” use of the Constitution to turn the gun debate on its head. It also noted gleefully that part of the plan was getting the “people” themselves to demand stricter gun control. This will be done by getting half of America (the left) to take the guns away from the other half (the right).

Faux right-wing leaders take particular care in ensuring that to be a “gun rights activist,” you must also be a xenophobic crypto-racist, Islamophobic, and a conservative who believes the problem facing the world are closet-Communist liberals. Likewise, the faux left’s leadership ensures that their followers believe conservatives, their religion, and their guns are the root of all problems. In reality, the corporate-financiers run both sides of the debate and direct the talking points of prominent personalities on both the faux-left and faux-right.

Obviously, instead of digging in and playing along, our goal should be to reach across the aisle and close this artificial divide – by abandoning the leaders claiming to represent our particular political proclivities and working together to address the true causes of violence – social injustice, socioeconomic decay, and inadequate, impractical education.

Getting involved includes creating local institutions that find common ground and reject this artificial polarization – common ground that includes improving education, health care, and local economic prospects, which in turn reduces violence and leaves only responsible people with firearms (and the means to make them). Local efforts must be apolitical and all-inclusive – because if we are reduced to talking politics, it is because we don’t have a pragmatic solution to solve our problems.

DefCAD has a pragmatic solution – leveraging tangible, modern technology to ensure our rights are not trampled upon by insidious politicians. Taking away guns is not an option politically, and soon, not an option practically. All sides who truly seek to reduce the violence in society will be forced to look elsewhere for the solution. Since guns were never the problem to begin with, the advent of 3D printed guns and the insurmountable deterrence they present to “gun control,” may be a blessing in disguise for all who seek a more peaceful and just world.

US Interior secretary also leaving post

US Interior Secretary Ken Salazar intends to step down from his post at the end of March, becoming the fifth cabinet member to leave the Obama administration.

The news of Salazar’s plan to leave the administration came on Wednesday as The Denver Post reported that the former Colorado senator intends to “return to Colorado to spend time with his family.”

Salazar’s office has reportedly confirmed news of his intent to leave Obama’s cabinet.

Others leaving the Obama administration in his second term in office are Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Leaon Panetta, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis.

White House Chief of Staff Jacob Lew is also due to leave his post since he has been nominated by President Barack Obama to replace Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reported on Wednesday that Obama intends to appoint “a key national security deputy,” Denis McDonough, as his new White House chief of staff, widely viewed as the closest advisor to the US president and “the gatekeeper to the Oval Office.”


Democratic Massachusetts Senator and former US presidential nominee John Kerry has been nominated to replace Clinton at the State Department and is widely expected to win a Senate confirmation.

Former Republican Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel has been nominated to take over as the next US Defense Secretary, replacing Leon Panetta.

Hagel’s confirmation, however, is expected to be difficult as he has come under harsh attacks from pro-Israeli Republican conservatives for criticizing the “Jewish Lobby” in the United States and opposing US or Israeli military strikes as well as economic sanctions against Iran while he was in the US Senate.

MFB/MFB

Welcome to the Shammies, the Media Awards that Recognise Truly Unsung Talent

brainwash

There are awards for everyone. There are the Logies, the Commies, the Tonys, the Theas,  the Millies (“They cried with pride”) and now the Shammies.

The Shammies celebrate the finest sham media. “Competition for the 2013 Gold Shammy,” said the panel of judges, “has been cutthroat.”  The Shammies are not for the tabloid lower orders. Rupert Murdoch has been honoured enough. Shammies distinguish  respectable journalism that guards the limits of what the best and brightest like to call the “national conversation”.

The Shammy judges were especially impressed by a spirited campaign to rehabilitate Tony Blair. The winner will receive the coveted Jeremy Paxman Hoodwink Prize, in honour of the famous BBC broadcaster who says he was “hoodwinked” over Iraq – regardless of the multiple opportunities he had to challenge Blair and expose the truth and carnage of the illegal invasion.

Short-listed for Hoodwink is Michael White, the Guardian’s political editor, whose lament for Blair’s “wasted talent” is distinguished by his defence of Blair as the victim of a “very unholy alliance between a familiar chorus of America-bashers and Blair bait[ers]”. (I am included).

On 19 December, another contender, White’s colleague, Jane Martinson, was granted a “rare” interview with Cherie Blair in her “stately private office” with its “gorgeous views over Hyde Park” and “imposing mahogany furniture”. In such splendour does Mrs. Blair (she prefers her married name for its “profile”) run her “foundation for women” in Africa, India and the Middle East. Her political collusion in her husband’s career and support for adventures that destroyed the lives of countless women was not mentioned. A PR triumph and odds-on for a Shammy.

Also nominated: the brains behind the Guardian’s front page of 8 November: “The best is yet to come”, dominated by a half-page picture of the happy-huggy-droney Obama family. And who could fail to appreciate the assurance from the BBC’s Mark Mardell that, in personally selecting people to murder with his drones, “the care taken by the president is significant”?

Matt Frei, formerly of the BBC now of Channel 4 News, drew commendation for his reporting of Obama as a “warrior president” and Hugo Chavez as a “chubby-faced strongman”. A study by the University of the West of England found that, of the 304 BBC reports on Venezuela published in a decade, only three mentioned the Chavez government’s extraordinary record in promoting human rights and reducing poverty.

In the Gold Shammy category, the judges were  struck by the outstanding work of the Guardian’s Decca Aitkenhead. “Everywhere we went, before my eyes people fell in love with him … no one seemed to be immune.” This was her memorable encounter with Peter Mandelson in 2009. She described his “effortless allure… the intensity of his theatre is electrifying to behold… His skin is dewey, as if fresh from a spa facial, and his grooming so flawless he looks almost hyper-real, the cuff links and tie delicately co-ordinated, with their detail inversely echoed in his socks … His whole body seems weirdly untroubled by the passage of time…”

Aitkenhead had previously “profiled” Alistair Darling, the Chancellor who presided over the worst financial collapse in memory. Greeted as “old friends” by Darling and his “gregarious” wife Maggie “who cooks and makes tea and supper while Darling lights the fire”, Aitkenhead effused over “a highly effective minister …he seems almost too straightforward, even high-minded, for the low cunning of political warfare.”

The judges were asked to compare and contrast such moments of journalistic ecstasy with the same writer’s profile of Julian Assange on 7 December.  Assange answered her questions methodically, providing her with a lot of information about the state’s abuse of technology and mass surveillance. “There is no debate that Assange knows more about this subject than almost anyone alive,” she wrote. No matter. Rather than someone who had exposed more state criminality than any journalist, he was described as “someone convalescing after a breakdown”: a mentally ill figure she likened to “Miss Havisham”.  Unlike the alluring, electrifying, twice disgraced Mandelson, and the high-minded, disastrous Chancellor, Assange had a “messianic grandiosity”. No evidence was offered. The Gold Shammy was within her grasp.

Then, on Christmas Eve, the BBC News magazine published an article marking the 40th anniversary of the 1972 Christmas bombing of Hanoi. The bombing, wrote Rebecca Kesby, “was President Richard Nixon’s attempt to hasten the end of the Vietnam war, as the growing strength of the Viet Cong caused heavy casualties among US ground troops”.

In fact, Nixon promised “an honourable end to the war” four years earlier. His 1972 Christmas bombing of Hanoi in the north was as much concerned with peace as Hitler’s bombing of Poland: a cynical, vengeful act of barbarism that changed nothing in the stalled Paris talks. Kesby cites Henry Kissinger’s absurd claim that the North Vietnamese “were on their knees”. Far from hastening “the end of the Vietnam war”, America’s savagery ensured the war went on for another two a half years, during which more Vietnamese were killed than during the previous decade.

Kesby claimed that previous US targets had been “fuel depots and munitions stores”.   On my wall is a photograph I took of a hamlet in the north obliterated by F-105 and Phantom fighters flying at 200 feet in order to pick off “soft targets” – human beings. In the town of Hongai, I stood in the debris of churches, hospitals, schools. A new type of “dart bomb” was used; the darts were made from a plastic that did not show in X-rays, and the victims, mostly children, suffered until they died. Filmed by Malcolm Aird and James Cameron, a news report on this type of terror bombing was suppressed by the BBC.

Today our memory of all of this is sanitised.  America and its allies, using even more diabolical weapons, continue to “hasten to the end of war”. Such has been the BBC’s unerring theme since Vietnam. The Gold Shammy is richly deserved.

For more information on John Pilger, please visit his website at www.johnpilger.com

Mehdi’s Morning Memo: Cable Vs Cameron

The ten things you need to know on Thursday 17 January 2013...

1) CABLE VS CAMERON

First there was an American diplomat. Then a German politician. Then a former British ambassador. And then, of course, a group of eurosceptic Tory backbenchers. Everyone seems to have something to say on Britain's relationship with Europe ahead of David Cameron's 'tantric' speech on the subject in the Netherlands tomorrow.

Tonight, just a few hours ahead of the PM's address, it's Vince Cable's turn. As Ned Simons and I report:

"In a speech to business leaders on Thursday, the Lib Dem business secretary will say it is a 'terrible time' to have the 'diversion and uncertainty' which build up to a referendum would entail.

“'Uncertainty is the enemy of investment. At a time of extreme fragility in business confidence such uncertainty would add to the sense of unresolved crisis and weaken Britain’s ability to deliver more reform inside the EU,' he will say.

"... Taking aim at eurosceptic Tory backbenchers, Cable will use his speech on Thursday evening to say that it will be “next to impossible” to safeguard the UK national interest in the Single Market if London tries to disengage from its existing commitments.

“'The eurosceptic calculation is that British permission is necessary for closer integration- via treaty change- and that this permission can be traded for the negotiating objectives. That seems to me a dangerous gamble to make,' he will say."

There aren't many Tories who like Vince Cable and there'll be even fewer after he delivers tonight's speech in Oxfordshire. A senior Lib Dem official tells us that the the party wants "to give the Tories enough rope to hang themselves with".

Meanwhile, the Guardian reports:

"In the runup to the [Cameron] speech, a group of prominent City figures have written to the Telegraph in support of an in-out referendum, and a group of 30 pro-European Tory MPs, including Ken Clarke and Sir Malcolm Rifkind, have written a letter charging the prime minister with jeopardising Margaret Thatcher's foremost European legacy, the single market. The MPs warn: 'We fear that a renegotiation which seems to favour the UK alone would force other capitals to ask why they cannot simply dispense with those parts of the single market that don't suit them, potentially endangering Margaret Thatcher's defining European legacy.'"

2) 'THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF'

The Tories' seem pretty divided on Europe - something Ed Miliband was keen to highlight during prime minister's questions yesterday. But what's Labour's position? We may found out today when shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander gives his own speech on Europe (yep, everyone's at it!) in which he will say:

“The gap between the minimum the Tories will demand and the maximum our European partners can accept remains unbridgeable."

Meanwhile, his boss, the Labour leader Ed Miliband, has told the Financial Times that David Cameron was about to take Britain "to the edge of an economic cliff" with a promise of an EU referendum, which he believes will also reawaken "collective" hysteria" in the Conservative Party.

Miliband told the FT that he is "not in favour now of committing to an in-out referendum - it wouldn't be the right thing for our country. The priority for this country is to focus on our economic difficulties and getting out of those difficulties and you don't do that by putting a big 'closed for business' sign around Britain."

Cameron "should be listening to the CBI and not Nigel Farage", the Labour leader added.

Oooh...

3) COLLECTIVE (IR)RESPONSIBILITY

Europhobes in the cabinet (IDS? Owen Paterson? Chris Grayling?) will be delighted - from the Guardian:

"The prime minister has refused to confirm or deny claims that he has given cabinet colleagues freedom to campaign for Britain to exit the European Union in a future referendum."

It could be 1975 all over again...

4) 'ROM THEIR WAY'

That's the headline in the Sun this morning, which reports:

"Up to 350,000 Romanians and Bulgarians could flock to Britain when restrictions are lifted at the end of this year, a report warns today.

"The influx would equal a city the size of Leicester.

"A new analysis estimates 50,000 Romanians and Bulgarians could arrive each year — or 250,000 over the next five years. But that figure could hit 70,000 annually — or 350,000 over five years, according to..."

Hmm. According to who? Yep, you guessed it:

"...campaign group Migration Watch."

But earlier this week, the prime minister said that the detail for such calculations "wasn't there yet" and as the BBC reports:

"Sarah Mulley, of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think tank said that although it was 'very difficult to predict migration flows with any degree of confidence in these circumstances' the estimates put forward by Migration Watch 'look high'.

"She said: 'The UK is opening access to its labour markets along with the rest of Europe and the process of opening up to Bulgaria and Romania has been a gradual one, in contrast with 2004 when the UK was the only large EU country to open its labour market and when borders and labour market access were opened at the same time.

"'So it would be very surprising if net migration from Bulgaria and Romania was on the scale predicted by Migration Watch.'"

Watch this space.

5) BARACK OBAMA VS THE NRA

Second-term Obama seems to have found his cojones - from my HuffPost colleagues in the US:

"In a bold and potentially historic attempt to stem the increase in mass gun violence, President Barack Obama unveiled on Wednesday the most sweeping effort at gun control policy reform in a generation.

"'This is our first task as a society: keeping our children safe. This is how we will be judged,' Obama said. 'We can’t put this off any longer.'

"... [T]he president recommended requiring criminal background checks for all gun sales; reinstating the assault weapons ban; restoring a 10-round limit on ammunition magazines; eliminating armor-piercing bullets; providing mental health services in schools; allocating funds to hire more police officers; and instituting a federal gun trafficking statute, among other policies. The cost of the package, senior officials estimated, would be roughly $500 million, some of which could come from already budgeted funds."

The NRA isn't happy. Prior to the president's announcement, America's largest gun lobby released a TV ad in which

"... a narrator argued that the Secret Service protection provided to Obama's two daughters, Sasha and Malia, is evidence that the president is an 'elitist hypocrite,' who wants armed guards for his own daughters, but not for other people's children. The ad was widely panned as soon as it was released, and White House spokesman Jay Carney called it 'repugnant and cowardly.'"

"Has the NRA lost it entirely?" asks Salon's Joan Walsh.

Er, yes.

BECAUSE YOU'VE READ THIS FAR...

Watch this video of two dogs Skypeing each other.

6) AFGHAN REDUX?

From the Times splash:

"British special forces were on standby last night to mount a rescue mission after al-Qaeda militants in Algeria took scores of foreign workers hostage, including up to five Britons.

"One British citizen was killed in the bloody siege at a BP gas plant in the East of the country — the worst terrorist crisis of David Cameron's premiership and one of the largest foreign kidnappings of recent times. The militants, from neighbouring Mali, claimed that they were responding to a decision by France, supported by Britain, to attack al-Qaeda Islamists in their country."

The paper adds:

"In a move that could increase tensions further, MPs approved plans yesterday to send a small number of British military personnel to help to train Mali's demoralised army as it battles to reclaim the sprawling north of the country from jihadists.

"Britain has contributed two transport aircraft to help the French mission, but was expected to send a small number of soldiers to Bamako, the Malian capital, as early as next month under proposals drawn up by the European Union."

But the Daily Mail's leader argues that "it would surely be disastrous for Britain to commit more of our overstretched men and equipment to a cause not obviously our own". It says:

"Indeed, in the rapidly escalating conflict in Mali, where France will triple its troop deployment 'within days', aren't there chilling echoes of Afghanistan? There, too - where the bloodshed continues after more than a decade - Britain took arms against a tribal enemy as a gesture of solidarity with an ally.

"In Mali, as in Afghanistan, the insurgents are proving a more formidable foe than expected, armed as they are with heavy machine guns, Kalashnikovs and rocketpropelled grenades.

"... As France calls for more international support, is it too much to hope that David Cameron will remember the British lives lost and the sobering lessons of our oh-so-recent history - and just say No?"

7) LABOUR'S IRON MAN?

The cover story of the Guardian's G2 supplement has a rather startling headline this morning: "Could Ed be Labour's Thatcher?"

Author Andy Beckett, a long-time Miliband-watcher, draws a fascinating comparison between the Labour leader and the Tories' most famous, successful and right-wing leader. He writes:

"Members of Miliband's unusually small inner circle are also open about their preoccupation with – and even sometimes admiration for – what Thatcher subsequently achieved in her 15 years as opposition leader and prime minister."

The whole thing is worth a read - and not just because Beckett plugs my biog of the Labour leader in the opening paragraph.

8) AUSTERITY WATCH, PART 129

From the Times:

"More than 100,000 disabled people will lose basic home support under government reforms of social care, leading disability groups are warning.

"Five charities including Scope, Mencap and Leonard Cheshire argue that the care system is already underfunded by at least £1.2 billion and “is on the verge of breakdown”.

"... In a report published today the charities say that 40 per cent of disabled people are already failing to get the basic care they need, such as help with washing, dressing, cooking and eating."

9) FORMER ISRAELI PM ACCUSES CURRENT ISRAELI PM

From the Daily Beast:

"Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says the government of Benjamin Netanyahu spent almost $3 billion in the past two years preparing for a war against Iran's nuclear program that it probably never intended to wage.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Olmert said the sum was above and beyond the billions allocated to the defense budget and helped raise Israel’s fiscal deficit to heights it hadn’t reached in years. As a result, he said, Netanyahu would be forced to make broad spending cuts, if reelected next week..."

Now that's what I call a deficit debate...

10) 'MY MATHS ISN'T GOOD ENOUGH'

From the HuffPost UK:

"Wonga's head of regulatory and public affairs has told a committee of MPs that he could not work out the interest on a loan from his own company because 'my maths isn't good enough.'

"Henry Raine, head of regulatory and public affairs at the payday loans company, defended his business to the House of Commons Public Accounts committee, where he was grilled by chair and Labour MP Margaret Hodge on the effectiveness of consumer credit regulation."

PUBLIC OPINION WATCH

From the latest Ipsos-MORI poll:

Labour 43
Conservatives 30
Ukip 9
Lib Dems 8

That would give Labour a majority of 124.

140 CHARACTERS OR LESS

@DanHannanMEP The lobby is covering the PM's coming speech in terms of party management. They're missing the epochal significance of an In/Out referendum.

@edballsmp When David Cameron gets so desperate he has to claim Labour wants Britain to join the single currency, you know he's really losing it..

@TheOnion On Tonight's ONNCast: NRA Fights Legislation That Would Ban Gun Sales To Those Currently On Killing Sprees

900 WORDS OR MORE

James Forsyth, writing in this week's Spectator, says: "Cameron’s European moment has come – a year late."

Peter Oborne, writing in the Telegraph, says: "Tony Blair’s record in the Middle East is a sorry one – it’s time he quit."

Slavoj Zizek, writing in the Guardian, says: "The west's crisis is one of democracy as much as finance."


Got something you want to share? Please send any stories/tips/quotes/pix/plugs/gossip to Mehdi Hasan (mehdi.hasan@huffingtonpost.com) or Ned Simons (ned.simons@huffingtonpost.com). You can also follow us on Twitter: @mehdirhasan, @nedsimons and @huffpostukpol

Selling the Shooting

A boy looks on as a customer inspects a pistol at the Saratoga Arms Fair at the City Center in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., Jan. 12, 2013. (Photo: Nathaniel Brooks / The New York Times) A boy looks on as a customer inspects a pistol at the Saratoga Arms Fair at the City Center in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., Jan. 12, 2013. (Photo: Nathaniel Brooks / The New York Times) Fuck you, that's my name. You know why, mister? 'Cause you drove a Hyundai to get here tonight, and I drove an $80,000 BMW...only one thing counts in this life: get them to sign on the line which is dotted.

- Glengarry Glen Ross

A few hours before President Obama and Vice President Biden unveiled their proposals for gun reform in America, the National Rifle Association launched a preemptive strike on the president's children. To wit: an NRA-sponsored television commercial claimed that, because Sasha and Malia get armed guards in school and your kids don't, Mr. Obama is an elitist hypocrite.

Leaving aside the colossal tin-eared stupidity involved in attacking children in the midst of a debate that was initiated after 20 children were slaughtered, and notwithstanding the fact that, to no small degree, the presidential children need bodyguards to protect them from the very audience targeted by that NRA ad, the simple, ugly truth of the matter is that this most recent example of the NRA's psychotic nonsense is pretty much what we can expect to hear now that the gun gauntlet has finally been thrown down.

The substance of the Obama administration's proposals are historic in scope: enact a stronger assault weapons ban, limit the size of ammunition magazines, require universal background checks for all gun sales, strengthen mental health treatment options, and empower schools to deal with gun violence threats while addressing issues of bullying. Beyond that, Mr. Obama released a list of 23 Executive Orders aimed at beefing up existing gun laws, allowing the Centers for Disease Control to research the underlying causes of gun violence (something the GOP successfully quashed for years), and reviewing safety standards for gun locks and gun safes.

On the whole, the administration's proposals are about as bold as one could hope for in this day and age; more than 900 people have been shot to death since the massacre at Sandy Hook, and Rep. Gabby Giffords was shot through the skull, and President Reagan was shot way back when, and his press secretary took a bullet to the head that day and has spent his whole life since trying to keep that from happening to anyone else, and Columbine happened, and Aurora happened, and the Sikh temple massacre happened, and the body count from American gun violence has been spinning like the fare meter on a Manhattan taxicab since Bobby Kennedy got his brains blown out in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen almost 50 years ago, and still, after everything that has happened and after everything we know, we all somehow became convinced that stuffing the Biblical camel through the eye of the Biblical needle would be easier than passing sensible gun control legislation on a national level in America.

That, my friends, is salesmanship.

Salesmanship the likes of which has rarely been seen in history, even in this nation of boiling commercialism. It is no small accomplishment to convince millions of people that their safety and security - indeed, their very existence as a nation - absolutely depends upon the astonishing preponderance of devices that kill them on the hour, every hour, every day.

All the gun lobby does is bellow about freedom, about the Constitution, about preserving the ability to defend oneself against the onset of an intrusive, tyrannical government. This is the song that has been sung for decades now, to the point that it is holy writ to those who think the ability to own an AR-15 with a magazine capacity large enough to take out half of Yankee Stadium, should the need somehow arise, is the apotheosis of American freedom. Good luck with that; send me a note from the front, hero. I'm sure your Red Dawn fantasy will unspool itself any day now.

Convincing so many people that their freedom is inviolably attached to things that kill them in piles every single day is amazingly successful salesmanship...and as we embark upon this national debate over guns, we must encompass this essential truth: all the grandstanding over personal freedom, over the Constitution, over the ability to defend oneself against the government, is the end-product of perhaps the most magnificent sales job ever deployed against anyone, ever.

Understand the bottom line here, best described by an astute observer: "I think the real problem gun manufacturers face is an inability to build planned obsolescence into their products. Unlike other instrument with moving parts, a gun can continue to shoot for a very, very long time. Hence, for gun manufacturers to remain profitable, the number of firearms in society and their lethality must continually increase if for no other reason than to maintain enough novelty to encourage new purchases."

There it is.

The root of the problem.

The NRA and the gun lobby in general getting into bed with the Republicans and the far right, all the shouting about freedom and the Constitution, is just window-dressing to the gun-makers. They don't believe that baloney; they just use it to sell their products, because unlike a Toyota or a blender, their products pretty much last forever.

There was a company once that made tractors, the best damned tractors ever assembled by anyone ever, and every farmer in the country bought one...and after a while, the company that made those excellent tractors went out of business, because all anyone needed was one, and the one they bought lasted forever, so no one ever bought another one.

For the gun-makers, it is about making the product they produce attractive enough to purchase over and over and over again. That is the only way they will be able to stay in business. Period, end of file.

We are going to hear a great deal of insane noise now that debate over guns in America has been fully engaged by - yeah, I'll say it - a president I am proud of today. Do not ever forget, no matter the rhetoric that gets wrapped up in this argument, that this is about the ability to sell guns. This isn't about freedom or the Constitution or anything else for the gun-makers and their friends.

It's a sales pitch, and nothing more.

Feds taunt rights group with blacked-out docs on GPS tracking

The first two pages of a US government document regarding GPS surveillance on American citizens given to the ACLU. (via aclu.org)

The first two pages of a US government document regarding GPS surveillance on American citizens given to the ACLU. (via aclu.org)

The American Civil Liberties Union has been given information on how Washington determines when it can surveil American citizens using GPS. The documents are so heavily redacted by the Justice Department, though, that they are essentially worthless.

­The redacted sections – which consume several paragraphs and even entire pages – are thought to show legal interpretations outlining the government's rationale on tracking its citizens with GPS. With so much of the documents blacked out, Americans are still wondering whether the federal government is required to obtain a warrant before spying on them with GPS technology – and if so, when exactly it can do so.

The ACLU, one of the most powerful American civil rights groups, had to sue the government in August 2011 with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in order to get their hands on the memos.

­The memos "outline the Justice Department’s conclusions regarding its obligations" under US v. Jones, a January 2012 Supreme Court trial that saw a unanimous ruling in favor of requiring law enforcement to get a warrant before tracking American citizens without their knowledge, ACLU staff attorney Catherine Crump wrote in a statement on the matter. They also show how the Justice Department's Criminal Division wrote up another memorandum, “Guidance Regarding the Application of United States v. Jones to GPS Tracking Devices,” in late February of 2012. That July, the same division wrote another document on the same topic that it said “should not be disseminated outside the Department of Justice.”

Such a move by Washington bureaucrats is not unprecedented by any means. For example, the government has refused American citizens access to the legal opinions guiding its use of PATRIOT Act Section 215, which applies to the seizure of personal material. The section's vague language allows law enforcement to search or seize "any tangible things" based on a few guidelines.

The government also keeps secret its legal opinions on when it is or is not acceptable to kill Americans with drones. President Barack Obama has even blocked at least one senator, Ron Wyden (D-OR), from seeing the opinions – though legislators are required access to them by law. 

The ACLU says it will ask for a court order requiring the Justice Department to release the documents, which the group says are "improperly withheld."

"The purpose [of] FOIA is to make sure the government doesn’t operate under secret law—and right now that’s exactly what these memos are," the statement concludes.

Guest Post: A Message To The ‘Left’ From A ‘Right Wing Extremist’

Submitted by Brandon Smith of Alt-Market blog,

A Message To The 'Left' From A 'Right Wing Extremist'

Some discoveries are exciting, joyful, and exhilarating, while others can be quite painful.  Stumbling upon the fact that you do not necessarily have a competent grasp of reality, that you have in fact been duped for most of your life, is not a pleasant experience.  While it may be a living nightmare to realize that part of one’s life was, perhaps, wasted on the false ideas of others, enlightenment often requires that the worldview that we were indoctrinated with be completely destroyed before we can finally resurrect a tangible identity and belief system.  To have rebirth, something must first die...

In 2004, I found myself at such a crossroads.  At that time I was a dedicated Democrat, and I thought I had it all figured out.  The Republican Party was to me a perfect sort of monster.  They had everything!  Corporate puppet masters.  Warmongering zealots.  Fake Christians.  Orwellian social policies.  The Bush years were a special kind of horror.  It was cinematic.  Shakespearean.  If I was to tell a story of absolute villainy, I would merely describe the mass insanity and bloodlust days of doom and dread wrought by the Neo-Con ilk in the early years of the new millennium.

But, of course, I was partly naïve...

The campaign rhetoric of John Kerry was eye opening.  I waited, day after day, month after month for my party’s candidate to take a hard stance on the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I waited for a battle cry against the Patriot Act and the unconstitutional intrusions of the Executive Branch into the lives of innocent citizens.  I waited for a clear vision, a spark of wisdom and common sense.  I waited for the whole of the election for that man to finally embrace the feelings of his supporters and say, with absolute resolve, that the broken nation we now lived in would be returned to its original foundations.  That civil liberty, freedom, and peace, would be our standard once again.  Unfortunately, the words never came, and I realized, he had no opposition to the Bush plan.  He was not going to fight against the wars, the revolving door, or the trampling of our freedoms.  Indeed, it seemed as though he had no intention of winning at all.

I came to see a dark side to the Democratic Party that had always been there but which I had refused to acknowledge.  Their leadership was no different than the Neo-Cons that I despised.  On top of this, many supporters of the Democratic establishment had no values, and no principles.  Their only desire was to “win” at any cost.  They would get their "perfect society" at any cost, even if they had to chain us all together to do it. 

There was no doubt in my mind that if the Democrats reoccupied the White House or any other political power structure one day, they would immediately adopt the same exact policies and attitudes of the Neo-Conservatives, and become just as power-mad if not more so.  In 2008 my theory was proven unequivocally correct.

It really is amazing.  I have seen the so-called “anti-war” party become the most accommodating cheerleader of laser guided death and domination in the Middle East, with predator drones operating in the sovereign skies of multiple countries raining missiles upon far more civilians than “enemy combatants”, all at the behest of Barack Obama.  I have seen the “party of civil liberties” expand on every Constitution crushing policy of the Bush Administration, while levying some of the most draconian legislation ever witnessed in the history of this country.  I have seen Obama endorse enemy combatant status for American citizens, and the end of due process under the law through the NDAA.  I have seen him endorse the end of trial by jury.  I have seen him endorse secret assassination lists, and the federally drafted murder of U.S. civilians.  I have seen him endorse executive orders which open the path to the declaration of a “national emergency” at any time for any reason allowing for the dissolution of most constitutional rights and the unleashing of martial law.

If I was still a Democrat today I would be sickly ashamed.  Yet, many average Democrats actually defend this behavior from their party.  The same behavior they once railed against under Bush.

However, I have not come here to admonish Democrats (at least not most of them).  I used to be just like them.  I used to believe in the game.  I believed that the rules mattered, and that it was possible to change things by those rules with patience and effort.  I believed in non-violent resistance, protest, civil dissent, educational activism, etc.  I thought that the courts were an avenue for political justice.  I believed that the only element required to end corruption would be a sound argument and solid logic backed by an emotional appeal to reason.  I believed in the power of elections, and had faith in the idea that all we needed was the “right candidate” to lead us to the promise land.  Again, I believed in the game. 

The problem is, the way the world works and the way we WISH the world worked are not always congruent.  Attempting to renovate a criminal system while acting within the rigged confines of that system is futile, not to mention delusional.  Corrupt oligarchies adhere to the standards of civility only as long as they feel the need to maintain the illusion of the moral high ground.  Once they have enough control, the mask always comes off, the rotten core is revealed, and immediate violence against dissent commences. 

Sometimes the only solutions left in the face of tyranny are not peaceful.  Logic, reason, and justice are not revered in a legal system which serves the will of the power elite instead of the common man.  The most beautiful of arguments are but meaningless flitters of hot air in the ears of sociopaths.  Sometimes, the bully just needs to be punched in the teeth.

This philosophy of independent action is consistently demonized, regardless of how practical it really is when faced with the facts.  The usual responses to the concept of full defiance are accusations of extremism and malicious intent.  Believe me, when I embarked on the path towards the truth in 2004, I never thought I would one day be called a potential “homegrown terrorist”, but that is essentially where we are in America in 2013.  To step outside the mainstream and question the validity of the game is akin to terrorism in the eyes of the state and the sad cowardly people who feed the machine. 

During the rise of any despotic governmental structure, there is always a section of the population that is given special treatment, and made to feel as though they are “on the winning team”.  For now, it would appear that the “Left” side of the political spectrum has been chosen by the establishment as the favored sons and daughters of the restructured centralized U.S.  However, before those of you on the Left get too comfortable in your new position as the hand of globalization, I would like to appeal to you for a moment of unbiased consideration.  I know from personal experience that there are Democrats out there who are actually far more like we constitutionalists and “right wing extremists” than they may realize.  I ask that you take the following points into account, regardless of what the system decides to label us...

We Are Being Divided By False Party Paradigms

Many Democrats and Republicans are not stupid, and want above all else to see the tenets of freedom respected and protected.  Unfortunately, they also tend to believe that only their particular political party is the true defender of liberty.  The bottom line is, at the top of each party there is very little if any discernible difference between the two.   If you ignore all the rhetoric and only look at action, the Republican and Democratic leadership are essentially the same animal working for the same special interests.  There is no left and right; only those who wish to be free, and those who wish to control.

Last year, the “Left and the “Right” experienced an incredible moment of unity after the introduction of the NDAA.  People on both sides were able to see the terrifying implications of a law that allows the government to treat any American civilian as an enemy of war without right to trial.  In 2013, the establishment is attempting to divide us once again with the issue of gun disarmament.  I have already presented my position on gun rights in numerous other articles and I believe my stance is unshakeable.  But, what I will ask anti-gun proponents and on-the-fence Democrats is this:  How do you think legislation like the NDAA will be enforced in the future?  Is it not far easier to threaten Americans with rendition, torture, and assassination when they are completely unarmed?  If you oppose the NDAA, you should also oppose any measure which gives teeth to the NDAA, including the debasement of the 2nd Amendment.

Democrats Are Looking For Help In The Wrong Place

Strangely, Democrats very often search for redress within the very system they know is criminal.  For some reason, they think that if they bash their heads into the wall long enough, a door will suddenly appear.  I’m here to tell you, there is no door. 

The biggest difference between progressives and conservatives is that progressives consistently look to government to solve all the troubles of the world, when government is usually the CAUSE of all the troubles in the world.  The most common Democratic argument is that in America the government “is what we make it”, and we can change it anytime we like through the election process.  Maybe this was true at one time, but not anymore.  Just look at Barack Obama!  I would ask all those on the Left to take an honest look at the policies of Obama compared to the policies of most Neo-Cons, especially when it comes to constitutional liberties.  Where is the end to Middle Eastern war?  Where is the end to domestic spy programs?  Where is the end to incessant and dictatorial executive orders?  Where is the conflict between the Neo-Cons and the Neo-Liberals?  And, before you point at the gun control debate, I suggest you look at Obama’s gun policies compared to Mitt Romney’s and John McCain’s – there is almost no difference whatsoever…

If the two party system becomes a one party system, then elections are meaningless, and electing a new set of corrupt politicians will not help us.

Democrats Value Social Units When They Should Value Individuals Instead

Democrats tend to see everything in terms of groups.  Victim status groups, religious groups, racial groups, special interest groups, etc.  They want to focus on the health of the whole world as if it is a single entity.  It is not.  Without individuals, there is no such thing as “groups”, and what we might categorize as groups change and disperse without notice.  Groups do not exist beyond shared values, and even then, the individual is still more important in the grand scheme of things. 

As a former Democrat, I know that the obsession with group status makes it easy to fall into the trap of collectivism.  It is easy to think that what is best for you must be best for everybody.  This Utopian idealism is incredibly fallible.  Wanting the best for everyone is a noble sentiment, but using government as a weapon to force your particular vision of the “greater good” on others leads to nothing but disaster.  The only safe and reasonable course is to allow individuals to choose for themselves how they will function in society IF they choose to participate at all.  Government must be left out of the equation as much as possible.  Its primary job should be to safeguard the individual’s right to choose how he will live.  You have to get over the fact that there is no such thing as a perfect social order, and even if there was, no government is capable of making it happen for you.   

Democrats Can Become As Power-Mad As Any Neo-Con

I think it is important to point out how quickly most Democratic values went out the door as soon as Barack Obama was placed in the White House.  Let’s be clear; you cannot claim to be anti-war, anti-torture, anti-assassination, anti-surveillance, anti-corporate, anti-bank, anti-rendition, etc. while defending the policies of Obama at the same time.  This is hypocrisy. 

I have heard some insane arguments from left leaning proponents lately.  Some admit that Obama does indeed murder and torture, but “at least he is pushing for universal health care…”.  Even if it did work (which it won’t), is Obamacare really worth having a president who is willing to murder children on the other side of the world and black-bag citizens here at home?  Do not forget your moral compass just because you think the system is now your personal playground.  If you do, you are no better than all the angry bloodcrazed Republicans that bumbled into the Iraq War while blindly following George W. Bush. 

There Is A Difference Between Traditional Conservatives And Neo-Cons

Neo-Cons are not conservative.  They are in fact socialist in their methods, and they always expand government spending and power while reducing constitutional protections.  The “Liberty Movement”, of which I am proudly a part, is traditional conservative.  We believe that government, especially as corrupt as it is today, cannot be trusted to administrate and nursemaid over every individual in our nation.  It has proven time after time that it caters only to criminally inclined circles of elites.  Therefore, we seek to reduce the size and influence of government so that we can minimize the damage that it is doing.  For this, we are called “extremists”. 

Governments are not omnipotent.  They are not above criticism, or even punishment.  They are merely a collection of individuals who act either with honor or dishonor.  In the Liberty Movement, we treat a corrupt government just as we would treat a corrupt individual.  We do not worship the image of the state, nor should any Democrat.

Liberty Minded Conservatives Are Not “Terrorists”

There will come a time, very soon I believe, when people like me are officially labeled “terrorists”.  Perhaps because we refuse gun registration or confiscation.  Perhaps because we develop alternative trade markets outside the system.  Maybe because some of us are targeted by federal raids, and we fight back instead of submitting.  Maybe because we speak out against the establishment during a time of “declared crisis”, and speech critical of the government is labeled “harmful to the public good”.  One way or another, whether you want to believe me now or not, the day is coming. 

Before this occurs, and the mainstream media attacks us viciously as “conspiracy theorists” and traitors, I want the Left to understand that no matter what you may hear about us, our only purpose is to ensure that our natural rights are not violated, our country is not decimated, and our republic is governed with full transparency.  We are not the dumb redneck racist hillbilly gun nuts you see in every primetime TV show, and anyone who acts out of personal bias and disdain for their fellow man is not someone we seek to associate with.  We fight because we have no other choice.  Our conscience demands that we oppose centralized tyranny.  We do what we do because the only other option is subservience and slavery.   

Many of the people I have dealt with in the Liberty Movement are the most intelligent, well-informed, principled and dedicated men and women I have ever met.  They want, basically, what most of us want:

  • to be free to determine their own destinies.
  • To be free to speak their minds without threat of state retribution.
  • To be free to defend themselves from any enemy that would seek to oppress them.
  • To live within an economic environment that is not rigged in favor of elitist minorities and on the verge of engineered collapse.
  • To live in a system that respects justice and legitimate law instead of using the law as a sword against the public.
  • To wake up each day with solace in the knowledge that while life in many regards will always be a difficult thing, we still have the means to make it better for ourselves and for the next generation.
  • To wake up knowing that those inner elements of the human heart which make us most unique and most endearing are no longer considered “aberrant”, and are no longer under threat.

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Comprehensive Mental Health Background Checks for Gun Buyers Is a No-Brainer — And Almost...

The White House and New York State want to use more mental health data, but obstacles abound.

January 16, 2013  |  

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On Wednesday, President Obama said strengthening background checks for gun buyers was one of the key features of his package of gun control reforms, before he signed an executive order telling federal agencies to “clarify that no federal law prevents healthcare providers from warning law enforcement authorities about threats of violence.”
 
And on Tuesday, the fine print of New York’s new gun-control law—rushed through its legislature and signed that day by Gov. Andrew Cuomo—went even further. New York is now requiring mental health professionals to report any mental illness that could lead to violence to police agencies. The police, in turn, will use that referral to revoke any gun license issued to that person, confiscate any guns they own (but pay them), and possibly order forced hospitalization if that person doesn’t follow a treatment plan.

These steps—from the White House issuing executive orders to try to get more and better information into the FBI’s national background check database for gun buyers, to what New York’s Gov. Cuomo is calling the nation’s “ most comprehensive” gun law—are conveying to Americans that better gun buyer background checks are on the horizon.

But health law and policy experts say both the White House—and to a much greater extent, New York state—are overpromising what can be delivered in the near future to strengthen gun buyer background checks, especially when it comes to including and acting on mental health records and information.

“There’s a lot of technical stuff embedded in these issues,” said Richard J. Bonnie, a public policy professor at University of Virginia’s law school who led his state’s review of its gun laws after the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting that left 33 people dead. “My own view is this is worth doing—trying to make the system have the data that the system is designed to have. But trying to make the system as good as it can be is a big challenge. It’s a bigger challenge than people are willing to indicate.”

The public discussion following the Sandy Hook school shooting in December has included calls for more and better background checks for gun buyers.

On the "more" side of this ledger, was Obama’s call for “universal” background checks. In 1986, Congress created a loophole for buying guns privately at gun shows, with no background check by the FBI. Forty percent of all guns are now sold this way. On the "better" side of this equation is submitting more mental health information to federal and state gun licensing databases, which, as Bonnie said, gets complicated.

The federal background check system is hardly all that it can be, for a variety of reasons.

The first reason is states don’t have to participate if they don’t want to. They can decide what mix of court records—from criminal matters to mental health orders—to submit, as a result of a 1997 Supreme Court decision authored by Justice Antonin Scalia. “A recent report by the Government Accountability Office found that there are still 17 states that have made fewer than 10 mental health records available,” the White House said in a report issued Wednesday, highlighting this gap.

“If they don’t want to do it, they can’t be made to do it,” said Bonnie, referring to the Supreme Court ruling about state’s compliance with the 1994 Brady Bill, which created a nationwide system of gun background checks.     

What Congress has done since the 1997 ruling and what the White House proposed on Wednesday, is to offer states new money to create the technical and administrative capacity to collect and submit the background check data. In many states, the lack of political will, incompatible state and county computing systems, and varying mental health systems from county to county are sizeable obstacles, Bonnie said.

Mental Health Privacy Laws

It Will Take The Fed Seven Years To Deliver 300 Tons Of German Gold

With the market yet another algo-controlled snoozer, programmed to close the S&P just green (as otherwise confidence in central planning may fail), the key things we learned today are as follows:

Obama proposed 23 "gun controling" executive actions, which do little to actually control guns - that part falls to Congress, where the proposal will be promptly killed - but which will add some $4.5 billion to US spending, and which will "push for further action on his health care law, including insisting on the kind of mental health coverage states must provide under their Medicaid programs."

The breakdown of the spending is as follows, per Weekly Standard:

  • $4 billion for the president’s proposal “to help keep 15,000 cops on the streets in cities and towns across the country.” (That is roughly $266,000 per police officer.)
  • $20 million to “give states stronger incentives to make [relevant] data available [for background checks] … “$50 million for this purpose in FY2014”
  • “$14 million to help train 14,000 more police officers and other public and private personnel to respond to active shooter situations.”
  • “$10 million for the Centers for Disease Control to conduct further research, including investigating the relationship between video games, media images, and violence.”
  • $20 million to expand the National Violent Death Reporting System.
  • $150 million to “put up to 1,000 new school resource officers and school counselors on the job.”

What can one say: politics, fully, theatrically and embarrassingly "endorsed" by the children sitting behind the president.

* * *

But the biggest news of the day comes from the official Buba announcement that, in its official capacity as a prudent central bank, it - as first of many - is looking to repatriate some 300 tons of gold from the New York Fed. That, however, is not today's news - that was Monday's news.

What is news is that courtesy of the supplied calendar of events in the Buba statement, it will take the Fed some seven years to procure Germany's 300 tons of gold. This is the same Fed that, in its own words, holds some "216 million troy ounces of gold" or some 6720 tons, in its vault 80 feet below ground level.

Putting the above in perspective, the amount of gold that Germany will have to wait 7 years for is shown in red. The amount of gold the Fed supposedly holds, is shown in yellow with a shade of tungsten. Why it will take the Fed 7 years to part with an amount of gold that is less than 5% of its total holdings is anyone's guess...

unless of course, the bulk of the gold in the column on the right has been rehypothecated numerous times to serve as collateral for countless counterparties, and it is no longer clear just who own what to anyone.

* * *

We can only wonder how many centuries it will take the New York Fed to deliver all the gold held by third parties in its vault, once the demand notices start rushing in...

For all those curious how the Fed itself describes the gold vault and its contents, can read more in the pamphet below:

 

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State Department denies Syria’s use of chemical weapons despite media reports

Soldiers loyal to President Bashar al-Assad travel in a Syrian Army tank in al-Arqoub neighbourhood, after clashes between Free Syrian Army fighters and regime forces in Aleppo city September 23, 2012. (Reuters/George Ourfalian)

Soldiers loyal to President Bashar al-Assad travel in a Syrian Army tank in al-Arqoub neighbourhood, after clashes between Free Syrian Army fighters and regime forces in Aleppo city September 23, 2012. (Reuters/George Ourfalian)

A classified State Department cable relayed US officials’ beliefs that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against opposition rebels but an investigation on Monday concluded that Assad was in fact using riot-control gas.

Foreign Policy’s “The Cable” reported Tuesday that a secret diplomatic cable provided information that Assad’s military had used chemical weapons in an attack that left five dead and injured about 100 in the city of Homs.

“We can’t definitely say 100 percent, but Syrian contacts made a compelling case that Agent 15 was used in Homs,” a White House official told Foreign Policy Magazine under condition of anonymity. Agent 15, also known as 3-Quinuclidinyl Benzilate (BZ), is an incapacitating chemical that causes hallucinations and confusion and can sometimes be lethal.

The cable had been signed and classified as “secret” by US consul general in Istanbul, Scott Frederic Kilner. It included interviews with activists, doctors and defectors who all believed the Assad regime had used chemical weapons in an attack against the rebels, which means he would have crossed the “red line” US President Barack Obama spoke about last August. Crossing this line would have evoked the possibility of direct US intervention in the Syrian conflict.

Foreign Policy claimed the report ‘confirmed’ US officials’ worst fears: that chemical weapons were being used in Syria and that Assad was ‘testing US red lines.’

But the results of a State Department investigation show that the material used by the Assad regime was a “riot control agent” which was designed not to have any lasting effects but was more dangerous than officials estimated, since it was released in dense areas.

“It is meant to be short term,” a State Department official told CNN. “But just like with tear gas, if you breathe in an entire canister, that can have a severe effect on your lungs and other organs.”

Dr. Abu al Fida, who treated about 30 of the gas victims, told CNN that proximity to the substance played a significant role in the severity of the symptoms. Victims who were closest to the riot gas suffered paralyses, seizures, muscle spasms and in some cases blindness – symptoms that could have also resulted from exposure to chemical weapons.

Some of the victims were effectively treated with a medication normally used to treat people exposed to the chemical weapon sarin.

The results of the new investigation may bring comfort to Americans worried about a US intervention in Syria, since riot gas does not classify as a chemical weapon and its use, however deadly, would therefore not be crossing the ‘red line’.

"The president was very clear when he said that if the Assad regime makes the tragic mistake of using chemical weapons, or fails to meet its obligation to secure them, the regime will be held accountable," National Security Council Spokesman Tommy Vietor told CNN.

On the News With Thom Hartmann: More Than 8,000 New York City School Bus...

In today's On the News segment: In New York City, more than 8,000 school bus drivers walked off the job in strike on Tuesday; a school shooting in eastern Kentucky claimed the lives of two people; Louisiana Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal wants to get rid of personal income and corporate taxes - and replace them with a higher sales tax in his state; and more.

TRANSCRIPT:

Thom Hartmann here – on the news...

You need to know this. Working people are again on strike. In New York City on Tuesday, more than 8,000 school bus drivers walked off the job. It's the first time school bus drivers have gone on strike in New York City in 33 years – and it's the largest bus drivers' union in the nation. The union claims bus drivers' jobs are in danger as the city puts their contract up for bid in an effort to reduce costs. On average, the drivers make $35,000 a year – with starting pay at $14 an hour – barely enough to get by, especially in New York City. These school bus drivers in New York City are facing the same problem as police officers in Camden and sanitation workers in Detroit. This is made worse by their cities teetering on the edge of bankruptcy since Wall Street crashed our economy – and the Bush Housing Bubble loaded everyone with debt. Now, looking to get their balance sheets in order, cities are cutting public services and selling our commons off to private corporations that don't like unions and don't give a damn about paying their workers a living wage. Luckily, as we've seen over the last few years in Wisconsin, Ohio, at Walmarts across the nation, at fast food joints in New York City, and at shipping ports on the east and west coasts – American people are saying enough is enough, and are going on strike. And as we know, progressive change in America has always moved forward by the efforts of organized working people.

In screwed news...return of the reverse Robin Hoods! Louisiana Republican Governor – and potential 2016 presidential candidate – Bobby Jindal is pushing tax reform in his state. And, as you'd expect – it's the sort of tax reform that gives the super-rich a hefty break – while raising taxes on the poor. Jindal wants to get rid of personal income and corporate taxes – and replace them with a higher sales tax. According to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, this plan will raise taxes on the poorest 80% of Louisianans, while cutting taxes for the top 1%. To break it down, Jindal wants to hit the poorest 20% of taxpayers in his state with $395 a year in new taxes. The middle 20% would be hit by $534 in new taxes. But the richest 1% would get a not-too-shabby tax cut of more than $25,000. This is trickle-down economics on steroids. And it demonstrates what billionaire Leona Helmsley once said, "We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes."

In the best of the rest of the news...

Another school shooting claimed the lives of two people on Tuesday. This time it was at a community college in eastern Kentucky. A gunman opened fire into a vehicle on campus – killing a man and a woman and injuring a third. The gunman was not caught. This latest school shooting paves the way for President Obama today to unveil his proposals for gun control. Reports indicate the President will call for a new assault weapons ban – including a ban on high capacity ammo clips – as well as universal background checks for all gun purchases. On those measures, the President will need to get Congress on board, too. However, he is expected to announce more than a dozen executive actions he can legally take on his own to stem gun violence across America. The President is putting forward a bold proposal to at least slow this scourge of violence on our society – and he's about to meet maximum resistance in Congress from Republicans and some Democrats who are in the pocket of the gun industry. It's up to us to get active and convince the President that this is a fight worth having.

26-year-old Internet activist Aaron Swartz was laid to rest on Tuesday just outside of Chicago after taking his own life over the weekend. At the funeral, Swartz's father told mourners that his son was "killed by the government." Swartz, who was caught tapping into the MIT network and downloading millions of online academic journals, was facing as many as 30 years in prison and a million dollar fine as a result of an overzealous Department of Justice. Under this pressure, and amid a long battle with depression, Swartz killed himself. On Tuesday, Republican Chairman of the House Government Oversight Committee Darrell Issa said he will investigate the DOJ's handling of Swartz. Speaking to reporters, Issa talked about the extreme sentence and then said Swartz was, "certainly someone who worked very hard...Had he been a journalist and taken that same material that he gained from MIT, he would have been praised for it." Congressman Issa has wasted taxpayer dollars and derailed President Obama's agenda with witch hunt investigations into Fast and Furious and Benghazi. But he's finally doing what he should be doing – and that's looking into the Department of Justice's extreme actions toward peaceful activists. As they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

More than ten years ago, President George W. Bush launched a campaign to bring democracy to the entire world with bombs and guns. A decade later, we know the results of Bush's crusade – it was a failure. According to an annual report by Freedom House – democracy is on the decline around the world. Although there are three more nations enjoying full freedom than were in 2011, according to the report, 27 other nations have actually clamped down on their populations tighter – restricting speech and the media. Currently, about 3 billion people around the world enjoy full freedom living in a democracy. Another 1.6 billion enjoy partial freedoms, and 2.3 billion live in nations deemed not free. Reacting to this news, the report calls for a "critical need for leadership from the United States and other democracies." That doesn't mean forcing democracy through violence – it means strengthening our own democracy at home to inspire other people around the planet. As my friend Dick Gregory once told me, if democracy is so good, we don't need to force it on anyone – they will steal it for themselves. And all we need to do is be there to help when they do.

And that's the way it is today – Wednesday, January 16, 2013. I'm Thom Hartmann – on the news.

Debate on Armed Police in Schools: Needed for Kid Safety or Part of the...

As the National Rifle Association pushes for armed guards in every school, we host a debate over what type of security measures should be taken in schools to prevent future tragedies. On Monday, the superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools proposed forming the school system’s own police force. We’re joined by Sean Burke, president of the School Safety Advocacy Council; and Damon Hewitt, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and co-author of "The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Structuring Legal Reform."

NERMEEN SHAIKH: One month after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, we turn now to a growing debate over what types of security measures should be taken in schools to prevent future tragedies. The NRA has just launched a new campaign called "Stand Up and Fight" as part of its push to place armed officers in every school. The NRA issued this new ad criticizing President Obama on Tuesday.

NRA AD: Are the president’s kids more important than yours? Then why is he skeptical about putting armed security in our schools, when his kids are protected by armed guards at their school? Mr. Obama demands the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes, but he’s just another elitist hypocrite when it comes to a fair share of security—protection for their kids, and gun-free zones for ours.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: NRA Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre first made the call for armed guards in U.S. schools last month during a press conference.

WAYNE LAPIERRE: The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. I call on Congress today to act immediately to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation, and to do it now, to make sure that blanket safety is in place when our kids return to school in January.

AMY GOODMAN: The call for armed guards is gaining momentum. On Monday, the superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools proposed forming the school system’s own police force.

For more, we turn now to a debate between two guests. In Boston, Sean Burke is with us, president of the School Safety Advocacy Council. He was formerly director of public safety for the Lawrence Public School’s Police/Safety Department, where he coordinated all safety efforts, including the creation of the school’s crisis plan, which now serves as a model throughout the country. His organization does not support the NRA call for armed volunteers, but it does support more efforts to place more police officers in schools.

And here in New York, Damon Hewitt is with us, director of the Education Practice Group at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. In 2002, he launched the group’s Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline Initiative, which challenges racial disparities that criminalize students and push them out of schools. The Legal Defense Fund is one of the groups that submitted recommendations to Vice President Biden’s task force on guns.

Before we talk about the issue of guns in schools, I wanted to get your response, Damon Hewitt, to the ad that the NRA has just put out targeting President Obama’s daughters.

DAMON HEWITT: Thanks for having me, Amy.

You know, I think that ad is a perfect example of how the public debate is so polarized and so driven by a culture of fear instead of a culture of solutions. We really have to move beyond rhetoric and beyond fear and really start to talk about how do we meaningfully keep schools safe, how do we develop not just school environments, but also environments in our communities where we won’t have these kinds of fears, where we won’t be afraid of mass shootings and all of these assault weapons, which are just so rampant in this country today.

AMY GOODMAN: Sean Burke, would you like to respond to the ad that says, "Are the president’s kids more important than yours? Then why is he skeptical about putting armed security in our schools when his kids are protected by armed guards?" Do you think this is appropriate?

SEAN BURKE: Good morning, Amy.

And I also don’t like anything that—that is bent out of fear. I don’t think that fear is going to be good for school safety. I don’t think fear is good for the United States. And I don’t think it’s going to produce anything that’s going to be positive in the way of changes in school safety. So, I don’t think it’s an appropriate ad to be running in the United States, no.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Sean Burke, can you elaborate your responses to the Newtown shooting and what you think ought to be done to increase safety in schools?

SEAN BURKE: Well, first of all, we promote reasonableness. I don’t think there is—there is call to go off on wild tangents or go out of the norm with a lot of ideas that are coming up nowadays. I think that we should be going back and putting an emphasis on things that we were doing, somewhat limited, before the shooting, but take advantage of this now, this public outcry that things have to be done in school.

I think that, ultimately, the only good thing the NRA does say is that there should be a police officer in every school, a well-trained police officer in every school. But we know that’s not a reasonable request in today’s budgetary area. So, what we proposed is a program called LEEP, Law Enforcement Enhancement Procedures, where patrol officers, while they’re doing their routine duties, or officers that are reserves promoting other duties, would stop by schools, have satellite offices in schools, get to know the administration, get to know the children that attend there, forge relationships. And, by that, it will be a deterrent for violence in the school. It will serve as police officers becoming more knowledgeable of the layout in case there is an emergency, and really promote safer schools by just that regular visiting on your daily patrol.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Damon Hewitt, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund co-authored a report called "Police in Schools Are Not the Answer to the Newtown Shooting." So can you respond to what Sean Burke said and what your report recommends?

DAMON HEWITT: Sure. Well, we think—we think we have to learn from the past, and not-so-distant past, in particular the tragedy at Columbine High School and the reactions thereto. We know that in—with the best of intentions, police officers were placed in many schools throughout Colorado, throughout the United States. We also know that in Denver public schools, for example, in the five years after the Columbine tragedy, we saw a 71 percent increase in referrals of students to law enforcement by schools, and the vast majority, over 90 percent of those referrals, were not for anything that was remotely dangerous at all.

What we started to see was that the line between matters of school safety and matters of school discipline have become completely blurred. In essence, throughout the country now, school resource officers, some of which are paid for at times by federal dollars, are actually becoming—or functioning, rather, as the disciplinary arm of schools. They’re actually enforcing discipline codes and criminalizing students for behavior that most of us wouldn’t consider criminal, things like using profanity, running in the classroom, talking back to teachers—behavior that should be disciplined, and students shouldn’t do those things, but they certainly shouldn’t get a citation, summons or arrest for those kinds of activities.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think of police officers—the idea that Sean Burke is putting forward, of police officers casually being in the schools so they can get to know them more easily, but in so doing, they’re in the schools?

DAMON HEWITT: Well, what we understand is this: You know, the call for a police officer in every school, in some communities that may give the appearance of safety, but it’s just that, the appearance. What we know is that this won’t keep us safer. There was a guard on duty at Columbine High School when that tragedy happened. At Virginia Tech, where Colin Goddard—when that tragedy happened, we know that there was an entire police force. So this isn’t going to keep us safe. What actually keeps us safe is the root cause solutions that the administration is working on. And also what keeps us safe is having a safe, functioning, healthy school environment, where children aren’t afraid of police officers, but children actually can engage their school leaders, they can engage their teachers, on matters of instruction or matters of a healthy climate, instead of feeling like their school is being treated like a prison.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Sean Burke, can you respond to what Damon Hewitt said and address specifically whether you have any concerns about a large number of police officers in schools playing a role—a disciplinary role, not just a security one?

SEAN BURKE: Well, the first point is that, of course, people are going to feel safer with a police officer in your school. I think any citizen that is doing nothing wrong feels much safer with a police officer nearby. You’re going to have a decreased fear of crime. Once you get to know that officer and develop a relationship with him, you’re going to feel comfortable with him. So I think the notion or any idea put forward that you’re not going to feel safer with a police offer in school, I don’t agree with that at all.

Secondly, to address the issue of the Columbine shooting, there was an SRO on duty, and the SRO exchanged fire with the gunmen before they entered the school, delaying their entrance into the school, thus cutting back—

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Sorry, Sean Burke, can you explain what an SRO is?

SEAN BURKE: A school resource officer is a certified police officer, and they’re usually from a sheriff’s department or a police department. And they work cooperatively with the education, with the school district, and they work full time in the school. They’re part of the administration team. They are highly trained to deal with issues such as special education, emergency response, even providing educational classes to schools.

So, what you have is a school resource officer, better known as an SRO, for short, he was working at Columbine. And as I said, he exchanged fire with the gunmen on the outside. Now, the failure at Columbine was the response after that. The SRO did his job, exchanged fire, delayed the entrance. The problem was the police response after that. Since then, tactics have changed. And now, instead of waiting for the SWAT team to gather and going into a school, now we know that police officers, even alone, are going to risk their lives and go into a school.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me get a response—

SEAN BURKE: So, the idea that—

AMY GOODMAN: Let me get a response from Damon Hewitt on the point that Sean Burke has made that anyone feels safer with a police officer nearby.

DAMON HEWITT: Well, we think that’s absolutely false. I mean, first of all, from a civil rights perspective, for many years, communities of color have actually felt under threat. They don’t have equal protection of the laws. They feel like they’re under assault. Students of color throughout—students of color throughout the country feel the same way in their schools. We know that what may appear to be a safe environment in some communities, in other communities it actually feels like danger.

And the racial disparities in the school-to-prison pipeline actually bear this out. We know that the U.S. Department of Education only recently began collecting data on school-based arrests. And although African-American students only comprise about 18 percent of public school students nationwide, they represent 35 and 42 percent of those students who are referred to law enforcement and arrested by law enforcement on school campuses. And so, unless you believe that African-American youth are somehow, in and of themselves, out on some rampage of crime, which is actually ridiculous, then you have to believe that there’s some type of cultural disconnect between what police are doing in schools, what SROs are doing in schools. And there’s a cultural disconnect, frankly, with your other guest’s statements, which just seem completely out of step with the reality that young people face and communities face throughout the country.

AMY GOODMAN: Sean Burke, your response, that not all people feel safe when a police officer is right there?

SEAN BURKE: Well, I think—I think you can take a reality and change it to fit your political agenda. And I believe that SROs do make schools safe. I believe that when you talk about prison-to pipeline, and you throw out all these stats to really scare, that maybe imply that police are racist, I think that’s a problem. And I think that doesn’t take into account, number one, victims’ rights. You talk about misdemeanors and people being arrested and summons for misdemeanors. Well, assault and battery isn’t a misdemeanor. So, what is a police officer to do if another student is assaulted or a teacher is assaulted? Is he to go to them and say, "I can’t help you because you’re in a school, and I can’t press charges, I can’t protect you"? I agree, there are instances—and we can name instances—where there are acts that may not have been correctly decided as far as actions against younger students and bringing them into the court system, but it’s hard to Monday-morning-quarterback an incident. And it’s also [inaudible]—

AMY GOODMAN: Let me get a quick comment from Damon Hewitt.

DAMON HEWITT: Well, you know, you don’t need to Monday-morning-quarterback when a student is given a criminal citation for cursing on a school campus. That’s absolutely ridiculous.

When we talk about agendas, let’s talk about the agenda of an industry. Look, I’ve worked very closely with law enforcement throughout my career. You know, I actually ran a task force for the former governor of New York regarding police-on-police shootings, where police shot other officers when they mistook them for criminal suspects. And they were black and Latino officers, primarily. So, the police community knows that there’s an issue here.

And it’s actually unfair not just to students, communities and teachers in schools; it’s also unfair to law enforcement, just to simply throw them into schools and say, "Police these school hallways." You know, you can’t bring that kind of mindset into a school, because you completely alter and disrupt the entire school environment. And what happens is, you don’t make schools safer. All the research shows, from the American Psychological Association, from the American Bar Association, none of the leading experts actually believe that simply placing cops in schools makes them safer.

Now, we can talk about training and have an honest conversation about that. And the current leadership of NASRO, the organization that your guest once headed, does talk somewhat about training. But we also have to just say, first things first, don’t use this strategy—this tragedy, rather, as an excuse, as a reason to advance an agenda to simply propagate and populate schools with more and more police officers. Let’s actually address the root causes.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: I want to go back to the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre. He appeared on Meet the Press last month.

WAYNE LAPIERRE: If it’s crazy to call for putting police and armed security in our school to protect our children, then call me crazy. I’ll tell you what the American people—I think the American people think it’s crazy not to do it. It’s the one thing that would keep people safe. And the NRA is going to try to do that.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was Wayne LaPierre of the NRA. Sean Burke, your response to what he had to say?

SEAN BURKE: Well, as I said before, one of the few statements from the NRA that I do suggest—that I do agree with. The bad thing is, we don’t have the money in this country to do it. And the bad part is also that we have these people now that have opinions on what happens in school, strictly by looking at numbers, never look at instances individually, you know, and when you have these people that criticize law enforcement in schools, my question to them: Have you ever worked in a school?

I was an SRO, and SRO commander, and I was there for 15 years. And I have numerous and countless stories of how I’ve helped people. And I know SROs all around the country that work hard every day and that it takes a certain kind of individual. You know, you can’t just have this idea of this macho cop walking in the school halls and arresting people for swearing or for horsing around with their friends. That’s just not the reality. The reality is, incidents happen in schools, police are called for one reason or another by the school administrator, and sometimes action is taken. And that’s the way it is. Schools are safer with cops in there. With a well-trained police officer, they are going to be safer. And it does take a special kind of police officer to work in schools. And I personally have worked in schools, and I know the response from the administrators. I know the response from the kids. I’ve never had a problem getting relationships started with kids. And I think it carries over to the street. I think when you have a good relationship with an SRO, or a school resource officer, I think it carries over to police, in general, where children and students are not afraid to come up and talk to them. If we look at school shootings—

AMY GOODMAN: Sean Burke, a quick question, as we wrap up: Do you also support the assault weapons ban?

SEAN BURKE: I support meaningful gun changes. I think that there has to be some changes in our gun laws in this country, and I think it’s imperative.

AMY GOODMAN: Just very directly, an assault weapons ban and a high-capacity magazine ban that’s being proposed today, that the NRA opposes?

SEAN BURKE: I haven’t seen the full ban, but I really don’t think that anyone needs a 100-round drum. I don’t think anyone needs a machine gun to go hunting. So, if you’re talking about bans on that, I do agree on that.

AMY GOODMAN: And final comment, Damon Hewitt?

DAMON HEWITT: Sure. You know, we have to really think about the perspective that communities have throughout this country, especially communities of color. They are being policed, and they feel under assault. Children, when they leave their homes, as they walk to school or catch a bus to school, when they’re in school and on their way back, it’s like they’re under constant assault. We really have to keep and understand that perspective. The notion that we have an Officer Friendly in every school who smiles and shakes hands, that’s a great aspiration, but it’s actually pollyannaish, and it doesn’t comport with reality. Until we have a bright line between officers’ involvement in matters of school safety, in matters of school discipline, then it will be irresponsible to just ad hoc say, "Let’s bring officers into schools en masse." Unless we deal with the unintended consequences, we’re actually doing more harm than good.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, and I thank you both for being with us, Damon Hewitt, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and Sean Burke, School Safety Advocacy Council, speaking to us from Boston.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we look at the NRA’s links to weapons manufacturers. Stay with us.

New Gun Laws’ Chief Enemy: Democratic Senators

President Obama announced his plan for stricter gun safety laws on Wednesday, saying that while some of his approach would be instituted by executive order much of the broader strokes would necessarily have to pass through Congress if they were to become law.

Meanwhile, at the nation's largest gun show taking place in Las Vegas this week, talk swirled about how the National Rifle Association was plotting 'the fight of the century' against any efforts in Washington to pass new legislation that would potentially injure the bottom line of the gun industry they so elegantly serve.

Gun safety advocates applauded Obama's speech while the predictable detractors were apoplectic and irrational about the announcement's implications.

To give a sense of national opinion, a Washington Post-ABC News poll on Monday showed 58 percent of adults and 59 percent of registered voters support a nationwide ban on the sale of assault weapons.

"The smart analysis says that the chances of Congress passing serious gun control legislation decrease by the day." –Harry Enten

But amid all the fanfare and talk about 'Obama vs. the NRA' or 'Obama vs. the House Republicans' it seems, by many accounts, that the largest obstacle to pushing through the proposed measures—no matter how modest they are in most regards—will be members of his own party.

During Wednesday's televised remarks that followed an introduction by his vice president Joe Biden, Obama said that together they would do everything they could to pass the plans set forth, but took special care to mark what is surely the most essential reality of the fight brewing over guns in Washington, by telling his audience—the American people—that moving even the modest measures he proposed forward would not be possible unless "the American people demand it."

"And by the way, that doesn’t just mean from certain parts of the country," Obama added, seeming to acknowledge the magnitude of difference between passing gun control laws in a place like New York versus a state like West Virginia or Montana. That said, it is powerful Democrats in those states that are likely to be political obstacles to new guns laws, not their champions.

"We’re going to need voices in those areas and those congressional districts where the tradition of gun ownership is strong to speak up and to say this is important. It can’t just be the usual suspects," he continued.  "We have to examine ourselves in our hearts, and ask yourselves what is important?"

"If parents and teachers, police officers, and pastors, if hunters and sportsman, if responsible gun owners, if Americans of every background stand up and say, enough. We’ve suffered too much pain, and care too much about our children to allow this to continue, then change will -- change will come."

But, as many political observers point out, the rhetoric of gun safety laws comes easy—perhaps more easy from one of the most eloquent politicians in American history—but perhaps too easy when it comes to glossing over the political realities that reside fully and deeply, as the facts show, within the president's own Democratic party.

As Politico reports, the Democrat-controlled Senate is likely to give Obama tremendous problems when he turns to it to re-instate an assault weapons ban:

...other than background checks, it’s not at all clear whether Senate Democrats will hold votes on any other piece of the Obama plan, most notably on the assault weapons ban. Reid — who benefited when the National Rifle Association stayed out of his 2010 reelection contest — threw cold water on passing an assault-weapons ban in a recent televised interview.

And political analyst Harry Enten at The Guardian writes:

I can't imagine a senator from a red state, especially one in which there are more guns per household than the national average, wanting to go up against a barrage from pro-gun forces.

That's why Max Baucus of Montana, Mark Begich of Alaska, and Tim Johnson of South Dakota all have A ratings from the NRA. They all come from states ranked third or fourth in gun ownership – at least 57% of households have a gun in the home. Baucus voted against a renewal of the assault weapons ban in 2004; Begich said he'd vote against it even after Newtown; and Johnson has seen his NRA grade go from a C+ in 2003 to an A, with an NRA endorsement, during his 2008 re-election fight.

The electoral prospects for each man adds to the unlikelihood that any will cast a vote in favor of serious gun control legislation. According to Public Policy Polling (PPP), Baucus has a net approval rating of -3pt and leads a generic Republican candidate by only 3pt. Begich won election 2008 by only 1pt and is rated as "vulnerable" by the Cook Political Report, which also pegs Johnson as the incumbent most likely to lose in 2014.

Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, too, is likely a goner on serious gun control legislation, despite a C from the NRA. She voted against renewing the assault weapons ban in 2004, and pretty much every other gun control measure of the past eight years. She won re-election in 2008 by six points – against a relatively weak opponent and in a state that voted for Romney by 17pt. She is "at risk" per the Cook Political Report. In Louisiana, 44% of households have a gun, 14th most in the nation.

Given the popular support for better gun safety laws, it's likely that some legislation will pass, but when it comes to the measures that safety advocates say would have the most impact—banning semi-automatic assault rifles and large ammunition clips—Sean Sullivan at the Washington Post puts likelihood of that passage at a mere fifty percent.

And Enten, even less optimistic, concludes: "the smart analysis says that the chances of Congress passing serious gun control legislation decrease by the day. The House is a foregone conclusion. When all these numbers start getting added together, I'm not even sure you can find a simple majority of senators to agree on tougher gun control."

With that in mind, it's worth noting that legislative action on Obama's proposals is not expected until February.

__________________________

Truthout’s Jason Leopold on His Upcoming Trip to Guantanamo, His Update on the Gitmo...

In this wide-ranging conversation with Jason Leopold, Truthout’s lead investigative reporter, he talks about his upcoming trip to Guantanamo, the impact of the new pro-torture film Zero Dark 30, the scheduled sentencing of former CIA agent Kiriakou, and his fifth report on the reported suicide of Gitmo prisoner Adnan Latif. We start with Leopold’s announcement that he’s been approved to cover the trial of Khaled Sheikh Muhammed at Guantanamo Bay, and will travel there at the end of January.  We talk about the sharp limitations on coverage and the rules of evidence that appear to preclude a fair trial.

We talk about the new film Zero Dark 30, and the way it cements the myths that torture is OK, and produces usable intelligence.  It also burnishes the image of the CIA, despite the numerous known cases where it tortured innocent people and bungled investigations.

Next, we discuss the recent plea deal taken by John Kiriakou, a CIA agent who helped capture Abu Zubaidah in 2002, who was mistakenly thought to be al Qaeda’s #3 leader.  Kiriakou, who was misled to believe that Zubaidah cracked during his first waterboarding, did not participate in torture sessions, but went public in 2007.  Leopold interviewed him in a 2010 video report, and asked Kiriakou about Deuce Martinez, whose name surfaced in the later investigation.  We talk about NY Times reporter Scott Shane’s remarkable January 6 report, which revealed Shane’s contacts with Kiriakou that drew Shane into the investigation, related to Martinez.  Ultimately, Kiriakou pled guilty to revealing a different agent’s name to a reporter, who did not even publish it.  So far, Kiriakou is the only person going to jail related to Bush’s torture program.

Finally, we talk about Leopold’s dogged efforts to get to the truth in the case of Yemeni Adnan Latif, who was reported a suicide on September 8, 2012 at Guantanamo.  We recap how Latif was not a terrorist, was approved for release by both Bush and Obama officials, and the contradictions in the initial death reports and his autopsy.

Correction:  In our interview, PBC states that the corporate media has barely covered the Latif story.  One exception is a recent “Op-Doc” posted on the NY Times website, a 9-minute video that shows the return of Latif’s remains to his family last December.  Credit is due to the producer, Laura Poitras.  The video is embedded in Leopold’s report.

What Do German Central Bankers Know That We Don’t?

Ben Bernanke and the rest of the US Federal Reserve bet the farm that they could engage in countless monetary interventions, keep interest rates at zero, and print over $2 trillion in new money without damaging the US’s credibility.

They were wrong. Indeed, Germany just fired a major warning shot to the US Federal Reserve.

On Monday, Germany announced that it will be moving a significant portion of its Gold reserves out of storage with the New York Fed and moving them back to Germany.

A few background details.

  • Germany has the second largest Gold reserves in the world behind the US.
  • Since the early ‘80s, Germany has stored the largest portion of its Gold reserves with the New York Fed (45% vs. 13% in London, 11% in Paris and the remaining 31% in Frankfurt).
  • In the fall of last year, German officials began raising the issue of auditing its reserves at the NY Fed.

Why would Germany suddenly decide that it wants to change a policy it has had in place for over 30 years?

More importantly, how did it go from wanting to audit its reserves to actually removing them from the NY Fed’s care?

In simple terms, Germany has just announced that it doesn’t trust the US Fed.

The world’s Central Banks have been staging a global currency way for several years now. Germany, China, Japan, and the US all want to keep their currencies weak to improve exports and minimize their debt loads.

In the case of Germany, it’s the second largest exporter of goods in the world behind China. More than anyone in the EU, Germany wants a weak Euro. However, every time the Fed announces a new policy, the US Dollar falls, the Euro rallies and German exports fall off a cliff.

Germany is now openly telling the Fed that it is done playing around. This will have severe consequences in the financial system.

Remember, the only thing holding the financial system together is belief in the Central Banks. If the Central Banks (it was Germany’s Bundesbank that is behind the Gold move) stop trusting one another or grow openly antagonistic, then things will get very bad very quickly.

For months now we’ve been asserting that the “improvements” in the global economy and financial system were a mirage. Germany’s move has confirmed this. If the financial system was in fact safe and the global economy was improving, Germany would not feel the need to repatriate its Gold.

Which begs the question, what exactly do German Central Bankers know that we don’t?

With that in mind, smart investors are taking advantage of the lull in the markets to position themselves for what’s coming.

We offer several FREE Special Reports designed to help them do this. They include:

Preparing Your Portfolio For Obama’s Economic Nightmare

What Europe’s Crisis Means For You and Your Savings

How to Protect Yourself From Inflation

And last but not least…

Bullion 101: Everything You Need to Know About Investing in Gold and Silver Bullion…

You can pick up free copies of all of the above at:

http://gainspainscapital.com/

Best

Phoenix Capital Research

Your rating: None

What Do German Central Bankers Know That We Don’t?

Ben Bernanke and the rest of the US Federal Reserve bet the farm that they could engage in countless monetary interventions, keep interest rates at zero, and print over $2 trillion in new money without damaging the US’s credibility.

They were wrong. Indeed, Germany just fired a major warning shot to the US Federal Reserve.

On Monday, Germany announced that it will be moving a significant portion of its Gold reserves out of storage with the New York Fed and moving them back to Germany.

A few background details.

  • Germany has the second largest Gold reserves in the world behind the US.
  • Since the early ‘80s, Germany has stored the largest portion of its Gold reserves with the New York Fed (45% vs. 13% in London, 11% in Paris and the remaining 31% in Frankfurt).
  • In the fall of last year, German officials began raising the issue of auditing its reserves at the NY Fed.

Why would Germany suddenly decide that it wants to change a policy it has had in place for over 30 years?

More importantly, how did it go from wanting to audit its reserves to actually removing them from the NY Fed’s care?

In simple terms, Germany has just announced that it doesn’t trust the US Fed.

The world’s Central Banks have been staging a global currency way for several years now. Germany, China, Japan, and the US all want to keep their currencies weak to improve exports and minimize their debt loads.

In the case of Germany, it’s the second largest exporter of goods in the world behind China. More than anyone in the EU, Germany wants a weak Euro. However, every time the Fed announces a new policy, the US Dollar falls, the Euro rallies and German exports fall off a cliff.

Germany is now openly telling the Fed that it is done playing around. This will have severe consequences in the financial system.

Remember, the only thing holding the financial system together is belief in the Central Banks. If the Central Banks (it was Germany’s Bundesbank that is behind the Gold move) stop trusting one another or grow openly antagonistic, then things will get very bad very quickly.

For months now we’ve been asserting that the “improvements” in the global economy and financial system were a mirage. Germany’s move has confirmed this. If the financial system was in fact safe and the global economy was improving, Germany would not feel the need to repatriate its Gold.

Which begs the question, what exactly do German Central Bankers know that we don’t?

With that in mind, smart investors are taking advantage of the lull in the markets to position themselves for what’s coming.

We offer several FREE Special Reports designed to help them do this. They include:

Preparing Your Portfolio For Obama’s Economic Nightmare

What Europe’s Crisis Means For You and Your Savings

How to Protect Yourself From Inflation

And last but not least…

Bullion 101: Everything You Need to Know About Investing in Gold and Silver Bullion…

You can pick up free copies of all of the above at:

http://gainspainscapital.com/

Best

Phoenix Capital Research

Your rating: None

America’s Big Political Fight: Will We Grapple with Reality or Fully Detach and Live...

Key elements of the American Right have set up permanent residence in the world of make-believe, making the real-world challenges we face almost impossible to solve.

January 16, 2013  |  

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The real struggle confronting the United States is not between the Right and the Left in any traditional sense, but between those who believe in reality and those who are entranced by unreality. It is a battle that is testing whether fact-based people have the same determination to fight for their real-world view as those who operate in a fact-free space do in defending their illusions.

These battle lines do relate somewhat to the Right/Left divide because today’s right-wing has embraced ideological propaganda as truth more aggressively and completely than those on the Left, though the Left (and the Center, too) are surely not immune from the practice of ignoring facts in pursuit of some useful agit-prop.

But key elements of the American Right have set up permanent residence in the world of make-believe, making any commonsense approach to the real-world challenges nearly politically impossible. The Right’s fantasists also have the passions of true-believers, like a cult that gets angrier the more its views are questioned.

So, it doesn’t matter that scientific evidence proves global warming is real; the deniers will insist the facts are simply a government ploy to impose “tyranny.” It doesn’t matter how many schoolchildren are slaughtered by semi-automatic assault rifles – or what  the real history of the Second Amendment was. To the gun fanatics, the Framers wanted armed rebellion against the non-violent political process they worked so hard to create.

On more narrow questions, it doesn’t matter whether President Barack Obama presents his short or long birth certificates, he must have somehow fabricated the Hawaiian state records to hide his Kenyan birth. Oh, yes, and Obama is “lazy” even though he may appear to an objective observer to be a multi-tasking workaholic.

The American Right’s collective departure from reality can be traced back decades, but clearly accelerated with the emergence of former actor Ronald Reagan on the national stage. Even his admirers acknowledge that Reagan had a strained relationship with facts, preferring to illustrate his points with distorted or apocryphal anecdotes.

Reagan’s detachment from reality extended from foreign policy to economics. As his rival for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination, George H.W. Bush famously labeled Reagan’s supply-side policies – of massive tax cuts for the rich which would supposedly raise more revenues – as “voodoo economics.”

But Bush, who knew better, then succumbed to Reagan’s political clout as he accepted Reagan’s vice presidential offer. In that way, the senior Bush would become a model for how other figures in the Establishment would pragmatically bend to Reagan’s casual disregard for reality.

Perception Management

The Reagan administration also built around the President a propaganda infrastructure that systematically punished politicians, citizens, journalists or anyone who dared challenge the fantasies. This private-public collaboration – coordinating right-wing media with government disinformationists – brought home to America the CIA’s strategy of “perception management” normally aimed at hostile populations.

Thus, the Nicaraguan Contras, who in reality were drug-connected terrorists roaming the countryside murdering, torturing and raping, became “the moral equivalent” of America’s Founding Fathers. To say otherwise marked you as a troublemaker who had to be “controversialized” and marginalized.

The remarkable success of Reagan’s propaganda was a lesson not lost on a young generation of Republican operatives and the emerging neoconservatives who held key jobs in Reagan’s Central American and public-diplomacy operations, the likes of Elliott Abrams and Robert Kagan. The neocons’ devotion to imperialism abroad seemed to motivate their growing disdain for empiricism at home. Facts didn’t matter; results did. [See Robert Parry’s  Lost History.]

But this strategy wouldn’t have worked if not for gullible rank-and-file right-wingers who were manipulated by an endless series of false narratives. The Republican political pros manipulated the racial resentments of neo-Confederates, the religious zeal of fundamentalist Christians, and the free-market hero worship of Ayn Rand acolytes.

Imposing Real Consequences for Prosecutorial Abuse in Case of Aaron Swartz

Whenever an avoidable tragedy occurs, it's common for there to be an intense spate of anger in its immediate aftermath which quickly dissipates as people move on to the next outrage. That's a key dynamic that enables people in positions of authority to evade consequences for their bad acts. But as more facts emerge regarding the conduct of the federal prosecutors in the case of Aaron Swartz - Massachusetts' US attorney Carmen Ortiz and assistant US attorney Stephen Heymann - the opposite seems to be taking place: there is greater and greater momentum for real investigations, accountability and reform. It is urgent that this opportunity not be squandered, that this interest be sustained.US Attorney Carmen Ortiz is under fire for her office's conduct in the prosecution of Aaron Swartz. (Photograph: US Department of Justice)

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that - two days before the 26-year-old activist killed himself on Friday - federal prosecutors again rejected a plea bargain offer from Swartz's lawyers that would have kept him out of prison. They instead demanded that he "would need to plead guilty to every count" and made clear that "the government would insist on prison time". That made a trial on all 15 felony counts - with the threat of a lengthy prison sentence if convicted - a virtual inevitability.

Just three months ago, Ortiz's office, as TechDirt reported, severely escalated the already-excessive four-felony-count indictment by adding nine new felony counts, each of which "carrie[d] the possibility of a fine and imprisonment of up to 10-20 years per felony", meaning "the sentence could conceivably total 50+ years and [a] fine in the area of $4 million." That meant, as Think Progress documented, that Swartz faced "a more severe prison term than killers, slave dealers and bank robbers".

Swartz's girlfriend, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, told the WSJ that the case had drained all of his money and he could not afford to pay for a trial. At Swartz's funeral in Chicago on Tuesday, his father flatly stated that his son "was killed by the government".

Ortiz and Heymann continue to refuse to speak publicly about what they did in this case - at least officially. Yesterday, Ortiz's husband, IBM Corp executive Thomas J. Dolan, took to Twitter and - without identifying himself as the US Attorney's husband - defended the prosecutors' actions in response to prominent critics, and even harshly criticized the Swartz family for assigning blame to prosecutors: "Truly incredible in their own son's obit they blame others for his death", Ortiz's husband wrote. Once Dolan's identity was discovered, he received assertive criticism and then sheepishly deleted his Twitter account.

Clearly, the politically ambitious Ortiz - who was touted just last month by the Boston Globe as a possible Democratic candidate for governor - is feeling serious heat as a result of rising fury over her office's wildly overzealous pursuit of Swartz. The same is true of Heymman, whose father was Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton administration and who has tried to forge his own reputation as a tough-guy prosecutor who takes particular aim at hackers.

Yesterday, the GOP's House Oversight Committee Chairman, Darrell Issa, announced a formal investigation into the Justice Department's conduct in this case. Separately, two Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee issued stinging denunciations, with Democratic Rep. Jared Polis proclaiming that "the charges were ridiculous and trumped-up" and labeling Swartz a "martyr" for the evils of minimum sentencing guidelines, while Rep. Zoe Lofgren denounced the prosecutors' behavior as "pretty outrageous" and "way out of line".

The US has become a society in which political and financial elites systematically evade accountability for their bad acts, no matter how destructive. Those who torture, illegally eavesdrop, commit systemic financial fraud, even launder money for designated terrorists and drug dealers are all protected from criminal liability, while those who are powerless - or especially, as in Swartz's case, those who challenge power - are mercilessly punished for trivial transgressions.

A petition on the White House's website to fire Ortiz quickly exceeded the 25,000 signatures needed to compel a reply, and a similar petition aimed at Heymann has also attracted thousands of signatures, and is likely to gather steam in the wake of revelations that another young hacker committed suicide in 2008 in response to Heymann's pursuit of him (You can [and I hope will] sign both petitions by clicking on those links; the Heymann petition in particular needs more signatures).

In sum, as CNET's Declan McCullagh detailed in a comprehensive article this morning, it is Ortiz who "has now found herself in an unusual - and uncomfortable - position: as the target of an investigation instead of the initiator of one." And that's exactly as it should be given that, as he documents, there is little question that her office sought to make an example out of Swartz for improper and careerist benefits. Swartz "was enhancing the careers of a group of career prosecutors and a very ambitious - politically-ambitious - U.S. attorney who loves to have her name in lights," the Cambridge criminal lawyer Harvey Silverglate told McCullagh. Swartz's lawyer said that Heymann "was going to receive press and he was going to be a tough guy and read his name in the newspaper." Writes McCullagh:

"If Swartz had stolen a $100 hard drive with the JSTOR articles, it would have been a misdemeanor offense that would have yielded probation or community service. But the sweeping nature of federal computer crime laws allowed Ortiz and [] Heymann, who wanted a high-profile computer crime conviction, to pursue felony charges. Heymann threatened the diminutive free culture activist with over 30 years in prison as recently as last week."

For numerous reasons, it is imperative that there be serious investigations about what took place here and meaningful consequences for this prosecutorial abuse, at least including firing. It is equally crucial that there be reform of the criminal laws and practices that enable this to take place in so many other cases and contexts.

To begin with, there has been a serious injustice in the Swartz case, and that alone compels accountability. Prosecutors are vested with the extraordinary power to investigate, prosecute, bankrupt, and use the power of the state to imprison people for decades. They have the corresponding obligation to exercise judgment and restraint in how that power is used. When they fail to do so, lives are ruined - or ended.

The US has become a society in which political and financial elites systematically evade accountability for their bad acts, no matter how destructive. Those who torture, illegally eavesdrop, commit systemic financial fraud, even launder money for designated terrorists and drug dealers are all protected from criminal liability, while those who are powerless - or especially, as in Swartz's case, those who challenge power - are mercilessly punished for trivial transgressions. All one has to do to see that this is true is to contrast the incredible leniency given by Ortiz's office to large companies and executives accused of serious crimes with the indescribably excessive pursuit of Swartz.

This immunity for people with power needs to stop. The power of prosecutors is particularly potent, and abuse of that power is consequently devastating. Prosecutorial abuse is widespread in the US, and it's vital that a strong message be sent that it is not acceptable. Swartz's family strongly believes - with convincing rationale - that the abuse of this power by Ortiz and Heymann played a key role in the death of their 26-year-old son. It would be unconscionable to decide that this should be simply forgotten.

Beyond this specific case, the US government - as part of its war to vest control over the internet in itself and in corporate factions - has been wildly excessive, almost hysterical, in punishing even trivial and harmless activists who are perceived as "hackers". The 1984 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) - enacted in the midst of that decade's hysteria over hackers - is so broad and extreme that it permits federal prosecutors to treat minor, victimless computer pranks - or even violations of a website's "terms of service" - as major felonies, which is why Rep. Lofgren just announced her proposed "Aaron's Law" to curb some of its abuses.

But the abuses here extend far beyond the statutes in question. There is, as I wrote about on Saturday when news of Swartz's suicide spread, a general effort to punish with particular harshness anyone who challenges the authority of government and corporations to maintain strict control over the internet and the information that flows on it. Swartz's persecution was clearly waged by the government as a battle in the broader war for control over the internet. As Swartz's friend, the NYU professor and Harvard researcher Danah Boyd, described in her superb analysis:

"When the federal government went after him – and MIT sheepishly played along – they weren't treating him as a person who may or may not have done something stupid. He was an example. And the reason they threw the book at him wasn't to teach him a lesson, but to make a point to the entire Cambridge hacker community that they were p0wned. It was a threat that had nothing to do with justice and everything to do with a broader battle over systemic power.

"In recent years, hackers have challenged the status quo and called into question the legitimacy of countless political actions. Their means may have been questionable, but their intentions have been valiant. The whole point of a functioning democracy is to always question the uses and abuses of power in order to prevent tyranny from emerging. Over the last few years, we've seen hackers demonized as anti-democratic even though so many of them see themselves as contemporary freedom fighters. And those in power used Aaron, reframing his information liberation project as a story of vicious hackers whose terroristic acts are meant to destroy democracy . . . .

"So much public effort has been put into controlling and harmonizing geek resistance, squashing the rebellion, and punishing whoever authorities can get their hands on. But most geeks operate in gray zones, making it hard for them to be pinned down and charged. It's in this context that Aaron's stunt gave federal agents enough evidence to bring him to trial to use him as an example. They used their power to silence him and publicly condemn him even before the trial even began."

The grotesque abuse of Bradley Manning. The dangerous efforts to criminalize WikiLeaks' journalism. The severe overkill that drives the effort to apprehend and punish minor protests by Anonymous teenagers while ignoring far more serious cyber-threats aimed at government critics. The Obama administration's unprecedented persecution of whistleblowers. And now the obscene abuse of power applied to Swartz.

This is not just prosecutorial abuse. It's broader than that. It's all part and parcel of the exploitation of law and the justice system to entrench those in power and shield themselves from meaningful dissent and challenge by making everyone petrified of the consequences of doing anything other than meekly submitting to the status quo. As another of Swartz's friends, Matt Stoller, wrote in an equally compelling essay:

"What killed him was corruption. Corruption isn't just people profiting from betraying the public interest. It's also people being punished for upholding the public interest. In our institutions of power, when you do the right thing and challenge abusive power, you end up destroying a job prospect, an economic opportunity, a political or social connection, or an opportunity for media. Or if you are truly dangerous and brilliantly subversive, as Aaron was, you are bankrupted and destroyed. There's a reason whistleblowers get fired. There's a reason Bradley Manning is in jail. There's a reason the only CIA official who has gone to jail for torture is the person – John Kiriakou - who told the world it was going on. There's a reason those who destroyed the financial system 'dine at the White House', as Lawrence Lessig put it.

"There's a reason former Senator Russ Feingold is a college professor whereas former Senator Chris Dodd is now a multi-millionaire. There's a reason DOJ officials do not go after bankers who illegally foreclose, and then get jobs as partners in white collar criminal defense. There's a reason no one has been held accountable for decisions leading to the financial crisis, or the war in Iraq.

"This reason is the modern ethic in American society that defines success as climbing up the ladder, consequences be damned. Corrupt self-interest, when it goes systemwide, demands that it protect rentiers from people like Aaron, that it intimidate, co-opt, humiliate, fire, destroy, and/or bankrupt those who stand for justice."

In most of what I've written and spoken about over the past several years, this is probably the overarching point: the abuse of state power, the systematic violation of civil liberties, is about creating a Climate of Fear, one that is geared toward entrenching the power and position of elites by intimidating the rest of society from meaningful challenges and dissent. There is a particular overzealousness when it comes to internet activism because the internet is one of the few weapons - perhaps the only one - that can be effectively harnessed to galvanize movements and challenge the prevailing order. That's why so much effort is devoted to destroying the ability to use it anonymously - the Surveillance State - and why there is so much effort to punishing as virtual Terrorists anyone like Swartz who uses it for political activism or dissent.

The law and prosecutorial power should not be abused to crush and destroy those who commit the "crime" of engaging in activism and dissent against the acts of elites. Nobody contests the propriety of charging Swartz with some crime for what he did. Civil disobedience is supposed to have consequences. The issue is that he was punished completely out of proportion to what he did, for ends that have nothing to do with the proper administration of justice. That has consequences far beyond his case, and simply cannot be tolerated.

Finally, there is the general disgrace of the US justice system: the wildly excessive emphasis on merciless punishment even for small transgressions. Numerous people have written extensively about the evils of America's penal state, including me in my last book and when the DOJ announced that HSBC would not be prosecuted for money laundering because, in essence, it was too big to jail.

All the statistics are well known at this point. The US imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation in the world, both in absolute numbers and proportionally. Despite having only roughly 5% of the world's population, the US has close to 25% of the world's prisoners in its cages. This is the result of decades of a warped, now-bipartisan obsession with proving "law and order" bona fides by advocating for ever harsher and less forgiving prison terms even for victimless "crimes".

The "drug war" is the leading but by no means only culprit. The result of this punishment-obsessed justice approach is not only that millions of Americans are branded as felons and locked away, but that the nation's racial minorities are disproportionately harmed. As the conservative writer Michael Moynihan detailed this morning in the Daily Beast, there is growing bipartisan recognition "the American criminal justice system, in its relentlessness and inflexibility, its unduly harsh sentencing guidelines, requires serious reexamination." As he documents, prosecutors have virtually unchallengeable power at this point to convict anyone they want.

In sum, as Sen Jim Webb courageously put it when he introduced a bill aimed at fundamentally reforming America's penal state, a bill that predictably went nowhere: "America's criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace" and "we are locking up too many people who do not belong in jail." The tragedy of Aaron Swartz's mistreatment can and should be used as a trigger to challenge these oppressive penal policies. As Moynihan wrote: "those outraged by Swartz's suicide and looking to convert their anger into action would be best served by focusing their attention on the brutishness and stupidity of America's criminal justice system."

But none of this reform will be possible without holding accountable the prime culprits in this case: Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heymann [MIT officials have their own reckoning to do]. Their status as federal prosecutors does not and must not vest them with immunity; the opposite is true: the vast power that has been vested in them requires consequences when it is abused. It is up to the rest of us to ensure that this happens, not to forget the anger and injustice from this case in a week or a month or a year. A sustained public campaign is necessary to bring real accountability to Ortiz and Heymann, and only then can further urgently needed reforms flow from the tragedy of Swartz's suicide.

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited

Glenn Greenwald

Imposing Real Consequences for Prosecutorial Abuse in Case of Aaron Swartz

Whenever an avoidable tragedy occurs, it's common for there to be an intense spate of anger in its immediate aftermath which quickly dissipates as people move on to the next outrage. That's a key dynamic that enables people in positions of authority to evade consequences for their bad acts. But as more facts emerge regarding the conduct of the federal prosecutors in the case of Aaron Swartz - Massachusetts' US attorney Carmen Ortiz and assistant US attorney Stephen Heymann - the opposite seems to be taking place: there is greater and greater momentum for real investigations, accountability and reform. It is urgent that this opportunity not be squandered, that this interest be sustained.US Attorney Carmen Ortiz is under fire for her office's conduct in the prosecution of Aaron Swartz. (Photograph: US Department of Justice)

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that - two days before the 26-year-old activist killed himself on Friday - federal prosecutors again rejected a plea bargain offer from Swartz's lawyers that would have kept him out of prison. They instead demanded that he "would need to plead guilty to every count" and made clear that "the government would insist on prison time". That made a trial on all 15 felony counts - with the threat of a lengthy prison sentence if convicted - a virtual inevitability.

Just three months ago, Ortiz's office, as TechDirt reported, severely escalated the already-excessive four-felony-count indictment by adding nine new felony counts, each of which "carrie[d] the possibility of a fine and imprisonment of up to 10-20 years per felony", meaning "the sentence could conceivably total 50+ years and [a] fine in the area of $4 million." That meant, as Think Progress documented, that Swartz faced "a more severe prison term than killers, slave dealers and bank robbers".

Swartz's girlfriend, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, told the WSJ that the case had drained all of his money and he could not afford to pay for a trial. At Swartz's funeral in Chicago on Tuesday, his father flatly stated that his son "was killed by the government".

Ortiz and Heymann continue to refuse to speak publicly about what they did in this case - at least officially. Yesterday, Ortiz's husband, IBM Corp executive Thomas J. Dolan, took to Twitter and - without identifying himself as the US Attorney's husband - defended the prosecutors' actions in response to prominent critics, and even harshly criticized the Swartz family for assigning blame to prosecutors: "Truly incredible in their own son's obit they blame others for his death", Ortiz's husband wrote. Once Dolan's identity was discovered, he received assertive criticism and then sheepishly deleted his Twitter account.

Clearly, the politically ambitious Ortiz - who was touted just last month by the Boston Globe as a possible Democratic candidate for governor - is feeling serious heat as a result of rising fury over her office's wildly overzealous pursuit of Swartz. The same is true of Heymman, whose father was Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton administration and who has tried to forge his own reputation as a tough-guy prosecutor who takes particular aim at hackers.

Yesterday, the GOP's House Oversight Committee Chairman, Darrell Issa, announced a formal investigation into the Justice Department's conduct in this case. Separately, two Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee issued stinging denunciations, with Democratic Rep. Jared Polis proclaiming that "the charges were ridiculous and trumped-up" and labeling Swartz a "martyr" for the evils of minimum sentencing guidelines, while Rep. Zoe Lofgren denounced the prosecutors' behavior as "pretty outrageous" and "way out of line".

The US has become a society in which political and financial elites systematically evade accountability for their bad acts, no matter how destructive. Those who torture, illegally eavesdrop, commit systemic financial fraud, even launder money for designated terrorists and drug dealers are all protected from criminal liability, while those who are powerless - or especially, as in Swartz's case, those who challenge power - are mercilessly punished for trivial transgressions.

A petition on the White House's website to fire Ortiz quickly exceeded the 25,000 signatures needed to compel a reply, and a similar petition aimed at Heymann has also attracted thousands of signatures, and is likely to gather steam in the wake of revelations that another young hacker committed suicide in 2008 in response to Heymann's pursuit of him (You can [and I hope will] sign both petitions by clicking on those links; the Heymann petition in particular needs more signatures).

In sum, as CNET's Declan McCullagh detailed in a comprehensive article this morning, it is Ortiz who "has now found herself in an unusual - and uncomfortable - position: as the target of an investigation instead of the initiator of one." And that's exactly as it should be given that, as he documents, there is little question that her office sought to make an example out of Swartz for improper and careerist benefits. Swartz "was enhancing the careers of a group of career prosecutors and a very ambitious - politically-ambitious - U.S. attorney who loves to have her name in lights," the Cambridge criminal lawyer Harvey Silverglate told McCullagh. Swartz's lawyer said that Heymann "was going to receive press and he was going to be a tough guy and read his name in the newspaper." Writes McCullagh:

"If Swartz had stolen a $100 hard drive with the JSTOR articles, it would have been a misdemeanor offense that would have yielded probation or community service. But the sweeping nature of federal computer crime laws allowed Ortiz and [] Heymann, who wanted a high-profile computer crime conviction, to pursue felony charges. Heymann threatened the diminutive free culture activist with over 30 years in prison as recently as last week."

For numerous reasons, it is imperative that there be serious investigations about what took place here and meaningful consequences for this prosecutorial abuse, at least including firing. It is equally crucial that there be reform of the criminal laws and practices that enable this to take place in so many other cases and contexts.

To begin with, there has been a serious injustice in the Swartz case, and that alone compels accountability. Prosecutors are vested with the extraordinary power to investigate, prosecute, bankrupt, and use the power of the state to imprison people for decades. They have the corresponding obligation to exercise judgment and restraint in how that power is used. When they fail to do so, lives are ruined - or ended.

The US has become a society in which political and financial elites systematically evade accountability for their bad acts, no matter how destructive. Those who torture, illegally eavesdrop, commit systemic financial fraud, even launder money for designated terrorists and drug dealers are all protected from criminal liability, while those who are powerless - or especially, as in Swartz's case, those who challenge power - are mercilessly punished for trivial transgressions. All one has to do to see that this is true is to contrast the incredible leniency given by Ortiz's office to large companies and executives accused of serious crimes with the indescribably excessive pursuit of Swartz.

This immunity for people with power needs to stop. The power of prosecutors is particularly potent, and abuse of that power is consequently devastating. Prosecutorial abuse is widespread in the US, and it's vital that a strong message be sent that it is not acceptable. Swartz's family strongly believes - with convincing rationale - that the abuse of this power by Ortiz and Heymann played a key role in the death of their 26-year-old son. It would be unconscionable to decide that this should be simply forgotten.

Beyond this specific case, the US government - as part of its war to vest control over the internet in itself and in corporate factions - has been wildly excessive, almost hysterical, in punishing even trivial and harmless activists who are perceived as "hackers". The 1984 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) - enacted in the midst of that decade's hysteria over hackers - is so broad and extreme that it permits federal prosecutors to treat minor, victimless computer pranks - or even violations of a website's "terms of service" - as major felonies, which is why Rep. Lofgren just announced her proposed "Aaron's Law" to curb some of its abuses.

But the abuses here extend far beyond the statutes in question. There is, as I wrote about on Saturday when news of Swartz's suicide spread, a general effort to punish with particular harshness anyone who challenges the authority of government and corporations to maintain strict control over the internet and the information that flows on it. Swartz's persecution was clearly waged by the government as a battle in the broader war for control over the internet. As Swartz's friend, the NYU professor and Harvard researcher Danah Boyd, described in her superb analysis:

"When the federal government went after him – and MIT sheepishly played along – they weren't treating him as a person who may or may not have done something stupid. He was an example. And the reason they threw the book at him wasn't to teach him a lesson, but to make a point to the entire Cambridge hacker community that they were p0wned. It was a threat that had nothing to do with justice and everything to do with a broader battle over systemic power.

"In recent years, hackers have challenged the status quo and called into question the legitimacy of countless political actions. Their means may have been questionable, but their intentions have been valiant. The whole point of a functioning democracy is to always question the uses and abuses of power in order to prevent tyranny from emerging. Over the last few years, we've seen hackers demonized as anti-democratic even though so many of them see themselves as contemporary freedom fighters. And those in power used Aaron, reframing his information liberation project as a story of vicious hackers whose terroristic acts are meant to destroy democracy . . . .

"So much public effort has been put into controlling and harmonizing geek resistance, squashing the rebellion, and punishing whoever authorities can get their hands on. But most geeks operate in gray zones, making it hard for them to be pinned down and charged. It's in this context that Aaron's stunt gave federal agents enough evidence to bring him to trial to use him as an example. They used their power to silence him and publicly condemn him even before the trial even began."

The grotesque abuse of Bradley Manning. The dangerous efforts to criminalize WikiLeaks' journalism. The severe overkill that drives the effort to apprehend and punish minor protests by Anonymous teenagers while ignoring far more serious cyber-threats aimed at government critics. The Obama administration's unprecedented persecution of whistleblowers. And now the obscene abuse of power applied to Swartz.

This is not just prosecutorial abuse. It's broader than that. It's all part and parcel of the exploitation of law and the justice system to entrench those in power and shield themselves from meaningful dissent and challenge by making everyone petrified of the consequences of doing anything other than meekly submitting to the status quo. As another of Swartz's friends, Matt Stoller, wrote in an equally compelling essay:

"What killed him was corruption. Corruption isn't just people profiting from betraying the public interest. It's also people being punished for upholding the public interest. In our institutions of power, when you do the right thing and challenge abusive power, you end up destroying a job prospect, an economic opportunity, a political or social connection, or an opportunity for media. Or if you are truly dangerous and brilliantly subversive, as Aaron was, you are bankrupted and destroyed. There's a reason whistleblowers get fired. There's a reason Bradley Manning is in jail. There's a reason the only CIA official who has gone to jail for torture is the person – John Kiriakou - who told the world it was going on. There's a reason those who destroyed the financial system 'dine at the White House', as Lawrence Lessig put it.

"There's a reason former Senator Russ Feingold is a college professor whereas former Senator Chris Dodd is now a multi-millionaire. There's a reason DOJ officials do not go after bankers who illegally foreclose, and then get jobs as partners in white collar criminal defense. There's a reason no one has been held accountable for decisions leading to the financial crisis, or the war in Iraq.

"This reason is the modern ethic in American society that defines success as climbing up the ladder, consequences be damned. Corrupt self-interest, when it goes systemwide, demands that it protect rentiers from people like Aaron, that it intimidate, co-opt, humiliate, fire, destroy, and/or bankrupt those who stand for justice."

In most of what I've written and spoken about over the past several years, this is probably the overarching point: the abuse of state power, the systematic violation of civil liberties, is about creating a Climate of Fear, one that is geared toward entrenching the power and position of elites by intimidating the rest of society from meaningful challenges and dissent. There is a particular overzealousness when it comes to internet activism because the internet is one of the few weapons - perhaps the only one - that can be effectively harnessed to galvanize movements and challenge the prevailing order. That's why so much effort is devoted to destroying the ability to use it anonymously - the Surveillance State - and why there is so much effort to punishing as virtual Terrorists anyone like Swartz who uses it for political activism or dissent.

The law and prosecutorial power should not be abused to crush and destroy those who commit the "crime" of engaging in activism and dissent against the acts of elites. Nobody contests the propriety of charging Swartz with some crime for what he did. Civil disobedience is supposed to have consequences. The issue is that he was punished completely out of proportion to what he did, for ends that have nothing to do with the proper administration of justice. That has consequences far beyond his case, and simply cannot be tolerated.

Finally, there is the general disgrace of the US justice system: the wildly excessive emphasis on merciless punishment even for small transgressions. Numerous people have written extensively about the evils of America's penal state, including me in my last book and when the DOJ announced that HSBC would not be prosecuted for money laundering because, in essence, it was too big to jail.

All the statistics are well known at this point. The US imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation in the world, both in absolute numbers and proportionally. Despite having only roughly 5% of the world's population, the US has close to 25% of the world's prisoners in its cages. This is the result of decades of a warped, now-bipartisan obsession with proving "law and order" bona fides by advocating for ever harsher and less forgiving prison terms even for victimless "crimes".

The "drug war" is the leading but by no means only culprit. The result of this punishment-obsessed justice approach is not only that millions of Americans are branded as felons and locked away, but that the nation's racial minorities are disproportionately harmed. As the conservative writer Michael Moynihan detailed this morning in the Daily Beast, there is growing bipartisan recognition "the American criminal justice system, in its relentlessness and inflexibility, its unduly harsh sentencing guidelines, requires serious reexamination." As he documents, prosecutors have virtually unchallengeable power at this point to convict anyone they want.

In sum, as Sen Jim Webb courageously put it when he introduced a bill aimed at fundamentally reforming America's penal state, a bill that predictably went nowhere: "America's criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace" and "we are locking up too many people who do not belong in jail." The tragedy of Aaron Swartz's mistreatment can and should be used as a trigger to challenge these oppressive penal policies. As Moynihan wrote: "those outraged by Swartz's suicide and looking to convert their anger into action would be best served by focusing their attention on the brutishness and stupidity of America's criminal justice system."

But none of this reform will be possible without holding accountable the prime culprits in this case: Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heymann [MIT officials have their own reckoning to do]. Their status as federal prosecutors does not and must not vest them with immunity; the opposite is true: the vast power that has been vested in them requires consequences when it is abused. It is up to the rest of us to ensure that this happens, not to forget the anger and injustice from this case in a week or a month or a year. A sustained public campaign is necessary to bring real accountability to Ortiz and Heymann, and only then can further urgently needed reforms flow from the tragedy of Swartz's suicide.

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited

Glenn Greenwald

Florida Prof Says Newtown Massacre Is Government Head Fake

Some people should not be professors and probably have too much time on their hands. Communications Professor James Tracy of Florida Atlantic University might be one of those people. Via Raw Story, some quotes from a blog post he wrote last month:

“While it sounds like an outrageous claim, one is left to inquire whether the Sandy Hook shooting ever took place—at least in the way law enforcement authorities and the nation’s news media have described,” he declared, noting that no surveillance video of photos of bodies had been released by authorities.

“Moreover, to suggest that [President Barack] Obama is not capable of deploying such techniques to achieve political ends is to similarly place one's faith in image and interpretation above substance and established fact, the exact inclination that in sum has brought America to such an impasse.”

Has anyone told this professor that the absence of evidence is not evidence, or that the absence of said evidence in this case suggests the event never happened?

26 graves in Sandy Hook, Connecticut say otherwise. That is evidence enough.

Professor Tracy appears to be a bit of a conspiracy theorist at heart, paranoid as all get-out, and sure that the Obama administration manufactured this whole tragedy in order to spark national sympathies toward gun control. But he did clarify his thoughts for WPTV:

On Tuesday, WPTV caught up with Tracy, who also doubts the official versions President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Sept. 11 terrorists attacks and the mass shooting at a theater in Aurora, Colorado last year.

“In terms of saying that Sandy Hook — the Newtown massacre — did not take place, is really an oversimplification of what I actually said,” he explained. “I said that I think that there may very well be elements of that event that are synthetic to some degree, that are somewhat contrived. I think that, overall, the media really did drop the ball. I don’t think that they got to the bottom of some of the things that may have taken place there.”

"Elements of that event that are synthetic to some degree"? Like what? Twenty dead children and six dead adults is not a synthetic thing, nor is the fact that they were killed with a weapon capable of gunning down an entire group. Yes, the conspiracy would be massive and for what? To start a showdown over responsible gun safety laws that will be bloody and likely leave no one feeling fully satisfied? Please, give me a small break here.

It should bother all of us that this wingnut is responsible for teaching students. It should bother us all more that he's teaching communications. Clearly he has some work to do on his own communicating style. The only 'bottom of things' here is the bottom of the conspiracy theorists' barrel.

Here Comes The Sequester, And Another 1% Cut To 2013 GDP

Several days ago we showed an analysis that indicated that the elimination of the payroll tax cut would likely eat into 1.5% of 2013 US GDP and subtract as much as 3.5% of 2013 growth based on one submodel - a deduction to overall US growth which alre...

Here Comes The Sequester, And Another 1% Cut To 2013 GDP

Several days ago we showed an analysis that indicated that the elimination of the payroll tax cut would likely eat into 1.5% of 2013 US GDP and subtract as much as 3.5% of 2013 growth based on one submodel - a deduction to overall US growth which alre...

Abortion as a Blessing, Grace, or Gift: Changing the Conversation about Reproductive Rights and...

How can we reclaim the moral high ground in the debate about abortion as a part of thoughtful, wise loving and living?

Most Americans think of childbearing as a deeply personal or even sacred decision. So do most reproductive rights advocates. That is why we don’t think anybody’s boss or any institution should have a say in it. But for almost three decades, those of us who hold this view have failed to create a resonant conversation about why, sometimes, it is morally or spiritually imperative that a woman can stop a pregnancy that is underway.

My friend Patricia offers a single reason for her passionate defense of reproductive care that includes abortion: Every baby should have its toes kissed. If life is precious and helping our children to flourish is one of the most precious obligations we take on in life, then being able to stop an ill-conceived gestation is a sacred gift. Whether or not we are religious, deciding whether to keep or terminate a pregnancy is a process steeped in spiritual values: responsibility, stewardship, love, honesty, compassion, freedom, balance, discernment. But how often do we hear words like these coming from pro-choice advocates?

Our inability to talk in morally resonant terms about abortion has clouded the broader conversation about mindful childbearing. The cost in recent decades has been devastating. In developing countries millions of real women and children have died because abortion-obsessed American Christians banned family planning conversations as a part of HIV prevention efforts. Those lost lives reveal the callous immorality of the anti-choice movement.

Back home, here in the U.S., our inability to claim the moral high ground about abortion has brought us one of the most regressive culture shifts of a generation. We are, incredibly, faced with “personhood rights” for fertilized eggs, pregnancies that begin legally before we even have sex, politicians with “Rape Tourette’s,” and a stunningly antagonistic debate about contraceptive technologies that could make as many as ninety percent of unintended pregnancies along with consequent suffering and abortions simply obsolete.

The voices that are strongest on reproductive rights often falter when it comes to the cultural dialogue. At least part of this absence is because so many of the pro-choice movement’s leaders and funders are secular and civic in their orientation, awkwardly uncomfortable with the moral and spiritual dimension of the conversation, or, for that matter, even with words like moral and spiritual. From language that seems moderately wise–Who decides?–we fall back on “safe, legal and rare” (a questionable effort to please everyone) or even the legal jargon of the “right to privacy.”

The other side talks about murdering teeny, weeny babies and then mind-melds images of ultrasounds and Gerber babies with faded photos of late term abortions. And we come back by talking about privacy?? Is that like the right to commit murder in the privacy of your own home or doctor’s office? Even apart from the dubious moral equivalence, let’s be real: In the age of Facebook and Twitter, is there a female under twenty-five in who gives a rat’s patooey about privacy, let alone thinks of it as a core value?

The right to privacy may work in court. But it is a proxy for much deeper values at play. Privacy simply carves out space for individual men and women to wrestle with those values. In the court of public opinion, it is the underlying values that carry the conversation.

Far too often those who care most about the lives of women and children and the fabric of life on this planet limit themselves to legal and policy fights. Fifty years ago, reproductive rights activists took the abortion fight to the courts and won, and they have kept that focus ever since. But the legal fight has drawn energy away from the broader conversation. And the emphasis on “privacy” has meant that even the most powerful stories that best illustrate our sacred values are too often kept quiet.

Legal codes and cultural sensibilities are never independent of each other. Abortion rights were secured legally because of a culture shift that was aided by anguished stories andstatements by compassion-driven Christian theologians during the 1960’s and 1970’s. The brutal deaths of American women every year, at a peak of thousands in the 1930’s, was, beyond question or doubt, a profound immorality that many Americans were desperate to stop. Protestant leaders across the theological spectrum took a moral stand in support of legal abortion. In contrast to the Vatican, they had long agreed that thoughtful decision-making about whether to bring a child into the world serves compassion and wellbeing—the very heart of humanity’s shared moral core.

At this point it should be clear that the tide has turned. Opponents, having lost in court, instead took their fight to conservative churches, where they have been refining their appeals for forty years. The last few years have seen a systematic erosion of legal rights driven by a culture shift that had been building long before. It has also seen a complete reversal of the once-stalwart moral support for reproductive rights among American Protestants, which in the 1950s was seen as a moral good by almost every denomination from the most liberal to the most conservative. Unless this shift is challenged and stopped, there is every reason to fear that abortion will once again become inaccessible for most women in the U.S.

Can pro-choice advocates reclaim the moral and spiritual high ground? Yes. But to do so will require a challenge to the status quo on two fronts. Rather than ignoring the right’s moral claims, we must confront their arguments. We must also express our pro-choice position in clear, resonant moral and spiritual terms. In other words, in combination, we must show why ours is the more moral, more spiritual position.

This isn’t as hard as it sounds. Most “pro-life” positions aren’t really pro-life; they are no-choice. They are designed to protect traditional gender roles and patriarchal institutions and, specifically, institutional religion. The Catholic Bishops and Southern Baptist Convention—both leaders in the charge against reproductive rights– represent traditions in which male “headship” and control of female fertility have long been tools of competition for money and power. They use moral language to advance goals that have little to do with the wellbeing of women or children or the sacred web of life that sustains us all.

The arguments they make to attain these ends are powerful emotionally but not rationally. They appeal to antiquated and brittle conceptions of God. They appeal to the crumbling illusion of biblical and ecclesiastical perfection—and the crumbling authority of authority itself. They corrupt the civil rights tradition and turn religious freedom on its head. They play games with our protective instinct and cheapen what it means to be a person. Theylie.

That adds up to a lot of vulnerability in what should be the stronghold of the priesthood: their claim to speak for what is good and right.

Republican Strategist Karl Rove will go down in history for his strategy of attacking enemies on their perceived strength — for example, by attacking John Kerry on his war record. In the recent election, we saw this strategy in play on both sides. Obama proved to be less vulnerable than his opponents hoped on his signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act. But by the time the election was over, Romney’s strongest credential, his background in business, was seen by many as parasitic “vulture capitalism.” If we want Americans to understand and distance from the moral emptiness of the “pro-life” movement, we will have to challenge the patriarchs in on their home turf, in their position as moral guides.

Here, for openers, are a few ways we might change the conversation:

1. Talk about the whole moral continuum. A moral continuum ranges from actions that are forbidden, to those that are allowed, to those that are obligatory. When it comes to abortion, we talk only about one half of this continuum—Is it forbidden or is it allowed?—when, in actuality, a women faced with an ill-conceived pregnancy often experiences herself at the other end of the continuum, wrestling with a set of competing duties or obligations. What is my responsibility to my other children? To society? To my partner?To myself? (To cite a personal example, my husband and I chose an abortion under circumstances where it would have felt like a violation of our core values to do otherwise.) The current conversation doesn’t reflect the real quandaries women face, one in which moral imperatives can and do compete with other moral imperatives. Nor does it reflect the wide range of spiritual values and god concepts that enter into the decision making process.

  • No-choice advocates say: Abortion is immoral. God hates abortion.
  • We can say: For me, bringing a child into the world under bad circumstances is immoral. It violates my moral and spiritual values. / Whose god decides?

2. Challenge the personhood/fetus-as-baby concept both philosophically and visually. The history of humanity’s evolving ethical consciousness has focused on the question of who counts as a person, and if the arc bends toward justice it is because it is an arc of inclusion. Non-land-owning men, slaves, women, poor workers, children—our ancestors have fought and won personhood rights for each of these, and abortion foes are smart to invoke this tradition. But their ploy involves a sleight of hand. The civil rights tradition is built on what a “person” can think and feel. By contrast, the anti-choice move is about DNA, and it seeks to trigger visual instincts that make us feel protective toward anything that looks remotely like a baby, even a stuffed animal. In reality, the tissue removed during most abortions is minute, a gestational sac the size of a dime or quarter, which is surprising to people who have been exposed to anti-abortion propaganda. It strikes almost no-one as being the substance of “personhood.”

  • They say: Abortion is murder. Abortion kills little babies.
  • We can say: A person can think and feel. My cat can feel hungry or hurt or curious or content; an embryo cannot. / Thanks to better and better pregnancy tests, over 60 percent of abortions now occur before 9 weeks of gestation. Want to see what theyactually look like?

3. Admit that the qualities of personhood begin to emerge during gestation.Pregnancy is no longer the black box it was at the time of Roe v. Wade. Ultrasound and photography have made fetal development visible, and research is beginning to offer a glimpse into the developing nervous system, with the potential to answer an important question: What, if anything, is a fetus capable of experiencing at different stages of development? Although this isn’t the only question in the ethics of abortion, it undeniably relevant. How we treat other living beings has long been guided by our knowledge of what they can experience and want. By implication, ethics change over the course of pregnancy. A fertilized egg may not be a person except by religious definitions, but by broad human agreement a healthy newborn is, and in between is a continuum of becoming. Most Americans understand this argument morally and emotionally. The Roe trimester framework also codified it legally. Ethical credibility requires that we acknowledge and address the ethical complexities at stake.

  • They say: A fetus is a baby. A baby is a living soul from the moment of conception.
  • We can say: In nature, most fertilized eggs never become babies. A fetus is becoming a baby, grows into a baby, is a potential person, or is becoming a person.

4. Pin blame for high abortion rates where it belongs – on those who oppose contraception—and call out the immorality of their position because it causes expense and suffering. Unintended pregnancy is the main cause of abortion. Right now half of pregnancies in the U.S. are unintended. For unmarried women under 30, that’s almost 70%. A third of those pregnancies end in abortion. The reality is that abortion is an expensive invasive medical procedure. For the price of one abortion, we can provide a woman with the best contraceptive protection available, something that will be over 99% effective for up to twelve years. If every woman had information and access to state-of-the-art long acting contraceptives, half of abortions could go away before Barack Obama gets out of office.

  • They say: Liberals are to blame for abortion. Planned Parenthood is an abortion mill.
  • We can say: Obstructing contraceptive knowledge and access causes abortion and unwanted babies. That’s what’s immoral. We have the technology to prevent almost all of the suffering and expense caused by unintended pregnancy, but many women don’t have access to that information or technology because of the twisted moral priorities of religious and cultural conservatives. Barack Obama and Planned Parenthood have done more to prevent abortions in America than all of the choice opponents combined. The no-choice position is anti-life. It kills women. It puts faith over life.

5. Acknowledge and address the powerful mixed feelings surrounding abortion. The most common emotional reaction to abortion is relief. That said, women react physically and emotionally in a variety of ways to terminating a pregnancy. Sometimes, even those who are clear that they have made the best decision feel a surprising intensity of loss. Women should be given the support they need to process whatever their experience may be. We also need to understand that some abortion opponents actively induce guilt and trauma in women who have had abortions.

  • They Say: Abortion is psychologically scarring. Women end up haunted by guilt and permanently traumatized after having an abortion.
  • We can say: No one should do something that violates her own values. Violating your values is wounding; that is why each woman should be supported in following her own moral, spiritual and life values when making decisions about pregnancy.

6. OWN religious freedom. Religious freedom is for individuals, not institutions. If the women and men who work for religious institutions all perceived the will of God in the same way, their employers wouldn’t be trying to control them by controlling their benefits package. Religious institutions have always tried to override the spiritual freedom of individuals, and they use the arm of the law as a lever whenever they can, and that is what they are doing now.

  • They say: Employers shouldn’t be forced to provide contraceptive or abortion coverage.
  • We Can Say: The freedom to choose how your employees spend their hard earned benefits and the freedom to choose whether to have a child are two very different things. No institution—and nobody’s boss–should have a say in one of the most personal and sacred decisions we can make: whether to have child. That is why all women, regardless of who they work for, should have access to the full range of contraceptives and reproductive care.

7. Talk about children and parenting, not just women. Responsible and loving parents do what they can to give their kids a good life. We take our kids to doctors, get them the best schooling we can afford, love them up, and pour years of our lives into helping them acquire the skills that will let them be happy, kind, generous, hard-working adults. But parenting starts before we even try to get pregnant. We consider our own education and finances and whether we have the kind of partnership or social support that would help a child to thrive. We may quit smoking or drinking to be as healthy as possible during pregnancy. More often than not, the decision to stop a given pregnancy is a part of this much bigger process of mindful, responsible parenting.

  • They say: Abortion is selfish. Women just want to have sex without consequences.
  • We can say: A loving mother makes hard decisions to bring her kids the best life possible. A responsible woman takes care of herself. A caring father wants the best life possible for his children. Wise parents know their limits.

8. Embrace abortion as a sacred gift or blessing. For years we have talked as if abortion were a lesser evil, rather than a remarkable gift. In reality, no medical procedure is pleasant and yet the option to have the treatments and surgeries we need is an unmitigated good. The term “safe, legal and rare” confuses things because it implies that what should be rare is the treatment rather than the problem, unintended pregnancy. An abortion should be exactly as safe, legal and rare as a surgery to remove swollen tonsils or an infected appendix. If we think about abortion like we think about other medical services, then the attitude is one not of shame or ambivalence but of gratitude.

  • They say: Abortion is bad. An abortion is regrettable.
  • We can say: An ill-conceived pregnancy is bad. An unintended pregnancy is regrettable. An abortion when needed is a blessing. It is a gift, a grace, a mercy, a cause for gratitude, a new lease on life. Being able to choose when and whether to bring a child into the world enables us and our children to flourish.

9. Honor doctors who provide abortion services as we honor other healers.The human body fends off most infections and cancers, but not all. It spontaneously heals most broken bones and closes many wounds but not all. Similarly, it spontaneously aborts most problem pregnancies, but not all. Nature tends to abort pregnancies where there are problems with cell division or fetal development, where there is little chance for a fetus to become a healthy, thriving person. Through medical or surgical abortion, as through every other medical procedure, doctors and healers extend the work of nature—of God, if you will—to promote health and wellbeing. By ending pregnancies that don’t have a good chance to turn into thriving children and adults, they are—literally or metaphorically–doing God’s work.

  • They say: Abortionists are murderers.
  • We can say: God (or Nature) aborts most fertilized eggs. Abortion doctors are compassionate healers who devote their lives to helping women and men ensure that they have strong, well-planned, wanted families. Their work is as sacred as any in the field of medicine.

10. Honor women who decide to terminate pregnancies just as we honor motherhood. Sometimes the decision to end a problem pregnancy is clear and simple. Other times not. Either way, a woman often has to fight off a sense of shame and blamethat she has internalized from religious and social conservatives — too often, including other women. She may feel bad even when her own values are clear and the decision has been thoughtful. How often do we affirm and honor the wisdom of women who make difficult childbearing choices (abortion, adoption, waiting) so as to best manage their lives and their parenting?

Most women chose an abortion so that they can later choose a well-timed pregnancy; or so they can take good care of the kids they have, ensuring those kids have the best possible chance in life. Sometimes a woman ends a pregnancy because she is choosing to put her life energy elsewhere. Even then, she is accepting that to embrace life fully she must choose among the kinds of good available to her and take responsibility for avoiding harm. She may or may not put it in these terms, but those are moral and spiritual questions, the kind that religion has long sought to guide. That is why many religious traditions support a woman or couple in weighing their own deepest values when it comes to reproductive decisions.

As individual stories show, the decision to end a pregnancy may be based in humility, responsibility, nurturing, prudence, forethought, vision, aspiration, stewardship, love, courage. . . . or some combination of these qualities. Mere tolerance fails to affirm the many strengths that go into reproductive decisions including the decision to end a pregnancy. These are virtues worthy of honor.

  • They say: An abortion is shameful. An abortion should be kept secret. An abortion needs to be forgiven by God.
  • We can say: Choosing abortion can be wise and brave. It can be loving and generous. It can be responsible and self-sacrificing.

In the end the real morality of our position lies in the right of babies to be truly loved and wanted and in the right of parents to bring babies into this world when they’re fully ready to welcome them with open arms. As my friend Patricia said, every baby should have its toes kissed. Her simple message speaks volumes. Parents who get to plan and choose are more likely to eagerly await that toe kissing. They are more likely to have the emotional energy that makes those little toes irresistible even after sleepless nights and days of work. They are more likely to have a supporting community that can kiss toes when they are busy. They are more likely to have what it takes when a baby turns into a kid, and toe kissing turns into play dates and homework and I-think-we-need-to-talk. And they are more likely to still be kissing when they have to stand on their own toes to plant a peck on the cheek of a kid who’s on the way out the door with the car keys.

Toe kissing is a small, spontaneous celebration of love and life, the same values that are at the heart of our spiritual traditions. They are the values that no-choice, anti-abortion leaders claim to represent, but represent so poorly. We would do well to say so.

Father of Aaron Swartz: “The Government Killed Him”.

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A funeral for Aaron Swartz was held Tuesday at the Central Avenue Synagogue in Highland Park, Illinois. The event overflowed with friends, family, collaborators and those who came to pay tribute to the 26-year-old open Internet activist who took his own life late last week.

In remarks delivered at the funeral, Robert Swartz, Aaron’s father, issued a stinging rebuke of the US government. “Aaron did not commit suicide,” he said. “The government killed him. Someone who made the world a better place was pushed to his death by the government.”

At the time of his death, Swartz faced federal felony charges for allegedly downloading millions of academic journal articles from subscription service JSTOR through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with the aim of making these articles freely available. Federal prosecutors were demanding prison time, and Swartz faced the prospect of 35 years in prison if convicted in trial. (See, “Open access activist dead at 26”)

Robert Swartz spoke passionately of his son, who he said grew up as a “beacon of light in a world of darkness.” He contrasted Aaron’s principled actions in service of open information access with the criminality of the financial system that crashed the global economy.

Swartz noted that Aaron did nothing legally wrong and yet was persecuted and bullied by the US government. He contrasted the actions of his son with those who did “sketchy or illegal” things in order to make vast fortunes, mentioning Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates.

From a very early age, Swartz played a major role in developing important internet infrastructure, including RSS feeds. A company he founded, Infogami, merged with Reddit, which has since become one of the most popular link aggregating sites on the Internet. Swartz also founded Demand Progress, a group that promotes Internet freedom.

In a document describing his views, written in 2008, Swartz argued that “the world’s scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.” He added that large corporations are opposed to any attempt to make information broadly available, “and the politicians they have bought off back them.”

Friends and family at the funeral spoke of Aaron’s intellectual curiosity, selflessness, emotional sensitivity and deep concern for improving the world. Various speakers spoke of a “light” within Aaron that drew people to him as he sought to hold the world to a higher standard. They spoke of his ability to challenge others and inspire them to solve complex problems, whether technological or social.

Aaron’s partner, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, recalled a kind, sensitive and creative person. “Aaron wanted so badly to change the world. He wanted it more than money and more than fame,” she said. “Aaron wanted us to see the world as it is,” she said, “even if it was very painful to do so.”

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Stinebrickner-Kauffman said that she “was never as worried about [Swartz] as the last few days of his life, and there’s no doubt in my mind that this wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for the overreaching prosecution.” She said that Swartz was particularly distraught by the need to make continual financial appeals from friends and supporters to fund his defense campaign. “He couldn’t face another day of, ‘Have you done this, have you asked people for money.’ I think he literally rather would have been dead.”

Other speakers and collaborators at the funeral spoke of the seriousness that Aaron gave to every subject he sought to understand. He was “wise beyond his years,” said his friend and collaborator Larry Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School.

Aaron’s defense lawyer, Elliot Peters, recollected a young man who looked vulnerable and needed protection, but always became animated and alive when conversations turned to complex subjects. He was pained that Aaron took his life, as he felt that his case could have been won. Peters spoke out against US Attorney Carmen Ortiz’s statement that “stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars.”

Ortiz, the US attorney for the district of Massachusetts and an Obama appointee, along with assistant attorney Stephen Heymann, pushed to get felony convictions against Swartz. In this they were operating at the behest of the Obama administration, which has aggressively pursued opponents of corporate and government control of the Internet.

Even after JSTOR indicated that it had no desire to pursue a case against Swartz, the federal government, with the support of MIT, brought the full weight of the law against him. The excessive charges were accompanied by a refusal to reach any settlement that did not include prison time and a guilty plea on 13 felony counts.

“I said, how about a misdemeanor and probation, and they said it will never happen,” Peters said on Monday. Swartz was adamant about not accepting a felony plea, Peters said, but this meant facing a trial that require enormous financial resources and could ruin his life.

Reporters from the World Socialist Web Site spoke to some of those in attendance at the funeral. Kathleen Geier, a writer for Washington Monthly, said, “Aaron was a representative of the best that is in America. He read more than anyone I knew and studied so many different subjects. He was a representative light to us all.”

Peter Eckersley, Technology Projects Director at Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a friend and collaborator of Swartz, said, “It was a terrible loss. We both worked together fighting SOPA and PIPA,” referring to proposed legislation to increase government control over the Internet.

With tears in his eyes, Eckersley said, “A big problem in the US is the out-of-control criminal justice system. I’m from Australia and I find it unbelievable here. You have a system that takes people that do not hurt anyone and puts them in prison.”

Neocons, War Hawks Call for ‘Overt Preparations’ for Attack on Iran

Four U.S. non-proliferation specialists are urging the Obama administration to impose tougher economic sanctions against Iran and issue more explicit threats to destroy its nuclear programme by military means.

Poverty in America: Growing Share of US Workers Forced to Tap Retirement Accounts

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A growing number of American workers are tapping their retirement savings accounts before they retire, due to economic distress. The Washington Post reported Tuesday that more than one in four workers with 401(k) and other retirement plans are cashing them out or taking out loans against them to pay for basic necessities.

The Post report, based on a study due out this week from the financial advisory firm HelloWallet, notes that workers are draining nearly a quarter of the estimated $293 billion that they and their employers pay into retirement accounts each year. The money is going toward mortgages, medical bills, college tuition, credit card debt and other expenses.

The news comes as the Obama administration signals its willingness to reduce future cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients and raise the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67, moves that will spell economic hardship for increasing numbers of American seniors as they reach their “golden years.”

Data provided to HelloWallet by Vanguard, one of the largest managers of 401(k) accounts, shows that the number of workers taking out loans or cashing out their accounts has grown significantly in the wake of the recession, rising by 12 percent since 2008.

One-third of workers in their 40s—i.e., some two decades before retirement—are depleting their 401(k) and other accounts to make ends meet.

Low-income workers are the most likely to cash out their retirement plans to pay for non- retirement expenses. HelloWallet found that 30 percent of households earning less than $50,000 a year had done so, while only 8 percent of households earning more than $150,000 had cleared out their retirement accounts.

Those taking out loans against their retirement funds must pay them back with interest. Withdrawing the money outright incurs a stiff penalty, usually 10 percent; the funds withdrawn are also subject to federal income tax. Workers and their families end up being financially penalized even as the funds that are supposed to be there for them in retirement dwindle in value.

According to a survey of 110 large employers by human resources consultancy firm Aon Hewitt in 2010, nearly a third of enrolled employees had an outstanding loan against their retirement account. Nearly 7 percent had taken “hardship withdrawals”—a 40 percent increase since the recession. About 42 percent had cashed out their plans when they changed jobs instead of rolling them over.

Increasing numbers of American workers have come to rely on 401(k) retirement accounts, created by Congress in 1978, as the vast majority of employers have eliminated traditional, defined benefit pension plans. In 1980, about 80 percent of private sector workers were covered by a pension that paid them a fixed benefit, calculated on the basis of their salaries and years worked.

Today, only about 20 percent of workers have a traditional pension. In most cases, new hires are not offered a pension, as employers wait for older workers with the benefit to retire or accept buyouts. Some corporations have also raided the pensions funds of workers through bankruptcy proceedings, leaving retirees with only their Social Security checks to survive.

About a third of all American households participate in a 401(k)-type plan, according to the Post, for a combined total of $3.5 trillion in assets. A study by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College found that the typical household on the eve of retirement has an average of only $120,000 in savings set aside for retirement, only enough for about $7,000 a year based on average life expectancy.

For those workers and households that have been forced to either deplete their 401(k)s or cash them out completely, retirement prospects are even more bleak. The average monthly Social Security check is about $1,230, or $14,760 annually, according to the Social Security Administration. For a single retiree, this is only 25 percent above the Health and Human Services Poverty Guideline for a one-member household—$11,170, already woefully inadequate.

For many more retirees—including those who spent their lives in low-paid jobs, or who were out of work for a considerable length of time—monthly Social Security checks will be much lower or nonexistent. Undocumented immigrant workers who are not enrolled in Social Security have virtually nothing to fall back on in retirement.

According to the US Census Bureau’s Supplementary Poverty Measure, 15.1 percent of people 65 years and older were living in poverty in 2011. This number can be expected to rise in the sluggish economy, forcing millions to depend on subsidized housing, food stamps and other social programs targeted by the government for cutbacks. As the vast majority of working families struggle to make ends meet, corporate profits and CEO pay have all returned to or surpassed pre-recession levels.

Congo’s M23 Conflict: Rebellion or Resource War?

M23 rebels in DR Congo have threatened to march to the capital and depose the government. UN reports confirm that rebels receive support from key US allies in the region, and Washington’s role in the conflict has become difficult to ignore. Instability, lawlessness and violence are nothing new to those who live in the troubled eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. An 

 Congolese have perished since 1996 in a spate of ceaseless military conflicts that have long gripped this severely-overlooked and underreported region. In late November 2012, members of the M23 rebel group invaded and took control of Goma, a strategic provincial capital in North Kivu state with a population of 1 million people, with the declared purpose of marching to the nation’s capital, Kinshasa, to depose the ruling government. M23′s president, Jean Marie Runiga, later agreed to withdraw only if the ruling President Joseph Kabila listened to the group’s grievances and adhered to their demands. Rebel leaders have threatened to abandon peace talks unless Kinshasa signs an official ceasefire, a demand the government dismissed as unnecessary.

Kinshasa called on M23 to respect previous agreements to withdraw 20km outside of Goma in a move to prevent the region falling back into war after two decades of conflict, fought largely over the DRC’s vast wealth of copper, cobalt diamonds, gold and coltan. The United Nation’s peacekeeping mission in DR Congo has come under fire for allowing M23 to take Goma without firing a single shot, despite the presence of 19,000 UN troops in the country. The UN’s Congo mission is its largest and most expensive peacekeeping operation, costing over US$1 billion a year. UN forces recently announced they would introduce the use of surveillance drones over the DRC, in addition to imposing a travel ban and asset freeze on M23 leader Jean-Marie Runiga and Lt. Col. Eric Badege. A confidential 44-page report issued by a United Nations panel accused the governments of neighboring Rwanda and Uganda of supporting M23 with weapons, ammunition and Rwandan military personnel. Despite both nations denying these accusations, the governments of the United States, Britain, Germany and the Netherlands have publicly suspended military aid and developmental assistance to Rwanda. The governments of both Rwanda and Uganda, led by President Paul Kagame and President Yoweri Museveni respectively, have long been staunch American allies and the recipients of millions in military aid.

M23 President Jean-Marie Runiga (2nd R) arrives to address the media in Bunagana in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.(Reuters / James Akena)

M23 President Jean-Marie Runiga (2nd R) arrives to address the media in Bunagana in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.(Reuters / James Akena)

Historical precedent

The DRC has suffered immensely during its history of foreign plunder and colonial occupation; it maintains the second-lowest GDP per capita despite possessing an estimated $24 trillion in untapped raw minerals deposits. During the Congo Wars of the 1996 to 2003, the United States provided training and arms to Rwandan and Ugandan militias who later invaded the Congo’s eastern provinces where M23 are currently active. In addition to enriching various Western multinational corporations, the regimes of Kagame in Rwanda and Museveni in Uganda both profited immensely from the plunder of Congolese conflict minerals such as cassiterite, wolframite, coltan (from which niobium and tantalum are derived) and gold; the DRC holds more than 30 per cent of the world’s diamond reserves and 80 per cent of the world’s coltan.

In 1990, civil war raged between Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups in neighboring Rwanda; Washington sought to overthrow the 20-year reign of then-President Juvénal Habyarimana (a Hutu) by installing a Tutsi client regime. At the time, prior to the outbreak of the Rwandan civil war, the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), led by the current president, was part of Uganda’s United People’s Defense Forces (UPDF). Kagame, who received training at the US Army Command and Staff College in Leavenworth, Kansas, invaded Rwanda in 1990 from Uganda under the pretext of liberating the Tutsi population from Hutu subjugation. Kagame’s forces defeated the Hutu government in Kigali and installed himself as head of a minority Tutsi regime in Rwanda, prompting the exodus of 2 million Hutu refugees (many of whom took part in the genocide) to UN-run camps in Congo’s North and South Kivu provinces.

Following Kagame’s consolidation of power in Rwanda, a large invasion force of Rwandan Tutsis arrived in North and South Kivu in 1996 under the pretext of pursuing Hutu militant groups, such as the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR). Under the banner of safeguarding Rwandan national security, troops from Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi invaded Congo and ripped through Hutu refugee camps, slaughtering thousands of Rwandan and Congolese Hutu civilians, including many women and children. US Special Forces trained Rwandan and Ugandan troops at Fort Bragg in the United States and supported Congolese rebels, who brought down Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko – they claimed he was giving refuge to the leaders of the genocide.

After deposing Mobutu and seizing control in Kinshasa, a new regime led by Laurent Kabila, father of the current president, was installed. Kabila was quickly regarded as an equally despotic leader, eradicating all opposition to his rule; he turned away from his Rwandan backers and called on Congolese civilians to violently purge the nation of Rwandans, prompting Rwandan forces to regroup in Goma. Laurent Kabila was assassinated in 2001 at the hands of a member of his security staff, allowing his son, Joseph, to usurp the presidency. The younger Kabila derives his legitimacy from the support of foreign heads of state and the international business community, primarily for his ability to comply with foreign plunder.

During the Congo’s general elections in November 2011, the international community and the UN remained silent regarding the mass irregularities observed by the electoral committee. The United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) has faced frequent allegations of corruption, prompting opposition leader Étienne Tshisikedi, who is currently under house arrest, to call for the UN mission to end its deliberate efforts to maintain the system of international plundering and to appoint someone “less corrupt and more credible” to head UN operations. MONUSCO has been plagued with frequent cases of peacekeeping troops caught smuggling minerals such as cassiterite and dealing weapons to militia groups. Kabila is seen by many to be self-serving in his weak oversight of the central government in Kinshasa. M23 rebels have demanded the liberation of all political prisoners, including opposition leader Étienne Tshisikedi, and the dissolution of the current electoral commission that was in charge 2011’s elections, widely perceived to be fraudulent.

Displaced civilians from Walikale arrive at Magunga III camp outside of the eastern Congolese city of Goma.(Reuters / Alissa Everett)

Displaced civilians from Walikale arrive at Magunga III camp outside of the eastern Congolese city of Goma.(Reuters / Alissa Everett)

Role of US in Rwanda’s M23 backing

M23, or The March 23 Movement, takes its name from peace accords held on March 23, 2009, which allowed members of the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP), an earlier incarnation of today’s M23, to integrate into the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC) and be recognized as an official political party. The CNDP was an entirely Rwandan creation, and was led by figures such as Bosco Ntaganda. In accordance to the deal reached in 2009, the Congolese government agreed to integrate 6,000 CNDP combatants into the FARDC, giving Ntaganda, a Rwandan Tutsi and former member of the Rwandan Patriotic Army, a senior position in the integrated force. The current M23 offensive began in April 2012, when around 300 former CNDP personnel led by Ntaganda defected from FARDC, citing poor working conditions and the government’s unwillingness to meaningfully implement the 23 March 2009 peace deal.

According to UN reports, Ntaganda controls several mining operations in the region and has derived enormous profits from mineral exploitation in eastern Congo, in addition to gaining large revenues from taxation levied by Rwandan-backed “mining police.” Bosco Ntaganda appears to be assisting Rwanda’s Tutsi government in plundering eastern Congo’s natural resources, which has gone on since Kagame came to power in 1994; M23 is basically paid for with the money from tin, tungsten and tantalum smuggled from Congolese mines. UN reports detail Rwanda’s deep involvement by even naming Rwandan personnel involved; Ntaganda takes direct military orders from Rwandan Chief of Defense Staff General Charles Kayonga, who in turn acts on instructions from Minster of Defense General James Kabarebe. Both Britain and France reportedly found the UN report to be “credible and compelling.”

Susan Rice, US Ambassador to the United Nations, finds herself mired in scandal yet again; Rice has come under fire for suppressing information on Rwanda’s role in the ongoing resource looting and rebellion in eastern Congo. Rice delayed the publication of a UN Group of Experts report detailing Rwandan and Ugandan depredations in Congo, while simultaneously subverting efforts within the State Department to rein in Kagame and Museveni. Rice, in her role as assistant secretary of state for African affairs in 1997 under the Clinton administration, tacitly approved Rwanda and Uganda’s invasion of the Democratic Republic of Congo and was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “…they [Kagame & Museveni] know how to deal with that, the only thing we have to do is look the other way.” Another article published in the New York Times by Helen Cooper detailed Rice’s business connections to the Rwandan government:

“Ms. Rice has been at the forefront of trying to shield the Rwandan government, and Mr. Kagame in particular, from international censure, even as several United Nations reports have laid the blame for the violence in Congo at Mr. Kagame’s door… Aides to Ms. Rice acknowledge that she is close to Mr. Kagame and that Mr. Kagame’s government was her client when she worked at Intellibridge, a strategic analysis firm in Washington… After delaying for weeks the publication of a United Nations report denouncing Rwanda’s support for the M23 and opposing any direct references to Rwanda in United Nations statements and resolutions on the crisis, Ms. Rice intervened to water down a Security Council resolution that strongly condemned the M23 for widespread rape, summary executions and recruitment of child soldiers. The resolution expressed ‘deep concern’ about external actors supporting the M23. But Ms. Rice prevailed in preventing the resolution from explicitly naming Rwanda when it was passed on Nov. 20.”

M23 rebel fighters walk as they withdraw near the town of Sake, some 42 km (26 miles) west of Goma.(Reuters / Goran Tomasevic)

M23 rebel fighters walk as they withdraw near the town of Sake, some 42 km (26 miles) west of Goma.(Reuters / Goran Tomasevic)

Geopolitics of plunder

It must be recognized that Kagame controls a vastly wealthy and mineral-rich area of eastern Congo – an area that has long been integrated into Rwanda’s economy – with total complicity from the United States. As Washington prepares to escalate its military presence throughout the African continent with AFRICOM, the United States Africa Command, what long-term objectives does Uncle Sam have in the Congo, considered the world’s most resource-rich nation? Washington is crusading against China’s export restrictions on minerals that are crucial components in the production of consumer electronics such as flat-screen televisions, smart phones, laptop batteries, and a host of other products. The US sees these Chinese export policies as a means of Beijing attempting to monopolize the mineral and rare earth market.

In a 2010 white paper entitled “Critical Raw Materials for the EU,” the European Commission cites the immediate need for reserve supplies of tantalum, cobalt, niobium, and tungsten among others; the US Department of Energy 2010 white paper “Critical Mineral Strategy” also acknowledged the strategic importance of these key components. In 1980, Pentagon documents acknowledged shortages of cobalt, titanium, chromium, tantalum, beryllium, and nickel. The US Congressional Budget Office’s 1982 report “Cobalt: Policy Options for a Strategic Mineral” notes that cobalt alloys are critical to the aerospace and weapons industries and that 64 per cent of the world’s cobalt reserves lay in the Katanga Copper Belt, running from southeastern Congo into northern Zambia.

Additionally, the sole piece of legislation authored by President Obama during his time as a Senator was SB 2125, the“Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act of 2006”. In the legislation, Obama acknowledges Congo as a long-term interest to the United States and further alludes to the threat of Hutu militias as an apparent pretext for continued interference in the region; Section 201(6) of the bill specifically calls for the protection of natural resources in the eastern DRC. The United States does not like the fact that President Kabila in Kinshasa has become very comfortable with Beijing, and worries that Congo will drift into Chinese economic orbit. Under the current regime in Congo, Chinese commercial activities have significantly increased not only in the mining sector, but also considerably in the telecommunications field.

In 2000, the Chinese ZTE Corporation finalized a $12.6 million deal with the Congolese government to establish the first Sino-Congolese telecommunications company; furthermore, the DRC exported $1.4 billion worth of cobalt between 2007 and 2008. The majority of Congolese raw materials like cobalt, copper ore and a variety of hardwoodsare exported to China for further processing and 90 per cent of the processing plants in resource rich southeastern Katanga province are owned by Chinese nationals. In 2008, a consortium of Chinese companies were granted the rights to mining operations in Katanga in exchange for US$6 billion in infrastructure investments, including the construction of two hospitals, four universities and a hydroelectric power project. In 2009, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) demanded renegotiation of the deal, arguing that the agreement between China and the DRC violated the foreign debt relief program for so-called HIPC (Highly Indebted Poor Countries) nations. The IMF successfully blocked the deal in May 2009, calling for a more feasibility study of the DRCs mineral concessions. An article published by Shamus Cooke of Workers Action explains:

“This act instantly transformed Kabila from an unreliable friend to an enemy. The US and China have been madly scrambling for Africa’s immense wealth of raw materials, and Kabila’s new alliance with China was too much for the US to bear. Kabila further inflamed his former allies by demanding that the international corporations exploiting the Congo’s precious metals have their super-profit contracts re-negotiated, so that the country might actually receive some benefit from its riches.”

During a diplomatic tour of Africa in 2011, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton herself has irresponsibly insinuatedChina’s guilt in perpetuating a creeping “new colonialism.” China annually invests an estimated $5.5 billion in Africa, with only 29 per cent of direct investment in the mining sector in 2009 – while more than half was directed toward domestic manufacturing, finance, and construction industries. China has further committed $10 billion in concessional loans to Africa between 2009 and 2012. As Africa’s largest trading partner, China imports 1.5 million barrels of oil from Africa per day, accounting for approximately 30 per cent of its total imports. Over the past decade, 750,000 Chinese nationals have settled in Africa; China’s deepening economic engagement in Africa and its crucial role in developing the mineral sector, telecommunications industry and much needed infrastructural projects is creating “deep nervousness” in the West, according to David Shinn, the former US ambassador to Burkina Faso and Ethiopia.

Too big to fail, or too big to succeed?

In December 2012, Dr J Peter Pham published a bizarre Op-Ed in the New York Times titled, “To Save Congo, Let It Fall Apart.” Pham is the director of the Michael S. Ansari Africa Center and is a frequent guest lecturer on the US Army War College, the Joint Special Operations University, and other US Government affiliated educational institutions; he is a Washington insider, and understanding his rationale is important, as his opinion may very well shape US policy in Congo. Pham argues that Congo is an “artificial entity” that is “too big to succeed,” and therefore, the policy direction taken by the US should be one of promoting balkanization:

“Rather than nation-building, what is needed to end Congo’s violence is the opposite: breaking up a chronically failed state into smaller organic units whose members share broad agreement or at least have common interests in personal and community security… If Congo were permitted to break up into smaller entities, the international community could devote its increasingly scarce resources to humanitarian relief and development, rather than trying, as the United Nations Security Council has pledged, to preserve the ‘sovereignty, independence, unity, and territorial integrity’ of a fictional state that is of value only to the political elites who have clawed their way to the top in order to plunder Congo’s resources and fund the patronage networks that ensure that they will remain in power.”

What Pham is suggesting is policy to bring out the collapse of the Congolese nation by creating tiny ethno-nationalist entities too small to stand up to multinational corporations. The success of M23 must surely have shaken President Kabila, whose father came to power with the backing of the Ugandan and Rwandan regimes in 1996, employing the same strategies that M23 is using today. If Kabila wants to stay in power, he needs the capability of exercising authority over the entire country. Sanctions should be imposed on top-level Rwandan and Ugandan officials and all military aid should be withheld; additionally, Rwandan strongman Paul Kagame should be investigated and removed from his position. Kambale Musavuli, of the Washington DC-based NGO, Friends of Congo, has it right when he says:

“People need to be clear who we are fighting in the Congo… We are fighting Western powers, the United States and the United Kingdom, who are arming, training and equipping the Rwandan and Ugandan militaries.”

M23 military leader General Sultani Makenga attend press conference in Bunagana in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.(Reuters / James Akena)

M23 military leader General Sultani Makenga attend press conference in Bunagana in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.(Reuters / James Akena)

Nile Bowie is an independent political commentator and photographer based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He can be reached at nilebowie@gmail.com 

New York Passes New Gun Laws, But Will Nation Follow?

In what Governor Andrew Cuomo called simply a 'common sense' approach, New York passed the nation's most stringent gun safety laws Tuesday night following swift passage of the bill through the state's legislature.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo at a bill-signing ceremony on Tuesday with, in foreground from left, Leah Gunn Barrett of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence; Senator Jeffrey D. Klein; Sheldon Silver, the Assembly speaker; and Senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins. (Photo: Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times) New York's progress came nearly one month after the Sandy Hook massacre in December and one day before President Obama will publicly announce the White House's approach to tougher federal laws on Wednesday.

Advocates for better gun laws championed the developments in New York, recognizing that political will is all that prevents similar gun laws from being passed in other states or at the national level.

“Governor Cuomo and the lawmakers in Albany have shown tremendous leadership on the critical issue of gun violence.  By making this a priority, the Governor has not only saved lives, but will hopefully inspire leaders in Washington also to take swift action,” said Dan Gross, President of the Brady Campaign.

"The policies will have an immediate and widespread impact on gun violence, and when coupled with public health and safety education programs, will finally begin to address in a real way the epidemic of gun deaths in America," he said.

The law itself, called the New York Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act of 2013 (NY SAFE ACT), purports to give New York the most comprehensive gun safety laws in the nation.  Among its key provisions, the law:

  • Completely bans all pre-1994 high capacity magazines
  • Bans any magazine that can hold over 7 rounds (down from a limit of 10)
  • Forces real time background checks of ammunition purchases in order to alert law enforcement of high volume buyers

"Seven bullets in a gun, why? Because the high-capacity magazines that give you the capacity to kill a large number of human beings in a very short period of time is nonsensical to a civil society," Cuomo said.

In a more controversial aspect, the law also puts higher burdens on mental health professionals when it comes to reporting patients who they believe may be planning or capable of violent acts with guns. As many experts point out, such an assessment is nearly impossible to make accurately or consistently.

In inteviews with the Associated Press, "one expert called the new law meaningless and said he expects mental health providers to ignore it, while others said they worry about its impact on patients." According to AP:

Dr. Paul Appelbaum at Columbia University said the prospect of being reported to local mental health authorities and maybe the police might discourage people from revealing thoughts of harm to a therapist, or even from seeking treatment at all.

"The people who arguably most need to be in treatment and most need to feel free to talk about these disturbing impulses, may be the ones we make least likely to do so," said the director of law, ethics and psychiatry at Columbia. "They will either simply not come, or not report the thoughts that they have." [...]

"[The law] undercuts the clinical approach to treating these impulses, and instead turns it into a public safety issue," Appelbaum said.

He also noted that in many mass shootings in the past, the gunman had not been under treatment and so would not have been deterred by a law like the proposed measure. Before the mass shooting in a Colorado movie theater last July, gunman James Holmes had been seeing a psychiatrist, but Appelbaum said he doesn't know whether a law like New York's would have made a difference.

Dr. Steven Dubovsky, chairman of the psychiatry department at the University at Buffalo, called the new measure meaningless. "It's pure political posturing" and a deceptive attempt to reassure the public, he said.

The intent seems to be to turn mental health professionals into detectives and policemen, he said, but "no patient is going to tell you anything if they think you're going to report them."

_________________________

Deafness at Doomsday

To our great peril, the scientific community has had little success in recent years influencing policy on global security. Perhaps this is because the best scientists today are not directly responsible for the very weapons that threaten our safety, and are therefore no longer the high priests of destruction, to be consulted as oracles as they were after World War II.(Image: Yarek Waszul)

The problems scientists confront today are actually much harder than they were at the dawn of the nuclear age, and their successes more heartily earned. This is why it is so distressing that even Stephen Hawking, perhaps the world’s most famous living scientist, gets more attention for his views on space aliens than his views on nuclear weapons.Scientists’ voices are crucial in the debates over the global challenges of climate change, nuclear proliferation and the potential creation of new and deadly pathogens. But unlike in the past, their voices aren’t being heard.

Indeed, it was Albert Einstein’s letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939, warning of the possibility that Hitler might develop a nuclear weapon, that quickly prompted the start of the Manhattan Project, the largest scientific wartime project in history. Then, in 1945, the same group of physicists who had created the atomic bomb founded the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to warn of the dangers of nuclear weapons, and to promote international cooperation to avoid nuclear war. As Einstein said in May 1946, “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

The men who built the bomb had enormous prestige as the greatest physics minds of the time. They included Nobel laureates, past and future, like Hans A. Bethe, Richard P. Feynman, Enrico Fermi, Ernest O. Lawrence and Isidor Isaac Rabi.

In June 1946, for instance, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had helped lead the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, N.M., argued that atomic energy should be placed under civilian rather than military control. Within two months President Harry S. Truman signed a law doing so, effective January 1947.

Today, nine nuclear states have stockpiled perhaps 20,000 nuclear weapons, many of which dwarf the weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet proliferation is as alarming as ever, even though President Obama signed, and Congress ratified, the new strategic arms-reduction treaty in 2010. Iran’s nuclear program could lead to conflict. So could the animosity between India and Pakistan, which both have nuclear weapons.

The United States is complicit, because whatever our leaders may say, our actions suggest that we have no real intention to disarm. The United Nations adopted the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would ban countries from testing nuclear weapons, in 1996. But it has not come into force; the Senate rejected ratification in 1999, and while President Obama has promised to obtain ratification, he has not shown enough urgency in doing so.

What’s striking is that today’s version of the Manhattan Project scientists — not the weapons researchers at our maximum-security national laboratories, but distinguished scientific minds at our research universities and other national labs — provide advice that is routinely ignored.

Last year, the National Academy of Sciences published a report demonstrating that all the technical preconditions necessary for ratifying the United Nations treaty were in place. But this vital issue did not come up in the presidential campaign and is barely mentioned in Washington. Another study by the academy last year, on flaws in America’s costly ballistic missile defense program, has had little impact even as the Pentagon considers cuts in military spending.

I am co-chairman of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which has supported the call for a world free of nuclear weapons — a vision backed by major foreign policy figures in both parties. But ideological biases have become so ingrained in Washington that scientific realities are subordinated to political intransigence.

Do scientists need to develop new doomsday tools before our views are again heard? Will climate researchers remain voiceless unless they propose untested geoengineering technologies that could have insidious consequences? Will biologists be heard only if their work spawns new biotechnologies that could be weaponized?

Because the threat of nuclear proliferation is not being addressed, because missile defense technologies remain flawed and because new threats exposed by scientists have been ignored, the Bulletin’s annual Doomsday clock — which was updated on Tuesday — still sits at five minutes to midnight. The clock is meant to convey the threats we face not only from nuclear weapons, but also from climate change and the potential unintended consequences of genetic engineering, which could be misused by those seeking to create bioweapons.

Until science and data become central to informing our public policies, our civilization will be hamstrung in confronting the gravest threats to its survival.

© 2012 The New York Times

Lawrence Krauss

Lawrence M. Krauss, member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, is the author, most recently, of “A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing.”

Mission Impossible? Ex-Ministers suggest ways to restore Russia-US partnership

As relations between Moscow and Washington turn increasingly frosty, two former high-ranking Russian and American officials have called for a series of measures to bring the two nuclear superpowers back in from the cold.

Former Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, together with former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, co-wrote an article in The New York Times (“A New Agenda for U.S.-Russia Cooperation,” Dec. 30, 2012) that suggests various bilateral-building initiatives between the two former Cold War foes.

Albright and Ivanov believe that since Presidents Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama are back in power for another six years and four years, respectively, the time is ripe for Moscow and Washington to restore the shine to the partnership.

But is the nostalgia for the Clinton-Yeltsin era, when Russia and America – not to mention Albright and Ivanov – enjoyed all the advantages of a rock-solid Russia-US relationship, clouding their perception of the current realities?

On the other hand, are the two former high-ranking Russian and American officials correct in their assumption that putting the Russia-US relationship back on track simply requires the fine-tuning of a few diplomatic channels?

Whatever the case may be, the first step, they advise, is to put arms reduction between the two countries on the fast track.

Considering the question as to whether it is necessary to wait until 2018 for reducing nuclear stockpiles, "START III has become a truly important achievement in (the reduction of nuclear weapons), but it is possible to do more,” they write.

Reminding that "Russia and the United States control 90 to 95 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons,” Albright and Ivanov believe it is possible to “continue negotiations of further reductions and still safely ensure our security.”

There is just one problem, however, with Russia agreeing to any substantial cuts in its ballistic missile arsenal: America has shown its determination to build an all-encompassing missile defense shield in Eastern Europe. In other words, Washington apparently thinks that Moscow will drop its sword at precisely the same time the US is constructing a mighty shield .

Albright and Ivanov, admitting that the US missile defense project “continues to cast a shadow over possible progress on arms control, even though both NATO and Russia say they want to cooperate in that sphere,"  may be underestimating the chances for setting things straight.

Indeed, there is a vast difference between words and deeds, as Russia is keenly aware as the US and NATO hold out promises on cooperation on the project that continually lead to a diplomatic dead-end.

Moscow, clearly at the end of its political patience, has warned that the construction of the system – without Russia’s participation – would upset the strategic applecart, thus putting the world at risk of another arms race. Despite such unappealing prospects, the US and NATO refuse to heed Russia’s warning, continuing on the construction of the project just miles from the Russian border.

Nevertheless, Albright and Ivanov remain positive that their two governments will find a way to overcome the atmosphere of mistrust that the ABM system has created.

Saying that “now is the time to be creative,” they go so far as to argue that missile defense could ultimately prove to be a “game-changer,” thereby uniting NATO and Russia “in protecting Europe."

While such a turn of events would certainly put the shine back in the bilateral relationship, are Madeleine Albright and Igor Ivanov being overly optimistic and even unrealistic about the chances of such a change of heart on the part of Washington?

After all, many Americans, and not least of all Americans who belong to the Democratic party, have given up hope on Barack Obama, who has backtracked on a number of dusty campaign pledges, including his promise to shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, as well as the pledge to “sit down and talk with America’s enemies.”

If unleashing aerial hell on America’s enemies courtesy of drone attacks may be considered “talking,” then Obama has certainly kept his word on that point (the US leader has authorized just under 300 drone attacks in Pakistan, six times more than during George W. Bush's two-term presidency).

In other words, if Barack Obama finds it so easy to retreat from his promises to members of his own constituency, it seems highly probable that he will find it equally easy to go back on his word with the Russians.

Meanwhile, Albright and Ivanov argue that the combined efforts of their respective governments in slashing nuclear stockpiles will set an example for other countries, possibly even enhancing the “credibility of our diplomacy in mobilizing international pressure on Iran to refrain from trying to build a nuclear weapon.”

Some countries, including the United States and Israel, believe that Iran is attempting to build a nuclear weapon. Tehran vehemently denies the claims, saying they are conducting nuclear research in an effort to provide a reliable energy source for their people.

Albright and Ivanov mentioned other trouble spots in the relationship, including their stance on Syria, where a western-backed militant opposition is attempting to usurp President Bashar al-Assad.

Despite differences in the bilateral relationship, “[I]t is essential not to interrupt dialogue even on those issues where positions differ substantially,” the article says.

On the question of Afghanistan, that has been the scene of a long war between Coalition forces and the Taliban,“Washington and Moscow, together with others, should support Afghan leadersinconstructingastablesociety, ableto withstand pressure from violent extremist groups," it says.

Indeed, the cornerstone of the Russia-US relationship has been the declared willingness to work together in the fight against terrorism, as well as on other fronts.

Albright and Ivanov called on Moscow and Washington to put disagreements behind them and “embark on a historic mission to start a new chapter” in relations between the two countries.

While that would represent a chapter of a book that many people on both sides of the Atlantic would like to read, it will be interesting to see if Moscow and Washington have the political will to move their relations forward the next four years.

Albright currently serves as a Professor of International Relations at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service, while Igor Ivanov serves as President of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC).

Robert Bridge, RT

Mehdi’s Morning Memo: Fiddling The Figures

The ten things you need to know on Wednesday 16 January 2013...

1) 'FIDDLING THE FIGURES'

Coalition ministers - led by George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith - have been keen to highlight "record high" employment figures in the UK, as well as the net creation of around half a million new jobs over the past year, but the Guardian has some rather interesting news for us this morning:

"Government claims to have created an additional 500,000 jobs in the past year have been called into question after it was revealed that one in five of the people involved are on government work schemes, including tens of thousands still claiming unemployment benefits.

".. [F]igures obtained by the Guardian from the Office for National Statistics show that just over 20% of this total (105,000) involves those on largely unpaid government back-to-work schemes, the majority of whom are still claiming jobseeker's allowance.

"They include unpaid workers doing voluntary and mandatory work experience in supermarkets and charity shops.

"Many more tens of thousands with no jobs, training or pay, who simply attend regular job hunt workshops as part of the work programme run by the Department for Work and Pensions, are also being counted as employed."

You couldn't make it up...

2) EUROPE: EVERYONE'S GOT AN OPINION

Less than 72 hours to go till the big Cameron speech on Europe in the Netherlands. Everyone - everyone - seems to want to give the PM some advice on what he should say/do. First, there's Eurosceptic Tory MPs - from the Telegraph:

"The Fresh Start group of Conservative backbenchers will throw down the gauntlet to the Prime Minister... as it sets out proposals to return responsibility for laws to Westminster and cut Britain’s bill for EU membership by billions of pounds a year."

"A copy seen by The Daily Telegraph recommends four “significant revisions” to the EU treaties:

"• The repatriation of all social and employment law, such as the Working Time Directive;
"• An opt-out from all existing policing and criminal justice measures;
"• An “emergency brake” on any new legislation that affects financial services;
"• An end to the European Parliament’s costly monthly move from Brussels to Strasbourg."

Then there's the "veteran Europhile", Ken Clarke, who issues this warning to the PM in the FT:

"Europe is not the primary interest of the British public and all kinds of things can arouse protest," Mr Clarke said in an interview with the Financial Times.

"... Mr Clarke admits that pro-Europeans have abandoned the battlefield and must regroup quickly. 'All referenda are a bit of a gamble. I don't think we can take a Yes vote for granted,' he said. 'I think one of the problems is, because so much of the media is overwhelmingly eurosceptic, no one has really campaigned very vigorously for the case for British leadership in the European Union for probably a decade or more.'"

Then there's Sir Nigel Sheinwald, the UK's former ambassador to Washington DC and Brussels, who tells the Guardian:

"I just cannot see any logical basis for thinking a move to the sidelines, or particularly a move out of Europe, would be anything other than diminishing to UK's capacity, standing, influence, ability to get things done and capacity to build coalitions internationally.

"... In any event other members of the EU would regard any really significant proposals by us to renegotiate as opportunistic, given the main areas they are going to be examining are ones they would say are necessary for the euro to survive and prosper."

Finally, there's the former (Labour) foreign secretary, David Miliband, writing in the Times: "Don’t be the PM who takes us out of Europe."

Lots to digest. Dave - over to you.

3) OUT OF CREDIT?

Perhaps, just perhaps, the PM should focus less on Europe and more on the British economy. He also might want to re-read the Conservative Party's 2010 manifesto, which promised to "safeguard Britain’s credit rating".

Because the Guardian has some bad news for Dave and for Gideon:

"Fitch, the credit ratings agency, has warned the chancellor that Britain could be stripped of its prized AAA status if he fails to boost the country's economic situation in the spring budget

"The agency said the UK remains under "significant pressure" following the autumn statement in December, when George Osborne conceded that growth would be lower over the next two years and for that reason he was likely to miss one of his two debt reduction targets."

Losing the triple-A crown at some point in 2013 could cost the chancellor, in particular, any little credibility that he might have left. He has, as the HuffPost UK documents here, staked his political and economic reputation on 'AAA'.

4) "STALINIST" NHS

The coalition's safest pair of hands, Jeremy Hunt, is back in the headlines again. From the Daily Mail:

"All medical records - including prescriptions and test results - are to be stored on computers and shared between hospitals, GPs, care homes and councils.

"Jeremy Hunt will pledge a 'paperless NHS' by 2018 to help save lives by allowing different parts of the NHS to communicate more effectively.

"... But the records 'free-for-all' raises fears that confidential information could be accessed inappropriately.

"Mr Hunt admitted the system was 'Stalinist' - in being driven from the top - but he said this was vital for patient safety."

5) OBAMA VS THE SECOND AMENDMENT

From the BBC:

"US President Barack Obama is expected on Wednesday to unveil wide-ranging measures aimed at curbing gun violence.

"The proposals could echo measures, considered the toughest in the nation, passed in New York state on Tuesday.

"Mr Obama has said he favours bans on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines, as well as broader background checks."

Good luck, Barack!

BECAUSE YOU'VE READ THIS FAR...

Watch this video of a drunk guy sing 'Bohemiam Rhapsody' - really loudly - on the New York subway.

6) BANKS WIN, WE LOSE (PART 1)

From the Telegraph:

"Taxpayers are sitting on a loss of £18 billion on government shareholdings in RBS and Lloyds Banking Group, which were acquired during the financial crisis.

"Grant Shapps, the Conservative Party chairman, compared the bank bail-out to Labour’s decision to sell the country’s gold reserves. 'Labour sold gold at a record low price and now it seems they massively overpaid for the taxpayer stakes in the banks,' he said.

"... Michael Cohrs, a member of the Bank of England’s financial policy committee, told MPs on the Treasury committee that the government had 'probably' overpaid for its stakes in the nationalised banks and that taxpayers were unlikely to enjoy the returns that had been seen in America."

Thanks, Gordon and Alistair.

7) BANKS WIN, WE LOSE (PART 2)

From the FT splash:

"In the face of withering criticism, Goldman Sachs has abandoned a plan which would have allowed bankers to benefit from a cut in the top rate of income tax by delaying UK bonus payments until after the start of the new British tax year.

"The Wall Street bank decided at a board meeting not to press ahead with the proposal after the governor of the Bank of England denounced the plan."

So, banks on the run, eh? Not quite. After all, why are banks still paying out massive bonuses to begin with, given the lack of lending and the ongoing economic stagnation? As the Telegraph reported earlier this week:

"Analysts expect the Wall Street bank to have amassed a total compensation pot, which includes bonuses and salaries, of between $13.3bn (8.2bn pounds) and $13.8bn for 2012... [t]hat is up from $12.2bn in 2011."

All in this together? I think not.

8) ROYAL 'VETO' UPDATE

The Guardian follows up on its exclusive from yesterday:

"Government ministers have exploited the royal family's secretive power to veto new laws as a way to quell politically embarrassing backbench rebellions, it was claimed on Tuesday.

"Tam Dalyell, the sponsor of a 1999 parliamentary bill that aimed to give MPs a vote on military action against Saddam Hussein, said he is 'incandescent and angry' that it was blocked by the Queen under apparent influence from Tony Blair's government. It also emerged that Harold Wilson used the Queen's power to kill off politically embarrassing bills about Zimbabwe and peerages."

9) MINISTERS VS LAWYERS

From the Times:

"The Government is facing a backlash from senior legal figures over plans to curb what ministers see as a 'growth industry' in judicial review challenges.

"Lord Woolf, the former Lord Chief Justice, and Lord Goldsmith, the former Attorney-General, warned that the Government should proceed with “caution” with any changes that could be seen as restricting the right to hold politicians to account.

"... The number of judicial review cases jumped from 160 in 1974 to more than 11,000 in 2011, costing the taxpayer millions in legal fees. But in 2011 only one in six applications was granted and even fewer were successful when they went ahead."

10) THE RETURN OF GORDO

Our ex-premier returned to the Commons yesterday to participate in a debate and give a speech - it's worth reading Ann Treneman's sketch in the Times:

"For the first time in 14 months, Gordo was in the Chamber.

"Dozens of MPs came to watch, peering at him as he appeared, at 6.44pm, at the tail end of a debate on Scotland. His fellow Scots stared at him as if they hardly recognised him. Alistair Darling, his Chancellor, moved as far away as possible. A small doughnut of hardcore Gordo fans formed around him."

"Almost Never Spotted was there for the adjournment debate on why the Government should save the Remploy factory in Fife. It started at 7pm.

"... When the lesser mortals stopped speaking, Gordo arose, his voice booming, his stomach protruding to the extent that his shirt-button deserves to be mentioned in despatches. He had known the factory for 30 years and he had a plan to save it. This involved the Government relaxing its financial restrictions. Gordon Brown asking for money!

"... When it was over, the Almost Never Spotted left, his shirt button relieved to have survived. When, I wondered, would we see him again?"

A very good question.

PUBLIC OPINION WATCH

From the latest Sun/YouGov poll:

Labour 44
Conservatives 32
Lib Dems 10
Ukip 9

That would give Labour a majority of 120.

140 CHARACTERS OR LESS

‏@David_Cameron Delighted that principle of wearing religious symbols at work has been upheld – ppl shouldn't suffer discrimination due to religious beliefs

‏@BenPBradshaw Bad ministers blame the #civilservice & if No 10 find out what's happening from the media it's because they don't have a grip @BBCr4today

@ShippersUnbound As we hang earnestly on the wisdom of Sir Nigel Sheinwald remember it was he who thought Barak Obama had no chance of getting elected

900 WORDS OR MORE

Mary Riddell, writing in the Telegraph, says: "Ed Miliband needs bolder answers over the European Union and immigration."

Simon Jenkins, writing in the Guardian, says: "Europe: no more talk of in-or-out. Let's think opt-outs."

Daniel Finkelstein, writing in the Times, says: "Public servants have private interests, just like the rest of us. They’ll only change if we make it worth their while."


Got something you want to share? Please send any stories/tips/quotes/pix/plugs/gossip to Mehdi Hasan (mehdi.hasan@huffingtonpost.com) or Ned Simons (ned.simons@huffingtonpost.com). You can also follow us on Twitter: @mehdirhasan, @nedsimons and @huffpostukpol

“The Chinese are Starting to Feel Surrounded by US Forces from All Sides”: Expert

“I don’t think that China’s leaders today want to make compromises with the US. It is unlikely that China will agree to create a program of developing its navy that would satisfy the US. In its turn, the US also doesn’t want to be ousted by China from its positions in the Asia-Pacific region. Besides its military presence there, the US also wants to maintain control over all the transport routes in this region, and China is now becoming a serious rival for the US from this point of view as well.”

In 2012, the US announced that it is starting “to return to Asia” – that is, to broaden its military presence in the south of the Asia-Pacific region.

This is the US’s response to China’s increasing military activity in disputed waters in the East China and the South China Seas.

The US is going to move up to 60% of its navy to the Asia-Pacific region. That would increase the US’s military presence there 3 times in comparison with the current situation.

At present, about 60 to 70 US military ships and from 200 to 300 planes are constantly present at US naval bases in Japan and South Korea. Besides, at least 2 US aircraft carriers are constantly keeping watch in the region.

Now, according to President Obama’s order, US naval forces are to increase in Australia, Singapore and the Philippines.

In Australia, the number of US marines will be increased 10 times and will reach 2,500 people. Besides, the US will have broader access to the Australian naval base on the coast of the Indian Ocean, to the south of the city of Perth.

Up to 4 US navy ships will be deployed near Singapore’s coast.

The US is also planning to deploy up to 500 servicemen and reconnaissance aircraft in the Philippines and to create a center for repairing US navy ships there. Moreover, the US does not rule out that in some time from now, the Philippines may become the center of commanding US forces in the Asia-Pacific region.

“In such conditions, the Chinese are starting to feel surrounded by US forces from all sides,” Russian expert in Eastern affairs Yuri Tavrovsky said in an interview with the Voice of Russia. “After all, the US does not hide the fact that the reason it is strenthening its military presence in the Asia-Pacific region is the growing influence of China there.”

“In its turn, China is actively developing its navy,” Mr. Tavrovsky continues. “It is hard to deny that within the last few years, China’s economy has been rapidly developing, which has allowed China to considerably increase its military might. It would probably be an exaggeration to say that China is becoming aggressive, but it is obviously starting to realize that it is getting strong enough to afford dictating its will to other countries.”

Another Russian expert, Evgeny Kanaev, is predicting that US-Chinese relations will most probably aggravate even further:

“I don’t think that China’s leaders today want to make compromises with the US. It is unlikely that China will agree to create a program of developing its navy that would satisfy the US. In its turn, the US also doesn’t want to be ousted by China from its positions in the Asia-Pacific region. Besides its military presence there, the US also wants to maintain control over all the transport routes in this region, and China is now becoming a serious rival for the US from this point of view as well.”

Experts are concerned that the US’s policy of regaining military control over the Asia-Pacific region and its competition for this role with China may aggravate the situation in this region to a very dangerous point.

One Year Of Tax Hikes On The Rich Is Promptly Spent As $60 Billion...

After more than two months of political grandstanding, finally the $60 billion pork-laden Sandy relief aid bill has passed through the House in a 241-180 vote (with 1 democrat and 179 republicans voting no), with the vote passing courtesy of just 49 republicans who voted with the democrats. The reminder objected in protest "against a bill that many conservatives say is too big and provides funding for things other than immediate relief for New York, New Jersey and Connecticut" Politico reports. Specifically, the House approved a $50 billion relief bill, after several hours of contentious debate in which scores of Republicans tried unsuccessfully to cut the size of the bill and offset a portion of it with spending cuts. $9.7 billion had been already voted on January 4th for a flood insurance lending facility.The biggest winner today? Chris Christie whose anti-Boehner soapbox rant drama two weeks ago may have been just the breaking straw that forced the passage of this porkulus bill.

From Politico:

Republican and Democratic supporters of the bill argued throughout the day that everyone should support it, or run the risk of losing votes for future disaster bills that might help people in their districts.

"Florida, good luck with no more hurricanes," Rep. Frank LoBiondo (R-N.J.) shouted to any member who might oppose the bill. "California, congratulations, did you get rid of the Andreas Fault? The Mississippi's in a drought. Do you think you're not going to have a flood again?

"Who are you going to come to when you have these things? We need this, we need it now. Do the right thing, as we have always done for you."

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) issued a similar warning to members who oppose the bill."

I hope that we can have an overwhelming bipartisan vote," she said. "I think that ideally… that would be the right thing to do.

"But as a practical matter, you just never know what mother nature may have in store for you in your region, and you would certainly want the embrace of the entire nation around you and your area, for your constituents, for your communities, for our country."

In other words, let's cut spending... but not when that spending may involve me being the benficiary. Incidentally, this is precisely why the US government will never, ever address the true cause of its insolvency: spending. Because doing so may mean being unable to rely on other, generous taxpayers when push comes to shove.

Scores of Republicans ignored these warnings and voted to either cut the bill or offset parts of it with cuts elsewhere. But there were not enough deficit hawks to overcome the many Republicans who favored the bill as it was presented, along with nearly every Democrat.

And yet another reason why the debt ceiling deal has no choice but to be enacted, with the usual theater, is the following:

The other big vote was on whether to offset the $17 billion baseline bill with a 1.63 percent cut to discretionary government programs. The sponsor of this language, Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), argued that while prior disaster bills did not have offsetting spending cuts, Congress is now operating in the context of a $16 trillion debt.

"The time has come and gone in this nation where we can walk in here one day and spend nine or 17 or 60 billion dollars and not think about who's paying for it," Mulvaney said.

But Mulvaney was rebuffed by House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), who opposed the idea of subjecting discretionary programs to an across-the-board cut. That left Mulvaney asking all members why Congress can't find cuts to fund important disaster recovery aid.

"Just tell me what you are willing to do without," said Mulvaney. "Are we willing and able to do without anything so that these people can get this money this year?"

Mulvaney's amendment failed 162-258, as Republicans split on the proposal 157-71. The vote split GOP leaders, as Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) voted for it, while Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) voted against it.

So, basically, there is nothing that the House was willing and able to do without. But yes: spending cuts.

Funny stuff.

And putting it all into context, $60 billion just happens to be the annual benefit from the Obama tax hikes on the rich. And just like that, the entire first year's budget benefit was spent in under 2 weeks.

Because if you tell them there is more money, they will gladly take it...

Your rating: None Average: 5 (3 votes)

US gives Afghanistan fleet of drones

A US army soldier with the 101st Airborne Division Alpha Battery 1-320th tries to launch a drone outside Combat Outpost Nolen in the village of Jellawar in The Arghandab Valley (AFP Photo / Patrick Baz)

A US army soldier with the 101st Airborne Division Alpha Battery 1-320th tries to launch a drone outside Combat Outpost Nolen in the village of Jellawar in The Arghandab Valley (AFP Photo / Patrick Baz)

Afghan President Hamid Karzai said his recent meeting with US President Obama gave him nearly everything his country hoped for – including a fleet of aerial surveillance drones that Afghan officials have long been requesting.

Karzai held a news conference on Monday in which he proudly announced the promised fleet of drones, as well as an upgraded fleet of aircraft including 20 helicopters and at least four C-130 transport planes. The Afghan president noted that the surveillance drones would be unarmed, but will nevertheless help spy on enemy combatants and watch over coalition forces. Western forces will train Afghans to fly, use and maintain them before giving complete control to the Karzai government.

The US will also provide Afghanistan with intelligence gathering equipment “which will be used to defend and protect our air and ground sovereignty,” Karzai said. The US has also pledged to speed up the handover of detainees currently imprisoned and held by American forces. Karzai has previously called this a violation of promised Afghan sovereignty and the issue has built up tension between the two nations.

“We are happy and satisfied with the results of our meetings,” the Afghan president told journalists at the presidential palace. “We achieved what we were looking for.”

American officials refused to confirm or deny the details of the agreement made between Afghanistan and the US regarding aircraft, the New York Times reports. But since his meeting with Obama, Karzai had repeatedly expressed his satisfaction with the outcome.

The US has long demanded that Afghanistan grant immunity to any US forces staying in the country after the 2014 withdrawal. Karzai has sternly opposed this measure, but conceded after Obama granted him many of his own wishes.

“This is a decision that should be made by the Afghan people in a Loya Jirga: whether they are granting immunity to them or not; if yes, how and under what conditions” he said in an interview with CNN.

But this might not even matter if Afghans have their way when it comes to post-withdrawal troops. Top Afghan officials have expressed their desire for Special Operations forces to leave the country at the same time as US military troops. These forces currently train the Afghan local police and US officials have assumed that the withdrawal would only apply to traditional military troops, the Washington Post reports.

The Washington meetings between Karzai and Obama have resulted in numerous benefits for the Afghans and Karzai’s news conference was the first mention of American drones being handed over to the Afghan government. Negotiations between the US and Afghanistan are still ongoing, with the two countries trying to determine details regarding the US presence in Afghanistan after the 2014 troop withdrawal.

On the News With Thom Hartmann: First New Gun Law Since Sandy Hook Massacre...

In today's On the News segment: Today New York is expected to pass the toughest gun control law in the nation – and the first new gun law since the massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is shying away from strong filibuster reform, and more. 

You need to know this. Today New York is expected to pass the toughest gun control law in the nation – and the first new gun law since the massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school. Under the new provision, which passed the state Senate Monday night, and will be taken up by the state Assembly today, any assault weapons with a “military rifle” feature will be banned. Also, every single assault weapon sale, whether through a private dealer or not, will be subject to a background check – and internet sales of assault weapons will be banned altogether. The legal limit for ammo clips will be reduced from ten to seven bullets – and residents who own high-capacity magazines will have one-year to sell them out of state before they are in violation of this new law. Those who refuse could face a misdemeanor for possession of high-capacity ammo clips. There are also provisions to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill who have made violent threats. New York’s passage of tough gun control laws sets the stage for the national debate. According to the New York Times, President Obama will push for comprehensive gun control – and even endorse 19 specific executive actions he will take on his own – without Congress – to prevent weapons of war from ending up in the hands of the deranged. Among the President’s options include – restrictions on gun imports from overseas, better sharing of mental health records between federal agencies, and tougher background checks. This fight is just getting started – and the safety of future generations is on the line. Stay tuned.  

In screwed news…Republican election rigging efforts just received a big boost from one of the most prominent members of the Republican Party. RNC Chairman, Reince Priebus, threw his support behind an idea that’s making the rounds in many blue states, like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which are now under the control of Republicans. That idea would change how the state counts its Electoral Votes – awarding those votes based on Congressional districts won – rather than winner take all. And since those Congressional districts were gerrymandered by Republican state legislatures – it would give the Republican presidential candidate a huge advantage. In fact, had Electoral Votes been counted in this way last election – Mitt Romney would be our President, despite President Obama winning handedly in every single battleground state. This is a blatant attempt by Republicans to rig the election – and should be an idea isolated to the fringe of the Party. Yet here’s what RNC Chair Reince Preibus said about it in an interview with the Milwaukee-Journal Sentinel, “I think it’s something that a lot of states that have been consistently blue, that are fully controlled red, ought to be looking at.” So, reacting to a changing American demographic, calls for more progressive social reforms, and the collapse of the primary Republican ideology of Reagan's trickle-down economics, Republicans have now pinned their best hopes of winning future elections, not on a new direction within the Party, but instead just rigging future elections.

In the best of the rest of the news…

President Obama is getting fed up with Republican intransigence over the debt limit. In a press conference on Monday, the President blasted Republicans for threatening to blow up the dead limit. Pointing out that raising the debt limit does not authorize more spending, but simply pays the bill on money Congress has already spent, the President said, “We are not a deadbeat nation.” He also reiterated that he will not negotiate over the debt-limit and put spending cuts on the table, in exchange for an increase in the debt-limit, saying, “House Republican will not collect a ransom in exchange for not crashing the American economy. The financial well-being of the American people is not leverage to be used.” Let’s hope the President stands firm – and doesn’t give in to the economic terrorists within the Republican Party. 

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is shying away from strong filibuster reform. In an interview with Las Vegas PBS, Reid threw his support behind modest filibuster reform – but  he stopped short of endorsing the Merkley-Udall plan, which would require a filibustering minority to speak on the floor of the Senate the entire time they wish to obstruct legislation. Under Reid’s plan, the minority would still be able to use a silent filibuster to block debate on legislation. But once debate has started, then Republicans would have to talk on the floor the entire time they wish to filibuster before a final vote is called. A spokesman for Senator Jeff Merkley said the Reid plan falls short, saying, “[T]his approach does nothing to take on the core problem we face in the Senate: routine obstruction by the secret, silent filibuster…Senator Merkley will continue his discussions with Leader Reid, and continue pushing for a real talking filibuster in any final package put together.” If Democrats hope to accomplish anything in the Senate these next two years, and actually be able to present passed legislation to the American people when the midterms come around in 2014, then it’s crucial for Harry Reid to take Senator Merkley’s advice, and pass strong filibuster reform.

And finally…Indiana Republicans are taking their cues from Glenn Beck. Two Indiana State Republicans have introduced legislation to outlaw the implementation of the UN’s Agenda 21 initiative – which is a modest, non-binding measure to encourage nations to support more sustainable environments. But according to Glenn Beck, who is currently promoting a new book titled “Agenda 21”, this initiative is the UN’s attempt to enact one-world government, and force us all into some sort of dystopia. There’s no proof whatsoever to back up Beck’s claims – but that hasn’t stopped Republican lawmakers in Georgia, Tennessee, and now Indiana, from taking action against it. The question we all have to face now is – what happens to our two-party American political system – when one party has flown over the cuckoo’s nest, and is basing their legislative agenda on paranoid conspiracy theories promoted by Glenn Beck? 

And that’s the way it is today – Tuesday, January 15, 2013. I’m Thom Hartmann – on the news. 

America’s War for Reality

The real struggle confronting the United States is not between the Right and the Left in any traditional sense, but between those who believe in reality and those who are entranced by unreality. It is a battle that is testing whether fact-based people have the same determination to fight for their real-world view as those who operate in a fact-free space do in defending their illusions.President Ronald Reagan.

These battle lines do relate somewhat to the Right/Left divide because today’s right-wing has embraced ideological propaganda as truth more aggressively and completely than those on the Left, though the Left (and the Center, too) are surely not immune from the practice of ignoring facts in pursuit of some useful agit-prop.

But key elements of the American Right have set up permanent residence in the world of make-believe, making any commonsense approach to the real-world challenges nearly politically impossible. The Right’s fantasists also have the passions of true-believers, like a cult that gets angrier the more its views are questioned.

So, it doesn’t matter that scientific evidence proves global warming is real; the deniers will insist the facts are simply a government ploy to impose “tyranny.” It doesn’t matter how many schoolchildren are slaughtered by semi-automatic assault rifles – or what the real history of the Second Amendment was. To the gun fanatics, the Framers wanted armed rebellion against the non-violent political process they worked so hard to create.

On more narrow questions, it doesn’t matter whether President Barack Obama presents his short or long birth certificates, he must have somehow fabricated the Hawaiian state records to hide his Kenyan birth. Oh, yes, and Obama is “lazy” even though he may appear to an objective observer to be a multi-tasking workaholic.

Simply put, the Right fights harder for its fantasyland than the rest of America does for the real world.

The American Right’s collective departure from reality can be traced back decades, but clearly accelerated with the emergence of former actor Ronald Reagan on the national stage. Even his admirers acknowledge that Reagan had a strained relationship with facts, preferring to illustrate his points with distorted or apocryphal anecdotes.

Reagan’s detachment from reality extended from foreign policy to economics. As his rival for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination, George H.W. Bush famously labeled Reagan’s supply-side policies – of massive tax cuts for the rich which would supposedly raise more revenues – as “voodoo economics.”

But Bush, who knew better, then succumbed to Reagan’s political clout as he accepted Reagan’s vice presidential offer. In that way, the senior Bush would become a model for how other figures in the Establishment would pragmatically bend to Reagan’s casual disregard for reality.

Perception Management

The Reagan administration also built around the President a propaganda infrastructure that systematically punished politicians, citizens, journalists or anyone who dared challenge the fantasies. This private-public collaboration – coordinating right-wing media with government disinformationists – brought home to America the CIA’s strategy of “perception management” normally aimed at hostile populations.

Thus, the Nicaraguan Contras, who in reality were drug-connected terrorists roaming the countryside murdering, torturing and raping, became “the moral equivalent” of America’s Founding Fathers. To say otherwise marked you as a troublemaker who had to be “controversialized” and marginalized.

The remarkable success of Reagan’s propaganda was a lesson not lost on a young generation of Republican operatives and the emerging neoconservatives who held key jobs in Reagan’s Central American and public-diplomacy operations, the likes of Elliott Abrams and Robert Kagan. The neocons’ devotion to imperialism abroad seemed to motivate their growing disdain for empiricism at home. Facts didn’t matter; results did. [See Robert Parry’s Lost History.]

But this strategy wouldn’t have worked if not for gullible rank-and-file right-wingers who were manipulated by an endless series of false narratives. The Republican political pros manipulated the racial resentments of neo-Confederates, the religious zeal of fundamentalist Christians, and the free-market hero worship of Ayn Rand acolytes.

"What was left of the Left often behaved like disgruntled fans in the bleachers booing everyone on the field, the bad guys who were doing terrible things as well as the not-so-bad guys who were doing the best they could under impossible conditions."

That these techniques succeeded in a political system that guaranteed freedom of speech and the press was not only a testament to the skills of Republican operatives like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. It was an indictment of America’s timid Center and the nation’s ineffectual Left. Simply put, the Right fought harder for its fantasyland than the rest of America did for the real world.

There were a number of key turning points in this “info-war.” For instance, Reagan’s secret relationship with the Iranian mullahs was partly revealed in the Iran-Contra scandal, but its apparent origins in treacherous Republican activities during Campaign 1980 – contacting Iran behind President Jimmy Carter’s back – were swept under the rug by mainstream Democrats and the Washington press corps.

Similarly, evidence of Contra drug-trafficking – and even CIA admissions about covering up and protecting those crimes – were downplayed by the major newspapers, including the Washington Post and the New York Times. Ditto the work of Central American truth commissions exposing massive human rights violations that Reagan aided and abetted.

The fear of taking on the Reagan propaganda machine in any serious or consistent way was so great that nearly everyone looked to their careers or their personal pleasures. One side dug in for political warfare and the other, too often, favored trips to wine country.

Distrusting the MSM

As this anti-empiricism deepened over several decades, the remaining thinking people in America came to distrust the mainstream. The initials “MSM” – standing for “mainstream media” – became an expression of derision and contempt, not undeserved given the MSM’s repeated failure to fight for the truth.

National Democrats, too, showed little fight. When evidence of Republican misconduct was available – as in the investigations of the early 1990s into Iran-Contra, Iraq-gate and the October Surprise case – accommodating Democrats, such as Rep. Lee Hamilton and Sen. David Boren chose to look the other way. [See Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.]

The Democrats even submitted when the Right and the Republicans overturned the electoral will of the American people, as happened in Election 2000 when George W. Bush stole the Florida election and thus the White House from Al Gore. [For details, see the book, Neck Deep.]

In the decades after the Vietnam War, the American Left also drifted into irrelevance. Indeed, it’s common in some circles on the Left to observe that “America has no Left.” But what was left of the Left often behaved like disgruntled fans in the bleachers booing everyone on the field, the bad guys who were doing terrible things as well as the not-so-bad guys who were doing the best they could under impossible conditions.

"The country is going to need its conscious inhabitants of the real world to stand up with at least the same determination as the deluded denizens of the made-up world."

This post-modern United States may have reached its nadir with George W. Bush’s presidency. In 2002-03, patently false claims were made about Iraq’s WMD and virtually no one in a position of power had the courage to challenge the lies. Deceived by Bush and the neocons – with the help of centrists like Colin Powell and the editors of the Washington Post – the nation lurched off into an aggressive war of choice.

Sometimes, the Right’s contempt for reality was expressed openly. When author Ron Suskind interviewed members of the Bush administration in 2004, he encountered a withering contempt for people who refused to adjust to the new faith-based world.

Citing an unnamed senior aide to George W. Bush, Suskind wrote: “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ …

“‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”

Reality Bites Back

Despite this imperial arrogance, real reality gradually reasserted itself, both in the bloody stalemate in Iraq and in the economic crises that Bush’s anti-regulatory and low-tax policies created at home. By Election 2008, the American people were awaking with a terrible hangover from a three-decade binge on anti-reality moonshine.

In that sense, the election of Barack Obama represented a potential turning point. However, the angry Right that Ronald Reagan had built – and the corresponding crippling effects on the Center and the Left – didn’t just disappear.

The Right counterattacked ferociously against the nation’s first African-American president, even intimating violent revolution if Obama acted on his electoral mandate; Obama often behaved like one of those accommodating Democrats (in retaining much of Bush’s national security team, for instance); the mainstream press remained careerist; and the Left demanded perfection regardless of the political difficulties.

This combination of dysfunction contributed to the rise of the Tea Party and the Republican congressional victories in 2010. But Election 2012, with Obama’s reelection and a general rejection of Tea Party fanaticism, has created the chance of a do-over for American rationalists.

After all, the United States continues to see the consequences of three decades of right-wing delusions, including high unemployment; massive deficits; self-inflicted financial crises; a degraded middle class; poor health care for millions; a crumbling infrastructure; an overheating planet; costly foreign wars; a bloated Pentagon budget; and children massacred by troubled young men with ridiculously easy access to semi-automatic assault rifles.

Yet, if rational and pragmatic solutions are ever going to be applied to these problems, it is not just going to require that President Obama display more spine. The country is going to need its conscious inhabitants of the real world to stand up with at least the same determination as the deluded denizens of the made-up world.

Of course, this fight will be nasty and unpleasant. It will require resources, patience and toughness. But there is no other answer. Reality must be recovered and protected – if the planet and the children are to be saved.

© 2012 Consortium News

Robert Parry

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat. His two previous books are Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'.

Aaron Swartz’s Politics

Aaron Swartz was my friend, and I will always miss him. I think it’s important that, as we remember him, we remember that Aaron had a much broader agenda than the information freedom fights for which he had become known. Most people have focused on Aaron’s work as an advocate for more open information systems, because that’s what the Feds went after him for, and because he’s well-understood as a technologist who founded Reddit and invented RSS. But I knew a different side of him. I knew Aaron as a political activist interested in health care, financial corruption, and the drug war (we were working on a project on that just before he died). He was a great technologist, for sure, but when we were working together that was not all I saw.

In 2009, I was working in Rep. Alan Grayson’s office as a policy advisor. We were engaged in fights around the health care bill that eventually became Obamacare, as well as a much narrower but significant fight on auditing the Federal Reserve that eventually became a provision in Dodd-Frank. Aaron came into our office to intern for a few weeks to learn about Congress and how bills were put together. He worked with me on organizing the campaign within the Financial Services Committee to pass the amendment sponsored by Ron Paul and Alan Grayson on transparency at the Fed. He helped with the website NamesOfTheDead.com, a site dedicated to publicizing the 44,000 Americans that die every year because they don’t have health insurance. Aaron learned about Congress by just spending time there, which seems like an obvious thing to do. Many activists prefer to keep their distance from policymakers, because they are afraid of the complexity of the system and believe that it is inherently corrupting. Aaron, as with much of his endeavors, simply let his curiosity, which he saw as synonymous with brilliance, drive him.

Aaron also spent a lot of time learning how advocacy and electoral politics works from outside of Congress. He helped found the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a group that sought to replace existing political consulting machinery in the Democratic Party. At the PCCC, he worked on stopping Ben Bernanke’s reconfirmation (the email Aaron wrote called him “Bailout Ben”), auditing the Fed and passing health care reform. I remember he sent me this video of Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, on Reddit, offering his support to Grayson’s provision. A very small piece of the victory on Fed openness belongs to Aaron.

By the time I met and became friends with Aaron, he had already helped create RSS and co-founded and sold Reddit. He didn’t have to act with intellectual humility when confronting the political system, but he did. Rather than approach politics as so many successful entrepreneurs do, which is to say, try to meet top politicians and befriend them, Aaron sought to understand the system itself. He read political blogs, what I can only presume are gobs of history books (like Tom Ferguson’s Golden Rule, one of the most important books on politics that almost no one under 40 has read), and began talking to organizers and political advocates. He wanted, first and foremost, to know. He learned about elections, political advertising, the data behind voting, and grassroots organizing. He began understanding policy, by learning about Congressional process, its intersection with politics, and how staff and influence networks work on the Hill and through agencies. He analyzed money. He analyzed corruption.

And he understood how it worked. In November of 2008, Aaron emailed me  the following: “apologies if you’ve already seen it, but check out this mash note to Rubin from Lay. ahh, politics.” This was attached to the message.

This note, from Enron CEO Ken Lay to Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, perfectly encapsulates the closed and corroded nature of our political system – two corporate good ole boys, one running Treasury and one running Enron, passing mash notes. This was everything Aaron hated, and fought against. What I respected about Aaron is that he burned with a desire for justice, but also felt a profound desire to understand the system he was attempting to reorganize. He didn’t throw up his hands lazily and curse at corruption, he spent enormous amounts of time and energy learning about and working the political system. From founding Reddit, to fighting the Fed. That was Aaron.

Aaron approached politics like he approached technology. His method was as follows - (1) Learn (2) Try (3) Gab (4) Build. He was methodical about his work, and his approach to life - this essay on procrastination will give you a good window into his mind. Aaron liked to “lean in” to difficult problems, work at them until he could break them down and solve them. He had no illusions about politics, which is why he eventually became so good at it. He didn’t disdain the political process the way so many choose to, but he also didn’t engage in flowery lazy thoughts about the glory of checks and balances. He broke politics down and systematically attempted to understand the system. Aaron learned, tried, gabbed, and then built.

This is a note I got from him years ago, when we were trying to put together flow charts of corporate PAC money and where it went.

“Been playing around with the numbers tonight. Turns out corporate PAC money explains 45% of the variance in ProgressivePunch scores among Dems. Scatterplot attached. Right is progressive, down is no corporate PAC money. So you can see how all the people with less than 80% progressive punch scores get more than 20% of their money from PACs.”

This is a chart of power, one of many Aaron put together to educate himself (and in this case, me). Most geeks hate the political system, and are at the same time awed by it. They don’t actually approach it with any respect for the underlying architecture of power, but at the same time, they are impressed by political figures with titles. Aaron recognized that politics is a corrupt money driven system, but also that it could be cracked if you spent the time to understand the moving parts. He figured out that business alliances, grassroots organizing, and direct lobbying to build coalitions was powerful, whereas access alone was a mirage. He worked very hard to understand how policy changes work, which ultimately culminated in his successful campaign to stop SOPA in 2011. This took many years of work and a remarkable amount of humility on his part.

But he was driven by a desire for justice, and not just for open information. He wanted an end to the drug war, he wanted a financial system not dominated by Bob Rubin, and he wanted monetary policy run to help ordinary people. Some of his last tweets are on monetary policy, and the platinum coin option for raising the debt ceiling (which is a round-about way of preventing cuts to social welfare programs for the elderly). Aaron was a liberal who saw class and race as core driving forces in American politics. In a lovely essay on how he organized his career, he made this clear in a very charming but pointed way.

So how did I get a job like mine? Undoubtedly, the first step is to choose the right genes: I was born white, male, American. My family was fairly well-off and my father worked in the computer industry. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any way of choosing these things, so that probably isn’t much help to you.

But, on the other hand, when I started I was a very young kid stuck in a small town in the middle of the country. So I did have to figure out some tricks for getting out of that. In the hopes of making life a little less unfair, I thought I’d share them with you.

Making “life a little less unfair.” Those aren’t the words of a techno-utopianist, those are the words of a liberal political organizer. They remind me of how Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has described her own work. Aaron knew life would always be unfair, but that was no reason not to try to make society better. He had no illusions about power but maintained hope for our society if, I suppose, not always for himself. This is a very difficult way to approach the world, but it’s why he was so heroic in how he acted. I want people to understand that Aaron sought not open information systems, but justice. Aaron believed passionately in the scientific method as a guide for organizing our society, and in that open-minded but powerful critique, he was a technocratic liberal. His leanings sometimes moved him towards more radical postures because he recognized that our governing institutions had become malevolent, but he was not an anarchist.

I am very angry Aaron is dead. I’ve been crying off and on for a few days, as it hits me that he’s gone forever. Aaron accomplished more in 13 than nearly everyone I know will get done in their entire lives, and his breadth of knowledge and creativity in politics were stunning, all the more so since he was equally well-versed in many other fields. But what I respected was his curiosity and open-mindedness. He truly loved knowledge, and loved people who would share it. We used to argue about politics, him a hopeful and intellectually honest technocratic liberal and me as someone who had lost faith in our social institutions. We made each other really angry sometimes, because I thought he was too sympathetic to establishment norms, and he thought I couldn’t emotionally acknowledge when technocrats had useful things to say. But I respected him, and he frequently changed my mind.  I saw that what looked like stubbornness was just intellectual honesty and a deep thirst for evidence. He wanted to understand politics, because he thought that understanding, and then action, was the key to justice.

As I said, I am very angry that he is dead. I don’t want to get into the specifics of his case, because others have discussed it and the political elements of it more eloquently than I ever could. His family and partner have put out a powerful statement placing blame appropriately.

Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.

I want to make a few points about why it’s not just sad that he is gone, but a tragedy, a symbol for all of us, and a call to action.

Aaron suffered from depression, but that is not why he died. Aaron is dead because the institutions that govern our society have decided that it is more important to target geniuses like Aaron than nurture them, because the values he sought – openness, justice, curiosity – are values these institutions now oppose. In previous generations, people like Aaron would have been treasured and recognized as the remarkable gifts they are. We do not live in a world like that today. And Aaron would be the first to point out, if he could observe the discussion happening now, that the pressure he felt from the an oppressive government is felt by millions of people, every year. I’m glad his family have not let the justice system off the hook, and have not allowed this suicide to be medicalized, or the fault of one prosecutor. What happened to Aaron is not isolated to Aaron, but is the flip side of the corruption he hated.

As we think about what happened to Aaron, we need to recognize that it was not just prosecutorial overreach that killed him. That’s too easy, because that implies it’s one bad apple. We know that’s not true. What killed him was corruption. Corruption isn’t just people profiting from betraying the public interest. It’s also people being punished for upholding the public interest. In our institutions of power, when you do the right thing and challenge abusive power, you end up destroying a job prospect, an economic opportunity, a political or social connection, or an opportunity for media. Or if you are truly dangerous and brilliantly subversive, as Aaron was, you are bankrupted and destroyed. There’s a reason whistleblowers get fired. There’s a reason Bradley Manning is in jail. There’s a reason the only CIA official who has gone to jail for torture is the person – John Kiriako - who told the world it was going on. There’s a reason those who destroyed the financial system “dine at the White House”, as Lawrence Lessig put it. There’s a reason former Senator Russ Feingold is a college professor whereas former Senator Chris Dodd is now a multi-millionaire. There’s a reason DOJ officials do not go after bankers who illegally foreclose, and then get jobs as partners in white collar criminal defense. There’s a reason no one has been held accountable for decisions leading to the financial crisis, or the war in Iraq. This reason is the modern ethic in American society that defines success as climbing up the ladder, consequences be damned. Corrupt self-interest, when it goes systemwide, demands that it protect rentiers from people like Aaron, that it intimidate, co-opt, humiliate, fire, destroy, and/or bankrupt those who stand for justice.

More prosaically, the person who warned about the downside in a meeting gets cut out of the loop, or the former politician who tries to reform an industry sector finds his or her job opportunities sparse and unappealing next to his soon to be millionaire go along get along colleagues. I’ve seen this happen to high level former officials who have done good, and among students who challenge power as their colleagues go to become junior analysts on Wall Street. And now we’ve seen these same forces kill our friend.

It’s important for us to recognize that Aaron is just an extreme example of a force that targets all of us. He eschewed the traditional paths to wealth and power, dropping out of college after a year because it wasn’t intellectually stimulating. After co-founding and selling Reddit, and establishing his own financial security, he wandered and acted, calling himself an “applied sociologist.”  He helped in small personal ways, offering encouragement to journalists like Mike Elk after Elk had broken a significant story and gotten pushback from colleagues. In my inbox, every birthday, I got a lovely note from Aaron offering me encouragement and telling me how much he admired my voice. He was a profoundly kind man, and I will now never be able to repay him for the love and kindness he showed me. There’s no medal of honor for someone like this, no Oscar, no institutional way of saying “here’s someone who did a lot of good for a lot of people.” This is because our institutions are corrupt, and wanted to quelch the Aaron Swartz’s of the world. Ultimately, they killed him. I hope that we remember Aaron in the way he should be remembered, as a hero and an inspiration.

In six days, on January 18th, it’s the one year anniversary of the blackout of Wikipedia, and some have discussed celebrating it as Internet Freedom Day. Maybe we should call this Aaron Swartz Day, in honor of this heroic figure. While what happened that day was technically about the internet, it should be remembered, and Aaron should be remembered, in the context of social justice. That day was about a call for a different world, not just protecting our ability to access web sites. And we should remember these underlying values. It would help people understand that justice can be extremely costly, and that we risk much when we allow those who do the right thing to be punished. Somehow, we need to rebuild a culture that respects people like Aaron and turns away from the greed and rent-extraction that he hated. There’s a cycle in American history, of religious “Great Awakenings”, where new cultural systems emerge in the form of religion, often sweeping through communities of young people dissatisfied with the society they see around them. Perhaps that is what we see in the Slow Food movement, or gay rights movement, or the spread of walkable communities and decline of vehicle miles, or maker movement, or the increasing acceptance of meditation and therapy, or any number of other cultural changes in our society. I don’t know. I’m sure many of these can be subverted. What I do know is that if we are to honor Aaron’s life, we will recognize him as a broad social justice activist who cared about transforming our society, and acted to do so. And we will take up his fight as our own.

Corporate Gold on the Fiscal Cliff

In economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s book, End This Depression Now!, there’s a chapter titled “The Second Gilded Age” in which he describes the extraordinary rise in wealth and power of the very rich during this era of unregulated greed. Since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, the top one percent of Americans have seen their incomes increase by 275 percent. After accounting for inflation, the typical hourly wage for a worker has increased just $1.23.

Big Money, as Krugman writes in his book, buys Big Influence. And that’s why the financiers of Wall Street never truly experience regime change — their cash brings both political parties to heel. So it is that the policies that got us where we are today — in this big ditch of chronic financial depression — have done little for most, but have been very good to a few at the top.

But they’re not satisfied with having only most of it — they want it all. If Krugman were writing his book today, he could find plenty of evidence in the deal that supposedly kept us from going over the fiscal cliff. Behind closed doors, Congress larded it with corporate tax breaks worth tens of billions of dollars — everything from tax credits for NASCAR racing and the railroads to subsidies for Hollywood, rebates for the rum industry and loopholes for off-shore financing that could help giant multinationals like General Electric avoid billions of dollars in corporate income taxes.

Writing in the conservative Washington Examiner, columnist Tim Carney says many of these expensive giveaways were “spawned by a web of lobbyists, donors and staffers surrounding Democratic Sen. Max Baucus of Montana,” chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. As we know from the Obamacare fight, Baucus is a connoisseur of revolving door corruption. “Pick any one of the special-interest tax breaks extended by the cliff deal,” Carney wrote, “and you’re likely to find a former Baucus aide who lobbied for it on behalf of a large corporation or industry organization.” Even the pro-business Wall Street Journal was appalled. They called it a “Crony Capitalist Blowout.”

And so it was — and more. It was payback time for all those campaign donations. CEOs and lobbyists were tripping over themselves as they traipsed up and down Pennsylvania Avenue between Congress and the White House. You’ve no doubt heard about Fix the Debt, that group of business execs and retired politicians taking out TV ads and campaigning to slash the deficit. In The New York Times, Nick Confessorereported, “…close to half of the members of Fix the Debt’s board and steering committee have ties to companies that have engaged in lobbying on taxes and spending, often to preserve tax breaks and other special treatment.”

Get it? They’re privately protecting their interests as they publicly urge austerity on everyone else.

Lloyd Blankfein, CEO and chair of the global investment giant Goldman Sachs, is on Fix the Debt’s Fiscal Leadership Council. Here’s what he said when asked by CBS News’ Scott Pelley about how he would reduce the federal deficit: “You’re going to have to undoubtedly do something to lower people’s expectations — the entitlements and what people think that they’re going to get, because it’s not going to — they’re not going to get it… Social Security wasn’t devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career… in general, entitlements have to be slowed down and contained.”

Yes, but Blankfein and Goldman Sachs make sure their entitlements aren’t touched! Here’s the story: After 9/11, Congress created tax-exempt Liberty Zone bonds to help small businesses rebuild near Ground Zero. Turns out Goldman’s friends in high places consider it a small business, too, although it made $5.6 billion in profits last year. As the fiscal cliff fiasco was playing out over New Year’s Eve, faster than the ball dropped in Times Square, a deal was struck that will extend the subsidies for Goldman’s fancy new headquarters in lower Manhattan. In their 43 stories of glass and steel, and a footprint two city blocks long, Goldman Sachs reigns supreme – thanks to a system rigged by and for the powerful rich.

And then, according to The Wall Street Journal, just before the fiscal cliff deal’s higher individual tax rates kicked in, Goldman handed “Lloyd Blankfein and his top lieutenants a total of $65 million in restricted stock” — bonuses awarded a month earlier than usual so they could all beat the coming tax hike from which they have been spared for more than ten lucrative years.

It won’t surprise you to learn that, “Corporations announced more special dividends last month than in any other December since at least 1955.” Doing everything they can to avoid helping pay off the debt their CEOs have been urging Congress to cut.

As for working people — tough luck. Because the fiscal cliff deal ends the cut in payroll taxes, the average worker this year will take home about a thousand dollars less.

The GOP’s Boldest Election-Rigging Move Yet

Ballots are run though counting machines at a polling station in Janesville, Wis., on Election Day, Nov. 6, 2012. (Photo: Narayan Mahon / The New York Times)Ballots are run though counting machines at a polling station in Janesville, Wis., on Election Day, Nov. 6, 2012. (Photo: Narayan Mahon / The New York Times)Boris Bazhanov was Joseph Stalin’s personal secretary from 1923 to 1928, and later served as secretary of the Soviet Political Bureau. In his memoirs published in 1980, he recounts something Stalin told him about voting.

I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how,” Stalin said. “But what is extremely important is this – who will count the votes, and how.” Despite never having to worry about surviving popular elections, or really being a fan of democracy, Stalin knew the trick to subverting a democracy wasn’t in getting your people to vote, but instead was in making sure their votes were counted in a way that made sure your side won.

You can get 100% of the population voting, but if you can selectively decide which votes to count and which to throw out, you’ll win every time.  As playwright Tom Stoppard quips in his play, Jumpers, “It’s not the voting that’s democracy; it’s the counting.”  

Now it appears the Republican Party has picked up on this, and is preparing for its boldest maneuver yet to ensure Democrats never again win the White House, by changing the way presidential Electoral Votes are counted.

The plan works like this: Instead of giving all of a state’s Electoral College votes to the popular vote winner of that state, Republicans want Electoral College votes in a small number of states to be doled out based on who won each Congressional district, plus two votes going to the popular vote winner. 

Of course, those Congressional districts in several traditionally blue states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan were drawn by newly-elected Republicans state legislatures after the 2010 census. And they were drawn in a way that already gives Republicans an advantage by carving up Democratic strongholds and creating “safe” Republican seats. That’s how Republicans kept control of the House of Representatives in 2012, despite House Democrats winning  a million and a half more votes nationwide than House Republicans.

For example, last November President Obama won the popular vote in Wisconsin and thus received all of Wisconsin’s 10 Electoral College votes. But under this new Republican plan, he would have only received one Electoral College vote for each Congressional district that he won. Since he only won three newly-gerrymandered districts, he would have only gotten three votes, plus two more votes for winning the popular vote. Mitt Romney, who won five gerrymandered districts, would have received five votes. So, under this scenario, despite winning the popular vote in Wisconsin by a 7-point landslide last November, President Obama would have walked away from the Badger State with an equal number of Electoral College votes as Mitt Romney – five each.

Now you can see why Republicans like this idea!

With this simple tweak in how Electoral College votes are counted, the big win for the President in Wisconsin turns into a tie. In fact, had all the battleground states adopted this new vote counting scheme, Mitt Romney would be our President today, despite losing the popular, majority vote in every single battleground state: Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and so on.

The way Congressional districts in several blue states are drawn today means it would be virtually impossible for a Democrat to win the White House should all of these states adopt this new method of counting Electoral College votes – at least until 2020, when the next census comes due and Congressional districts are redrawn.

Again, as Stalin said, it’s not about who votes, it’s about how the votes are counted.

Now, as you might imagine, an idea like this is explosive. It would hand the White House over to Republican one-party rule. And any political party that truly believes in a democracy that reflects the will of the people would never embrace an election-rigging scheme like this.      

But Republicans have no shame.

This exact idea was first proposed in 2011 by Pennsylvania’s Republican Governor Tom Corbett. Again, that’s a Governor proposing it and not some local crackpot party official. Luckily, Corbett abandoned it before the election, or else Mitt Romney would have won the state’s majority share of Electoral College votes despite losing the popular vote statewide.

But, after seeing how bad they got shellacked in November, more and more prominent Republicans are voicing their support for this idea. The idea has been revived in Pennsylvania. Also, Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker said he supports it, and his colleague, Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos is promising to introduce legislation to make it happen. Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State, Jon Husted, wants to do it, too. And so, too, do Republican state lawmakers in Michigan.

But most shocking of all, the latest endorser of this election-rigging scheme is none other than the top Republican Party official himself, RNC Chair Reince Preibus. In an interview with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Priebus said, “I think it’s something that a lot of states that have been consistently blue that are fully controlled red out to be looking at.” 

What all this adds up to is this: Republicans are really going to try to do this. Over the next few years, they really are going to try to rig the next election.

After all, what other choice do they have?

They could ditch trickle-down economics, which the American middle class now knows is nothing more than a scam that makes the rich richer while making the poor poorer. But since that would mean casting aside what George W. Bush referred to as his “base” – the billionaire class – we know that won’t happen.

Republicans could just accept the issue of women’s’ choice as settled and stop trying to limit women’s access to contraceptives or talking about “legitimate” rape. But that might cause the religious zealots on the Right who are preparing for the rapture to stop donating, and even leave the Republican Party. So, that won’t happen.

They could adopt a more compassionate approach to minorities in hopes of adapting to America’s changing demographics. Or they could just ditch their war on the New Deal and accept that the majority of Americans like social insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security. But we know that won’t happen, either – there’s too much money there that their bankster buddies on Wall Street want to get their hands on.

The truth of the matter is, Republicans simply aren’t willing to say “no” to the billionaires, and evolve from their prehistoric and unelectable current form into a political party that can actually build majority coalitions once again.

So, the only option left for a party that can’t win elections is to rig elections.

Consider this a warning. We thought we’d seen the worse.  But Voter Suppression ID laws, cuts to early voting, long lines in heavily Democratic precincts, and new hurdles to voter registration are nothing compared to this latest vote-rigging scheme.

While most of us are focused on “fiscal cliffs” and budget battles in Washington, DC, the real fight for the future of our democracy is, right now, happening in State legislatures in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan.

To badly paraphrase Paul Revere: Awaken the citizenry and spread the word!

Gun, ammunition sales soar in US

Gun and ammunition sales in the US have spiked over the past two weeks as people rush to stock up arsenals before any restrictions that might be imposed, Press TV reports.

As impending restrictions on gun sales are spurring fear among some gun owners that they won’t have easy access to weaponry, leading liberal lawmakers plead for stores to curb gun sales.

“I’m urging our major gun retailers in America; the Walmart and the Sports Authority, to suspend sales of modern assault-style weapons until the Congress is able to fully consider and vote on legislation to curb gun violence,” said US Senator Chuck Schumer.

In a series of meetings with gun policy stakeholders, including the National Rifle Association (NRA), US Vice President Joe Biden offered a comprehensive package of proposals on preventing gun violence in the country.

NRA officials left the talks disenchanted and challenged negotiations with the Vice President on gun policy. Biden is to offer its proposals to President Barack Obama on Tuesday.

“The National Rifle Association is one of the most useless and reactionary groups in America,” said US domestic policy analyst Brent Budowsky.

“They offered the President nothing. They don’t want to give up any guns. They want people running around with machine guns and semi-automatic weapons.”


Following the Newtown shooting spree, President Obama appointed Biden to lead an effort to find proposals "to reduce the epidemic of gun violence.” The president also pledged to present the proposals to Congress.

Biden’s suggestions include universal background checks and limits on high capacity clips like the one used in the Sandy Hook shooting spree, which left 20 children and six adults dead on December 14, 2012.

TE/SS

Hagel Prostrates Himself Before the Lobby, Gets Votes

The drama around Chuck Hagel's nomination for Secretary of Defense seems to be heading into its predictable third act. While much attention has been given to Hagel's heterodox views (for D.C.) on the Middle East, and the threat that several Democrats might oppose his nomination over Israel, both the nominee and the party seem to be getting in line behind the President (and conveniently the lobby).Chuck Hagel's nomination for Secretary of Defense seems to be heading into its predictable third act.

Politico is reporting this morning on a letter Hagel sent to California Sen. Barbara Boxer answering her concerns regarding his views on U.S. policy towards Iran and Israel, the Israel lobby, as well as issues pertaining to women and gays and lesbians in the military. You can read Hagel's letter here. In it he does an about face on several positions to move towards the conventional wisdom in Washington. The most glaring example is the issue of sanctions against Iran, where Hagel had previously argued against unilateral U.S. sanctions in favor of multilaterial action. No longer. From the letter:

I have long supported economic sanctions that are applied in concert with allies and partners. I strongly supported the Obama Administation's approach which has brought to bear unprecedented multilateral sanctions on Iran, including UN Council Resolution 1929. Regarding unilateral sanctions, I have told the President I completely support his policy on Iran. I agree that with Iran's continued rejection of diplomatic overtures, further effective sanctions, both multilateral and unilateral -- may be necessary and I will support the President.

Hagel also apologized for using the term "Jewish lobby" and promised the special relationship is in safe hands if he is confirmed:

As to my use of the phrase "Jewish lobby" to describe those who advocate for a strong U.S.-Israeli relationship, I've acknowledged that this was a very poor choice of words. I've said so publicly and I regret saying it. I used that terminology only once, in an interview. I recognize that this kind of language can be construed as anti-Israel.  I know the pro-Israel lobby is comprised of both Jewish and non-Jewish Americans. In the Senate, I was a strong supporter of Defense appropriations, which provided enduring support for Israel’s security. Most Americans, myself included, are overwhelmingly supportive of a strong U.S.-Israel strategic and security relationship.

Hagel proves his pro-Israel bona fides by promising to deepen military cooperation with Israel and repeating a beltway mantra as American as baseball and apple cake:

America’s relationship with Israel is one that is fundamentally built on our nations shared values, common interests and democratic ideals. The Middle East is undergoing dramatic and historic changes, ones which surround Israel with tremendous uncertainty. We are working together daily, hand in hand, in unprecedented ways, to counter old, new and emerging mutual threats. I fully intend to expand the depth and breadth of U.S.-Israel cooperation.

Caving to political pressure sure pays quick dividends. Following the letter, Boxer annoucned she is on board with the Hagel nomination. Charles Schumer also announced he will support Hagel following similar outreach. From the New York Times:

Of deepest concern to Mr. Schumer and many Israel advocacy groups, are Mr. Hagel’s positions on the nuclear threat posed by Iran, particularly his suggestions in the past that a military strike against Iran would be counterproductive. It is a position that is out of step with the Obama administration, which became increasingly hawkish on Iran during the 2012 campaign.

“On Iran, Senator Hagel rejected a strategy of containment and expressed the need to keep all options on the table in confronting that country,” Mr. Schumer said. “But he didn’t stop there. In our conversation, Senator Hagel made a crystal-clear promise that he would do ‘whatever it takes’ to stop Tehran from obtaining nuclear weapons, including the use of military force.”

As a senator from Nebraska, Mr. Hagel voted against several rounds of sanctions against Iran that ultimately passed the Senate, citing unilateral sanctions are ineffective. On this matter too, Mr. Schumer seemed to find comfort. “Senator Hagel clarified that he ‘completely’ supports President Obama’s current sanctions against Iran,” Mr. Schumer said. “He added that further unilateral sanctions against Iran could be effective and necessary.”

On nearly every other issue that Mr. Schumer brought up with Mr. Hagel — his views on the militant Islamist groups Hezbollah and Hamas, his prior comments about gays, his use of the term “Jewish lobby” to refer to Israel advocacy groups — all seemed to be tamped down in the meeting.

“I know some will question whether Senator Hagel’s assurances are merely attempts to quiet critics as he seeks confirmation to this critical post,” Mr. Schumer said. “But I don’t think so. Senator Hagel realizes the situation in the Middle East has changed, with Israel in a dramatically more endangered position than it was even five years ago.”

US set to lose top rating over debt ceiling. Again

A picture shows the entrance of Fitch ratings agency (AFP Photo / Miguel Medina)

A picture shows the entrance of Fitch ratings agency (AFP Photo / Miguel Medina)

If the US Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling and sends the country into default, it risks losing its top credit rating.

­One credit agency has already assured it may downgrade America’s score if there’s any sort of delay in coming up with a budget plan.

If the US fails to increase its debt limit by March 1, it may not be able to pay its bills and could fall into default. Fitch Ratings, a top credit agency, said Tuesday that it would downgrade the nation’s AAA credit rating if Congress fails to agree on a plan “in a timely manner”.

“In Fitch’s opinion, the debt ceiling is an ineffective and potentially dangerous mechanism for enforcing fiscal discipline,” the company said.

A credit rating influences a nation’s borrowing costs, which would be higher if a country proves unable to repay its debts. Lower credit ratings could potentially harm the US economy by increasing its borrowing costs. Even if the US were not sent into default, Fitch would consider downgrading America’s credit rating if it witnesses another heated bipartisan debate that stalls time-sensitive progress.

Fitch said on its website that a repeat of the 2011 congressional battle, which almost sent the US into default, would instigate a formal review of the country’s credit rating and increase skepticism in Congress’ ability to come to agreements.

“The pressure on the US rating, if anything, is increasing,” said David Riley, managing director of Fitch Ratings’ global sovereigns division. “We thought the 2011 crisis was a one-off event.”

Standard & Poor’s downgraded America’s AAA rating after Congress’ debt limit battle in 2011. Moody’s Investor Services did not downgrade the country’s rating, but gave it a negative outlook. The US is still burdened with this negative outlook, with Moody’s having expressed doubtfulness over its ability to come up with a deficit-reduction plan in a timely manner.

And even if the US once again averts the financial crisis, Fitch said it would consider downgrading the country’s rating anyway.

“In the absence of an agreed and credible medium-term deficit-reduction plan that would be consistent with sustaining the economic recovery and restoring confidence in the long-run sustainability of US public finances, the current negative outlook on the AAA rating is likely to be resolved with a downgrade later this year even if another debt-ceiling crisis is averted,” Fitch said.

And a downgraded credit rating is not the only consequence the country faces if it fails to raise the debt ceiling. The US may run out of cash to pay its bills, which would abandon those dependent on government assistance. The US would not be able to afford paying for Social Security, veterans benefits, US troops, aid for low-income families or government salaries.

In order to force the Obama administration to cut spending, some Republican leaders have pledged to allow the US to fall into default and shut down the government, thereby hurting the nation’s credit rating.

The top three credit rating agencies – Fitch Ratings, Standard & Poor’s, and Moody’s – have all at one point expressed doubt in Congress’ ability to raise the debt ceiling, and Fitch’s announcement makes the country’s economic outlook even more dire than before.

Farcebook

As we anxiously await the titanic announcement about to spew forth from Menlo Park, we thought a look at 2013's +20% performance was worthwhile. We would expect to hear a plethora of 'monetizing mobile' and a cajillion eyeballs must mean something. Will the Facebook phone replace the Obama-phone? Will being 'liked' provide external stimulus? Will they be merging with Dell (or Radioshack?) Feeling bullish? Be wary, implied vol is at its most expensivce to realized vol in 7 months... Rest assured, we will bring the critical headlines as they break...

  • *FACEBOOK SAYS IT'S A PRODUCT ANNOUNCEMENT                :FB US
  • *FACEBOOK ANNOUNCES GRAPH SEARCH                          :FB US

FB stumbling now -1.7%

Implied vol is very expensve to realizeds (i.e. people are 'hedged')...

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Eight Things I Miss About the Cold War

At a book festival in Los Angeles recently, some writers (myself included) were making the usual arguments about the problems with American politics in the 1950s -- until one panelist shocked the audience by declaring, “God, I miss the Cold War.”  His grandmother, he said, had come to California from Oklahoma with a grade-school education, but found a job in an aerospace factory in L.A. during World War II, joined the union, got healthcare and retirement benefits, and prospered in the Cold War years.  She ended up owning a house in the suburbs and sending her kids to UCLA.

Several older people in the audience leaped to their feet shouting, “What about McCarthyism?”  “The bomb?”  “Vietnam?”  “Nixon?”

All good points, of course.  After all, during the Cold War the U.S. did threaten to destroy the world with nuclear weapons, supported brutal dictators globally because they were anti-communist, and was responsible for the deaths of several million people in Korea and Vietnam, all in the name of defending freedom. And yet it’s not hard to join that writer in feeling a certain nostalgia for the Cold War era.  It couldn’t be a sadder thing to admit, given what happened in those years, but -- given what’s happened in these years -- who can doubt that the America of the 1950s and 1960s was, in some ways, simply a better place than the one we live in now? Here are eight things (from a prospectively longer list) we had then and don’t have now.

1. The president didn’t claim the right to kill American citizens without “the due process of law.”

Last year we learned that President Obama personally approved the killing-by-drone of an American citizen living abroad without any prior judicial proceedings. That was in Yemen, but as Amy Davidson wrote at the New Yorker website, “Why couldn’t it have been in Paris?”  Obama assures us that the people he orders assassinated are “terrorists.”  It would, however, be more accurate to call them “alleged terrorists,” or “alleged terrorist associates,” or “people said by some other government to be terrorists, or at least terroristic.”

Obama’s target in Yemen was Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who was said to be a senior figure in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.  According to the book Kill or Capture by Daniel Klaidman, the president told his advisors, “I want Awlaki. Don’t let up on him.”  Steve Coll of the New Yorker commented that this appears to be “the first instance in American history of a sitting president speaking of his intent to kill a particular U.S. citizen without that citizen having been charged formally with a crime or convicted at trial.”  (Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, whom no one claims was connected to terrorist activities or terror plots, was also killed in a separate drone attack.)

The problem, of course, is the due-process clause of the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits “any person” from being deprived of “life, liberty, or property without due process of law.”   It doesn’t say: "any person except for those the president believes to be terrorists."

It gets worse: the Justice Department can keep secret a memorandum providing the supposed “legal” justification for the targeted killing of a U.S. citizen, according to a January 2013 decision by a federal judge.  Ruling on a Freedom of Information lawsuit brought by the ACLU and the New York Times, Judge Colleen McMahon, wrote in her decision, “I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret.”

It's true that the CIA has admitted it had an assassination program during the Cold War -- described in the so-called “family jewels” or “horrors book,” compiled in 1973 under CIA Director James Schlesinger in response to Watergate-era inquiries and declassifiedin 2007.  But the targets were foreign leaders, especially Fidel Castro as well as the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba and the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo.  Still, presidents preferred “plausible deniability” in such situations, and certainly no president before Obama publicly claimed the legal right to order the killing of American citizens.  Indeed, before Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. regularly condemned “targeted killings” of suspected terrorists by Israel that were quite similar to those the president is now regularly ordering in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, Yemen, and possibly elsewhere.

2. We didn’t have a secret “terrorism-industrial complex.”

That’s the term coined by Dana Priest and William Arkin in their book Top Secret America to describe the ever-growing post-9/11 world of government agencies linked to private contractors charged with fighting terrorism.  During the Cold War, we had a handful of government agencies doing “top secret” work; today, they found, we have more than 1,200.

For example, Priest and Arkin found 51 federal organizations and military commands that attempt to track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.  And don’t forget the nearly 2,000 for-profit corporate contractors that engage in top-secret work, supposedly hunting terrorists.  The official budget for “intelligence” has increased from around $27 billion in the last years of the Cold War to $75 billion in 2012. Along with this massive expansion of government and private security activities has come a similarly humongous expansion of official secrecy: the number of classified documents has increased from perhaps 5 million a year before 1980 to 92 million in 2011, while Obama administration prosecutions of government whistleblowers have soared.

It’s true that the CIA and the FBI engaged in significant secret and illegal surveillance that included American citizens during the Cold War, but the scale was small compared to the post-9/11 world.

3. Organized labor was accepted as part of the social landscape. 

“Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of their right to join the union of their choice.” That’s what President Dwight D. Eisenhower said in 1952.  “Workers,” he added, “have a right to organize into unions and to bargain collectively with their employers,” and he affirmed that “a strong, free labor movement is an invigorating and necessary part of our industrial society.”  He caught the mood of the moment this way: “Should any political party attempt to… eliminate labor laws, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.”  “There is,” he acknowledged, “a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things, but their number is negligible... And they are stupid.” 

You certainly wouldn’t catch Barack Obama saying anything like that today.  

Back then, American unions were, in part, defended even by Republicans because they were considered a crucial aspect of the struggle against Communism.  Unlike Soviet workers, American ones, so the argument went, were free to join independent unions.  And amid a wave of productive wealth, union membership in Eisenhower’s America reached an all-time high: 34% of wage and salary workers in 1955.  In 2011, union membership in the private sector had fallen under 7%, a level not seen since 1932.

Of course, back in the Cold War era the government required unions to kick communists out of any leadership positions they held and unions that refused were driven out of existence.  Unions also repressed wildcat strikes and enforced labor peace in exchange for multi-year contracts with wage and benefit increases. But as we’ve learned in the last decades, if you’re a wageworker, almost any union is better than no union at all.

4. The government had to get a warrant before it could tap your phone. 

Today, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act (yes, thatrepetitive tongue twister is its real name) gives the government vast powers to spy on American citizens -- and it’s just been extended to 2017 in a bill that Obama enthusiastically signed on December 29th.  The current law allows the monitoring of electronic communications without an individualized court order, as long as the government claims its intent is to gather “foreign intelligence.”  In recent years, much that was once illegal has been made the law of the land.  Vast quantities of the emails and phone calls of Americans are being “data-mined.”  Amendments approved by Congress in 2008, for instance, provided "retroactive immunity to the telecom companies that assisted the Bush administration in its warrantless wiretapping program," which was then (or should have been) illegal, as the website Open Congress notes

There were several modest congressional attempts to amend the 2012 FISA extension act, including one that would have required the director of national intelligence to reveal how many Americans are being secretly monitored.  That amendment would in no way have limited the government’s actual spying program.  The Senate nevertheless rejected it, 52-43, in a nation that has locked itself down in a way that would have been inconceivable in the Cold War years.

It’s true that in the 1950s and 1960s judges typically gave the police and FBI the wiretap warrants they sought.  But it’s probably also true that having to submit requests to judges had a chilling effect on the urge of government authorities to engage in unlimited wiretapping.

5. The infrastructure was being expanded and strengthened.

Today, our infrastructure is crumbling: bridges are collapsing, sewer systems are falling apart, power grids are failing.  Many of those systems date from the immediate post-World War II years.  And the supposedly titanic struggle against communism at home and abroad helped build them.  The best-known example of those Cold War infrastructure construction programs was the congressionally mandated National Defense Highways Act of 1956, which led to the construction of 41,000 miles of the Interstate Highway System. It was the largest public works project in American history and it was necessary, according to the legislation, to “meet the requirements of the national defense in time of war.”  People called the new highways “freeways” or “interstates,” but the official name was "the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways."

Along with the construction of roads and bridges came a similar commitment to expanding water delivery systems and the electrical and telephone grids.  Spending on infrastructure as a share of gross domestic product peaked in the 1960s at 3.1%.  In 2007, it was down to 2.4% and is assumedly still falling.

Today the U.S. has dropped far behind potential global rivals in infrastructure development.  An official panel of 80 experts noted that China is spending $1 trillion on high-speed rail, highways, and other infrastructure over the next five years.  The U.S., according to the report, needs to invest $2 trillion simply to rebuild the roads, bridges, water lines, sewage systems, and dams constructed 40 to 50 years ago, systems that are now reaching the end of their planned life cycles.  But federal spending cuts mean that the burden of infrastructure repair and replacement will fall on state and local governments, whose resources, as everyone knows, are completely inadequate for the task.

Of course, it’s true that the freeways built in the 1950s made the automobile the essential form of transportation in America and led to the withering away of public mass transit, and that the environment suffered as a result.  Still, today’s collapsing bridges and sewers dramatize the loss of any serious national commitment to the public good.

6. College was cheap.

Tuition and fees at the University of California system in 1965 totaled $220.  That’s the equivalent of about $1,600 today, and in 1965 you were talking about the best public university in the world.  In 2012, the Regents of the University of California, presiding over an education system in crisis, raised tuition and fees for state residents to $13,200.  And American students are now at least $1 trillion in debt, thanks to college loans that could consign many to lifetimes as debtors in return for subprime educations.

In 1958, in the panic that followed the Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik, the first satellite, public universities got a massive infusion of federal money when the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) was passed.  The Department of Education website today explains that the purpose of the NDEA was “to help ensure that highly trained individuals would be available to help America compete with the Soviet Union in scientific and technical fields.”  For the first time, government grants became the major source of university funding for scientific research.  The Act included a generous student-loan program.

With the end of the Cold War, federal funding was cut and public universities had little choice but to begin to make up the difference by increasing tuitions and fees, making students pay more -- a lot more.

True, the NDEA grants in the 1960s required recipients to sign a demeaning oath swearing that they did not seek the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, and that lots of government funding then supported Cold War military and strategic objectives.  After all, the University of California operated the nuclear weapons labs at Livermore and Los Alamos. Still, compare that to today’s crumbling public education system nationwide and who wouldn’t feel nostalgia for the Cold War era?

7. We had a president who called for a “war on poverty.”

In his 1966 State of the Union address, President Lyndon Baines Johnson argued that “the richest Nation on earth… people who live in abundance unmatched on this globe” ought to “bring the most urgent decencies of life to all of your fellow Americans.”  LBJ insisted that it was possible both to fight communism globally (especially in Vietnam) and to fight poverty at home.  As the phrase then went, he called for guns and butter.  In addition, he was determined not simply to give money to poor people, but to help build “community action” groups that would organize them to define and fight for programs they wanted because, the president said, poor people know what’s best for themselves.

Of course, it’s true that Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” unlike the Vietnam War, was woefully underfunded, and that those community action groups were soon overpowered by local mayors and Democratic political machines.  But it’s also true that President Obama did not even consider poverty worth mentioning as an issue in his 2012 reelection campaign, despite the fact that it has spread in ways that would have shocked LBJ, and that income and wealth inequalities between rich and poor have reached levels not seen since the late 1920s.  Today, it’s still plenty of guns -- but butter, not so much.

8. We had a president who warned against “the excessive power of the military-industrial complex.”

In Eisenhower’s “farewell address,” delivered three days before John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, the departing president warned against the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” He declared that “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”  The speech introduced the phrase “military-industrial complex” into the vernacular.  It was a crucial moment in the Cold War: a president who had also been the nation’s top military commander in World War II was warning Americans about the dangers posed by the military he had commanded and its corporate and political supporters.

Ike was prompted to give the speech because of his disputes with Congress over the military budget.  He feared nuclear war and firmly opposed all talk about such a war being fought in a “limited” way.  He also knew that, when it came to the Soviet Union, American power was staggeringly preponderant.  And yet his opponents in the Democratic Party, the arms industry, and even the military were claiming that he hadn’t done enough for “defense” -- not enough weapons bought, not enough money spent.  President-elect Kennedy had just won the 1960 election by frightening Americans about a purely fictitious “missile gap” between the U.S. and the Soviets.

It’s true that Ike’s warning would have been far more meaningful had it been in his first or even second inaugural address, or any of his State of the Union speeches.  It’s also true that he had approved CIA coups in Iran and Guatemala, and had green-lighted planning for an invasion of Cuba (that would become Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs disaster).  He had also established Mutual Assured Destruction as the basis for Cold War military strategy, backed up with B-52s carrying atomic bombs in the air 24/7.

By the end of his second term, however, Ike had changed his mind.  His warning was not just against unnecessary spending, but also against institutions that were threatening a crisis he feared would bring the end of individual liberty.  “As one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization,” the president urged his fellow citizens to resist the military-industrial complex.  None of his successors has even tried, and in 2013 we’re living with the results.

...But there is one thing I do NOT miss about the Cold War: nuclear arsenals on hair-trigger alert.

Our Cold War enemy had nuclear weapons capable of destroying us, and the rest of the planet, many times over.  In 1991, when the Cold War ended, the Soviet Union had more than 27,000 nuclear weapons.  According to the Federation of American Scientists, these included more than 11,000 strategic nuclear weapons -- warheads on land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched missiles, and weapons on bombers capable of attacking the US -- along with more than 15,000 warheads for “tactical” use as artillery shells and short-range “battlefield” missiles, as well as missile defense interceptors, nuclear torpedoes, and nuclear weapons for shorter-range aircraft.  We learned in 1993 that the USSR at one time possessed almost 45,000 nuclear warheads, and still had nearly 1,200 tons of bomb-grade uranium.  (Of course, sizeable Russian -- and American -- nuclear arsenals still exist.)  In comparison to all that, the arsenalsof al-Qaeda and our other terrorist enemies are remarkably insignificant.

Hollywood’s Waterboard: Review of the CIA’s “Zero Dark Thirty”

spy

The Oscar nominations have been announced and despite much hope on this side of the pond there is no place for Skyfall in the Best Picture category. There is, however, a place for not one but two spy films telling good old fashioned patriotic tales: Argo and Zero Dark Thirty.  Argo tells the 1979-80 story of the ‘Canadian Caper’, part of the Iran hostage crisis in the wake of the ’79 revolution.  Zero Dark Thirty is the first big budget, big name production to depict the official story of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, culminating in his death in May 2011.  Along with Lincoln, it is looking to be a great year for chest-beating, flag-saluting U!-S!-A!-chanting types.

Like Skyfall, Zero Dark Thirty is primarily a human story, focusing on the work of one CIA agent who is trying to find Bin Laden. Unsurprisingly, she is an attractive, young, white female, the demographic of character with the broadest appeal in the Western world.  ’Maya’ is shown tracking down Bin Laden over a number of years via a closely-trusted courier. Her insistence and persistence are a major factor in the success of the narrative in reaching its bloody climax. The other major factor is torture.

The film opens with an audio montage from 9/11, including the most-discussed ‘is this real world or exercise?’ dialogue from the NORAD tapes. With the horror of the attacks still ringing in our ears we are thrown forward several years and shown a ‘black site’ at an ‘undisclosed location’ where we are party to extended scenes of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’.

Hollywood’s Waterboard

The ‘detainees’ are portrayed being waterboarded, beaten, constantly degraded and insulted, generally abused and in one scene dehumanised by being made to strip naked and then led around on the floor via a dog collar and lead.  The sexual undertones to all this, particularly when S&M bonkbuster 50 Shades of Grey is the most successful book in recent memory, are presumably intended to titillate the audience.  This is Hollywood torture, where attractive young white spies dominate and humiliate tall dark strange terrorists.

This theme of dehumanising the ‘terrorists’ while sympathetically humanising the intelligence agents torturing them makes up most of the first hour of this lengthy film.  The implication is clear: the torture was a necessary response to 9/11.  This is the first major untruth of Zero Dark Thirty, as everything from the court record to declassified CIA ‘interrogation’ manuals proves that torture was an accepted practice in the more secretive agencies of governments in the US and beyond for decades prior to 9/11.

There has been considerable criticism of the films apparent advocation of torture in both the mainstream and alternative media, and some criticism of whether it is accurate to portray torture as being essential to the success of the hunt for Bin Laden.  Even acting CIA director Michael Morell said that the film, ‘creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation program were the key to finding Bin Laden. That impression is false.’  That torture was not only a necessary response to 9/11 but also that it was essential in finding the alleged sponsor of 9/11 – Bin Laden – is the second major untruth of the movie.

Despite this criticism, the question that hasn’t been asked is whether anything in this story is actually true.  Despite immense and perhaps unprecedented official co-operation in the making of Zero Dark Thirty struggled with basic facts.  For example, the film includes what was obviously a quite expensive CGI-laced reconstruction of the bus bombing in London on 7/7.  The film not only gets the route number of the bus wrong, it also shows it blowing up while moving rapidly (which it certainly wasn’t) and in the wrong spot in Tavistock Square.

These are quite basic details that one can establish with only a few minutes research.  That the filmmakers got these facts wrong illustrates that they weren’t really concerned with accuracy, but with telling a story in such a way that it would have an emotional impact.  The simulated bus explosion is just about the only action in the opening 40 minutes of the film that isn’t either torture sequences or CIA agents drinking coffee and looking stressed.  It livens up what is otherwise a horrifying but very tedious narrative.

Did they find Bin Laden?

According to Zero Dark Thirty, and much of the official information leaked or published before the film’s release, the CIA found Bin Laden’s courier and right-hand man Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti and he led them to the house in Abbottabad.  However, they were unable to get any kind of photographic or otherwise physical evidence of exactly who was in the house, and therefore whether it was Bin Laden.

The movie includes a scene showing then CIA director Leon Panetta asking his analysts how certain they are that Bin Laden is actually in the large, walled house in Abbottabad.  The answer comes back: 60% sure, with the notable exception of our sympathetic, flame-haired go-getting protagonist, who is 100% sure.  We never seen what Panetta said to President Obama because, despite Judicial Watch’s efforts to claim so, this wasn’t actually a party political film.  It was something far, far worse than that.  The presence of James Gandolfini – a man most famous for playing neurotic, serial killing gangster Tony Soprano – as head of the CIA is a sick joke that symbolises what this film is truly about.

According to the film the CIA and DOD were far from certain that they had actually found Bin Laden before the raid took place.  Nonetheless the order is given, and two stealth helicopters are provided for the job of getting over the Afghan border into Pakistan to carry out the assault.  The action is notably understated, with no musical score underpinning the various packs of SEALs running around the house shooting at people.  This is presumably to give the climax a realistic feel though it only requires a brief examination to find problems and questions.

The film offers a third version of events in the third floor of the house in Abbottabad.  Initial, officially-supported reports say that Bin Laden, or whoever the man was who was killed on the third floor of the house, used a woman as a human shield and fired shots at the encroaching SEALs before they killed him.

This story stood until it was directly contradicted in the 2012 book No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama bin Laden.  In that book the pseudonymous Mark Owen says that ‘Bin Laden’ was unarmed and did not use anyone as a human shield.  Instead, he records how he was behind the ‘point man’ going up the stairs and that ‘Less than five steps’ from the top of the stairs he heard gunfire.  Apparently, ‘Bin Laden’ was shot when he ducked his head out from inside the room where he died.  No Easy Day replaced 50 Shades of Grey at the top of the bestseller lists shortly after September 11th 2012.

Zero Dark Thirty contradicts this again, showing no exchange of fire or human shields, but showing several SEALs waiting at the top of the stairs (not one with ‘Mark Owen’ a few steps further down).  They whisper ‘Osama’, and then when ‘Bin Laden’ opens the door they shoot him in the face.  While this is considerably closer to ‘Mark Owen’s version than to the White House version, it doesn’t fully replicate either story.

There are no sequences in Zero Dark Thirty depicting any kind of DNA testing, or the reported burial at sea that officially explains why there can be absolutely no external verification of who the man was that the SEALs shot on the third floor of that house.  Following the mission Zero Dark Thirty shows the body of ‘Bin Laden’ being flown back to a base in Afghanistan where it is quickly and unequivocally identified by the female CIA agent.

‘Maya’ is then shown getting into an immense cargo plane to fly home (on her own, a typically Pentagonian waste of resources) whereupon she breaks down and cries.  Again, the message is clear: what’s at stake here is not an illegal military operation and deception on a grand scale, but the fact that this pretty young woman doesn’t have anything to focus her life on anymore.

Official Secrets

The Bin Laden raid of early May 2011 was conducted in near-total secrecy.  No word of it leaked out beforehand.  In fact, and as Zero Dark Thirty highlights, by April 2011 there wasn’t much talk about Bin Laden and many people thought he was already dead and perhaps had been for several years.  It appears that no one even told the Pakistanis, despite the assault taking place on their soil.

It seems that the CIA had no specific information linking Bin Laden to the house before the raid.  The process by which the body was identified after the raid has been shrouded in secrecy.  FOIA requests from major mainstream news and ‘reputable’ lobbying organisations have been refused.  The DOD denies having a death certificate or any records of DNA testing or an autopsy.  They have also denied having any photographs of the body.

The DOD have released a small number of largely-redacted emails from people on the USS Vinson involved in the preparation and burial of the body.  While it does seem that a body was wrapped and buried at sea, none of the emails provide any confirmation of whose body it was and less than a dozen people were informed about what was happening.  No sailors watched the sea burial.  An email summarising the burial notes that, ‘The paucity of documentary evidence in our possession is a reflection of emphasis placed on operational security during the execution of this phase of the operation.’ The CIA have acknowledged that they hold some relevant records, both documents and photographs, but they have refused to release anything at all and so far the courts have backed them.

To fill the space left by ‘the paucity of documentary evidence’ we have been offered Zero Dark Thirty and we can expect a handful of copycat movies in the years to come.  It is a film that enjoyed truly extraordinary co-operation from the CIA, not just from the Office of Public Affairs but from everyone they dealt with in their pre-production meetings.  Even this was a largely secret matter, that we only know about now because the extremely partisan group Judicial Watch obtained many pages of emails detailing meetings between Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal and various people from the DOD and CIA.

Filling in the blanks

What is abundantly clear from these emails is just how enthusiastic the CIA were about the project, almost as though they had been sitting around waiting for someone to call them and ask about the Bin Laden raid.  The DOD were slightly more reticent, but ultimately very keen to help.  One email from July 17th 2011 details how meetings between CIA officials and Bigelow “went really, really well.  Mr Morell gave them 40 minutes, talked some of the substance again, told them we’re here to help with whatever they need, and gushed to Kathryn about how much he loved ‘The Hurt Locker’.”

Another CIA email says that, ‘We really do have a sense that this is going to be the movie about UBL – and we all want the CIA to be as well-represented in it as possible.’  Another email from the same person – Marie E Harf of the Office of Public Affairs – says, ‘I know we don’t pick favorites but it makes sense to get behind a winning horse… Mark and Kathryn’s movie is going to be the first and the biggest. It’s got the most money behind it, and two Oscar winners on board.’  It wasn’t all one way as another email records how Mark Boal ‘agreed to share scripts and details about the movie with us, so we’re absolutely comfortable with what he will be showing.’

The CIA even granted the filmmakers access to ‘The Vault’, an office where some of the key planning for the raid took place.  Similarly in one meeting with Boal and Bigelow the DOD even suggested a specific Navy SEAL for them to talk to about the raid.  These agencies have been so secretive about the assault itself, even when it is the mainstream news asking for information, and yet both the CIA and DOD were apparently willing to tell two Hollywood filmmakers all about it.  This is not just a hypocrisy, to fail to release evidence to the public while offering maximum possible information and assistance to Hollywood filmmakers.  It is the double dealing ‘secrecy’ of the security state.

In amongst the inaccuracies, the official revisionism, the humanising of faceless, murdering institutions and the endless glowering of the protagonist there is a dynamic at play that is crucial to understand and to resist.  The same pattern of behaviour can be found across almost all security services: refuse to release any facts, but give huge support to the fiction.  Just as the FAA/NORAD recordings asked ‘Is this real world or exercise?’ we might ask of Zero Dark Thirty: is this real world or myth-making? All the documents cited in this review can be download here, and they are perhaps as important for what they don’t record as they are for what they do.

The ultimate effect of this dynamic is the advanced of the security state.  Whoever was truly in that house in Abbottabad were actually killed, there appears to be no dispute about that.  There is no good reason, and certainly no hard evidence in the public domain, to believe that among those killed was Osama Bin Laden.  By refusing to release any evidence, but giving tremendous assistance to a Hollywood film depicting them in a very sympathetic light, the CIA and DOD have got away with murder, and even managed to get huge numbers of people to praise them for murder.

Indeed, the most poignant moment in the whole film, complete with emotive swelling music and softly edited slow-mo is when the SEALs have to blow up the downed stealth helicopter.  It is as though amongst all the murder and torture and traumatising of children and adults alike the loss of a helicopter is the greatest tragedy.  This truly alienated, immoral and boring film will no doubt win awards and make a handsome profit, but it is a vehicle for ongoing secrecy and ongoing violence.  It deserves to be boycotted, or at least to only be watched for free online at zero profit to the people who made it.

Coulter: If You Compare White Populations, US Murder Rate Same as Belgium

Leave it to Coultergeist to inject a little race baiting into the gun control debate on Hannity's show. She just can't stop herself: Coulter On Gun Violence: ‘If You Compare White Populations, We Have The Same Murder Rate As Belgium’:

Ann Coulter visited Sean Hannity‘s show Monday night to discuss President Obama‘s recent cabinet picks, as well as his possible actions on gun control. Coulter said she had just come back from England where they have “not bought into” the “diversity enthusiasm” of the States. “The liberals,” Coulter claimed, are “pushing and pushing and pushing” to have more mass murderers of color.

“If you compare white populations, we have the same murder rate as Belgium,” Coulter said. “So perhaps it’s not a gun problem, it’s a demographic problem.”

"Demographic problem," huh? Perhaps it's a poverty problem, Annie. I'm not sure where she's getting her statistics, but I imagine it's her usual source: pulled out of her rear end.

Never mind that the better part of these mass murderers we've seen lately were committed by white males, or that we might have more crime where most of the people actually live in the cities as opposed to rural areas, or in poverty-stricken inner cities as opposed to wealthy suburban areas. No, Ann would rather blame the homicide rates on the color of someone's skin and pretend that white people never commit murder. It's really disgusting, the things they'll resort to on Fox in order to carry water for the gun manufacturers and their lobbyists at the NRA.

6 Economic Steps to a Better Life and Real Prosperity for All

We've got to break out of the old ways of thinking about the economy.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

January 15, 2013  |  

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Most activists tend to approach progressive change from one of two perspectives: First, there’s the “reform” tradition that assumes corporate control is a constant and that “politics” acts to modify practices within that constraint. Liberalism in the United States is representative of this tradition. Then there’s the “revolutionary” tradition, which assumes change can come about only if the major institutions are largely eliminated or transcended, often by violence.

But what if neither revolution nor reform is viable?

Paradoxically, we believe the current stalemating of progressive reform may open up some unique strategic possibilities to transform institutions of the political economy over time. We call this third option evolutionary reconstruction. Like reform, evolutionary reconstruction involves step-by-step nonviolent change. But like revolution, evolutionary reconstruction changes the basic institutions of ownership of the economy, so that the broad public, rather than a narrow band of individuals (i.e., the “one percent”) owns more and more of the nation’s productive assets.

1. A People’s Bank

One area where this logic can be seen at work is in the financial industry. At the height of the financial crisis in early 2009, some kind of nationalization of the banks seemed possible. It was a moment, President Obama told banking CEOs, when his administration was “the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” The president opted for a soft bailout, but that was not the only possible decision.

When the next financial crisis occurs – and many experts think it will —a different resolution may well be possible. One option has already been put on the table. In 2010, 33 senators voted to break up large Wall Street investment banks that were “too big to fail.” Such a policy would not only reduce financial vulnerability, it would alter the structure of institutional power .

Nor is an effort to break up banks, even if successful, likely to be the end of the process. The modern history of anti-trust and finance suggests that the big banks, even if broken up, will ultimately regroup. So what can be done when breaking them up fails?

Traditional reforms have aimed at improved regulation, higher reserve requirements and the channeling of credit to key sectors. But future crises may bring into play a spectrum of sophisticated proposals for more radical change. For instance, a “Limited Purpose Banking” strategy put forward by conservative economist Laurence Kolticoff would impose a 100% reserve requirement on banks. Since banks typically provide loans in amounts many times their reserves, this would transform them into modest institutions with little or no capacity to finance speculation. It would also nationalize the creation of all new money as federal authorities, rather than bankers, directly control system-wide financial flows.

More striking is the argument of Willem Buiter, the chief economist of Citigroup, that if the public underwrites the costs of bailouts, “banks should be in public ownership.” In fact, had the taxpayer funds used to bail out major financial institutions in 2007-2010 been provided on condition that voting stock be issued in return for the investment, one or more major banks would have become essentially public banks. 

Nor is this far from current political tradition. Unknown to most, there have been a large number of small and medium-sized public banking institutions for some time now. In fact, the federal government already operates 140 banks and quasi-banks that provide loans and loan guarantees for an extraordinary range of domestic and international economic activities.

The economic crisis has also produced widespread interest in the Bank of North Dakota, a highly successful state-owned bank founded in 1919. Between 1996 and 2008, the bank returned $340 million in profits to the state. The bank enjoys broad support in the business community, as well as among progressive activists. Legislative proposals to establish banks patterned in whole or in part on the North Dakota model have been put forward by activists and legislators in more than a dozen states .

Internet Freedom and Copyright Reform: Aaron Swartz’s Suspicious Death

aaron-swartz-100021334-orig

 The Wall Street Journal headlined “An Internet Activist Commits Suicide.”

New York’s medical examiner announced death by “hang(ing) himself in his Brooklyn apartment.”

Lingering suspicions remain. Why would someone with so much to give end it all this way? He was one of the Internet generation’s best and brightest.

He advocated online freedom. Selflessly he sought a better open world. Information should be freely available, he believed. A legion of followers supported him globally.

Alive he symbolized a vital struggle to pursue. Death may elevate him to martyr status but removes a key figure important to keep alive.

The New York Times headlined “Internet Activist, a Creator of RSS, Is Dead at 26, Apparently a Suicide.”

He was an Internet folk hero. He supported online freedom and copyright reform. He advocated free and open web files. He championed a vital cause. He worked tirelessly for what’s right.

Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle called him “steadfast in his dedication to building a better and open world. He is among the best spirits of the Internet generation.”

Who’ll replace him now that he’s gone? He called locking up the public domain sinful. He selflessly strove to prevent it.

In July 2011, he was arrested. At the time, he was downloading old scholarly articles. He was charged with violating federal hacking laws. MIT gave him a guest account to do it.

He developed RSS and co-founded Reddit. It’s a social news site.

He was found dead weeks before he was scheduled to stand trial. He was targeted for doing the right thing. He didn’t steal or profit. He shared. His activism was more than words.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) defends online freedom, free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights. It “champion(s) the public interest in every critical battle affecting digital rights.”

On January 12, it headlined “Farewell to Aaron Swartz, an extraordinary hacker and activist.” It called him “a close friend and collaborator.” Tragedy ended his life.

Vital questions remain unanswered. Supporters demand answers. So do family members.They blame prosecutors for what happened. Their statement following his death said the following:

“Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts US Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death.”

Swartz did as much or more than anyone to make the Internet a thriving open knowledge ecosystem. He strove to keep it that way. He challenged repressive Internet laws.

He founded Demand Progress. It “works to win progressive policy changes for ordinary people through organizing and grassroots lobbying,” he said.

It prioritizes “civil liberties, civil rights, and government reform.” It ran online campaigns for justice. It advocated in the public interest. It challenged policies harming it.

He mobilized over a million online activists. His other projects included RSS specification, web.py, tor2web, the Open Library, and the Chrome port of HTTPS Everywhere.

He launched Creative Commons. He co-founded Reddit. He and others made it successful. His Raw Thought blog discussed “politics and parody.” He had much to say worth hearing.

In 2011, he used the MIT campus network. He downloaded millions of journal articles. He used the JSTOR database. Authorities claimed he changed his laptop’s IP and Mac addresses. They said he did it to circumvent JSTOR/MIT blocks.

He was charged with “unauthorized (computer) access” under the Computer and Abuse Act. He did the equivalent of checking out too many library books at the same time.

Obama prosecutors claim doing so is criminal. They’ve waged war on Internet freedom. They want Net Neutrality and free expression abolished. They want fascist laws replacing them.

They usurped diktat power. They spurn rule of law principles and other democratic values. They enforce police state authority. They prioritize what no civil society should tolerate.

They claimed Aaron intended to distribute material on peer-to-peer networks. He never did. It hardly mattered. Documents he secured were returned. No harm. No foul. Federal authorities charged him anyway.

In July 2011, a Massachusetts grand jury indicted him. He was arraigned in Boston US District Court. He pled not guilty to all charges. He was freed on a $100,000 unsecured bond.

If convicted, he faced up to 35 years imprisonment and a $1 million dollar fine. He wanted scientific/scholarly articles liberated. They belong in the public domain. He wanted everyone given access. It’s their right, he believed.

He wanted a single giant dataset established. He did it before. He wasn’t charged. Why now?

“While his methods were provocative,” said EFF, his goal was “freeing the publicly-funded scientific literature from a publishing system that makes it inaccessible to most of those who paid for it.”

EFF calls it a cause everyone should support. Aaron was politically active. He fought for what’s right. Followers supported him globally.

In the “physical world,” at worst he’d have faced minor charges, said EFF. They’re “akin to trespassing as part of political protests.”

Doing it online changed things. He faced possible long-term incarceration. For years, EFF fought this type injustice.

Academic/political activist Lawrence Lessig called Aaron’s death just cause for reforming computer crime laws. Overzealous prosecutors are bullies. They overreach and cause harm.

EFF mourned his passing, saying:

“Aaron, we will sorely miss your friendship, and your help in building a better world.” Many others feel the same way.

Did Aaron take his own life or was he killed? Moti Nissani is Wayne State University Department of Biology Professor Emeritus. “Who Killed Aaron Swartz,” he asked?

He quoted Bob Marley saying: “How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look?” He listed reasons why Obama administration scoundrels wanted him dead.

His death “was preceded by a vicious, totally unjustified, campaign of surveillance, harassment, vilification, and intimidation.”

CIA/FBI/Mossad/MI5 assassins expertly “mak(e) murder look like suicide.” Numerous “enemies of the state” die under suspicious circumstances. Media scoundrels don’t explain.

US authorities “had excellent reasons to kill” Aaron. He was legendary in his own right like John Lennon, MLK, Malcolm X and others. He threatened status quo dominance. He denounced Obama’s kill list and anti-Iranian cyber attacks.

Powerful government and business figures deplored him. In 2009, FBI elements investigated him. Charges didn’t follow.

Despite extreme pressure, he pressed on. He defied prosecutorial authority. In October 2009, he posted his FBI file online. Doing do “probably signed his own lynch warrant,” said Nissani.

Two days before his death, JSTOR, his alleged victim, declined to press charges. It went further. It “announced that the archives of more than 1,200 of its journals would be available to the public free.”

Aaron had just cause to celebrate. “Are we to believe” he hanged himself instead?

Government officials and corporate bosses “had plenty of reasons” to want him dead. He challenged their totalitarian agenda. “He was creative, idealistic and unbendable.”

“He was young and admired by many.” Did “invisible government” elements kill him?

“They did so either indirectly through constant harassment….or, most likely, directly by hanging him and” blaming him for their crime.

“All this raises a dilemma for those of us possessing both conscience and a functioning brain.” How much longer will we stand by and do nothing?

How long will we tolerate what demands condemnation? When will we defend our own interests?

Freedom is too precious to lose. Preserving it depends on us. No one will do it for us. It’s not possible any other way. It never was. It never will be.

Aaron’s Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto

His own words say it best.

“Information is power,” he said. “But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.”

“The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.”

“Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.”

“There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it.”

“But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.”

“That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them?”

“Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.”

” ‘I agree,’ many say, but what can we do?’ The companies hold the copyrights. They make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal – there’s nothing we can do to stop them. But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.”

“Those with access to these resources – students, librarians, scientists – you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out.”

“But you need not – indeed, morally, you cannot – keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.”

“Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.”

“But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral – it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.”

“Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it – their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.”

“There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.”

“We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive.”

“We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerrilla Open Access.”

“With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge – we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?”

Does Aaron’s manifesto sound like someone planning suicide?

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

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

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

 Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

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

http://www.dailycensored.com/aaron-swartzs-suspicious-death/

Punishment Before Trial: More Than 1,000 Days and Counting for Bradley Manning

I read the news about Colonel Denise Lind's ruling in the case against Bradley Manning with great interest. She ruled that Manning, the U.S. soldier accused of releasing thousands of military and diplomatic emails and cables to Wikileaks was indeed subjected to excessively harsh treatment whilst in military detention and this must surely be seen as a small victory for the Manning defense team.

The punishment of Bradley Manning goes directly against the Uniform Code of Military Justice's own laws, namely Section 813 article 13, which basically states, "No punishment before trial." This law was obviously broken. People in this country are entitled to a "speedy trial," which is normally between 100 and 120 days from the date of the crime. Bradley Manning has been incarcerated for more than 1,000 days before his trial has begun and even a United Nations investigation confirmed that Manning was being held in inhumane conditions that was tantamount to torture.

In my humble opinion, the judges' ruling, granting Manning a 112-day reduction in any sentence he might receive, is welcome but far short of true justice. If the military broke its own laws and President Obama even declared publicly that Manning had broken the law, then how can anyone say that this could be a "fair" trial? Which military judge is going to go against the statements of his or her commander in chief?

An internal investigation by the Marine Corps, which operates the prison in which Manning was being held, stated that Manning's jailers violated their own policies in imposing oppressive conditions. The Obama administration's own State Department spokesman, PJ Crowley, denounced the detention conditions as "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid" and was fired for his outspokenness.

President Obama, a constitutional lawyer, pays great lip service to "whistle blowers," maintaining that the U.S. needs people who will attempt to tell the truth, that the country needs people of courage to step forward when they witness wrongdoing of any kind, but cannot see the need to protect Bradley Manning. Perhaps the greatest crime that Manning committed was one of embarrassing the military and disturbing the status quo and one also has to wonder why the newspapers that profited from the publication of the events are not being brought to task. Manning is accused of aiding the enemy but surely the members of Al-Qaeda can read the newspaper.

When Bradley Manning saw and was asked to take part in things that troubled his heart and soul he went through the normal channels, bringing his concerns to his superiors only to be disregarded. As a U.S. soldier Manning swore an oath to protect the constitution of the United States and when he witnessed murder and mayhem being carried out in the name of the American people he felt it necessary to reveal what he knew. I truly believe that he wanted, above all, to start a serious dialogue about what was really being done in our name.

When Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers to the American public in 1971, the case against him was thrown out when it was discovered that the Nixon administration had illegally broken into his offices. If, as the judge in Manning's case declared, he was subjected to excessively harsh treatment in military detention then surely he case against Bradley Manning should be held to the same standards.

I became a citizen of this country more than 30 years ago and it is an honor and a privilege to be a small part of the USA. I came here to "the land of the free" because of the wonderful people I met and the beauty of the country I saw. The fact is that we are supposed to be a nation of laws, but when we break our laws and very little is done about it then I begin to question one of the primary reasons I came here in the first place.

© 2012 Graham Nash

Graham Nash

Graham Nash is singer, songwriter, photographer and political activist. Member of the group Crosby, Stills, and Nash (and sometimes Young), Nash also helped create NukeFree.org.

Punishment Before Trial: More Than 1,000 Days and Counting for Bradley Manning

I read the news about Colonel Denise Lind's ruling in the case against Bradley Manning with great interest. She ruled that Manning, the U.S. soldier accused of releasing thousands of military and diplomatic emails and cables to Wikileaks was indeed subjected to excessively harsh treatment whilst in military detention and this must surely be seen as a small victory for the Manning defense team.

The punishment of Bradley Manning goes directly against the Uniform Code of Military Justice's own laws, namely Section 813 article 13, which basically states, "No punishment before trial." This law was obviously broken. People in this country are entitled to a "speedy trial," which is normally between 100 and 120 days from the date of the crime. Bradley Manning has been incarcerated for more than 1,000 days before his trial has begun and even a United Nations investigation confirmed that Manning was being held in inhumane conditions that was tantamount to torture.

In my humble opinion, the judges' ruling, granting Manning a 112-day reduction in any sentence he might receive, is welcome but far short of true justice. If the military broke its own laws and President Obama even declared publicly that Manning had broken the law, then how can anyone say that this could be a "fair" trial? Which military judge is going to go against the statements of his or her commander in chief?

An internal investigation by the Marine Corps, which operates the prison in which Manning was being held, stated that Manning's jailers violated their own policies in imposing oppressive conditions. The Obama administration's own State Department spokesman, PJ Crowley, denounced the detention conditions as "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid" and was fired for his outspokenness.

President Obama, a constitutional lawyer, pays great lip service to "whistle blowers," maintaining that the U.S. needs people who will attempt to tell the truth, that the country needs people of courage to step forward when they witness wrongdoing of any kind, but cannot see the need to protect Bradley Manning. Perhaps the greatest crime that Manning committed was one of embarrassing the military and disturbing the status quo and one also has to wonder why the newspapers that profited from the publication of the events are not being brought to task. Manning is accused of aiding the enemy but surely the members of Al-Qaeda can read the newspaper.

When Bradley Manning saw and was asked to take part in things that troubled his heart and soul he went through the normal channels, bringing his concerns to his superiors only to be disregarded. As a U.S. soldier Manning swore an oath to protect the constitution of the United States and when he witnessed murder and mayhem being carried out in the name of the American people he felt it necessary to reveal what he knew. I truly believe that he wanted, above all, to start a serious dialogue about what was really being done in our name.

When Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers to the American public in 1971, the case against him was thrown out when it was discovered that the Nixon administration had illegally broken into his offices. If, as the judge in Manning's case declared, he was subjected to excessively harsh treatment in military detention then surely he case against Bradley Manning should be held to the same standards.

I became a citizen of this country more than 30 years ago and it is an honor and a privilege to be a small part of the USA. I came here to "the land of the free" because of the wonderful people I met and the beauty of the country I saw. The fact is that we are supposed to be a nation of laws, but when we break our laws and very little is done about it then I begin to question one of the primary reasons I came here in the first place.

© 2012 Graham Nash

Graham Nash

Graham Nash is singer, songwriter, photographer and political activist. Member of the group Crosby, Stills, and Nash (and sometimes Young), Nash also helped create NukeFree.org.

Turtles and Tomahawk Missiles, Together at Last? War is Not the Answer to Climate...

Two Soldiers with 2-8 Cav., 1BCT, 1st Cav. Div., reach the turnaround point, June 25, on the battalion’s 12 mile road march portion of the Iron Warrior Stakes competition. (Photo: Spc. Kim Browne / US Army)The tendency to invoke a national security framework in discussions of climate change can lead to misguided and opportunistic policies centered on greenwashed imperialism.

Over the past few years a handful of liberal environmentalists, pundits and scientists have been co-opting the language and methods of the National Security State in order to declare a "War on Climate Change."

A number of recent articles on the topic illustrate just how far militarism has coiled its way around climate change politics. A recent blog post by Joe Romm, an editor at Climate Progress, noted President Obama's likely (and now actual) nomination of Senator John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) as secretary of state. The article described Kerry as a "climate hawk" who "believes that climate change is the 'biggest long term threat' to national security."

Then there is the blog Climate Code Red, which published "Scientists call for war on climate change, but who on earth is listening?" on December 7, 2012. The magazine New Scientist, in a November 2, 2012 editorial: "The US military is a useful ally on climate change," it exclaimed. "Letting the military lead the way might be the best way to build a new energy economy." The editorial lauds the Pentagon's ability to generate research dollars, and as a result develop new markets for new technologies." Greens, too, should support the man oeuvre ... when you've got a war to fight, it helps to have the big boys on your side."

And three days after the New Scientist editorial, Boston Globe columnist Juliette Kayyem wrote, "After Sandy, environmentalists, military find common cause," adding to the chorus of voices singing the praises of the National Security State's interest and involvement in climate change.

Kayyem, coincidentally a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, wrote, "War might be an entirely accurate - and now even more appropriate - word to describe the urgency of the effort to curb climate change ... because climate change poses a continuing and unpredictable threat to national and global security." The Pentagon first ranked climate change as a national security threat in 2010, and in November 2012 the National Academy of Sciences sounded alarms in a report that noted "the security establishment is going to have to start planning for natural disasters, sea-level rise, drought, epidemics and the other consequences of climate change." However, the Boston Globe's Kayyem does point out that the Pentagon's involvement is not driven by altruistic humanitarian or ecological concern, but rather US geopolitical interests, such as the potential threat to US military bases around the globe as a result of a rise in sea-level.

The latest war metaphor was coined by Grist staff writer David Roberts in an October 2010 column, "Introducing 'climate hawks'." Roberts says he wanted a new label to define a new subset of people concerned with climate change and clean energy. For Roberts, traditional environmentalists should not be leading the discussion on climate change. No, Roberts wanted to create a name that could bring people together from the usually opposed corporate, military and activist communities. He asked his readers for ideas, although "climate hawk" ended up being proposed by one of his colleagues at Grist. Roberts explains why he liked the term:

First and foremost, it doesn't carry any implications about The Truth. It doesn't say, 'I'm right, you're wrong. I'm smarter and more enlightened than you.' Instead it evokes a judgment: that the risks of climate change are sufficient to warrant a robust response.... It becomes about values, about how hard to fight and how much to sacrifice to defend America and her future.... The health of Mother Earth just doesn't move that many people. For better or worse, more Americans respond to evocations of toughness in the face of a threat. In foreign policy a hawk is someone who, as Donald Rumsfeld used to put it, 'leans forward,' someone who's not afraid to flex America's considerable muscle, someone who takes a proactive attitude toward gathering dangers.

Climate Progress's Romm chose "Climate Hawk" as their phrase of the year in 2010. But the term has been gaining ground. More recently, after November's election, it was used in a headline by Mother Jones,"Five Climate Hawks Who Won Tuesday", demonstrating that the term is finding its way into mainstream environmental vernacular.

A "climate hawk" flexes muscles, fights and - most importantly - defends America. The term and the reasoning co-opt the language and logic of masculinity, militarism and nationalism, and thus perpetuate a cultural ailment that afflicts US society and how it approaches national and international dilemmas (think War on Drugs, War on Terror, etc.)"Any term one chooses to describe a movement will be more inviting to some and more alienating to others," said Robert Jensen, a professor of journalism at University of Texas at Austin's College of Communication. "Someone like me, who has been a harsh critic of US militarism and imperialism and an advocate for radical change to deal with climate, doesn't care what a movement is called, because the work goes on."

According to George Lakoff, Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, the use of the term "climate hawk" and using national security within a climate frame are ambiguous and open to interpretations. He believes that a term like "climate hawk" and the nexus between climate change and national security are being used by some with the intention of instilling the urgency of the situation to our health as a nation and the need for aggressive policy and action. "Resorting to turning climate policy over to the Defense Department is certainly a failure," said Lakoff, of a possible misinterpretation. "I don't think that is what either Romm or Kerry has in mind."

However, in its militarism, the term can alienate women, who are often on the front lines of climate struggle. "Many would argue that a culture of militarized nationalism is firmly established in the US, and that patriarchy directly relates to this culture. Patriarchy marginalizes that which is associated with femininity while privileging masculinity," said Nicole Detraz, assistant professor of political science at the University of Memphis. "Societal depictions of women as caregivers or mothers, and men as leaders or fighters establish men as the 'most appropriate' actors to take care of the real world of security."

Militarism has been creeping into the mainstream environmental movement for years. On December 4, 2012, The World Wildlife Federation announced it would use drones to track poachers in Africa, thanks to a $5 million grant from Google. Al Jazeera correspondent Eddie Walsh examined the global implications of non-state actors engaging in drone surveillance and other international security activities. Private military security contractors operating largely with impunity in Iraq, Afghanistan and other conflict zones already have brought similar issues to light.

"I strongly believe militarism stands in the way of achieving progress on climate change," said Betsy Hartmann, director of the population and development program and professor of development studies at Hampshire College, who currently focuses on the militarization of climate change in her research and writing. "Linking climate change and national security is a dangerous road to go down."

First "climate hawks," now "enviro-drones." While climate change does have the capacity to cause destabilization in areas of the world, as well as become an existential threat for many, looking at this through a national security framework divides the world between us and them, while reinforcing the dangerous notion of American exceptionalism. "Using this language suggests that there are no solutions, so we have to fight," added Hartmann.

Unfortunately, this is a road we have been traveling down for some time now, and adopting foreign policy discourse and tools exacerbates this troubling tendency.

According to Detraz, whose research critically examines the environment, security and gender, the trend of "utilizing security discourse" for national and international problems dates back to the Cold War. "There is typically a perception that security issues garner a great deal of attention and resources, and that framing environmental issues as security issues can tap into this," said Detraz. "For these reasons, environmentalists who want to raise awareness of climate change may use concepts/terms like climate security, the insecurity of energy dependence, or environmental conflict."

In a 2009 editorial, The New York Times advocated securitizing environmental discourse. Lamenting Congress's failure to pass legislation to reduce greenhouse gases, it argued in an editorial, "The Climate and National Security," that, "Proponents of climate change legislation have now settled on a new strategy: Warning that global warming poses a serious threat to national security," and that it was "pretty good politics" because "many politicians will do anything for the Pentagon." Hampshire's Hartmann said that this strategic decision by mainstream environmentalists is a testament to the power of the fossil fuel industry and climate denial in this country.

Also in 2009, the CIA opened the Center on Climate Change and National Security. But when a historian at the National Security Archived sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the CIA for copies of its reports on climate change the request was denied because the agency said the information was classified. Another example of the "benefits" of the CIA's partnership with climate change activists comes courtesy of WikiLeaks. The US State Department, acting at the behest of the CIA, sent out a directive "seeking human intelligence on UN diplomats," as well as "compromising intelligence on the officials running the climate negotiations" to undermine and manipulate the 2009 climate talks in Copenhagen, as the Guardian reported in two separate articles on Dec. 3, 2010.

The Obama Administration ended up closing the CIA's center on climate change in November 2012. "The goal of the intelligence apparatus is to help make Americans safer and more secure," Romm, also a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, told Public Radio International's (PRI) program, "Living on Earth" on December 6, 2012. "And, since global warming is clearly a growing threat to our security, both directly and through how it affects countries that we have an interest in, we need to focus the CIA's and the Pentagon's thinkers on climate change."

Do we? Professor Detraz argues that if actors adopt a relatively narrow, environmental conflict discourse we are likely to get policies that are narrowly focused on protecting and enhancing state security.

An October 2011 report prepared by the Defense Science Board, which advises the secretary of defense, supports Detraz's argument. "The United States, however, has neither the knowledge nor the resources needed to produce widespread amelioration. US resources must be focused on the most serious US national risks," it reads. The report, which pays particular attention to Africa, also pointed out, "In some instances, climate change will serve as a threat multiplier, exacerbating tensions between tribes, ethnic groups and nations. In other cases, [it] will seem more like Mother Nature's weapon of mass destruction."

"It's dangerous that some liberal environmentalists bought into this climate conflict narrative about poor people of color becoming violent when climate change makes resources scarce. This narrative draws on deep-seated stereotypes of Africans in particular as savages and barbarians, incapable of technological and institutional innovation or cooperation," said Hartmann. "The media loves this stuff because fear sells in this country, especially racialized fears of poor people. The tragedy is that this approach works against the kind of international solidarity we need to build popular, democratic and effective solutions to climate change."

There have been other national security climate change projections of regional destabilizations caused by famine, droughts, subsequent migration flows, as well as wars fought over resources. This also calls into question the term "climate refugees," a depoliticized term that minimizes or fails to consider the socioeconomic factors and institutionalized structures of racism and oppression that make certain populations more vulnerable to environmental instability.

"One of the strongest critiques of environmental security discourses [is] that they result in othering populations, many of whom are disproportionately vulnerable to climate change impacts. It is true that when institutions from the global North have discussed climate migrants they have tended to assume that it is a problem of people from Southern states entering their borders," according to Detraz.

This can lead racist, xenophobic backlashes by both state actors and right-wing movements. "I advocate using narratives that highlight the human security threats that stem from environmental degradation, and the economic, social, and political vulnerabilities that make environmental insecurity a very real experience for millions of people," she added.

As the Defense Science Board points out, it is not about stopping or reversing climate change, but rather the focus is about mitigating and adapting to projected crises that threaten US national security interests. And we shouldn't fool ourselves. These interests are guided by maintaining US global hegemony and unfettered access to the world's resources, not empathy, human rights or environmental sustainability. Accepting and perpetuating the narrative of climate security, and by talking about climate change through a national security framework, opens doors for the national security state to execute its imperial tools, with a new imperial alibi: a new, green humanitarian imperialism, with some NGO's, International Financial Institutions, and academics serving as accessories. This is another method of preserving the global world order and Western-based notions of development.

For instance, the Pentagon's enlisting of academics in its war efforts has stirred controversy in the recent past with university anthropologists helping the war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq and University of Kansas geographers mapping indigenous land in Oaxaca, Mexico. The Scientific American reported in March 2012 in an article, "US Defense Department Develops Map of Future Climate Chaos" that University of Texas researchers, courtesy of a 5-year $7.6 million defense department grant, will be creating maps to show "where vulnerability to climate change and violent conflicts intersects throughout the African continent." The US has expanded military operations in recent years with the creation of AFRICOM, something viewed as driven by "resource exploitation and imperial expansion," and announced in December that it will be increasing troops and drones for 2013. The continent is in the midst of a natural resource boom, and China's growing presence in the continent's resource markets has bothered Washington and is perceived as challenging US hegemony in the region.

Also lurking in the dark imaginations of Pentagon planners could be something akin to regional military climate change operations - think Plan Colombia for climate change, and how the War on Drugs is not exclusively about stopping or controlling drug trafficking or consumption.

Guatemala has already provided an example of so-called environmental security. In 2010, then-president of Guatemala Alvaro Colom created a "green battalion" allegedly to protect Laguna del Tigre National Park Maya Biosphere Reserve in the department of Petén. But the creation of the battalion was the result of an agreement with French oil company Perenco. According to the Latin American Herald Tribune, "Colom said oil drilling is not the cause of environmental damage in that region and instead put the blame on land invasions by small farmers and cattle raising." Indeed, this prediction seems to be coming true. "Some of these soldiers have taken part in forced evictions of communities living inside the park and are currently responsible for what amounts to a state of siege for those still living inside. Not only are the 25 to 30 communities inside the park forbidden from cutting a tree without a permit, they are under constant pressure from soldiers and armed park rangers," wrote journalist Dawn Paley, writing for Briarpatch magazine in July 2012. In the US we've seen private mercenary company Blackwater called upon for security in response to natural disaster Hurricane Katrina, while BP hired private security contractors in 2010 to keep reporters away from the beaches after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf Coast.

It is sad that a national discussion on climate change that points to facts, science, solidarity and peaceful democratic measures has been lost on some people and deemed ineffective. Nevertheless, Lakoff, who is the author of Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, a book widely believed to have influenced the Democratic Party and progressive organizations, points out that, "Peace, justice, and equality have been tried and don't even motivate liberals, despite their truth." But the voices that apply these principles risk being excluded from the conversation as a militaristic, fear-mongering framework gains more traction. It is important to examine the cultural pathologies that have taken us down this "dangerous road."

"Human beings have always had a capacity for violence, but not all societies are pathological in their glorification of violence. I believe the root of this pathology is patriarchy, the foundational hierarchy of men over women," said the University of Texas's Jensen. "The domination-subordination dynamic at the heart of patriarchy defines our world, including our conceptions of nation, of racial identity, of wealth accumulation."

This also currently defines our relationship with nature, which in modern times has been driven by accumulation and domination. Responses guided by this pathos, whether it is through militarism or scientific "panaceas," such as genetically modifying agriculture or geoengineering, further illustrate this mentality.

So where do we begin?

"We start by recognizing that the story of progress, technological solutions and endless bounty are a fantasy. We face the fact that the human species is now facing an end to the endless expansion of the fossil fuel era and a permanent contraction," said Jensen. "We start by growing up."

Beyond Torture: ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ and the Promotion of Extrajudicial Killing

The film Zero Dark Thirty has sparked debate on its justification of torture, its misuse of facts, and its pro-CIA agenda. The main focus of the debate so far has been on whether torture was necessary to track Osama bin Laden and whether the film is pro or anti torture.

Criticism of the film has come from the highest levels of the political establishment. In a letter to the CIA, Diane Feinstein, Karl Levin and John McCain, members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, fault the film for showing that the CIA obtained through torture the key lead that helped track down Osama bin Laden. The letter further blasts former CIA leaders for spreading such falsehoods in public statements.

Film director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, who worked with the CIA in the making of this film, likely did not expect such push back since they seem to have got a green light from the White House.

In the face of these attacks, some have risen to the film makers’ defense such as Mark Bowden, the author of The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden. Writing in the Atlantic, he argues that the film is not pro-torture because the first scene shows that torture could not stop an attack in Saudi Arabia, instead it was cleverness and cunning that produced results.

Far more commentators, however, in a range of mainstream media from the New York Times, to CNN and the Daily Beast, have stated that the film lied about torture. Taking their lead from Feinstein et al numerous voices have condemned the film and insisted that bin Laden’s whereabouts where obtained through means other than torture.

It’s hard to say who is correct. The CIA clearly has an interest in promoting its version in order to win public support for its clandestine activities. The Democrats have an interest in distancing themselves from torture so as to separate themselves from the worst of the Bush era policies.

While much of the air is being sucked up by this debate, scant attention has been paid to the larger, and in my view, more significant message of this film: that extra judicial killing is good. The film teaches us that brown men can and should be targeted and killed with impunity, in violation of international law, and that we should trust the CIA to act with all due diligence.

At a time when the key strategy in the “war on terror” has shifted from conventional warfare to extra judicial killing, here comes a film that normalizes and justifies this strategy. The controversy around this film will no doubt increase its box office success, but don’t expect mainstream debate on extrajudicial killing. On this, there is bipartisan consent. Therefore the real scandal behind this Oscar nominated film—its shameless propaganda for extrajudicial murder—will remain largely hidden.

Rebranding the Killing Machine

Zero Dark Thirty has very clear cut “good guys” and “bad guys.” The CIA characters, in particular Maya and Dan, are the heroes and brown men, be they Arab or South Asian, are the villains.

The first brown man we encounter, Omar, is brutally tortured by Dan as Maya the protagonist (played by Jessica Chastain) watches with discomfort and anxiety. We soon learn, however, that Omar and his brethren wanted “to kill all Americans” thereby dispelling our doubts, justifying torture, and establishing his villainy.

In an interesting reversal (first established by the TV show 24) torture, a characteristic normally associated with villains, is now associated with heroes. This shift is acceptable because all the brown men tortured in the film are guilty and therefore worthy of such treatment. Maya soon learns to overcome her hesitation as she becomes a willing participant in the use torture. In the process, audiences are invited to advance with her from discomfort to acceptance.

A clear “us” versus “them” mentality is established where “they” are portrayed as murderous villains while “we” do what we need to in order to keep the world safe. One scene in particular captures “their” irrational rage against all Americans. This is the scene when Maya is attacked by a barrage of machine gun fire as she exits a safe house in her car. We are then told that her identity as a CIA agent is not public and that in fact all Americans are the targets of such murderous rage and brutal attacks in Pakistan.

Pakistan, the country in which the majority of the film is set, is presented as a hell hole. In one the early scenes, Maya as a CIA freshman new to the area, is asked by a colleague what she thinks of Pakistan. She replies: “it’s kind of fucked up.”

Other than being the target of bombing attacks in her car and at a hotel, a part of what seems to make Pakistan “fucked up” is Islam. In one scene she is disturbed late at night by the Muslim call to prayer sounding loud enough that it wakes her from her sleep. Disgusted by this, she grunts “oh God” and rolls back to sleep. Maya also uses the term “mullah crackadollah” to express her contempt for Muslim religious leaders (I have never heard this term before and hope that I transcribed it correctly. I certainly do not wish to waste another $14 to watch the film again, and will wait till the film is out on DVD to confirm this term).

What does not need re-viewing to confirm is the routine and constant use of the term “Paks” to refer to Pakistani people, a term that is similar to other racist epithets like “gooks” and “japs.” The film rests on the wholesale demonization of the Pakistani people. If we doubt that the “Paks” are a devious lot that can’t be trusted, the film has a scene where Maya’s colleague and friend is ambushed and blown to bits by a suicide bomber whom she expected to interrogate.

Even ordinary men standing by the road or at markets are suspicious characters who whip out cell phones to inform on and plot against the CIA. It is no wonder then that when Pakistanis organize a protest outside the US embassy we see them with contempt and through the eyes of Maya, who is standing inside the embassy, and whose point of view we are asked to identify with.

For a film maker of Bigelow’s talent it is shocking to see such unambiguous “good guys” and “bad guys.” The only way to be brown and not to be a villain in her narrative is to be unflinchingly loyal to the Americans, as the translator working for the CIA is. The “good Muslim” does not question, he simply acts to pave the way for American interests.

Against the backdrop of this racist dehumanization of brown men, Maya and her colleagues routinely use the word “kill” without it seeming odd or out of place. After Maya has comes to terms with the anguish of losing her friend in the suicide attack she states: “I’m going to smoke everybody involved in this operation and then I’m going to kill Osama bin Laden.” When talking about a doctor who might be useful in getting to bin Laden, she says if he “doesn’t give up the big man” then “we kill him.”

At the start of the film Maya refuses a disguise when she re-enters the cell in which Omar is being held. She asks Dan if the man will ever get out and thereby reveal her identity to which he replies “never,” suggesting that Omar will either be held indefinitely or killed.

A top CIA official blasting a group of agents for not making more progress in the hunt for bin Laden sums up the role of the CIA as a killing machine in the following manner, he says “do your fucking jobs and bring me people to kill.” By this point in the film, the demonization of brown men is so complete that this statement is neither surprising nor extraordinary.

It is a clever and strategic choice that the resolution of film’s narrative arc is the execution of Osama bin Laden. After all, who could possibly object to the murder of this heinous person other than the “do good” lawyers who are chastised in the film for providing legal representation for terrorists.

Here then is the key message of the film: the law, due process, and the idea of presenting evidence before a jury, should be dispensed with in favor of extra judicial killings. Further, such killings can take place without public oversight. The film not only uses the moral unambiguity of assassinating bin Laden to sell us on the rightness and righteousness of extra judicial killing, it also takes pains to show that this can be done in secret because of the checks and balances involved before a targeted assassination is carried out.

Maya is seen battling a male dominated bureaucracy that constantly pushes her to provide evidence before it can order the strike. We feel her frustration at this process and we identify with her when she says that she is a 100% sure that bin Laden is where she says he is. Yet, a system of checks and balances that involves scrupulous CIA heads, and a president who is “smart” and wants the facts, means that due diligence will not be compromised even when we know we are right.

This, in my view, is the key propaganda accomplishment of the film: the selling of secret extra judicial killing at a time when this has been designated the key strategy in the “war on terror” for the upcoming decade.

The Disposition Matrix

As I have argued in my book Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, the Obama administration has drawn the conclusion, after the failed interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, that conventional warfare should be ditched in favor of drone strikes, black operations, and other such methods of extra judicial killing.

The New York Times expose on Obama’s “kill list,” revealed that this strategy is one presided over by the president himself. John Brennen, his top counterterrorism advisor, is one of its key authors and architects. Brennen’s nomination to head the CIA is a clear indication that this strategy will not only continue but that the spy agency will more openly become a paramilitary force that carries out assassinations through drone attacks and other means, with little or no public oversight.

Greg Miller’s piece in the Washington Post reveals that the Obama administration has been working on a “blueprint for pursuing terrorists” based on the creation of database known as the “disposition matrix.” The matrix developed by the National Counterterrorism Center brings together the separate but overlapping kill lists from the CIA and the Joint Operations Special Command into a master grid and allocates resources for “disposition.” The resources that will be used to “dispose” those on the list include capture operations, extradition, and drone strikes.

Miller notes that Brennen has played a key role in this process of “codify[ing] the administration’s approach to generating capture/kill lists.” Based on extensive interviews with top Obama administration officials Miller states that such extra judicial killing is “likely to be extended at least another decade.” Brennan’s nomination to the CIA directorship no doubt will ensure such a result.

In short, at the exact point that a strategic shift has been made in the war on terror from conventional warfare to targeted killing, there comes a film that justifies this practice and asks us to trust the CIA with such incredible power.

No doubt the film had to remake the CIA brand dispelling other competing Hollywood images of the institution as a clandestine and shady outfit. The reality, however, is that unlike the film’s morally upright characters Brennan is a liar and an unabashed torture advocate (except for waterboarding).

As Glenn Greenwald notes, Brennen has “spouted complete though highly influential falsehoods to the world in the immediate aftermath of the Osama bin Laden killing, including claiming that bin Laden "engaged in a firefight" with Navy SEALS and had "used his wife as a human shield".”

Zero Dark Thirty, nominated for the “best picture of year” Oscar award, is a harbinger of things to come. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) signed into law by Obama earlier this month includes an amendment, passed in the House last May, that legalizes the dissemination of propaganda to US citizens. Journalist Naomi Klein argues that the propaganda “amendment legalizes something that has been illegal for decades: the direct funding of pro-government or pro-military messaging in media, without disclosure, aimed at American citizens.”

We can therefore expect not only more such films, but also more misinformation on our TV screens, in our newspapers, on our radio stations and in social media websites. What used to be an informal arrangement whereby the State Department and the Pentagon manipulated the media has now been codified into law. Be ready to be propagandized to all the time, everywhere.

We live in an Orwellian world: the government has sought and won the power to indefinitely detain and to kill US citizens, all wrapped in cloud of secrecy, and to lie to us without any legal constraints.

The NDAA allows for indefinite detention, and a judge ruled that the Obama administration need not provide legal justification for extra judicial killings based on US law thereby granting carte blanche authority to the president to kill whoever he pleases with no legal or public oversight.

Such a system requires an equally powerful system of propaganda to convince the citizenry that they need not be alarmed, they need not speak out, they need not think critically, in fact they need not even participate in the deliberative process except to pull a lever every couple of years in an elaborate charade of democracy. We are being asked, quite literally, to amuse ourselves to death.

© 2012 Mondoweiss.net

Deepa Kumar

Deepa Kumar is an associate professor of Media Studies and Middle East Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire and Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization and the UPS Strike.

Beyond Torture: ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ and the Promotion of Extrajudicial Killing

The film Zero Dark Thirty has sparked debate on its justification of torture, its misuse of facts, and its pro-CIA agenda. The main focus of the debate so far has been on whether torture was necessary to track Osama bin Laden and whether the film is pro or anti torture.

Criticism of the film has come from the highest levels of the political establishment. In a letter to the CIA, Diane Feinstein, Karl Levin and John McCain, members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, fault the film for showing that the CIA obtained through torture the key lead that helped track down Osama bin Laden. The letter further blasts former CIA leaders for spreading such falsehoods in public statements.

Film director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, who worked with the CIA in the making of this film, likely did not expect such push back since they seem to have got a green light from the White House.

In the face of these attacks, some have risen to the film makers’ defense such as Mark Bowden, the author of The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden. Writing in the Atlantic, he argues that the film is not pro-torture because the first scene shows that torture could not stop an attack in Saudi Arabia, instead it was cleverness and cunning that produced results.

Far more commentators, however, in a range of mainstream media from the New York Times, to CNN and the Daily Beast, have stated that the film lied about torture. Taking their lead from Feinstein et al numerous voices have condemned the film and insisted that bin Laden’s whereabouts where obtained through means other than torture.

It’s hard to say who is correct. The CIA clearly has an interest in promoting its version in order to win public support for its clandestine activities. The Democrats have an interest in distancing themselves from torture so as to separate themselves from the worst of the Bush era policies.

While much of the air is being sucked up by this debate, scant attention has been paid to the larger, and in my view, more significant message of this film: that extra judicial killing is good. The film teaches us that brown men can and should be targeted and killed with impunity, in violation of international law, and that we should trust the CIA to act with all due diligence.

At a time when the key strategy in the “war on terror” has shifted from conventional warfare to extra judicial killing, here comes a film that normalizes and justifies this strategy. The controversy around this film will no doubt increase its box office success, but don’t expect mainstream debate on extrajudicial killing. On this, there is bipartisan consent. Therefore the real scandal behind this Oscar nominated film—its shameless propaganda for extrajudicial murder—will remain largely hidden.

Rebranding the Killing Machine

Zero Dark Thirty has very clear cut “good guys” and “bad guys.” The CIA characters, in particular Maya and Dan, are the heroes and brown men, be they Arab or South Asian, are the villains.

The first brown man we encounter, Omar, is brutally tortured by Dan as Maya the protagonist (played by Jessica Chastain) watches with discomfort and anxiety. We soon learn, however, that Omar and his brethren wanted “to kill all Americans” thereby dispelling our doubts, justifying torture, and establishing his villainy.

In an interesting reversal (first established by the TV show 24) torture, a characteristic normally associated with villains, is now associated with heroes. This shift is acceptable because all the brown men tortured in the film are guilty and therefore worthy of such treatment. Maya soon learns to overcome her hesitation as she becomes a willing participant in the use torture. In the process, audiences are invited to advance with her from discomfort to acceptance.

A clear “us” versus “them” mentality is established where “they” are portrayed as murderous villains while “we” do what we need to in order to keep the world safe. One scene in particular captures “their” irrational rage against all Americans. This is the scene when Maya is attacked by a barrage of machine gun fire as she exits a safe house in her car. We are then told that her identity as a CIA agent is not public and that in fact all Americans are the targets of such murderous rage and brutal attacks in Pakistan.

Pakistan, the country in which the majority of the film is set, is presented as a hell hole. In one the early scenes, Maya as a CIA freshman new to the area, is asked by a colleague what she thinks of Pakistan. She replies: “it’s kind of fucked up.”

Other than being the target of bombing attacks in her car and at a hotel, a part of what seems to make Pakistan “fucked up” is Islam. In one scene she is disturbed late at night by the Muslim call to prayer sounding loud enough that it wakes her from her sleep. Disgusted by this, she grunts “oh God” and rolls back to sleep. Maya also uses the term “mullah crackadollah” to express her contempt for Muslim religious leaders (I have never heard this term before and hope that I transcribed it correctly. I certainly do not wish to waste another $14 to watch the film again, and will wait till the film is out on DVD to confirm this term).

What does not need re-viewing to confirm is the routine and constant use of the term “Paks” to refer to Pakistani people, a term that is similar to other racist epithets like “gooks” and “japs.” The film rests on the wholesale demonization of the Pakistani people. If we doubt that the “Paks” are a devious lot that can’t be trusted, the film has a scene where Maya’s colleague and friend is ambushed and blown to bits by a suicide bomber whom she expected to interrogate.

Even ordinary men standing by the road or at markets are suspicious characters who whip out cell phones to inform on and plot against the CIA. It is no wonder then that when Pakistanis organize a protest outside the US embassy we see them with contempt and through the eyes of Maya, who is standing inside the embassy, and whose point of view we are asked to identify with.

For a film maker of Bigelow’s talent it is shocking to see such unambiguous “good guys” and “bad guys.” The only way to be brown and not to be a villain in her narrative is to be unflinchingly loyal to the Americans, as the translator working for the CIA is. The “good Muslim” does not question, he simply acts to pave the way for American interests.

Against the backdrop of this racist dehumanization of brown men, Maya and her colleagues routinely use the word “kill” without it seeming odd or out of place. After Maya has comes to terms with the anguish of losing her friend in the suicide attack she states: “I’m going to smoke everybody involved in this operation and then I’m going to kill Osama bin Laden.” When talking about a doctor who might be useful in getting to bin Laden, she says if he “doesn’t give up the big man” then “we kill him.”

At the start of the film Maya refuses a disguise when she re-enters the cell in which Omar is being held. She asks Dan if the man will ever get out and thereby reveal her identity to which he replies “never,” suggesting that Omar will either be held indefinitely or killed.

A top CIA official blasting a group of agents for not making more progress in the hunt for bin Laden sums up the role of the CIA as a killing machine in the following manner, he says “do your fucking jobs and bring me people to kill.” By this point in the film, the demonization of brown men is so complete that this statement is neither surprising nor extraordinary.

It is a clever and strategic choice that the resolution of film’s narrative arc is the execution of Osama bin Laden. After all, who could possibly object to the murder of this heinous person other than the “do good” lawyers who are chastised in the film for providing legal representation for terrorists.

Here then is the key message of the film: the law, due process, and the idea of presenting evidence before a jury, should be dispensed with in favor of extra judicial killings. Further, such killings can take place without public oversight. The film not only uses the moral unambiguity of assassinating bin Laden to sell us on the rightness and righteousness of extra judicial killing, it also takes pains to show that this can be done in secret because of the checks and balances involved before a targeted assassination is carried out.

Maya is seen battling a male dominated bureaucracy that constantly pushes her to provide evidence before it can order the strike. We feel her frustration at this process and we identify with her when she says that she is a 100% sure that bin Laden is where she says he is. Yet, a system of checks and balances that involves scrupulous CIA heads, and a president who is “smart” and wants the facts, means that due diligence will not be compromised even when we know we are right.

This, in my view, is the key propaganda accomplishment of the film: the selling of secret extra judicial killing at a time when this has been designated the key strategy in the “war on terror” for the upcoming decade.

The Disposition Matrix

As I have argued in my book Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, the Obama administration has drawn the conclusion, after the failed interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, that conventional warfare should be ditched in favor of drone strikes, black operations, and other such methods of extra judicial killing.

The New York Times expose on Obama’s “kill list,” revealed that this strategy is one presided over by the president himself. John Brennen, his top counterterrorism advisor, is one of its key authors and architects. Brennen’s nomination to head the CIA is a clear indication that this strategy will not only continue but that the spy agency will more openly become a paramilitary force that carries out assassinations through drone attacks and other means, with little or no public oversight.

Greg Miller’s piece in the Washington Post reveals that the Obama administration has been working on a “blueprint for pursuing terrorists” based on the creation of database known as the “disposition matrix.” The matrix developed by the National Counterterrorism Center brings together the separate but overlapping kill lists from the CIA and the Joint Operations Special Command into a master grid and allocates resources for “disposition.” The resources that will be used to “dispose” those on the list include capture operations, extradition, and drone strikes.

Miller notes that Brennen has played a key role in this process of “codify[ing] the administration’s approach to generating capture/kill lists.” Based on extensive interviews with top Obama administration officials Miller states that such extra judicial killing is “likely to be extended at least another decade.” Brennan’s nomination to the CIA directorship no doubt will ensure such a result.

In short, at the exact point that a strategic shift has been made in the war on terror from conventional warfare to targeted killing, there comes a film that justifies this practice and asks us to trust the CIA with such incredible power.

No doubt the film had to remake the CIA brand dispelling other competing Hollywood images of the institution as a clandestine and shady outfit. The reality, however, is that unlike the film’s morally upright characters Brennan is a liar and an unabashed torture advocate (except for waterboarding).

As Glenn Greenwald notes, Brennen has “spouted complete though highly influential falsehoods to the world in the immediate aftermath of the Osama bin Laden killing, including claiming that bin Laden "engaged in a firefight" with Navy SEALS and had "used his wife as a human shield".”

Zero Dark Thirty, nominated for the “best picture of year” Oscar award, is a harbinger of things to come. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) signed into law by Obama earlier this month includes an amendment, passed in the House last May, that legalizes the dissemination of propaganda to US citizens. Journalist Naomi Klein argues that the propaganda “amendment legalizes something that has been illegal for decades: the direct funding of pro-government or pro-military messaging in media, without disclosure, aimed at American citizens.”

We can therefore expect not only more such films, but also more misinformation on our TV screens, in our newspapers, on our radio stations and in social media websites. What used to be an informal arrangement whereby the State Department and the Pentagon manipulated the media has now been codified into law. Be ready to be propagandized to all the time, everywhere.

We live in an Orwellian world: the government has sought and won the power to indefinitely detain and to kill US citizens, all wrapped in cloud of secrecy, and to lie to us without any legal constraints.

The NDAA allows for indefinite detention, and a judge ruled that the Obama administration need not provide legal justification for extra judicial killings based on US law thereby granting carte blanche authority to the president to kill whoever he pleases with no legal or public oversight.

Such a system requires an equally powerful system of propaganda to convince the citizenry that they need not be alarmed, they need not speak out, they need not think critically, in fact they need not even participate in the deliberative process except to pull a lever every couple of years in an elaborate charade of democracy. We are being asked, quite literally, to amuse ourselves to death.

© 2012 Mondoweiss.net

Deepa Kumar

Deepa Kumar is an associate professor of Media Studies and Middle East Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire and Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization and the UPS Strike.

US Prepares Support for French Military Intervention in Mali

WASHINGTON - U.S. Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta has applauded France’s surprise airstrikes on Islamist rebels in northern Mali that began late last week and continued over the weekend.

The United States has poured money into training the Malian military in the last several years. Above, U.S. Special Forces inspect weapons in Mali in 2007. (Credit: The U.S. Army/ CC by 2.0) Panetta added that the U.S. government is readying plans for assistance in the ongoing operations, which scholars and human rights workers worry could continue for an extended period.

“I commend France for taking the steps that it has, and we have promised…to provide whatever assistance we can to try to help them in that effort,” Panetta told reporters on Monday.

“We have a responsibility to make sure that Al Qaeda does not establish a base for operations in North Africa and Mali,” he continued. “The effort is to try to do what is necessary to halt [rebel] advances and to try to secure some of the key cities in Mali.”

On Friday, the French government authorised airstrikes and ordered 550 French troops into Mali, where for 10 months the massive northern section of the country has been under the control of a combination of Islamists, ethnic Tuareg nationalists and criminal gangs. In March, the weak government in Bamako fell to a military coup, creating a power vacuum in the north.

Since then the international community has debated how to proceed. While France, Mali’s former colonial power, has pushed a military option, others such as the United States and the United Nations have been more cautious.

Still, in December, Washington and Paris co-sponsored a U.N. resolution that allowed for a military operation carried out by the West African grouping ECOWAS, for which the United States has offered training. (Washington is barred by law from training the Malian army until democratic elections are held.)

The ECOWAS force is not expected to be ready to enter Mali until the fall at the earliest, however. Meanwhile, Islamists reportedly linked to Al Qaeda have continued advancing against the Malian military. The French actions over the weekend sought to halt rebel attempts to take the central city of Konna, a strategy with which Washington appears to agree.

“It was clear to France and to all of us that that could not be allowed to continue,” Panetta said Monday. ”That’s the reason France has engaged, and it’s the reason that we’re providing cooperation to them in that effort.”

While Panetta refused to offer details of new U.S. assistance, he did state that there would be “some limited logistical support” and “intelligence support”, as well as “some areas of airlift”.

Both the United Kingdom and Canada have stated that they would send aircraft to assist in the Mali mission. The European Union on Monday said that it would not send any combat mission to North Africa, although it publicly supported the French decision.

Already a crisis

While France’s move appears to have taken observers by surprise, the strikes are reportedly received with cautious relief by many Malians.

Mali’s interim president, Dioncounda Traore, has been pleading for an intervention. And Oumou Sall Seck, the first woman mayor elected in northern Mali, warned in an opinion piece published in late December, “Immediately reclaiming northern Mali from violent extremists must become a priority. And it can’t be done without international help, especially from key powers like America and France."

With international action now underway, however, the mission’s exact scope is unclear. “I’m very surprised that things moved so quickly, given that there had been no movement and just a lot of talk for some time,” Susanna Wing, a professor at Haverford College who has written widely on Mali, told IPS.

“The French are clearly operating in the hope of a rout, but that is not likely to happen quickly. I’m worried this could go on and on and result in a real civilian catastrophe. It’s important to remember that there’s already a humanitarian crisis in Mali, with some 400,000 refugees having fled.”

Humanitarian groups are sounding the alarm, with Medecins Sans Frontieres and Amnesty International on Monday calling on international forces to protect civilians and health infrastructure.

While rumours surfaced on Monday of greater U.S. involvement in the fast-evolving situation in Mali, Wing says such involvement seems unlikely.

“Intelligence support, troop training – that seems reasonable, but I would be very surprised if there were anything other than that,” she says. “Since Somalia, everyone knows the U.S. isn’t going to move to put troops on the ground anytime soon.”

A more recent memory guiding many international actors, including the United States, may be that of Libya. The 2011 intervention and the resulting outflow of both weapons and fighters are widely regarded as having led directly to the subsequent spike in violence in Mali.

Piecemeal intelligence

Washington has been building up a covert network of Special Forces bases and operations in Africa over the past decade, and the sudden and dramatic decline in stability in Mali in the past year has come as a stinging surprise to many U.S. policymakers, particularly in the military.

According to new analysis published on Monday in the New York Times, Washington under President Barack Obama has spent upwards of 600 million dollars in a “sweeping effort to combat militancy” in North Africa. The effort has included a significant focus on Mali, which was regarded as a bastion of stability and where the United States has poured money into training the military.

“Has this backfired?” Wing asked. “The Malian military training that was provided was useful, but what the U.S. government was not doing was putting all the pieces together.”

For instance, she said, the Pentagon should not have been surprised by discontent within the military that led to this spring’s coup. Furthermore, despite a key move during the 1990s to integrate ethnic Tuareg into the state military, Wing noted that little effort was put into actually resolving longstanding northern grievances of underdevelopment and decentralisation.

“The U.S. was always just looking at fragments of the picture and saying they would continue to support the situation through training operations,” Wing said. “It’s piecemeal intelligence – in Mali, somehow, the whole picture was never seen.”

© 2012 IPS North America

US Prepares Support for French Military Intervention in Mali

WASHINGTON - U.S. Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta has applauded France’s surprise airstrikes on Islamist rebels in northern Mali that began late last week and continued over the weekend.

The United States has poured money into training the Malian military in the last several years. Above, U.S. Special Forces inspect weapons in Mali in 2007. (Credit: The U.S. Army/ CC by 2.0) Panetta added that the U.S. government is readying plans for assistance in the ongoing operations, which scholars and human rights workers worry could continue for an extended period.

“I commend France for taking the steps that it has, and we have promised…to provide whatever assistance we can to try to help them in that effort,” Panetta told reporters on Monday.

“We have a responsibility to make sure that Al Qaeda does not establish a base for operations in North Africa and Mali,” he continued. “The effort is to try to do what is necessary to halt [rebel] advances and to try to secure some of the key cities in Mali.”

On Friday, the French government authorised airstrikes and ordered 550 French troops into Mali, where for 10 months the massive northern section of the country has been under the control of a combination of Islamists, ethnic Tuareg nationalists and criminal gangs. In March, the weak government in Bamako fell to a military coup, creating a power vacuum in the north.

Since then the international community has debated how to proceed. While France, Mali’s former colonial power, has pushed a military option, others such as the United States and the United Nations have been more cautious.

Still, in December, Washington and Paris co-sponsored a U.N. resolution that allowed for a military operation carried out by the West African grouping ECOWAS, for which the United States has offered training. (Washington is barred by law from training the Malian army until democratic elections are held.)

The ECOWAS force is not expected to be ready to enter Mali until the fall at the earliest, however. Meanwhile, Islamists reportedly linked to Al Qaeda have continued advancing against the Malian military. The French actions over the weekend sought to halt rebel attempts to take the central city of Konna, a strategy with which Washington appears to agree.

“It was clear to France and to all of us that that could not be allowed to continue,” Panetta said Monday. ”That’s the reason France has engaged, and it’s the reason that we’re providing cooperation to them in that effort.”

While Panetta refused to offer details of new U.S. assistance, he did state that there would be “some limited logistical support” and “intelligence support”, as well as “some areas of airlift”.

Both the United Kingdom and Canada have stated that they would send aircraft to assist in the Mali mission. The European Union on Monday said that it would not send any combat mission to North Africa, although it publicly supported the French decision.

Already a crisis

While France’s move appears to have taken observers by surprise, the strikes are reportedly received with cautious relief by many Malians.

Mali’s interim president, Dioncounda Traore, has been pleading for an intervention. And Oumou Sall Seck, the first woman mayor elected in northern Mali, warned in an opinion piece published in late December, “Immediately reclaiming northern Mali from violent extremists must become a priority. And it can’t be done without international help, especially from key powers like America and France."

With international action now underway, however, the mission’s exact scope is unclear. “I’m very surprised that things moved so quickly, given that there had been no movement and just a lot of talk for some time,” Susanna Wing, a professor at Haverford College who has written widely on Mali, told IPS.

“The French are clearly operating in the hope of a rout, but that is not likely to happen quickly. I’m worried this could go on and on and result in a real civilian catastrophe. It’s important to remember that there’s already a humanitarian crisis in Mali, with some 400,000 refugees having fled.”

Humanitarian groups are sounding the alarm, with Medecins Sans Frontieres and Amnesty International on Monday calling on international forces to protect civilians and health infrastructure.

While rumours surfaced on Monday of greater U.S. involvement in the fast-evolving situation in Mali, Wing says such involvement seems unlikely.

“Intelligence support, troop training – that seems reasonable, but I would be very surprised if there were anything other than that,” she says. “Since Somalia, everyone knows the U.S. isn’t going to move to put troops on the ground anytime soon.”

A more recent memory guiding many international actors, including the United States, may be that of Libya. The 2011 intervention and the resulting outflow of both weapons and fighters are widely regarded as having led directly to the subsequent spike in violence in Mali.

Piecemeal intelligence

Washington has been building up a covert network of Special Forces bases and operations in Africa over the past decade, and the sudden and dramatic decline in stability in Mali in the past year has come as a stinging surprise to many U.S. policymakers, particularly in the military.

According to new analysis published on Monday in the New York Times, Washington under President Barack Obama has spent upwards of 600 million dollars in a “sweeping effort to combat militancy” in North Africa. The effort has included a significant focus on Mali, which was regarded as a bastion of stability and where the United States has poured money into training the military.

“Has this backfired?” Wing asked. “The Malian military training that was provided was useful, but what the U.S. government was not doing was putting all the pieces together.”

For instance, she said, the Pentagon should not have been surprised by discontent within the military that led to this spring’s coup. Furthermore, despite a key move during the 1990s to integrate ethnic Tuareg into the state military, Wing noted that little effort was put into actually resolving longstanding northern grievances of underdevelopment and decentralisation.

“The U.S. was always just looking at fragments of the picture and saying they would continue to support the situation through training operations,” Wing said. “It’s piecemeal intelligence – in Mali, somehow, the whole picture was never seen.”

© 2012 IPS North America

Afghans reject US bid to train police

US plan to continue its local police training bid in Afghanistan even after the pullout of its troops there has been rejected by top Afghan officials, highlighting persisting disputes over future role of American forces in the country.

Top Afghan officials insist that Obama’s recent offer to remove US troops from Afghan villages must include Special Operations forces tasked with training the so-called Afghan Local Police (ALP), despite assumption by American officials that police trainers would be exempt from the pledged military force drawdown, The Washington Post reports on Tuesday.

While the US military regards the ALP training mission as “critical to security throughout Afghanistan, the effort has been opposed by top Afghan officials, including President Hamid Karzai, who argues that it helps create lawless armed militias, undermining the authority of the central government’s security forces.


The dispute, the report says, “Underscores just how difficult negotiations over a long-term security partnership could be during the next year.”

The report adds that while US officials say the local police training prevents assaults by militant groups, President Karzai “insists that it invites attacks.”

According to the daily, nearly 4,500 US Special Operations forces are tasked with training the ALP, a force of over 18,000 villagers “who are armed, paid and taught to defend their communities against encroaching insurgents.”

The report further reiterates that although Karzai initially approved the formation of the ALP under pressure from US military commanders, he has persistently objected to the presence of US-led forces in Afghan villages, expressing skepticism of their ability to protect Afghan civilians and describing them as “a source of instability and tension.”


Meanwhile, the daily quotes Karzai’s spokesman Aimal Faizi as stating in a Monday interview that the Afghan president has met with a number of civilians in recent months that “have accused the local police of rape, murder and theft in their villages.”

The report goes on to add that “many Western human rights organizations” verify such assessment.

“The creation of the ALP is a high-risk strategy to achieve short-term goals in which local groups are again being armed without adequate oversight or accountability,” it says, quoting a 2011 Human Rights Watch report.

American officials, however, stand by the program, describing it as a viable solution to Afghanistan’s security problems in remote villages. This is despite reports that since 2010, there have been at least three instances of ALP recruits shooting at their American trainers.

MFB/MFB

How Torture Misled the US into an Illegal War

“Zero Dark Thirty” stands in a long line of Hollywood-Washington collaborations that essentially do the work of propaganda.

Walmart plans to employ 100,000 veterans over 5 years

The world's largest retail chain Walmart Stores Inc has announced plans to hire more than 100,000 veterans in the US over the next five years.

­"Hiring a veteran can be one of the best business decisions you make … veterans have a record of performance under pressure," Reuters cited Walmart US Chief Executive Bill Simon’s speech be to delivered on Tuesday at the National Retail Federation conference.

The job offer will apply to any honorably discharged veteran within his or her first twelve months off active duty. "We believe Walmart is already the largest private employer of veterans in the country, and we want to hire more," Simon said.

The company plans to provide most of the jobs at Walmart stores and clubs, while some veterans will be employed in distribution centers, according to Simon. The retailer will start its veterans’ jobs campaign on Memorial Day in May.

The company would be able to employ any veteran in at least a part-time job, according to New York Times, citing Gary Profit, senior director of military programs at Walmart as saying.

Currently Walmart group is the largest private employer in the United States, with about 1.4 million employees, according to a March regulatory filing.

Walmart’s hiring initiative was also welcomed by First Lady Michelle Obama’s team.

"As our wars come to an end and our troops continue to come home, it's more important than ever that all of us – not just the government, but our businesses and non-profits as well – do our part to serve those who have served us so bravely," Michelle Obama said in the Walmart statement.

Last year the US Congress passed legislation that – among other things – gave employers tax credits for hiring veterans.

The unemployment rate for veterans serving after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks is 10%, about two percentage points higher than the overall rate across the US, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. With lack of education and experience other than the military, and wounds of war both physical and mental, young veterans face a tough job market in the US.

While employers appreciate the qualities veterans bring such as resistance to stress and problem-solving skills, they are reluctant to hire them because of concerns about mental health, triggered by military experience, according to Veterans Affairs. Nearly 450,000 recent veterans have been diagnosed with PTSD and other mental disorders.

Complicated Politics: Democrats and the Grand Bargain

It is a well-known fact that President Obama wants a “grand bargain” with the Republicans, a deal that would reduce future deficits both by raising tax revenues and cutting spending, including on the so-called “entitlement programs”. He has offered this idea up repeatedly to Speaker Boehner and other Republican leaders in the 2011 debt ceiling talks and in the 2012 fiscal cliff debate, and media reports suggest that he is discussing the idea again with Republicans in the lead-up to the next perils of Pauline budget crisis in that is only a few weeks off.

Democrats in the progressive wing of the party (of which, full disclosure, I am a card-carrying member) think the idea of cutting Social Security, Medicare, and/or Medicaid benefits is terrible public policy because senior citizens who can least afford it will be badly hurt, and we have been working hard to convince the President to back away from this offer. This may be difficult to do, though, as the President has some strong (wrong, in my judgment, but compelling to the President’s political and legislative team) political reasons for wanting to do this grand bargain. But the politics of this deal are very different for the rest of the party, and it may well be that progressives can win over a lot more of those Democrats than conventional wisdom currently expects.

The Obama team’s logic is that they are sick and tired, understandably, of Republicans wanting to make every single issue, every policy debate, about the deficit issue, and they don’t want our country to keep lurching from fiscal crisis to fiscal crisis as Republicans continue to look for “leverage” to force more cuts. And the White House, to their credit, is eager to move on to other issues that will move the country forward, such as immigration reform and gun safety issues. They believe that if they can finally close the deal and get the grand bargain they have been searching for, they will be on strong political ground to say, “Hey, we've already done something big on that, it’s time to move on.”

Now I happen to believe their logic is wrong on the politics of the issue, as Republicans’ strongest political issue by far is the deficit, and they will never give it up-- no matter what happens, they will keep demanding more and more cuts, and the deficit hawks in the media and well-funded groups like Fix The Debt will back them up. But even if you were to grant that the White House was right on the politics of this issue for them, for Democratic members of Congress the politics on this issue, the politics are completely different.

For starters, members of Congress are far more affected by what I call the intensity factor. Remember about 25 years ago when senior citizens surrounded Rep. Rostenkowski’s car and started rocking it back and forth because of a bill they didn’t like on catastrophic health care? Think what seniors today might do if their Social Security benefits were cut. That kind of intensity drives bad media coverage back home, primary challenges, contributions to opponents- and it kills your contributors’ and volunteers’ and base voters’ enthusiasm levels.

The threat of a primary is not as great on the Democratic side as on the Republicans, as the progressive movement has less money and capacity in general to mount many successful primary challenges. In the last several cycles, there has usually been one major primary challenge (some successful, some not) to an incumbent from the left, and that isn't enough to strike fear into most Democrats’ hearts. The intensity factor, though, might change the dynamics on this, adding new money and volunteers to primary fights. Add to that the combination of progressive forces with older voters who have just had their Social Security cut, and incumbent Democrats might have something to worry about, especially in states like PA, OH, MI, WI, and IA with both large numbers of seniors and large numbers of union members.

Beyond the primaries, though, the politics of cutting benefits is far worse for Democratic incumbents in an off year general election. Think about the demographics alone: in the past two Presidential elections, the percent of the electorate that came from voters 65 and over was 16%, whereas in the 2010 off-year election it jumped to 21%. And seniors have been one of the most volatile demographic groups in the electorate in recent years, and one not inclined to like Democrats very well: Democrats lost them by 8% in 2008, by a whopping 21% in 2010, and by 12% in 2012.

But seniors are far from the only worry with a bad vote on Social Security or Medicare. The voters that Democrats have to turn out in big numbers in an off-year are base voters. Base voters hate the idea of cutting Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, and a Democrat who had to defend that vote would be looking square in the face at a base voter constituency that was likely to be very depressed. I’ve lived through two off-year elections where Democratic base voters were unexcited about voting- 1994 and 2010- and I don’t relish living through that again.

What will be especially brutal in the off-year election for Democrats who believe they have cut a responsible bi-partisan deal that will protect them from Republican attacks is that the unaccountable outside groups with their millions of dollars in attack ads won’t hesitate to do brutal ads on them for cutting Social Security and Medicare, just as they did the last two elections attacking them for “cutting” Medicare. It won’t matter that the Republicans wanted to cut even more, or that the money for the ads comes from millionaires who would love to see these programs privatized: the attack dogs will not hesitate to make political hay off such a vote.

Beyond rank and file members of Congress, there is another major force in the Democratic party for whom a grand bargain is potentially deadly, and that is potential Presidential candidates. Try explaining your vote cutting Social Security to the heavily senior citizen and base activist-dominated Iowa caucuses. I've been involved in five different Presidential campaigns, and I feel pretty confident saying that it would be extremely tough to win a Democratic Presidential primary after voting to cut Social Security benefits.

Even if you grant that the politics of the grand bargain idea are good for President Obama, they are poison for Democrats in Congress who have to run again in 2014 and 2016. The President, who will never run for office again, may feel like his best political alternative is to ignore the wishes of both his base and the seniors who have never voted for him anyway on an issue like Social Security cuts. For the rest of the party, they had better take a close look at how this will affect their own political well-being.

How to Lose Your Entire Savings In an Instant

By the look of things, Europe’s banking system is breaking down again.

Bankia’s shareholders have received a nasty new year’s surprise. They may lose most of their investments or even all of them says the Spanish bank rescue fund in its latest report.

 

According to FROB, the Fund for Orderly Bank Restructuring, Bankia has a negative value of 4.2 billion euros, and its parent group BFA is 10.4 bn in the red.

 

Valuation is key in the recapitalisation of Spain’s banking system, weighed down by massive bad loans accumulated in a property bubble that burst in 2008. Bankia/BFA is set to receive 18 bn euros of European aid, and become the country’s biggest bailout recipient.

 

http://www.euronews.com/2012/12/27/bankia-worthless-says-new-report/

 

Greece’s four largest banks need to boost their capital by 27.5 billion euros ($36.3 billion) after taking losses from the country’s debt swap earlier this year, the largest sovereign restructuring in history.     

 

National Bank of Greece SA, the country’s biggest lender, needs to raise 9.8 billion euros, according to an e-mailed report by the Athens-based Bank of Greece (TELL) today. Eurobank Ergasias SA (EUROB) needs 5.8 billion euros, Alpha Bank (ALPHA) needs 4.6 billion euros and Piraeus Bank SA (TPEIR) needs 7.3 billion euros, according to the report. Total recapitalization needs for the country’s banking sector amount to 40.5 billion euros, the report said.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-27/greek-bank-capital-needs-at-eu27-5-billion-bank-of-greece-says.html

The above articles tell us point blank that Europe’s banking crisis is neither fixed nor even close to over.

Consider the article on Spain.

A little known fact about the Spanish crisis is that when the Spanish Government merges troubled banks, it typically swaps out depositors’ savings for shares in the new bank.

So… when the newly formed bank goes bust, “poof” your savings are GONE. Not gone as in some Spanish version of the FDIC will eventually get you your money, but gone as in gone forever.

This is why Bankia’s collapse is so significant: in one move, former depositors at seven banks just lost virtually everything.

In the case of Greece, the above article needs some perspective. Sure, €27.5 billion sounds like a lot of money, but just how big is it relative to Greece’s banks.

The entire capital base of the Greek banking system is only €22 billion.

By saying that Greek banks need €27.5 billion Greece is essentially admitting that is needs to recapitalize its entire banking system. Also, you should know that Greek banks are still sitting on €46.8 billion in bad loans.

There is a word for a banking system with a capital base of €22 billion and bad loans of €46.8. It’s INSOLVENT.

Take note, the EU Crisis is anything but over. The ECB may have pushed it back by a year by promising unlimited bond buying… but that relief rally is coming to an end.

With that in mind, smart investors are taking advantage of the lull in the markets to position themselves for what’s coming.

We offer several FREE Special Reports designed to help them do this. They include:

Preparing Your Portfolio For Obama’s Economic Nightmare

What Europe’s Crisis Means For You and Your Savings

How to Protect Yourself From Inflation

And last but not least…

Bullion 101: Everything You Need to Know About Investing in Gold and Silver Bullion…

You can pick up free copies of all of the above at:

http://gainspainscapital.com/

Best

Phoenix Capital Research

Your rating: None

Fk The Deficit

I caught some of Obama's last presser of his first administration and although he is fighting against the psychos wanting to destroy the global markets by refusing to raise the debt ceiling; I just don't understand some of his other words pertaining to our economy. Why does the President spend so much time on convincing America that the deficit is the GOD of all things and he's there to reduce it in a balanced approach? That's not what he was elected for.

The always awesome Charles Pierce:

The general public seems to think that The Economy is defined by how many people are working and how many people are not. The political elite, including the president, and the courtier press that services that elite, all seem to define the economy through the deficit. The cognitive dissonance in Washington is about how best to deal with an economy defined by the deficit. The cognitive dissonance in the country is about how best to deal with an economy that is being defined at the highest levels of the government in a way that the rest of the country finds odd and inadequate. So when the general public hears the president say this...

As I said on the campaign, one component to growing our economy and broadening opportunity for the middle class is shrinking our deficits in a balanced and responsible way. And for nearly two years now I've been fighting for such a plan, one that would reduce our deficits by $4 trillion over the next decade, which would stabilize our debt and our deficit in a sustainable way for the next decade. That would be enough not only to stop the growth of our debt relative to the size of our economy, but it would make it manageable so it doesn't crowd out the investments we need to make in people and education and job training and science and medical research — all the things that help us grow.

...it thinks the president has his priorities in the wrong order. When he talks about The American People, and the Middle Class thereof, he ought not to convince himself that he was re-elected because he's the guy who'll best bring down The Deficit. He got re-elected because the other guy convinced America that he wouldn't much care if people ate grass by the side of the road. The people who voted for this president did not do so because they wanted a balance program to bring down the deficit. They did so because they thought he was less likely to make their everyday lives harder than they already are. Because, as the blog's First Law Of Economics states: Fk The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money.

Prez Obama has used the Republican talking points about the federal debt for a long time now and I had hoped it would disappear for his second term, but I've been mistaken. I wonder if it's the Beltway Villagers unduly influencing his advisers to make sure he constantly talks like this when discussing the economy in front of America, or if he really believes this FOX News strategy. It makes no sense at all. Americans want to work. Americans want to make money.

That's what the economy means to them.

The additional maddening thing is that if you fix the jobs problem you largely fix the deficit problem. The reverse is not true. If you "fix" the deficit you kill the jobs.

It's that simple.

Mehdi’s Morning Memo: The Great Political Sulk

The ten things you need to know on Tuesday 15 January 2012..

1) 'THE GREAT POLITICAL SULK'

Last week, the PM and Deputy PM were renewing their vows and extolling the virtues and achievements of their coalition government. Last night, the latter's party blocked a key proposal of the former's party, prompting a Tory peer to denounce the deputy prime minister for his "great political sulk".

From the Daily Mail:

"Angry Tories rounded on Nick Clegg for staging a 'sulk' after Libs Dems last night voted down constituency boundary reform.

"The Government was defeated by 300 votes to 231 in the Lords, where Lib Dem ministers voted against their Tory Coalition partners for the first time. Reforms will now be delayed until 2018.

"Last night Tory peer Lord Dobbs said Lib Dem leader Mr Clegg had staged 'a great political sulk'.

"David Cameron has vowed to equalise constituency sizes, but the Lib Dems are furious over what they see as a betrayal after contentious plans to reform the House of Lords failed."

The Tories desperately need this policy in order to secure around 20 extra seats at the next election and the prime minister is said to be prepared to use the Parliament Act in order to overturn the Lords amendment in a Commons vote later this month. But does he have enough support in the lower house to do so? The SNP has said it now plans to join Labour and the Lib Dems in voting against the boundary changes.

Good luck, Dave!

2) CAMERON'S EUROPE SPEECH, PART 101

Whatever happened to Great British Sovereignty, eh? The prime minister, it seems, doesn't even have the power to decide which day to give a speech on.. er.. repatriating powers..

Due to German objections, it'll now be on Friday, not next Tuesday, explains the Times splash:

"David Cameron will this week light a five-year fuse under Britain’s place in Europe after being forced, under pressure from Germany, to bring forward his long-awaited EU speech.

"..[A]rrangements for his EU speech slid into disarray yesterday when he was forced to change the date because of objections from Angela Merkel.

"The German Chancellor advised Mr Cameron during a telephone call on Sunday night that his preferred date of January 22 would be viewed poorly in Berlin and Paris.

"No 10 planners and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office failed to notice that next Tuesday is the 50th anniversary of the Elysée treaty, a key date in the Franco-German calendar, which is being marked by elaborate commemorations."

Whoops!

Meanwhile, the Guardian reports that the UK is in "danger of putting at risk the fight against terrorism and organised crime if the Conservatives win a battle within the coalition to end British involvement in a series of European Union justice measures".

Oh dear. Oh, and Nick Clegg has just been on the Today programme saying the Lib Dem position on a referendum has not changed: "We need to give the British people the reassurance that if there is a new [EU] treaty.. in the future.. then, of course, we should have a referendum at that point." He also said a premature referendum could have a "chilling" effect on the UK economy.

3) NEW YEAR, NEW WAR

The French government has had strong backing from the UN Security Council overnight, for its ongoing attacks on Islamist rebels in Mali, but is urging African Union troops to take over the mission as soon as possible. The Guardian reports on its front page that " an Islamist militant leader warned the French government its intervention in Mali had opened the 'gates of hell'."

Meanwhile, the Independent splashes on a "warning" to Number 10 from the UK military's "top brass":

"Defence chiefs have warned against Britain becoming enmeshed in the mission against Islamists in Mali, pointing out that any action could be drawn-out and require significantly greater resources than have so far been deployed.

"The most senior commanders are due to make their apprehension clear at a meeting of the National Security Council with the Prime Minister today. They have the backing of the Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond."

Has the military learned the lessons of Iraq and especially Afghanistan? You'd hope so. Right?

4) MALI: BY NUMBERS

15.8m number of people living in Mali
90 percentage of population which is Muslim
53 average life expectancy
550 number of French troops deployed so far
1960 the year Mali gained independence from France

(via Huffington Post)

5) THE ROYALS' 'NUCLEAR DETERRENT'

Republicans like me are always accused of exaggerating the political and constitutional power of the good ol' monarchy.

Well, check out this astonishing report in today's Guardian:

"The extent of the Queen and Prince Charles's secretive power of veto over new laws has been exposed after Downing Street lost its battle to keep information about its application secret.

"Whitehall papers prepared by Cabinet Office lawyers show that overall at least 39 bills have been subject to the most senior royals' little-known power to consent to or block new laws.

".. In one instance the Queen completely vetoed the Military Actions Against Iraq Bill in 1999, a private member's bill that sought to transfer the power to authorise military strikes against Iraq from the monarch to parliament.

".. Charles has been asked to consent to 20 pieces of legislation and this power of veto has been described by constitutional lawyers as a royal 'nuclear deterrent' that may help explain why ministers appear to pay close attention to the views of senior royals."

Out-rageous!

BECAUSE YOU'VE READ THIS FAR...

Watch this video of the funniest moments from Sunday night's Golden Globes awards ceremony.

6) GOD VS THE COALITION

Have ministers been attacking senior civil servants in recent weeks in order to distract attention from country's economic problems and their own political difficulties? That's the view of GOD - Gus O'Donnell - as reported in the Independent:

"In an unprecedented intervention, the recent Cabinet Secretary Lord O'Donnell accuses ministers of undermining civil service morale by blaming officials for self-inflicted difficulties..

"'There is a correlation between attacking the civil service and a Government's standing in the polls,' Lord O'Donnell told The Independent. 'The fact is that the eurozone crisis has meant the economy has not recovered as fast as everyone would have liked. But that is not the fault of the civil service.' Lord O'Donnell also warned of the dangers of rushing through new policies without sufficient thought.

"'No one could argue that this Government has been prevented (by the civil service) from pursuing radical policies,' he said. 'Just look at health, education and welfare. They are not short of radical policies. The issue is whether they are the right policies.'"

Ouch.

7) LOWER PENSIONS FOR ALL!

As I pointed out in yesterday's Memo, the centre-right papers have been very excited about the government's plans for a new flat-rate stat pension, which would help stay-at-home mums. Today's Independent, citing research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), pours cold water on the policy:

"According to the IFS, 'the main effect in the long run will be to reduce pensions for the vast majority of people, while increasing rights for some particular groups, most notably the self-employed.' It said this verdict applied to people born after about 1970. 'In the long run, the reform will not increase accrual for part-time workers and women who take time out to care for children. In fact, in common with everyone else, these groups would end up with a lower pension.'"

8) CHRISTIANS, UNITE!

From the BBC:

"The European Court of Human Rights is due to deliver a landmark ruling in the cases of four British Christians who claim they suffered religious discrimination at work.

"They include an airline worker stopped from wearing a cross and a registrar who did not want to marry gay people.

"The four insist their right to express their religious beliefs was infringed."

Watch this space. The ruling is expected at around 9am.

9) DEADBEAT NATION

Barack Obama, re-elected and reinvigorated, took the fight over the debt ceiling to the Republicans yesterday, with some pretty strong rhetoric - from the Huffington Post:

"President Barack Obama issued a strong warning to Republicans on Monday that he will not negotiate over the debt ceiling or allow Republicans to use it as a bargaining chip.

"'To even entertain the idea of the United States of America not paying our bills is irresponsible. It's absurd,' Obama said in a press conference.

".. If the country failed to meet these obligations, Obama argued, investors around the world would question the credibility of the United States.

"'We are not a deadbeat nation,' Obama said. 'So there's a very simple solution to this: Congress authorizes us to pay our bills.'"

Meanwhile, The Hill reports:

"'I'm a pretty friendly guy. I like a good party,' Obama said during his press conference Monday at the White House. He joked that, 'now that my girls are getting older, they don't want to spend that much time with me anyway, so I'll be probably calling around, looking for somebody to play cards with.'"

10) BORIS BEAR

Sorry, what?

From the Times:

"A 12ft sculpture of a polar bear named Boris has been unveiled in Sloane Square to raise awareness of the plight of the species. It was unveiled by the Mayor of London’s father, Stanley Johnson, who is an environmental campaigner."

PUBLIC OPINION WATCH

From the Sun/YouGov poll:

Labour 44
Conservatives 31
Lib Dems 11
Ukip 9

That would give Labour a majority of 124.

140 CHARACTERS OR LESS

@TomHarrisMP Thinking of writing an article about how Twitter's increasing unpleasantness and intolerance is making it less relevant.

‏@DAaronovitch I enjoy the incredulity with which Government Nick Clegg reacts to evidence of Opposition Nick Clegg. #bbcr4today

@joshgreenman We are not a deadbeat nation. We are a dubstep nation.

900 WORDS OR MORE

Rachel Sylvester, writing in the Times, warns Cameron not to morph into a "pub bore": "A tough line on Europe and shirkers may be popular, but the Prime Minister has to play the measured statesman."

Polly Toynbee, writing in the Guardian, says: "On the economy, Europe, tax and the NHS, the trajectory is all in favour of Ed Miliband. Now his party can start to dare."

Will Straw, writing in the Daily Telegraph, says: "A referendum would give pro-Europeans the chance to win the case for democratic reform."


Got something you want to share? Please send any stories/tips/quotes/pix/plugs/gossip to Mehdi Hasan (mehdi.hasan@huffingtonpost.com) or Ned Simons (ned.simons@huffingtonpost.com). You can also follow us on Twitter: @mehdirhasan, @nedsimons and @huffpostukpol

By Decree Of The King: “There Are Some Steps That We Can Take That...

Mac Slavo
January 14th, 2013
SHTFplan.com

Read by 13,416 people

President Obama, much like his predecessors, has implemented scores of policy changes by way of Executive Order, a legal technique that allows the Commander-In-Chief to delegate legislation that, just like a bill passed in Congress, has the full force and authority of law.

Presidents have used executive powers to delegate authority over all sorts of issues since Abraham Lincoln first used this Executive power to mobilize troops against rebels operating in southern states. Franklin Roosevelt declared the possession of gold illegal by way of executive order in the 1930′s. A recent order by President Obama authorizes the seizure of farms, energy resources and skilled laborers in the event of a declared national emergency. An order authorizing the use of force and war in Kosovo was issued by President Bill Clinton in 1999.

Thousands of such orders have been issued, with President Obama having signed 144 of them so far during his first term.

But, arguably, there will be no Executive Order as significant and impactful as the one the President is promising to implement next.

According to assessments by Vice President Joe Biden and President Obama, they believe they have the authority to utilize this Constitutionally provided method of decree with respect to Americans’ right to bear arms:

My understanding is the vice president’s going to provide a range of steps that we can take to reduce gun violence.

Some of them will require legislation, some of them I can accomplish through executive action.

And so I will be reviewing those today, and as I said, I will speak in more detail to what we’re going to go ahead and propose later in the week.

But I’m confident that there are some steps that we can take that don’t require legislation and that are within my authority as president, and where you get a step that, has the opportunity to reduce the possibility of gun violence, then i want to go ahead and take it.

They may not have the ability to outlaw firearms, but you can bet they are exploring every legal loophole possible to restrict access to semi-automatic weapons (handguns and rifles), the acquisition of ammunition, and the private sale of guns and accessories between individuals.

THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN.

Our only hope once done is that the Supreme Court will quickly move to reject the President’s decrees.

Author: Mac Slavo
Views: Read by 13,416 people
Date: January 14th, 2013
Website: www.SHTFplan.com

Copyright Information: Copyright SHTFplan and Mac Slavo. This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to www.shtfplan.com. Please contact us for permission to reproduce this content in other media formats.

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On the News With Thom Hartmann: White House Supports Immigration Reform With Pathway to...

In today's On the News segment: Seattle teachers boycott new standardized test, and more.

Thom Hartmann here – on the news...

You need to know this. Internet trailblazer and activist Aaron Swartz is dead at age 26. Aaron, who often appeared on this show, was found dead in his apartment after an apparent suicide over the weekend. He had long battled depression. But friends, family, and supporters of Aaron are placing the blame for his death on the Department of Justice, which was currently prosecuting Aaron for an incident that happened back in 2011 on the campus of MIT. Aaron, an advocate for freedom of information on the Internet, was busted for tapping into MIT's network, and downloading millions of scholarly journals from the online database JSTOR. Despite it being a victimless crime, and JSTOR itself settling the matter with Aaron, the Department of Justice stepped in to make an example out of Aaron – charging him with multiple crimes and the possibility of serving more than 30 years in prison – which is more than killers, bank robbers, child pornographers, and terrorist sympathizers receive. The Secret Service even got involved in the matter. According to a statement – Aaron's family blamed his death on, "an exceptionally harsh array of charges." Our justice system is clearly broken. How is that banksters who steal billions, or corporate executives who are responsible for the deaths of workers on oil rigs and mines, never see a day in jail. But whistleblowers and freedom of information activists have the book thrown at them, and suffer the full might of the United States Justice Department? Over the weekend – online activists affiliated with Anonymous claimed responsibility for taking down the websites of MIT and the Department of Justice. One thing is for sure, the online community, which had joined together in the past for significant achievements, like the defeat of SOPA and PIPA, will not let Aaron die in vain. Like the suicide of the Tunisian street vendor, which kicked off the Arab Spring, Aaron's death just may be a spark to wake Americans up to this cancer in our justice system, this abuse of copyright laws, and this corporate domination of the internet, and our society. Let's hope.

In screwed news...gun-crazy America is arming up. While Vice President Biden and his gun taskforce think of ways to stem horrific gun violence in America – the shootings and the gun purchases keep piling up. According to the Children's Defense Fund, nearly 450 children and teenagers have been shot by a gun just since the 113th Congress was sworn in earlier this month. But the NRA is refusing to contribute anything meaningful to the debate, with the head of the NRA saying on Sunday that he opposes any sort of measure that will require background checks for ALL gun purchases. Currently, about 40% of gun purchases do not come with any sort of background check at all. And thanks to the fear mongering going on in the gun community, assault rifles are fling off the shelves around the nation. According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, there were 2.2 million gun background checks performed in December, which is more than a 58% increase over the same period in 2011. The longer our lawmakers wait to pass common sense gun safety measures, the more weapons of war will find their way onto our street corners, our shopping malls, and our schools. It's a dangerous game that the gun lobby is playing.

In the best of the rest of the news...

Teachers in Seattle are fed up with the corporate school reform agenda – and they are standing up against standardized testing. Nearly the entire teaching faculty at Garfield High School announced they will not teach, or administer, a new standardized test for 9th graders known as the MAP – the Measures of Academic Progress. The teachers say such standardized testing is a waste of time and money. A second school is even expected to join the boycott. In a statement about their decision, the teachers said, "After this thorough review, we have all come to the conclusion that we cannot in good conscience subject our students to this test again." Under George W. Bush, the use of standardized testing to judge progress in our schools exploded – despite little evidence that these tests are actually good measures of how well a student is learning. In reality – all these tests do is enrich corporate executives – like George W's brother Neil Bush – who sell these standardized tests to schools. Good on the Seattle teachers for fighting back against this education scam – and let's hope other teachers around the nation join this movement.

According to the White House – comprehensive immigration reform must include a pathway to citizenship. As the New York Times reports – the White House will soon tackle immigration reform head-on, with a call to allow undocumented immigrants currently in the United States an opportunity to be citizens one day. This is certain to draw the ire of Republicans, who call any sort of pathway to citizenship, "amnesty." But expect party elders on the Right – who understand the changing demographics in America – to sign on to immigration reform, in a desperate attempt to not become an irrelevant party in a rapidly changing United States.

And finally...take the trillion-dollar platinum coin off the table. Just like the 14th Amendment solution, the Obama administration ruled out using a platinum coin to raise the debt ceiling, should Republicans in the House not act. A statement from the Treasury released on Saturday read, "Neither the Treasury Department nor the Federal Reserve believes that the law can or should be used to facilitate the production of platinum coins for the purpose of avoiding an increase in the debt limit." And with that, the best chance Ronald Reagan had to put his face on a U.S. coin was lost. White House spokesman Jay Carney said there is no back-up plan, and it's up to Congress to raise the debt-limit. In other words – the fate of the entire global economy is in the hands of House Republicans. Be concerned. Be very concerned.

And that's the way it is today – Monday, January 14, 2013. I'm Thom Hartmann – on the news.

Cameron faces tightrope EU speech, shuns exit vote

LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister David Cameron will spell out plans to dilute Britain's membership of the European Union on Friday, a move that could reshape its role in the world, upset some of the premier's allies and decide his government's fate. ...

Republicans set to let US default

Republicans set to let US default

Republicans set to let US default

To force the Obama administration to cut spending, some House Republicans have advocated allowing the US to fall into default or shut down the government. By running out of money, the US would be unable to pay its bills as early as mid-February.

Some Republicans on Monday expressed their intentions to send the country into default if significant spending isn’t cut soon. The government could run out of cash as early as February 15 – but partisanship is preventing the parties from agreeing on a deficit-reduction plan to keep the US economy going.

“I think it is possible that we would shut down the government to make sure President Obama understands that we’re serious,” House Republican Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers told Politico. “We always talk about whether or not we’re going to kick the can down the road. I think the mood is that we’ve come to the end of the road.”

Gathering for private meetings, GOP leaders agreed that they consider it riskier to add to the US debt than undergo a default. Republican leadership officials said that more than half of their members are ready to let the country run out of money and shut down the government to have their voices heard.

“The President could absolutely never have to deal with the debt limit again. It will just require him to get serious about spending cuts,” Brendan Buck, spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, wrote in a tweet.

President Obama addressed the issue during a news conference Monday, outlining the bills that would be left unpaid if the country were to fall into default.

“If congressional Republicans refuse to pay America’s bills on time, Social Security checks and veterans benefits will be delayed,” Obama said. “We might not be able to pay our troops, or honor our contracts with small business owners. Food inspectors, air traffic controllers, specialists who track down loose nuclear materials wouldn’t get their paychecks.”

Between Feb. 15 and March 15, the government will receive $277 billion in revenue and face  $452 billion in bills that it would not be able to pay unless it increases the debt ceiling and/or cuts spending. Those who rely on government programs, such as Social Security recipients, veterans, and the poor, would be cut off from receiving aid and government employees would not be able to work. Interest rates would rise, the nation’s credit rating could be downgraded, and other countries would be less likely to trust the US financially.

Obama called the GOP stance on raising the debt ceiling “irresponsible” and “absurd” and pledged not to let Republican threats destroy the US economy and create “a self-inflicted wound”.

“They will not collect ransom in exchange for not crashing the American economy,” he said during his last news conference of his first term in office. “The full faith and credit of the United States of America is not a bargaining chip. And they better decide quickly because time is running short.”

‘Sandy Hook Truthers’ Crank Their Gun-Nuttery Up to the Max

A vile conspiracy theory is gaining traction in the gun rights community.

January 14, 2013  |  

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There's been no shortage of delusional claims made by the gun manufacturers' lobby and its allies in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre. Usually, they revolve around macho fantasies of gun owners heroically keeping their cool during surprise attacks, taking down mad gunmen without killing onlookers or being shot by arriving police. In the real world, of course, these are the kinds of people who tend to shoot themselves while  shopping for milk at Walmartrummaging around in their purses for lipstick or sleeping (sleeping can be really dangerous). 

But last week, Salon's Alex Seitz-Wald reported that a far more disturbing delusion is gaining traction on the fringes of the “gun rights” movement. Seitz-Wald calls them “Sandy Hook Truthers,” and he appeared on the AlterNet Radio Hour to discuss the phenomenon. Below is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion (you can listen to the whole show  here).

Joshua Holland: Alex, Talking Points Memo  reported this week that Joe Biden has given some hints of the recommendations that his Gun Control Task Force might offer as soon as next week. They're talking about banning high-capacity magazines and mandating universal background checks. Did you know that as many as 40 percent of all firearm sales in this country are done without a background check?

Alex Seitz-Wald: Yes. It’s really unbelievable. This is the so-called “gun show loophole,” but it extends way beyond gun shows. I can go online on Craigslist right now and find a gun and buy it, without any kind of background check or oversight.

JH: Any private citizen who’s not a licensed firearms dealer can just sell a gun to anybody without doing anything. It’s just crazy. 

Anyway, we’re going to have a big fight on our hands against one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington, the NRA, which represents the interests of firearms’ manufacturers. That fight is only coming, really, because 20 young children were cut down with a Bushmaster at a Connecticut school. That brings us to  your report this week on Salon.com, which I found mindblowing. Alex, tell us about the worst Sandy Hook conspiracy theory out there.

ASW: Yes. This is really unbelievable -- I could hardly believe it myself, but we all know about 9/11 truthers by now. These are the people who thought that 9/11 was an inside job. Now these folks -- I’m calling them the “Sandy Hook truthers” -- these are people, and there’s a surprising number of them, who think that the Sandy Hook massacre either didn’t happen or did happen, but was perpetrated by maybe government agents or crazy liberals.

There are different versions of the theory, all in an attempt to create a national movement for gun control. Obama or somebody killed all these little kids in order to get you and me to talk about guns and get the American people interested in gun control.

This was out there for a little while, but then it really picked up steam after they latched onto a girl named Emily Parker. She was a 6-year-old who was killed, and her father has been pretty active in the media. There was a funeral service in Utah, where the governor spoke, and that got a lot of attention. A photo emerged of her sister, sitting on Obama’s lap when he went and visited the family. The girl is wearing the same dress that Emily was wearing in a photo that the family had distributed to the media. To the Internet conspiracy theorists, it must be the same girl. Emily Parker must be alive! Therefore, the whole thing was a hoax.

Matt Taibbi & Former Bank Regulator William Black on Bailout Secrets and How New...

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to look at the state of Wall Street four years after the massive bailout and the news of this week's mortgage settlements with the major banks. Matt Taibbi has just written a new piece for Rolling Stone titled "Secrets and Lies of the Bailout." Also still with us is former financial regulator William Black, author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One. He is an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Matt, beginning with you, the latest announcement of the agreement for some of the banks to pay several billion dollars now to—supposedly to homeowners who were cheated in one way or another in the foreclosure crisis?

MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, I mean, I think this is just—to me, the most significant aspect of this is that it speaks to the failure of the government to address the foreclosure problem still, four and five years after the financial crisis. And one of the points I make in the piece I just wrote, "Secrets and Lies of the Bailout," is that foreclosure relief was originally written into the statute, the TARP statute, as a primary function of the original bailouts. It's right there in black and white, section 109, that TARP was supposed to provide all—a massive program of foreclosure relief, and they never got around to it. And the only bailout program that ever provided any foreclosure relief was HAMP, and that only—to date, they've only ended up spending about $3 [billion] or $4 billion out of all the bailout on that program. They have now—through litigation, there are these settlements that are starting to trickle in, but it's just too little, too late. And you contrast that with what happened at the beginning of the bailout, where the banks and the financial companies were instantly handed hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars of relief, and I think that that dichotomy is important for people to recognize, that the relief for ordinary people is still coming slowly and insufficiently years later, whereas relief for Wall Street came instantaneously and was excessive.

AMY GOODMAN: The latest news about AIG, the board has decided not to sue the American people—

MATT TAIBBI: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —for not bailing them out enough, not joining the former CEO, Hank Greenberg.

MATT TAIBBI: I think they probably didn't want to become a Saturday Night Live routine this weekend, but yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the significance of this and what actually is going on? Greenberg, the CEO, the former CEO, is suing.

MATT TAIBBI: Right, right, yes. This is a longstanding dispute between the former CEO of AIG, Hank Greenberg, and the government. And it's funny. If you actually read Greenberg's suit, there are some points in it that have a little bit of validity. I mean, it's still preposterous that Greenberg, who was, in a way, kind of like the Patient Zero of the financial crisis, because the scandal that he started at AIG back in the 2000—in the early 2000s. It was a reinsurance scandal where he was artificially inflating the balance sheet of AIG, that led to a downgrade of AIG, which led to the catastrophe of 2008, when the company went into—imploded. And that subsequently caused the entire financial crisis. You can really point to Hank Greenberg as maybe the guy who caused the financial crisis, and here he is suing the American government over the bailout.

But one of the things he says in this—his lawsuit is that the bailout of AIG was not really a bailout of AIG, it was a bailout of the companies that were owed money by AIG, because they gave 100 cents on the dollar to all the companies—the counterparties of AIG, like Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank and Barclays, and that if he were in that position, he would have negotiated a much tougher deal. That's probably true. I mean, there's actually some validity to that point, that there's no way, under any rational circumstances, that those companies should have gotten 100 cents on the dollar for the money they were owed by AIG.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: William Black, I'd like to ask you about this whole issue of the mortgage settlement that was announced. It is really, to me, amazingly scandalous that, years later, justice has not been forthcoming for all of these homeowners who lost their homes. I think the settlement calls for about $3.5 billion in cash to some three million homeowners; that works out to maybe about $1,000 a homeowner. And here we had instances of banks, with the massive robo-signings, evicting people from homes that they didn't even legally own at the time. And the thing became such a mess that the government review ended up wasting about a billion dollars just on the consultants hired to review all the bank foreclosures. What do you make of this settlement?

WILLIAM BLACK: So, the first thing is, this is more of what Matt and people like me have been writing about for years: the complete immunity of the elite Wall Street folks who caused this crisis through fraud, who became wealthy because of those frauds, and were then bailed out as a result of their frauds. None of them are being prosecuted. So we have admissions—and, by the way, this would have continued but for the discovery of this fraud. In other words, the banks weren't stopping it on their own.

The robo-signing, that means what they were doing was lying systematically to the tune, typically, of the large places, of 10,000 times a month, so over 100,000 times a year, committing felonies that would lead to people being made homeless in America, in many cases. It's just an astonishing aspect that nobody has gone to prison for all of this and that they gave them one of the largest grants of immunity you'll ever see.

Second thing, as you say, the money in the press reports is grossly inflated. There's only about $3 billion in cash. You're quite correct, that works out to less than $1,000 per victim. So it is exactly what Barofsky quotes Geithner as saying, that these housing programs were not designed for the victims; they were designed to, quote, "foam the runways" for the banks to reduce their loss exposure. So the rest of the supposed $5 billion in settlement is really just what in the commercial world we call "troubled debt restructurings," which are the things you would do anyway if the government didn't exist, because in most cases it's better for the bank not to have the default, to instead reduce the principal slightly. So, none of that is actually a bailout. None of it is actually a settlement. It's just the banks doing that which will profit maximize for the banks anyway.

AMY GOODMAN: ...June, when JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon testified on Capitol Hill. This is Oregon Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley questioning Dimon.

SEN. JEFF MERKLEY: In 2008, 2009, your company benefited from half-a-trillion dollars in low-cost federal loans, $25 billion in TARP loans, of TARP funds, untold billions indirectly through the bailout of AIG that helped address your massive exposure in repurchase agreements and derivatives. With all of that in mind, wouldn't JPMorgan have gone down without the massive federal intervention, both directly and indirectly, in 2008 or 2009?

JAMIE DIMON: I think you were misinformed. And I think that misinformation is leading to a lot of the problems we're having today. JPMorgan took TARP because we were asked to by the secretary of Treasury of the United States of America, with the FDIC in the room, head of the New York Fed, Tim Geithner, chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke. We did not, at that point, need TARP. We were asked to, because we were told—I think correctly so—that if the nine banks there—and some may have needed it—take this TARP, we can get it to the—all these other banks and stop the system from going down. We did not—

SEN. JEFF MERKLEY: I'm going to cut you—

JAMIE DIMON: We did not borrow from the Federal Reserve, except when they asked us to. They said, "Please use these facilities, because it makes it easier for other" —

SEN. JEFF MERKLEY: We would all like to be asking—

JAMIE DIMON: And we were not bailed out by AIG, OK? If AIG itself would have—we would have had a direct loss of maybe a billion or $2 billion if AIG went down, and we would have been OK.

SEN. JEFF MERKLEY: Then you have a difference of opinion with many analysts of the situation who felt the AIG bailout did benefit you enormously. And I'm not going to carry that argument with you now.

JAMIE DIMON: Well, but they're factually—

SEN. JEFF MERKLEY: Sir—

JAMIE DIMON: They're factually wrong.

SEN. JEFF MERKLEY: Sir, this is not your hearing. I'm asking you to respond to questions. And I also only have five minutes.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Oregon Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley questioning JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon. Matt Taibbi, the significance of this exchange?

MATT TAIBBI: Well, I think that's one of the things that's really interesting. And one of the things that I write about in this article is that this is what Neil Barofsky, the bailout inspector, calls the "original sin" of the bailout, which is this moment in time where—right after TARP was passed, where the government elected to call companies that were unhealthy and insolvent "healthy" and "solvent." When they scrapped the plan to buy up troubled assets—remember, TARP was the Troubled Asset Relief Program—well, they scrapped that idea a few days after the bill was passed and decided to just dump a whole bunch of money onto the balance sheets of these banks. This was called the Capital Purchase Program. They spent $125 billion right off the bat. It was spent on nine companies. And one of the things they said was, all of these companies are healthy and viable. And it turned out later, according to numerous sources, including all the SIGTARP reports, including—according to Barofsky and other sources, that they didn't even check to see if these companies were solvent at the time. They had no interest in discovering that, one way or the other. And, in fact, many of these companies were on the brink of failure at the time. Barofsky was told specifically that Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs were both on the brink of disaster when they were given this money.

It's interesting that Jamie Dimon talks about how his company didn't need that Fed money. You know, it came out in the—in Bloomberg's Freedom of Information request, when they got all the data from the audit of the Federal Reserve, it came out that his company, at that time, in late 2008, had a $50 [billion] or $60 billion line of credit with the Fed on top of all the money they were getting through the TARP bailout, through the bailout of Bear Stearns and other facilities. So, apparently, they didn't need all that money, you know, that $100 billion or whatever it was they got from the federal government; it was just they were taking it because they were being polite, they were being—and they were asked to by the federal government. And this fiction, that they didn't need the money, that they were healthy all the time, the government—we not only gave them money, but we vouched for them, and now we're stuck vouching for them basically forever. And that's the ongoing bailout that has become the real problem.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask William Black—in the deal that the Obama administration reached on taxes recently with the House Republicans, there hasn't been a lot of attention to the issue of what happened to carried interest. The hedge fund moguls of the world were most concerned about that, their abililty to evade taxes by having their payments as capital gains instead of actual fees and salaries. Could you talk about what the Obama administration did there?

WILLIAM BLACK: Yeah. Let me mention just one thing, though, that fits to Matt's point. They also changed the accounting rules, so the banks didn't have to recognize their losses, so that they could hide them and pretend to be healthy. So that's a huge part of that story.

As to taxes, you know, this was, again, a classic example of the Obama administration snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, where it had all the leverage and negotiated against itself once again. And so, yes, the wealthiest folks—and this is the irony, of course, is we're talking about the George Romneys of the world—I'm sorry, the Mitt Romneys of the world—I grew up in Michigan; I'm dating myself—are the principal beneficiary through the—something that is completely unsupportable, on any policy ground, which is this carried interest, which simply treats income as if it weren't income anymore for the wealthiest Americans who receive their money from running hedge funds. And that's continued.

AMY GOODMAN: Let's end with the legacy of the outgoing treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner. On Thursday, President Obama praised his time in office.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Thanks in large part to his steady hand, our economy has been growing again for the past three years. Our businesses have created nearly six million new jobs. The money that we spent to save the financial system has largely been paid back. We've put in place rules to prevent that kind of financial meltdown from ever happening again. An auto industry was saved. We made sure taxpayers are not on the hook if the biggest firms fail again. We've taken steps to help underwater homeowners come up for air and opened new markets to sell American goods overseas. And we've begun to reduce our deficit through a balanced mix of spending cuts and reforms to a tax code that, at the time that we both came in, was too skewed in favor of the wealthy at the expense of middle-class Americans. So, when the history books are written, Tim Geithner is going to go down as one of our finest secretaries of the Treasury.

AMY GOODMAN: That was President Obama. Professor Black, final seconds.

WILLIAM BLACK: OK. First, Geithner is a principled person who caused the crisis. He was supposed to be the top regulator preventing it in New York and did nothing. Second, he has created crony capitalism, American style. Third, those regulations in fact will not prevent future crises and were designed to make sure they were not. And I agree strongly with Matt that the choice of Jack Lew is to not only produce continuity with Geithner's disastrous failed policies, but to signal the administration's desire to continue the bailout of Wall Street.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt Taibbi?

MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, I think the legacy of Tim Geithner is simple. He's the architect of "too big to fail." And that's going to be, historically, his legacy. When this all blows up—and it's going to blow up, for sure, because it can't—things can't continue the way they are right now—people are going to look back in history, and they're going to say, "Who was to blame for this?" And Timothy Geithner is going to be the guy who designed this entire system.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Of course, and he will always be remembered as the first treasury secretary who neglected to pay his own taxes.

MATT TAIBBI: Right, right, there's that, true, exactly.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you both for being with us. Matt Taibbi, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, his latest piece, "Secrets and Lies of the Bailout." We'll link to it at democracynow.org. And William Black, professor of university—professor at University of Missouri-Kansas City. This is Democracy Now! We'll be back in a minute on this anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti. Stay with us.

Treasury Nominee Jack Lew’s Pro-Bank, Austerity, Deregulation Legacy

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: President Obama is facing criticism for nominating another former Wall Street executive to become treasury secretary. On Thursday, Obama tapped his own chief of staff, Jack Lew, to replace Timothy Geithner. Lew was an executive at Citigroup from 2006 to 2008 at the time of the financial crisis. He served as chief operating officer of Citigroup's Alternative Investments unit, a group that bet on the housing market to collapse.

Lew has also long pushed for the deregulation of Wall Street. From 1998 to January 2001, he headed the Office of Management and Budget under President Clinton. During that time, Clinton signed into law two key laws to deregulate Wall Street: the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000.

On Thursday, independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont criticized Lew's nomination, saying, quote, "We don't need a treasury secretary who thinks that Wall Street deregulation was not responsible for the financial crisis."

At a press conference at the White House Thursday, President Obama praised Jack Lew's record.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Jack has the distinction of having worked and succeeded in some of the toughest jobs in Washington and the private sector. As a congressional staffer in the 1980s, he helped negotiate the deal between President Reagan and Tip O'Neill to save Social Security. Under President Clinton, he presided over three budget surpluses in a row. So, for all the talk out there about deficit reduction, making sure our books are balanced, this is the guy who did it—three times. He helped oversee one of our nation's finest universities and one of our largest investment banks. In my administration, he's managed operations for the State Department and the budget for the entire executive branch. And over the past year, I've sought Jack's advice on virtually every decision that I've made, from economic policy to foreign policy.

AMY GOODMAN: For more on the nomination of Jack Lew, as well as other news about Wall Street, we're joined by two guest. William Black, author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One_, he's associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, former senior financial regulator. His recent 2446848.html">article for the Huffington Post is called "Jacob Lew: Another Brick in the Wall Street on the Potomac."

We're also joined by Matt Taibbi, contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine, his latest piece, "Secrets and Lies of the Bailout," which we'll talk about in a bit, author of Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Professor Black, let's start with you. Your assessment of Jack Lew?

WILLIAM BLACK: Well, on financial matters, Jack Lew has been a failure of pretty epic proportions, and he gets promoted precisely because he is willing to be a failure and is so useful to Wall Street interests. So, you've mentioned two of the things in terms of the most important and most destructive deregulation under President Clinton by statute. But he was also there for much of the deregulation by rule, and a strong proponent of it, and he was there for much of the cutting of staff. For example, the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, lost three-quarters of its staff, and that huge loss began under Clinton. And the whole reinventing government, Lew was a strong supporter of that. And, for example, we were taught—instructed by Washington that we were to refer to banks as our "clients" in our role as regulators and to think of them as clients.

He goes from there to Wall Street, where he was a complete failure. You noted that part of what Citicorp did was bet that housing would fall. That was actually one of their winning bets. But they actually made a bunch of losing bets, as well. And the unit that he was heading would have not been permissible but for the deregulation of getting rid of Glass-Steagall under President Clinton. And you saw, as an example of Citicorp, why we shouldn't be doing this. Why would we create a federal subsidy where all of us, through the U.S. government, are on the hook for Citicorp's gambling on financial derivatives for its own account, you know, running a casino operation? That makes absolutely no public policy sense.

Then he comes into the Obama administration, and he was disastrously wrong. He tried very hard to impose austerity on the United States back in 2011, which is—he wanted, you know, the European strategy, which has pushed the eurozone back into recession, and Spain, Greece and Italy into Great Depression levels of unemployment.

And this is the guy, after all of these failures, who also is intellectually dishonest. He will not own up to his role and deregulation's role and de-supervision's role in producing this crisis—and not just this crisis, but the Enron-era crisis and the savings-and-loan debacle.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Matt Taibbi, your reaction to the nomination of Jack Lew by President Obama?

MATT TAIBBI: I think there's a couple things. I agree with everything that Professor Black said. I think it's—the symbolism of this choice is, I think, very important for people, just the mere fact of picking somebody from Citigroup and from that same Bob Rubin nexus that Timothy Geithner came from. And, you know, you heard Barack Obama, as he's introducing Jack Lew, praising Tim Geithner as somebody who's going to go down in history as one of the great treasury secretaries of all time. I think what this tells everybody is that Jack Lew is going to represent absolute continuity with the previous treasury secretary, who had a very specific agenda when it came to Wall Street. And I think we're just going to expect more of the same, more of the same really being overt and covert support of these too-big-to-fail institutions that Lew worked for, Citigroup being the worst and most disastrous example of that kind of company. So I think it's—the choice of somebody from that particular firm is fraught with pretty upsetting symbolism for the country, I think.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to 2010, when Jack Lew appeared before the Senate Budget Committee for a confirmation hearing after he was nominated by President Obama to head the Office of Management and Budget. During the hearing, he was questioned by Senator Bernie Sanders.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Do you believe that the deregulation of Wall Street, pushed by people like Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, contributed significantly to the disaster we saw on Wall Street several years ago?

JACK LEW: Senator, I—as when we discussed, I mentioned to you, I don't consider myself an expert in some of these aspects of the financial industry. My experience in the financial industry has been as a manager, not as an investment adviser. My sense is, as someone who has, you know, generally been familiar with these trends, is that the problems in the financial industry preceded deregulation. There was an increasing emphasis on highly abstract leveraged derivative products that got us to the point that, in the period of time leading up to the financial crisis, risks were taken. They weren't fully embraced. They weren't well understood. I don't personally know the extent to which deregulation drove it, but I don't believe that deregulation was the, you know, proximate cause. I would defer to others who are more expert about the industry to try and parse it better than that.

AMY GOODMAN: That's Jack Lew responding to Bernie Sanders, who, when President Obama announced his nomination of treasury secretary—to treasury secretary of Jack Lew, Senator Sanders said, "We don't need a treasury secretary who thinks that Wall Street deregulation was not responsible for the financial crisis." Professor Black?

WILLIAM BLACK: Well, I mean, we can agree that he lacks expertise in the area, but he was supposed to have expertise. This was supposed to be his area of expertise, both in his role as OMB head under Clinton, and then, of course, as being in the industry and actually implementing the fruits of this deregulation.

So—and he has the history, in one sense, correct. He says the problem arose before deregulation. That's true that derivatives were already a problem before deregulation. And so, Brooksley Born proposes to deal with the problem by having a regulation to deal with credit default swaps. And then the Clinton administration, in league with Greenspan, in league with Phil Gramm, and with one of the important architects of all of this being Jack Lew, squashes Brooksley Born to destroy the proposed regulation and to pass something, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act—talk about a dishonest phrase—that not only said, "You, Brooksley Born, cannot go forward with this particular regulation," the statute actually said, "We hereby withdraw all regulatory powers to protect the nation, period. From the federal government, from the state and local governments, we exempt you from the gambling laws. We exempt you from the boiler room laws to prevent fraudulent operations." It's one of the most extraordinary abusive things in the world, heavily involved with AIG's ability to produce not just the disaster at AIG, but the disaster of credit—of the CDOs that blew up a larger portion of the world. And those CDOs would not have been possible without these credit default swaps.

So, this is a guy who designed the disaster, participated in the disaster on Wall Street, was made rich by it. We haven't talked about the fact that he got a huge bonus for destroying—helping to destroy the world at Citicorp. And he got it through the bailout of Citicorp by the U.S. government. So he produces disaster, profits from the disaster, we pay him bonuses for causing the disaster, and then we have the absurdity of the president of the United States saying that this is a man with a track record of unmitigated success. It is exactly the opposite, in terms of finance. He is a worthy successor to Tim Geithner, in that he has screwed up everything substantively he has ever touched.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: William Black, I'd like to ask you about another aspect of Lew's portfolio: his stance on austerity. You have raised questions in terms of his continued support of austerity measures, as opposed to efforts by the government to stimulate the economy. Could you talk about that?

WILLIAM BLACK: Yeah, and this is an irony, as well, in terms of the political aspects and Obama. So, under Lew, in his new incarnation a while back as OMB head of—for Obama, I have a piece that talks about how OMB under Obama sounds almost exactly like the tea party. So, it adopts all of their rubric about, you know, these terrible social programs, this terrible safety net and how it's going to imperil our nation, and what we need to do is be balancing the budget—in other words, austerity.

Now, had Obama succeeded in following Lew's recommendation in July 2011, when they were trying to negotiate the so-called "grand bargain," which is really the grand betrayal of the safety net—unemployment in July 2011 was 9.1 percent. Austerity in the United States would have done just what it did in Europe. Unemployment would have surged. So, all through 2012, the election year, unemployment would have been going up well above 10 percent, quite possibly into the 11 and 12 percent range, which is where it is in Europe. Obama would have been toast; would have been no chance. He would have been crushed in the election. The Democrats would have lost control of the Senate, and such. And these folks, even today, are claiming that the failure to achieve the grand betrayal and to cut the safety net is their great disappointment. So, they not only tried to destroy themselves and the country, they are continuing to do that, and indeed, but for Harry Reid literally throwing the Obama administration's suggestion that they do cuts to the safety net in the fireplace and burning it up, they would have gotten it as part of this interim austerity deal that was just done about eight days ago.

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to break, then come back to this discussion with William Black, professor at University of Missouri-Kansas City, and Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone editor. "Secrets and Lies of the Bailout" [is] his latest piece. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.

Great Fallout: NDAA Chinese tunnel scare ‘smokescreen for US nuclear intentions’

A US defense report has called for contingency planning to neutralize a vast Chinese tunnel network with both “conventional and nuclear forces.”

Finding Excuses to Torture

Canada Supports Torture: An Instrument of "Terrorism Propaganda"

Despite evidence over the centuries that torture fails to elicit reliable information – and is criminal as well – apologists for George W. Bush and movies like Zero Dark Thirty continue to perpetuate the myth that torture is a necessary evil, at least when Americans are doing the torturing, as Lawrence Davidson writes.

In 2005, I wrote an essay, published in the journal Logos, entitled “Torture in our Time.” In it I laid out the historical evidence for the conclusion that torture rarely works. This position goes back at least to the Enlightenment when Cesare Beccaria wrote a famous pamphlet, “ On Crimes and Punishments” (1764) in which he observed the obvious:
“The impression of pain, then, may increase to such a degree that, occupying the mind entirely, it will compel the sufferer to use the shortest method of freeing himself from torment. … He will accuse himself of crimes of which he is innocent so that the very means employed to distinguish the innocent from the guilty will most effectually destroy all difference between them.”

Along with false admissions of guilt, those under torture will tell their tormenter just about anything, regardless of truth and accuracy. Modern researchers, and even modern practitioners of interrogation, know this to be so. They have come to the same conclusion as Beccaria. Torture produces more false and fictional information than not.

For instance, Darius Rejali in his book Torture and Democracy (2009), tells us that “the available evidence [against the efficacy of torture] is conclusive” and alludes to the fact that, for 250 years, criminologists, and psychologists have been pointing this out.

Image: Depiction of torture methods in the 16th Century. 

The ex-intelligence officer, Colonel John Rothrock, who headed a combat interrogation team in Vietnam, told the Washington Post in 2005 that, given the Vietnam experience, “he doesn’t know any professional intelligence officers of my generation who would think this [torture] is a good idea’” even in a so-called “ticking bomb” scenario.

The inclusion of “my generation” in Rothrock’s statement implies that each generation has to learn the truth about torture anew, over the wreckage of newly broken bodies.

More recently, in December 2012, the Senate Intelligence committee approved a report which, in some 6,000 pages, concludes that “the harsh interrogation measures used by the CIA [that is the torture techniques allowed by the administration of George W. Bush] did not produce significant intelligence breakthroughs.”

This specifically includes the production of intelligence leading to the discovery of Osama bin Laden. Indeed, the report says that torture actually became “counterproductive in the broader campaign against al-Qaeda.” All this led Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to call Bush Jr.’s secret CIA prisons and use of torture “terrible mistakes.”

The Eternal Skeptics

For a certain subset of the population (and not just in the U.S.) these truths do not matter. This subset constitutes a modern warrior caste and their followers. The American sampling includes many (but not all) neoconservatives, classic tough-guys turned politicians, faux-realists, military professionals, and an ever-present small number of people who just like to hurt and humiliate others and find their way into professions that allow them to do so (often the actual torturers).

For all these folks the evidence against torture appears counter-intuitive and just does not “feel right.” Therefore, intuitively, these skeptics feel more comfortable with another statement, that might be juxtaposed with Beccaria’s above. This one was written by White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, in a memorandum for President Bush on Jan. 25, 2002:

“The nature of the new war places a high premium on … the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians.  In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s [the Geneva Convention Against Torture] strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners.”

Currently, it is the Republican Party that harbors many of the skeptics who share this opinion about the efficacy of torture and the “obsolete” nature of the treaties (ratified by the United States) forbidding it.

Some Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee that issued the latest report proving torture’s uselessness, even refused to participate in the report’s investigatory process. For them this might have been the result of obeying their party’s dictate to remain loyal to the discredited Bush administration.

For others though, it was loyalty plus their belief (in the face of all the evidence to the contrary) that Bush was correct to send the CIA out into the world to cause unbearable pain and suffering. They believe such behavior materially contributed to “making America safe.”

Making Torture’s Case at the Movies

Unfortunately, there is a general tendency on the part of Americans to agree with the skeptics. And, this trend is about to be strengthened. There is now a movie, Zero Dark Thirty (the work of the Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow) in U.S. theaters that will reinforce the erroneous view that torture works.

Zero Dark Thirty purports to tell the story, based on “first-hand accounts,” of the hunt for and killing of Osama Bin Laden. According to this film, torture formed a “critical aspect of intelligence gathering” process. There is good evidence that the U.S. government assisted in making the movie, if not the actual writing of the script.

It would be nice if some talented director could make a movie, based on “first-hand accounts” of the making of the Senate report on Bush era torture. But that sort of movie will not be made because Washington has no desire to tie its hands in this regard. Nor will the truly accurate documentaries (see below) that do exist on the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, or the now defunct hell-hole that was Abu Ghraib, get national distribution.

However, we can expect many more films like Zero Dark Thirty. This is because the recent 2013 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) signed by President Barack Obama makes legal direct government funding of propaganda aimed at the American population. Perhaps the U.S. government is about to buy its own back-lot in Hollywood.

There is a story about Abraham Lincoln that claims that every time he was confronted by someone extolling the benefits of slavery, he had a desire to see it (slavery) tried out on the one defending it. Torture can be approached the same way.

Does President Bush Jr. and ex-counsel Alberto Gonzales think it is a vital part of America’s defense? Do those Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee have such faith in torture that they can dismiss out of hand 6,000 pages of contrary evidence?

OK. Let’s see torture tried out on these fellows and note whether they will confess to false reports about, say, their sex lives.

Just wishful thinking. The torturers we are talking about are all past or present powerful government officials and their henchmen. Most of them will die in bed and maybe, someday, have their face put on a postage stamp. Their horrid deeds, already excused, will soon be forgotten.

For what are crimes when committed by the average person, are but vices when committed by the powerful (so said Benjamin Disraeli). Finally, it has been known for ages that, as the old Latin saying goes, “in times of war the laws go silent.”

Note: Here are three good documentaries touching on the U.S. practice of torture: Alex Gibney, “Taxi to the Dark Side;” Rory Kennedy, “Ghosts of Abu Ghraib;” Annie Sunberg and Ricki Stern, “The End of America.”

Lawrence Davidson is a history professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. He is the author of Foreign Policy Inc.: Privatizing America’s National InterestAmerica’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood; and Islamic Fundamentalism.

Congo’s M23 conflict: Rebellion or resource war? (Op-Ed)

M23 rebels in DR Congo have threatened to march to the capital and depose the government. UN reports confirm that rebels receive support from key US allies in the region, and Washington's role in the conflict has become difficult to ignore.

Instability, lawlessness and violence are nothing new to those who live in the troubled eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. An estimated 6.9 million Congolese have perished since 1996 in a spate of ceaseless military conflicts that have long gripped this severely-overlooked and underreported region. In late November 2012, members of the M23 rebel group invaded and took control of Goma, a strategic provincial capital in North Kivu state with a population of 1 million people, with the declared purpose of marching to the nation’s capital, Kinshasa, to depose the ruling government.

M23's president, Jean Marie Runiga, later agreed to withdraw only if the ruling President Joseph Kabila listened to the group's grievances and adhered to their demands. Rebel leaders have threatened to abandon peace talks unless Kinshasa signs an official ceasefire, a demand the government dismissed as unnecessary.

Kinshasa called on M23 to respect previous agreements to withdraw 20km outside of Goma in a move to prevent the region falling back into war after two decades of conflict, fought largely over the DRC’s vast wealth of copper, cobalt diamonds, gold and coltan.

The United Nation’s peacekeeping mission in DR Congo has come under fire for allowing M23 to take Goma without firing a single shot, despite the presence of 19,000 UN troops in the country. The UN’s Congo mission is its largest and most expensive peacekeeping operation, costing over US$1 billion a year. UN forces recently announced they would introduce the use of surveillance drones over the DRC, in addition to imposing a travel ban and asset freeze on M23 leader Jean-Marie Runiga and Lt. Col. Eric Badege.

A confidential 44-page report issued by a United Nations panel accused the governments of neighboring Rwanda and Uganda of supporting M23 with weapons, ammunition and Rwandan military personnel. Despite both nations denying these accusations, the governments of the United States, Britain, Germany and the Netherlands have publicly suspended military aid and developmental assistance to Rwanda. The governments of both Rwanda and Uganda, led by President Paul Kagame and President Yoweri Museveni respectively, have long been staunch American allies and the recipients of millions in military aid.

M23 President Jean-Marie Runiga (2nd R) arrives to address the media in Bunagana in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.(Reuters / James Akena)
M23 President Jean-Marie Runiga (2nd R) arrives to address the media in Bunagana in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.(Reuters / James Akena)

Historical precedent

 The DRC has suffered immensely during its history of foreign plunder and colonial occupation; it maintains the second-lowest GDP per capita despite possessingan estimated $24 trillion in untapped raw minerals deposits.

During the Congo Wars of the 1996 to 2003, the United States provided training and arms to Rwandan and Ugandan militias who later invaded the Congo’s eastern provinces where M23 are currently active. In addition to enriching various Western multinational corporations, the regimes of Kagame in Rwanda and Museveni in Uganda both profited immensely from the plunder of Congolese conflict minerals such as cassiterite, wolframite, coltan (from which niobium and tantalum are derived) and gold; the DRC holds more than 30 per cent of the world's diamond reserves and 80 per cent of the world's coltan.

In 1990, civil war raged between Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups in neighboring Rwanda; Washington sought to overthrow the 20-year reign of then-President Juvénal Habyarimana (a Hutu) by installing a Tutsi client regime. At the time, prior to the outbreak of the Rwandan civil war, the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), led by the current president, was part of Uganda’s United People's Defense Forces (UPDF).

Kagame, who received training at the US Army Command and Staff College in Leavenworth, Kansas, invaded Rwanda in 1990 from Uganda under the pretext of liberating the Tutsi population from Hutu subjugation. Kagame’s forces defeated the Hutu government in Kigali and installed himself as head of a minority Tutsi regime in Rwanda, prompting the exodus of 2 million Hutu refugees (many of whom took part in the genocide) to UN-run camps in Congo’s North and South Kivu provinces.

Following Kagame’s consolidation of power in Rwanda, a large invasion force of Rwandan Tutsis arrived in North and South Kivu in 1996 under the pretext of pursuing Hutu militant groups, such as the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR). Under the banner of safeguarding Rwandan national security, troops from Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi invaded Congo and ripped through Hutu refugee camps, slaughtering thousands of Rwandan and Congolese Hutu civilians, including many women and children.

US Special Forces trained Rwandan and Ugandan troops at Fort Bragg in the United States and supported Congolese rebels, who brought down Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko – they claimed he was giving refuge to the leaders of the genocide.

After deposing Mobutu and seizing control in Kinshasa, a new regime led by Laurent Kabila, father of the current president, was installed. Kabila was quickly regarded as an equally despotic leader, eradicating all opposition to his rule; he turned away from his Rwandan backers and called on Congolese civilians to violently purge the nation of Rwandans, prompting Rwandan forces to regroup in Goma.

Laurent Kabila was assassinated in 2001 at the hands of a member of his security staff, allowing his son, Joseph, to usurp the presidency. The younger Kabila derives his legitimacy from the support of foreign heads of state and the international business community, primarily for his ability to comply with foreign plunder.

During the Congo’s general elections in November 2011, the international community and the UN remained silent regarding the mass irregularities observed by the electoral committee. The United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) has faced frequent allegations of corruption, prompting opposition leader Étienne Tshisikedi, who is currently under house arrest, to call for the UN mission to end its deliberate efforts to maintain the system of international plundering and to appoint someone “less corrupt and more credible” to head UN operations.

MONUSCO has been plagued with frequent cases of peacekeeping troops caught smuggling minerals such as cassiterite and dealing weapons to militia groups. Kabila is seen by many to be self-serving in his weak oversight of the central government in Kinshasa. M23 rebels have demanded the liberation of all political prisoners, including opposition leader Étienne Tshisikedi, and the dissolution of the current electoral commission that was in charge 2011’s elections, widely perceived to be fraudulent.

Displaced civilians from Walikale arrive at Magunga III camp outside of the eastern Congolese city of Goma.(Reuters / Alissa Everett)
Displaced civilians from Walikale arrive at Magunga III camp outside of the eastern Congolese city of Goma.(Reuters / Alissa Everett)

Role of US in Rwanda’s M23 backing

M23, or The March 23 Movement, takes its name from peace accords held on March 23, 2009, which allowed members of the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP), an earlier incarnation of today’s M23, to integrate into the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC) and be recognized as an official political party.

The CNDP was an entirely Rwandan creation, and was led by figures such as Bosco Ntaganda. In accordance to the deal reached in 2009, the Congolese government agreed to integrate 6,000 CNDP combatants into the FARDC, giving Ntaganda, a Rwandan Tutsi and former member of the Rwandan Patriotic Army, a senior position in the integrated force.

The current M23 offensive began in April 2012, when around 300 former CNDP personnel led by Ntaganda defected from FARDC, citing poor working conditions and the government's unwillingness to meaningfully implement the 23 March 2009 peace deal.

According to UN reports, Ntaganda controls several mining operations in the region and has derived enormous profits from mineral exploitation in eastern Congo, in addition to gaining large revenues from taxation levied by Rwandan-backed “mining police.” Bosco Ntaganda appears to be assisting Rwanda’s Tutsi government in plundering eastern Congo’s natural resources, which has gone on since Kagame came to power in 1994; M23 is basically paid for with the money from tin, tungsten and tantalum smuggled from Congolese mines.

UN reports detail Rwanda's deep involvement by even naming Rwandan personnel involved; Ntaganda takes direct military orders from Rwandan Chief of Defense Staff General Charles Kayonga, who in turn acts on instructions from Minster of Defense General James Kabarebe. Both Britain and France reportedly found the UN report to be "credible and compelling."

Susan Rice, US Ambassador to the United Nations, finds herself mired in scandal yet again; Rice has come under fire for suppressing information on Rwanda’s role in the ongoing resource looting and rebellion in eastern Congo. Rice delayed the publication of a UN Group of Experts report detailing Rwandan and Ugandan depredations in Congo, while simultaneously subverting efforts within the State Department to rein in Kagame and Museveni.

Rice, in her role as assistant secretary of state for African affairs in 1997 under the Clinton administration, tacitly approved Rwanda and Uganda’s invasion of the Democratic Republic of Congo and was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “…they [Kagame & Museveni] know how to deal with that, the only thing we have to do is look the other way.”

Another article published in the New York Times by Helen Cooper detailed Rice’s business connections to the Rwandan government:

“Ms. Rice has been at the forefront of trying to shield the Rwandan government, and Mr. Kagame in particular, from international censure, even as several United Nations reports have laid the blame for the violence in Congo at Mr. Kagame’s door… Aides to Ms. Rice acknowledge that she is close to Mr. Kagame and that Mr. Kagame’s government was her client when she worked at Intellibridge, a strategic analysis firm in Washington… After delaying for weeks the publication of a United Nations report denouncing Rwanda’s support for the M23 and opposing any direct references to Rwanda in United Nations statements and resolutions on the crisis, Ms. Rice intervened to water down a Security Council resolution that strongly condemned the M23 for widespread rape, summary executions and recruitment of child soldiers. The resolution expressed ‘deep concern’ about external actors supporting the M23. But Ms. Rice prevailed in preventing the resolution from explicitly naming Rwanda when it was passed on Nov. 20.”

M23 rebel fighters walk as they withdraw near the town of Sake, some 42 km (26 miles) west of Goma.(Reuters / Goran Tomasevic)
M23 rebel fighters walk as they withdraw near the town of Sake, some 42 km (26 miles) west of Goma.(Reuters / Goran Tomasevic)

Geopolitics of plunder

It must be recognized that Kagame controls a vastly wealthy and mineral-rich area of eastern Congo – an area that has long been integrated into Rwanda’s economy – with total complicity from the United States.

As Washington prepares to escalate its military presence throughout the African continent with AFRICOM, the United States Africa Command, what long-term objectives does Uncle Sam have in the Congo, considered the world’s most resource-rich nation?

Washington is crusading against China's export restrictions on minerals that are crucial components in the production of consumer electronics such as flat-screen televisions, smart phones, laptop batteries, and a host of other products. The US sees these Chinese export policies as a means of Beijing attempting to monopolize the mineral and rare earth market.

In a 2010 white paper entitled Critical Raw Materials for the EU,” the European Commission cites the immediate need for reserve supplies of tantalum, cobalt, niobium, and tungsten among others; the US Department of Energy 2010 white paper Critical Mineral Strategy also acknowledged the strategic importance of these key components.

In 1980, Pentagon documents acknowledged shortages of cobalt, titanium, chromium, tantalum, beryllium, and nickel. The US Congressional Budget Office’s 1982 report Cobalt: Policy Options for a Strategic Mineral notes that cobalt alloys are critical to the aerospace and weapons industries and that 64 per cent of the world’s cobalt reserves lay in the Katanga Copper Belt, running from southeastern Congo into northern Zambia.

Additionally, the sole piece of legislation authored by President Obama during his time as a Senator was SB 2125, the Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act of 2006. In the legislation, Obama acknowledges Congo as a long-term interest to the United States and further alludes to the threat of Hutu militias as an apparent pretext for continued interference in the region; Section 201(6) of the bill specifically calls for the protection of natural resources in the eastern DRC.

The United States does not like the fact that President Kabila in Kinshasa has become very comfortable with Beijing, and worries that Congo will drift into Chinese economic orbit. Under the current regime in Congo, Chinese commercial activities have significantly increased not only in the mining sector, but also considerably in the telecommunications field.

In 2000, the Chinese ZTE Corporation finalized a $12.6 million deal with the Congolese government to establish the first Sino-Congolese telecommunications company; furthermore, the DRC exported $1.4 billion worth of cobalt between 2007 and 2008. The majority of Congolese raw materials like cobalt, copper ore and a variety of hardwoods are exported to China for further processing and 90 per cent of the processing plants in resource rich southeastern Katanga province are owned by Chinese nationals.

In 2008, a consortium of Chinese companies were granted the rights to mining operations in Katanga in exchange for US$6 billion in infrastructure investments, including the construction of two hospitals, four universities and a hydroelectric power project.

In 2009, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) demanded renegotiation of the deal, arguing that the agreement between China and the DRC violated the foreign debt relief program for so-called HIPC (Highly Indebted Poor Countries) nations.

The IMF successfully blocked the deal in May 2009, calling for a more feasibility study of the DRCs mineral concessions. An article published by Shamus Cooke of Workers Action explains:

“This act instantly transformed Kabila from an unreliable friend to an enemy. The US and China have been madly scrambling for Africa’s immense wealth of raw materials, and Kabila’s new alliance with China was too much for the US to bear. Kabila further inflamed his former allies by demanding that the international corporations exploiting the Congo’s precious metals have their super-profit contracts re-negotiated, so that the country might actually receive some benefit from its riches.”

During a diplomatic tour of Africa in 2011, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton herself has irresponsibly insinuated China’s guilt in perpetuating a creeping “new colonialism.” China annually invests an estimated $5.5 billion in Africa, with only 29 per cent of direct investment in the mining sector in 2009 – while more than half was directed toward domestic manufacturing, finance, and construction industries. China has further committed $10 billion in concessional loans to Africa between 2009 and 2012.

As Africa’s largest trading partner, China imports 1.5 million barrels of oil from Africa per day, accounting for approximately 30 per cent of its total imports. Over the past decade, 750,000 Chinese nationals have settled in Africa; China’s deepening economic engagement in Africa and its crucial role in developing the mineral sector, telecommunications industry and much needed infrastructural projects iscreating "deep nervousness" in the West, according to David Shinn, the former US ambassador to Burkina Faso and Ethiopia.

Too big to fail, or too big to succeed?

In December 2012, Dr J Peter Pham published a bizarre Op-Ed in the New York Times titled, To Save Congo, Let It Fall Apart.” Pham is the director of the Michael S. Ansari Africa Center and is a frequent guest lecturer on the US Army War College, the Joint Special Operations University, and other US Government affiliated educational institutions; he is a Washington insider, and understanding his rationale is important, as his opinion may very well shape US policy in Congo. Pham argues that Congo is an “artificial entity” that is “too big to succeed,” and therefore, the policy direction taken by the US should be one of promoting balkanization:

“Rather than nation-building, what is needed to end Congo’s violence is the opposite: breaking up a chronically failed state into smaller organic units whose members share broad agreement or at least have common interests in personal and community security… If Congo were permitted to break up into smaller entities, the international community could devote its increasingly scarce resources to humanitarian relief and development, rather than trying, as the United Nations Security Council has pledged, to preserve the ‘sovereignty, independence, unity, and territorial integrity’ of a fictional state that is of value only to the political elites who have clawed their way to the top in order to plunder Congo’s resources and fund the patronage networks that ensure that they will remain in power.”

What Pham is suggesting is policy to bring out the collapse of the Congolese nation by creating tiny ethno-nationalist entities too small to stand up to multinational corporations. The success of M23 must surely have shaken President Kabila, whose father came to power with the backing of the Ugandan and Rwandan regimes in 1996, employing the same strategies that M23 is using today.

If Kabila wants to stay in power, he needs the capability of exercising authority over the entire country. Sanctions should be imposed on top-level Rwandan and Ugandan officials and all military aid should be withheld; additionally, Rwandan strongman Paul Kagame should be investigated and removed from his position. Kambale Musavuli, of the Washington DC-based NGO, Friends of Congo, has it right when he says:

“People need to be clear who we are fighting in the Congo… We are fighting Western powers, the United States and the United Kingdom, who are arming, training and equipping the Rwandan and Ugandan militaries.”

M23 military leader General Sultani Makenga attend press conference in Bunagana in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.(Reuters / James Akena)
M23 military leader General Sultani Makenga attend press conference in Bunagana in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.(Reuters / James Akena)

­Nile Bowie for RT

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

The Pentagon as a Global NRA

Given these last weeks, who doesn’t know what an AR-15 is? Who hasn’t seen the mind-boggling stats on the way assault rifles have flooded this country, or tabulations of accumulating Newtown-style mass killings, or noted that there are barely more gas stations nationwide than federally licensed firearms dealers, or heard the renewed debates over the Second Amendment, or been struck by the rapid shifts in public opinion on gun control, or checked out the disputes over how effective an assault-rifle ban was the last time around? Who doesn’t know about the NRA’s suggestion to weaponize schools, or about the price poor neighborhoods may be paying in gun deaths for the present expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment? Who hasn’t seen the legions of stories about how, in the wake of the Newtown slaughter, sales of guns, especially AR-15 assault rifles, have soared, ammunition sales have surged, background checks for future gun purchases have risen sharply, and gun shows have been besieged with customers?

If you haven’t stumbled across figures on gun violence in America or on suicide-by-gun, you’ve been hiding under a rock. If you haven’t heard about Chicago’s soaring and Washington D.C.'s plunging gun-death stats (and that both towns have relatively strict gun laws), where have you been?

Has there, in fact, been any aspect of the weaponization of the United States that, since the Newtown massacre, hasn’t been discussed? Are you the only person in the country, for instance, who doesn’t know that Vice President Joe Biden has been assigned the task of coming up with an administration gun-control agenda before Barack Obama is inaugurated for his second term? And can you honestly tell me that you haven’t seen global comparisons of killing rates in countries that have tight gun laws and the U.S., or read at least one discussion about life in countries like Colombia or Guatemala, where armed guards are omnipresent?

After years of mass killings that resulted in next to no national dialogue about the role of guns and how to control them, the subject is back on the American agenda in a significant way and -- by all signs -- isn’t about to leave town anytime soon. The discussion has been so expansive after years in a well-armed wilderness that it’s easy to miss what still isn’t being discussed, and in some sense just how narrow our focus remains.

Think of it this way: the Obama administration is reportedly going to call on Congress to pass a new ban on assault weapons, as well as one on high-capacity ammunition magazines, and to close the loopholes that allow certain gun purchasers to avoid background checks. But Biden has already conceded, at least implicitly, that facing a Republican-controlled House of Representatives and a filibuster-prone Senate, the administration’s ability to make much of this happen -- as on so many domestic issues -- is limited.

That will shock few Americans. After all, the most essential fact about the Obama presidency is this: at home, the president is a hamstrung weakling; abroad, in terms of his ability to choose a course of action and -- from drones strikes and special ops raids to cyberwar and other matters -- simply act, he’s closer to Superman. So here’s a question: while the administration is pledging to try to curb the wholesale spread of ever more powerful weaponry at home, what is it doing about the same issue abroad where it has so much more power to pursue the agenda it prefers?

Flooding the World With the Most Advanced Weaponry Money Can Buy

As a start, it’s worth noting that no one ever mentions the domestic gun control debate in the same breath with the dominant role the U.S. plays in what’s called the global arms trade. And yet, the link between the two should be obvious enough.

In the U.S., the National Rifle Association (NRA), an ultra-powerful lobbying group closely allied with weapons-making companies, has a strong grip on Congress -- it gives 288 members of that body its top “A-rating” -- and is in a combative relationship with the White House. Abroad, it’s so much simpler and less contested. Beyond U.S. borders, the reality is: the Pentagon, with the White House in tow, is the functional equivalent of the NRA, and like that organization, it has been working tirelessly in recent years in close alliance with major weapons-makers to ensure that there are ever less controls on the ever more powerful weaponry it wants to see sold abroad.

Between them, the White House and the Pentagon -- with a helping hand from the State Department -- ensure that the U.S. remains by far the leading purveyor of the “right to bear arms” globally. Year in, year out, in countries around the world, they do their best to pave the way (as the NRA does domestically) for the almost unfettered sales of ever more lethal weapons. In fact, the U.S. now has something remarkably close to a monopoly on what’s politely called the “transfer” of weaponry on a global scale. In 1990, as the Cold War was ending, the U.S. had cornered an impressive 37% of the global weapons trade. By 2011, the last year for which we have figures, that percentage had reached a near-monopolistic 78% ($66.3 billion in weapons sales), with the Russians coming in a distant second at 5.6% ($4.8 billion).

Admittedly, that figure was improbably inflated, thanks to the Saudis who decided to spend a pile of their oil money as if there were no tomorrow. In doing so, they created a bonanza year abroad for the major weapons-makers. They sealed deals on $33.4 billion in U.S. arms in 2011, including 84 of Boeing’s F-15 fighter jets and dozens of that company’s Apache attack helicopters as well as Sikorsky Blackhawk helicopters -- and those were just the highest-end items in a striking set of purchases. But if 2011 was a year of break-the-bank arms-deals with the Saudis, 2012 doesn’t look bad either. As it ended, the Pentagon announced that they hadn’t turned off the oil spigot. They agreed to ante up another $4 billion to Boeing for upgrades on their armada of jet fighters and were planning to spend up to $6.7 billion for 20 Lockheed 25 C-130J transport and refueling planes. Some of this weaponry could, of course, be used in any Saudi conflict with Iran (or any other Middle Eastern state), but some could simply ensure future Newtown-like carnage in restive areas of that autocratic, fundamentalist regime’s land or in policing actions in neighboring small states like Bahrain.

And don’t think the Saudis were alone in the region. When it came to U.S. weapons-makers flooding the Middle East with firepower, they were in good company. Among states purchasing (or simply getting) infusions of U.S. arms in recent years were Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Tunisia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Yemen. As Nick Turse has written, “When it comes to the Middle East, the Pentagon acts not as a buyer, but as a broker and shill, clearing the way for its Middle Eastern partners to buy some of the world's most advanced weaponry.”

Typically, for instance, on Christmas Day in 2011, the U.S. signed a deal with the UAE in which, for $3.5 billion, it would receive Lockheed Martin’s Theater High Altitude Area Defense, an advanced antimissile interception system, part of what Reuters termed “an accelerating military buildup of its friends and allies near Iran.” Of course, selling to Arab allies without offering Israel something even better would be out of the question, so in mid-2012 it was announced that Israel would purchase 20 of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, America’s most advanced jet (and weapons boondoggle), still in development, for $2.7 billion.

From tanks to littoral combat ships, it would be easy to go on, but you get the idea. Of course, U.S. weapons-makers in Pentagon-brokered or facilitated deals sell their weaponry and military supplies to countries planet-wide, ranging from Brazil to Singapore to Australia. But it generally seems that the biggest deals and the most advanced weaponry follow in the wake of Washington’s latest crises. In the Middle East at the moment, that would be the ongoing U.S.-Israeli confrontation with Iran, for which Washington has long been building up a massive military presence in the Persian Gulf and on bases in allied countries around that land.

A Second Amendment World, Pentagon-Style

It’s a given that every American foreign policy crisis turns out to be yet another opportunity for the Pentagon to plug U.S. weapons systems into the “needs” of its allies, and for the weapons-makers to deliver. So, from India to South Korea, Singapore to Japan, the Obama administration’s announced 2012 “pivot to” or “rebalancing in” Asia -- an essentially military program focused on containing China -- has proven the latest boon for U.S. weapons sales and weapons-makers.

As Jim Wolf of Reuters recently reported, the Aerospace Industries Association, a trade group that includes Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and other weapons companies, “said sales agreements with countries in the U.S. Pacific Command's area of activity rose to $13.7 billion in fiscal 2012, up 5.4% from a year before. Such pacts represent orders for future delivery.” As the vice president of that association put it, Washington’s Asian pivot “will result in growing opportunities for our industry to help equip our friends." We’re talking advanced jet fighters, missile systems, and similar major weapons programs, including F-35s, F-16s, Patriot anti-missile batteries, and the like for countries ranging from South Korea to Taiwan and India.

All of this ensures the sharpening of divides between China and its neighbors in the Pacific amid what may become a regional arms race. For the Pentagon, it seems, no weaponry is now off the table for key Asian allies in its incipient anti-China alliance, including advanced drones. The Obama administration is already brokering a $1.2 billon sale of Northrop Grumman's RQ-4 "Global Hawk" spy drones to South Korea. Recently, it has been reported that Japan is preparing to buy the same model as its dispute sharpens with China over a set of islands in the East China Sea. (The Obama administration has also been pushing the idea of selling advanced armed drones to allies like Italy and Turkey, but -- a rare occurrence -- has met resistance from Congressional representatives worrying about other countries pulling a “Washington”: that is, choosing its particular bad guys and sending drone assassins across foreign borders to take them out.)

Here’s the strange thing in the present gun control context: no one -- not pundits, politicians, or reporters -- seems to see the slightest contradiction in an administration that calls for legal limits on advanced weaponry in the U.S. and yet (as rare press reports indicate) is working assiduously to remove barriers to the sale of advanced weaponry overseas. There are, of course, still limits on arms sales abroad, some imposed by Congress, some for obvious reasons. The Pentagon does not broker weapons sales to Iran, North Korea, or Cuba, and it has, for example, been prohibited by Congress from selling them to the military regime in Myanmar. But generally the Obama administration has put effort into further easing the way for major arms sales abroad, while working to rewrite global export rules to make them ever more permeable.

In other words, the Pentagon is the largest federally licensed weapons dealer on the planet and its goal -- one that the NRA might envy -- is to create a world in which the rights of those deemed our allies to bear our (most advanced) armaments “shall not be infringed.” The Pentagon, it seems, is intent on pursuing its own global version of the Second Amendment, not for citizens of the world but for governments, including grim, autocratic states like Saudi Arabia which are perfectly capable of using such weaponry to create Newtowns on an unimaginable scale.

A well regulated militia indeed.

Hawks on Iraq Prepare for War Again, Against Hagel

In the bitter debate that led up to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, Senator Chuck Hagelof Nebraska said that some of his fellow Republicans, in their zest for war, lacked the perspective of veterans like him, who have “sat in jungles or foxholes and watched their friends get their heads blown off.”       

Those Republicans in turn called him an “appeaser” whose cautious geopolitical approach dangerously telegraphed weakness in the post-Sept. 11 world.       

The campaign now being waged against Mr. Hagel’s nomination as secretary of defense is in some ways a relitigation of that decade-old dispute. It is also a dramatic return to the public stage by the neoconservatives whose worldview remains a powerful undercurrent in the Republican Party and in the national debate about the United States’ relationship with Israel and the Middle East.       

To Mr. Hagel’s allies, his presence at the Pentagon would be a very personal repudiation of the interventionist approach to foreign policy championed by the so-called Vulcans in the administration of President George W. Bush, who believed in pre-emptive strikes against potential threats and the promotion of democracy, by military means if necessary.       

“This is the neocons’ worst nightmare because you’ve got a combat soldier, successful businessman and senator who actually thinks there may be other ways to resolve some questions other than force,” said Richard L. Armitage, who broke with the more hawkish members of the Bush team during the Iraq war when he was a deputy to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.       

William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, who championed the Iraq invasion and is leading the opposition to Mr. Hagel’s nomination, says the former senator and his supporters are suffering from “neoconservative derangement syndrome.”       

Mr. Kristol said he and other like-minded hawks were more concerned about Mr. Hagel’s occasional arguments against sanctions (he voted against some in the Senate), what they deem as his overcautious attitudes about military action against Iran and his tougher approach to Israel than they were about his views on Iraq — aside from his outspoken opposition to the American troop surge there that was ultimately deemed successful.       

Mr. Kristol’s latest editorial argues that Mr. Hagel’s statement that he is an unequivocal supporter of Israel is “nonsense,” given his reference in a 2006 interview to a “Jewish lobby” that intimidates lawmakers into blindly supporting Israeli positions.       

“I’d much prefer a secretary of defense who was a more mainstream internationalist — not a guy obsessed by how the United States uses its power and would always err on the side of not intervening,” he added. Of Mr. Hagel and his allies, Mr. Kristol said, “They sort of think we should have just gone away.”       

In fact, the neoconservatives have done anything but disappear. In the years since the war’s messy end, the most hawkish promoters have maintained enormous sway within the Republican Party, holding leading advisory posts in both the McCain and Romney presidential campaigns as their counterparts in the “realist” wing of the party, epitomized by Mr. Powell, gravitated toward Barack Obama.       

And while members of both parties think the chances are good that Mr. Hagel will win confirmation, the neoconservatives are behind some of the most aggressive efforts to derail it, through television advertisements, op-ed articles in prominent publications and pressure on Capitol Hill, where some Democrats, including Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, have also indicated reservations.       

Their prominence in the fight over Mr. Hagel’s nomination is testament to their continued outsize voice in the public debate, helped by outlets like The Weekly Standard, research groups like the American Enterprise Institute and wealthy Republican financiers like the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, whose nearly $100 million in political donations last year were driven largely by his interest in Israel. The Republican Jewish Coalition, on whose board of directors Mr. Adelson sits, was among the first to criticize the Hagel nomination.       

The most outspoken among them had leading roles in developing the rationale and, in some cases, the plan for invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein.       

One critic is Elliott Abrams, a national security adviser to Mr. Bush during the Iraq war who pleaded guilty in the Iran-contra scandal to withholding information from Congress. He called Mr. Hagel an anti-Semite who has “some kind of problem with Jews” in an interview on NPR last week. (The Council on Foreign Relations, where Mr. Abrams is a senior fellow, distanced itself from his comments.)       

The Emergency Committee for Israel, a conservative group, has run a TV advertisement and has a Web site calling Mr. Hagel an inappropriate choice for the Defense Department, citing some of his votes against sanctions on Iran and Libya and his calls to engage in direct talks with groups like Hamas. Its donors have included the activist financier Daniel S. Loeb, and Mr. Abrams’s wife, Rachel, serves on its board.       

And of course, there is Mr. Kristol himself, who in the late 1990s helped form a group called the Project for a New American Century. In 1998, the organization released a letter to President Bill Clinton arguing that Saddam Hussein posed a potential nuclear threat to the United States, Israel and moderate Arab states and should be ousted.       

It was signed by several future members of the Bush national security team: Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as defense secretary; Paul D. Wolfowitz, who served under Mr. Rumsfeld; Mr. Abrams; and outsider advisers, including Richard N. Perle, a former chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee; and Mr. Armitage. Serving as a research associate was Michael Goldfarb, who is helping to direct the Emergency Committee for Israel’s attacks against Mr. Hagel.       

Around the same time in the late 1990s, Mr. Hagel was allied with Mr. Kristol and other hawks calling for the commitment of ground troops in support of the Clinton administration’s intervention in Kosovo. Mr. Kristol went so far as to suggest Mr. Hagel as a potential running mate for Mr. Bush in 2000, calling him an “impressive and attractive first-term senator.”       

Their relationship broke with Mr. Hagel’s criticism of the Iraq war, and his rare status as a Congressional Republican critical of the intervention led to plentiful TV bookings and the antipathy of the war’s architects and supporters. Besides being a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Hagel had added cachet by way of two Purple Hearts from his service in Vietnam, which left shrapnel embedded in his chest and, he has said, a unique perspective on war.       

“Here was a Republican with national security credentials saying that the Republican president was being irresponsible on national security — that’s potent,” said Kenneth L. Adelman, a member of the Defense Policy Review Board at the time and a frequent sparring partner with Mr. Hagel on television. “It drove me up the wall not so much that he was Republican, because I didn’t care that much from a political point of view — I thought the substance of his arguments were just wrong and unfounded.”       

Mr. Hagel’s earliest concerns arose before the Congressional vote authorizing the use of force. “You can take the country into a war pretty fast,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2002, “but you can’t get us out as quickly, and the public needs to know what the risks are.” In the interview, he took a swipe at Mr. Perle, then one of the most visible promoters of the war, saying, “Maybe Mr. Perle would like to be in the first wave of those who go into Baghdad.”       

Mr. Perle had never served in the military. Along with Mr. Hagel’s comment in Newsweek that many of the war’s most steadfast proponents “don’t know anything about war,” his criticism prompted a national discussion about “chicken hawks,” a derisive term for those advocating war with no direct experience of it. And his comments drew a rebuke from The Weekly Standard that Mr. Hagel was part of an “axis of appeasement.”       

Mr. Hagel’s words appear to sting to this day. “Normally you hope your cabinet officers don’t resort to ad hominem argument,” said Mr. Perle, who is now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. In an interview, he said his opposition to the nomination stemmed from his fear that Mr. Hagel was among those who “so abhor the use of force that they actually weaken the diplomacy that enables you to achieve results without using force.”       

Yet Mr. Hagel did ultimately vote to give Mr. Bush the authority to go to war. He has said that he did so to give the administration diplomatic leverage and that he now regrets it. Explaining his vote on the floor of the Senate, he warned, “We should not be seduced by the expectations of ‘dancing in the streets’ after Saddam’s regime has fallen.”       

If Mr. Hagel’s call for caution seems prescient, several opponents have argued that his prediction that the 2006 troop surge would fail was not — a position sure to come up frequently as confirmation hearings get closer.

Hedge Funds Most Levered And Long Since 2004

In the last days of 2012 we penned an article describing the current situation of the market as follows: "Margin Debt Soars To 2008 Levels As Everyone Is "All In", Levered, And Selling Vol." Today, Bloomberg catches up with this rather critical topic, and confirms that the buying power of the biggest marginal traders left in the market who do not recycled deposits into stocks - hedge funds - is nothing more than debt piled upon debt, as "Leverage among managers who speculate on rising and falling shares climbed to the highest level to start any year since at least 2004, according to data compiled by Morgan Stanley." BBG also recaps what our readers already know: "Margin debt at NYSE firms rose in November to the most since February 2008, data from NYSE Euronext show." In other words: everyone is all in and levered. And soon, in about two weeks, Bloomberg will figure out that everyone, or at least a central bank here or there, is, indeed, "selling vol."

From Bloomberg:

Gross leverage, a measure of hedge fund borrowing that shows how much their holdings exceed the cash invested by clients, was 153 percent in the week ended Jan. 4, up from an average of 152 percent in 2012 and 143 percent a year ago, according to data from New York-based Morgan Stanley. The level has averaged 143 percent since 2005, the data show.

Managers are borrowing more amid a 15 percent rally in the S&P 500 since June, a gain that was mostly missed by professional investors who speculated shares would fall, according to data from Hedge Fund Research Inc. and International Strategy & Investment Group.

Borrowing increased as President Barack Obama and Republican lawmakers reached an agreement averting more than $600 billion in automatic tax increases and spending cuts.

Sadly, Bloomberg's conclusion is off:

The rising use of borrowed money shows that everyone from the biggest firms to individuals is willing to take more risks after missing the rewards of the bull market that began in 2009. While leverage means bigger losses should stocks decline, investors are betting that record earnings and valuations 9.8 percent below the six-decade average will help push the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index toward the record it set in October 2007.

“The first step of increasing risk is just going long, the second part of that is levering up in order to go longer,” James Dunigan, who helps oversee $112 billion as chief investment officer in Philadelphia for PNC Wealth Management, said in a Jan. 8 telephone interview. “Leverage increasing in the hedge-fund area suggests they’re now getting on board.”

Actually no.

What near record leverage means is that hedge funds have absolutely zero tolerance for even the smallest drop in prices, which are priced to absolute and endless central bank-intervention perfection - sorry, fundamentals in a time when global GDP growth is declining, when Europe and Japan are in a double dip recession, when the US is expected to report its first sub 1% GDP quarter in years, when corporate revenues and EPS are declining just don't lead to soaring stock prices. 

It also means that with virtually all hedge funds in such hedge fund hotel names as AAPL (the stock held by more hedge funds - over 230 - than any other), any major drop in the price would likely lead to a wipe out of the equity tranche at the bulk of AAPL "investors", sending them scrambling to beg for either more LP generosity, or to have their prime broker repo desk offer them even more debt. And while the former is a non-starter, the latter has so far worked, which means that most hedge funds have been masking losses with more debt, which then suffers even more losses, and so on.

Is this sustainable? Find out soon, perhaps in as soon as one month, when it will finally be up to the flailing market, not some trillion dollar nonsense, to get Congress to a debt-ceiling compromise (because it is not different this time). It is at that point that we will find out just how much the surge in leverage is due to optimism, and how much due to being held hostage by a market in which to keep up with the beta rally one has no choice but to layer debt upon debt upon debt to pretend alpha still works in the New Normal.

Or else: "career risk."

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How About Gun Control for the Pentagon?

U.S. Army Pvt. Adam Eggers shoots his M4 rifle at a live-fire range on Camp Blessing in Kunar province, Afghanistan, July 27, 2009(Photo: U.S. Army Spc. Evan D. Marcy / US Army)“There has to be a national conversation” about gun control, says Nancy Pelosi. The killing of school children and teachers in Newtown, Connecticut and other shootings since have turned up the heat.

If, after Newtown, it’s all talk and no action, the former House Speaker said this week, “it’ll amount to a dereliction of duty on the part of us in public office.”

Too right. Pelosi wants to see action. The president’s demanding it too. So are state leaders. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has his sights set on the presidency (if you’ll excuse the expression), has proposed not only rewriting the state’s existing assault weapons ban but also more expansive mental health checks and background checks of gun buyers, lower limits on how many bullets a single gun magazine can fire and a new requirement that gun buyers be periodically recertified.

At the level of congress and the states, all sights (if you’ll excuse the expression again) are set on gun control. State district attorneys are joining the call for reform and almost 100 lawmakers have signed onto a proposal to limit handgun purchases to just one gun a month. (Apparently one a month is too strict a diet for the other 435.)

There’s just one piece of the picture missing. Now that lawmakers, DAs, governors and the White House have all agreed that gun violence is wrong, when are we going to start talking about troops and bombs and drones? You think American weapons are a problem in the US? Take a look at what American weapons are dong outside the country.

In Newtown, shooter Adam Lanza's weapons killed twenty kids, six teachers and his mom and shocked the nation. As Robert Dreyfuss recently pointed out here, American weapons have killed hundreds, probably thousands of kids in Afghanistan. In that one country alone, all sorts of people have US weapons. (The sales are good for the US economy, even if the weapons are used with some regularity against Americans.) Afghan soldiers carry US guns. So do some of the former Mujahadeen “freedom fighters” the Army’s up against. (The United States sold them guns when the freedom they were fighting for was from Soviet, rather than US occupation.)

US troops carry US guns too, of course. Last March, an army sergeant used his to methodically slaughter sixteen civilians, including at least nine kids in their homes in southern Afghanistan one Sunday morning.

And then there are those drones. Seven drone attacks in the last two weeks have killed an estimated forty people in Pakistan and Yemen so far this year and we're not even half way through January. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that from June 2004 through mid-September 2012, drone strikes killed 474-881 civilians, including 176 children.

For all the droning on about violence, it would be good to hear someone drone on just a bit about drones.

The good news is surely this. We’re finally taking aim at gun violence (as the headline writers say). The powerful gun lobby the National Rifle Association has taken some hits. Thanks to Lee Fang, we know all about their corporate backers, and NRA President Wayne LaPierre came in for no end of grief when he finally broke his post-Newtwon silence and suggested stationing more shooters in more schools. Arm schools to protect schools? Ridiculous.

Except that's exactly US foreign policy. The NRA works for its corporate partners no harder than the State Department works for theirs. US government-brokered arms sales tripled to a record high in 2011: $66.43 billion dollars, more than three-quarters of the global arms market, driven by major arms deals with Persian Gulf states. For all the talk of background checks stateside, when the US approved a $30 billion deal with the authoritarian state of Saudi Arabia, it wasn’t the background, only the size of the check that got much attention. (President Obama said the sale would be good for jobs and the State Department said that in such an insecure region, the arms deal would be good for sercurity.) And when was the last time we periodically recertified Israel?

The United States last year did its best to keep ammunition out of a new treaty on small arms, and the Land of the Free won’t even sign the international ban on land-mines. If the president really wants action on high-capacity killing, how about a deal: gun owners give up Bushmasters when the US agrees absolutely to ban cluster bombs?

It may be I’m getting ahead of myself. Perhaps we should aim a little lower. One step at a time. Set our sights on just one handgun a month. And how about just one shooting metaphor? At least that would be a start.

This story originally appeared in The Nation.
Copyright © 2013 The Nation distributed by Agence Global.

Is AIPAC Waging A Shadow War On Hagel?

Is the Israel lobby’s premier organization outsourcing its assault on Chuck Hagel?

January 14, 2013  |  

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“A lobby is like a night flower: It thrives in the dark and dies in the light.” – former AIPAC foreign policy director Steve Rosen

If the most powerful Israel lobbying group in America is to be believed, it has no involvement in the increasingly ugly campaign to sabotage the nomination of former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel to Secretary of Defense. According to Eli Lake, a reliable water carrier for the Israeli government and its various Beltway lobbying arms, the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is “sitting out” the Hagel fight. The same day, another faithful pro-Israel partisan, Jeffrey Goldberg, speculated on his blog at the Atlantic that “AIPAC will not mount a significant campaign” against Hagel.

“AIPAC does not take positions on presidential nominations,” insisted AIPAC spokesman Marshall Wittman.

But a closer investigation of the campaign against Hagel indicates that AIPAC -- and by extension, the Israeli government -- may be outsourcing the attacks to its longtime former spokesman, the notoriously combative pro-Israel operative Josh Block. Through Block, who was until very recently quoted by reporters as a “former AIPAC spokesman,” AIPAC has apparently been able to assail one of President Barack Obama’s key nominees without risking the political fallout that such a gambit might invite.

“Because Josh Block does not work for AIPAC anymore, he can say whatever he wants,” MJ Rosenberg, a former editor of AIPAC's weekly newsletter and ex-congressional aide who is now one of the Israel lobby’s premier critics, told me. “And he does: when AIPAC wants a message sent, it tells journalists, ‘We have no comment but you can call Josh Block.’ And Block, who is in constant contact with AIPAC, gives the line but AIPAC has deniability – they can just say, he doesn’t work for us.”

AIPAC has good reasons to keep its fingerprints off the public campaign to demonize Hagel. For one, AIPAC thrives on its ability to influence lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, requiring it to avoid alienating the key congressional Democrats who rubberstamp the anti-Palestinian resolutions and Iran sanctions legislation it routinely authors. If AIPAC waded into the Republican-led crusade against Hagel in a public way, it might enrage some of its most reliable Democratic allies in Congress, generating unnecessary acrimony that might complicate future lobbying initiatives.

What’s more, were AIPAC to openly oppose President Barack Obama on a key cabinet pick, it would risk deepening the tension between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who came dangerously close to openly campaigning for Obama’s Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, during the 2012 presidential campaign. Given the already icy relationship between Netanyahu and Obama, it is no surprise that AIPAC has gone to such lengths to distance itself from the campaign against Hagel.

Another reason for AIPAC’s reluctance to publicly oppose Hagel is its complicated legal status. Though it functions as a virtual arm of the Israeli government, AIPAC is not regulated by the US Department of Justice as other foreign agents are. If it were ever exposed for directly coordinating with the Israeli government, AIPAC would be required to register with the DoJ under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Its staff members would then be allowed to carry the line of the Israeli government, but only under strict regulations that would severely hamper their effectiveness, and erode their image as a homegrown reflection of America’s supposedly pro-Israel sensibility.

According to Rosenberg, this is where Block enters the picture.

“The Josh Block phenomenon is a strategem to get around laws relating to foreign lobbying,” Rosenberg explained. “He talks to the Israeli embassy constantly and can and does convey what the Netanyahu government wants. But, hey, he isn't AIPAC, so he can do that. He's just a citizen. That’s why Josh Block is infinitely more valuable as ex-AIPAC than he was before.”

5 Celebrities Who Shill For Pathetic Junk Food and Drinks

Beyoncé for Pepsi, Jennifer Aniston for Smartwater: Many celebrities shill for products that are worthless, or worse.

January 14, 2013  |  

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

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Super Bowl season is upon us, and with that time of year comes a slew of new celebrity endorsements on our TV sets and billboards. Last year around this time AlterNet published an article about celebrities with endorsement deals for dubious products and financial services – think Hulk Hogan for Rent-a-Center and Alec Baldwin for Capital One.

This week, in a blog post for the New York Times Mark Bittman wondered why celebrities think it’s acceptable to shill soda -- “a product that may one day be ranked with cigarettes as a killer we were too slow to rein in.”

That made us think it’s time to update our year-old list with an exploration of questionable food and beverage endorsement deals. But first, let’s hear more from Bittman on why he’s so bothered by stars selling their likeness to soda companies:

Some will say that soda is food and that there’s no smoking gun as there is with tobacco. But food provides nourishment, and soda doesn’t. In fact, it packs calories that provide no satiety and directly cause weight gain, and despite the recent Journal of the American Medical Association meta-analysis questioning the link between obesity and early death, we know there is a link between obesity and diseases like diabetes.

Two things can slow down this machine: anti-tobacco-style legislation and public opinion.

There’s one group of people that excels at turning around popular opinion: celebrities. Below are several (among many) stars who we generally like, but whose endorsement deals might not be so wholesome.

1. Beyoncé for Pepsi

Bittman cites a number of celebrity soda endorsers in his Times piece, but he mostly focuses on superstar singer Beyoncé, who is “eager, evidently, to have the Pepsi logo painted on her lips and have a limited-edition Pepsi can bearing her likeness” as part of a larger $50 million campaign pegged to the upcoming Super Bowl. Bittman points out that “unless she’s donating some or all of that money, this is an odd move for a politically aware woman who, with her husband, Jay-Z, raised money for President Obama and supported Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign, meant to encourage children to exercise.”

That is an odd paradox, and we all know that Beyoncé is too smart not to have picked up on it. And in a broader sense, given soda’s known health risks, it’s strange that soda endorsements are perceived as some of the more wholesome deals out there; everyone from Elton John to Britney Spears to Cindy Crawford has had one. Is it really just because of the money (which is clearly substantial)? Or is it possible that celebrities don’t think soda is “that bad”?

2. Jennifer Aniston for Smartwater

Smartwater may not be as unhealthy as Pepsi, but it is a pretty big waste of money and plastic bottles.

For the uninitiated, Smartwater is simply bottled water with added electrolytes that allow parent company Glacéau to jack up the price. Electrolytes are important for staying hydrated, but most people do not need them added to their water. On a more fundamental level, the bottled water industry is doing terrible things for our planet by creating an enormous amount of plastic waste.

Perhaps Jennifer Aniston felt better about endorsing a bottled water product than a brand of soda. But guess what? Glacéau is a Coca-Cola company. So even if Aniston didn’t endorse a soda product, she still endorsed a soda company.

(We do have to give it to Smartwater and Aniston for a somewhat clever recent ad poking fun at our celebrity-obsessed culture, and in particular the media’s nonstop speculation about Aniston’s love life and empty womb.)

Two of the Biggest Issues the Financial System Will Face in 2013

This week is options expiration week: the week in which various call and put positions will expire. Wall Street is notorious for using these weeks to gun the markets this way and that in order to insure that the greatest number of puts and calls expire worthless. So expect the market to be even more volatile than usual this week.

Outside of this, the investment world is slowly emerging from its Central Bank policy induced stupor to realize two of our long-standing themes:

  1. That European markets are highly overvalued based on their underlying fundamentals.  
  2. China has an inflation problem and cannot print money non-stop to keep its economy on track.

Regarding #1, Bloomberg ran an article over the weekend expressing concerns that the European markets are overvalued. The truth of the matter is that the entire European banking system is insolvent. There is simply no other way to describe a banking system that is leveraged at 26 to 1 with net assets at nearly 300% of GDP (Europe’s GDP is $16 trillion and its banking system is $46 trillion).

However, the mainstream media can never tell the ugly truth here (doing so would trigger a panic). So instead we’re going to see concerns voiced that Europe is “overvalued” and that European economies need to pick up because the ECB is essentially tapped out.

This is about as close as we’ll get to the media admitting Europe is bust and out of solutions. The fact that this story is already showing up in the media should be a warning that the next round of the EU Crisis is likely around the corner. Both Spain and Greece have recently admitted their banks are at negative value. Expect the news to worsen out of Europe in the coming weeks. What happens if the markets call Mario Draghi’s bluff? We’ll find out this year.

Regarding #2, roughly 30% of China’s population lives off of $2 per year. Food inflation hits this country very hard. And the Government is now stuck between a rock (a slowdown in its economy) and a hard place (higher inflation that results in mass civil unrest).

As a result of this, the Government has to focus on managing expectations both inside and outside of the country. Inside of China this means making public displays of cracking down on corruption to keep the population calm (many Chinese area beginning to ask themselves, “why should I go along with a system in which I’m not getting wealthy but corrupt officials are?” The Government is also taking measures to control prices (see the ongoing rise in Chinese imports despite the economic slowdown) in an attempt to keep inflation at bay.

Outside of China, the Government needs to send signals to the rest of the world that it will not be engaging in massive stimulus without triggering a capital run. Notice that the language coming out of the new leadership is carefully crafted: new party leader Xi Jinping has openly stated that China will not be pursuing “high” growth rates through stimulus going forward.

The message here is that “we’ll engage in stimulus, but we won’t be pumping anywhere near the amount needed to hit double digit growth.” The investment world is totally convinced China is going to pump $1 trillion or more into its economy. Chinese officials are denying this. Take note… typically when the investment world finds out it’s wrong there are serious fireworks.

These are just two of the major issues pointing towards 2013 being a debacle for investors. With that in mind, smart investors are taking advantage of the lull in the markets to position themselves for what’s coming.

We offer several FREE Special Reports designed to help them do this. They include:

Preparing Your Portfolio For Obama’s Economic Nightmare

What Europe’s Crisis Means For You and Your Savings

How to Protect Yourself From Inflation

And last but not least…

Bullion 101: Everything You Need to Know About Investing in Gold and Silver Bullion…

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The 3 Percent Cut to Social Security, a.k.a. the Chained CPI

(Image: Social Security via Shutterstock)According to inside-Washington gossip, Congress and the president are going to do exactly what voters elected them to do: they are going to cut Social Security by 3 percent. You don't remember anyone running on...

Sen. Corker Claims There are Questions Regarding Hagel’s ‘Temperament’

As Sarah Jones at Politicususa rightfully noted, this is pretty rich coming from today's Republican party: The Party of Hotheads Cheney and McCain is Concerned About Hagel’s Temperament:

On ABC’s This Week, Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) concern trolled about the ‘temperament’ of Republican former Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NB), whom Obama has nominated as Secretary of Defense. To back up his concern, Corker referenced possible issues with staffers, “I think there are numbers of staffers who are coming forth now just talking about the way he has dealt with them.” [...]

What staffers? Can he name one of them? Does Corker “think” they are coming forth or have they come forth? And since Hagel’s staffers would have most likely been Republican, it’s possible that such a desperate move might stink to high heaven of a Republican Party agenda, if in fact they ever do “come forth.” But really, since when do staffers weigh in on nominations?

Corker is worried about temperament, and he’s proving that by spreading unfounded rumors from alleged anonymous staffers that may or may not be a figament of his imagination. [...]

The real issue Republicans have with Hagel is that not only has he been to war, unlike most in the chicken hawk party, but he is a two-time recipient of the Purple Heart and he is against a war-first strategy. Hagel warned us before invading Iraq that it is very easy to start a war, and not so easy to end one. Republicans were outraged at Hagel for suggesting such a fact.

I never thought I’d see the day when a modern day Republican suggested that temperament should be an issue. After all, this is the party of distemper. This is the party that allegedly can’t control its members from shouting insults during a State of the Union address. This is the party that lied us into war and ran Sarah Palin as a Vice President.

It’s ironic that the party of irascible hotheads Dick Cheney and John McCain is concerned about Hagel’s temperament, because if they had listened to him, we never would have invaded Iraq. Hagel’s temperament is actually an argument for his confirmation.

I'm wondering when Corker has ever expressed any concern for this guy's temperament?


(Bob Schieffer asks McCain why he's opposed to every one of President Obama's cabinet picks on his gazillionth appearance on the Sunday talk shows.)

Transcript via below the fold.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator Corker, you had some positive things to say about Senator Hagel last month when his name was first floated. You said you had good relations on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Do you see anything out there now that should disqualify him from the Pentagon post?

CORKER: Well, I think like a lot of people, the hearings are going to have a huge effect on me. I know I talked to Chuck this week. He's coming in to see me next week. But I think the hearings, this is going to be a real hearing process, unlike many of the people who end up being confirmed or not confirmed.

You know, I have a lot of questions about just this whole nuclear posture views. Those are things that haven't really been discussed yet. Obviously people have concerned about his stance towards Iran and Israel.

But I think another thing, George, that's going to come up is just his overall temperament, and is he suited to run a department or a big agency or a big entity like the Pentagon, and so look --

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you have questions about his temperament?

CORKER: -- forward to sitting down -- I -- what's that?

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you have questions about his temperament?

CORKER: I think -- I think there are numbers of staffers who are coming forth now just talking about the way he has dealt with them. I have certainly questions about a lot of things. I begin all of these confirmation processes with an open mind. I did have a good relationship with him. I had a good conversation with him this week. But I think this is one where people are going to be listening to what he has to say, me in particular about the things I just mentioned, but especially some of the positions he's taken generally speaking about our nuclear posture.

I think you know that I affirmed the new START Treaty. A lot of modernization was supposed to take place as a result of that on our nuclear arsenal. That's not happening at the pace that it should. The Pentagon is going to have a big effect on that, and for me, that is going to be a very big issue.

Dangerous Crossroads: Japan to Seek NATO Support Against China

By Liu Sha

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will write a letter to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to call for closer ties in the face of China’s rising maritime power.

The letter will say that China’s frequent patrols in the disputed Diaoyu Islands and increasing maritime power has intensified the security situation in East Asia, Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun reported on Sunday.

In the letter, Abe will also mention that Japan is ready to take a more active role in maintaining stability and prosperity in East Asia, NHK reported.

According to the report, Katsuyuki Kawai, chairman of the Lower House Foreign Affairs Committee of Japan, will arrive at Brussels next Wednesday and bring Abe’s personal letter to NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

This letter, viewed as another move by Japan to enhance its military capability, comes after the nation increased its defense budget for the first time in 11 years last Sunday against the background of the Diaoyu Islands disputes.

Japan Self-Defense Forces also conducted a 2,000-man island-retaking drill on Sunday, China Central Television reported.

Liu Jiangyong, deputy director and professor of the Institute of International Studies at Tsinghua University, said that Japan would not succeed in uniting NATO.

“NATO’s main task was to maintain the peace and protect human rights in Europe and many member countries of NATO are facing economic problems, which they hope to fix with the help of China,” Liu told the Global Times.

Liu said Abe was repeating failed moves, referring to the fact that Abe was the first Japanese head to visit NATO headquarters in 2007 but no military ties resulted, as he wished.

Although the two sides shared security threats such as the North Korean nuclear and missile programs, most NATO members do not have a conflict of interest with China in terms of sea territory, Liu said.

In the letter that will be sent to NATO, Abe will also note that North Korea’s behavior led to the tense security environment in East Asia, NHK reported.

Abe’s first overseas trip after re-taking the position of prime minister was to South East Asian countries in January after his visit to the US was delayed due to US President Barack Obama’s tight schedule, Reuters reported.

However, most Southeast countries would not take a side and risk conflict with China, Liu said, adding Japan is on the way to being isolated from other countries.

Lü Chao, a researcher with the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times that despite Japan’s efforts to fix the relationship with South Korea, Seoul’s release of attempted Yasukuni arsonist Liu Qiang, a Chinese national, showed common ground with China.

Abe gave a speech on Friday, accusing China of deliberately targeting Japanese companies during protests against Japan as part of a strategy of confrontation over the territorial dispute.

Agencies contributed to this story

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Hawaii: 120 Years of US Occupation: Militarism and “America’s Pacific Century”

hawaii

Many tourists from the US and around the world visit Hawaii for its beautiful islands and its beaches covered with white sand. It is known for its food and traditional luau celebrations, its native people and its culture. When you vacation in Hawaii it offers surfing, snorkeling, scuba diving, fishing, hiking and many other activities. It has been the 50th State of the United States since August 21st, 1959. Since statehood, tourism has been the main industry followed by Education, Government and the Military. However, Hawaii was a country whose government of Queen Lili’uokalani was overthrown more than 120 years ago on January 17th, 1893, when Hawaii was actually known as the Kingdom of Hawaii. It is a part of history that needs to be told.

Hawaii has experienced a transformation of its culture and politics into a Western-style democracy that has seen a steady decline in the indigenous Hawaiian population. In a US Census Bureau of 2011 reported that native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders accounted for only 10.1% of the total population.

Hawaii has also experienced a militarization of its country since President William McKinley; a veteran of the American Civil War expanded the US military on Hawaii with several bases. Military expansion continued under President Theodore Roosevelt. After the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941 the US military expanded its power and declared Martial Law until October 24th, 1944. Since then Hawaii has been turned into a major strategic location for the US military. Since January 1st, 1947, the U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM) was established after World War II with its headquarters based in Aiea, a small Hawaiian town on the island of Oahu, near the community of Halawa Heights. The story of Hawaii is tragic and the world needs to know exactly what happened to the sovereignty of this nation. It is not just an island where you can have an adventurous vacations, because the truth is that Hawaii was systematically stolen from its native population by an imperial power, one that it was setting its horizons towards the rest of the world, but this time through the Pacific Ocean.

Before the American Occupation

The Kingdom of Hawaii had been an independent Chiefdom since 1810 with smaller independent chiefdoms of O’ahu, Maui, Moloka’i, Lana’i, Kaua’i and Ni’ihau that were unified by the chiefdom of Hawaii under King Kamehameha I or “Kamehameha the Great”. Hawaii had its own culture and political systems for at least 2,000 years before the unification of Hawaii in 1810. There were two families who ruled the Kingdom of Hawaii, the House of Kamahameha who ruled from 1810-1872 and the Kalakaua Dynasty from 1873-1893.

King Kamehameha I

King Kamehameha I

Kamehameha I ruled from 1810 until 1819, the year he died. His son King Kamehameha II was his successor and ruled Hawaii from May 8, 1819 until July 1824 the day he died of measles in London.Then King Kamehameha III, the second son of Kamehameha I, was the successor to the throne. The Hawaiian Kingdom was governed independently until 1838. It was based upon a system of common law, which included the ancient kapu (taboo) and the traditions of the Chiefs. King Kamehameha III initiated and influenced the Declaration of Rights and signed it on June 7, 1839. It was the first step into a modern democracy, one that did not follow the ancient ways of life that the people of Hawaii were accustomed to. It offered protections to all classes of people, Government, Chiefs and Native tenants.

King Kamehameha II

King Kamehameha II (right)

The Declaration of Rights opening statement read as follows:“God hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on the earth,” in unity and blessedness. God has also bestowed certain rights alike on all men and all chiefs, and all people of all lands. These are some of the rights which He has given alike to every man and every chief of correct deportment; life, limb, liberty, freedom from oppression; the earnings of his hands and the productions of his mind, not however to those who act in violation of the laws”. On October 8, 1840, King Kamehameha III voluntarily relinquished his powers and created a constitution that recognized three divisions of a civilized monarchy that included the King as the Chief Executive, the Legislature, and the Judiciary. The King represented the Government class, the House of Nobles represented the Chiefly class and the House of Representatives represented the Tenant class (Native Hawaiians). The Hawaiian Government’s function was to protect the rights that were already established by the 1839 Declaration of Rights. King Kamehameha III introduced Hawaii’s first constitution as a constitutional monarchal system modeled after the Declaration of Independence of the United States. The Constitution defined the duties of each branch of government through laws stated that protected the rights and maintained the duties with respect for better relations between all three classes of people.

King Kamehameha III

King Kamehameha III

The new constitution encouraged the development of the country with industry and commerce. The Constitution granted land tenure which protected the rights of landowners as to promote the cultivation of soil modeled after feudalism in Medieval Europe where tenants were allowed to occupy lands in exchange for their service or labor. However, such arrangements under the revised constitution did not require a vassal-style service by both the Chiefly and Tenant classes to the King as in medieval times.By 1843, King Kamehameha III sent delegations to the United States and Europe to settle differences and negotiate treaties for recognition of Hawaii’s Independence. That same year, the success of the delegations meetings with the US and Europe acknowledged Hawaii’s call for their recognition as an independent nation. Many nations recognized Hawaii’s claim of sovereignty by 1843 and signed on to numerous Treaties and Conventions over the years including Denmark (1846), Great Britain (1851), Sweden and Norway (1852), France (1857), Belgium (1862), Netherlands (1862), Italy and Spain (1863), Russia (1869), Japan (1871), Austria-Hungary (1875), Hamburg and Bremen (now Germany in 1879), Portugal (1882) and many others. Ironically, the United States which recognized Hawaii’s claim to sovereignty and signed numerous treaties and conventions in 1849, 1870, 1875, 1883 and 1884.On December 15, 1854 King Kamehameha III had died, his successor, King Kamehameha IV born Alexander ʻIolani Liholiho Keawenui was assumed office of the Constitutional Monarch. He died of chronic asthma on November 30, 1863. Lot Kapuaiwa, a former Premier became King Kamehameha V under constitutional law of 1852. He was the architect behind the 1864 Constitution or the ‘Kamehameha Constitution’ that did not relinquish more power to the Monarch, because the power of the Monarch it once had, was now limited.

King Kamehameha IV

King Kamehameha IV (right)

It was also law that the Monarch had to take an oath of office to serve the people. The new constitution also removed the office of the Kuhina Nui (Premier) because it interfered with the duties of the Minister of Interior. On December 11, 1872, King Kamehameha V died. He did not name a successor to the throne. On January 8, 1873, William Charles Lunalilo of the Kalakaua Dynasty was elected successor to King Kamehameha V. One year later on February 3rd, 1874, King Lunalilo died without naming a successor. The Hawaiian Legislature then elected David Kalakaua on February 12th, 1874 in a special session. His first act was to nominate and confirm his younger brother, William P. Leleiohoku, as successor, but on April 10, 1877, William P. Leleiohoku had died. King David Kalakaua publicly announced Lydia Kamaka’eha Dominis to be his successor who was later called Queen Lili’uokalani. By 1887, turmoil erupted when the Bayonet Constitution was imposed on Hawaii by a small group of American, European and Hawaiian nationals called the “Honolulu Rifles” which had more than 1,500 armed men. They had a meeting and planned to take away the political rights from the native population. They threatened King David Kalakaua with death if he did not accept their demands. One of the demands was for a new Cabinet Council, so on July 7, 1887 the new “Bayonet Constitution” was forced upon the King by the newly imposed members of his cabinet.

King Kamehameha V

King Kamehameha V

However, the Legislative Assembly had been adjourned since October 16, 1886 making the new constitution illegal because it did not obtain the consent or the necessary ratification of the Legislative Assembly. The new constitution forced voters including foreign nationals (who were considered aliens and first time voters) to swear an oath to support the constitution before they could vote in any election. The “Honolulu Rifles” used the vote to disenfranchise the majority vote of the native Hawaiian population so that “White” foreign nationals can gain control of the Legislature and it also provided a loophole that benefited the self-imposed Cabinet Council to control the Monarchy. Hui Kalai’aina or the Hawaiian Political Party was an organization that protested against the constitution of 1887. Hui Kalai’aina consistently petitioned King David Kalakaua to bring back the legitimate 1864 constitution.

The Overthrow of Queen Lili’uokalani

Queen Lili'uokalani

Queen Lili’uokalani

The Annexation of Hawaii was a result of a planned Coup d’état by a group of Christian Missionaries who came from Boston, Massachusetts called the Committee of Safety, a 13-member group of the Hawaiian League or ironically known as the Annexation Club composed of American, Hawaiian, and European citizens who were also members of the Missionary Party. The Coup also involved American and European residents who supported the Reform Party of the Hawaiian Kingdom.On January 16, Charles B. Wilson a Marshal of the Kingdom was told that a planned coup was taking place by Hawaiian detectives. Wilson requested warrants to arrest members of the Committee of Safety and called for martial law. But the members were politically connected to United States Government Minister John L. Stevens so the requests were denied by Attorney General Arthur P. Peterson and members of the Queen’s cabinet to avoid any violence if they issued the arrest warrants.The planned Coup was led by Lorrin A. Thurston, a grandson of American missionaries and future President of the Provisional Government of Hawaii, Sanford B. Dole. He was supported by American and European business interests that were living in Hawaii. Thurston was also supported by the Reform Party of the Hawaiian Kingdom who registered voters and delivered voter turnouts for political candidates in their favor. After Wilson tried to negotiate with Thurston which failed, he began a mobilization of armed men for a confrontation with the Committee of Safety with Captain Samuel Nowlein of the Royal Household Guard and accumulated a force of about 496 men to protect the Queen.

Lorrin A. Thurston

Lorrin A. Thurston

The Coup began on January 17, 1893 when a local police officer was shot and wounded trying to stop a wagon carrying weapons to the Honolulu Rifles. The Committee of Safety organized the Honolulu Rifles to position themselves at Ali’olani Hale, right across the street from Iolani Palace (the Queen’s residence) and waited for her response to the Coup.The overthrow of Queen Lili’uokalani took place on January 17, 1893. The Committee of Safetyremoved the queen, overthrew the entire monarchy, and led the charge for Hawaii’s annexation to the United States. What prompted the actions undertaken to overthrow the Queen? Three days prior to the Coup, which was on January 14, 1893, Queen Lili’uokalani drafted a new constitution that carried the principles and the laws of the Constitution of 1864. During the Coup, the Committee of Safety was concerned that American citizens could have possibly been in danger of retaliation from the Native population, so the United States government Minister John L. Stevens called for US Marines and sailors from the USS Boston to protect the Consulate, Arion Hall and the US Legation. The Queen was deposed and the Kingdom of Hawaii was under the control of the US military.

Sanford B. Dole

Sanford B. Dole

U. S. Marines and sailors who were ordered to land in Hawaii at the conspirators request contributed to the success of the coup. Queen Lili’uokalani was placed under house arrest at the Iolani Palace. It led to the formation of the Republic of Hawaii for a short time. In order to avoid bloodshed Queen Lili’uokalani temporarily relinquished her throne and issued the following statement to the United States Government:

I, Liliuokalani, by the grace of God and under the constitution of the Hawaiian Kingdom, Queen, do hereby solemnly protest against any and all acts done against myself and the constitutional Government of the Hawaiian Kingdom by certain persons claiming to have established a Provisional Government of and for this Kingdom. That I yield to the superior force of the United States of America, whose minister plenipotentiary, His Excellency John L. Stevens, has caused United States troops to be landed at Honolulu and declared that he would support the said Provisional Government.Now, to avoid any collision of armed forces, and perhaps the loss of life, I do, under this protest and impelled by said forces, yield my authority until such time as the Government of the United States shall, upon the facts being presented to it, undo (?) the action of its representative and reinstate me in the authority which I claim as the constitutional sovereign of the Hawaiian Islands.

Done at Honolulu, this 17th day of January, A. D. 1893.

A provisional government was established and assumed power until the annexation of Hawaii took place with the United States. On February 1, 1893, the US Minister (ambassador) John L. Stevens proclaimed Hawaii a protectorate of the United States. A treaty of annexation was submitted to the United States Senate, on February 15, 1893 but the newly elected U.S. President Grover Cleveland, withdrew the treaty of annexation and appointed former Democratic congressman from Georgia, James H. Blount, as Special Commissioner to investigate the illegal intervention by U.S. diplomatic and military personnel on behest of the business elites. Although Blount did not interview any of the conspirators for the report, he concluded that the United States legation and the US Marines and Navy were responsible for the overthrow of Queen Lili’uokalani’s government as an illegal act that violated international laws.

On November 16, 1893, President Cleveland proposed to return Queen Lili’uokalani to the throne if she granted amnesty to those responsible for the Coup. She refused the offer. It was then reported that Queen Lili’uokalani would have the conspirators “beheaded”, but she denied the accusation. She did admit however that she intended the Coup plotters to suffer the punishment of banishment. In her book, Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen by Liliuokalani, Queen of Hawaii (1838-1917) clearly stated her position on beheading her opponents and how the media misinformed the public on what she actually said:

I well knew, and it has been conclusively shown in this history, that my actions could not be binding or in any way recognized unless supported by the ministers in cabinet meeting. This was according to law, and according to the constitution these very persons had forced upon the nation. Perhaps Mr. Willis thought that all he had to do was to propose, and then that my place was to acquiesce. But he asked again for my judgment in the matter as it stood, and seemed determined to obtain an expression of opinion from me. I told him that, as to granting amnesty, it was beyond my powers as a constitutional sovereign. That it was a matter for the privy council and for the cabinet. That our laws read that those who are guilty of treason should suffer the penalty of death.

He then wished to know if I would carry out that law. I said that I would be more inclined personally to punish them by banishment, and confiscation of their property to the government. He inquired again if such was my decision. I regarded the interview as an informal conversation between two persons as to the best thing for the future of my country, but I repeated to him my wish to consult my ministers before deciding on any definite action. This terminated the consultation, excepting that Mr. Willis specially requested me not to mention anything concerning the matter to any person whomsoever, and assured me he would write home to the government he represented.

He did so. It was a long month before he could receive any reply; but when it came he communicated the fact to me, and asked for another interview at his house. This time he also inquired if there was any other person I would like to have with me. I suggested the name of Mr. J. O. Carter, at which the American minister seemed to be highly pleased. So at the stated hour we met. This time Mr. Willis had present as his stenographer Mr. Ellis C. Mills, afterward American consul-general at Honolulu. He first read me what he said were some notes of our former interview. From whence did these come? By Mr. Willis’s own proposition we were to be entirely alone during that interview, and to all appearance we were so. Was there a stenographer behind that Japanese screen? Whatever the paper was, Mr. Willis finished the reading of it, and asked me if it was correct. I replied, “Yes.”

Doubtless, had I held the document in my hand, and had I been permitted to read and examine it, for the eye perceives words that fall unheeded on the ear, I should then have noticed that there was a clause which declared that I was to have my opponents beheaded. That is a form of punishment which has never been used in the Hawaiian Islands, either before or since the coming of foreigners. Mr. Willis then asked me if my views were the same as when we met the first time; and I again said “Yes,” or words to that effect. Mr. Carter inquired if I rescinded so much of Mr. Willis’s report as related to the execution of the death penalty upon those in revolt. To this I replied, “I do in that respect.”

Yet, notwithstanding the fact was officially reported in the despatches of Mr. Willis, that I especially declared that my enemies should not suffer the death penalty, I found to my horror, when the newspapers came to Honolulu from the United States, that the President and the American people had been told that I was about to behead them all! There is an old proverb which says that “a lie can travel around the world while the truth is putting on its boots.” That offensive charge was repeated to my hurt as often as possible; although I immediately send my protest that I had not used the words attributed to me by Mr. Willis in our informal conversation, and that at my first official interview with him I had modified (so far as my influence would go) the law of all countries regarding treason.

The American government and media were demonizing the Queen by misreporting what she was saying about the death penalty. It made the Hawaiian Kingdom look like a barbaric society when it came to law and order. President Cleveland sent the issue of reinstating Queen Lili’uokalani to the United States Congress with a referral for a US Senate investigation. But later the Queen changed her position on the issue of punishment. So on December 18, 1893, US Minister Willis demanded that the Queen should be returned to the throne by the Provisional Government without knowing that President Cleveland had already sent a referral to Congress. So the Provisional government flatly refused the demands of US Minister Willis knowing that the issue was out of the President’s hands. The US Congress commissioned John Tyler Morgan, a known racist and a supporter of Hawaiian Annexation to investigate the Hawaiian revolution.

John Tyler Morgan

John Tyler Morgan

The Morgan Report was produced on February 26, 1894 found all parties involved in the coup “NOT GUILTY”. Shortly after the Morgan Report was released, President Cleveland changed his position and ignored the Queen’s demands upon the US government to intervene on Hawaii’s political situation concerning her reinstatement of her throne. President Cleveland resumed normal diplomatic relations with the Provisional Government of the Republic of Hawaii. On July 4, 1894, Sanford B. Dole became the President of the Republic of Hawaii and was recognized by the United States government as a protectorate. The Republic continued to govern Hawaii but was unpopular among the country’s residents who were against annexation, so voting rights became limited to only 4,000 people who were eligible to the Republic’s standards; most of them were politicians that were already in power.

The US government did not reinstate the constitutional government of the Hawaiian Kingdom after it was clear that the Provisional government was fully responsible for the political dilemma.Then a resistance took place between January 6th and January 9th, 1895 on the island of Oahu, Hawaii by Royalists who opposed the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii, known as a Counter-revolution. The Counter-revolution was led by Robert Wilcox, Joseph Nawahi, a former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Charles T. Gulick, an advisor to both Kalākaua and Queen Liliʻuokalani and other members of the former Royal Guard who were disbanded in 1893.

They recruited native Hawaiians who were willing to fight, but were inexperienced and their numbers were small in comparison to the Provisional government’s forces who were well armed and funded through Hawaii’s treasury. The plan was to restore Queen Liliuokalani to the throne. The rebels had smuggled arms from California and sent to a secret Honolulu location. Three separate battles took place on Oahu, but the rebels lost the fight. After the battles, arms were found at Washington Place; Queen Lili’uokalani was convicted of treason and was under house arrest at ‘Iolani Palace. She formally abdicated on January 24, 1895, and eventually won clemency for the rebels.The US government’s non-action on Hawaii’s political status continued after the rebellion. The US government waited for five years until President Cleveland left office on March 1897.

Then a new President of the United States was elected and it was non-other than Republican William McKinley who defeated Democrat William Jennings Bryan. One of President McKinley’s campaign planks was that “The Hawaiian Islands should be controlled by the United States and no foreign power should be permitted to interfere with them.” President McKinley entered a second treaty of annexation with the same group of men of the U.S. legation that was involved in the overthrow of the Constitutional Monarchy on June 16, 1897. However, due to the protests submitted by Queen Lili‘uokalani and more than 21,169 signature petitions by Hawaiian Nationals against annexation, the treaty could not be ratified by the US Senate.

On December 1897, the U.S. Battleship Maine was sent to Havana Harbor to “protect U.S. citizens and property” during the Cuban War of Independence, the road to war with Spain was in the making.On February 15th 1898, The USS Maine exploded and sunk killing more than 260 sailors. The US Naval Court of Inquiry created the Sampson Board to investigate the incident and declared that the incident occurred by a submerged explosive mine, but no blame was put on a particular country at the time. “Yellow” journalism of William Randolph Hearst blamed the attack on Spain (In 1969, the U.S. Navy determined that the USS Maine exploded due to a defective boiler). However, the American public and congress along with the Republican Party wanted war with Spain, thanks to the propaganda by the media who published headlines such as “Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain” brought war fever to the people and won popular support.

President McKinley continued negotiations with Spain for Cuba’s Independence with a three-point plan that called for a cease-fire for at least six-months, allow civilians the freedom to return to their homes and communities and allow US Ambassador Steward Woodford to have Spain agree if peace is not achieved by October 1st President McKinley would then find a solution to the crisis, but it was unsuccesful. McKinley sent the matter to Congress. Congress declared war and McKinley sent a list of demands through US Ambassador Steward Woodford for the immediate cease-fire with the Cuban rebels and the withdrawal of Spain from Cuba since the Cuban War of Independence was ongoing. Spain agreed to U.S. demands on April 10, but before McKinley received Spain’s response he had reversed his position on war with Spain and called for “forcible intervention” to bring peace to Cuba. On April 20, 1898, Congress passed a joint resolution which McKinley signed and called for the recognition of Cuba’s Independence; the withdrawal of Spain from Cuba authorizes the President to use the military to meet its demands and denied any intention of occupying Cuba after Spain withdrew its forces which the Teller Amendment attached to the Joint resolution had implied. The resolution was received by Spain with an ultimatum that the US would use military force if Cuba’s independence was not recognized.

On April 21st Spain broke diplomatic relations with the US and on the following day the US implemented a naval blockade of all Cuban ports. On April 24th Spain declared war on the US. The next day, the US formally declares war on Spain by Act of Congress although the US had declared war by its blockade of the Cuban ports.On May 4th, 1898 Representative Frances G. Newlands of Nevada introduces Joint Resolution of Annexation known as the Newlands Resolution in House of Representatives regarding Hawaii’s political situation. Part of the resolution said:

Whereas the Government of the Republic of Hawaii having, in due form, signified its consent, in the manner provided by its constitution, to cede absolutely and without reserve to the United States of America all rights of sovereignty of whatsoever kind in and over the Hawaiian Islands and their dependencies, and also to cede and transfer to the United States the absolute fee and ownership of all public, Government, or Crown lands, public buildings or edifices, ports, harbors, military equipment, and all other public property of every kind and description belonging to the Government of the Hawaiian Islands, together with every right and appurtenance thereunto appertaining;

Therefore Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress Assembled, That said cession is accepted, ratified, and confirmed, and that the said Hawaiian Islands and their dependencies be, and they are hereby, annexed as a part of the territory of the United States and are subject to the sovereign dominion thereof, and that all and singular the property and rights hereinbefore mentioned are vested in the United States of America.

In a Secret Debate on the Annexation of Hawaii on May 31st, 1898, Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge saw the Annexation of Hawaii as a Military strategic location concerning the Spanish-American War:

“Mr. President, if I had been permitted to continue I could have finished in ten minutes. I have really made the argument which I desire to make. If it had not been that it would have precipitated a protracted debate, I should have argued then what has been argued ably since we came into secret legislative session, that at this moment the Administration was compelled to violate the neutrality of those islands, that protests from foreign representatives had already been received, and complications with other powers were threatened, that the annexation or some action in regard to those islands had become a military necessity”

On June 15th, The House of Representatives passed the resolution. Then on July 6th in a 42-21 vote with the absence of 26 Senators passed the resolution. Present McKinley signed the Newlands Resolution the next day on July 7th. By August 12th, 1898, Hawaii is a US territory.

A ceremony took place that removed the Hawaiian flag and replaced it with an American flag. It also established Hawaii as a US military base to fight Spain in the Pacific Ocean notably, Guam and the Philippines. It was a plan by the US government to annex Hawaii as a military strategic location recommended by Alfred T. Mahan. Mahan was considered an important strategist on the issue of “Sea Power”. His strategies influenced Navies from Great Britain, Germany, Japan and the United States. He wrote a letter to the New York Times which was published back on January 31st, 1893 caught the attention from the editor of ‘The Forum’ and asked him to state his case to the military on the importance of Hawaii called Hawaii and Our Future Sea-power.” It was published in the March-August 1893 issue. In the letter Mahan wrote:

To the Editor of the “New York Times”:–

There is one aspect of the recent revolution in Hawaii which seems to have been kept out of sight, and that is the relation of the islands, not merely to our own and to European countries, but to China. How vitally important that may become in the future is evident from the great number of Chinese, relatively to the whole population, now settled in the islands.

It is a question for the whole civilized world and not for the United States only, whether the Sandwich Islands, with their geographical and military importance, unrivalled by that of any other position in the North Pacific, shall in the future be an outpost of European civilization, or of the comparative barbarism of China. It is sufficiently known, but not, perhaps, generally noted in our country, that many military men abroad, familiar with Eastern conditions and character, look with apprehension toward the day when the vast mass of China—now inert—may yield to one of those impulses which have in past ages buried civilization under a wave of barbaric invasion. The great armies of Europe, whose existence is so frequently deplored, may be providentially intended as a barrier to that great movement, if it come. Certainly, while China remains as she is, nothing more disastrous for the future of the world can be imagined than that general disarmament of Europe which is the Utopian dream of some philanthropists.

China, however, may burst her barriers eastward as well as westward, toward the Pacific as well as toward the European Continent. In such a movement it would be impossible to exaggerate the momentous issues dependent upon a firm hold of the Sandwich Islands by a great, civilized, maritime power. By its nearness to the scene, and by the determined animosity to the Chinese movement which close contact seems to inspire, our own country, with its Pacific coast, is naturally indicated as the proper guardian for this most important position. To hold it, however, whether in the supposed case or in war with a European state, implies a great extension of our naval power. Are we ready to undertake this?

A.T. MAHAN, Captain, United States Navy

 Hawaii was annexed because it was a strategic location for imperial reasons. One of them was to have a military presence on the Pacific ocean in close proximity to East Asia which includes China, Japan, North and South Korea, Mongolia and Taiwan. The other reason was to have access to Asian markets for American Corporate interests.

The Territory of Hawaii and the “Big Five” Corporate Monopoly

Under President McKinley, Americans fought against Spain in 1898 in the Caribbean (Cuba and Puerto Rico), and in the Pacific (The Philippines, and Guam). Hawaii’s strategic location for warfare in the Philippines was vital to American interests. President McKinley also signed the Hawaiian Organic Act of 1900. It established the Office of the Territorial Governor, a control mechanism that allowed the Governor of Hawaii to be dictated by the President of the United States. The Territorial Governor can be removed at any time without the consensus of the Hawaiian people. Since then Hawaii’s tourism industry expanded. The US Military also expanded under American Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt with several bases on the island of Oahu. By 1906, the island of Oahu was fortified as a “Ring of Steel,” with gun batteries pointed outwards towards the Pacific Ocean mounted on steel coastal walls. Today there is even a Hawaii Army Museum.

From July 7, 1898 until August 21st, 1959 the “Big Five” were multi-million dollar corporations that operated during the Kingdom era until Hawaii became the 50th state. The “Big Five” benefited from the annexation and became dominate power in the Hawaiian economy. The “Big Five” were Castle & Cooke, Alexander & Baldwin, C. Brewer & Co., American Factors (who was later renamed to Amfac) and Theo H. Davies & Co. Sugarcane plantations gained investments by eliminating tariffs imposed on the sugarcane that was sent to the United States which benefitted them with extra money to spend on new equipment, acquire more land and hire more cheap labor. The companies did not compete with each other because they joined forces by working together to keep the prices on their goods and services relatively high. This allowed them to gain enormous profits. The executives of the “Big Five” collaberated on all issues even as board of directors for all of their companies. They gained political power since their corporations dominated all of Hawaii. They controlled the labor force and even steered the labor force to vote in their favor. Hawaii was effectively ruled by the “Big Five” as an oligarchy. They backed only white candidates who were Republicans to run the government. Democrats were not popular among the Oligarchs.

A signature produce from Hawaii that is known and sold in many countries around the world today was Pineapples. The Pineapples industry was started by Sanford B. Dole’ s cousin, James Drummond Dole known as the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, today it called the Dole Food Company. James Dole arrived around 1899 and started the first Pineapple Plantation. Around that same time on August 8, 1899, Hurricane San Ciriaco struck Puerto Rico followed by another hurricane which severely damaged the agricultural industry that left more than 3,000 dead and left thousands of people without food or shelter. The Hurricanes also destroyed more than 80% of Puerto Rico’s coffee crop. It contributed to the shortage of sugar produced in the Caribbean. A demand for the sugar from Hawaii and other sugar producing countries needed more workers in the labor force. Puerto Rican laborers were recruited to meet the world market demands of sugar. Other immigrants including Koreans, Filipinos, Japanese, Portuguese and the Chinese were recruited to work on plantations in Hawaii as well since the early 1850’s.

The Attack on Pearl Harbor and FDR’s Role

Pearl Harbor Attack on December 7, 1941

Pearl Harbor Attack on December 7, 1941

It is now known that by 1941, the US government decrypted Japanese military and Diplomatic codes before the attack on Pearl Harbor took place according to World War II veteran and Author Robert Stinnett who wrote ‘Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor’ . Stinnett’s obtained documents related to intelligence gathering of intercepted codes that proved President Franklyn Delano Roosevelt and at least 35 other people in the top levels of the US government and the military knew that an imminent attack on Pearl Harbor was going to take place through the Freedom of Information Act.

A photograph of letter written to President Roosevelt’s high-level military advisors Captains Walter S. Anderson and Dudley W. Knox by Lt. Commander Arthur H. McCollum of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) was discovered on January 24, 1995. In the letter, an 8-point plan to lure Japan into attacking US ships. The 8-point plan read as follows:

9. It is not believed that in the present state of political opinion the United States Government is capable of declaring war against Japan without more ado; and it is barely possible that vigorous action on our part might lead the Japanese to modify their attitude. Therefore, the following course of action is suggested:

A. Make an arrangement with Britain for the use of British bases in the Pacific, particularly Singapore.
B. Make an arrangement with Holland for the use of base facilities and acquisition of supplies in the Dutch East Indies.
C. Give all possible aid to the Chinese Government of Chiang-Kai-Shek
D. Send a division of long range heavy cruisers to the Orient, Philippines’, or Singapore.
E. Send two divisions of submarines to the Orient.
F. Keep the main strength of the U.S. fleet now in the Pacific in the vicinity of Hawaiian Islands.
G. Insist that the Dutch refuse to grant Japanese demands for undue economic concessions, particularly oil.
H. Completely embargo all U.S. trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire. 10.

If by these means Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war so much the better. In any case we should be prepared to accept the threat of war.

President Roosevelt seized on the opportunity. Author Robert Stinnett links the connection between the attack on Pearl Harbor and FDR’s ambitious plan to bring the US into war with Japan in six actions of the McCollum’s 8-point:

“President Roosevelt can be directly linked to ..six of McCollum’s proposed actions: namely Actions B and G, curtailing Japanese access to natural resources of Southeast Asia – for he met with Dutch officials and received Japanese intercepts concerning Japan- Dutch negotiations in 1940-41; Action C, aid to China: FDR directed the Administration’s China strategy which antagonized Japan’s leaders who were engaged in war with China. On September 25, 1940, the administration approved a $25 million loan to China’s U.S.-recognized government headed by Generalissimo Chiang-Kai-Shek. …

The conclusive evidence that links FDR or high-level administration officials to the eight action proposals is as follows: Action A: Arrange for U.S. use of British Pacific Bases. Arrangements were made for U.S. use of Rabaul’s Simpson Harbor, a British possession in New Britain in South Pacific, as USN Advance Pacific Base F. Orders came from Admiral Harold Stark, FDR’s Chief of Naval Operations

One of the most stunning comments that FDR was quoted as saying was “I just want them to keep popping up here and there and keep the Japs guessing, I don’t mind losing one or two cruisers, but do not take a chance of losing five or six.” Stinnett further wrote that “from March through July 1941, White House records show that FDR ignored international law and dispatched naval task groups into Japanese waters on three such pop-up cruises.” Stinnett makes the case that prove that one of FDR’s actions were deliberate by sending US Navy cruisers to Japanese waters to create a response from the Japanese by way of a military attack:

Documentation that directly links FDR with McCollum’s Action D – sending US Navy cruisers in provocative moves against Japan includes the following first discussion in the White House Feb 10, 1941. Present were President Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of Navy Frank Knox, General George Marshall, Army Chief of Staff and Admiral Harold R. Stark, Chief of Navy Operations. Stark warned FDR that the cruises “will precipitate hostilities”

The plan was to lure the US into a war with Japan. What were the benefits of such actions by the US government? So that the US can justify to the American people that Japan is a threat to the US population. It was also a boost to the Military-Industrial Complex by creating a war economy that provides jobs to produce weapons that benefit American corporations. It allowed the US to expand its Imperial agenda in the Pacific Region and it allowed the US to expand its bases on the Territory of Hawaii. Japan finally attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941 following provocative acts by the US which left 2,403 US military personal dead and 1,178 injured. Japan suffered 64 deaths from their attack. On that day President Roosevelt delivered “The Day of Infamy Speech” and congress declared war on Japan shortly after. America entered World War II.

Martial Law in Hawaii 1941-1944

Martial Law Declared

Martial Law Declared

After the Attack on Pearl Harbor, a dark moment in Hawaii’s history occurred. Martial Law was declared on December 7th, 1941 until October 24th, 1944. The US declared Hawaii a war zone that can be a potential target for invasion and infiltration by its enemies. The territorial governor of Hawaii Joseph Boyd Poindexter suspended the Writ of Habeas Corpus meaning that the military can detain you without no judge or jury and signed a declaration of martial law prepared by the US army. Army commander General Short stationed on Oahu declared he was the military governor in charge until he was relieved of command on December 17th 1941. Martial Law continued until October 24, 1944. It was legally justified under the Hawaiian Organic Act of 1900 that made Hawaii a US territory in which section 67 of the Organic act stated: That the governor shall be responsible for the faithful execution of the laws of the United States and of the Territory of Hawaii within the said Territory, and whenever it becomes necessary he may call upon the commanders of the military and naval forces of the United States in the Territory of Hawaii, or summon the posse comitatus,or call out the militia of the Territory to prevent or suppress lawless violence, invasion, insurrection, or rebellion in said Territory, and he may, in case of rebellion or invasion, or imminent danger thereof, when the public safety requires it, suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, or place the Territory, or any part thereof, under martial law until communication can be had with the President and his decision there on made known. According to Joseph Garner Anthony, a prominent Lawyer who was based in Honolulu, Hawaii and served as Attorney General in the Territory of Hawaii from October 1942 until December 1943 stated that Martial law in Hawaii was unconstitutional. On May 31st, 1942 Anthony published an article in the California Law Review called ‘Martial Law in Hawaii’ described what the orders of the military governor were:

The general orders of the Military Governor cover a wide range of subjects, the jurisdiction and powers of all civil courts, the creation of military tribunals for the trial of civilians, regulation of traffic, firearms, gasoline, liquor, food stuffs and feed, the possession of radios, the censorship of the press, communications by wireless, cable and wireless telephone, the freezing of wages for all persons employed on the Island of Oahu, and the regulation of the possession of currency.

Martial law was intentionally directed at the Japanese population, but it targeted all Hawaiian residents. Anthony describes that the military controlled all aspects of civilian life. It controlled all government functions and the judicial system which was replaced with a military tribunal. Constitutional rights were suspended. All civilians were forced to submit to curfews and blackouts, fingerprinting, food and gas rationing. Martial Law censored the news personal communications. Personal mail was screened and read by the army. Foreign languages were banned for telephone calls, newspapers, and radio. All Hawaiian residents were required to carry Identity cards by law. The Japanese population were highly restricted and oppressed by the military in every aspect of their lives. J. Garner Anthony was proven correct because after the war, the United States Supreme Court found that martial law in Hawaii had been unconstitutional in a Supreme Court decision based on the Duncan v. Kahanamoku case. Kahanamoku was a military police officer who arrested Lloyd C. Duncan, a civilian employed as a ship fitter for public intoxication during the war.

Hawaii under Martial Law

Hawaii under Martial Law

Hawaii was not a state, but still was administered under the Hawaiian Organic Act of 1900 which instituted martial law. Duncan was therefore tried by a military tribunal but appealed to the Supreme Court for a Writ of Habeas Corpus or for a person who was arrested to be brought before a judge or a court jury to decide the fate of the defendant. The Supreme Court ruled in Duncan’s favor on February 25, 1946 stating that Duncan v. Kahanamoku case did not give the military any authority to try civilians in military tribunals because it was unconstitutional therefore Martial Law in the state of Hawaii was not different than other US states of the union. Justice Hugo Black declared in an opinion that law and policy is as follows:

It follows that civilians in Hawaii are entitled to the constitutional guarantee of a fair trial to the same extent as those who live in any part of our country. We are aware that conditions peculiar to Hawaii might imperatively demand extraordinarily speedy and effective measures in the event of actual or threatened invasion. . . . Extraordinary measures in Hawaii, however necessary, are not supportable on the mistaken premise that Hawaiian inhabitants are less entitled to constitutional protection than others. For here Congress did not in the Organic Act exercise whatever power it might have had to limit the application of the Constitution [citation omitted]. The people of Hawaii are therefore entitled to constitutional protection to the same extent as the inhabitants of the 48 states.

The case was finally declared that the military tribunals were unconstitutional.

“Our system of government clearly is the antithesis of total military rule and the founders of this country are not likely to have contemplated complete military dominance within the limits of a Territory made part of this country and not recently taken from an enemy. They were opposed to governments that placed in the hands of one man the power to make, interpret and enforce the laws. Their philosophy has been the people’s throughout our history. For that reason we have maintained legislatures chosen by citizens or their representatives and courts and juries to try those who violate legislative enactments. We have always been especially concerned about the potential evils of summary criminal trials and have guarded against them by provisions embodied in the constitution itself.

Legislatures and courts are not merely cherished. American institutions, they are indispensable to our government. Military tribunals have no such standing. For as this Court has said before, ‘…the military should always be kept in subjection to the laws of the country to which it belongs, and that he is no friend to the Republic who advocates the contrary. The established principle of every free people is, that the law shall alone govern, and to it the military must always yield.”

J. Garner Anthony published an article in the Yale Law Journal titled “Hawaiian Martial Law in the Supreme Court,” on November 1947. He wrote:

It will probably be years before the historian of the future can clearly appraise the motives and causes that led the Army to pursue the course it did in Hawaii. It is inconceivable that those in high places in the War Department were not cognizant of the fact that the regime erected in Hawaii superceding the civil Government was not only illegal but contrary to our most cherished traditions of the supremacy of the law. It is readily understandable that military personnel not familiar with the mixed peoples of Hawaii should have certain misgivings concerning them. However, the conduct of the populace on December 7 and thereafter should have put these military doubts at rest. To be sure it took some time for the military authorities to assure themselves that the civil population was all that it seemed–a loyal American community. What is not understandable is why the military government was continued after several years had elapsed and the fears of the most suspicious had been allayed.

It was dark moment in Hawaii’s history that signifies what a military dictatorship is capable of. The Hawaiian population experienced Martial law and its oppressive tactics first hand.

Hawaii Statehood 1959

In 1959, Hawaii had a Plebiscite vote that allowed residents to vote on whether to become a State or remain as a territory of the United States. Independence was not on the ballot. Non-native Hawaiians (Whites) outnumbered the Native-Hawaiians who were in favor of Statehood, won the majority vote. Native Hawaiians (the Kanaka Maoli) were disenfranchised again so they were denied the right to decide the which path their country would take. With the United States and Hawaii’s state legislature in control of the vote, it was no surprise what outcome would be produced. According to International Human Rights attorney and advocate in the 1993 People’s International Tribunal in Hawaii Jose Luis Morin wrote an essay in 1997 for NACLA Report on the Americas titled “Hawaii: Stirrings in the Colony” wrote:

As it had done with Puerto Rico in 1953, the United States used the 1959 plebiscite to declare to the United Nations that the people of Hawaii had attained full self-government through the exercise of self-determination. Based on this misrepresentation, and without further investigation or monitoring of the election, Hawaii-together with Alaska- was removed from the UN list of Non-Self-Governing territories. Thereafter, the Kanaka Maoli have been hindered in their ability to use international law in the struggle for their rights.

The vote took Hawaii off the list of Non-Self-Governing Territories of the United Nations that included Alaska, Guam, the Panama Canal Zone and others who were controlled by colonial powers had under international law the right to decide self-determination through a fair and peaceful de-colonization process. Hawaii was denied that right through fraud. It happened again in the 1996 Native Hawaiian vote. The state of Hawaii –sponsored a vote with a question. “Shall the Hawaiian People elect delegates to propose a Native Hawaiian government? According to Morin “All told, 60% did not participate, while 10% voted against the measure. These figures are due in large part to the success of a boycott against the plebiscite organized by Stop the State-Sponsored Plebiscite-a coalition of Kanaka Maoli organizations that refused to legitimate the vote with their participation” It was a protest against the fraudulent nature of the vote. Morin continued:

As with the 1959 statehood plebiscite in Hawaii, the outcome of the Native Hawaiian vote was orchestrated through various Legislative maneuvers and fraudulent electoral practices. The entire enterprise was created and financed by the state legislature-a body not representative of the Kanaka Maoli people. The state legislature dictated the time, manner, process and ballot question. It also granted itself the power to accept or reject the results of the vote as well as the outcome of the “Hawaiian Constitutional Convention” that would allegedly follow the vote, by making explicit that no legal changes were possible without state approval.

Hawaii’s fight for independence will continue despite the fact that the voting system is fraudulent. The world one day will recognize the injustice committed against the Hawaiian people. They will demand an end to the colonial dilemma by demanding free and fair elections for the Hawaiian population. The Hawaiian people deserve better. They have been victims of US imperialism for more than 120 years.

Hillary Clinton’s “America’s Pacific Century”

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote an article entitled “America’s Pacific Century” based on the need to expand America’s power into the Pacific region on the November 2011 issue of Foreign Policy Magazine. Clinton clearly defined the US role in the region:

Harnessing Asia’s growth and dynamism is central to American economic and strategic interests and a key priority for President Obama. Open markets in Asia provide the United States with unprecedented opportunities for investment, trade, and access to cutting-edge technology. Our economic recovery at home will depend on exports and the ability of American firms to tap into the vast and growing consumer base of Asia. Strategically, maintaining peace and security across the Asia-Pacific is increasingly crucial to global progress, whether through defending freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, countering the proliferation efforts of North Korea, or ensuring transparency in the military activities of the region’s key players.

Clinton talk’s about a regional strategy that would dictate to key Asian states in the Pacific how they will work with Washington concerning American interests.

A strategic turn to the region fits logically into our overall global effort to secure and sustain America’s global leadership. The success of this turn requires maintaining and advancing a bipartisan consensus on the importance of the Asia-Pacific to our national interests; we seek to build upon a strong tradition of engagement by presidents and secretaries of state of both parties across many decades. It also requires smart execution of a coherent regional strategy that accounts for the global implications of our choices.

WHAT DOES THAT regional strategy look like? For starters, it calls for a sustained commitment to what I have called “forward-deployed” diplomacy. That means continuing to dispatch the full range of our diplomatic assets — including our highest-ranking officials, our development experts, our interagency teams, and our permanent assets — to every country and corner of the Asia-Pacific region. Our strategy will have to keep accounting for and adapting to the rapid and dramatic shifts playing out across Asia. With this in mind, our work will proceed along six key lines of action: strengthening bilateral security alliances; deepening our working relationships with emerging powers, including with China; engaging with regional multilateral institutions; expanding trade and investment; forging a broad-based military presence; and advancing democracy and human rights.

The Regional Strategy Clinton is describing is to support regimes in Asia that comply with Washington’s demands with her Bilateral Security alliances, for example the Prime Minister of Thailand Thaksin Shinawatra and his sister Yingluck who the Obama administration supports. According to the Agence France-Presse (AFP) on November 15th, 2011 regarding Clinton’s trip to offer assistance to a flood ravaged Thailand with a commitment to support Shinawatra politically with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and militarily “One of the messages that the secretary will bring directly to the Thai people and the government is that we believe it is in the national security and political interest of the United States to have this government succeed” according to a Senior State Department official.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton

The comment on what Clinton’s message will be coincides with what she wrote in her article:

Our treaty alliances with Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and Thailand are the fulcrum for our strategic turn to the Asia-Pacific. They have underwritten regional peace and security for more than half a century, shaping the environment for the region’s remarkable economic ascent. They leverage our regional presence and enhance our regional leadership at a time of evolving security challenges.

The United States is preparing a plan that would engage with China militarily and economically. It will take place from the Hawaii, where the United States Pacific Command (USPACOM) is located at Camp H. M. Smith, a town of Aiea on the island of Oahu. Hawaii is the main place where all operations of the US government to destabilize, launch a war, or threaten China, North Korea and any other nation who does not cooperate within Washington’s Imperial agenda for the next 100 years.

The 2011 APEC Leader’s Meeting was held at the Hawaii Convention Center in Honolulu, Hawaii from November 12–13 of 2011. In the press conference about talked about the economic impact of the Asia-Pacific will have on the US economy. President Obama said “Now, the single greatest challenge for the United States right now, and my highe

Peggy Noonan Thinks the Time is Ripe For Republicans to be Democrats!

(h/t Heather for the vid, Andrew for the tip) I confess that I almost wish I would be invited to sit on a panel for "This Week" now. Whatever they are serving in the green room is some pretty strong stuff, based on how loopy Peggy Noonan is in this ...

More Than Half Of Republicans Prepared To Let US Default

Yesterday, Citigroup floated the idea that a temporary government shutdown once the full array of debt ceiling extension measures expires some time in mid/late February, is possible, which would also mean the first technical default of the US depending on the prioritization of US debt payments. Now, Politico reports that this idea is rapidly gaining support within the GOP and that "more than half of GOP members are prepare to allow default unless Obama agress to dramatic cuts he has repeatedly said he opposes." It gets better... or worse depending how many ES contracts on is long: "Many more members, including some party leaders, are prepared to shut down the government to make their point. House Speaker John Boehner “may need a shutdown just to get it out of their system,” said a top GOP leadership adviser. “We might need to do that for member-management purposes — so they have an endgame and can show their constituents they’re fighting.”" Of course, at this point not even a US government bankruptcy may send the ES more than one or two ticks lower. After all, there is no risk of anything happening anywhere, any time.

More from Politico:

House Republicans are seriously entertaining dramatic steps, including default or shutting down the government, to force President Barack Obama to finally cut spending by the end of March.

The idea of allowing the country to default by refusing to increase the debt limit is getting more widespread and serious traction among House Republicans than people realize, though GOP leaders think shutting down the government is the much more likely outcome of the spending fights this winter.

"I think it is possible that we would shut down the government to make sure President Obama understands that we’re serious,” House Republican Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington state told us. “We always talk about whether or not we’re going to kick the can down the road. I think the mood is that we’ve come to the end of the road.”

The country would eventually default if House Republicans refuse to raise the debt limit, which the Treasury estimates will hit in late February or early March. The government would shut down if House Republicans instead were to refuse to extend the law funding current government operations on March 27.

Boehner assumes he can ultimately talk members out of default, but he is so wounded and weakened from last month’s tax-hike battle that the speaker might very well be wrong. Obama assumes Republicans would never be so foolish as to put the economy at risk to win a spending fight. Conservatives say he’s definitely wrong on that score. They say he’s the foolish and reckless one for piling up $6 trillion in debt on his watch.

The coming spending fights make the Christmastime tax increase battle seem like child’s play. While everyone knew the tax drama would end with the rich paying more taxes, no one can telegraph how the coming spending fights will unfold. And the economic stakes are more dire.

“For too long, the pitch was, we’ll deal with it next time,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a conservative from Utah. He said GOP lawmakers are prepared to shut things down or even default if Obama doesn’t bend on spending. “No one wants to default, but we are not going to continue to give the president a limitless credit card.”

Starting Monday, Boehner will huddle with his leadership team to discuss his preliminary thinking on a spending strategy. A source who attended meetings to prepare for those private talks said GOP leaders are authentically at a loss on how to control members who don’t respond to the normal incentives of wanting to help party leaders or of avoiding situations — like default — that could be public relations nightmares.

And while historically a US default would send the USD soaring on a flight to safety, this time around nobody knows what will happen, as the algos out there are, for some amusing reason, pushing more capital into the EUR. And with the weak USD to strong ES correlation, it just may be that a US default would send the S&P 500 limit up.

Perfectly rational "market."

Your rating: None Average: 5 (1 vote)

‘Foreign pullout to boost Afghan security’

Afghan President Hamid Karzai says Afghanistan will become a “more secure” country once US-led forces leave the Asian state by the end of 2014, Press TV reports.

Speaking to reporters on Monday upon his arrival in Kabul and following his meeting with US President Barack Obama in Washington, the Afghan president expressed optimism that the Afghanistan’s security will improve after the pullout of the US-led forces.

“Afghanistan will be a more secure and better place,” he said.

Commenting on the US demand to grant immunity to the American soldiers who will remain in Afghanistan post-2014, Karzai reiterated that the negotiations over the issue inquires a second round of discussions with the presence of Afghanistan’s Loya Jirga, a “grand assembly” of political and community leaders.

On Friday, in a joint press conference with his Afghan counterpart, Obama said that Afghanistan must grant US forces legal immunity if Kabul wants American troops to stay in the country beyond 2014.

Karzai noted, “The issue of immunity is under discussion [and] it is going to take eight to nine months before we reach [an] agreement.”

The Obama administration is contemplating a plan to keep up to 9,000 US soldiers in Afghanistan to conduct what it calls counter-terrorism operations and provide assistance to Afghan forces.

Afghanistan and the US signed a strategic partnership agreement in May, which would allow the US to keep some military bases in Afghanistan after its key forces withdraw from the country.

Karzai, however, said Kabul would not sign any new security agreements with the United States until the prisoners held in US custody were transferred to Afghan authorities.


During the press conference, Obama pledged that US-led forces would hand the lead role in the ‘fight against militants’ to Afghan forces in the next few months.

The United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 under the pretext of fighting terrorism.

The invasion removed the Taliban regime from power; but, torn apart by a war that has lasted for 12 years, Afghanistan is still dealing with untamed violence, rising insecurity, and social problems.

AZA/AO/SZH/HJL

‘US must show change in practice’

US must show change in practice: Iranian cmdr.

Deputy Commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Brigadier General Hossein Salami

A top Iranian commander says the Islamic Republic has not trusted and will not trust claims made by US officials unless they make practical changes to their attitude vis-à-vis Iran.

“The Islamic Republic has not and will not trust the words of US authorities, unless practical changes are made,” Deputy Commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps Brigadier General Hossein Salami said on Monday.

Referring to the nomination of former US Senator Chuck Hagel for the position of defense secretary in the US, Salami said, “The US policy-makers make interesting claims, but, considering their actions, their words are meaningless for us.”

US President Barack Obama on January 7 nominated Hagel for the position of defense secretary despite political uproar over the nomination.

At a White House press conference Obama said Hagel is "the leader our troops deserve,” and praised his “willingness to speak his mind."

Salami said the US strategy and interests dictate the policies of the country’s officials.


Hagel left the Senate in 2008. Certain comments by him have been interpreted as being against the Israeli regime.

The 66-year-old was the first Republican senator to publicly criticize the war in Iraq, calling it the worst foreign policy blunder since the Vietnam War, and has, on several occasions, opposed any plan to launch a military strike against Iran.

MYA/HMV/HJL

Protestors and Former Detainees Mark Guantanamo Anniversary in London

Context: As yet there are no context links for this item.

Transcript

Hassan Ghani

Another year, and another sombre vigil outside the US embassy in London. A somewhat eclectic gathering in near freezing temperatures ensured that 11 years of Guantanamo did not go unmarked.Aisha Maniar, London Guantanamo Campaign“It’s down to the public now. President Obama broke his promise four years ago to close Guantanamo Bay. The argument with so-called terrorists, is that terrorists act outside of the law; but what we actually see is governments acting like mafia, like terrorists themselves, and they too are acting outside the known confines of the law. There’s no exceptions for the use of torture, there’s no reason for arbritrary detention – if people have committed crimes then try them, in a normal court of law. Try them and then lock them up. Don’t lock them up and then hold them for eleven years and say ‘oh these people are bad because we say so’.”Alice, Student Activist“It’s just unintelligible that it would still be open. And especially the inhumane treatment to people that have been proven innocent.”Hassan GhaniOf the nearly 800 men and children held in Guantanamo over the years, today 166 still remain. More than half of them have also cleared for release, some many years ago. But despite having come out clean after years of detention without trial, interrogations, and torture - or what the US department of defence called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, they remain trapped in this legal blackhole.Staff at ‘Reprieve’, the legal action charity, have been working on some of the cases.Hilary Stauffer, Deputy Director of Reprieve“The US Congress in 2010 passed a law called the National Defence Authorisation Act – that is the defence bill for the year, that’s just the spending bill that manages the budget for the army. But they also tacked on a provision in there that had a lot to do with Guantanamo.It said that no US funds could be used to transfer detainees. It said that detainees could never be transferred or resettled in the United States, even the ones that are completely innocent. And it said that if they were going to be released, the Secretary of Defence, the Secretary of State, and the Director of National Intelligence all had to agree. And that the country he went to had to certify that he would never commit an act of terrorism again, certify that he would never pose a threat to the United States ever again, and had to certify that they would watch him in perpetuity. And it’s very difficult to meet those, no one’s been released since the NDAA came into effect, except through political deals behind the scenes.”Hassan GhaniAmong those cleared for release several years ago is the last remaining British resident in Guantanamo, Shaker Aamer. His family have been campaigning on his behalf. But, for the moment, there doesn’t seem to be any light at the end of the tunnel.Hilary Stauffer, Deputy Director of Reprieve“In many cases these men don’t want to go back to where they are from. Shaker is a British resident, he’s married to a British citizen, has children who are British citizens, but he’s originally from Saudi Arabia. If he went back to Saudi Arabia he’d probably be very very mistreated or tortured, because that happens in a lot of places, these guys go back to countries that are less democratic than others, and it’s guilt by suspicion. So they don’t want to go back to their country of origin, they want to be resettled to a third country. But in many cases these countries say ‘if the US wont take them, why should we?’”Hassan GhaniFor those who’ve survived rendition, torture and detention without trial, and have begun rebuilding their lives, the mental scars are enduring. And the anniversary brings with it a reminder of those left behind.Bisher al-Rawi, Guantanamo Detainee 2002-2007“We write them letters, we keep in touch with their families, we try to send them news. And although it’s extremely important to work, it’s extremely painful. Every day is a reminder. I look in the faces of my children and I think of the brothers who have left their children behind, the brothers who have not had families – people who got married and never had kids.”Hassan GhaniOmar Deghayez was held in Guantanamo for five years. At one point he was beaten so badly, that he lost the use of one of his eyes.Omar Deghayes, Guantanamo Detainee 2002-2007“They were holding my head back and holding me down, and then he pushed his fingers into my eyes. I didn’t understand what he was doing so I had my eyes clearly open, until I felt the pain of his fingers coming wholly inside the eyes, and he was pushing harder. So I closed my eyes but it was too late when his fingers were already inside. And the officer kept saying to him ‘more more’, and the guard was screaming, because he was I think frightened himself, saying ‘I am I am’.I think they wanted to make an example of us, we were in a ‘Oscar’ block where they thought we were rebellious, because they did that to me and then they went to the next cell and the next cell, and they did it to all of them. It was one night they did that. Several people lost their eyes.The mistreatment in Guantanamo will last with you, I think, forever. It’s a grave wound, probably it will stay in the heart, in the psyche, of the person.”Hassan GhaniLike other former detainees, he too feels a sense of guilt at being free when others remain inside.Omar Deghayes, Guantanamo Detainee 2002-2007“There are still people who were with us, comrades, people who are inmates, friends of ours, people who we lived with and we promised that when we go out.. they had expectations that we would be able to speak about them – especially us in the United Kingdom, because many who are released to Saudi Arabia, Yemen and others are gagged, imprisoned, sometimes silenced by force.When they heard the announcement in Guantanamo that I was going to be released, people were celebrating as if they were going to be released. Because they know my background, I’m a lawyer, a human rights lawyer, and on top of that I speak English, on top of that I’m in the UK.”Hassan GhaniBut while media attention is generally drawn to Guantanamo, the US administration and the CIA hold prisoners in even more controversial facilities in other countries around the world, known as black sites, where few know what really goes on. And now, with drone strikes, human rights organisations say the Obama administration has completely bypassed the whole legal process.Hilary Stauffer, Deputy Director of Reprieve“It’s a controversial policy, but instead of capturing terrorism suspects he’s often just killing them abroad through drone strikes, so that you negate the need for a prison if you’re not even bringing people to any kind of trial, or you’re just killing them on the ground. Generally, the vast majority of them are just unnamed alleged terrorists abroad, but nobody has any idea what they’re being charged with. And drone strikes are particularly problematic because Obama has said that his justification is basically anybody in military age, between 18 and 65, is a target, a potential militant, and it’s up to them to prove after the fact that they weren’t a militant. But if they’re dead, it’s very difficult to prove that.”Hassan GhaniFor protestors outside the US embassy in London, Guantanamo remains a powerful symbol of a wider unjust system, and they say they know their work isn’t over if the prison closes tomorrow.“It’s likely that opponents of the US government’s network of renditions, black sites, and drone killings will be meeting here for many more years to come. The US administration says that some of the detainees it currently holds can be held indefinitely, without charge or trial, pending an end to hostilities, as prisoners of war. The seemingly never-ending, ever-expanding, war on terror. Hassan Ghani, for the Real News, London.


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A Global NRA: Our Government Is the Largest Federally Licensed Weapons Dealer on the...

The White House and the Pentagon -- with a helping hand from the State Department -- ensure that the U.S. remains by far the leading purveyor of the “right to bear arms” globally.

January 13, 2013  |  

Photo Credit: © Aaron Amat/ Shutterstock.com

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Given these last weeks, who doesn’t know what an AR-15 is?  Who hasn’t seen the mind-boggling stats on the way assault rifles have  flooded this country, or tabulations of accumulating Newtown-style  mass killings, or noted that there are  barely more gas stations nationwide than federally licensed firearms dealers, or heard the renewed debates over the Second Amendment, or been struck by the  rapid shifts in public opinion on gun control, or checked out the disputes over how  effective an assault-rifle ban was  the last time around?  Who doesn’t know about the NRA’s  suggestion to weaponize schools, or about  the price poor neighborhoods may be paying in gun deaths for the present expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment?  Who hasn’t seen the legions of stories about how, in the wake of the Newtown slaughter,  sales of guns, especially AR-15 assault rifles, have  soared, ammunition sales have  surged, background checks for future gun purchases have  risen sharply, and gun shows have been  besieged with customers?

If you haven’t stumbled across figures on gun violence in America or on  suicide-by-gun, you’ve been hiding under a rock.  If you haven’t heard about  Chicago’s soaring and Washington D.C.'s plunging gun-death stats (and that both towns have  relatively strict gun laws), where have you been?

Has there, in fact, been any aspect of the weaponization of the United States that, since the Newtown massacre, hasn’t been discussed?  Are you the only person in the country, for instance, who doesn’t know that Vice President Joe Biden has been assigned  the task of coming up with an administration gun-control agenda before Barack Obama is inaugurated for his second term?  And can you honestly tell me that you haven’t seen global comparisons of  killing rates in countries that have tight gun laws and the U.S., or read at least one  discussion about life in countries like Colombia or Guatemala, where armed guards are omnipresent?

After years of mass killings that resulted in next to no national dialogue about the role of guns and how to control them, the subject is back on the American agenda in a significant way and -- by all signs -- isn’t about to leave town anytime soon.  The discussion has been so expansive after years in a well-armed wilderness that it’s easy to miss what still isn’t being discussed, and in some sense just how narrow our focus remains.

Think of it this way: the Obama administration is  reportedly going to call on Congress to pass a new ban on assault weapons, as well as one on high-capacity ammunition magazines, and to close the loopholes that allow certain gun purchasers to avoid background checks.  But Biden has  already conceded, at least implicitly, that facing a Republican-controlled House of Representatives and a filibuster-prone Senate, the administration’s ability to make much of this happen -- as on so many domestic issues -- is limited.

That will shock few Americans.  After all, the most essential fact about the Obama presidency is this: at home, the president is a hamstrung weakling; abroad, in terms of his ability to chose a course of action and -- from drones strikes and special ops raids to cyberwar and other matters -- simply act, he’s closer to  Superman.  So here’s a question: while the administration is pledging to try to curb the wholesale spread of ever more powerful weaponry at home, what is it doing about the same issue abroad where it has so much more power to pursue the agenda it prefers?

Guest Post: What Happens When China Goes “Gray”?

Submitted by The Diplomat's  Mark W. Frazier, Professor of Politics and Co-Academic Director of the India-China Institute at the New School

What Happens When China Goes “Gray”?

Developed economies are beginning to struggle with aging populations and more retirees. China may soon join them.

As China's major trading partners try to control rising public pension and health care costs, they may not realize they also have an important stake in China's ongoing struggle to fashion a safety net for its own rapidly aging population. Many observers assume China has no pensions or healthcare insurance for the 185 million people over the age of 60 (13.7% of population), the highest official retirement age for most workers. They may well believe this explains why Chinese families save so much–more than 30% of household income–and therefore spend less on consumer goods, including imports from trading partners.

But this line of reasoning is faulty because China already has large and rapidly growing public pension and health insurance programs in the cities, and is in the process of extending them to rural areas. It's time that China's trading partners, especially the United States, understand what this means for China's economic future and, by extension, their own.

For all the criticism of outgoing President Hu Jintao for presiding over a “do-nothing” administration, he did manage to oversee a substantial increase spending on China's public support systems.As a result, pensions have now become the most expensive function of the Chinese government—which already spends a lot on infrastructure, housing and defense. In 2011, pension expenditures rose to 1.28 trillion renminbi (RMB, U.S.$205 billion), up from only 489 billion RMB in 2006. These and civil service pensions cover only about half of those over age 60, but at current rates of growth universal coverage—and vastly higher expenditures—are not far off. The number of urban workers (including migrants from rural areas who in theory are in the cities temporarily) contributing to the public pension system now exceeds 290 million, while rural pensions are also growing rapidly. With so many new people paying in, the government's future pension obligations are rising quickly. A recent report issued by the Bank of China and Deutsche Bank estimated that China’s pension system will have a U.S.$2.9 trillion gap between assets and liabilities by the end of 2013. By 2033 the gap is expected to reach U.S.$10.9 trillion, or 38.7% of GDP.

What happened in the past decade or so to cause China, with an annual per capita income of around $5,000 (adjusted for purchasing power), to begin to acquire pension burdens found in richer and heavily indebted industrial states? What will this mean for trading partners who keep urging the Chinese government to rebalance its economy toward greater consumption (and imports) and away from relying so heavily on exports?

Essentially what happened is that Beijing designed a pension system in the late 1990s that will leave households with much less to spend than many observers assume. Urged by World Bank economists and foreign pension experts, the Chinese government put in place a hybrid pension arrangement that relies on both traditional pay-as-you-go collections from employers and mandatory individual accounts, from which workers were to finance anywhere from one half to two-thirds of their retirement needs. (They also were expected to buy pension and annuity products from commercial providers). But that pension design has resulted in a double whammy: households consume less in order to save for retirement needs, while the government's long term pension debt is escalating rapidly because local governments raided the individual accounts to pay benefits to current retirees.

The central government has tried to prevent local governments from tapping current pension assets, but has done so only by allowing them to accumulate further debt. Moreover, many local administrations bristle under the requirement that pension assets must be invested in low-interest bonds and bank deposits. Don't be surprised if future pension scandals like the one that rocked Shanghai in 2006 are exposed as local administrations seek a higher, though riskier return on their pension assets.

As China's population ages, scholars and officials are seriously considering proposals to phase out the one-child policy that is beginning to curb the flow of new workers into the economy, as well as raise retirement ages (currently 60 for men, 5 or 10 years earlier for women). But such adjustments are just as politically difficult in China as in in Western democracies because, as it turns out, not wanting to work longer is a widely held preference. Many Chinese also view the relatively early retirement age as a way to make vacancies for the millions of young people who enter the labor market each year. If older workers continue working into their twilight years, young workers may encounter greater difficulty in trying to find employment. This would pose its own issues for the country.

What does all this mean for the Asian, European, and American economies that trade with China? First, they should understand that China's aging problem is a slow-motion fiscal crisis. China is not Greece, but local debt burdens are already enormous, and these calculations do not include the mounting pension obligations that local governments have incurred. Just as in America and Europe, the tendency in China is for local officials running state-level pension funds to ramp up current benefits and let future generations pay for them. China's National Social Security Fund is the largest in the world at $150 billion, but these assets (some of which are permitted to be invested in stocks) still fall well short of the liabilities racked up by provincial and city pension funds.

Second, we should realize that as China moves towards universal pension and medical coverage (a likely prospect under its 2010 Social Insurance Law), the effect on household savings will be limited. True, families may no longer need to save for the high costs of catastrophic illnesses. But it is quite plausible that any reduction in household savings arising from the new safety net will be offset by mandatory payments by both workers and employers into the new welfare programs. In other words, don't count on the new safety net to rebalance China's economy, because it won’t give discretionary income much of a lift. This means that countries that have large bilateral trade deficits with China should not expect a turnaround at some uncertain date when Chinese households suddenly have imagined new spending powers.

Finally, we must consider the larger implications aging has on China and major economies such as the United States, Europe, and Japan. Aging trends don’t make the decline of these economies inevitable, of course, but it is time to calibrate expectations. Aging will curb or even reduce household consumption, which is the primary driver of Chinese exports to industrialized economies and what many hope will fuel future exports to China. All these governments need to find ways to slow the growth of health care and pension costs. In the United States and China, for example, insurance and other financial services providers (state-owned in China) make large profits on fees and other administrative charges for handling the funds that pass through their accounts. Cutting these costs is essential. More broadly, all these societies will be compelled to rethink the outdated notion that work is over and retirement begins at some arbitrary age defined by law.

Aging and the policies to cope with a graying population are first and foremost domestic issues, but, as is so often the case, the consequences of Beijing’s pension policies will resonate far beyond its borders. Those who manage economic relations with China should focus less on trade deficits and exchange rates and spend more time thinking through the long-term implications of aging, and what it will mean for patterns of trade and investment among the world's largest economies.

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Kristol: Congress Won’t Move Because President ‘Didn’t Campaign on Gun Control’

Here's the latest excuse to come from Fox News on why Republicans will not cooperate with President Obama on passing any new gun control legislation. According to Bloody Bill Kristol, they're only going to feel compelled to work with him on legislat...

US arrests two for fake school bomb

The photo of the fake bomb that Sean Doran and Kayla Sypek allegedly left at the entrance of East Hampton Middle School on January 12, 2013

Police in the US state of Connecticut have arrested two young people for leaving a fake bomb at a school and charged them with three felony counts.

Police arrested the young couple, Sean Doran and Kayla Sypek, after they admitted to planting the facsimile bomb outside the front doors of East Hampton Middle School on Saturday.

The incident prompted officials to lock down the building and call in the state police bomb squad, who after examining and X-raying the device, determined it did not contain any explosives.


Police said the two were charged with first-degree threatening, first-degree reckless endangerment and first-degree breach of peace, all felony charges, adding that the young men are each being held on $100,000 bail and are set to appear in court on Monday.

On December 14, 2012, 20 children and six adults were killed by a gunman -- who later killed himself -- at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The assailant had also killed his mother earlier in the day.

After the Sandy Hook massacre, a Gallup poll found that the majority of Americans would like stricter gun laws and a ban on high-capacity firearms.

Over 100,000 US citizens have signed the White House’s We the People petition on line, asking the administration of President Barack Obama to make gun laws stricter and to promote a national debate on gun control.

MN/MA

Wall Street Looting: Will JPMorgan Chase Be Held Accountable for Money Laundering “Lapses”?

stealing_money_safe_lg_nwm

As a sop to outraged public opinion over Wall Street’s looting of the real economy, criminal banksters are coming under increased scrutiny by federal regulators.

Scrutiny however, is not the same thing as enforcement of laws such as the Bank Secrecy Act and other regulatory measures meant to stop the flow of dirty money from organized crime into the financial system.

And never mind that President Obama and his hand-picked coterie of insiders from Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo (all of whom figured prominently in recent narcotics scandals) are moving to impose Eurozone-style austerity measures that threaten to ravage the social safety net, the American people are spoon-fed a pack of lies that this cabal will protect their interests and enforce the law when it comes to drug money laundering.

Late last week, Reuters reported that “U.S. regulators are expected to order JPMorgan Chase & Co to correct lapses in how it polices suspect money flows … in the latest move by officials to force banks to tighten their anti money-laundering systems.”

In December, the Department of Justice cobbled together a widely criticized deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) with Europe’s largest bank, HSBC, over charges that the institution, founded in 1865 by British drug lords when the British Crown seized Hong Kong from China in the wake of the First Opium War, knowingly laundered billions of dollars in drug and terrorist money for some of the most violent gangsters on earth.

Despite the fact that DOJ imposed a $1.9 billion (£1.2bn) fine which included $655 million (£408m) in civil penalties, not a single senior officer at HSBC was criminally charged with enabling Mexican drug cartels and Al Qaeda terrorists to illegally move money through its American subsidiaries.

More outrageously, even when stiff fines are levied against criminal banks and corporations, as likely as not “some or all of these payments will probably be tax-deductible. The banks can claim them as business expenses. Taxpayers, therefore, will likely lighten the banks’ loads,” The New York Times disclosed.

“The action against JPMorgan,” Reuters reported,

“would be in the form of a cease-and-desist order, which regulators use to force banks to improve compliance weaknesses, the sources said. JPMorgan will probably not have to pay a monetary penalty, one of the sources said.”

Read that sentence again. America’s largest bank, responsible for some of the worst depredations of the housing crisis which tossed millions of citizens out of their homes and fined $7.3 billion (£4.53bn) for doing so, will not be fined nor will their officers be criminally charged for presumably washing black money for organized crime.

Despite the recklessness of senior officials at JPMorgan, including CEO Jamie Dimon, former CFO Doug Braunstein and former CIO Ina Drew over the bank’s massive losses in the credit derivatives market last year, Bloomberg News reported that the board will only “consider” whether to release a report on the fiasco which wiped out close to $51 billion in shareholder value at this “too big to fail” bank.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), severely criticized by the US Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in their 335-page report into HSBC, along with the Federal Reserve are expected to issue the cease-and-desist order as early as this week.

Last April however, when OCC issued a cease-and-desist order against Citigroup for alleged “gaps” in their oversight of cash transactions similar to those of drug-tainted HSBC and Wells-owned Wachovia, which laundered hundreds of billions of dollars for narcotics traffickers through dodgy cash exchange houses in Mexico, no monetary penalties were attached.

A “person close” to Citigroup “attributed part of the problem to an accident when a computer was unplugged from anti-money-laundering systems,” according to The New York Times.

While such bald-faced misrepresentations may pass muster with America’s “newspaper of record,” Citigroup’s sorry history when it comes to facilitating criminal money flows is not so easily swept under the rug.

Late last year investigative journalist Bill Conroy reported in Narco News: “In the 1990s, Raul Salinas de Gortari, the brother of former Mexican President Carlos Salinas, tapped US-based Citibank to help transfer up to $100 million out of Mexico and into Swiss bank accounts. Although US authorities investigated the suspicious money movements, ultimately no charges were brought against Raul Salinas or Citibank–a Citigroup Inc. subsidiary.”

“Again,” Conroy reported,

“in January 2010, Citigroup popped up on banking regulators’ radar, this time in Mexico, when a Mexican judge accused a half dozen casa de cambios (money transmitters) of laundering drug funds through various banks, including Citigroup’s Mexican subsidiary. In that case, Citigroup again was not accused of violating any laws.”

However, despite that fact that the OCC’s cease-and-desist order against Citigroup accused the bank of systemic “internal control weaknesses” that opened the institution up to shady transactions by “high-risk customers,” presumably including flush-with-cash narcotics traffickers, the bank was not indicted for criminal violations under the Bank Secrecy Act and did not admit wrongdoing, instead promising to “institute reforms.”

As with Wachovia and HSBC, OCC charged that Citigroup’s “lapses” included “the incomplete identification of high risk customers in multiple areas of the bank, inability to assess and monitor client relationships on a bank-wide basis, inadequate scope of periodic reviews of customers, weaknesses in the scope and documentation of the validation and optimization process applied to the automated transaction monitoring system, and inadequate customer due diligence.”

Additionally, Citigroup “failed to adequately conduct customer due diligence and enhanced due diligence on its foreign correspondent customers, its retail banking customers, and its international personal banking customers and did not properly obtain and analyze information to ascertain the risk and expected activity of particular customers.”

According to OCC auditors, Citigroup “self-reported” that “from 2006 through 2010, the Bank failed to adequately monitor its remote deposit capture/international cash letter instrument processing in connection with foreign correspondent banking.” As I have pointed out, correspondent and private banking are gateways for laundering drug and other criminal money flows.

In other words, replicating patterns employed for decades by the world’s leading financial institutions, organized criminals and terrorist financiers were enabled, with a wink-and-a-nod by the US government, above all by US secret state agencies which siphoned off part of the loot for covert operations, to wash black cash through the system as a whole.

Already stung by billions of dollars in losses due to risky trades in credit derivatives as noted above, MoneyWatch reported “CEO Jamie Dimon can’t blame this on a ‘flawed, complex, poorly reviewed, poorly executed and poorly monitored’ strategy, like he did when the bank lost $6.2 billion on the so-called ‘London Whale’ trade.”

“In many ways,” reporter Jill Schlesinger wrote, “the current potential regulatory action is worse than any trading loss, because it indicates a systemic lapse in controls.”

According to MoneyWatch, regulators “appear to have found a company-wide lapse in procedures and oversight connected to anti-money-laundering (AML) surveillance and risk management. AML controls are intended to deter and detect the misuse of legitimate financial channels for the funding of money laundering, terrorist financing and other criminal acts.”

But there’s the rub; federal regulators are loathe to police, let alone hold to account those responsible for such illicit transactions precisely because the infusion of dirty money into the system is a splendid means to keep failed capitalist financial institutions afloat, a process which Global Research political analyst Michel Chossudovsky has termed “the criminalization of the state.”

In fact, as former London Metropolitan Police financial crimes specialist Rowan Bosworth-Davies recently wrote on his website: “These institutions exist … to handle and facilitate the through-put of the staggering volume of criminal and dirty money which daily flows through the financial sector, because the profits there from are just so incredibly valuable.”

“The biggest problem for these banks,” Bosworth-Davies observed,

“is that by far the greatest amount of this money is illegal to handle under international money laundering laws. All banking institutions are now effectively subject to international laws which prohibit the handling or the facilitation of criminally-acquired money from whatever source, and that money includes the proceeds of drug trafficking, all other criminal activities (including tax evasion), and the proceeds of terrorism.”

Indeed, “The money they were moving was so huge … that it became very easy to persuade Governments to turn a blind eye, while regulators were encouraged to look the other way, when the banks began engaging in a series of wholesale criminal activities.”

Until OCC reveals the content of its cease-and-desist order pending against JPMorgan Chase we do not know the extent of the bank’s potential criminal “lapses” under the Bank Secrecy Act.

However, as Reuters reported although “no immediate action is expected from US prosecutors,” it is a near certainty that the federal government and complicit media will disappear whatever dirty secrets eventually emerge down the proverbial memory hole.

Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, he is a Contributing Editor with Cyrano’s Journal Today. His articles can be read on Dissident Voice, Pacific Free Press, Uncommon Thought Journal, and the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military “Civil Disturbance” Planning, distributed by AK Press and has contributed to the new book from Global Research, The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century.

Twilight of the Pale Patriarchs

Being the party of white men no longer adds up to victory for the GOP.

January 13, 2013  |  

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There’s always a scene in the grittiest vampire movies where the old bloodsucker is sleeping peacefully in his coffin, looking as innocent as the undead can look, and the handsome hero plants a pointed stake in the vampire’s sternum and takes a big swing at it with his mallet. Whether or not the blow turns out to be accurate and fatal, the vampire always wakes up when he’s pierced. His eyes pop open, his mouth opens on those awful canines dripping blood and saliva, and with a savage snarl he tries to sit up, as the audience draws a deep common breath. It’s a crowd-pleaser, if you like this stuff. And if the thing climbs out of the coffin, 20 minutes of premium violence are guaranteed.

Excuse a rare display of optimism on my part, but I’m suggesting a useful metaphor for the presidential election of 2012. After Mitt Romney collected 75% of the white male vote and lost, I fancied that I could hear a strangled snarl and imagine that the bloodthirsty, near immortal thing with the stake in its chest was the white patriarchy — the high-testosterone, low-melanin monopoly that has misguided and misruled this country, and this violent Western civilization, throughout recorded history and long before.

I’m not claiming a clean kill. The monster’s heart is still beating, though the stake that was struck on Nov. 6 pierced its coat, its shirt, even its undershirt — a sleeveless “wife-beater” of course — and possibly enough skin to leave a bead of blood (someone else’s) on its deathly-pale breast. It may yet climb out of the coffin. But the damned thing felt this one. Forty-five percent of the votes that re-elected Barack Obama were cast by minorities. The president won 55% of the women’s vote — though the huge question is what the other 45% were thinking when they voted for Romney, chained as he was to a platform that ignored and insulted women as recklessly as it dismissed the non-Aryan and the poor.

But the point — that sharp, whittled point of the vampire-slayer’s stake — is that three out of four white men rejected the president and it didn’t matter. He didn’t need them. When the dust settled, there were an unprecedented 20 women in the Senate and 78 in the House of Representatives, far short of a fair gender distribution but edging closer to 20% of Congress. As recently as the early 1990s, the norm was a marginal 5 or 6 percent. The Democratic caucus in the new House of Representatives, a 200-strong minority, will include 61 women, 43 African-Americans, 27 Latinos and 10 Asians. Fewer than half — 94 — will be male Caucasians. Neither the president nor the secretary of state is a white man, nor are four of the nine Supreme Court justices, though what we might accurately label Clarence Thomas, besides an African-American, is always up for debate.

All this is causing acute chest pain for the patriarchy, as well as the Republican Party that incorporates its demographic and its agenda. Though Republicans subsist on militant denial, the future is there for them to see, too, and the future is not bright for what columnist Gail Collins of the Times (in a nod to New Yorkers’ favorite red-tailed hawk) likes to call “the pale male.” The demographics are fatal: By 2043, according to the Census Bureau, non-Hispanic whites will be a minority in America, and of course less than half of the Caucasian minority will be male. We can predict fairly confidently that each generation of aging white men will be a little less rigid and arrogant than its predecessor. Voters under 30 chose Obama decisively, 60 to 36 percent. Mean old men, the heart, soul and checkbook of 21st-century Republicanism, are not a renewable resource.

CNN’s Ali Velshi Lets GOP Sen. Ron Johnson Blow Smoke

Lately, CNN's Ali Velshi has done a good job of pushing back at some of these Republican politicians when they come on his show and lie. This wasn't one of those times. While Velshi did do a good job of making clear that raising the debt ceiling is pay...

Why a Woman Should Lead the FCC

The Federal Communications Commission has been around since 1934. And not once has a woman served as chair.

President Obama may soon need to appoint a new chair to succeed Julius Genachowski, who is expected to step down. The Women's Media Center created a petition at Change.org urging the president to appoint a woman to succeed Genachowski. It’s within the realm of possibility: Two of the five current FCC commissioners are women. I’ve signed the petition, and I hope you will too.

This isn’t just about having more women in positions of leadership within the federal government. (But we need that too. Just yesterday another female member of President Obama’s cabinet stepped down. So far, all of the president’s top appointments for his new administration are men.)

This is also about who owns the media. White men own most broadcast TV and radio outlets. The FCC’s own data show that women own less than 7 percent of all broadcast licenses. And people of color own just 7 percent of radio stations and just 3 percent of TV stations. To make matters worse, the percentage of minorities in newsrooms has declined every year since 2006.

Is diversity a priority at the FCC? Well, consider that it took the agency 13 years to issue this data. And that’s a shame because diversity in media ownership expands the variety of options, voices and stories on our airwaves.

Right now we have a system where women’s perspectives are often missing. The presidential election dominated the 2012 news cycle, and guess what? 4th Estate’s report on gender and election coverage showed that men crowded out women in electoral reporting during the six months studied.

As in: Men wrote 72.1 percent of the print articles in major publications during the time of the study. Men were seven times more likely to be quoted in major newspapers and TV news programs. (Yes, even for stories on “women’s issues” like abortion, birth control, Planned Parenthood and women’s rights. No, really.) And as my colleague Amy Kroin pointed out, this trend held true for both conservative and liberal media outlets.

The biggest story of 2012 illustrates the larger problem. Women are underrepresented in print bylines, as expert sources in print and in television news broadcasts, as guests on talk shows and as creators, producers and directors of content. And men run almost every major telecom company. Read these and other sobering statistics in the Women’s Media Center’s “Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2012” report.

The Consumer Electronics Show is taking place right now in Vegas. I want to see a woman give a keynote address at the next conference, as Chairman Genachowski has in years past. I want to see a woman lead the fight in Washington for policies that connect more Americans to high-speed broadband. And I want to see someone who departs from Genachowski’s missteps — especially when it comes to diversity issues.

The new FCC chair will help shape the policies that define our media landscape and infrastructure for years to come. Sign the petition and tell President Obama to nominate a woman as the next FCC chair.

Frank Luntz Offers A Critique

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Frank Luntz wants everyone to believe the 2012 epic failure of the Republican Party and the current low opinion of Republicans in Congress is all about their language. If only they had used different language, he argues, they wouldn't be regarded as lower than cockroaches by the American public.

Take, for example, the debt ceiling fight unfolding right now. In the world according to Luntz, the debt ceiling battle has been lost already by Republicans because they keep referring to it as a hostage (they don't). Luntz writes:

But they need a new language to communicate their ideas effectively; it starts with abandoning ugly phrases such as “a hostage you might take a chance at shooting” to describe budget negotiations. And Republicans need to stop expressing a willingness to shut down the government if they don’t get their way on the debt ceiling. Americans don’t want a government shutdown — for any reason.

What language does he suggest? When it comes to the debt ceiling, he doesn't suggest anything, which suggests he may be telling Republicans to quit playing that tired game and just pass the clean increase just as previous Congresses have done since there was a debt ceiling to raise.

On other issues, here are his suggestions.

  • Instead of smaller government, they should talk about more efficient and effective government. The former is ideological language of the 1980s; the latter is practical language of today.
  • Instead of tax reform, talk about making the IRS code simpler, flatter and fairer. Speak to what people really hate about the code: its complexity.
  • In addition to cutting spending, they must talk about controlling — not capping — it. What angers Americans more than how much politicians spend today is how much more they know Washington will waste tomorrow. A “cap” can be lifted, but “controls” are constant.
  • Instead of entitlement reform or controlling the growth of Medicare and Social Security, talk about how to save and strengthen these programs so they are there when voters need them. After all, they paid for them.
  • Better than discussing economic opportunity and growth, Republicans should talk about creating a healthier and more secure economy. Everyone benefits when economic health is restored. And while economic opportunity would be nice, security is a necessity.

In other words, Frank Luntz is instructing Republicans to start agreeing with President Obama, who has used every single one of these phrases in recent speeches. When you read that list, surely you heard the president's campaign speeches about protecting and strengthening Social Security and Medicare, or making the tax code simpler and fairer?

Like Peggy Noonan, Luntz is telling Republicans to start acting like Democrats and deal with the very real issues at hand. Like Democrats. I'm not sure Republicans actually get that yet.

If I had a chance to speak to Frank Luntz face to face about this article, I'd tell him it's not merely language, and it's cynical to say it is. Pretty language has to be backed up with some solid policy ideas. Paul Ryan says he wants to strengthen Medicare all the time and preserve it for future generations. Then Paul Ryan puts forward his proposal, which kills Medicare and hands its future off to private insurers, which gives them far more power than they deserve to have while taking it away from the sick, disabled and elderly.

It isn't mere language that is a problem here. I can call that brown thing over there on the grass canine excrement but if anyone goes over and examines it, it's still dog sh*t and if you step in it and get it on your shoes your shoes will stink and no one will let you come inside before you take your shoes off and leave them far away from the back door. Luntz can call Paul Ryan's Medicare-killing proposal "strengthening Medicare", but it still carries the stench of a dog turd attached to his shoe.

When Luntz says Americans are angry about spending, he forgets what spending they're angry about. They're not angry about spending on Americans; they're angry about spending on bank bailouts and wars that no one wanted in the first place. They're not angry about spending on the elderly; they're angry about giving rich people such a huge and loophole-ridden tax code that they pay less than 15 percent while the rest of us pay whatever we owe, which on average is higher than their 14 percent.

If Republicans head out from their retreat with the intention of papering over what they do and have been doing with less incendiary language, they will still be the same monumental failures they've been for the last four years, because people are not that stupid. They know the smell of dog crap on someone's shoes when they smell it.

Nevertheless, there is one suggestion Luntz makes that Republicans should heed.

Beyond fiscal policy, Republicans need to revamp their messaging on other issues. For example, the tragic school shooting in Newtown, Conn., offered Republicans a chance to discuss public safety — a more personal issue than “crime” — on a human level. That hasn’t happened, but it still can. Most people agree that there is a middle ground between gun-control hard-liners, who see every crime as an excuse to enact new laws, and the National Rifle Association, which sees every crime as an excuse to sell more guns. The Second Amendment deserves defending, but do Republicans truly believe that anyone should be able to buy any gun, anywhere, at any time? If yes, they’re on the side of less than 10 percent of America. If not, they need to say so.

Yes, they need to say so and they need to put some action items behind that say-so. No more kowtowing to the lunatic fringe who thinks a war should break out over reasonable gun safety laws. It is high time for Republicans to stop allowing the blood of their fellow Americans to wash over them every time some nut with an assault weapon decides to make some kind of a statement and step up.

On that score, they should listen, and so should any Democrat who still thinks the NRA has any hold over them.

Joe Sestak Calls Kay Bailey Hutchison ‘Ideal Choice’ For Transportation Secretary

Sadly it seems MSNBC has found yet another former Pennsylvania Democrat to come on the air to advocate for rewarding Republicans for their obstruction and intransigence over the last four years. We were already treated to "Fix the Debt" corporate sh...

Mike’s Blog Round Up

Liberal Values: Obama in his second term will be more of a fighter, but he's going to need our help. The People's View: Outrage without action is just whining. Cannonfire: As long as we've got that trillion-dollar coin lying around, let's spend it on ...

Is a Planetary Cooling Spell Straight Ahead? NASA: We May Be On the Verge...

All climate scientists agree that the sun affects Earth’s climate to some extent. They only disagree about whether or not the effect form the sun is minor compared to man-made causes.

We noted in 2011:

This week, scientists from the US Solar Observatory and the US Air Force Research Laboratory have discovered – to their great surprise – that the sun’s activity is declining, and that we might experience the lowest solar output we’ve seen since 1645-1715. The Register describes it in dramatic tones:

What may be the science story of the century is breaking this evening.

Scientists who are convinced that global warming is a serious threat to our planet say that such a reduced solar output would simply buy us more time … delaying the warming trend, but not stopping or reversing it.

On the other hand, scientists who are skeptical about global warming say that the threat is a new mini ice age. (Remember that scientists have been convinced in the past that we would have a new ice age, and even considered pouring soot over the arctic in the 1970s to help melt the ice – in order to prevent another ice age. Obama’s top science advisor was one of those warning of a new ice age in the 1970s. And see this.)

NASA reports this week that we may be on the verge of another Maunder Minimum (a period with an unusually low number of sunspots, leading to colder temperatures):

Much has been made of the probable connection between the Maunder Minimum, a 70-year deficit of sunspots in the late 17th-early 18th century, and the coldest part of the Little Ice Age, during which Europe and North America were subjected to bitterly cold winters. The mechanism for that regional cooling could have been a drop in the sun’s EUV output; this is, however, speculative.

 NASA: We May Be On the Verge of a Mini Maunder Event

The yearly averaged sunspot number for a period of 400 years (1610-2010). SOURCE: Courtesy of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.

***

The sun could be on the threshold of a mini-Maunder event right now. Ongoing Solar Cycle 24 is the weakest in more than 50 years. Moreover, there is (controversial) evidence of a long-term weakening trend in the magnetic field strength of sunspots. Matt Penn and William Livingston of the National Solar Observatory predict that by the time Solar Cycle 25 arrives, magnetic fields on the sun will be so weak that few if any sunspots will be formed. Independent lines of research involving helioseismology and surface polar fields tend to support their conclusion.

NASA explains that interactions between the sun, sources of cosmic radiation and the Earth are very complicated, and it takes an interdisciplinary team of heliophysicists, chemists and others to quantify what is really going on. And the Earth’s climate is also affected by cosmic radiation.

So – even if NASA’s prediction of a period of an unusually low amount of sun spots is proven correct – it is hard to know whether that will lead to a large or small reduction in temperature trends.

Permanent Afghanistan Occupation Planned

 America came to stay. Accelerated withdrawal claims reflect subterfuge. Washington officials and media scoundrels don’t explain. Msinformation and illusion substitute for reality.

Reuters headlined “Obama, Karzai accelerate end of US combat role in Afghanistan.”

“Obama’s determin(ed) to wind down a long, unpopular war.”

The New York Times headlined ‘Obama Accelerates Transition of Security to Afghans.”

Obama is “eager to turn a page after more than a decade of war.”

“(B)eginning this spring American forces (will) play only a supporting role in Afghanistan.”

The Washington Post headlined “Obama announces reduced US role in Afghanistan starting this spring.”

Plans are “for a small troop presence in the country after the American mission formally ends there in 2014.”

On January 11, Obama and Karzai’s joint press conference was more surreal than honest. Duplicitous doublespeak substituted for truth.

“(T)ransition is well underway,” said Obama. Plans are for Afghan forces to replace Americans. By yearend 2014, they’ll “have full responsibility for their security, and this war will come to a responsible end.”

At the same time, US forces will “continue to fight alongside (Afghans) when necessary.” Obama didn’t say what troop strength will remain.

Drone wars continue daily. US Special Forces and CIA elements came to stay. Search and destroy missions are prioritized.

By spring 2013, “our troops will have a different mission – training, advising, assisting Afghan forces. It will be a historic moment and another step toward full Afghan sovereignty.”

“Afghanistan (has) a long-term partner in the United States of America.”

It’s Washington’s longest war. Iraq and Afghanistan are its most costly ones.

Iraq boils out of sight and mind. Afghanistan rages. Experts agree. The war was lost years ago. It continues. Why US officials don’t explain.

A previous article discussed Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis. He assessed conditions accurately. His 84-page unclassified report called them disastrous.

“How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding,” he asked? His report’s opening comments said:

“Senior ranking U.S. military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the US Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable.”

“This deception has damaged America’s credibility among both our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan.”

His classified report was more explicit.

“If the public had access to these classified reports,” he explained, “they would see the dramatic gulf between what is often said in public by our senior leaders and what is actually true behind the scenes.”

“It would be illegal for me to discuss, use, or cite classified material in an open venue, and thus I will not do so.”

He traveled thousands of miles throughout the country. He spoke to US commanders, subordinates, and low-ranking soldiers. He talked at length with Afghan security officials, civilians and village elders.

What he learned bore no resemblance to rosy scenario official accounts. Insurgent forces control “virtually every piece of land beyond eyeshot of a US or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) base.”

Everywhere he visited, “the tactical situation was bad to abysmal.”

Afghanistan’s government can’t “provide for the basic needs of the people.” At times, local security forces collude with insurgents.

Davis hoped to learn something positive. He “witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level.” One senior enlisted leader spoke for others. He hoped to get out alive in one piece.

Why war continues remains for Obama to explain. He dissembles instead.

Afghanistan is strategically important. It straddles the Middle East, South and Central Asia. It’s in the heart of Eurasia.

Occupation projects America’s military might. It targets Russia, China, Iran, and other oil-rich Middle East States. It furthers Washington’s imperium. It prioritizes unchallenged global dominance.

China and Russia matter most. Allied they rival US superpower strength. Beijing is economically robust. Russia’s nuclear capability and military pose the only threat to America’s formidable might.

Russia is also resource rich. Its oil reserves are vast. Its natural gas supply is the world’s largest. Expect neither country to roll over for Washington. They’re a vital last line of defense.

More on Washington’s plans below. A previous article discussed Afghanistan’s troubled history.

In his book titled, “Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire,” John Pilger addressed it, saying:

“Through all the humanitarian crises in living memory, no country has been abused and suffered more, and none has been helped less than Afghanistan.”

 For centuries, Afghans endured what few can imagine. Marauding armies besieged cities, slaughtered thousands, and caused vast destruction.

Great Game 19th century struggles followed. Wars, devastation, and deplorable human misery reflect daily life for millions. America bears full responsibility now.

Wherever US forces show up, mass killings, destruction and incalculable human misery follow. After over 11 years of war and occupation, Afghans perhaps suffer most of all.

Living conditions are deplorable. Millions remain displaced. Makeshift dwellings substitute for real ones. Little protection from harsh Afghan weather is afforded. People freeze to death in winter.

Dozens of children die daily. Millions have little or no access to clean water. Life expectancy is one of the world’s lowest. Infant mortality is one of the highest. So is pre-age five mortality. Electricity is scarce.

Extreme poverty, unemployment, human misery, and constant fear reflect daily life. Afghans worry about surviving. Many don’t get enough food. Forced evictions affect them. They lack healthcare, education, and other vital services.

Occupation related violence harms innocent men, women, children and infants. Civilians always suffer most. Washington prioritizes conquest, colonization, plunder and dominance. War without end rages. Human needs go begging.

Displaced Afghans lack virtually everything necessary to survive. Included are proper housing, clean water, sanitation, healthcare, education, employment, enough income, and sufficient food to avoid starvation.

America and Afghanistan’s puppet government don’t help. Karzai is a pathetic stooge. He’s a caricature of a leader. He wasn’t elected. He was installed. He’s a former CIA asset/UNOCAL Oil consultant.

He’s little more than Kabul’s mayor. He’s despised. He wouldn’t last five minutes unprotected anywhere.

Afghanistan is the world’s leading opium producer. During the 1990s, Taliban officials largely eradicated it. Washington reintroduced it.

Crime bosses and CIA profit hugely. So do major banks. Money laundering is a major profit center. An estimated $1.5 trillion is laundered annually. Around $500 billion reflects elicit drug money.

Obama lied about ending combat operations by 2014. America came to stay. Permanent occupation is planned. Washington’s empire of bases reflect it.

During WW II, Brits complained that Americans were “overpaid, overfed, oversexed, and over here.” They virtually everywhere now. Planet earth is Washington occupied territory. Bases vary in size.

They include large main operating bases to medium and smaller-sized ones. Covert ones supplement them. US Special Forces operate in over 120 countries. CIA elements are everywhere.

National sovereignty rights are violated. America’s malevolent agenda is hostile. Public land is expropriated.

Toxic pollution, environmental damage, intolerable noise, violence, occupation related criminality, and unaccountability reflect Washington’s presence.

It’s hugely destructive. Afghanistan’s dystopian hell reflects it. Status of forces (SOFA) agreements establish a framework under which US forces operate abroad.

They provide an illusion of legitimacy. Nations are pressured and bullied to accept what harms their national interest.

In his book, “The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic,” Chalmers Johnson explained SOFAs as follows:

“America’s foreign military enclaves, though structurally, legally, and conceptually different from colonies, are themselves something like microcolonies in that they are completely beyond the jurisdiction of the occupied nation.”

“The US virtually always negotiates a ‘status of forces agreement’ (SOFA) with the ostensibly independent ‘host’ nation.”

They’re a modern day version of 19th century China’s extraterritoriality agreements. They granted foreigners charged with crimes the right to be tried by his (or her) own government under his (or her) own national law.

SOFAs prevent local courts from exercising legal jurisdiction over American personnel. Murder and rape go unpunished unless US officials yield to local authorities. Offenders are usually whisked out of countries before they ask.

America’s total number of SOFAs is unknown. Most are secret. Some are too embarrassing to reveal. America has hundreds of known, shared, and secret bases in over 150 countries.

Johnson said they “usurp, distort, or subvert whatever institutions of democratic (or other form of) government may exist with the host society.”

Their presence is troubling. Locals lose control of their lives. They have no say. There’s virtually no chance for redress. Permanent occupations harm most.

America built city-sized Iraq and Afghanistan super bases. They weren’t established to be abandoned. Washington came to stay. Both countries are US occupied territory.

Tens of thousands of private military contractors supplement military forces. Their skills range from technical to hired guns.

Obama suppressed Washington’s agenda. Permanent occupation is planned. America came to stay. Abandoning what’s strategically important won’t happen. How much longer Americans will tolerate war without end, they’ll have to explain.

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

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

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

 Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

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

http://www.dailycensored.com/permanent-afghanistan-occupation-planned-2/

‘We Do Not Support Blowing Up Planets’: Death Star Petition Rejected

A petition calling on President Obama to build a working Death Star has been rejected by the White House.

The proposal to build an inter-stellar space station with unimaginable destructive power passed the needed 25,000 signatures last month.

The petition was launched in the name of "national security".

stormtroopers

Close but no Death Star

Yet on Friday in a somewhat sarcastic response, Paul Shawcross, chief of the Science and Space Branch of the Office of Management and Budget, pointed out: "The Administration does not support blowing up planets."

In the Star Wars film series, the Death Star was a space station about the size of a small moon that was equipped with laser weapons powerful enough to destroy planets.

Shawcross added: "The construction of the Death Star has been estimated to cost more than $850,000,000,000,000,000. We're working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it.

"Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?"

Sad face for all those Star Wars fans then...

The official wording of the petition was:

"We petition the Obama administration to:

Secure resources and funding, and begin construction of a Death Star by 2016.

By focusing our defense resources into a space-superiority platform and weapon system such as a Death Star, the government can spur job creation in the fields of construction, engineering, space exploration, and more, and strengthen our national defense."

Several fictional characters added their signatures to the 34,000 long list, including a mysterious Mr Darth V, who listed his location as "Imperial Battlecruiser".

Earlier this year it was calculated that the Death Star would cost more than £541 trillion just for the raw materials - or 13,000 times the gross domestic product of the Earth.

While the very idea of the American government sanctioning the construction of such a thing may sound ridiculous, let's not forget the US once considered blowing up the Moon during the Cold War, hence nothing is off the table.

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  • REBELS NEED A CAUSE

    Princess Leia and the Alliance didn’t just oppose Emperor Palpatine on general principles. Their rebellion aimed to restore the Republic that Palpatine had dismantled a generation earlier. Joan of Arc’s rebellion against the English takeover of France in the early fifteenth century was another uprising seeking to restore the old order. Henry VI’s rule in France wasn’t as despotic as the Emperor’s dark regime: but Frenchmen and women saw the English as foreign occupiers in their kingdom. Joan dreamed of restoring the French monarchy: it was a dream so compelling that an ordinary farmgirl would put aside her quiet life in the country to don a warrior’s armor and fight for France. When she raised the siege at Orléans, her legend grew and England soon was on the defensive. Similarly, Leia’s role in defeating the Death Star both raised her profile and benefited the Alliance. Leaders may come and go but causes last: Joan was captured and executed in 1431. Twenty-two years later, her vision became reality with the final French victory at Castillon. Joan and Leia were both important but, in the end, the causes were bigger than they were.

  • YOU HAVE TO TOUGH IT OUT TO WIN

    Hoth is a harsh and inhospitable hideout for Luke, Leia, Han and the rest of the rebel forces as they struggle against the Empire. History shows us that resistance fighters survive, even thrive, by taking to the hills, the swamps and other hostile terrain that conventional forces avoid. Like Washington’s Continental Army surviving the brutal winter at Valley Forge over 1777 to 1778, the Alliance faces great difficulties operating from Echo Base, and that’s even before Luke encounters a wampa! Hiding out and enduring hardship, even deadly risks, was better than certain capture. History shows us that operating in punishing landscapes allows guerrilla warriors to outlast their better-armed and supplied opponents, just as the American rebels did against their British opponents in the eighteenth century or, conversely, the Viet Cong when faced with the overwhelming might of the Americans two centuries later. Of course, they never enjoyed the Force powers that the Jedi employ to hide in plain sight or cloud the minds of their opponents. Even so, the greatest Jedi, Yoda, retreats to the safety of Dagobah when threatened by the might of the Empire. He understands that a little hardship might just win the war.

  • WHEN MONEY TALKS, IT USUALLY MEANS WAR

    Both the British and the Dutch built their colonial empires on the backs of corporations. The British East India Company, founded in the last years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, eventually controlled most of India while the Dutch company, founded soon after, claimed a fair bit of Southeast Asia. In both cases, these companies used private armies or local puppet rulers to protect and expand their role in the lucrative trade in spices and luxury goods from these regions. Their historical experiences closely parallel the rise of the Trade Federation and its allies during the Republic’s dying days. Viceroy Nute Gunray, the calculating and ambitious leader of the Trade Federation who directs the occupation of Naboo, would feel right at home with historical wheeler-dealers such as Jan Pieterszoon Coen, governor general in the Dutch East India Company who mercilessly conquered Banda. In history or Star Wars, big business pushes agendas of war and conquest in pursuit of higher profits. In both cases, powerful companies control the entire enterprise, from initial voyage to established settlement, and the armies needed to enforce their ambitions by overthrowing local rulers, if the bottom line demands it.

  • THERE’S PROFIT IN LONG-TERM PLANS

    Palpatine plays a very long game as he rises from senator to chancellor and, finally, emperor. He does so with the eager assistance of the business interests he courts in his political career. Similarly, in history, we see politicians rise and their opponents fall, when they coordinate with the rich and powerful. Queen Elizabeth granted the charter to create and empower the East India Company, and the monarchy profited for centuries from this wise decision until the British government swallowed up the company entirely in 1858. Soon after Queen Victoria was crowned empress. She ruled over a state so large that it was claimed that “the sun never set on the British empire”. Similarly, Palpatine assists the Trade Federation and other corporate groups to rise under his apprentice, Count Dooku. Their ambitions help to spark the very crises he needs to rise in the Senate and seize power. Soon he, too, claims an imperial power: one strengthened immeasurably after his new apprentice, Darth Vader, executes Nute Gunray of the Trade Federation and other former allies.

  • ONE MAN’S PIRATE IS ANOTHER’S PATRIOT

    Whether you’re a scoundrel or a hero depends on perspective. Han Solo and Lando Calrissian start out as disreputable smugglers and pirates but, after aiding the Alliance, become respected generals in the fight against the Empire. So did John Hancock, the first signer of the Declaration of Independence. Long before he set his pen to that document, Hancock made his fortune running circles around the British navy and His Majesty’s customs officers. Hancock’s business thrived through his smuggling of Dutch tea, French molasses and other luxury goods that would have been subjected to a high tax if legally imported. By offloading away from the ports where authorities kept a watchful eye, John Hancock grew rich, powerful and admired. In fact, when he was captured by the authorities in 1768, the people of Boston rose to his defense as Hancock’s smuggling was now vital to the city’s economy. Not a decade later, Hancock led the Boston Tea Party in a public attack on Britain’s imperial might, rather like Lando Calrissian roused the people of Cloud City against the Empire. Both men publicly defied power to rebrand themselves from pirate to patriot.

  • NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF EMOTIONS

    Sometimes great changes start at the personal level. Opposition to the evils of slavery grew one person at a time, as when Harriet Jacobs told the story of the unbearable anguish experienced by a North Carolina enslaved woman who saw her seven children sold before the Civil War. Slaves could be and were freed by some owners. George Washington’s will emancipated his slaves after his wife’s death. He was a rare exception: many slave-owners valued profit and property above the humanity of their slaves. Watto the Toydarian sees his slaves, Anakin and Shmi Skywalker, as assets in his business. He wagers only Anakin’s freedom in the podrace bet with Qui-Gon Jinn. When Watto loses the bet, Anakin is freed but mother and son are painfully divided. That anguish fuels Anakin’s darker emotions and when he returns to Tatooine too late to rescue Shmi, he believes that Palpatine’s absolute power is the only protection he can trust. Heartbreak also scarred the lives of former slaves in the Civil War era but, unlike Anakin, Harriet Jacobs and others used their painful experiences to rally people against slavery in the United States.

  • THAT’S THE LAW, BUT IN REALITY. . . .

    Padmé is shocked to discover that slavery, outlawed in the Republic, nevertheless thrives on the Outer Rim world of Tatooine. History is filled with examples of laws that weren’t always followed or even enforced. If you write your history from the laws and official plans, you miss a lot of what really happened. For example, the Eighteenth Amendment banned the sale and manufacture of alcohol in the United States. From 1920 until the ban was repealed in 1933, the country was officially dry and sober. But a thriving trade in alcohol led to a culture of rum-runners and bootleggers, driving up the crime rate across the nation. Mobsters such as Al Capone profited handsomely from the illicit alcohol their gangs provided to an eager public including a lot of the same lawmakers who had pushed so vigorously to ban booze in the first place: Jabba the Hutt benefited from a lawless environment, too, enslaving women who fell into his trap. Finding out that the world isn’t always as it should be is the start of wisdom. Luke Skywalker’s adventure begins when Ben Kenobi corrects his mistaken personal history. Once he learns that his father wasn’t an anonymous navigator but a renowned Jedi Knight, Luke’s eyes are opened to the differences between the stories he’s been told and real history.

  • STEP INTO A LARGER WORLD

    Winning wars isn’t just about superior firepower. Sometimes the most critical forces in history are the ones that you can’t see. Obi-Wan knows this when he embraces death at Darth Vader’s hand. His connection with the Force will only strengthen when he dies. Samurai culture also trained followers to face death in battle without fear. But the samurai weren’t simply great and fearless warriors. They followed a philosophy of bunbu itchi, meaning “the pen and sword in equal measure.” Like the Jedi, the samurai valued the skills of peace and wisdom along with the way of the warrior. Miyamoto Musashi embodied this in his seventeenth-century text that blended Zen philosophy and sword fighting: The Book of Five Rings. In the samurai tradition which he helped to express, the long sword that was the samurai’s weapon of choice became more than a tool. Like the lightsaber, the samurai’s sword was the life, the symbol and the soul of the samurai and helped them remain an important force into the nineteenth century. When Admiral Motti scorns Vader’s belief in the Force, he, too, is suddenly faced with the power of the intangible.

  • THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT

    C-3PO unfairly blames R2-D2 for their many predicaments: that’s an amusing habit in droids, but sobering in the real world. History shows us that ambitious people reap great benefits when they make someone else the scapegoat for their problems. When Adolf Hitler sought to rally the German people behind his Nazi party, he suggested that Communists, Jews and traitors were the real problem. This began with the mysterious fire that destroyed the German parliament, the Reichstag, in 1933. Hitler suggested the fire was the work of Communists and arrested all of the Communist politicians, leaving the Nazis with a majority government. In 1934, the SA leader Ernst Röhm and other high-profile politicians were murdered in what became known as the Night of the Long Knives. Hitler’s Gestapo and the SS carried out these executions, claiming the victims were all traitors to Germany. They were hailed by many, including ailing Chancellor Hindenburg, for “nipping treason in the bud”. Rather like Palpatine after Order 66 caused the stormtroopers to mow their Jedi commanders suddenly identified as traitors and enemies, Hitler enjoyed a ‘purified’ Nazi party and widespread public support.

  • LIBERTY DIES TO THUNDEROUS APPLAUSE

    Politics is a popular sport: if you don’t have the people behind you, you won’t last for long. Caesar Augustus knew this: he wooed the Romans with bribes, bread and circuses to win their support. Napoleon was so popular that, when he escaped Elba in 1815, the French army sent to capture him instead defected to his cause. Adolf Hitler also understood how to appeal to the people. He was the first politician to embrace air travel in his campaigns, allowing him to make personal appeals across the country. Hitler mastered the new media of film and television: broadcasting Nazi spectacles that promoted himself as well as his Nazi causes. Palpatine is also a master of manipulation, beginning when he takes over as chancellor and continuing when he creates crises to force the Republican Senate to grant him emergency powers. A few critics, including Bail Organa and Padmé Amidala, see through his pretence. “So this is how liberty dies,” Padmé comments in Revenge of the Sith, “with thunderous applause.” Her ability to see through Palpatine sets her apart from the swell of adoring supporters who celebrate the inauguration of the Galactic Empire.

  • YOU IGNORE HISTORY AT YOUR PERIL

    Historians hate it when people talk about history repeating itself. It doesn’t: new people and new situations mean that everything’s different. You can’t truly equate the rise of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Napoleonic Empire, since first-century Rome was very different from nineteenth-century France. History may not be doomed to repeat itself, but there are patterns in the past that the wise person should heed. Jedi Masters such as Yoda scoff at the idea that the Dark Lords of the Sith were an active threat. Yes, the Sith had been long-ago rivals of the Jedi but that was ages ago. They were history: dead and long gone! Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan discover that comfortable certainty was groundless when they confront the Sith, Darth Maul. The old enemies of the Jedi Order were a living threat, not a historical curiosity. If the Jedi had taken that history seriously and kept a close watch for the Sith, they might have discovered Palpatine’s plot before the galaxy was doomed to suffer under his ruthless rule. The Emperor, in his turn, ignores the history of rebellions to his own cost, and so the cycle continues.

All images from "Star Wars and History," edited by Nancy R. Reagin and Janice Liedl, published by Wiley, November 2012

Cameron Facing Tory Backlash Over EU

Prime Minister, David Cameron, is facing a huge challenge to keep the Conservatives together ahead of his crunch speech on Britain's relationship with the EU. Tory Europhiles have launched a fightback against demands for an in-out referendum. Cabinet ...

‘Security delirium’: Netanyahu wasted $3bn on Iran attack plan – former PM

Ehud Olmert.(AFP Photo / David Silverman)

Ehud Olmert.(AFP Photo / David Silverman)

Ex-Israeli premier Ehud Olmert has accused current PM Benjamin Netanyahu of spending $3 billion on a war with Iran that never took place.

­Olmert pointed out that the current leader “wasted” the money on “harebrained adventures that haven’t, and won’t, come to fruition.”

“We are dealing with expenditures that go above and beyond multi-year budgets,” Olmert also said in an interview with Israeli broadcaster Channel 2 News. “They scared the world for a year and in the end didn’t do anything.”

The former leader also pointed out that the money was spent on “security delirium”, and “the projects won’t be carried out because 2012 was the decisive year.” The ex-PM referred to the Israeli drive to toughen sanctions, and possibly engage in a military conflict, with Iran to interfere with the nuclear development in the country.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, along with Ehud Barak, the deputy PM and the defense minister, reacted to the ex-premier’s claims in an interview with Army Radio set to be aired on Sunday, IsraelNationalNews.com reported. Netanyahu called the former PM’s criticism “a bizarre, irresponsible thing to say.” The current leader also indicated, “We’ve done a lot to strengthen the IDF, Mossad and Shin Bet [the Israeli Security Service] in various ways.”

In fact, it’s not the first time that Benjamin Netanyahu has come under fire from former top Israeli politicians. Olmert commented on the anti-Iran drive back in May, saying “There is no reason at this time not to talk about a military effort, but definitely not to initiate an Israeli military strike.” 

Tzipi Livni, the resigned leader of the centrist liberal Kadima party, joined the chorus of critics, saying that Netanyahu’s government is putting the existence of the Jewish state “in mortal danger” by ignoring growing international discontent.

“Israel is on a volcano, the international clock is ticking and you should not be the ‘chief of Shin Bet’ to understand that. The real danger is a politics that buries its head in the sand,” Livni pointed out.

Last week, the former head of Israeli Security Service (Shin Bet) Yuval Diskin accused Netanyahu of putting his own interests ahead of the state’s and of playing fast and loose with the country’s security.

"Bibi [Netanyahu] wants to go down in history as the person who did something on this size and scale. I have heard him belittle what his predecessors have done and assert that his mission on Iran is on a much grander scale," Yuval Diskin told Yediot. In particular, Diskin mentioned a meeting during which an attack on Iran was discussed, with Netanyahu eager to convince the leadership to launch an assault on Iran, The Times of Israel reported.

Netanyahu’s leadership comes under fire on the backdrop of calls from leading economists to cut the defense budget, or at least stop its expansion, Haaretz reported. Professor Manuel Trajtenberg, chair of the Israeli Council for Higher Education's planning and budgeting Committee, warned that Israel can’t sustain larger defense spending and that further increases would lead to financial collapse. Furthermore, the former director general of the Finance Ministry, Yarom Ariav, called to shake up the military establishment, reducing the massive armored corps and reconsidering the costly pension arrangements that prevail in the Israel Defense Forces, according to TheMarker.com.

As for the assault on Iran, Defense Minister Ehud Barak estimated at the end of October that Israel and its allies would have to take decision over a military solution of the stand-off in “eight to 10 months”, because sanctions and diplomacy would fail to curb Iran’s nuclear ambition, Britain's Daily Telegraph quoted him as saying.

The waves of criticism sweep the Netanyahu leadership just weeks before the election, and the current leader’s campaign has largely been focusing on bolstering defense in the country.

‘Mad’ To Leave The EU, Cameron Tells Friends

David Cameron thinks it would be ‘mad’ for Britain to leave the EU and is secretly backing a move by Tory MPs to warn of the perils of cutting all our ties with Brussels.

The Prime Minister was also ‘pleased’ at US President Barack Obama sending a clear signal that the White House is opposed to the UK leaving the European Union.

Read the whole story at Mail On Sunday

US ‘kill list’ critic found dead in NY

Prominent American blogger and computer prodigy Aaron Swartz, who spoke against US President Barack Obama’s “kill list” and cyber attacks against Iran, has been found dead in New York.

Police found the body of the 26-year-old in his apartment in New York City borough of Brooklyn on Friday, said a spokeswoman for the city’s chief medical examiner.

Brooklyn’s chief medical examiner ruled the death a suicide by hanging, but no further detail is available about the mysterious death.

Last year, Swartz openly criticized the US and the Israeli regime for launching joint cyber attacks against Iran.

The blogger was also vocal in criticizing Obama’s so-called kill list and other policies.

Obama has been reportedly approving the names put on the “kill lists” used in the targeted killing operations carried out by US assassination drones.

Every week or so, more than 100 members of the US national security team gather via secure video teleconference run by the Pentagon and go over the biographies of suspects in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan, and “nominate” those who should be targeted in the attacks.


Obama is then provided with the identities of those put on the “kill list” and signs off on every strike in Yemen and Somalia as well as the risky strikes in Pakistan.

Swartz was also widely credited for co-authoring the specifications for the Web feed format RSS 1.0 (Rich Site Summary) which he worked on at age 14.

RSS is designed to deliver content from sites that change constantly, such as news pages, to users.

Swartz was critical of monopoly of information by corporate cartels and believed that information should be shared and available for the benefit of society.

“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves,” he wrote in an online “manifesto” in 2008.

Based on that belief, the computer prodigy founded the nonprofit group DemandProgress.

The group launched a successful campaign to block a 2011 bill that the US House of Representatives called the Stop Online Piracy Act.

Had it been approved, the bill would have allowed court orders to restrain access to some websites considered to be involved in illegal sharing of intellectual property.

DemandProgress argued that the thwarted Stop Online Piracy Act would have broadly authorized the US government to censor and restrict legitimate Web communication.

ASH/HSN/MA

Guest Post: The Social Security System Is Already Broke

Submitted by Jim Quinn from The Burning Platform

Free Shit "Disabled" Army Massing Its Forces

Whenever I hear a liberal MSM talking head say that Social Security is not a problem, I want to throw something at the TV. Obama and Romney both declared the Social Security system sound. They lied to the American people that it will only require minor tweaks to keep it solvent for a hundred years. Liberals hate math. The Social Security System has an unfunded liability of $18 trillion. This means our politicians have promised $18 trillion more than they can possibly pay out. I guess $18 trillion is trivial to a liberal minded person like Krugman or Obama. Lucky for them that 99% of all Americans don’t understand what unfunded liability even means. The chart below gives the gory details. The Social Security system had a negative cashflow of $47.8 billion last year, after running a $48 billion deficit the year before. You may notice that 77% of this deficit was created by the SSDI program, where the depressed masses gather after their 99 weeks of unemployment run out. Do you have a headache? Are you depressed because liquor stores don’t accept food stamps? Did you pull a muscle getting on your government provided rascal? Trouble hearing your Obama phone? Then you are eligible for SSDI.

The funniest line item on the chart is the Assets at End of Year line, which shows the Social Security system having $2.7 trillion. Even using this funny number, the SSDI will be broke in three years. Al Gore told us this money was in a lockbox. They take it out of your paycheck and put it into a fund, waiting for you to retire and collect what you’re owed. Right? Wrong! If you tried to observe the vault with the $2.7 trillion on deposit, you’d be looking for a long long time. You see, the noble politicians in Washington DC took the $2.7 trillion and spent it on undeclared wars overseas, ethanol subsidies, investments in Solyndra, turtle crossings, tax breaks for hedge funds, TARP, bailing out AIG, subsidizing GM, $800 billion stimulus packages, cash for clunkers, homebuyer tax credits, predator drones, DHS, Sandy relief and thousands of other buckets of shit. There are nothing but IOU’s in the vault. The $2.7 trillion is long gone. The U.S. government had to borrow $47.8 billion to fund SS last year. They will have to borrow over $50 billion this year. There will be 10,000 per day turning 65 for the next decade. The borrowing will rise exponentially. If the $2.7 trillion actually existed, why would we need to borrow?

The trust funds are required by law to hand over all surplus revenues to the Treasury and the Treasury then provides “special issue” non-marketable bonds—essentially electronic IOUs—to the trust funds in return for the cash. These “IOUs” become part of the national debt. When the Treasury pays “interest” that increases the value of the Social Security Trust Funds it does so by increasing the number of IOUs it owes the trust funds. When the Social Security program runs a net cash flow deficit, as it has in the last three fiscal years, the Treasury needs to borrow cash from the “public” to keep the program funded.

Does this look like a trend that is going to reverse itself or level out with 10,000 Boomers turning 65 years old every freaking day?

These costs will be exceeding $1 trillion per year in the near future. Meanwhile, the number of workers per retiree will continue to fall as it has for decades. In 1945 there were 42 workers per retiree. In 1965 there were 5 workers per retiree. Today there are less than 2.5 workers per retiree. There are only 1.6 full time private workers for every one retiree. With Obamacare working its magic of destroying jobs across the land, there is much less revenue going into the Social Security System. The system is unsustainable and ignoring the problem will not make it go away.

A recent article on Bloomberg below barely scratches the surface of the massive fraud going on in the SSDI program. Those who think we owe them a living are faking disabilities by the millions. The number of annual applications were flat at 2.1 million per year between 2004 and 2007. They now exceed 3 million per year, as the Obama administration has actively attempted to get more people on the dole. In a matter of a couple years, there were suddenly 40% more people getting disabled. Amazing!!!

Shockingly, as 1.4 million people have been kicked off the 99 week unemployment rolls, the number of people applying for SSDI skyrocketed. Just because the scumbags on Wall Street and in the rest of corporate America commit fraud on a massive scale does not mean we should look the other way when lowlifes in our community do the same thing on a smaller scale. The working middle class pays the bill for the cost of both frauds. More than 90% of all the people who go onto SSDI never go back to work. This program was supposed to be short term until people could recover and go back to work. There are now 8.83 million people so disabled, they supposedly can’t work. There are only 12 million officially unemployed people in the country. The government is so incompetent, they barely check the applications for SSDI. Anyone with an ounce of brain power (this disqualifies anyone on MSNBC) knows that at least 50% of the people on SSDI are capable of some form of employment.

The Social Security system is already broke. The money is gone. Pretending all is well is for fools and there are millions of them in this country. If someone within the leadership of this country was honest with the American people we could fix the Social Security system. A combination of age adjustments, means testing, and reconfiguration of income levels subject to the tax could make it viable. Too bad Washington is inhabited by snakes, scumbags, liars and knaves. Corrupt lowlife politicians, lying liberal media whores, and a delusional populace will ignore the Social Security problem until it becomes a crisis of epic proportions. Then they will propose wrong solutions and implement them badly. Some things are easily predictable.

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Republicans Won’t Deal On Budget Because There’s No Political Gain In It

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A couple of articles out this week lay out the reasons for Republicans' whinging about not dealing with the White House anymore on anything, never, no how.

First, there's Jonathan Chait's analysis of the current stonewalling strategy; namely, not one penny more of revenue from anywhere no matter what, but plenty of cut, cut, cut. And absolutely no deal. Here's the paragraph that caught my eye, though:

So, step one: Block any compromise to reduce the deficit. Step two: Blame Obama for failing to reduce the deficit. I actually think this plan can work.

This may sound like a cynical strategy. And it is. But it’s not a purely cynical strategy. It reflects an important intellectual development on the right. Capretta is advocating not just the classic no-taxes-ever approach that has defined the party for years, but also its newer (or newly fervent) belief in privatizing health-care services.

Aha, and that follows what I'm seeing on a state level.

Rick Scott's little song and dance was the first salvo. Scott, as you'll recall, decided he would turn down the Medicaid expansion dollars from the federal government because he's crazy. But after hospitals lobbied him hard, he went to Kathleen Sibelius looking for a deal that went like this: Let me privatize all Medicaid services and I'll take your Medicaid dollars.

What a guy. And that leads me to this article in the New York Times on Wednesday, addressing the differences in care between for-profit providers and not-for-profit providers.

Writing about his colleagues’ research in his 1988 book “The Nonprofit Economy,” the economist Burton Weisbrod provided a straightforward explanation: “differences in the pursuit of profit.” Sedatives are cheap, Mr. Weisbrod noted. “Less expensive than, say, giving special attention to more active patients who need to be kept busy.”

This behavior was hardly surprising. Hospitals run for profit are also less likely than nonprofit and government-run institutions to offer services like home health care and psychiatric emergency care, which are not as profitable as open-heart surgery.

A shareholder might even applaud the creativity with which profit-seeking institutions go about seeking profit. But the consequences of this pursuit might not be so great for other stakeholders in the system — patients, for instance. One study found that patients’ mortality rates spiked when nonprofit hospitals switched to become profit-making, and their staff levels declined.

These profit-maximizing tactics point to a troubling conflict of interest that goes beyond the private delivery of health care. They raise a broader, more important question: How much should we rely on the private sector to satisfy broad social needs?From health to pensions to education, the United States relies on private enterprise more than pretty much every other advanced, industrial nation to provide essential social services. The government pays Medicare Advantage plans to deliver health care to aging Americans. It provides a tax break to encourage employers to cover workers under 65.

It's a little amazing to think this even has to be said, but apparently it does. If you're chasing a bottom line, it's likely that services will suffer while profits are padded, and nowhere is that more evident than health care. A simple comparison of the administrative costs between Medicare and private insurance plans proves that. Medicare averages around 7 percent annually, while private insurers "struggle" to keep theirs below 20 percent.

So if I'm right, Republicans have decided that they will not participate in any budget negotiation that actually reduces the deficit because while they happen to agree that health costs will be the primary driver of future deficits, their answer is simply to privatize those costs, continue to drive up the deficit while loading up the pockets of their corporate for-profit cronies.

If this is, in fact, their strategy then we can expect bandaid solutions to deadlines. When this continuing resolution runs out Republicans will submit yet another budget privatizing Medicare, signed with a Paul Ryan flourish. The Senate will, of course, reject anything that looks like that, and the House will not approve any Senate amendments changing that, which means they'll just go on approving the continuing resolution for short periods of time.

Siege mentality with a privatized chaser. The only answer to this is to get ahead of the message now, to keep hammering home how disgusting and odious privatizing Medicare and giving Granny a voucher would be, and to make Republicans own it. They can't be allowed to hand this off to Democrats, which means pushing Democrats to quit thinking there is some bipartisan answer to this. There isn't.

Then in 2014, boot their asses out of office. Just like that.

Let’s Ask John Brennan About Politicizing Intelligence

You've probably heard there's some controversy about Obama's nominating John Brennan as head of the CIA, but you may not be clear why. While we know he's a big booster of drone strikes and torture, we don't know the rest of his history. Over at WhoWhatWhy, which does some fascinating original investigative journalism, they've taken a good hard look at the background of the man who would be CIA king:

As Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, Brennan played a central role in two episodes that provided the President with much needed image-boosts. In one, Navy SEALs bagged the numero uno prize, Osama bin Laden. In the other, Navy SEALs rescued a young American woman from Somali pirates.

As we noted here previously, neither of these operations is free of controversy. You can see some of the issues we raised on the Abbottabad raid, shortly after it took place, here, here, here, and later here.

With the bin Laden operation, Brennan has provided a shifting panoply of details concerning what went on that have never been rationalized, and that raise fundamental questions. In that linked article, we reported that Brennan…was the principal source of incorrect details in the hours and days after the raid. These included the claim that the SEALs encountered substantial armed resistance, not least from bin Laden himself; that it took them an astounding 40 minutes to get to bin Laden, and that the White House got to hear the soldiers’ conversations in real time.

[...] Almost all that turns out to be hogwash—according to the new account produced by The New Yorker three months later. An account that, again, it seems, comes courtesy of Brennan. The minutes did not pass like days. Bin Laden was not armed, and did not take cover behind a woman. And the commandoes most certainly were not on the ground for 40 minutes. Some of them were up the stairs to the higher floors almost in a flash, and it didn’t take long for them to run into and kill bin Laden.

Perhaps the most troubling of many troubling assertions was the final explanation Brennan provided for why Osama bin Laden’s body was hastily dumped in the ocean—rather than being made available for autopsy and identification procedures, or buried somewhere unknown to the public but where the body could later be exhumed if necessary (a common occurrence when identity issues arise). Here’s what Brennan said: he consulted the Saudis on what to do with the body, and they said sure, good idea to toss the terror leader into the deep.

Brennan, it should be noted, has close ties to the Saudi leadership from his years running the CIA station in Riyadh, 1996 to 1999. (He then returned to Washington and was CIA deputy executive director at the time of the September 11 attacks.)

There’s a great deal of irony in taking advice from the Saudis on deep-sixing a valuable piece of evidence, given questions about the Saudi leadership’s knowledge of what was afoot with the 9/11 hijackers. For one thing, there’s the well-known rapid departure of Saudi royals from around the United States immediately following the carnage in New York and Washington.

But there’s a meatier, documented Saudi connection. If you’re not familiar with it, be sure to read our multi-part piece here. As we reported, in the weeks prior to the attacks the alleged hijackers were hanging out at the Florida house owned by a top lieutenant in the Saudi hierarchy. Is Brennan not interested in that? Shouldn’t some Senator ask him about it?

And why did the SEALs kill the unarmed bin Laden, when it would have seemed strategically wiser to exert every effort to capture him alive? Imagine what stories this Saudi black sheep could tell! To explain why he was summarily killed, we were first told that he was armed, then we learned he was not, then that his fate was left up to the SEALs themselves.)

Brennan—who ran the National Counterterrorism Center for George W. Bush while Bush was seeking re-election in 2004 and pushing the “terror alerts” button like crazy—has plenty of questions to answer.

There's more, for those of you who actually want to know what our intelligence community is up to.

Some Stories You Might Have Blinked And Missed This Week

Just some stories that may have escaped your notice this week: R.I.P. Aaron Swartz, 26. He changed our lives in ways you don't even realize. And our government helped push him over the edge. Oh, goody. Once again, Paul Ryan's fetal personhood bill ...

Mehdi’s Morning Memo: Withdraw From The EU? ‘Mad,’ Says PM

The ten things you need to know on Sunday 13 January 2013...

1) WITHDRAW FROM THE EU? 'MAD,' SAYS PM

It feels like the early 1990s, with the papers full of Europe stories this morning. The best one is in the Mail on Sunday, where it seems the prime minister's allies have been briefing against his Europhobic backbenchers. That'll go down well, won't it?

The Mail on Sunday's Simon Walters reveals:

"David Cameron thinks it would be 'mad' for Britain to leave the EU and is secretly backing a move by Tory MPs to warn of the perils of cutting all our ties with Brussels.

"The Prime Minister was also 'pleased' at US President Barack Obama sending a clear signal that the White House is opposed to the UK leaving the European Union."

".. [T]hose close to Mr Cameron say he does not believe withdrawal is 'realistic or desirable'."

Meanwhile, as the Huffington Post reports:

"David Cameron could slash Ukip's support by more than a third if he promises an in-out referendum on EU membership, according to a poll.

"Research by ComRes for the Sunday People found 63% of the public want a vote on whether Britain should remain in the union.

"Some 33% said they would cast their ballot in favour of a full withdrawal - including two thirds of Ukip supporters, 27% of Tories, 25% of Labour voters, and 17% of Liberal Democrats.

"However, more people - 42% said they were against leaving the EU."

The poll also shows that Ukip could push the Tories into third place in 2014's European elections - Cameron's Conservatives would fall to 22%, one point below Ukip. Uh-oh.

2) THE KEN AND MANDY SHOW

It's not just the Spice Girls who are getting back together again to perform their greatest hits. From the Observer:

"Tory grandee Ken Clarke is joining forces with Labour peer Lord Mandelson in a historic cross-party bid to turn back the rising tide of Euroscepticism.

"The two political heavyweights will share a platform to call for an abandonment of plans to disengage from the European project. Clarke, who attends cabinet as a minister without portfolio, is determined to fight back against the clamour for Britain to step back from the European Union or withdraw entirely.

"Along with Liberal Democrat Lord Rennard, Clarke and Mandelson will spearhead a new organisation, the Centre for British Influence through Europe (CBIE), which will support a cross-party 'patriotic fightback for British leadership in Europe'. The organisation will hold its launch event at the end of the month."

Hmm. Will it affect public opinion? Tory Eurosceptics, like the Spectator's James Forsyth, don't seem too scared of interventions from the likes of Clarke, Mandelson and - yesterday - Heseltine:

"Eurosceptics need to get organised and start pointing out that the people claiming that renegotiation will lead to the sky falling in are, by and large, the same people who were pushing for Britain to join the single currency. If this message is rammed home to the public, then it should be a lot easier to persuade them to take these warnings with a pinch of salt."

"The Britain in Europe crowd was wrong on the most fundamental public policy issue of our time. They need to be reminded of this fact every time they enter the Europe debate."

Ouch.

3) ON THE FRONT FOOT

Ed Miliband has had a strong and high-profile start to 2013 - and will be buoyed by the latest polls (see Public Opinion Watch, below).

The Independent on Sunday reports on Miliband's

".. plans to protect tenants from 'rogue landlords'.

"In a keynote speech on the future of his party, Labour's leader revived calls for a national register of landlords - and greater powers for councils to bar the worst."

Miliband was on the Andrew Marr programme this morning, where he said "'One Nation' is about the way I want to govern this country...about responsiblity going all the way to top of society".

On Europe, he said he thought it was "incredibly dangerous what David Cameron is doing..sleepwalking us towards the exit door of the European Union".

On the economy and the deficit, he refused to give any pledges on reversing Tory cuts - to child benefit or anything else - but highlighted the importance of tackling tax avoidance and changing the law to prevent multinations from dodging tax in the UK.

He also resisted calls to support "means-testing" on welfare and said "the tax system is a fairer way" of redistributing from rich to poor and pointed out the "best way" to cut the welfare bill is to cut unemployment.

On the leaders' TV debates, the Labour leader didn't seem too keen on having Ukip's Nigel Farage join the 'big three' but said he was "relishing these TV debates...I hope they happen".

On Ed Balls, he said Balls was "doing a great job" as shadow chancellor - Miliband even reminded viewers of Balls' prescient speech on austerity at Bloomberg's HQ in August 2010. Now there's an endorsement!

"There is no vacancy for shadow chancellor," declared Ed.

4) O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?

David Miliband isn't coming back to Labour's front bench anytime soon, says the Sunday Telegraph's Patrick Hennessy:

"Mr Miliband, who lost his party’s leadership election to his younger brother in 2010, was said last week to be giving 'serious thought' to coming back to the political front line - with the post of shadow chancellor claimed to be in his sights.

"However, it can be revealed that Ed Miliband has no plans to replace the current shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, or to hand his brother the job of masterminding Labour’s preparations for the next general election campaign."

The Sunday Telegraph story says the elder Miliband's supporters were briefing journos that David might return because they're 'spooked' by the meteoric rise of the shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna.

5) UKIP MEMBERS: IN THEIR OWN WORDS?

The Sunday Mirror seems to have set out to prove David Cameron right that Ukip is a party of "fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists', containing "some pretty odd people". The paper reports:

"On the [party's official online] forum, senior Ukip member Dr Julia Gasper branded gay rights a 'lunatic's charter' and claimed some homosexuals prefer sex with animals. She added: 'As for the links between homosexuality and paedophilia, there is so much evidence that even a full-length book could hardly do justice to the ­subject.'

"The former parliamentary candidate and UKIP branch chairman in Oxford now faces the sack over her comments.

"Tackled about her remarks yesterday, she said: 'I'm not going to talk about them. It's none of your business.'

"Lecturer Dr Gasper is just one of many Ukip members who use the forum to vent their controversial views.

".. Another member complained about the impact of immigration on the NHS, writing: 'I am informed by past media that Black Caribbean and not Black African have a higher instance of schizophrenia.

"'I wonder if this is due to inbreeding on these small islands in slave times or is it due to smoking grass.'"

BECAUSE YOU'VE READ THIS FAR...

Watch this video of a puppy trying to eat an orange.

6) 'KING OF WHITEHALL'

Fascinating piece on top civil servant Sir Jeremy Heywood by James Forsyth in the Mail on Sunday today:

"Sir Jeremy is regarded by friend and foe alike as the most formidable operator in Whitehall," he writes, adding: "Aides who want to give Cameron advice without Heywood's knowledge have been reduced to trying to surreptitiously slip a note into the Prime Minister's Red Box."

Forsyth writes:

"Steve Hilton, Cameron's senior adviser, once tried to wrest control of the box from Heywood by demanding that all the box notes had to go through him as well. Yet the sheer weight of material put paid to this effort. Hilton has since gone on sabbatical, partly in frustration at the extent of Heywood's influence."

He concludes:

"Heywood knows that he is playing a long game. In conversation, he sometimes pointedly refers to the 'current Government'.

"It is a reminder that he intends to be at the centre of power far longer than any politician."

Meanwhile, the Sunday Times reports on how Hilton:

".. has revealed his 'horror' at the powerlessness of Downing Street to control government decisions, admitting the prime minister often finds out about policies from the radio or newspapers — and in many cases opposes them.

"Steve Hilton, who remains one of Cameron’s close confidants, said: 'Very often you’ll wake up in the morning and hear on the radio or the news or see something in the newspapers about something the government is doing. And you think, well, hang on a second — it’s not just that we didn’t know it was happening, but we don’t even agree with it! The government can be doing things ... and we don’t agree with it? How can that be?'

"He described how No 10 is frequently left out of the loop as important policy changes are pushed through by 'papershuffling' mandarins."

7) NORTHERN IRISH GLOOM

It ain't getting any better. The Sun reports:

"A total of 29 cops were hurt in riots over flying the Union flag in Northern Ireland yesterday.

"Police used water cannon and baton rounds after being bombarded with bricks and fireworks as they tried to separate loyalists and republicans.

".. Chief Constable Matt Baggott said cops acted with 'exceptional courage'. Politicians from Belfast, Dublin and London will discuss the protests this week."

8) ROUGE ALERT

From the BBC:

"French President Francois Hollande has ordered security stepped up around public buildings and transport because of military operations in Africa.

"He was responding to the risk of Islamist attack after French forces attacked militants in Mali and Somalia.

"France's anti-terrorism alert system known as "Vigipirate" is being reinforced immediately, with security boosted at public buildings and transport networks, particularly rail and air. Public gatherings will also be affected.

"The alert will remain at red, the second-highest level at which emergency counter-attack measures are put in place."

Is it wrong of me to point out that the chaos and instability in Mali is a direct result of, and spillover from, the west's intervention in Libya, which France pushed hardest for?

Meanwhile, the HuffPost UK reports:

"David Cameron has agreed to help transport foreign troops and equipment to Mali amid efforts to halt an advance by Islamist rebels in a conflict that has already claimed 120 lives."

9) 'GOTCHA' - THE SEQUEL

From the Sunday Telegraph:

"Defence chiefs have drawn up new contingency plans designed to prevent hostile action by Argentina towards the Falkland Islands.

"A series of military options are being actively considered as the war of words over the islands intensifies.

"It is understood that additional troops, another warship and extra RAF Typhoon combat aircraft could be dispatched to the region ahead of the March referendum on the Falkland Islands' future."

The paper adds, however, that

".. the British government believes that Buenos Aries currently lacks both the political will and military capability to recapture the islands."

Phew. That's alright then.

10) KENNEDY JOINS.. KENNEDY CONSPIRACY THEORISTS

Conspiracy theorists of the world: you have a new and important ally!

From the Mail on Sunday:

"Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is convinced that a lone gunman wasn't solely responsible for the assassination of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, and said his father believed the Warren Commission report was a 'shoddy piece of craftsmanship.'

".. He said that he, too, questioned the report.

"'The evidence at this point I think is very, very convincing that it was not a lone gunman,' he said, but he didn't say what he believed may have happened."

Oliver Stone will be delighted.

PUBLIC OPINION WATCH

From the Sunday Times/YouGov poll:

Labour 44
Conservatives 31
Lib Dems 11
Ukip 8

That would give Labour a majority of 124.

From the Observer/Opinium poll:

Labour 41
Conservatives 31
Ukip 12
Lib Dems 7

That would give Labour a majority of 116.

140 CHARACTERS OR LESS

@PeterHain @Ed_Miliband commanding on Marr programme ludicrous to expect detailed Labour tax and spend now: no idea scale of mess we will inherit 2015

@paulwaugh Memories of 'tax bombshell' Saatchi campaign runs deep in Lab psyche. EdM's remarks about 92 prove it. #marr #kinnockyears

@Mike_Fabricant When Hezza attacks David Cameron about Europe, and Norman Tebbit attacks DC about morality, I know we are getting it about right.

900 WORDS OR MORE

Andrew Rawnsley, writing in the Observer, says: "David Cameron should take tips from John Major about Europe."

Janet Daley, writing in the Sunday Telegraph, says: "A system intended to promote social solidarity has had the opposite effect."

John Rentoul, writing in the Independent on Sunday, focuses on Sir Jeremy Heywood: "A civil servant too effective for his own good."

Got something you want to share? Please send any stories/tips/quotes/pix/plugs/gossip to Mehdi Hasan (mehdi.hasan@huffingtonpost.com) or Ned Simons (ned.simons@huffingtonpost.com). You can also follow us on Twitter: @mehdirhasan, @nedsimons and @huffpostukpol

Cameron’s Plan For EU Referendum Would Slash Ukip Support

David Cameron could slash Ukip's support by more than a third if he promises an in-out referendum on EU membership, according to a poll.

Research by ComRes for the Sunday People found 63% of the public want a vote on whether Britain should remain in the union.

Some 33% said they would cast their ballot in favour of a full withdrawal - including two thirds of Ukip supporters, 27% of Tories, 25% of Labour voters, and 17% of Liberal Democrats.

However, more people - 42% said they were against leaving the EU.

There were also signs that opposition to the union has softened, with the proportion who think there should be a referendum dropping from 68% in October 2011.

At that time 37% wanted to exit the EU altogether.

The poll suggested that Ukip is on track to knock the Tories into third place in next year's European parliament elections.

Asked who they would back in the contest, 35% said Labour, 23% Ukip and 22% the Conservatives. The Lib Dems were on just 8%.

But as the Prime Minister prepares to make his crunch speech on Europe later this month, Ukip voters were asked how they would react if he pledges to hold an in-out referendum.

Nearly four in 10 - 37% - said they would probably not support the party any more.

Quick Poll

Should Cameron hold a referendum on Britain's EU membership?

Share your vote on Facebook so your friends can take this poll

ComRes chairman Andrew Hawkins said: "While European and Westminster electoral dynamics are different, the prospect of humiliation in 2014 would fuel disquiet among Mr Cameron's right flank who have still not forgiven him for not winning in 2010 and want to see traditional Tory values asserted more aggressively.

"The challenge for (Ukip leader) Nigel Farage is to appeal now to Labour voters and to maintain his party's support in the event of the promise of a referendum."

Earlier on Saturday, Tory grandee Lord Heseltine turned on David Cameron, warning the PM against taking a “punt” by holding a referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the European Union.

The former minister, who served under Margaret Thatcher, made the comments in interviews with The Times and FT ahead of Cameron’s speech on the EU later this month.

Cameron has said he wants the UK to stay in the EU, but wants to renegotiate the terms of the relationship, particularly as those within the EU are pushing for greater integration.

However the PM's desire to fashion a looser relationship with Europe could prove tricky. On Thursday, a delegation of German MPs told the prime minister not to "blackmail" the rest of Europe with threats, while on Wednesday the Obama administration warned Britain not to turn "inwards" with a referendum.

ComRes interviewed 2,059 adults online between December 19 and 21. Data were weighted to be representative of all adults. The Ukip voter sample size was 304.

The “Qualified Mortgage” Rule: Housing Bubble on the Horizon

The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s rule defining a “qualified mortgage”, which was announced on Thursday, creates vast new opportunities for the nation’s biggest banks to engage in predatory lending practices with impunity.

While the mainstream media describes the rule as an attempt to protect borrowers from the risky types of loans that caused the financial crisis, the opposite is true. The real purpose of the rule is to provide legal protection for the banks from homeowner lawsuits, and to lay the groundwork for more reckless lending that could inflate another housing bubble. In other words, the rule was designed to serve the interests of the banks and the banks alone. This is why bankers everywhere are celebrating the final draft. Take a look at this from Forbes:

“We applaud the Bureau for offering a legal safe harbor to lenders when they originate loans that meet the rigorous ‘qualified mortgage’ standards in the rule,” said Debra Still, chairman of the Mortgage Bankers Association, in a statement. “This approach should allow lenders to offer sustainable mortgage credit to a great number of qualified borrowers without having to risk unreasonable and overly punitive litigation and penalties.” (Could New Tighter Mortgage Rules Actually Ease Lending?” Forbes)

The banks are happy because they got everything they wanted; blanket legal immunity for garbage mortgages they plan to offload onto US taxpayers, a green light to resume extending credit to high-risk borrowers, and a first-rate public relations campaign that makes the entire coup look like genuine consumer protection. As one cheery bankster quipped, “This was the Superbowl of rules”.

Indeed. It’s a big victory for the banks, but a major defeat for consumers. And the aftershocks will be felt for years to come, because (as we said in an earlier article) housing sales are already above trend and prices are back to normal which means that the only way the banks can reduce their huge backlog of 5 million distressed homes (which will face foreclosure in the next few years) is by creating another housing bubble. And, as we all know, housing bubbles require lax lending standards so that people who are not really creditworthy, end up borrowing hundreds of thousands of dollars that they’ll never be able to repay. This is what the new rule is really all about; it provides new opportunities for predatory lending, but with one notable difference from before, that is, if the loan meets the pitiable standard of a qualified mortgage, then the losses from the defaulting loan will be paid by taxpayers. That’s why the bankers are celebrating.

So, ignore the PR-hype about the banning of “deceptive teaser rates” or “no documentation loans” or “protecting the consumer”. That’s just a smoke screen to confuse you. The meat and potatoes in this rule, is what it doesn’t say. Here’s a clip from the Wall Street Journal that sums it up perfectly:

“Do qualified mortgages have a minimum down payment or credit score requirement?

No. Instead, the rules focus primarily on documenting a borrower’s ability to make monthly payments.” (“What the CFPB Measures Mean For Borrowers”, Wall Street Journal)

Have you ever heard anything more ridiculous in your life?

Didn’t we just go through a massive housing implosion which sent the financial system and the real economy into a 4-year death spiral? And now the agency which is supposed to protect consumers from another similar catastrophe is allowing the banks to issue mortgages that will be guaranteed by the government to applicants who don’t have the wherewithal for a lousy 5 or 10 percent down payment (No “skin in the game”) and whose credit scores will not be used to help decide whether they’re capable of repaying the loan or not?

What sense does that make? Does CFPB Director Richard Cordray think that he’s protecting consumers from the ravages of predatory lending by abandoning traditional standards and criteria for issuing a mortgage? Is that it?

Or is Cordray just another “captured” regulator doing the banks’ bidding? (It was clear that Cordray was another malleable bank toady back in Oct 2012 when this issue first arose. See: “Consumer Protector Caves to the Banks“, CounterPunch)

The media is making a big deal about the “ability-to-repay” provision of the new rule which requires banks to see that borrowers have sufficient assets or income to pay back the loan. But, once again, it’s all fluff. Banks don’t operate on the “honor system”. They’re going to stretch the new QM rule as far as possible, fitting borrowers into loans that will certainly fail sometime in the future. The losses for those loans will then be passed on to taxpayers. This is the same scam that took place during the subprime mortgage crisis. The banks booked profits on all manner of junk loans to high-risk borrowers figuring that the losses would be shifted onto investor groups who purchased the (subprime) bonds in the secondary market. The same nightmare is about to unfold again, only this time the banks won’t get stuck with the tab. Here’s an excerpt from an article in the New York Times that explains:

“As regulators complete new mortgage rules, banks are about to get a significant advantage: protection against homeowner lawsuits … some banking and housing specialists worry that borrowers are losing a critical safeguard. Industries rarely get broad protection from consumer lawsuits, and banks would seem unlikely candidates given the range of abuses revealed during the housing bust.” (“Banks Seek a Shield in Mortgage Rules”, New York Times)

Can you believe it? Even the business-friendly NYT is shocked that the CFPB is giving the banks legal immunity. (“Safe harbor”) Why? Why would the government agree to insure the activities of private industry (through Fannie and Freddie), especially when that industry has shown that it is loaded with crooks and criminals? This is corporate welfare at its worst and, unfortunately, it creates a powerful incentive for the banks to game the system and recklessly extend credit to anyone who can sit upright and sign a mortgage application.

Here’s more from the NYT:

“The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the fledgling agency that is shaping the rules, faces a crucial but difficult task. Banks are pressing for a strong version of the legal shield. They also want qualified mortgages to be available to a broad range of borrowers, not just those with pristine credit.”

Of course they do. That’s how they make their money, by creating toxic loans that are passed along to Uncle Sam. How else are the banks going to boost profits in an economy where underemployment is tipping 14 percent, where wages are shrinking, and where the net wealth of the average American has plunged by a harrowing 40 percent in the last decade?

Business investment?

Don’t make me laugh. The only way the banks can survive is by attaching themselves parasitically to the US government and sucking for all they’re worth. Bad loans are simply the modus operandi, the means by which they extract fluid from their victim. Cordray and Co. appear to be only-too-eager to assist them in this task. Here’s more from the Times:

“Big financial institutions have faced an onslaught of litigation since the downturn, although mostly by the government, investors and other companies instead of borrowers. In February, five large mortgage banks reached a $26 billion settlement with government authorities that aimed, in part, to hold banks accountable for foreclosure abuses.”

Okay, so now we’re getting down to brass tacks. The banks want the new rule to shield them from future losses that will naturally accrue when they start ripping people off again. Right? This is why they fought tooth-n-nail to keep Elizabeth Warren off the CFPB board, because they knew she wouldn’t play ball with them. So they turned to “rubber stamp” Cordray instead, who has performed admirably executing Wall Street’s latest big heist with the skillfulness of a paid assassin.

Way to go, Rich.

There’s one more tidbit in the new QM rule that’s worth noting, a provision that states that “loans would be deemed qualified mortgages if borrowers are spending no more than 43% of their pretax income on monthly debt payments.”

“43% pretax income”?

You gotta be kidding me. That means that borrowers can qualify even if they’ll have to fork over 50% or more of their weekly paycheck. How many of those loans are going to get repaid?

Not many, I’d wager. This bill is a joke. Cordray has set up taxpayers for some hefty losses just to ingratiate himself with the Wall Street Bank Mafia. It’s shocking.

Can you see what’s going on?

The banks don’t want to act like banks anymore. They don’t want to hold capital against the loans they issue, they don’t want to keep loans on their books, and they don’t want to pay the losses when the loans blow up. The just want to keep printing private money (credit), booking profits on that money (loans), and then dumping the red ink on Uncle Sam. That’s how the whole thing works.

The QM rule was designed to work hand in hand with the Fed’s $40 billion per month purchases of mortgage backed securities. (MBS) This is key to understanding what’s going on.

The Fed, in concert with the Obama administration and the big banks, has replicated the same conditions that existed just prior to the last big bubble. The Central Bank will play the same role as investors in the secondary market (from 2003 to 2007), that is, the Fed will buy up all the garbage MBS the banks can produce. All the banks have to do is to find mortgage applicants who meet the wretched “no down payment, no credit score” requirements of the CFPB, and then “Let ‘er rip.”

All the pieces are now in place for another humongous, economy-crushing housing bubble. This isn’t going to end well.

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.

The “Qualified Mortgage” Rule: Housing Bubble on the Horizon

The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s rule defining a “qualified mortgage”, which was announced on Thursday, creates vast new opportunities for the nation’s biggest banks to engage in predatory lending practices with impunity.

While the mainstream media describes the rule as an attempt to protect borrowers from the risky types of loans that caused the financial crisis, the opposite is true. The real purpose of the rule is to provide legal protection for the banks from homeowner lawsuits, and to lay the groundwork for more reckless lending that could inflate another housing bubble. In other words, the rule was designed to serve the interests of the banks and the banks alone. This is why bankers everywhere are celebrating the final draft. Take a look at this from Forbes:

“We applaud the Bureau for offering a legal safe harbor to lenders when they originate loans that meet the rigorous ‘qualified mortgage’ standards in the rule,” said Debra Still, chairman of the Mortgage Bankers Association, in a statement. “This approach should allow lenders to offer sustainable mortgage credit to a great number of qualified borrowers without having to risk unreasonable and overly punitive litigation and penalties.” (Could New Tighter Mortgage Rules Actually Ease Lending?” Forbes)

The banks are happy because they got everything they wanted; blanket legal immunity for garbage mortgages they plan to offload onto US taxpayers, a green light to resume extending credit to high-risk borrowers, and a first-rate public relations campaign that makes the entire coup look like genuine consumer protection. As one cheery bankster quipped, “This was the Superbowl of rules”.

Indeed. It’s a big victory for the banks, but a major defeat for consumers. And the aftershocks will be felt for years to come, because (as we said in an earlier article) housing sales are already above trend and prices are back to normal which means that the only way the banks can reduce their huge backlog of 5 million distressed homes (which will face foreclosure in the next few years) is by creating another housing bubble. And, as we all know, housing bubbles require lax lending standards so that people who are not really creditworthy, end up borrowing hundreds of thousands of dollars that they’ll never be able to repay. This is what the new rule is really all about; it provides new opportunities for predatory lending, but with one notable difference from before, that is, if the loan meets the pitiable standard of a qualified mortgage, then the losses from the defaulting loan will be paid by taxpayers. That’s why the bankers are celebrating.

So, ignore the PR-hype about the banning of “deceptive teaser rates” or “no documentation loans” or “protecting the consumer”. That’s just a smoke screen to confuse you. The meat and potatoes in this rule, is what it doesn’t say. Here’s a clip from the Wall Street Journal that sums it up perfectly:

“Do qualified mortgages have a minimum down payment or credit score requirement?

No. Instead, the rules focus primarily on documenting a borrower’s ability to make monthly payments.” (“What the CFPB Measures Mean For Borrowers”, Wall Street Journal)

Have you ever heard anything more ridiculous in your life?

Didn’t we just go through a massive housing implosion which sent the financial system and the real economy into a 4-year death spiral? And now the agency which is supposed to protect consumers from another similar catastrophe is allowing the banks to issue mortgages that will be guaranteed by the government to applicants who don’t have the wherewithal for a lousy 5 or 10 percent down payment (No “skin in the game”) and whose credit scores will not be used to help decide whether they’re capable of repaying the loan or not?

What sense does that make? Does CFPB Director Richard Cordray think that he’s protecting consumers from the ravages of predatory lending by abandoning traditional standards and criteria for issuing a mortgage? Is that it?

Or is Cordray just another “captured” regulator doing the banks’ bidding? (It was clear that Cordray was another malleable bank toady back in Oct 2012 when this issue first arose. See: “Consumer Protector Caves to the Banks“, CounterPunch)

The media is making a big deal about the “ability-to-repay” provision of the new rule which requires banks to see that borrowers have sufficient assets or income to pay back the loan. But, once again, it’s all fluff. Banks don’t operate on the “honor system”. They’re going to stretch the new QM rule as far as possible, fitting borrowers into loans that will certainly fail sometime in the future. The losses for those loans will then be passed on to taxpayers. This is the same scam that took place during the subprime mortgage crisis. The banks booked profits on all manner of junk loans to high-risk borrowers figuring that the losses would be shifted onto investor groups who purchased the (subprime) bonds in the secondary market. The same nightmare is about to unfold again, only this time the banks won’t get stuck with the tab. Here’s an excerpt from an article in the New York Times that explains:

“As regulators complete new mortgage rules, banks are about to get a significant advantage: protection against homeowner lawsuits … some banking and housing specialists worry that borrowers are losing a critical safeguard. Industries rarely get broad protection from consumer lawsuits, and banks would seem unlikely candidates given the range of abuses revealed during the housing bust.” (“Banks Seek a Shield in Mortgage Rules”, New York Times)

Can you believe it? Even the business-friendly NYT is shocked that the CFPB is giving the banks legal immunity. (“Safe harbor”) Why? Why would the government agree to insure the activities of private industry (through Fannie and Freddie), especially when that industry has shown that it is loaded with crooks and criminals? This is corporate welfare at its worst and, unfortunately, it creates a powerful incentive for the banks to game the system and recklessly extend credit to anyone who can sit upright and sign a mortgage application.

Here’s more from the NYT:

“The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the fledgling agency that is shaping the rules, faces a crucial but difficult task. Banks are pressing for a strong version of the legal shield. They also want qualified mortgages to be available to a broad range of borrowers, not just those with pristine credit.”

Of course they do. That’s how they make their money, by creating toxic loans that are passed along to Uncle Sam. How else are the banks going to boost profits in an economy where underemployment is tipping 14 percent, where wages are shrinking, and where the net wealth of the average American has plunged by a harrowing 40 percent in the last decade?

Business investment?

Don’t make me laugh. The only way the banks can survive is by attaching themselves parasitically to the US government and sucking for all they’re worth. Bad loans are simply the modus operandi, the means by which they extract fluid from their victim. Cordray and Co. appear to be only-too-eager to assist them in this task. Here’s more from the Times:

“Big financial institutions have faced an onslaught of litigation since the downturn, although mostly by the government, investors and other companies instead of borrowers. In February, five large mortgage banks reached a $26 billion settlement with government authorities that aimed, in part, to hold banks accountable for foreclosure abuses.”

Okay, so now we’re getting down to brass tacks. The banks want the new rule to shield them from future losses that will naturally accrue when they start ripping people off again. Right? This is why they fought tooth-n-nail to keep Elizabeth Warren off the CFPB board, because they knew she wouldn’t play ball with them. So they turned to “rubber stamp” Cordray instead, who has performed admirably executing Wall Street’s latest big heist with the skillfulness of a paid assassin.

Way to go, Rich.

There’s one more tidbit in the new QM rule that’s worth noting, a provision that states that “loans would be deemed qualified mortgages if borrowers are spending no more than 43% of their pretax income on monthly debt payments.”

“43% pretax income”?

You gotta be kidding me. That means that borrowers can qualify even if they’ll have to fork over 50% or more of their weekly paycheck. How many of those loans are going to get repaid?

Not many, I’d wager. This bill is a joke. Cordray has set up taxpayers for some hefty losses just to ingratiate himself with the Wall Street Bank Mafia. It’s shocking.

Can you see what’s going on?

The banks don’t want to act like banks anymore. They don’t want to hold capital against the loans they issue, they don’t want to keep loans on their books, and they don’t want to pay the losses when the loans blow up. The just want to keep printing private money (credit), booking profits on that money (loans), and then dumping the red ink on Uncle Sam. That’s how the whole thing works.

The QM rule was designed to work hand in hand with the Fed’s $40 billion per month purchases of mortgage backed securities. (MBS) This is key to understanding what’s going on.

The Fed, in concert with the Obama administration and the big banks, has replicated the same conditions that existed just prior to the last big bubble. The Central Bank will play the same role as investors in the secondary market (from 2003 to 2007), that is, the Fed will buy up all the garbage MBS the banks can produce. All the banks have to do is to find mortgage applicants who meet the wretched “no down payment, no credit score” requirements of the CFPB, and then “Let ‘er rip.”

All the pieces are now in place for another humongous, economy-crushing housing bubble. This isn’t going to end well.

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.

Gun wackos planning pre-MLK Day event

Pro-gun activists in the United States will be holding an event called Gun Appreciation Day on January 19. (file photo)

Pro-gun activists in the United States have announced that they will be holding an event called Gun Appreciation Day on January 19.

The organizers of the event say that on January 19, people should go to local firearm stores, gun shows, and shooting ranges with their rifles, US flags, the US Constitution, and signs saying “Hands off my gun.”

On Friday, Larry Ward, the chairman of the group organizing Gun Appreciation Day, said the event would be a day to demonstrate against President Barack Obama’s “post-Sandy Hook assault on gun rights" and a day to “honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” who was killed by a racist gunman in 1968.

"I think Martin Luther King, Jr. would agree with me if he were alive today that if African Americans had been given the right to keep and bear arms from day one of the country’s founding, perhaps slavery might not have been a chapter in our history," Ward said.

However, anti-gun activist Maria Roach called Ward’s remarks “ridiculous” and said that the statements contradict historical reality, since slaves actually did mount many armed uprisings in the US, although all failed and were followed by heavy retaliation by the slave owners.

In addition, many people find it offensive that the pro-gun activists are trying to claim some kind of connection with the legacy of civil rights movement leader Martin Luther King, Jr., who was a pacifist, by staging Gun Appreciation Day on the weekend before the Monday holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

The organizers of Gun Appreciation Day have estimated that 50 million US citizens will back the proposal and say that there are more than 70 listed sponsors on its website, including sports stores, magazines, and political groups.

The discussion on gun control has greatly intensified in the United States since the massacre of 20 children and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in the town of Newton, Connecticut on December 14.

CAH/HGL

Wall Street Keeps Winning: Can it Change?

The news from the world of finance has been incredibly depressing of late, as the big Wall Street banks keep winning round after round in their battles with regulators. The flurry of deals, which in part were closed pre-Jan 1st to allow the banks to clean up their books before the end of the year, were just one big win for the banks after another: the $10 billion Bank of America deal with Fannie Mae; the deal between 2 regulatory agencies and 10 major banks to come up with $3.3 billion dollars for 3.8 million homeowners; the international Basel 3 capitulation caving into everything the big international banks were asking for on regulation. Compared with the size of the crimes, the number of people who got badly hurt, and the amount of money these banks made off the fraudulent deals they committed, this money is pocket change, an insult to the millions of hard working families who have had their lives ripped apart by bank fraud.

Now even the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the one agency which has been rightly lauded for fighting for consumers on other issues since it got created due to Elizabeth’s Warren’s work, has caved into Wall Street demands on a new rule they just issued relating to mortgages and given the big banks a major edge against homeowners in legal issues going forward. People at Americans for Financial Reform and the other groups working on these issues tell me they are appalled by these new rules.

The best hope for investigating and prosecuting fraudulent bankers has been in the inter-agency task force co-chaired by NY AG Eric Schneiderman, but the DOJ has refused to give the task force the staff that it needed, and as a result things have been moving slower than molasses, and it is not at all clear at this point whether anything is going to come of it.

Media figures enamored of Wall Street think all this is a swell thing. WP writer Neil Irwin thinks it’s terrific because “every dollar a bank holds as part of its liquidity buffer is a dollar they are not lending out…as a loan to build a factory.” This was Obama’s argument in his first State Of The Union speech, where he talked about how he hated to bail out the banks but only by helping them would they be able to start making loans again so that the economy would recover. It has pretty much been Geithner’s entire philosophy while at Treasury: anything that gets in the way of the big banks’ ability to make money will hurt the economy. The problem is that while the big banks have been swimming in money most of the last 4 years, making record profits and handing out record bonuses to execs in some years, the rest of the economy is flat. Small businesses are still having trouble getting loans, factory start-ups have been slow, housing remains weak even with its recent uptick, and in case nobody has noticed in a DC obsessed by deficits, unemployment is still appallingly high.

Here’s the other thing: if people steal money and commit fraud and never have to go to jail or pay any real penalty, they generally keep doing it. It is equally true of street criminals and Wall Street bankers. With a government that is doing nothing to prosecute these crimes, that is settling for light slap on the wrist settlements time and time again, and that is still allowing banks to get bigger and bigger, what exactly will stop future financial crises caused by big bank greed and fraud?

One other extremely important point here: this is also about the functioning of the day to day economy, not just occasional financial crises. When the financial sector is as big and powerful and corrupt as the American financial sector is, and when tax law and special interest loopholes are so weighted to the finance sector and speculative finance as they are today, it drains money out of the real economy- out of manufacturing, out of small business start-up loans, out of housing, out of construction, out of Main Street business and workers’ pocketbooks.

What is especially painful to a loyal Democrat like me is how much of the power of Wall Street has flourished on my party’s watch. I was proud to be a member of the Bill Clinton ’92 campaign and White House, we did a lot of good things the years he was President- progressive budget packages, S-CHIP, a minimum wage increase, the Brady Bill and Assault Weapons Ban, Family and Medical Leave, etc. I was proud to support Barack Obama in his 2 races, and be a part of his transition team. He too has accomplished many things I am proud of: a progressive stimulus bill, Obamacare, the CFPB, the Lily Ledbetter Act, the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and many others. But these Presidents have a blind spot the size of the Bank of America building about Wall Street, and have appointed 3 Treasury Secretaries and other financial regulators who have done way more for Wall Street than for working families.

Which brings me to Jack Lew. Personally, I am quite biased toward Jack Lew, as he and I worked together on health care reform for Hillary Clinton in the 1993-94. Before he worked on health care reform he worked with my dear friend and mentor the late Eli Segal on creating AmeriCorps. He was the intellectual father of the S-CHIP program. I found him to be a straight shooter with a good heart who was a tried and true heir to the politics of the man he worked for a few years, Tip O’Neill. He is certainly not, as some have described him, a protege of Bob Rubin. And as OMB director, he worked on budget issues not financial issues, so he doesn’t deserve the blame for truly god-awful bill that repealed Glass-Steagall.

However, as fond as I am of Jack, he is not the progressive answer to the power of the big banks. He once said that financial deregulation had little to do with the financial collapse of 2008, which is very disappointing, and he certainly isn’t my style of a strong progressive in terms of taking on the power of Wall Street. (Of course, someone with my view about taking on the power of Wall Street would not be appointed by this President or confirmable by this Senate.) And regardless of Jack’s views, he will still be surrounded by what Jeff Connaughton in his book The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins calls the Wall Street “blob”: the Treasury appointees who come from Wall Street and plan to return there after they leave; the Capitol Hill staffers who want high paid Wall Street jobs after they leave the Hill; the armies of Wall Street lawyers, lobbyists, political operatives, PR guys; the members of Congress whose campaigns are well-funded by those Wall Street denizens; the think tanks given huge Wall Street contributions to spout the party line.

I think Jack will be a better Treasury Secretary than Rubin, Summers, or Geithner. He may well be the best a financial reform activist like me could have hoped for, given the alternatives. I hope so, because you never want your friends to sorely disappoint you. But it will take a renewed and impassioned movement to take on Wall Street and have a chance at lessening their economic stranglehold on the nation’s throat, and the nation’s political system. Having a champion like Elizabeth Warren in the Senate will help, but the rest of us who care about these issues will need to fight like cats and dogs to make anything happen where the rest of can win, rather than Wall Street.

From Kindergarten to University: Homeland Security Culture in America

In early March of 2009, The Department of Homeland Security, held it’s annual National Fusion Center Conference [1]. The conference highlighted the necessity for Fusion Centers to achieve Baseline Capabilities in the sharing of information and intelligence with the federal government and each other.

At the end of the same month the DHS gave a press release [2] to announce their selection of Purdue, and Rutgers Universities to co-lead the newest Center of Excellence (COE).

Centers of Excellence were created through the Homeland Security Act of 2002; the first centers began operation in 2004. With the addition of the newest one above, there are a total of 12 Centers across the country. The total number of these centers is skewed; as each center is in collaboration with multiple universities; as well as being partners with local, state, federal, and international entities. These COE’s also work with national laboratories, and corporate partners such as the RAND corporation to offer viable real world applications. In the end, there aren’t 12 centers, but a web of several hundred, and possibly thousands of centers.

The official list[3] of 12 centers are overseen by the Orwellian “Office of University Programs” [4]. The “Strategic Objectives” of this office are quoted as follows:

  •  Foster a homeland security culture within the academic community through research and educational programs.
  •  Strengthen U.S. scientific leadership in homeland security research.
  •  Generate and disseminate knowledge and technical advances to advance the homeland security mission.
  •  Integrate homeland security activities across agencies engaged in relevant academic research.
  •  Create and leverage intellectual capital and nurture a homeland security science and engineering workforce.

Notice, their admitted overall goal is not only to ‘disseminate knowledge’ and technical advances for the homeland security ‘mission’, but also to create a Homeland Security Culture within the educational system; [5], 6].

Each COE website[3] has an education link; not all sites have their educational portion up for viewing. The ones who do have the educational curricula visible, show programs offered for K-12 and college curricula, into graduate school education. From Purdue University’s COE website [7],

“This program is designed to support undergraduate and graduate students in developing the skills to become preeminent scientists in the homeland security specific and technical community.”

The Orwellian Office of University Programs, is not only creating “Obama’s Youth”, but also creating  “scientists” who are studied in Department of Homeland Security disciplines!

Two Centers of Excellence stood out from the rest. The first, is Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism [8], or START which is based at the University of Maryland.

Amongst other activities, they do as the name suggests; they create studies. Hidden amongst the Islamic Jihad studies[9] were the reports of the real terrorists; you, and I!

Two reports stuck out more than the rest. The first was a study conducted from 2007 to 2008, and finished with the creation of the U.S. Extremist Criminal Terror database[10]. The study, and now database focus on far-right extremists; the data base of U.S. Extremist Crime, comprises 1990 to 2005.

The other study of interest was,Homegrown Radicalization and the Role of Social Networks and Social Inclusiveness in the United States”[11]. There is no finished report of this study. The last update was, July 31, 2008. It seems this study is the one requested through The Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act (H.R. 1955/S. 1959)[12] “The act would establish a national commission and a university-based “Center for Excellence” to study and propose legislation to prevent the threat of “radicalization” of Americans.” Interestingly enough, just a few months after the final START study update on July 31, 2008, the DHS released, The “Domestic Extremism Lexicon”[13]. This Lexicon was a “newly unclassified Department of Homeland Security report warns against the possibility of violence by unnamed “right-wing extremists” concerned about illegal immigration, increasing federal power, restrictions on firearms, abortion and the loss of U.S. sovereignty and singles out returning war veterans as particular threats.”[14] All this came from the START Center of Excellence!

Most interesting of all these Centers of Excellence, is the newest one; which was awarded to Purdue, and Rutger Universities. It’s the Center of Excellence in Command, Control and Interoperability (C2L). There are direct links to both the Rutgers, and part of the Purdue websites from the DHS official list[3]. The link for Purdue goes to PURVAC; which is the Purdue University Regional Visualization, and Analytics Center[15]. It is labeled at the bottom as a Center of Excellence, but not the C2L website.

After a little hunting around, and *no* direct links from PURVAC, I was able to come across the official Command, Control, and Interoperability(C2L) website.

VACCINE: Visual Analytics for Command, Control, and Interoperability Environments, is the C2L Center of Excellence[16]. The stated goal is,

“To help the 2.3 million DHS personal by turning massive data into actionable knowledge through innovative visual analytic techniques is vital to the mission of the Command, Control, and Interoperability (CCI) Division of The Department of Homeland Security, as well as all of the mission areas of DHS.”

They’ve got some catchy informational research projects, such as Jigsaw, Panviz, and a host of others; which all culminate to what appears as the solution sought by the DHS Fusion Center Conference in March[1]. It seems like VACCINE is the answer to culminating all the Centers of Excellence, and the Fusion Centers into the next generation; a cure for the 21st century American. Focused on culminating, and disseminating information through all phases of life, and government; from childhood to adulthood. YOU will comply.

In learning about the 12 Centers of Excellence; there seems to be a jaded, and deliberately hidden nature about them. The problem with this is that continually when reading through all the COE websites, there were two aspects that really stuck out.

The first was a concentration on education beginning at Kindergarten, and the overall presentation of what is to be taught, is of a hidden nature. Secondly, is the fact that even though the information is hidden for our benefit; so as to keep it a secret from “We The Terrorists”, I noticed that in every single COE website, the partners included foreign countries, and multi national corporations. It’s okay for foreign countries, global corporations, and agents there of, to know what is being taught to the 21th century American, but not okay for “We The People” to know.

This investigation yielded massive amounts of information; which had no ends. The information shows the US Government, dancing around it’s true intentions with “powder puffing” a monster. These 12 Centers of Excellence headed by the DHS Office of University Programs, is not all there are. The rabbit hole opens to another 106 universities[17], and the accompanying affiliations with multiple universities, foreign countries, stake holders, and private corporation partners; sponsored by a joint program between the National Security Agency/Central Security Service, and the Department of Homeland Security. These are not just DHS centers of excellence, but are as follows:

“The National Centers of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education (CAEIAE) and the CAE-Research (CAE-R) are outreach programs designed and operated initially by the National Security Agency (NSA) in the spirit of Presidential Decision Directive 63, National Policy on Critical Infrastructure Protection, May 1998. The NSA and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in support of the President’s National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, February 2003, now jointly sponsor the program. The goal of the program is to reduce vulnerability in our national information infrastructure by promoting higher education in information assurance (IA), and producing a growing number of professionals with IA expertise in various disciplines. ”[18]

Simply they are the same as the COE’s, but with more agencies involved, and just another way to cover government outcome based education through ‘spookier’ means. They are to create more homeland security molded, subservient 21st century citizens. Interestingly enough both the CAEIAE schools[19], and the COE schools have to meet requirements set forth by private foundations. Another point of interest regarding these CAEIAE schools is they are usually located so as to permit easy access to DoD installations, federal research centers, and other agency facilities.

These universities, and their disseminated information are not just a national problem for Americans, but the entire world. They are creating educational programs from kindergarten, and they are partnered with several foreign countries. It’s seemingly more, and more a 1984 Orwellian hell of reality, that Americans are being made into a “new breed”; now with the words of Patrick Henry:

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?

Forbid it, Almighty God!

I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

Notes

[1] http://www.dhs.gov/ynews/releases/pr_1236792314990.shtm
[2] http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/pressreleaseD … -31-09.pdf
[3] http://www.dhs.gov/files/programs/editorial_0498.shtm
[4] http://www.dhs.gov/xabout/structure/editorial_0555.shtm
[5] http://www.robodoon.com/reece.htm
[6] http://www.crossroad.to/text/articles/tnmfobe1196.html
[7] http://www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/vac … career.php
[8] http://www.start.umd.edu/start/
[9] http://www.start.umd.edu/start/research … ndex.asp#1
[10] http://www.start.umd.edu/start/research … .asp?id=36
[11] http://www.start.umd.edu/start/research … .asp?id=45
[12] http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stor … ntion-act/
[13] http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=96916
[14] http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=94803
[15] https://engineering.purdue.edu/PURVAC/
[16] http://www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/vaccine/
[17] http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/press_ro … ters.shtml
[18] http://www.esu.edu/compusec/NSA&CAE.html
[19] http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=National … 5bf9d43a8f

Final note: the study by START, and published by the DHS has been amended to reflect Islamic Extremism, but with the overall same title: New Report on Homegrown Terrorism in the US, and UK.http://hsdl.hsdl.org/hslog/?q=node/4837

US life expectancy lowest among industrialized countries

Life expectancy in the United States continues to lag behind that in Western Europe, Canada, Australia and Japan, according to a new report commissioned by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The study’s findings are a stinging indictment of social inequality in the US and its impact on the conditions of life for wide layers of the American population, young and old.

The panel of experts from the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine identified the inaccessibility of health care, high levels of poverty and income inequality, as well as the prevalence of gun violence as major contributing factors to the poor life expectancy rate in the US.

The 378-page report, “U.S. Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health,” compares life expectancy and health in the United States with that in 16 “peer countries,” examining data beginning in the 1970s, but relying mainly on statistics from the late 1990s through 2008.

The panel found that Americans are not only dying at younger ages than people in almost all other higher-income “peer countries,” but that this pattern of poor health “is strikingly consistent and pervasive over the life course—at birth, during childhood and adolescence, for young and middle-aged adults, and for older adults.”

“This goes all the way back to the beginning of life,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, chairman of the Department of Family Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University, who led the panel. “We found that American babies are less likely to survive to their first birthday than babies born in other high-income countries. Young children are less likely to survive till age five. American adolescents are in worse health than their counterparts in other countries. American adults have higher rates of obesity, diabetes and chronic diseases.”

Among the 17 countries examined, in 2007 the US ranked last in life expectancy for males (75.64 years) and second to last for females (80.78 years). The disparity was the greatest for females, with a woman born in the US in 2007 expected to live more than five years less than a woman in Japan, where the highest life expectancy was 85.98 years. Male life expectancy in Switzerland, 79.33, was 3.69 years higher than that for US males.

Compared with an average of the other countries, Americans also fared worse in at least nine health areas: infant mortality and low birth weight, injuries and homicides, teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease, HIV and AIDS, drug-related deaths, obesity and diabetes, heart disease, chronic lung disease, and disability.

These health conditions have a particularly acute affect on younger layers of the population, reducing the odds of Americans living to age 50 to the lowest among the countries studied. While earlier studies had shown the US lagging behind other countries in health and life expectancy for those over 50 years old, this was the first comprehensive study to show the dire impact on young people.

The study found that leading causes of death in the US before age 50 include car accidents, gun violence and drug overdoses. Citing a 2011 study of 23 countries, the panel found the rate of firearm homicides to be 20 times higher in the US. And despite a lower overall suicide rate in the US, firearm suicides were six times higher.

“One behavior that probably explains the excess lethality of violence and unintentional injuries in the United States is the widespread possession of firearms and the common practice of storing them (often unlocked) at home,” the report notes. “The statistics are dramatic.”

The study, however, does not attempt to probe the reasons why the wide accessibility of firearms translates into a rate of violent acts in the US that outstrips that in other countries to such an alarming extent. Such an examination would have to take into account police brutality used against the US population at home, the government’s endless military pursuits on an international scale, and the general glorification of violence by the political establishment.

The study’s authors do point to some of the underlying social causes of what they term the “U.S. health disadvantage.” “Unlike its peer countries,” they write, “the United States has a relatively large uninsured population and more limited access to primary care. Americans are more likely to find their health care inaccessible or unaffordable and to report lapses in the quality and safety of care outside of hospitals.”

What is described here is a health care system that is entirely subordinate to the capitalist market. The inaccessibility and unaffordability of health care will only be exacerbated by provisions of the Obama-backed Affordable Care Act (ACA), whose primary aim is to slash costs for corporations and the government, while rationing treatments and services for the vast majority of working families. US health insurers are already hiking premiums by double-digit rates as the ACA begins to be implemented, making quality health care increasingly out of reach for growing numbers of people.

The study notes that social inequality is a prime driver of poor health outcomes in the US. While the average income of Americans is higher than in the other countries studied, the authors write, the US has higher levels of poverty, particularly among children. This, combined with “income inequality and lower rates of social mobility,” is one of the greatest contributing factors to both lower life expectancy and poor health overall.

Americans also benefit far less from a social safety net to buffer the effects of poverty and social inequality, according to the report. These same social programs—already inferior when compared to those in most of the US “peer countries”—are now targeted for even deeper cutbacks by the ruling elite, threatening even poorer health and conditions of life for the wide layers of the population.

Health care spending per capita in the US far exceeds that in any of the other countries studied by the panel commissioned by the NIH, yet the health of the US population continues to deteriorate. In a society dominated by extreme levels of social inequality, combined with a health care system motivated by profit, the well being of the majority of the population falls victim to this seeming contradiction.

Think Media Consolidation Is Good for Journalism? Think Again

The Federal Communications Commission is pushing a plan to gut its 30-year-old newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership ban. This proposal would allow one company to own a local paper, two TV stations and up to eight radio stations in a single market. Advocates of more media consolidation argue that allowing TV stations and newspapers to merge is critical to cutting costs and saving local journalism.

This is the same argument the Bush FCC used to try to push through the same bad rules in 2007. Back then, the Senate voted the rules down and the courts later threw them out. It’s time to put this argument to bed for good: More media consolidation won’t save journalism.

Banks have toxic assets. Journalism has media consolidation.

When we think about the state of journalism today, let’s not forget that media consolidation is largely what got us into this mess in the first place. Newspapers and TV stations have long been hugely profitable enterprises — and many still are.

Rick Edmonds at Poynter recently highlighted the fact that 2012 was a good year for newspaper stocks. Indeed, the top publicly traded newspaper companies remain quite profitable. In 2011, the McClatchy Company enjoyed 27 percent profit margins, Lee Enterprises had 24 percent profit margins and the Gannett Company’s profits were at 22 percent.

This sounds good, but not that long ago many media companies reported 30 or 40 percent profits. But instead of investing in their product during those flush times — hiring more journalists, diving head-first into the Web — most companies went on a buying spree. The biggest news organizations in the country got over-leveraged with debt as they gobbled up competitors.

Ad revenue eroded as a result of the economic downturn and the media companies’ failure to invest resources online. These companies could have weathered all of this if they weren’t also drowning in debt.

As media companies are bought and sold, as they go bankrupt and get traded by private equity firms, the people who get hurt are journalists and communities. Journalists lose their contracts or their jobs and communities are left with newspapers whose revenues are used only to pay off debt.

More media consolidation will only make the situation worse.

Letting one company own both a newspaper and broadcast stations in the same market isn’t just bad for the community; it’s also bad business. Cross-ownership doesn’t save anything; it simply drags down the performance of both broadcasting and print operations.

Media General was once one of the biggest advocates for gutting the newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership ban, but the company is silent on the issue now. In fact, over the course of 2012 Media General broke up its four cross-owned properties. Similarly, Belo Corp. spun off its broadcasting and newspaper operations. Margins at both then improved, with the newspaper’s profit margin doubling.

The Tribune Company has cross-owned print/broadcast holdings in five cities around the U.S. The company just emerged from the largest bankruptcy in media history and plans to unbundle its cross-owned properties.

The only company actively lobbying the FCC to weaken the cross-ownership rules is Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which sent representatives to meetings with the FCC chairman’s office just last month. That may be why the FCC proposal looks like such a plum handout to Murdoch, who wants to buy the L.A. Times and the Chicago Tribune — but can’t unless the agency changes its cross-ownership rules.

Media consolidation leads to less local news.

Here at Free Press, we’re concerned as anyone about the future of journalism. We need a system where communities have access to a full range of news and information, where diverse perspectives are part of the national debate, where journalists make a living wage and are protected enough to hold power to account.

However, relaxing the newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership ban will move us in exactly the wrong direction. While the FCC’s 2007 studies indicated that cross-ownership leads to increased news production at the cross-owned station, that finding was later debunked in peer reviews. It turns out the FCC was counting sports and weather segments in its calculations. Those categories aside, cross-owned stations actually aired less hard news than non-cross-owned stations.

In addition, if you look beyond the one station and take into account the entire region being served by local TV and newspapers, both FCC data and outside studies indicate that cross-ownership leads to less total news produced locally. Cross-ownership crowds out the competition. The presence of a cross-owned station leads other stations in a market to collectively curtail their news output by about 25 percent.

The FCC’s plan to relax the newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership ban will lead to more absentee landlords controlling our nation’s public airwaves, and it will hurt media diversity. The same old media consolidation policies are not a solution for the new challenges (or opportunities) facing journalism today.

John Brennan vs. a Sixteen-Year-Old

In October 2011, 16-year-old Tariq Aziz attended a gathering in Islamabad where he was taught how to use a video camera so he could document the drones that were constantly circling over his Pakistani village, terrorizing and killing his family and neighbors. Two days later, when Aziz was driving with his 12-year-old cousin to a village near his home in Waziristan to pick up his aunt, his car was struck by a Hellfire missile. With the push of a button by a pilot at a US base thousands of miles away, both boys were instantly vaporized—only a few chunks of flesh remained.

Afterwards, the US government refused to acknowledge the boys’ deaths or explain why they were targeted. Why should they? This is a covert program where no one is held accountable for their actions.

The main architect of this drone policy that has killed hundreds, if not thousands, of innocents, including 176 children in Pakistan alone, is President Obama’s counterterrorism chief and his pick for the next director of the CIA: John Brennan.
On my recent trip to Pakistan, I met with people whose loved ones had been blown to bits by drone attacks, people who have been maimed for life, young victims with no hope for the future and aching for revenge. For all of them, there has been no apology, no compensation, not even an acknowledgement of their losses. Nothing.

That’s why when John Brennan spoke at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington DC last April and described our policies as ethical, wise and in compliance with international law,  I felt compelled to stand up and speak out on behalf of Tariq Aziz and so many others. As they dragged me out of the room, my parting words were: “I love the rule of law and I love my country. You are making us less safe by killing so many innocent people. Shame on you, John Brennan.”

Rather than expressing remorse for any civilian deaths, John Brennan made the extraordinary statement in 2011 that during the preceding year, there hadn’t been a single collateral death “because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.” Brennan later adjusted his statement somewhat, saying, “Fortunately, for more than a year, due to our discretion and precision, the U.S. government has not found credible evidence of collateral deaths resulting from U.S. counterterrorism operations outside of Afghanistan or Iraq.” We later learned why Brennan’s count was so low: the administration had come up with a semantic solution of simply counting all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.

The UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism has documented over 350 drones strikes in Pakistan that have killed 2,600-3,400 people since 2004. Drone strikes in Yemen have been on the rise, with at least 42 strikes carried out in 2012, including one just hours after President Obama’s reelection. The first strike in 2013 took place just four days into the new year.

A May 29, 2011 New York Times exposé showed John Brennan as President Obama’s top advisor in formulating a “kill list” for drone strikes. The people Brennan recommends for the hit list are given no chance to surrender, and certainly no chance to be tried in a court of law. The kind of intelligence Brennan uses to put people on drone hit lists is the same kind of intelligence that put people in Guantanamo. Remember how the American public was assured that the prisoners locked up in Guantanamo were the “worst of the worst,” only to find out that hundreds were innocent people who had been sold to the US military by bounty hunters?

In addition to kill lists, Brennan pushed for the CIA to have the authority to kill with even greater ease using “signature strikes,” also known as “crowd killing,” which are strikes based solely on suspicious behavior.

When President Obama announced his nomination of John Brennan, he talked about Brennan’s integrity and commitment to the values that define us as Americans.  He said Brennan has worked to “embed our efforts in a strong legal framework” and that he “understands we are a nation of laws.”

A nation of laws? Really? Going around the world killing anyone we want, whenever we want, based on secret information? Just think of the precedent John Brennan is setting for a world of lawlessness and chaos, now that 76 countries have drones—mostly surveillance drones but many in the process of weaponizing them. Why shouldn’t China declare an ethnic Uighur activist living in New York City as an “enemy combatant” and send a missile into Manhattan, or Russia launch a drone attack against a Chechen living in London? Or why shouldn’t a relative of a drone victim retaliate against us here at home? It’s not so far-fetched. In 2011, 26-year-old Rezwan Ferdaus, a Massachusetts-based graduate with a degree in physics, was recently sentenced to 17 years in prison for plotting to attack the Pentagon and US Capitol with small drones filled with explosives.

In his search for a new CIA chief, Obama said he looked at who is going to do the best job in securing America. Yet the blowback from Brennan’s drone attacks is creating enemies far faster than we can kill them. Three out of four Pakistanis now see the US as their enemy—that’s about 133 million people, which certainly can’t be good for US security. When Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar was asked the source of US enmity, she had a one word answer: drones.

In Yemen, escalating U.S. drones strikes are radicalizing the local population and stirring increasing sympathy for al-Qaeda-linked militants. Since the January 4, 2013 attack in Yemen, militants in the tribal areas have gained more recruits and supporters in their war against the Yemeni government and its key backer, the United States. According to Abduh Rahman Berman, executive director of a Yemeni National Organization for Defending Rights and Freedoms, the drone war is failing. “If the Americans kill 10, al-Qaeda will recruit 100,” he said.

Around the world, the drone program constructed by John Brennan has become a provocative symbol of American hubris, showing contempt for national sovereignty and innocent lives.

If Obama thinks John Brennan is a good choice to head the CIA and secure America, he should contemplate the tragic deaths of victims like 16-year-old Tariq Aziz, and think again.

US Interference Spoiling Yemen’s Revolution

The latest military restructuring announced by Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi brought much-needed relief to an anxious nation. Beyond establishing new regional commands to increase the Defense Ministry’s centralization, Hadi’s decrees finally terminated several high-ranking relatives of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, namely his son Ahmed and nephew Yahya. Yemenis had demanded their dismissal from Saleh’s personal “counter-terrorism” units since launching a revolution in January 2011, and both would assume instrumental roles in spearheading Saleh’s vicious crackdown on peaceful demonstrators.

Gone, too, is the First Armored Division commanded by rogue general Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, who defected from Saleh’s government in March 2011 to escape punishment and pursue his own interests. His division and Ahmed Saleh’s Republican Guard now count themselves as part of Yemen’s Special Operations Command and Strategic Reserve Forces, and theoretically fall under Hadi’s personal authority.

This news was lauded by John Brennan, the Obama administration’s counter-terrorism coordinator: “Mr. Brennan extended President Obama’s congratulations to President Hadi for the decrees issued yesterday to further restructure the Yemeni armed forces, advancing the goal of a unified, professional military that serves the Yemeni people.”

Unfortunately the jubilant air soon cleared and Yemen’s situation has tumbled back downhill in the days since. Following their “removal,” the normally resistant Salehs welcomed Hadi’s announcement and pledged to cooperate fully, triggering immediate suspicion of their payoffs. Ali Mohsen greeted Hadi’s orders as though they had nothing to do with him. Reports then surfaced to explain their reactions – new military appointments – and were half-confirmed by the spokesman of Yemen’s embassy in Washington; Mohammed Albasha announced on December 23rd that “there are no restrictions to their reappointments in the Ministry of Defense.”

Subsequent reports predict that Hadi’s decrees could take six months to implement, and that Ahmed Saleh and Ali Mohsen will continue to oversee their positions until then. If they do receive new regional commands, they can thank their ongoing survival for the immunity granted by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and United Nations Security Council (UNSC).

These collective actions serve more private interests than Yemen’s people, beginning with Hadi’s interim government and the foreign powers that secured his promotion. Although he has admirably stepped up to fill Saleh’s void after serving nearly two decades as his vice president, Hadi remains a controllable instrument of the GCC deal’s true brokers, Riyadh and Washington. That leaves Yemen’s revolutionaries – the country’s future – at the bottom of national and international priorities, at a time when they have enough interference to deal with at home. Out-resourced by the oppositional Islah party, which dips its hands into most of Yemen’s political movements, the country’s civil parties have already been isolated in the UN-sponsored National Dialogue with few seats relative to the whole (the youth and women received 60 combined seats out of 565).

They could easily be squashed by Saleh’s own General People’s Congress (GPC) and the 112 delegates they plan to sit – the most of any bloc.

As of now the Islah-dominated Joint Meeting Parties (JMP), in addition to the youth, refuses to participate in the event that Saleh does represent his party (another “medical leave” is being planned by Riyadh and Washington, but both rumor and reality are fraught with uncertainties). Conversely, Islah has interfered with efforts to organize an independent youth conference, a phenomenal idea to advance a democratic Yemen, while Ali Mohsen’s loyalists have “protected” the youth by militarizing their square at Sana’a University. The general recently agreed to withdraw his forces following persistent demonstrations against their presence, but only after months of physical altercations with the youth camps.

Yemen’s youth and women are tragically viewed as groups to appease with scraps, not sources of national power to nurture and cooperate with. They have found few allies inside or outside the country due to their independent agenda, and cannot turn to the United States in their hour of need. The second incarnation of Yemen’s Life March, a mobile demonstration traveling from the revolutionary hub of Ta’izz in December 2011 en route to Sana’a, recently arrived in the capital to remind Hadi and his foreign backers that they won’t back down either. With no action taken by their transitional government or the UNSC, Yemenis once again marched to advocate their standing demands: “Dismissal of all military leaders who worked with Saleh, headed by Ahmad Ali Saleh, Ali Mohsen Saleh, Ghalib Algamesh and fully dismissing them and not reshuffling their positions in the new appointments, whatever the circumstances.”

The march ended when government forces blocked its path and violently dispersed protesters with tear gas, eroding another piece of the goodwill initially earned by Hadi’s military shakeup.

U.S. influence is hardly responsible for all of Yemen’s political dilemmas and the tribal knots created by Saleh’s nepotism. However the sheer gravity of America’s counter-terrorism is warping Yemen’s political and military reforms. The Obama administration no longer has practical use for Saleh and company, but they also possess too much incriminating evidence on Saudi and U.S. actions in Yemen to be cast away completely. Instead Saleh has been kept close, traveling to America twice since the revolution began, and silent under the GCC’s immunity package. Potential sanctions against “spoilers” – the always unnamed Saleh – remain a manipulative tool to avoid accountability.

In the meantime U.S. drones continue to strike at suspected targets of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), accumulating enough collateral damage to produce a bombshell report by The Washington Post. Hadi has opened a wider door than his predecessor in exchange for U.S. and Saudi support, approving the Obama administration’s covert activities and moving to kill inquiries into civilian casualties. This relationship-building and the preservation of mutual interests is more responsible for Hadi’s decrees than any genuine effort to uproot Saleh’s regime from Yemen’s political equation.

Ultimately, Ali Abdullah Saleh cannot be held accountable for decades of misrule because the U.S. and Yemen’s power-sharing government are working outside the bounds of accountability. The fact that Washington and Riyadh have exhausted their operational need for his regime is far from stabilizing, and poses an enhanced threat to Yemen’s democratic growth. One can reasonably assume that Washington will possess greater influence over Hadi’s Special Operations Command than Saleh’s U.S.-trained units. Counterterrorism activities are being established in systematic fashion – land, sea and air forces surround the peninsula nation – but U.S. policy as a whole represents counterinsurgency at its worse: deep hostility and mistrust with the local population.

The Obama administration cannot realistically expect to defeat AQAP with its current strategy, and the same power that lifted Hadi to his current position is weighing him down with his own people.

“The main problem is not only with the US administration – extrajudicial killings in Yemen of ‘suspected’ targets, killing and terrorizing civilians and creating animosity towards the US – but rather with our government’s position, approving those drone strikes,” says Noon Arabia, a Yemeni-Egyptian blogger who maintains her anonymity for personal and security reasons. “Former president Saleh with all his shortcomings tried to hide his role in allowing the US drones to strike in Yemen, before being exposed by Wikileaks. However his predecessor President Hadi not only publicly endorsed them, he even argued regarding their accuracy. Drone strikes in Pakistan decreased by 41% in 2011 and another 40% in 2012 because the Pakistani government publicly condemned and disapproved of them. Yet in Yemen they have increased by 240% in 2011, and another 250% in 2012 and most likely will increase further in 2013 thanks to our puppet government.”

Yemen’s revolutionaries are marching, bleeding and dying for a better future than what is currently being forced onto them. The U.S. would be wise to begin a new era of engagement and vanquish the same fear that is normally reserved for al-Qaeda.

Millennials Occupy TransCanada Offices Across the US

More than 100 young people stormed a TransCanada office in Houston, Texas on Monday as part of a Tar Sands Blockade mass action targeting company offices across the United States. Blockaders streamed into the Houston office, occupying the space with their own hand-crafted “KXL pipe monster.”

Activist Alec Johnson was arrested Monday while refusing to leave the lobby of the Houston office after police ushered protesters outside. A videographer with the Chicago Indymedia Center was also arrested. Four others were arrested in a separate action in Liberty County, Texas for interrupting construction on the Keystone XL at work sites there.

Solidarity actions took place in Michigan, Maine, Massachusetts, Wisconsin and New York, including actions at banks known to have investments in the Alberta tar sands. In Massachusetts eight student organizers locked themselves inside a TransCanada office, super-gluing their hands together to symbolize how fossil fuel corporations have us all locked into to irreversible climate change. The sit-in was organized by Students for a Just and Stable Future, a student coalition also campaigning to divest university endowments from the top 200 fossil fuel companies.

One of those students arrested in Massachusetts Monday was Lisa Purdy, a student organizer with the Brandeis Divestment Campaign Coalition at Brandeis University. Purdy told Campus Progress about her work on divestment back in November, and after she was released from jail we caught up with her again.

“If we want to be building this new economy that’s not based on fossil fuels than we need to be fighting at every level,” Purdy said. “So we have people fighting down in Texas against the actual infrastructure, we have people fighting in the courts, we have people getting arrested at related offices of TransCanada, and we have people working at their universities to divest.”

Purdy said she felt ecstatic after she was released and hopes that her action will inspire similar actions in across New England.

Assistant District Attorney Julie Richard said the state of Massachusetts will seek “considerable restitution for the costs of removing the protesters," but she did not mention what the amount would be, according to the Westborough Daily Voice.

“Right now we’re unaware of the costs we have to pay for the exact decision or actions led to those costs,” Alli Welton—another student working on divestment at Harvard University who was also among those arrested during the Massachusetts action—told Campus Progress. “It would be unfair for the Westborough taxpayers to pay for the attention that TransCanada has drawn because of its ethically dubious actions.”

“We’re dreaming of a day when the law asks TransCanada to pay restitution for the families they’ve uprooted and the resources they’ve damaged and the other impacts of the climate crisis they’ve caused by pushing forward projects like Keystone XL,” Welton continued.

Protesters also gathered in Brownsville, Wisconsin Monday, at the offices of Michel’s Corporation—the construction company contracted to build the southern leg of the Keystone XL across Texas.

What's next for the Keystone XL?

Despite the years of mass protest against the tar sands project, former Bush and Clinton cabinets have said they expect President Obama to rubber stamp the pipeline soon.

Former Environmental Protection Agency Head Lisa Jackson is expected to resign this month. A reportedly close source suggests the departure is due to the Obama administration's plans to approve the Keystone XL.

“She was going to stay on until November or December,” a Jackson insider told the New York Post. “But this changed it. She will not be the EPA head when Obama supports it [Keystone] getting built.”

President Obama denied the original construction permit for the Keystone XL pipeline in January of 2012 when TransCanada proposed the 1,700-mile pipeline as a single project. Since then, the corporation has split the pipeline into two halves and reapplied for a permit for the northern section.

Jackson’s spokeswoman, Victoria Rivas-Vazquez, pointed back to the original announcement regarding the resignation, claiming Jaskson wanted to “pursue new challenges, time with her family and new opportunities. She said “the idea that her decision was made based on anything else is entirely false.”

The White House refused to comment on Jackson perceived reasons for leaving. Spokesman Clark Stevens told The Post that the “State Department’s assessment (of Keystone) is ongoing and any speculation would be premature.”

While the EPA is not responsible for the pipeline review process, it is one of many federal agencies that have advised the Obama administration on the pipeline project. The State Department, the agency that is responsible for the pipeline review, has clashed in the past with the EPA over earlier drafts of the pipeline’s Environmental Impact Statement, which the EPA said didn’t address the impacts on air and water quality among many other issues. The EPA, while under Jackson’s helm, has continued to raise serious concerns about the pipeline.

Though questions concerning the reason for Jackson’s resignation still loom, environmentalists are elated over the nomination of John Kerry for Secretary of State to replace Hillary Clinton. While Clinton has been criticized for having close ties to Paul Elliot, a top TransCanada lobbyist and former deputy director her presidential campaign, John Kerry has been known as a vocal climate hawk.

In October 2011, Kerry, the head of the U.S. Senate's foreign relations committee, vowed to use his influence to thoroughly examine the environmental impact of Keystone XL.

But no matter who is charged with helm-holding at the State Department or the EPA—or whether or not the president approves the project—the Tar Sands Blockade movement has proved that something grand and game-changing needs to happen.

Despite mass public outcry, mass symbolic protest actions, legislative battles and now even some high-ranking resignations, it's direct action that's ultimately need to stop a toxic project that has been deemed “game over” for the planet by NASA’s top climate scientist.

And that’s the idea that’s really catching on with young people across the nation who are utilizing nonviolent tactics, like locking themselves to dirty energy infrastructure in an effort to spread the message that we can’t afford to continue down an unsustainable path for our climate.

The Tar Sands Blockade movement vows to continue obstructing construction on the pipeline in the event that President Obama indeed gives the project a green light.

Use FDR’S Grandson To Cut Social Security? Just Plain Evil

Watch the latest video at video.foxbusiness.com

What a too-slick, amoral PR move this would be, for the Obama administration to select FDR's grandson to head the Social Security Administration -- because he's a highly-paid insurance CEO ($1.7 million last year) who (of course!) supports Social Security cuts. Why, I can just see the shameless and misleading ads now:

The Boston Globe reports this morning that Tufts Health Plan chief executive James Roosevelt Jr. is being considered for the Obama administration’s nomination to head the Social Security Administration.

Last May, he wrote an op-ed with Robert L. Reynolds, a Republican and CEO of Putnam Investments, where he advocates for raising the Social Security retirement age at a brisker pace as well as cutting back the growth of benefits with a different Consumer Price Index (CPI):

On the benefits side, we should change the way we calculate the cost-of-living adjustment for all beneficiaries, by utilizing a revised Consumer Price Index which most economists agree more accurately reflects the rate of inflation for the expenses most seniors incur. Such a change would curb the rate of increase in benefits for future generations of retirees [...]

Lastly, we should accelerate the rise in Social Security’s full-benefit retirement age from age 67 to 68 by 2030 and then index the full benefit age for future generations to gains in longevity.Life expectancy past age 65 has risen nearly 50 percent since 1940, when Social Security first began regular monthly payments. That said, we should improve disability options for those engaged in physically demanding jobs. No one expects coal miners or telephone line crews to work into their late 60s.

“There is actually no agreement that the chained CPI provides a better measure of inflation for seniors. An experimental index constructed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics actually shows that the elderly experience a higher rate of inflation primarily because they consume more health care,” says economist Dean Baker. “It is also likely that they don’t substitute as much between items as other consumers. If the concern is accuracy, then the answer would be to have the BLS construct a full elderly index. Those who just want to switch to the chained CPI based on the evidence available are obviously interested in cutting Social Security, not accuracy.”

Let's not forget that all kinds of workers have painful repetitive motion injuries that OSHA backed off from regulating because it "might hurt small business." (The magic words that make regulation disappear!) You'd be hard pressed to find any job that didn't cause some kind of long-term problems. This kind of thinking would require many older workers in pain to keep working past the point where they were promised they could retire.

US Law Prohibits Transferring Guantanamo Prisoners to America

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FY 2013 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) legislation proscribes it.

January 11, 2013 marks Guantanamo’s 11th anniversary. More on that below.

On January 11, 2002, its first 20 prisoners arrived. It’s one of many US torture prisons globally.

Most held there are innocent victims. They’re not terrorists. They’re lawlessly detained. Many remained for years uncharged and untried. Fundamental rights are denied.

Seton Hall University Law Professor Mark Denebeaux analyzed unclassified government data. He got them through FOIA requests.

They revealed what’s vital to know. The vast majority of Guantanamo detainees weren’t accused of hostile acts. Afghan bounty hunters seized around 95% of them.

They sold them to US forces for $5,000 per claimed Taliban and $25,000 for alleged Al Qaeda members. Evidence of criminality wasn’t sought.

Washington wanted prisoners. It still does. Innocence or guilt didn’t matter. It still doesn’t.

What George Bush began, Obama continues. It’s institutionalized. Torture and other crimes against humanity reflect official US policy.

On January 20, 2009, Obama became America’s 44th president. He promised closure. On January 22, 2009, his Executive Order followed. It said:

“By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, in order to effect the appropriate disposition of individuals currently detained by the Department of Defense at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base (Guantánamo) and promptly to close detention facilities at Guantánamo, consistent with the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and the interests of justice…”

He promised “immediate review of all” detainees within 30 days and “humane standards of confinement.”

He lied. He’s a serial liar. He broke every major promise made. He’s a moral coward. He’s an unindicted war criminal. He belongs in prison, not government.

He’s got four more years to wage war on humanity. Expect him to take full advantage.

On January 3, 2013, the ACLU headlined “NDAA Prevents Closing Guantanamo, Could Lead to Claims of a Right to Discriminate.”

On December 31, 2012 (New Year’s eve), Obama signed FY 2012 NDAA legislation. He assumed diktat authority. He’s now judge, jury and executioner.

NDAA lets him order anyone arrested and indefinitely detained. He can do so based solely on suspicions, unfounded allegations, or none at all. US citizens are included. They can be targeted at home or abroad. There’s no place to hide.

FY 2013 NDAA repeats the same authority. Obama again signed quietly on New Year’s eve. Doing so helps institutionalize greater harshness. It’s fast-tracking America toward full-blown tyranny.

It targeted Guantanamo detainees. The ACLU explained, saying:

Obama signed NDAA. It “jeopardizes his ability to meet his promise to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay during his presidency.”

It “contains a troubling provision compelling the military to accommodate the conscience, moral principles, or religious beliefs of all members of the armed forces without accounting for the effect an accommodation would have.”

It “restricts Obama’s ability to transfer detainees for repatriation or resettlement in foreign countries or to prosecute them in federal criminal court.”

“Originally set to expire on March 27, the transfer restrictions have been extended through Sept. 30. As recently as October, Obama reiterated his commitment to close Guantanamo. Currently, 166 prisoners remain at the prison camp.”

According to ACLU director Anthony Romero:

Obama “utterly failed the first test of his second term, even before inauguration day. His signature means indefinite detention without charge or trial, as well as the illegal military commissions, will be extended.”

He “jeopardized his ability to close Guantanamo during his presidency.”

“Scores of men who have already been held for nearly 11 years without being charged with a crime – including more than 80 who have been cleared for transfer – may very well be imprisoned unfairly for yet another year.”

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) reported on “torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of” Guantanamo prisoners.

Documented evidence was obtained. Abusive treatment is standard practice. Waterboarding is one of many tactics.

Others include beatings, painful hog-tying, prolonged stress positions, electric shocks, sensory deprivation, extreme heat and cold, deafening sounds, and much more.

CCR described prolonged isolation. “Approximately 70%” of detainees “are in solitary confinement or isolation,” it said.

“Virtually none have ever been charged, and most will never be charged or tried.”

“Yet, they remain in ‘super-maximum security confinement’ conditions.” Doing so exceeds what’s psychologically tolerable.

Pentagon authorities won’t acknowledge what’s done. Euphemisms substitute. Prisoners get greater “privacy” and “single-occupancy cells,” they claim. Hell is hell. Sanitizing it doesn’t wash.

Conditions speak for themselves. Cells are small, windowless steel cages without access to natural light or air. Fluorescent lights stay on 24 hours a day. Sleep is impeded.

Attorney Brent Mickum represents Bisher al-Rawi. He’s “slowly but surely, slipping into madness,” he said. He has no human contact. He’s entirely cut off from the outside world. So are most others.

Attorney Clive Stafford Smith said his client smeared feces on his cell walls. When asked why, he couldn’t explain.

Prisoners are zombie-like. They resemble the living dead. Appalling treatment continues out of sight and mind. Media scoundrels say nothing.

CCR explained Guantanamo by the numbers:

Since 2002, an estimated 779 men were detained. Nearly all were Muslims. Another 664 men were transferred from Guantanamo. It now holds 166 indefinitely.

According to US government records, 92% aren’t terrorists. They’re not Al Qaeda fighters. Eighty-six men cleared for release remain detained.

Another 46 are indefinitely held without charge or trial. Washington claims they can neither be released or prosecuted.

Twenty-two or more prisoners were under 18 when captured. Twelve or more fear torture or persecution if returned to their home countries. They’ll remain detained until or unless other nations offer them safe havens.

Ten years or longer reflect how long most men have been held without charge or trial. Nine died in captivity. Two were forcibly sent to Algeria “despite credible fears of abuse.”

No US government officials have been held accountable. None will be. They freely get away with murder, torture, and other unconscionable abuses. They do it out of sight and mind.

Obama authorized it. He’s guilty of gross crimes against humanity. So are other complicit government and Pentagon officials.

Guantanamo remains open. Obama won’t close it. The New York Times tried having it both ways. On November 25, 2012, it headlined “Close Guantanamo Prison.”

Obama promised, it said. He pledged no more torture and abuse. It “was a bold beginning.” It’s unfilled. He continues Bush administration practices. He claims executive power.

During last year’s presidential campaign, Guantanamo “scarcely came up.”

At the same time, NYT editors “trust” he’ll fulfill his pledge. He spurned it for four years. Expect no change ahead.

Jennifer Daskal is Georgetown University adjunct professor. Formerly she was Justice Department counsel to the assistant attorney general. She’s senior counterterrorism counsel for Human Rights Watch.

On January 10, her Times op-ed headlined “Don’t Close Guantanamo.”

Earlier she favored closure. No longer. She believes “Guantanamo should stay open – at least for the short term.”

Dozens of prisoners can’t be prosecuted, she said. They’re “too dangerous to be transferred or released.” Why she didn’t explain.

She turned international law on its head. She claims they’re “held under rules of war” that permit “detention without charge for the duration of hostilities.”

False! Bush officials called them “unlawful combatants.” They’re now classified “unprivileged enemy belligerents.”

Language changed but not intent or lawlessness. Francis Boyle told this writer and others earlier. He said Bush spurned Geneva, constitutional and US statute laws.

He “created an anti-matter of legal nihilism where human beings (including US citizens) can be disappeared, detained incommunicado, denied access to attorneys and regular courts, tried in kangaroo courts, executed, tortured, assassinated and subjected to numerous other manifestations of State Terrorism.”

Obama continues the same practices. Lawlessness is official US policy.

Dascal claims “legal authority” permits detaining them. She says Guantanamo today “is a far cry from” 2002. She ignores continued abusive treatment.

She claims most detainees “live in communal facilities where they can eat, pray and exercise together.”

On June 24, 2012, Jimmy Carter headlined “A Cruel and Unusual Record.”

He condemned America’s “widespread abuse of human rights.”

He cited targeted assassinations, indiscriminate drone killings, indefinite detentions without charge, warrantless spying, abusing people based on “their appearance, where they worship or with whom they associate,” keeping Guantanamo open, and obtaining confessions by torture.

What Bush authorized, Obama continues. Illegal practices remain policy. Torture is institutionalized. International law is spurned. Constitutional rights don’t matter.

America “abandon(ed) its role as the global champion of human rights,” said Carter. Remaining Guantanamo prisoners “have little prospect of ever obtaining their freedom.”

US authorities “revealed that, in order to obtain confessions, (prisoners were) tortured by waterboarding more than 100 times or intimidated with semiautomatic weapons, power drills or threats to sexually assault their mothers.”

National security priorities prevent defense attorneys from raising these issues responsibly.

“Instead of making the world safer, America’s violation of international human rights abets our enemies and alienates our friends.”

Dascal disagrees. Closing Guantanamo “would do more harm than good,” she claims. Keep it open, she urges. Violating international, constitutional, and US statute laws wasn’t explained.

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) headlined “January 11: (National) Day of Action Against Guantanamo.”

“Join us,” it said. “Call on President Obama to fulfill his promise.” Demand he uphold human rights.

“166 men remain detained at Guantanamo.” Most never should have been sent there in the first place.

They’ve been lawlessly held “over ten years without any charge or trial. They must be tried in a fair (civil) court or released. Guantanamo must be shut down.”

At 1:30PM in Washington, activists gathered outside the Supreme Court. They marched past Capitol Hill to the White House.

The New York Avenue Presbyterian Church hosted a 2:30PM interfaith prayer service. Efforts continue to do the right thing. Over 25 organizations participated.

They include CCR, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, CloseGuantanamo.Org, Code Pink, Council on American Islamic Relations, Veterans for Peace, Voices for Creative Nonviolence, Physicians for Human Rights, Women Against Military Madness, and others.

Obama ignores them. He spurns rule of law principles. He’s defiant. He’s obstructionist.

Keep Gitmo open, he ordered. Torture and other forms of abuse continue out of sight and mind. They reflect official US policy.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

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

http://www.dailycensored.com/us-law-prohibits-transferring-guantanamo-prisoners-to-america/US Law Prohibits Transferring Guantanamo Prisoners to America

Heseltine Warns Cameron Over EU Referendum ‘Punt’

Tory grandee Lord Heseltine has turned on David Cameron, warning the PM against taking a “punt” by holding a referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the European Union.

The former minister, who served under Margaret Thatcher, is renowned for his staunch Europhile views, and Saturday’s comments, made in interviews with The Times and FT ahead of Cameron’s speech on the EU later this month, will only serve to exacerbate Tory tensions over Europe.

heseltine

Heseltine: "Thatcher said 'Never go into a room unless you know how to get out of it'."

The peer, who serves as an adviser to the coalition on economic growth and has gone on record in his belief that Britain will eventually adopt the Euro, said: "Mrs Thatcher said 'Never go into a room unless you know how to get out of it'.

"To commit to a referendum about a negotiation that hasn't begun, on a timescale you cannot predict, on an outcome that's unknown, where Britain's appeal as an inward investment market would be the centre of the debate, seems to me like an unnecessary gamble."

Lord Heseltine added: "If I was responsible for inward investment into any of our European colleagues, it would give me the best argument I could dream of.

"Why put your factory (in Britain) when you don't know - and they can't tell you - the terms upon which you will trade with us in future?"

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Cameron has come under pressure from an increasingly unruly Tory backbench, with many criticising the prime minister for not pushing Britain further away from the ailing European project.

The Tory leader has said he wants the UK to stay in the EU, but wants to renegotiate the terms of the relationship, particularly as those within the EU are pushing for greater integration.

However Cameron's desire to fashion a looser relationship with the EU could prove tricky. On Thursday, a delegation of German MPs told the prime minister not to "blackmail" the rest of Europe with threats.

Washington will be watching Cameron's speech closely, with the Obama administration having warned Britain on Wednesday not to turn "inwards" with a referendum.

Philip Gordon, the US assistant secretary for European affairs, made clear that the United States favoured a "strong British voice" within the EU.

Trump Threatens to Sue Maher Over ‘Bet’ Asking for Proof He Wasn’t Birthed From...

Attention junkie Donald Trump is doing his best to take advantage of Bill Maher poking fun at him on Jay Leno's show this week, where he decided to one-up Trump's birtherism with President Obama. Sean Hannity actually had this clown on for the better half of his show Thursday evening and Trump repeated some of the same remarks he made on Extra the previous day: Trump will ‘probably sue’ Maher after proving mother didn’t have sex with orangutan:

Real estate mogul Donald Trump is threatening sue HBO comedian Bill Maher over a bet over whether the billionaire’s mother had sex with an orangutan.

During an interview with NBC’s Jay Leno earlier this week, Maher had mocked Trump’s absurd offer of $5 million if President Barack Obama could prove he was a U.S. citizen. Maher said that he would donate $5 million to the “Hair Club for Men” or “Institute for Incorrigible Douchebaggery” if Trump produced evidence to counter the claim that he “had been the spawn of this mother having sex with an orangutan.”

“The other night on Jay Leno’s show, he made an absolute offer, I made an absolute acceptance,” Trump explained to Extra on Wednesday. “I sent him documentation and he owes me $5 million, which I’m going to give to charity.”

Trump repeated his threat to sue Maher and also told Hannity that HBO should fire the comedian immediately for insulting him:

Hannity said there would be far more outrage if anyone but Trump had been the target of Maher’s barbs. Trump called Maher “insulting” and said he was shocked by the “horrible things” Maher was saying about his parents. He sent a letter directly to Maher with his birth certificate demanding the five million dollars, which he joked that Maher may or may not have. There has been some question over whether Maher would be legally obligated to pay up, but Trump assured Hannity that his lawyer is confident of their case.

But on the subject of the double standard, Trump agreed that there is only minimal outrage because the insults were directed at him. He told Hannity that if he ever said anything similar about Obama, “you would be fired immediately.” He said that more people should be outraged about Maher’s statements, bragging that his lawyer won him five million dollars before and he’ll do it again.

Apparently the entire concept of comedy and satire is lost on these two. You've got to give it to both of them for having that feigned victimhood routine down pat, though. Heaven forbid that mean old comedian was picking on Trump. It's not like he's ever said anything hateful or disrespectful to deserve it!

Hannity was also pushing him about whether he's going to run for president again and he didn't rule it out, so I guess we've got an early scoop: The next Republican presidential primary is going to be just as big of a clown show as the last one.

Here's Maher on Leno's show earlier this week for anyone that missed it.

Breitbrat Ben Shapiro Sounds The Tyranny Alarm Over Gun Control

This segment with Piers Morgan is precisely why I called Breitbrat Ben Shapiro a twerp. At the ripe old age of 28, he has all the answers and thinks he's the smartest guy in the room. He's perfectly comfortable calling someone a bully for disagreein...

Malkin’s Hate-Filled Plea For Thoughtful Discussion On Gun Control

Michelle Malkin employed her special brand of fire-breathing derision on Fox & Friends this morning where, without a trace of irony, she attacked the Obama administration for not having a thoughtful, “deliberative” discussion on gun control. In an effort to bolster her case, she lobbed a barrage of inflammatory and untruthful sound bites about the Obama administration’s intentions. The hosts listened approvingly without challenge. Meanwhile, they ignored the kinds of unhinged responses from the right such as the Tactical Response CEO who threatened to start shooting people if President Obama "goes one inch further" with gun control measures.

Steve Doocy set the tone as he introduced the discussion by saying, “Yesterday, we heard from Sheriff Joe Biden.” “Sheriff Joe Biden” was displayed often in a banner on the screen. Doocy added that Biden “sounds like he wants to have the president use an executive order to do something to clamp down on guns. What do you think about this?”

Malkin’s contempt was cued up:

Well, if you thought the last four years showed how little disregard this administration has for the deliberative process, you ain’t seen nothing yet! And that cheesy grin that Joe Biden just can’t wipe off his face (said seconds after a sneering grin of her own), even when he’s talking about something as dire and as grave and serious as this particular issue. It gives me the chills because that impetus to do something, anything without the kind of reflection that we need on these kind of issues is very dangerous.

But, naturally, “reflection” and “deliberative process” are for other people, not the “fair and balanced” Fox News. Why look for facts when you can make incendiary guesses? Brian Kilmeade wondered if President Obama could issue a unilateral order, “No more assault weapons.”

Malkin “thoughtfully” responded:

Why the heck not? This administration has used the executive order and administrative fiat to completely undermine and sabotage our immigration policy, for example. They’ve done so many things by executive order on the environment that are radical shifts from where most Americans are.

Um, not really. Polls have consistently shown that Americans approve of and trust President Obama on the environment. A recent poll shows Americans think climate change is a serious problem and only 45% think he will take “major steps” to combat it.

Not that anyone corrected Malkin. All three hosts were a vision of credulousness as Malkin went on to sneer, “What’s most dangerous is the way that they couch their rhetoric in what seems to be moderation.” Rolling her eyes with scorn, she added, “Right now, they’re talking about ‘gun safety’ instead of ‘gun control.’ And when they harp about ‘assault weapons’ or ‘ammunition,’ what they’re really talking about – and we have had this kind of candor before from the gun grabbers – is talking about the kind of handguns that ordinary Americans use to protect themselves!”

Doocy said admiringly, “Sure, exactly.”

But according to the New York Times – which bothered to do some real investigation and reporting - Malkin and Kilmeade were way off base in their suggestion that the Obama administration is about to take some unilateral action to confiscate ordinary citizens’ guns: “Most changes to the current system, which allows easy access to weapons with hugely destructive power, has to come through legislation,” reporter David Firestone noted. Unlike the Curvy Couch Crew, he pointed out that Republicans have signaled that they will block “most of President Obama’s plans.”

So what are President Obama’s options? The Times offers up concrete possibilities, instead of off-hand theories:

Perhaps most importantly, he can strengthen the database that the F.B.I. uses to perform background checks on gun buyers. Many federal agencies that don’t currently contribute to the database, such as the Social Security Administration, have access to mental competence information about prospective buyers, or details about failed drug tests and other issues that might prevent a sale to the wrong person. Through an order, the president can get these agencies to share more information with the F.B.I.. As Charlie Savage of The Times recently reported, the Justice Department has studied several similar ideas to improve the background-check system, most of which have been shelved.

The president could also demand that the states share more information from their crime and mental-health databases.

This is hardly the kind of gun-seizing, power-grabbing maneuver that Malkin and her like-minded hosts were trying to scare viewers into believing is afoot. But don't expect these facts to replace paranoid fear mongering any time soon on Fox. Do expect the kind of rhetoric that paints President Obama as a dangerous dictator and that people like the Tactical Response CEO feed off.

Republicans Are Split Over How to Catch up to the 21st Century (But Both...

"Pirate time" and "gutted" welfare: the conservative schism in two columns.

January 11, 2013  |  

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As President Obama gears up for a reinauguration that, right up to Election Day, conservatives truly believed would never happen, the right is trying to figure out what went wrong and what can be done to set things right. A schism has emerged between those who think Republicans and conservatives simply need to tweak their messaging (a majority of Republicans  believe this) versus those who think the party needs to update its policies (a majority of all Americans agree on this point). Both these factions get find their voice in separate columns from prominent conservatives today.

Jim DeMint, fresh off his resignation from the Senate to take over the Heritage Foundation, plants his flag firmly in the "messaging" camp in a Washington Post  op-ed. Meanwhile, Peggy Noonan writes in the  Wall Street Journal that Republicans in Congress should raid the Democratic policy chest like seafaring privateers: "Really: It's pirate time."

Both columns, though, demonstrate that the lessons of 2012 have been ill-learned, and the intractability of the problems facing conservatives.

Let's start with DeMint and his missive in support of message tweaks. Here's what DeMint saw in 2012:

Unfortunately, welfare reform and missile defense have something in common beyond Heritage's intellectual paternity. They both have been gutted by President Obama. Always faint-hearted about missile defense, the president in his first year dismantled our programs in Poland and the Czech Republic. He disabled welfare reform last year, when he took away the work requirements that were at the heart of that law's success.

How could the president get away with hobbling two successful programs with barely a peep from the media or backlash from the millions of Americans whose lives are made better and more secure by these initiatives? That's a question and a challenge I take very personally.

DeMint's solution is to do "research" to make sure going forward conservative messaging on topics like missile defense and welfare is more effective. Of course, anyone who paid even casual attention to the 2012 race knows that Mitt Romney's attacked Obama relentlessly-- and falsely -- for "gutting welfare reform," and those attacks were covered extensively by the political press. The problem with the attack (which  originated with Heritage) was that it was over-the-top and wrong, and undermined by the fact that Republican governors were embracing the welfare policies Romney was attacking.

And really, the welfare attack was effective insomuch as it achieved its purpose: stoking  racial resentmentamong white, blue-collar voters against the president. The problem is that those voters don't make up quite the share of the electorate that they used to. That speaks to a deeper problem within conservative politics that can't be patched over with a little PR.

Meanwhile, at the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan is  pushing for much more sweeping changes within Republican politics and writing about pirates:

Now is the time to fight and be fearless, to be surprising, to break out of lockstep, to be the one thing Republicans aren't supposed to be, and that is interesting.

Now's the time to put a dagger 'tween their teeth, wave a sword, grab a rope and swing aboard the enemy's galleon. Take the president's issues, steal them--they never belonged to him, they're yours!

In political terms this means: Reorient yourselves. Declare for Main Street over Wall Street, stand for the little guy against the big interests. And move. Don't wait for the bill, declare the sentiments of your corner..

Really, it's pirate time.

One can glean from Noonan's argument that she's either an incurable optimist with a soft-spot for the dramatic, or she hasn't been paying attention. One of the pirate-time reforms she encourages the GOP to embrace is closing the  carried interest loophole, a sneaky bit of tax code that allows investment bankers to tax their wage income at the lower capital-gains rate. It disproportionately favors the wealthy, and Noonan spies an opportunity to seize the populist mantle: "If congressional Republicans care about their party they'll want it to get credit for fairness, as opposed to the usual blame for being lackeys of the rich."

CIA drones have already killed at least 40 since the start of the year

Pakistani demonstrators shout anti-US slogans during a protest in Multan on January 8, 2013, against the drone attacks in Pakistan's tribal areas. (AFP Photo/S.S Mirza)

Pakistani demonstrators shout anti-US slogans during a protest in Multan on January 8, 2013, against the drone attacks in Pakistan's tribal areas. (AFP Photo/S.S Mirza)

The CIA has escalated its use of drones in Pakistan, launching seven deadly strikes during the first 10 days of 2013 and killing at least 40 people, 11 of which may have been civilians.

The flurry of strikes has raised speculation that the Obama administration is accelerating attacks in the wake of the 2014 withdrawal from Afghanistan, in fear of losing the capacity to carry them out.

In 2012, the US launched 43 drone strikes in Pakistan with an average 7 to 8 days between strikes. At the current rate, the US is set to kill far more people than last year.

This year’s drone attacks have so far done little to spare civilians: the Long War Journal found that US drones have killed at least 11 civilians since Jan. 1, which exceeds the number of civilians US officials say were killed in all of 2012.

US intelligence officials claim the increase in drone strikes is an initiative to take out as many possible opponents of the Afghan government because of the looming 2014 withdrawal of 66,000 US troops.

These strikes “may be a signal to groups that include not just al-Qaeda that the US will still present a threat” after most American forces have gone, counterterrorism expert Seth Jones of Rand Corp. told the Washington Post. “With the drawdown in US forces, the drone may be, over time, the most important weapon against militant groups.”

With less than 6,000 troops remaining in Afghanistan after 2014, the CIA’s network of bases will be reduced from more than 15 to five, due in large part to a lack of security for its outposts.

“As the military pulls back, the agency has to pull back,” a former US intelligence official told the Post.

While the Pakistani government has remained mute about the increase in attacks, some claim to be baffled by the CIA’s surge in activity. In South Waziristan, thousands of Pakistani tribesmen took to the streets on Saturday to protest the killing of Taliban commander Maulvi Nazir, who had reached a truce with the Pakistani military but was killed in a US-led drone attack on Jan. 2.

“This is beyond our understanding why the drone strikes are increased,” said a tribal elder from North Waziristan.

The Pakistani government has made no mention of the strikes, but politician Imran Khan publicly condemned the strikes on Sunday, calling them a violation of Pakistani sovereignty and international law.

Drone attacks in Pakistan’s tribal region have significantly increased over the last few years, with US officials claiming they are an effective strategy to combat militant groups based in the tribal regions. The CIA has launched more than 340 drone strikes in Pakistan. It is unknown exactly how many civilians have been killed, but the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that from June 2004 to mid-September 2012, drone strikes killed between 2,562 and 3,325 Pakistanis, many of whom were children.

“We will seek an end to drone strikes and there will be no compromise on that,” said Pakistani ambassador to the US, Sherry Rehman, at an Aspen Security Forum in July.

Chavez Misses Inauguration, Will Be Sworn in by Supreme Court if He Recovers

Alex Main (CEPR): Venezuelan opposition hopes to take advantage of crisis but after sweeping state elections and winning decisively in the Presidential election, Chavez forces unlikely to lose power in a new election.

TRANSCRIPT:

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore.

In Venezuela, the government announced that President Hugo Chávez was too ill to attend inauguration on January 10, the day he was supposed to be sworn in for his third term. This has stirred up quite a bit of controversy about what happens next.

Now joining us to discuss all of this is Alex Main. Alex is a senior associate for international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. He focuses on U.S. policy in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Thanks for joining us again, Alex.

ALEX MAIN, SENIOR ASSOC. FOR INTERNATIONAL POLICY, CEPR: Thank you, Paul.

JAY: So what happens next? As I understand it, the Supreme Court has ruled that it was okay not to attend the inauguration and that President Chávez can be sworn in again at a future date by the Supreme Court. But how long and what are the parameters of that?

MAIN: Well, they have not been defined yet, and it's not clear that they will be any time soon, as the Constitution is not very specific in this point. I mean, what the Constitution says is that normally the inauguration of the president should take place on January 10 before the National Assembly, but if not, it should be before the Supreme Court, and then it simply doesn't specify a date. So at this point we're left hanging, and we don't know, really, what the state of President Chávez's health is. Clearly it's not great at the moment. But there have been no images of him, and he has not been heard from directly, certainly not via television or radio, for a number of weeks now.

JAY: Now, a Brazilian minister, I think, accompanied Vice President Moduro—I guess he's still vice president—back to Venezuela from Cuba. Am I right about that? And essentially to say that the Brazilians think the way the process is being dealt with is constitutional.

MAIN: That's right. So that's Marco Aurélio, adviser to President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil. He was just recently in Cuba and had long meetings. It's not clear whether he met with President Chávez or not. He certainly met with [Vice] President Maduro. And he returned from that trip with some strong statements to the press, in which he said indeed he believed that it was constitutional for the inauguration to be postponed, and even offered that it might be postponed for as long as 180 days, according to the Constitution.

JAY: Well, that's—where is this 180-day figure come from? 'Cause I'm hearing this in different places. Like, [crosstalk] one day you read there is no time parameter, and then another day we hear about 180 days.

MAIN: Well, the 180 days is based on Article 233 of the Venezuelan Constitution, where it says that if the president cannot, you know, fully function as president, in a temporary manner (this is a temporary condition), then he can be given a 90-days leave, if you will, and those 90 days are renewable. So that gives you a total of 180 days. So that's what it says in that article.

JAY: Now, if President Chávez's health is such that he really can't assume power again, which it seems that is his health condition—it's hard to imagine that even if he recovers from the crisis he's in at the moment, that he's going to be in shape to run a government. What would happen next? Why postpone things? It seems that if that's the case, they're going to have to head into elections sooner than later.

MAIN: Well, that's right. I mean, at some point, you know, of course they're going to have to make a determination on whether Chávez can be temporarily absent or whether he will be permanently absent. And I imagine it has to do with his recovery process in Cuba, and that there are still hopes that he can recover and reassume the presidency, although the picture seems pretty bleak, based on the communiques that we've had so far about President Chávez's health.

Now, if he shouldn't make it, he's given very clear instructions, or very clear endorsement, in any case, of the next candidate. And there would have to be elections within 30 days if it were announced that he is permanently unable to be president. And so in 30 days there would be elections, and President Chávez clearly announced who he thought should be his successor, and that is Nicolás Maduro, the current vice president and foreign minister of Venezuela.

JAY: Now, we're seeing in the American press—I believe it was The Washington Post—today that quote-unquote the Americans are sending messages to Maduro, hoping for better relations and trying to—I think the language was create new openings between the United States and Venezuela. What is that about?

MAIN: Well, I think that actually isn't necessarily directly related to the current situation, because we learned that overtures began and some talks began towards the end of November, at which point President Chávez seemed to be in better shape and it appeared that he would be continuing as normal in the presidency. That's when talks appeared to have begun.

But I think, you know, regardless of that, the United States government is very clear that at the moment, you know, they probably will have to reckon with the forces of Chavismo for the foreseeable future. That was confirmed, really, in a strong way during the last elections in November—or, rather, in December, the regional elections, where the opposition did really quite badly. They won only 3 of 23 of Venezuela's states, the governorships of those states. So that was a clear indication that the opposition is not gaining in popularity. If anything, it's even declined a bit. And that's despite the fact that President Chávez, during nearly that entire campaign for the regional elections, was not present, was not able to be there and campaign, and so he wasn't actually one of the big contributors to the success of those Chavista candidates.

JAY: Is there any reason to think that President Obama and his administration might have somewhat a different attitude towards Venezuela now that President Obama does not have to worry about getting reelected in Florida?

MAIN: No, absolutely. I mean, you know, for a number of reasons, you know, there is hope that President Obama is going to have a different agenda from his first term and perhaps try to develop a more progressive agenda, certainly in terms of his foreign policy. His nomination of Republican former senator Chuck Hagel is an indication of that, I think.

Certainly, in terms of Venezuela, you know, that could be the case as well, although, you know, what we've seen pretty consistently so far with President Obama is that he isn't particularly concerned about Latin American relations, you know, even with some of the important countries of that region, like Brazil. I think a lot is actually going to rest on the future—well, the presumed future secretary of state John Kerry. And Kerry has focused quite a bit on Latin America over his long career in the Senate. He had very progressive positions in opposition to Ronald Reagan's policies in Central America in the '80s. Since then, he has become a bit more conservative, along with, I think, you know, most of Congress. He's kind of gone in that same direction. But one could hope that he will have a more enlightened vision of relations with Latin America, including Venezuela.

JAY: And if President Chávez does not survive this, or if he's not capable of coming back and resuming his office, what do you think in terms of the election? We would be into an election fairly soon after that as well. I think it has to be called within 30 days of that becoming clear. Is that correct? And then how does the electorial situation look like, given that President Chávez's party did sweep all the state elections and he just got reelected president? So in terms of the elections that will have to be called if President Chávez can't resume office, I mean, is there any reason to think that Maduro wouldn't simply repeat the same electoral victories that his party just won on state elections and the reelection of President Chávez?

MAIN: No. Really, you know, barring some sort of catastrophe, it would seem very unlikely that he would lose future elections. I think the opposition is quite clear on that, and—or at least some of the opposition is, and particularly the opposition that is interested in electoral victories, because, unfortunately, you still have a sector of the opposition which seems to be more intent on trying to destabilize the country.

But those who are, let's say, more mature about, you know, following electoral democracy's sort of precepts, they seem to be trying to buy time, and they haven't objected that greatly to the postponement of Chávez's inauguration. I think they see it as working in their favor. They would like to see perhaps a few months of rule under someone other than Chávez, whether it be Nicolás Maduro or the president of the National Assembly, Diosdado Cabello, and then try to undermine that individual in order to gain some clout, which they don't have at the moment. They're very weak, so they don't really have much to gain by having elections in 30 days.

JAY: Alright. Thanks very much for joining us, Alex.

MAIN: Sure. Thank you, Paul.

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

Eleven Years of Guantanamo; Drone Strategy Consolidates Under Brennan

Michael Ratner: From Guantanamo to Brennan at CIA, Obama carries on the policies of George Bush.

TRANSCRIPT:

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore. And welcome to this week's edition of The Ratner Report with Michael Ratner, who now joins us from New York City.

Michael is president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, chair of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin, and a board member for The Real News. Thanks for joining us, Michael.

MICHAEL RATNER, PRESIDENT EMERITUS, CENTER FOR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS: Good to be with you, Paul.

JAY: So what are you following this week? I guess the big issue will be the anniversary of Guantanamo.

RATNER: I wish I could say it's a big issue. Of course it's a big issue. But it's a grim anniversary. It's the 11th year of Guantanamo. We're entering the 12th year. The U.S. has had that detention camp since January 11, 2002. The original order came down in November 2001. That's the order that the Center for Constitutional Rights and myself has been challenging since that time. And despite our challenges, despite Obama, we still have Guantanamo there. And we have a Guantanamo—and these numbers are important—that 166 people still remaining at Guantanamo, and that 86 of those, 86 have been cleared for release. That means they're innocent, they shouldn't be there anymore, and they are still there. And they've been there going on, in some cases, 11 years, ten years, nine years. Still there. So we're still running a detention camp.

JAY: Why are they still there if they've been cleared for release?

RATNER: You know, that gets into the big issue on Guantanamo. It gets into the president's promise to close it. The president on January 22, 2009, wrote an executive order saying exactly it has to be closed in one year from this date and saying it's in the national security interests of the United States and the foreign policy interests and the interests of justice to close Guantanamo. And yet it remains open.

So the big question is: why? Well, you know, politicians are politicians. And what happened in Guantanamo—I can do a couple of factors quickly, but they're still at the politicians' door. One is [incompr.] the first people who were ordered released from Guantanamo when Obama became president, the Uyghers from Western China, which is the Muslim split-off group from China, they were picked up in Afghanistan. The U.S. refused to let them come into the United States, despite a federal court order and despite a Uyghur community that was willing to take them in, and despite their complete clearance for release. Obama showed weak knees. That was early in his term, you know, probably by February or March.

And then, after he refused to let those Uyghurs into the United States, Congress got in the act. And that goes on and on. Congress then said nobody from Guantanamo can come to the United States, nobody from Guantanamo can be sent to any other country, unless there are all kinds of hurdles that they go through and clearances.

And that's now reflected in, like, two years of legislation, which we've talked about before, called the National Defense Authorization Act. Obama signed that again. That contains the Guantanamo restrictions on transfer to the United States and to other countries. Obama said in his signing statement, I think a lot of it's unconstitutional and I may override it. He said that last year as well. But I don't expect him to do it.

So my prediction: you and I will be celebrating, sadly, this grim anniversary year after year. And I put it—yes, I put it at the feet of Obama. I put it at the feet of Congress, and also the courts. While at my office we won a right for the Guantanamo detainees to challenge their detentions in courts, that right has not been carried out by the courts, and we have not yet gotten people out in the last few years as a result of any of the litigation. All of it has been reversed in the appeals court.

And so we're sitting there now with what I consider to be an incredible human rights and political outrage. The only way people seem to be getting out of the camp now is by death. And we had one death in September, a man named Adnan Latif, who'd been there for ten years. Government claimed suicide. Who knows. It was an overdose of drugs somehow. How he got that in a detention camp when there's a camera on you every second is unclear to me.

So Guantanamo is really like the albatross around Obama's neck. But be honest: it's not the only albatross. If we look at what the Obama administration has done, the areas that I care about and have litigated, he's not very much different than President Bush was. If you look at Guantanamo, [it] exists. You look at military commissions, which are those special rum trials, still going on. If you look at death by drone, more under Obama by far than under Bush. If you look at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is the right that they've given the government to surveil your and my conversations, it's as broad as it's ever been. They don't even have to name the U.S. citizens they're surveilling anymore. They can go to the secret court and get a warrant and say, we just want to investigate The Real News, pick up all the American citizens they want by wiretap, and that's it. So Obama on those issues is really hand-in-glove with President Bush. And on torture, of course, yes, he did do an order to stop the worst forms of torture—waterboarding and otherwise. That had actually ended by the time Obama took office.

JAY: What about the appointment of John Brennan as director of the CIA?

RATNER: Well, that really seals what I've been saying about the two wings of the same bird sense of Bush and Obama on these national security issues that I've been discussing. John Brennan has been the national security adviser for President Obama in the White House. The reason he was that adviser was because he couldn't get to be head of the CIA, which is what Obama wanted to appoint him to four years ago. And he couldn't appoint him to that because Brennan set up the counterintelligence center or the Counterterrorism Center in Washington to fight terrorism. And as part of that, of course, we had the torture techniques employed widely. Brennan was head of that. We had rendition employed widely. Brennan was head of that. So there was too much opposition for Brennan to get to be head of the CIA.

Go ahead now four more years. Brennan's been heading the drone program for President Obama. He's become like a brother, as far as we can tell, to President Obama on the drone program. What happens next? Obama nominates Brennan to be head of the CIA. Is there going to be significant opposition? I doubt it. The torture stuff probably won't come up at all. It seems that every member of Congress or at least every member of the Senate is on the same page or almost the same page on the drone issues with a few exceptions. And so probably Brennan is going to sweep through.

So what does that tell you about what's happened to the country? When we had Bush in office, I had a tremendous amount of support for the opposition that my office and others have had to Guantanamo, drones, the torture program, getting people prosecuted for torture [inaud.] Obama's taken office, that support has evaporated. And worse than that, they're now putting into the head of the CIA one of the architects of the Bush program, and actually the head of the drone program, essentially. We've seen a normalization now of these issues in the country.

JAY: Just to be clear, when you said head of the drone program, now we know from—'cause they told The New York Times, this is Brennan and Obama sitting around, deciding who's going to be killed.

RATNER: That's where they make up the kill list. Obama said he signs off on it personally. It includes a wide variety of people, not just people who are alleged terrorists, who they know the names of; it includes what are called signature strikes, which are just people who have characteristics they say belong to terrorists or in the areas where terrorists allegedly hang out; and it includes people killing outside of war zones, which is, I think, what people are really getting upset by, because it may be one thing—it's like a bomber if you're fighting a shooting war, to drop bombs on, you know, the other side; but when you're talking about people who were not in uniforms, who were not in a war zone, but are living in Yemen or living in Somalia, or could be living in the United Kingdom or right here in the United States, you're talking about something else. And that's who's going to be the head of our CIA.

So I would say that this country on those issues is really in a hell somewhere. I mean, we have a long way to come back. Eleven years of Guantanamo, six, seven, eight years of drones, a dozen years of torture and no prosecutions for it, and then you throw into the mix the last little bit, a nice film like Zero Dark Thirty—and I mean nice facetiously—that essentially makes an argument that torture works and that we need torture to protect ourselves in the United States. Luckily, while it was nominated for an academy award, its director, who should not be directing, Kathryn Bigelow, was not nominated. But the film confirms, really, what this country has become, which is a country where torture is considered acceptable and necessary for its protection.

JAY: Alright. Thanks for joining us, Michael.

RATNER: Thank you, Paul.

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

Investors Are Missing the Single Most Critical Fact About China

The investment world is convinced that China is about to engage in another massive round of stimulus. After all, this is what China did in 2008 when its economy slowed, so surely this is what they’ll do now that the economy is slowing again.

The fact of the matter is that China cannot do this and will not do this. The reason is that the Chinese Government today is facing a very different set of circumstances than it was in 2008.

Since 2008, global Central Banks have printed $10 trillion in new money. Between this and the supply shock for natural resource companies created by credit drying up in the crash, the inflation genie is now officially out of the bottle.

This is most clear in China, where workers have begun demanding wage increases.

With nearly a third of its population living off less than $2 per day, any bump in food prices hits China much harder than the US or other developed nations.

Chinese workers are now demanding higher wages to survive. Indeed, this situation is so serious that many multi-national manufacturing firms are in fact moving facilities to the US because of the greater stability there. Apple, Ford, GE, Bridgestone and many others have announced this.

Even China’s official data shows inflation is at a seven month high. Chilly weather is blamed in the official reports, but the truth is that China has a major problem with food inflation regardless of the weather.

The Chinese Government cannot suddenly print a massive amount of money without facing massive civil unrest. We already know that the Government is deeply concerned about losing its grip on society from the fact that it is making a very public display of cracking down on corruption.

This is meant to appease a population that has realized A) it’s no longer better off than before B) many government officials and their families are getting wealthy through corrupt means.

So China cannot and will not be engaging in massive stimulus for the simple reason that doing so would kick off a very dangerous wave of civil unrest. Indeed, China’s new party leader Xi Jinping has openly stated that China will not be pursuing high growth rates through stimulus going forward.

This is just one of many major issues pointing towards 2013 being a debacle for investors. With that in mind, smart investors are taking advantage of the lull in the markets to position themselves for what’s coming.

We offer several FREE Special Reports designed to help them do this. They include:

Preparing Your Portfolio For Obama’s Economic Nightmare

What Europe’s Crisis Means For You and Your Savings

How to Protect Yourself From Inflation

And last but not least…

Bullion 101: Everything You Need to Know About Investing in Gold and Silver Bullion…

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‘Guantanamo creates deep wounds’ — former detainees

The flag over a war crimes courtroom in Camp Justice at US Naval Base Guantanamo Bay in Cuba (Reuters / Michelle Shephard / Pool)

(13.3Mb) embed video

Guantanamo Bay is sending a very disturbing signal to the world as it legalizes torture, say former detainees. In an interview with RT they shared their painful memories and the feeling of guilt facing the innocent people imprisoned.

Former Guantanamo detainee, Bisher Amin Khalil Al-Rawi, 52, is an Iraqi citizen who became a UK resident in 1980s. He was held in Guantanamo from 2002 to 2007. Al-Rawi argues that he was arrested by the Gambian National Intelligence Agency while on a business trip in Banjul Airport. He was then turned over to US authorities and transferred to Guantanamo Bay. He was held under suspicion of having links with Al-Qaeda.

Al-Rawi tells RT that he still feels guilt in front of those other prisoners who have been cleared off, but still remain in Guantanamo.

Bisher Amin Khalil Al-Rawi
Bisher Amin Khalil Al-Rawi

­“I do not know why I was released and others were not, especially when you know that people who have been cleared still remain in Guantanamo. At the time when I was released I do not know whether I was cleared or not. And I think one cannot but feel uncomfortable and that guilt is lingering in you. Why am I out and they are still in there?”

“Dictators are pressing people, we all know that, but oppression from countries that have put themselves forward as the leaders of the free world, I think oppression from them should not be tolerated. The UK is my country, it is my home, but I think the government can do much more to help. The US needs to be reminded of the wrongs that it is committing.”

Former Guantanamo detainee Omar Deghayes, 43, is a Libyan citizen with residency status in the UK. He was held in Gitmo for five years from 2002 to 2007. Deghayes was arrested in Pakistan and then taken into US military custody and sent to Guantanamo.  After his release he was returned to Britain, but was arrested under a Spanish warrant. In 2008 the extradition attempts were dropped.

Omar Deghayes
Omar Deghayes

Deghayes believes that the message US is sending by enforcing torture is very disturbing and says it creates deep wounds that are not healed easily.

“I have been released now for four years, since December 2007. But the memories of Guantanamo are very clear because of what had happened. The mistreatment does not go away easily. It does create a deep wound that will last a long time. When we talk about Guantanamo, these things do come back.”

“The message that Guantanamo sends to the world is very disturbing and very serious [and] has to be opposed and spoken against. In the US the people who committed the crimes which legalized and engineered torture in Guantanamo not only have not been prosecuted or accounted for what they had committed, but they are at large campaigning very powerfully with media – and now film – to justify and make torture acceptable to the American public at large. Such a message is very dangerous and has to be opposed.”

Human rights lawyer Saghir Hussain talked about Guantanamo prisoner Shaker Aamer, who is a Saudi Arabian citizen and the last British resident held at Gitmo. Aamer was cleared for release by the Bush administration in 2007 and the Obama administration in 2009, but remains in detention.

Saghir Hussain
Saghir Hussain

“The promise [to bring Shaker Aamer back home] has not been fulfilled and that is very disappointing and we urge the British government to fulfill the promise made to the former detainees, who despite their own personal emotional sufferings are strongly concerned about Shaker Aamer and the fact that he is still not back.”

Hussain also spoke out against the ‘Secret Justice’ bill that would allow national security evidence to be heard behind closed court doors.

“[The] Secret Justice bill would allow a Secretary of State to tell the judge what is secret and what is not. So there is no judicial oversight as to what can be open in court.”

‘The EU Needs To Change For Britain To Remain A Member’

Chancellor George Osborne has raised the prospect that Britain could leave the European Union unless there is change in Brussels.

In an interview with the German Die Welt newspaper, the Chancellor said that he very much wanted the UK to continue as an EU member state.

However he made clear that in order for that to happen, there would have to be meaningful reform of the current arrangements.

george osborne

George Osborne has raised the prospect that Britain could leave the European Union

"I very much hope that Britain remains a member of the EU. But in order that we can remain in the European Union, the EU must change," he said.

A Treasury aide insisted that his comments were fully consistent with the Government's position - that the EU needs to change "and indeed is changing".

SEE ALSO: Cameron 'To Offer EU Referendum In 2018' In Dutch Speech

However the fact such a senior member of the Government is prepared publicly to discuss the possibility Britain may be unable to stay in the EU is likely to be welcomed by Tory eurosceptics who have been pressing for an in-out referendum on Britain's membership.

Osborne made his comments during a visit to Berlin on Tuesday. On Thursday a key ally of German chancellor Angela Merkel issued a sharp warning that any attempt at "blackmailing" member states into accepting change would backfire on Britain.

Bundestag European affairs committee chairman Gunther Krichbaum said a referendum could leave the UK isolated in Europe.

"You cannot create a political future if you are blackmailing other states. That will not help Britain," he said.

Earlier this week Sir Richard Branson teamed up with top businessmen to caution David Cameron his plans to renegotiate the UK's relationship with the EU could harm Britain's economy, and the US assistant secretary for European affairs, Philip Gordon, has made clear the Obama administration wanted "a strong British voice" in the EU and referendums risked turning countries "inward".

Downing Street said today that David Cameron had talked Barack Obama through Britain's approach to Europe when they spoke before Christmas and that the president was supportive.

Shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander said George Osborne's real audience was not Die Welt but "Conservative backbenchers."

“No wonder only this week Britain’s allies and British business leaders warned the Government about the risk of sleepwalking to exit.

“As this week has shown Cameron and Osborne are neither in control of their party nor the agenda," he said.

Cameron is due to spell out his position more fully in a keynote speech later this month, where according to The Sun he will promise British voters an in/out referendum in 2018 if the Conservative Party is returned to power at the next election.

Chavez Misses Inauguration, Will Be Sworn in by Supreme Court if he Recovers

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Bio

In his work at CEPR, Alexander Main focuses on U.S. foreign policy in Latin America and the Caribbean and regularly engages with U.S. policy makers and civil society groups to inform the public debate. He is frequently interviewed by media in the U.S. and Latin American and his analyses on U.S. policy in the Americas have been published in a variety of domestic and international media outlets including Foreign Policy, NACLA and the Monde diplomatique. Prior to CEPR, Alexander spent more than six years in Latin America working as an international relations analyst. He has a degree in history and political science from the Sorbonne University in Paris, France.

Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore.

In Venezuela, the government announced that President Hugo Chávez was too ill to attend inauguration on January 10, the day he was supposed to be sworn in for his third term. This has stirred up quite a bit of controversy about what happens next.Now joining us to discuss all of this is Alex Main. Alex is a senior associate for international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. He focuses on U.S. policy in Latin America and the Caribbean. Thanks for joining us again, Alex.ALEX MAIN, SENIOR ASSOC. FOR INTERNATIONAL POLICY, CEPR: Thank you, Paul.JAY: So what happens next? As I understand it, the Supreme Court has ruled that it was okay not to attend the inauguration and that President Chávez can be sworn in again at a future date by the Supreme Court. But how long and what are the parameters of that?MAIN: Well, they have not been defined yet, and it's not clear that they will be any time soon, as the Constitution is not very specific in this point. I mean, what the Constitution says is that normally the inauguration of the president should take place on January 10 before the National Assembly, but if not, it should be before the Supreme Court, and then it simply doesn't specify a date. So at this point we're left hanging, and we don't know, really, what the state of President Chávez's health is. Clearly it's not great at the moment. But there have been no images of him, and he has not been heard from directly, certainly not via television or radio, for a number of weeks now.JAY: Now, a Brazilian minister, I think, accompanied Vice President Moduro—I guess he's still vice president—back to Venezuela from Cuba. Am I right about that? And essentially to say that the Brazilians think the way the process is being dealt with is constitutional.MAIN: That's right. So that's Marco Aurélio, adviser to President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil. He was just recently in Cuba and had long meetings. It's not clear whether he met with President Chávez or not. He certainly met with [Vice] President Maduro. And he returned from that trip with some strong statements to the press, in which he said indeed he believed that it was constitutional for the inauguration to be postponed, and even offered that it might be postponed for as long as 180 days, according to the Constitution.JAY: Well, that's—where is this 180-day figure come from? 'Cause I'm hearing this in different places. Like, [crosstalk] one day you read there is no time parameter, and then another day we hear about 180 days.MAIN: Well, the 180 days is based on Article 233 of the Venezuelan Constitution, where it says that if the president cannot, you know, fully function as president, in a temporary manner (this is a temporary condition), then he can be given a 90-days leave, if you will, and those 90 days are renewable. So that gives you a total of 180 days. So that's what it says in that article.JAY: Now, if President Chávez's health is such that he really can't assume power again, which it seems that is his health condition—it's hard to imagine that even if he recovers from the crisis he's in at the moment, that he's going to be in shape to run a government. What would happen next? Why postpone things? It seems that if that's the case, they're going to have to head into elections sooner than later.MAIN: Well, that's right. I mean, at some point, you know, of course they're going to have to make a determination on whether Chávez can be temporarily absent or whether he will be permanently absent. And I imagine it has to do with his recovery process in Cuba, and that there are still hopes that he can recover and reassume the presidency, although the picture seems pretty bleak, based on the communiques that we've had so far about President Chávez's health.Now, if he shouldn't make it, he's given very clear instructions, or very clear endorsement, in any case, of the next candidate. And there would have to be elections within 30 days if it were announced that he is permanently unable to be president. And so in 30 days there would be elections, and President Chávez clearly announced who he thought should be his successor, and that is Nicolás Maduro, the current vice president and foreign minister of Venezuela.JAY: Now, we're seeing in the American press—I believe it was The Washington Post—today that quote-unquote the Americans are sending messages to Maduro, hoping for better relations and trying to—I think the language was create new openings between the United States and Venezuela. What is that about?MAIN: Well, I think that actually isn't necessarily directly related to the current situation, because we learned that overtures began and some talks began towards the end of November, at which point President Chávez seemed to be in better shape and it appeared that he would be continuing as normal in the presidency. That's when talks appeared to have begun. But I think, you know, regardless of that, the United States government is very clear that at the moment, you know, they probably will have to reckon with the forces of Chavismo for the foreseeable future. That was confirmed, really, in a strong way during the last elections in November—or, rather, in December, the regional elections, where the opposition did really quite badly. They won only 3 of 23 of Venezuela's states, the governorships of those states. So that was a clear indication that the opposition is not gaining in popularity. If anything, it's even declined a bit. And that's despite the fact that President Chávez, during nearly that entire campaign for the regional elections, was not present, was not able to be there and campaign, and so he wasn't actually one of the big contributors to the success of those Chavista candidates.JAY: Is there any reason to think that President Obama and his administration might have somewhat a different attitude towards Venezuela now that President Obama does not have to worry about getting reelected in Florida?MAIN: No, absolutely. I mean, you know, for a number of reasons, you know, there is hope that President Obama is going to have a different agenda from his first term and perhaps try to develop a more progressive agenda, certainly in terms of his foreign policy. His nomination of Republican former senator Chuck Hagel is an indication of that, I think. Certainly, in terms of Venezuela, you know, that could be the case as well, although, you know, what we've seen pretty consistently so far with President Obama is that he isn't particularly concerned about Latin American relations, you know, even with some of the important countries of that region, like Brazil. I think a lot is actually going to rest on the future—well, the presumed future secretary of state John Kerry. And Kerry has focused quite a bit on Latin America over his long career in the Senate. He had very progressive positions in opposition to Ronald Reagan's policies in Central America in the '80s. Since then, he has become a bit more conservative, along with, I think, you know, most of Congress. He's kind of gone in that same direction. But one could hope that he will have a more enlightened vision of relations with Latin America, including Venezuela.JAY: And if President Chávez does not survive this, or if he's not capable of coming back and resuming his office, what do you think in terms of the election? We would be into an election fairly soon after that as well. I think it has to be called within 30 days of that becoming clear. Is that correct? And then how does the electorial situation look like, given that President Chávez's party did sweep all the state elections and he just got reelected president? So in terms of the elections that will have to be called if President Chávez can't resume office, I mean, is there any reason to think that Maduro wouldn't simply repeat the same electoral victories that his party just won on state elections and the reelection of President Chávez?MAIN: No. Really, you know, barring some sort of catastrophe, it would seem very unlikely that he would lose future elections. I think the opposition is quite clear on that, and—or at least some of the opposition is, and particularly the opposition that is interested in electoral victories, because, unfortunately, you still have a sector of the opposition which seems to be more intent on trying to destabilize the country. But those who are, let's say, more mature about, you know, following electoral democracy's sort of precepts, they seem to be trying to buy time, and they haven't objected that greatly to the postponement of Chávez's inauguration. I think they see it as working in their favor. They would like to see perhaps a few months of rule under someone other than Chávez, whether it be Nicolás Maduro or the president of the National Assembly, Diosdado Cabello, and then try to undermine that individual in order to gain some clout, which they don't have at the moment. They're very weak, so they don't really have much to gain by having elections in 30 days.JAY: Alright. Thanks very much for joining us, Alex.MAIN: Sure. Thank you, Paul.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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“Zero Dark Thirty”: Torturing the Facts

On January 11, eleven years to the day after George W. Bush sent the first detainees to Guantanamo, the Oscar-nominated film Zero Dark Thirty is making its national debut. Zero Dark Thirty is disturbing for two reasons. First and foremost, it leaves the viewer with the erroneous impression that torture helped the CIA find bin Laden’s hiding place in Pakistan. Secondarily, it ignores both the illegality and immorality of using torture as an interrogation tool.

The thriller opens with the words “based on first-hand accounts of actual events.” After showing footage of the horrific 9/11 attacks, it moves into a graphic and lengthy depiction of torture. The detainee “Ammar” is subjected to waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and confined in a small box. Responding to the torture, he divulges the name of the courier who ultimately leads the CIA to bin Laden’s location and assassination. It may be good theater, but it is inaccurate and misleading.

The statement “based on first-hand accounts of actual events” is deceptive because it causes the viewer think the story is accurate. All it really means, however, is that the CIA provided Hollywood with information about events depicted in the movie. Acting CIA Director Michael Morrell wrote a letter to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in which he admitted the CIA engaged extensively with the filmmakers. After receiving his letter, Senators John McCain, Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin requested information and documents related to the CIA’s cooperation.

The senators sent a letter to Morrell saying they were “concerned by the film’s clear implication that information obtained during or after the use of the CIA’s coercive interrogation techniques played a critical role in locating Usama Bin Laden (UBL).” They noted, “the film depicts CIA officers repeatedly torturing detainees. The film then credits CIA detainees subjected to coercive interrogation techniques as providing critical lead information on the courier that led to the UBL compound.” They state categorically: “this information is incorrect.”

The letter explains that after a review of more than six million pages of CIA records, Feinstein and Levin made the following determination:

The CIA did not first learn about the existence of the UBL courier from CIA detainees subjected to coercive interrogation techniques. Nor did the CIA discover the courier’s identity from CIA detainees subjected to coercive techniques. No CIA detainee reported on the courier’s full name or specific whereabouts, and no detainee identified the compound in which UBL was hidden. Instead, the CIA learned of the existence of the courier, his true name, and location through means unrelated to the CIA detention and interrogation program.

In a speech on the Senate floor, McCain declared, “It was not torture, or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees that got us the major leads that ultimately enabled our intelligence community to find Osama bin Laden.” McCain added: “In fact, not only did the use of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ on Khalid Sheik Mohammed not provide us with the key leads on bin Laden’s courier, Abu Ahmed; it actually produced false and misleading information.”

Many high-level interrogators, including Glenn L. Carle, Ali Soufan and Matthew Alexander, report that torture is actually ineffective and often interferes with the securing of actual intelligence. A 2006 study by the National Defense Intelligence College concluded that traditional, rapport-building interrogation techniques are very effective even with the most recalcitrant detainees, but coercive tactics create resistance.

Moreover, torture is counter-productive. An interrogator serving in Afghanistan told Forbes, “I cannot even count the amount of times that I personally have come face to face with detainees, who told me they were primarily motivated to do what they did, because of hearing that we committed torture . . . Torture committed by Americans in the past continues to kill Americans today.”

Torture is also illegal and immoral – important points that are ignored in Zero Dark Thirty. After witnessing the savage beating of a detainee at the beginning of the film, the beautiful heroine “Maya” says “I’m fine.” As he’s leaving Pakistan, Maya’s colleague Dan tells her, “You gotta be real careful with the detainees now. Politics are changing and you don’t want to be the last one holding the dog collar when the oversight committee comes.”

Torture is illegal in all circumstances. The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, a treaty the United States ratified which makes it part of U.S. law, states unequivocally: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” The prohibition of torture is absolute and unequivocal. Torture is never lawful.

Yet despite copious evidence of widespread torture and abuse during the Bush administration, and the Constitution’s mandate that the President enforce the laws, Obama refuses to hold the Bush officials and lawyers accountable for their law breaking.

Granting impunity to the torturers combined with propaganda films like Zero Dark Thirty, which may well win multiple Oscars, dilutes any meaningful public opposition to our government’s cruel interrogation techniques. Armed with full and accurate information, we must engage in an honest discourse about torture and abuse, and hold those who commit those illegal acts fully accountable.

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law. Her most recent book is The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse.

11 Years of Guantanamo; Brennan CIA Nomination Consolidates Drone Assassination Strategy

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Bio

Michael Ratner is President Emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York and Chair of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin. He is currently a legal adviser to Wikileaks and Julian Assange. He and CCR brought the first case challenging the Guantanamo detentions and continue in their efforts to close Guantanamo. He taught at Yale Law School, and Columbia Law School, and was President of the National Lawyers Guild. His current books include "Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in the Twenty-First Century America," and “ Who Killed Che? How the CIA Got Away With Murder.” NOTE: Mr. Ratner speaks on his own behalf and not for any organization with which he is affiliated.

Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore. And welcome to this week's edition of The Ratner Report with Michael Ratner, who now joins us from New York City.

Michael is president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, chair of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin, and a board member for The Real News. Thanks for joining us, Michael.MICHAEL RATNER, PRESIDENT EMERITUS, CENTER FOR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS: Good to be with you, Paul.JAY: So what are you following this week? I guess the big issue will be the anniversary of Guantanamo.RATNER: I wish I could say it's a big issue. Of course it's a big issue. But it's a grim anniversary. It's the 11th year of Guantanamo. We're entering the 12th year. The U.S. has had that detention camp since January 11, 2002. The original order came down in November 2001. That's the order that the Center for Constitutional Rights and myself has been challenging since that time. And despite our challenges, despite Obama, we still have Guantanamo there. And we have a Guantanamo—and these numbers are important—that 166 people still remaining at Guantanamo, and that 86 of those, 86 have been cleared for release. That means they're innocent, they shouldn't be there anymore, and they are still there. And they've been there going on, in some cases, 11 years, ten years, nine years. Still there. So we're still running a detention camp.JAY: Why are they still there if they've been cleared for release?RATNER: You know, that gets into the big issue on Guantanamo. It gets into the president's promise to close it. The president on January 22, 2009, wrote an executive order saying exactly it has to be closed in one year from this date and saying it's in the national security interests of the United States and the foreign policy interests and the interests of justice to close Guantanamo. And yet it remains open. So the big question is: why? Well, you know, politicians are politicians. And what happened in Guantanamo—I can do a couple of factors quickly, but they're still at the politicians' door. One is [incompr.] the first people who were ordered released from Guantanamo when Obama became president, the Uyghers from Western China, which is the Muslim split-off group from China, they were picked up in Afghanistan. The U.S. refused to let them come into the United States, despite a federal court order and despite a Uyghur community that was willing to take them in, and despite their complete clearance for release. Obama showed weak knees. That was early in his term, you know, probably by February or March. And then, after he refused to let those Uyghurs into the United States, Congress got in the act. And that goes on and on. Congress then said nobody from Guantanamo can come to the United States, nobody from Guantanamo can be sent to any other country, unless there are all kinds of hurdles that they go through and clearances. And that's now reflected in, like, two years of legislation, which we've talked about before, called the National Defense Authorization Act. Obama signed that again. That contains the Guantanamo restrictions on transfer to the United States and to other countries. Obama said in his signing statement, I think a lot of it's unconstitutional and I may override it. He said that last year as well. But I don't expect him to do it. So my prediction: you and I will be celebrating, sadly, this grim anniversary year after year. And I put it—yes, I put it at the feet of Obama. I put it at the feet of Congress, and also the courts. While at my office we won a right for the Guantanamo detainees to challenge their detentions in courts, that right has not been carried out by the courts, and we have not yet gotten people out in the last few years as a result of any of the litigation. All of it has been reversed in the appeals court. And so we're sitting there now with what I consider to be an incredible human rights and political outrage. The only way people seem to be getting out of the camp now is by death. And we had one death in September, a man named Adnan Latif, who'd been there for ten years. Government claimed suicide. Who knows. It was an overdose of drugs somehow. How he got that in a detention camp when there's a camera on you every second is unclear to me. So Guantanamo is really like the albatross around Obama's neck. But be honest: it's not the only albatross. If we look at what the Obama administration has done, the areas that I care about and have litigated, he's not very much different than President Bush was. If you look at Guantanamo, [it] exists. You look at military commissions, which are those special rum trials, still going on. If you look at death by drone, more under Obama by far than under Bush. If you look at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is the right that they've given the government to surveil your and my conversations, it's as broad as it's ever been. They don't even have to name the U.S. citizens they're surveilling anymore. They can go to the secret court and get a warrant and say, we just want to investigate The Real News, pick up all the American citizens they want by wiretap, and that's it. So Obama on those issues is really hand-in-glove with President Bush. And on torture, of course, yes, he did do an order to stop the worst forms of torture—waterboarding and otherwise. That had actually ended by the time Obama took office.JAY: What about the appointment of John Brennan as director of the CIA?RATNER: Well, that really seals what I've been saying about the two wings of the same bird sense of Bush and Obama on these national security issues that I've been discussing. John Brennan has been the national security adviser for President Obama in the White House. The reason he was that adviser was because he couldn't get to be head of the CIA, which is what Obama wanted to appoint him to four years ago. And he couldn't appoint him to that because Brennan set up the counterintelligence center or the Counterterrorism Center in Washington to fight terrorism. And as part of that, of course, we had the torture techniques employed widely. Brennan was head of that. We had rendition employed widely. Brennan was head of that. So there was too much opposition for Brennan to get to be head of the CIA. Go ahead now four more years. Brennan's been heading the drone program for President Obama. He's become like a brother, as far as we can tell, to President Obama on the drone program. What happens next? Obama nominates Brennan to be head of the CIA. Is there going to be significant opposition? I doubt it. The torture stuff probably won't come up at all. It seems that every member of Congress or at least every member of the Senate is on the same page or almost the same page on the drone issues with a few exceptions. And so probably Brennan is going to sweep through. So what does that tell you about what's happened to the country? When we had Bush in office, I had a tremendous amount of support for the opposition that my office and others have had to Guantanamo, drones, the torture program, getting people prosecuted for torture [inaud.] Obama's taken office, that support has evaporated. And worse than that, they're now putting into the head of the CIA one of the architects of the Bush program, and actually the head of the drone program, essentially. We've seen a normalization now of these issues in the country. JAY: Just to be clear, when you said head of the drone program, now we know from—'cause they told The New York Times, this is Brennan and Obama sitting around, deciding who's going to be killed.RATNER: That's where they make up the kill list. Obama said he signs off on it personally. It includes a wide variety of people, not just people who are alleged terrorists, who they know the names of; it includes what are called signature strikes, which are just people who have characteristics they say belong to terrorists or in the areas where terrorists allegedly hang out; and it includes people killing outside of war zones, which is, I think, what people are really getting upset by, because it may be one thing—it's like a bomber if you're fighting a shooting war, to drop bombs on, you know, the other side; but when you're talking about people who were not in uniforms, who were not in a war zone, but are living in Yemen or living in Somalia, or could be living in the United Kingdom or right here in the United States, you're talking about something else. And that's who's going to be the head of our CIA. So I would say that this country on those issues is really in a hell somewhere. I mean, we have a long way to come back. Eleven years of Guantanamo, six, seven, eight years of drones, a dozen years of torture and no prosecutions for it, and then you throw into the mix the last little bit, a nice film like Zero Dark Thirty—and I mean nice facetiously—that essentially makes an argument that torture works and that we need torture to protect ourselves in the United States. Luckily, while it was nominated for an academy award, its director, who should not be directing, Kathryn Bigelow, was not nominated. But the film confirms, really, what this country has become, which is a country where torture is considered acceptable and necessary for its protection.JAY: Alright. Thanks for joining us, Michael.RATNER: Thank you, Paul.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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Gitmo-go-round: No solution in sight on 11th Guantanamo anniversary

January 11 marks the 11th anniversary since the first inmates were airlifted into the US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay. With an almost blanket ban on transferring prisoners out of Camp Delta in operation, it is unlikely to be the last one.

­The date has been met with outright condemnation by human rights groups – with accusations that have been aired repeatedly over the past decade, to no avail.

“The USA’s claim that it is a champion of human rights cannot survive the Guantánamo detentions, the military commission trials, or the absence of accountability and remedy for past abuses by US personnel, including the crimes under international law of torture and enforced disappearance,” stated Rob Freer of Amnesty International.

Since George W. Bush established the detention camp that would operate outside normal standards of justice on a secluded base in Cuba, Guantanamo has – perhaps more visibly than anything else – eaten away at any moral high ground the US had in its War on Terror.

"The United States has an operation that can only be described as a medieval torture chamber.  It’s in violation of Geneva Convention, and in violation of the US constitution. It violates legal principles such as trial by jury that goes back thousands of years," anthropologist Dr. Mark Mason said to RT.

But while extraordinary renditions, military tribunals and “enhanced interrogation techniques” are largely a part of Camp Delta’s history (the last inmate was brought here in 2008) its continuing existence is perhaps even less justifiable.

It is one thing to capture and hold (potentially) genuine terrorists no-holds-barred, but it is another to be keep innocent people in jail. Shockingly, out of the 166 prisoners who are reported by outside sources to remain in Guantanamo, more than half have been cleared and are actually due for release. But they won’t be allowed to leave.

Just how confident Barack Obama sounded of closing Guantanamo during his initial campaign (repeatedly calling it the terrorists’ top “recruitment tool”) seems implausible in the light of what has happened since.

Obama ordered Guantanamo Bay shut within a year early in 2009, and still promised he would do so during his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech later this year.

What has happened since has been repeated obstruction by Congress, and a consistent display of weak political will from the President. Initial plans to transfer the prisoners to a newly-constructed facility in Illinois, dubbed “Gitmo North”, were struck down by lawmakers.

Further, they used the financial oversight committee to rule that no federal funds could be used to move any Guantanamo inmate to the US mainland.

Attempts to try suspects in US courts were also resisted by local politicians.

But at least acquitted suspects or enemies who have served their term could be repatriated to their own countries (providing they wanted them and could guarantee them safety – hardly a given).

This is no longer easily possible either. In 2011 Congress imposed a rule where the US Defense Secretary would have to sign a waiver promising that any released Guantanamo inmate would not harm America in the future.

As a result, only two people have been released from the facility since 2010. The only other way for people to leave has been to die of illness or to commit suicide.

Congress has overpowered the president by bundling the measures in with the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the overall defense budget of the country. Obama has the power to veto the entire piece of legislation, but not to challenge it.

Obama has threatened to do so several times as Congress has imposed more and more stringent measures on Guantanamo, yet has backed down every time.

The latest NDAA, which further lessens the chance of Guantanamo closing, was signed only earlier this week. Obama reiterated that he wished to shut down Camp Delta, but rationalized his decision by saying “the need to renew critical defense authorities and funding was too great to ignore.”

To many of his supporters in the media and politics, Obama has been handed a problem of someone else’s making, for which there is no solution. But human rights experts have been roundly unimpressed.

“Under international law, domestic law and politics may not be invoked to justify failure to comply with treaty obligations. It is an inadequate response for one branch of government to blame another for a country’s human rights failure. International law demands that solutions be found, not excuses,” said Rob Freer.

“The burden is on Obama to show he is serious about closing the prison,” echoes Andrea Prasow from Human Rights Watch.

With extraordinary legal barriers to anyone leaving now in place, it is likely that Obama will not be able to shut Guantanamo even in his second term. It is not clear his successor will even want to.

In the meantime, this is what will remain:

A $150 million-a-year facility (which, as pointed out by the Obama administration, works out at $800,000 per inmate) that has produced only seven convictions, and holds more than 40 “indefinite detainees” – people who have been told they will face no charges due to lack of evidence, but will not be released, as the US has reason to believe they are dangerous, together with nearly 90 people who should not be there at all.

Whatever danger these people pose to the US (and no one argues that some of them are extremists), it is not likely to be greater than the damage Guantanamo is doing to its reputation.

“After 11 years, Guantanamo has immense symbolic power. To all those who believe in justice, truth and the rule of law it represents a continuing injustice,” Aisha Maniar, from the London Guantanamo Campaign, told RT.

Protestors wear orange prison jump suits and black hoods on their heads during protests against holding detainees at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay during a demonstration in front of the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on January 8, 2013 (AFP Photo / Saul Loeb)
Protestors wear orange prison jump suits and black hoods on their heads during protests against holding detainees at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay during a demonstration in front of the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on January 8, 2013 (AFP Photo / Saul Loeb)

2013: Year of redeeming the Russia-US reset?

Barack Obama (R) and Vladimir Putin (AFP Photo / Jewel Samad)

Barack Obama (R) and Vladimir Putin (AFP Photo / Jewel Samad)

Amid rumors that US President Barack Obama will send a message to Vladimir Putin at the end of January, is the United States finally prepared to give the reset a much needed boost?

Despite the bilateral enthusiasm that accompanied the Russia-US reset, relations between the two nuclear superpowers remain frosty. Indeed, there has even been talk of “another Cold War” emerging between the two Soviet-era enemies.

However, now that the election cycle in Russia and the US is over, political analysts are watching to see if Moscow and Washington can find the political will to finally forge a meaningful partnership.

The first sign of a possible thaw came with the news that Obama will send his National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon to Moscow in late January to meet with President Putin.

"At the end of January, shortly after Barack Obama is sworn in, National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon will come to Moscow on a special mission,” Kommersant newspaper reported on Friday. “The US President's envoy is expected to meet with Vladimir Putin.”

(Donilon) is expected to “convey a message from the US President to the Russian leader," the article said.

Only Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev and US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul are expected to be present at the meeting, Kommersant reported.

In the heat of last year’s US presidential campaign season, which pitted Obama against the Republican challenger, Mitt ‘Russia-is-America’s-number-one-geopolitical-foe’ Romney, the Democratic leader told former President Dmitry Medvedev that he would have more “flexibility” after the elections.

“On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this can be solved but it’s important…to give me space,” Obama was overheard telling Medvedev courtesy of an open mic. “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.”

Now, political analysts are pondering whether the deterioration in Russia-US relations is due to Washington’s fiercely partisan political climate, or if it is simply a case that the Obama administration is not serious about fortifying the bilateral partnership.

To date, the single issue undermining the Russia-US reset is Washington’s plan for installing a missile defense shield in Europe, just miles from the Russian border. Ostensibly designed to protect Eastern Europe from rogue missile attack, the US ABM system also threatens to throw a monkey wrench into the strategic balance of the region.

Moscow has warned the US and NATO on numerous occasions that unless the two sides can reach agreement on the system, the world is heading for “another arms race.”

Despite such grim prospects, Washington continues to deny Russia’s participation in the project, while even refusing to provide Moscow with legal assurances that the system will not, in some hypothetical future crisis (a Romney presidency?) aim the technology at Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

At the same time, the US missile defense shield is a small part of an increasingly large machine, collected under the aegis of NATO, which continues its eastward march. The 28-state military bloc is on a constant membership drive that seems to know no limits.

Even Georgia, the Caucasian nation that launched a military offensive against South Ossetia in August 2008, killing Russian peacekeepers and triggering a 5-day conflict with Russia, has been declared a worthy candidate for membership.

These disturbing facts open a can of worms regarding Washington’s ultimate motives for pursuing a reset with Moscow in the first place. The irony has not been lost on many Russians that at the same time the Obama administration is pushing for renewed bilateral relations, even signing a New Start ballistic missile reduction treaty with Russia, it is adamantly opposed to Russia’s participation in the missile defense project.

Finally, one of the main architects of the Russia-US reset, Michael McFaul, was appointed by Barack Obama to the post of US Ambassador to Russia at practically the same moment that Russia was experiencing street protests.

"The fact is that McFaul is not an expert on Russia," said Channel One analyst Mikhail Leontyev, one of the individuals who spoke out against McFaul’s nomination.

Commenting on the title of McFaul's 2001 book – "An Unfinished Revolution in Russia, The political change from Gorbachev to Putin" – Leontev ventured to ask, "Has Mr. McFaul arrived in Russia to work on his specialty? That is, to finish the revolution?"

It is this sort of suspicion on both sides of the Atlantic that Moscow and Washington will have to overcome before any real breakthrough can be made in the reset.

Robert Bridge, RT

US drone hit hike tied to Afghan pullout

The recent major surge in US assassination drone strikes in Pakistan by American CIA spy agency has been linked to an Obama administration decision to reveal plans for withdrawing most of its forces from neighboring Afghanistan.

Quoting “current and former US intelligence officials,” influential US daily Washington Post attributes the hike in terror drone attacks to “a sense of urgency surrounding expectations that President Obama will soon order a drawdown that could leave Afghanistan with fewer than 6,000 US troops after 2014” in an article published on Friday.

“The strikes are seen as a way to weaken adversaries of the Afghan government before the withdrawal and serve notice that the United States will still be able to launch attacks,” the article contends, citing unnamed intelligence officials.

According to the report, an assassination drone strike in Pakistan’s North Waziristan border region on Thursday was the seventh in 10 days, “marking a major escalation in the pace of attacks.”


The report further reiterates that the series of recent targeted “CIA strikes” are a likely “signal” to militant groups “that the US will still present a threat” after most American-led forces are withdrawn from Afghanistan, quoting “counterterrorism expert” Seth Jones of prominent think tank Rand Corporation, which mainly conducts research studies for the US government.

“With the drawdown in U.S. forces, the drone may be, over time, the most important weapon against militant groups,” Jones is further quoted as saying.

According to the report, US officials have further tied the hike in CIA’s assassination drone attacks to “recent intelligence gains on groups blamed for lethal attacks on US and coalition forces in Afghanistan.”

The daily also states that CIA has begun preparing plans to trim back “its network of bases” across Afghanistan “to five from 15 or more because of the difficulty of providing security for its outposts after most US forces have left” the country, citing a former “intelligence official with extensive experience in Afghanistan.”


“As the military pulls back, the agency has to pull back,” the former US intelligence official is further quoted as saying on the condition of anonymity, “particularly from high-risk outposts along the country’s eastern border that have served as bases for running informant networks and gathering intelligence on al-Qaeda and Taliban strongholds in Pakistan.”

According to the article, CIA’s plans to reduce the number of its bases in Afghanistan are among a wide range of topics that American officials have been negotiating with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who is meeting with top US authorities in Washington this week.

A CIA spokesman, the daily notes, declined to say whether agency officials had met with Karzai.

MFB/MFB

Cameron ‘To Offer EU Referendum In 2018’ In Dutch Speech

David Cameron will enlist the support of the Dutch when he makes a bid to take back powers from Brussels in a long awaited speech on the EU, it has been reported.

According to The Sun the prime minister will travel to The Hague in the Netherlands on 22 January where he will promise British voters an in/out referendum in 2018 if the Conservative Party is returned to power at the next election.

The paper reports that Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte will support Cameron's call for more powers and money to be returned to individual EU nations.

On Thursday Nick Clegg, no doubt aware of Cameron's planned trip, joked with journalists about the coalition partners' different views on Britain's membership of the EU.

“As a native Dutch speaker I will be at hand to give a translation from double-Dutch to just Dutch," the Lib Dem leader said.

Cameron has kept his eurosceptic backbenchers waiting for quite some time to deliver his EU speech, with a large proportion of Tory MPs unlikely to satisfied with anything less than a promise to hold an in/out referendum.

However Cameron's desire to fashion a looser relationship with the EU could prove tricky. Yesterday a delegation of German MPs told the prime minister not to "blackmail" the rest of Europe with threats.

Washington will be watching Cameron's speech closely, with the Obama administration having warned Britain on Wednesday not to turn "inwards" with a referendum.

Philip Gordon, the US assistant secretary for European affairs, made clear that the United States favoured a "strong British voice" within the EU.

Also on HuffPost:

Ex-Gitmo inmates share bitter memories

On the 11th anniversary of the opening of notorious US Guantanamo military prison and torture facility in Cuba, nine former British inmates at the camp gathered to share their bitter experiences while still one more Briton remains held there, Press TV reports.

British citizen Shaker Aamer is among more than a hundred captives still held in the controversial US military prison without any formal charges brought against them, disallowing any chance for legal representation or challenging terror allegations.

The gathering of the former Guantanamo inmates comes as the censured detention and torture facility remains open over four year after US President Barack Obama repeatedly pledged to shut it down as part of his pre-election “change” campaign in 2008.


While some of the ex-captives at Guantanamo talked on camera, others could not, offering at times emotional details about the harsh treatment they underwent at the military prison and how it had changed their lives forever.
“Every year I tell myself maybe …this year Guantanamo will finish, but unfortunately it is 11 years now and still there are people in Guantanamo that authorities at Guantanamo say they are cleared to be released but they have not been released yet,” said former inmate Bisher al-Rawi.

Many former Guantanamo detainees in Britain now work to highlight the injustices they suffered at the hands of US military and intelligence authorities and how lucky they have been to be freed from the facility.

This year’s anniversary comes as John Brennan, one of the chief advocates of the so-called “enhanced interrogation” or torturing of ‘terror suspects’ at Guantanamo and other foreign-based detention facilities run by the US military, has been nominated by Obama as the next director of the country’s spy agency CIA.


As Guantanamo turns eleven, 169 inmates still remain there. Almost half have been cleared, yet there are fears that they probably will never be released.

MFB/MFB

California School Gunman ‘Planned Attack’

One person has been wounded in a shooting at a high school in California, as Vice President Joe Biden said he would provide the president with recommendations to curb gun violence in the next five days.

The victim was airlifted from Taft Union High School, about 120 miles north of Los Angeles, to hospital in nearby Bakersfield.

The suspected gunman, a student at the school, was arrested about 20 minutes after the shooting, said Ray Pruitt, spokesman for the Kern County Sheriff's Department.

The victim's condition was not immediately known. Mr Pruitt said a shotgun was used in the attack.

Local news media reported receiving phone calls from people who were hidden in closets inside the school.

Mr Biden has been meeting groups ranging from victims of gun violence to members of America's powerful gun lobby as the country considers its response to the Newtown school massacre, which left 26 people dead.

"I have committed to him I will have his recommendations to him by Tuesday," Biden said on Thursday, ahead of a meeting with sportsman and hunting organisations.

Mr Biden said the recommendations would be ideas gleaned from the various groups he has been meeting with in recent weeks. 

He hinted that his ideas could include new restrictions on high capacity ammunition magazines and more comprehensive background checks for gun buyers.

The Vice President is due to talk with representatives from the National Rifle Association, which opposes reforms like the reinstatement of an assault weapons ban - and has called for armed guards in all US schools.

Biden and other White House officials have also met mental health advocates to try to figure out how to make it harder for disturbed people to get firearms.

On Wednesday Mr Biden said Mr Obama may take executive action intended to prevent gun attacks.

Mr Biden's involvement in this task force comes in response to the December massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, where 20 children and six staff members were killed by a 20-year-old gunman. 

Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14 after killing his mother, Nancy Lanza, at her home. He later killed himself.

He had taken his mother's guns, including a rifle which fires 20 to 30 rounds at a fast pace.

The AR-15 style rifle Lanza used is America's most popular rifle. It is also the weapon most commonly used in mass shootings in the US and is the same as the one used by the gunman in the cinema shooting in Aurora, Colorado.

Post-Assad plans: US focuses on Syrian chemical arms

US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey (R) speak during a press conference at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, on January 10, 2013 (AFP Photo / Saul Loeb)

US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey (R) speak during a press conference at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, on January 10, 2013 (AFP Photo / Saul Loeb)

Painting a picture of a post-Assad Syria, Washington has voiced concern over how it can secure the country's chemical weapons stockpiles in case the regime falls while under attack. Some experts warn that this is only a new pretext for meddling.

Speaking to reporters, US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said he was concerned about how the US and its allies would be able to secure the chemical and biological weapons stored in various locations across Syria and make sure they do not end up in the wrong hands.

"I think the greater concern right now is, what steps does the international community take to make sure that when Assad comes down, that there is a process and procedure to make sure we get our hands on securing those sites," Panetta told a news conference. "That, I think, is the greater challenge right now."

Stressing that the US has no plans of putting ground troops in Syria, the Pentagon chief did however add that the US could provide forces if the Assad government agrees to a peaceful transition. “You always have to keep the possibility that, if there is a peaceful transition and international organizations get involved, that they might ask for assistance in that situation."

At the same press conference, General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that if the Assad government decides to use its chemical weapons, the US military would be unable to stop it. He therefore stressed that the US must rely on deterrence and continue warning Syria that using them would be unacceptable.

“The act of preventing the use of chemical weapons would be almost unachievable,” Dempsey told reporters at the Pentagon. “You would have to have such clarity of intelligence, persistent surveillance, you’d have to actually see it before it happened. And that’s unlikely, to be sure.”

US President Barack Obama has said that the Assad government's use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line” and cause him to change his “calculus” about possible military intervention in Syria.

Earlier, the Pentagon said that any military effort to seize Syria’s stockpiles of chemical weapons would require some 75,000 troops.

Middle East commentator and blogger Karl Sharro believes the talk about such stockpiles is just another pretext for Washington to get involved in Syrian affairs.

“There is a process of planning for the day after Assad, as Western powers are imagining it,” he told RT. “They are piling up different reasons for them to step in and take control of the country.”

He stressed that there are multiple forces engaged in this process, saying that “it is really shocking that the fate of Syria can be decided from outside this blatantly.”


Brahimi ‘flagrantly biased’

Meanwhile, Damascus has slammed UN and Arab League envoy for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi as “flagrantly biased,” casting doubt on his role as a mediator in the crisis that has claimed over 60,000 lives since March 2011.

The international peace envoy told the BBC that he didn’t see Assad as a part of a transitional government, and called for him to step down. Brahimi added that “ruling for 40 years is a little bit too long,” referring to Assad, who inherited the presidency from his father, whose tenure lasted 30 years.

The pro-Assad al-Watan newspaper referred to Brahimi as "a tool for the implementation of the policy of some Western countries."

Joe Scarborough Gets Male Chauvinist Award of the Day


[h/t Scarce]

Joe Scarborough needs some sensitivity lessons. You don't snap your fingers at someone, talk over them, verbally barrage them with accusatory nonsense, and then claim you're not a chauvinist.

Wonkette:

Joe Scarborough is trying to do the right thing. He is trying to get Barack Obama to hire more women. That is good! GOOD FOR YOU JOE SCARBOROUGH. (It is also somewhat akin to the Republican mouthpieces foaming that Chuck Hagel is too mean to gays, but baby steps.) Unfortunately, then Mika calls him a chauvinist, and he tries to make the point about how not-chauvinist he is by yelling over all the women, and snapping his fingers in their faces. This is … problematic.

I think the whole "more women in the Cabinet" idea is concern trolling on MSNBC's part right now anyway. It isn't as if this President doesn't have a strong record of putting women in high places. Ahem, Hillary Clinton, Janet Napolitano, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, Kathleen Sibelius, and Hilda Solis, anyone? Please.

There's no question there's a pipeline problem, as panelists on Alex Wagner's show pointed out this morning. Speaking strictly for me, I'll take the most qualified candidate regardless of gender, sexual preference, or skin color. Shoot, they could dye their hair purple for all I care if they're qualified.

That doesn't stop Scarborough from being outraged over the lack of women appointees, and in his outrage, demonstrating that Mika was absolutely correct to call him a chauvinist.

You know what happens to a man who snaps his fingers in my face? You probably don't want to know. Suffice it to say, I hear nothing of what they might say after that. Nothing. Zero.

Funny how he fails to mention the savaging of a very qualified Susan Rice by his guys, isn't it?

Spot The “Blockbuster” Retail Season

In the chart below, the blue bar is Toys 'R' Us retail sales for 2011. Red is 2012. Hence our confusion: just which is this "blockbuster" retail season CNBC's Bob Pisani keeps referring to - the blue or the red? Oh, and yes, the reason for the collap...

Jim Grant Exposes “The Bureau Of Money Materialization” And A Submerging America

Jim Grant spends exactly the correct amount of time (zero) discussing the "urban myth' of the trillion dollar coin in this brief interview on CNBC; instead deciding to try and strike up some intelligent understanding of the dire situation we face. By ...

‘US can’t ensure safety of own citizens’

Protesters hold a demonstration outside the offices of the National Rifle Association in Washington DC on December 17, 2012, demanding the gun lobby stand down in reaction to the fatal shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Forty-five percent of people responding to a Press TV poll say they believe the US government is unable to ensure the safety of its citizens in the wake of recent shooting incidents plaguing the country.

The data, gathered from December 30, 2012 to January 9, 2013, also found that 34 percent of respondents saw proposal by the United States’ top gun lobby, National Rifle Association (NRA), to place armed guards in all US schools as a strategy to sell more guns and reap more benefits.

The poll also showed that 21 percent considered arming school staff the best way to prevent gun massacres in US schools.

On December 21, 2012, NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said that guns protect American children at schools and called for armed police officers to be posted in every school across the country.

There have been several deadly shootings across the United States over the several past months.


On December 14, 2012, 20 children and six adults were killed by a gunman -- who later killed himself -- at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The assailant had also killed his mother earlier in the day.

In another shooting incident a week later, four people, including the shooter, were killed in the state of Pennsylvania. A number of police officers were also injured in the exchange of fire.

After the Sandy Hook massacre, a Gallup poll found that the majority of Americans would like stricter gun laws and a ban on high-capacity firearms.

Over 100,000 US citizens have signed the White House’s We the People petition on line, asking the administration of President Barack Obama to make gun laws stricter and to promote a national debate on gun control.

MN/MHB

The World In 2030

Authored by Joseph S. Nye, originally posted at Project Syndicate,

What will the world look like two decades from now? Obviously, nobody knows, but some things are more likely than others. Companies and governments have to make informed guesses, because some of their investments today will last longer than 20 years. In December, the United States National Intelligence Council (NIC) published its guess: Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds.

The NIC foresees a transformed world, in which “no country – whether the US, China, or any other large country – will be a hegemonic power.” This reflects four “megatrends”:

[These trends exist today, but during the next 15-20 years they will deepen and become more intertwined, producing a qualitatively different world. For example, the hundreds of millions of entrants into the middle classes throughout all regions of the world create the possibility of a global “citizenry” with a positive effect on the global economy and world politics. Equally, absent better management and technologies, growing resource constraints could limit further development, causing the world to stall its engines.]

1. Individual Empowerment and the growth of a global middle class;

2. Diffusion of Power from states to informal networks and coalitions;

3. Demographic changes, owing to urbanization, migration, and aging;

4. Increased demand for food, water, and energy.

Each trend is changing the world and “largely reversing the historic rise of the West since 1750, restoring Asia’s weight in the global economy, and ushering in a new era of ‘democratization’ at the international and domestic level.” The US will remain “first among equals” in hard and soft power, but “the ‘unipolar moment’ is over.”

It is never safe, however, to project the future just by extrapolating current trends. Surprise is inevitable, so the NIC also identifies what it calls “game-changers,” or outcomes that could drive the major trends off course in surprising ways.

First among such sources of uncertainty is the global economy: will volatility and imbalances lead to collapse, or will greater multipolarity underpin greater resilience? Similarly, will governments and institutions be able to adapt fast enough to harness change, or will they be overwhelmed by it?

Moreover, while interstate conflict has been declining, intrastate conflict driven by youthful populations, identity politics, and scarce resources will continue to plague some regions like the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. And that leads to yet another potentially game-changing issue: whether regional instability remains contained or fuels global insecurity.

Then there is a set of questions concerning the impact of new technologies. Will they exacerbate conflict, or will they be developed and widely accessible in time to solve the problems caused by a growing population, rapid urbanization, and climate change?

The final game-changing issue is America’s future role. In the NIC’s view, the multi-faceted nature of US power suggests that even as China overtakes America economically – perhaps as early as the 2020’s – the US will most likely maintain global leadership alongside other great powers in 2030. “The potential for an overstretched US facing increased demands,” the NIC argues, “is greater than the risk of the US being replaced as the world’s preeminent political leader.”

Is this good or bad for the world? In the NIC’s view, “a collapse or sudden retreat of US power would most likely result in an extended period of global anarchy,” with “no stable international system and no leading power to replace the US.”

The NIC discussed earlier drafts of its report with intellectuals and officials in 20 countries, and reports that none of the world’s emerging powers has a revisionist view of international order along the lines of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or the Soviet Union. But these countries’ relations with the US are ambiguous. They benefit from the US-led world order, but are often irritated by American slights and unilateralism. One attraction of a multipolar world is less US dominance; but the only thing worse than a US-supported international order would be no order at all.

The question of America’s role in helping to produce a more benign world in 2030 has important implications for President Barack Obama as he approaches his second term. The world faces a new set of transnational challenges, including climate change, transnational terrorism, cyber insecurity, and pandemics. All of these issues require cooperation to resolve.

Obama’s 2010 National Security Strategy argues that the US must think of power as positive-sum, not just zero-sum. In other words, there may be times when a more powerful China is good for the US (and for the world). For example, the US should be eager to see China increase its ability to control its world-leading greenhouse-gas emissions.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has referred to the Obama administration’s foreign policy as being based on “smart power,” which combines hard and soft power resources, and she argues that we should not talk about “multipolarity,” but about “multi-partnerships.” Likewise, the NIC report suggests that Americans must learn better how to exercise power with as well as over other states.

To be sure, on issues arising from interstate military relations, understanding how to form alliances and balance power will remain crucial. But the best military arrangements will do little to solve many of the world’s new transnational problems, which jeopardize the security of millions of people at least as much as traditional military threats do. Leadership on such issues will require cooperation, institutions, and the creation of public goods from which all can benefit and none can be excluded.

The NIC report rightly concludes that there is no predetermined answer to what the world will look like in 2030. Whether the future holds benign or malign scenarios depends in part on the policies that we adopt today.

The upper chart below shows US share of real global GDP under four 'alternate' scenarios. The lower chart illustrates patterns in the shift in global economic clout across regions (measured in terms of regions’/countries’ share of global GDP) in 2010 and in our four scenarios for 2030. The four scenarios are:

  • Stalled Engines–a scenario in which the US and Europe turn inward and globalization stalls.
  • Fusion–a world in which the US and China cooperate, leading to worldwide cooperation on global challenges.
  • Gini-Out-of-the-Bottle–a world in which economic inequalities dominate.
  • Nonstate World–a scenario in which nonstate actors take the lead in solving global challenges.

GlobalTrends_2030 by xxyyxxyy123123

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Mehdi’s Morning Memo: 1% For You, 32% For Us

The ten things you need to know on Friday 11 January 2013...

1% FOR YOU, 32% FOR US

Who says MPs are out of touch, eh? From the Mirror's splash:

"Grasping MPs sparked fury yesterday - by demanding a £20,000 pay rise.

"A poll showed 69% thought their £65,738 salary was not enough.

"Just days after capping benefits and branding hard-up families scroungers, they whined that they should get an average 32% increase."

That would take their salary to £86,250. According to the Guardian, the survey of MPs carried out by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) found that Conservatives - the guys and girls behind the below-inflation 1% rise in benefits - were "the most likely to believe they were underpaid, with 47% saying so, while 39% of Labour MPs and 9% of Liberal Democrats held the same view".

Personally, I think there is a case to be made for higher salaries for MPs - but clearly now is not the time to make it. It's difficult to disagree with Unison's Dave Prentis: "At a time when millions of workers are getting zero pay rises, the idea that MPs believe they deserve a 32 per cent increase is living in cloud cuckoo land."

2) HERE COME THE GERMANS

First, Barack, now Angela. From the Times:

"David Cameron's hopes of negotiating looser ties between Britain and Brussels are all but impossible, according to an ally of Angela Merkel.

"Gunther Krichbaum, chairman of the Bundestag's European Affairs Committee, said that the Prime Minister's strategy was unwise and risked opening a Pandora's box that would threaten European stability.

"He also urged Mr Cameron not to "blackmail" the rest of Europe with threats as he tries win opt-outs from EU treaties."

The paper notes how his intervention comes "after President Obama's Assistant Secretary of State for Europe warned that Britain would be diminished in America's eyes if it marginalised itself within the EU.

"The flurry of diplomatic activity underlines the high stakes for Mr Cameron and his Europe policy with Britain's closest allies. The Prime Minister will promise a referendum in the next Parliament on a new relationship with the EU in a speech this month."

However, the Sun reports that

"David Cameron will hit back at President Obama’s attack on his EU referendum plan by unveiling a major European ally — the Dutch.

"The Sun has learned the PM will spell out his vision of a post-crisis Europe on January 22.

"And he will almost certainly make the speech in The Hague. Dutch leader Mark Rutte will back his bid to fight for powers and money to be returned to nation states."

3) GIVE MONEY, GET A JOB

You could not make this up. From the Independent:

"A Conservative Party donor and venture capitalist whose charity funds two academy schools was appointed an education minister today.

"Labour raised questions about a possible conflict of interest after John Nash was named as the successor to Lord Hill of Oareford, who was promoted to Leader of the Lords on Monday following the surprise resignation of Lord Strathclyde.

"Mr Nash, his family and companies have donated about £300,000 to the Conservatives since the mid-1980s. The charity he founded, Future, sponsors the Pimlico Academy and Millbank Primary Academy in London. He is a former chairman of the British Venture Capital Association."

Nash will be made a peer but won't take a salary and won't take any decisions in which his charity is involved.

Well, that's okay then.

4) BLAIR'S BANKING UNION

There was a time, not so long ago, when Tony Blair had to make do with a modest MP's salary.

Nowadays, however, as the Times reports, the ex-premier is able to do things like this:

"Tony Blair is in talks about a commercial alliance with one of the most highly paid bankers in the world.

"The combination would bring together Michael Klein's unrivalled contacts in global finance with the former Prime Minister's relationships in politics and government, particularly in the Middle East.

"The discussions, which could lead to a merger of their companies, highlight Mr Blair's ambitions for his commercial operations, which generate millions of pounds a year from advising governments and companies around the world.

The paper says "Mr Klein was co-head of Citigroup's investment bank, which made billions of dollars of losses on holdings of mortgage securities in the financial crisis".

A shameless alliance? You tell me.

5) 'SOCIAL ENGINEERING'

The former defence secretary and darling of the Tory right, Dr Liam Fox, has written a letter to 60 constituents. So what, I hear you ask?

Let the Daily Mail explain:

"Liam Fox has become the most prominent Conservative yet to announce that he will vote against gay marriage.

"The former defence secretary dismissed David Cameron's 'absurd' plans as a form of 'social engineering' that is 'divisive, ill-thought through and constitutionally wrong'.

"In a letter seen by the Daily Mail, Dr Fox said same-sex unions will alienate Conservative Party members and weaken the Church.

"He warned that pressing ahead with plans to introduce gay marriage is enraging 'sections of the British public who are not normally stirred to political anger', and called for a rethink before 'things get out of hand'."

BECAUSE YOU'VE READ THIS FAR..

Watch this video of two cats sharing one bowl of food. Go on, you know you want to..

6) PHONE HACKING, PART 557

The Guardian splashes on "the first hacking conviction":

"Detective Chief Inspector April Casburn, 53, was found guilty of misconduct in public office at Southwark crown court after the jury decided she had tried to sell information from the phone-hacking inquiry, which was set up in 2010, to the News of the World."

Meanwhile, my colleague Ned Simons reports:

"The government will look 'absurd' if it rejects the Leveson Report’s recommendations for the regulation of the press in favour of a Royal Charter, a former chairman of the Conservative Party has said.

"Lord Fowler, also a former chairman of the House of Lords Communications Committee, has urged David Cameron to reverse his opposition to Lord Justice wrLeveson’s suggestion for the statuatory underpinning of the independent self-regulation of the press.

"On Friday peers will debate the Leveson Report, the recommendations of which has split parliament, the coalition and the Tory party down the middle."

7) WERE THE CURTAINS DRAWN, MATTHEW?

From the Daily Mail:

"Skills Minister Matthew Hancock missed his chance to publicise a flagship policy to help unemployed youths become more employable - by oversleeping.

"The red-faced minister was spurned by ITV's Daybreak after he was late for his primetime breakfast slot just before 7am.

"He has admitted that he could not get out of bed on time, despite the broadcaster sending a chauffeur-driven executive car to get him from his West London home."

8) 'THE RAPE OF JUSTICE'

A shocking story on the front of the Independent (with an eye-catching infographic as its image):

"Fewer than one rape victim in 30 can expect to see her or his attacker brought to justice, shocking new statistics reveal.

"Only 1,070 rapists are convicted every year despite up to 95,000 people – the vast majority of them women – suffering the trauma of rape – according to the new research by the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office and the Office for National Statistics.

"The figures have reignited controversy over the stubbornly low conviction rates for sex crimes, as well as the difficulties in persuading victims to go to police in the first place."

9) 'BARBARIC SLAUGHTER'

Is Pakistan's Sunni majority engaged in a war on its Shia minority? From the Guardian:

"The vicious double bombing of a snooker club capped one of the bloodiest days in Pakistan for many months yesterday, leaving more than 100 people dead and hundreds injured in three different attacks.

".. Many of the dead and wounded, Murtaza said, were from the Shia sect of Islam, which extremist groups drawn from Pakistan's majority Sunni population regard as heretics.

"Shias, many of whom are members of the Hazara ethnic community in Quetta, have been particularly targeted by sectarian terror groups. Human Rights Watch said the government's failure to protect Shias 'amounts to complicity in the barbaric slaughter of Pakistani citizens.'"

10) 'ONESIE NATION' LIB DEMS

'Call Clegg' on LBC yesterday morning didn't go so well for the deputy prime minister. Even though he had a little 'help' from his friends..

From the Daily Mail:

"After half an hour of tough questioning, Nick Clegg must have been relieved to get a light-hearted question about whether he had worn a onesie.

"But caller 'Harry from Sheffield', was later unmasked as Harry Matthews, 20, a Liberal Democrat student activist and former intern in Mr Clegg's office - who bought the outfit for him.

".. He describes himself online as 'King of the Young Liberals', and gave Mr Clegg the green Incredible Hulk onesie at a party.

"Speaking afterwards, Mr Clegg denied the call was a stunt, saying: 'Of course I had no idea who the guy was.'"

Nick Clegg's 'Incredible Hulk onesie' can be seen here.

The Huffington Post UK's picture desk has done a mock-up of Clegg wearing his green onesie here.

“My core philosophy," the Lib Dem leader joked in front of the parliamentary press gallery lunch yesterday, "is of the Onesie Nation"

PUBLIC OPINION WATCH

From the Sun/YouGov poll:

Labour 42
Conservatives 31
Lib Dems 11
Ukip 10

That would give Labour a majority of 112.

140 CHARACTERS OR LESS

@DavidJonesMP Huge gap in my zeitgeist awareness. Until today I didn't know what a onesie was and thought it was pronounced "oh-kneesy".

@StewartWood Big paradox for UK Eurosceptics that their view that EU membership holds back our engagement with US & China is not shared by the US & China

@caitlinmoran Nadine Dorries: "The teenagers ask me a lot of questions now." "What about?" Unspoken answer: what it's like eating balls. #bbcqt

900 WORDS OR MORE

Philip Collins, writing in the Times, says: "If David Cameron wants to win in 2015 he must find a big problem to take on. Championing care of the elderly fits the bill."

Menzies Campbell, writing in the Guardian, says: "Britain's future in Europe must be defined by its national interests, not those of the Conservative party."

Fraser Nelson, writing in the Telegraph, says: "The Tories have a moral mission – and David Cameron should say so."


Got something you want to share? Please send any stories/tips/quotes/pix/plugs/gossip to Mehdi Hasan (mehdi.hasan@huffingtonpost.com) or Ned Simons (ned.simons@huffingtonpost.com). You can also follow us on Twitter: @mehdirhasan, @nedsimons and @huffpostukpol

On the News With Thom Hartmann: Decriminalization of Marijuana Possession Is one of New...

In today's On the News segment: New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said that decriminalization of marijuana possession is one of his top legislative priorities; there’s talk coming out of the White House that President Obama is seriously considering hosting a climate summit; Sheriff Joe Arpaio is dispatching members of his armed, volunteer posse to schools around Maricopa county; and More.

TRANSCRIPT

Thom Hartmann here – on the news…

You need to know this. So-called Free Trade is destroying our national manufacturing base. According to a new report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, free trade relations with China, beginning in 2000, are responsible for killing off 30% of the manufacturing jobs we had in this nation. You can see this decline in the raw numbers. Around 2001, there were 17 million manufacturing jobs in America. Today, that’s collapsed to 11.5 million. And, according to the Economic Policy Institute, nearly 3 million of those lost manufacturing jobs went directly to China since 2001. Thanks to so-called Free Trade, our "job creators" are exporting those crucial blue-collar jobs that once sustained a prosperous middle class, from the end of World War 2 all the way until the 1980’s. And without those jobs, Americans are forced into the minimum wage service sector, asking, “Would you like Fries with that?” or greeting people at the door saying, “Welcome to Wal-Mart.” This is exactly what the transnational billionaires who push for these trade agreements want. And until we drop out of these so-called free trade agreements, and once again begin protecting domestic manufacturing with tariffs or VAT taxes – the middle class will continue to shrink – and America will look more and more like a Third-World nation.   

In screwed news…the days of guaranteed retirement benefit in the form of a pension are long gone. As numbers out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics show – defined benefit retirement pensions are on a drastic decline since 1981. That was the year when over 80% of full-time workers in the private sector participated in a pension plan. By 1997, that number had fallen to just over 50%. And by 2011, looking at all workers in all private businesses in America, fewer than 20% of workers have some sort of pension retirement plan. This creates massive economic insecurity for seniors – especially now that Republicans in the House are trying to give Social Security and Medicare to Wall Street. It also adds to the growing list of things that Corporate America, in its quest for higher and higher profits, is taking from their workers. In recent months – we’ve seen employers promise to cut hours to avoid providing health insurance, we’ve seen the right to free political speech taken away, guaranteed vacation time and maternity leave don’t exist – workplace safety laws are getting watered down – heck, they’ve even taken our money by flattening our wages during a time of increased productivity. In some states, they even want to take away our bathroom breaks! This is nothing short of theft. And pretty soon, we’ll be handing over the shirts on our backs, just so our bosses can squeeze out whatever profits they can.     

In the best of the rest of the news…

If you don't want your kids' school guarded by a gun-toting posse of excitable volunteers – then stay out of Maricopa County, Arizona. Beginning this week – Sheriff Joe Arpaio is dispatching members of his armed, volunteer posse to schools around that county, saying it will prevent violence. Arpaio’s posse is comprised of 3,000 mostly-volunteer officers – with a good chunk of them owning firearms. All posse members pay for their own weapons and equipment, but are insured by the Sheriff’s office. As you might expect, some parents are uneasy with the idea of armed posse members camped out in front of their children’s’ school. As one parent told a local news outlet, “They have guns? No, I don’t like that, and I can’t believe something like this would be implemented without speaking to parents first.” What we have here is yet another gun nut who thinks more guns will solve gun violence – and who thinks the best way to protect kids is to turn our schools into military zones. It's enough to make Americans long for the good ol’ days when Sheriff Joe’s posse was just looking for the President’s birth certificate!

Coming off the hottest year ever recorded in the United States, there’s talk coming out of the White House that President Obama is seriously considering hosting a climate summit early in his second term. As the Guardian reports, “The White House has given encouraging signals to a proposal for Obama to use the broad-based, bipartisan summit, to launch a national climate action strategy.” Given that the last year has seen super storms, super droughts, and super heat – we’re past-due for action on global climate change. And not since 2009, when Democrats in the House passed cap-and-trade legislation, which was later filibustered by Republicans in the Senate, has there been any real legislative solution to our warming planet. A summit is a start – but the time for talk is over – and the time for action was yesterday.

And finally…the nation’s most influential state could be taking a big step in the right direction when it comes to stopping Richard Nixon’s failed drug war. In his State of the State Address on Wednesday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said that decriminalization of marijuana possession is one of his top legislative priorities this year. Referring to the thousands of people in the state who are busted for non-violent drug possession, Cuomo said, “It’s not fair, it’s not right. It must end, and it must end now.” Already, the number of marijuana arrests in New York is expected to decline, now that the courts have barred “stop and frisk” searches without reasonable suspicion. About half of all the people arrested in New York City for pot possession were targets of a "stop and frisk." After California decriminalized marijuana – arrests for the drug dropped 61% - which means fewer taxpayer dollars being funneled into an unwinnable drug war. It's time for the rest of the nation to chill out like California, Washington, Colorado, and, hopefully, New York state.

And that’s the way it is today – Thursday, January 10, 2013. I’m Thom Hartmann – on the news.

Demanding the right to digitally protest: Hacktivists petition the White House to legalize DDoS

Is temporarily slowing down a website a legal form of protest? Current US law says it isn’t, but hacktivists want the White House to make changes that would force the government to reconsider their witch-hunt against alleged computer criminals.

In the latest WhiteHouse.gov petition to go viral, the Obama administration is asked to make a method of momentarily crippling a website comparable to real word demonstrations, essentially allowing for a whole new legal form of online protest.

“With the advance in internet technology comes new grounds for protesting,” writes ‘Dylan K’ of Eagle, Wisconsin.

Dylan’s petition, uploaded this week to the White House’s We the People page, is the most recent of these electronic pleas on the website to generate national headlines. A series of petitions in late 2012 demanding the peaceful secession of certain states from the US garnered nearly one million signatures from across the country, and just this week the Obama administration was prompted to respond to one popular request to depot CNN host Piers Morgan over his outspoken anti-gun views. That call for action, advocated by Second Amendment proponents and firearm owners concerned over a possible rifle ban, eventually accumulated around 110,000 electronic signatures.

When the White House responded to the petition to deport Morgan this week, press secretary Jay Carney said Americans shouldn’t let “arguments over the Constitution’s Second Amendment violate the spirit of its First.”

Those rallying for new computer laws say that current legislation limits those very constitutional rights, though, and that one electronic form of action should be covered under the First Amendment — the provision that provides for the freedom of speech, protest and assembly.

In the latest instance, the White House is asked to evaluate a federal rule that currently makes it unlawful to engage in distributed denial-or-service, or DDoS, attacks — a harmless but effective way of flooding a website’s server with so much traffic that it can’t properly render pages for legitimate users.

Performed by both seasoned hackers and novice computer users alike, DDoS-ing a website essentially makes certain pages completely unavailable for minutes, hours or days. Unlike real world protests, though, demonstrators don’t even have to leave the house to protest. Instead, humongous streams of information can be sent to servers with a single mouse click, only for that data to become so cumbersome that the websites targeted can’t properly function.

Under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a DDoS assault is highly illegal. For those familiar with the method, though, they say it’s simply a matter of voicing an opinion in an online format and should be allowed.

“Distributed denial-of-service is not any form of hacking in any way,” states the petition. “It is the equivalent of repeatedly hitting the refresh button on a webpage.”

Overloading a targeted website with too much traffic, says Dylan K, is “no different than any ‘occupy’ protest.” According to him and the roughly 1,100 cosigners, there is much common ground between the two. “Instead of a group of people standing outside a building to occupy the area, they are having their computer occupy a website to slow (or deny) service of that particular website for a short time,” he says.

For companies that are hit with DDoS assaults, though, they sing a different song. In 2006, controversial radio host Hal Turner had his website taken offline after members of the then-infant hacktivist movement Anonymous used denial-of-service attacks to shut down his site to visitors. Turner said the bandwidth overflow cost him thousands of dollars in fees from his hosting company.

When Turner tried to sue those he blamed for the DDoS attack, a federal judge for the United States District Court in New Jersey eventually dismissed his claim. Other “hackers,” however, haven’t been so lucky.

When PayPal, Visa and MasterCard announced in 2010 that it would no longer accept funds for the website WikiLeaks, Anonymous and others responded with a DDoS attack on the payment service providers. The following summer, the US Department of Justice filed an indictment against 14 Americans they accused of participating in shutting down PayPal.

That same year, a homeless hacker using the alias “Commander X” was charged with waging a DDoS attack on the official government website of Santa Cruz, California because he opposed the city’s policy that outlawed sleeping in public space. X could have been sentenced to serious time for committing a felony, but he escaped the United States, allegedly seeking refuge in Canada where he is reported to be in hiding today.

“For a 30-minute online protest I’m facing 15 years in a penitentiary,” he told the National Post last year while on the run. According to an interview he gave last month with Ars Technica, he also participated in OpPayBack — the Anonymous-led assault PayPal and others over their WikiLeaks blockage.

California attorney Jay Leiderman has represented X, and has gone on the record to compare DDoS attacks with real life sit-ins.

“A DDoS is a protest, it’s a digital sit it. It is no different than physically occupying a space. It’s not a crime, it’s speech,” he told Talking Points Memo in 2011. “They are the equivalent of occupying the Woolworth's lunch counter during the civil rights movement," The Atlantic quoted him saying last year.

Speaking specifically of the operation against the companies that cut funding to WikiLeaks, the lawyer said online action is equivalent to peaceful protest.

“Take PayPal for example, just like Woolworth's, people went to PayPal and said, I want to give a donation to WikiLeaks. In Woolworth's they said, all I want to do is buy lunch, pay for my lunch, and then I'll leave. People said I want to give a donation to WikiLeaks, I'll take up my bandwidth to do that, then I'll leave, you'll make money, I'll feel fulfilled, everyone's fulfilled,” he said. “PayPal will take donations for the Ku Klux Klan, other racists and questionable organizations, but they won't process donations for WikiLeaks. All the PayPal protesters did was take up some bandwidth. In that sense, DDoS is absolutely speech, it should absolutely be recognized as such, protected as such, and the law should be changed.”

Leiderman added that he considers the use of DDoS not to be an “attack” in some circumstances, but actually legitimate protest.

“[T]he law should be narrowly drawn and what needs to be excised from that are the legitimate protests,” he said. “It's really easy to tell legitimate protests, I think, and we should be broadly defining legitimate protests,” he said.

New York attorney Stanley Cohen, who is representing one of the accused “PayPal 14” hackers responsible for the Anonymous-led operation, agrees.

“When Obama orders supporters to inundate the switchboards of Congress, that’s good politics, when a bunch of kids decide to send a political message with roots going back to the civil rights movement and the revolution, it’s something else,” Cohen told TPM in 2011. “Barack Obama urged people to shutdown the switchboard, he’s not indicted.”

“It’s not identity theft, not money or property, pure and simple case of an electronic sit in, at best,” he said.

So far over 1,100 people agree on WhiteHouse.gov, and hope the Obama administration will get their point. Until then, though, Commander X and others face upwards of a decade in prison apiece for violating a clause in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that makes it unlawful to “knowingly cause the transmission of a program, information code or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damages without authorization to a protected computer.”

With attorneys like Leiderman and Cohen arguing that the damages in questions aren’t quite criminal, the White House may have to respond to the latest WhiteHouse.gov petition. The Obama administration is mandated to respond if it can garner 25,000 signatures in the next month. Until then, though, proponents of DDoS as free speech can cite what Jay Carney said when petitioners rallied for the deportation of Piers Morgan for his call to ban assault weapons.

“The Constitution not only guarantees an individual right to bear arms, but also enshrines the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press – fundamental principles that are essential to our democracy,” said Carney.

Meanwhile, exercising constitutional rights by way of overloading web servers isn’t being accepted as such by the government. That doesn’t mean that Anonymous or other so-called ‘hacktivists’ will change their ways: just last month, members of the hive-mind computer collective waged a DDoS attack on the website of the Westboro Baptist Church after the religious group announced plans to picket the funerals of mass shooting victims in Newtown, Connecticut. Anonymous waged a similar wave of attacks on the Church of Scientology in 2008, the result of which landed a number of Anons in prison for violating federal law.

Guest Post: Where Does The Hatred Of Constitutionalism Come From?

Submitted by Brandon Smith of Alt-Market blog

Where Does The Hatred Of Constitutionalism Come From?

The Constitution of the United States is an undeniably powerful document.  So powerful in fact, that it took establishment elitists with aspirations of globalized governance over a century to diminish the American people’s connection to it.  It’s been a long time coming, but in the new millennium, there is now indeed a subsection of the masses that not only have no relationship to our founding roots, they actually despise those of us who do!

There are a number of reasons for this dangerous development in our culture:  A public school system that rarely if ever teaches children about the revolution, the founders, constitutional liberty, or the virtues of individualism in general.  A mainstream media apparatus that has regurgitated endless anti-constitutional shlock for decades, attacking any person or group that presents a freedom oriented view.  And a governmental structure that has become so corrupt, so openly criminal, that they ignore all aspects of constitutional law without regard, rarely feeling the need to explain themselves.  As a people, we are surrounded daily by the low droning wash-talk of denigration and disdain for our principled foundations.  The wretched ghosts of collectivism and tyranny mumble in our ears from birth to death.  It’s truly a miracle that every man and woman in this nation has not succumbed to the mind numbing hypnotism…

However, our propaganda soaked environment is not the ONLY cause of our self destructive society; many people are themselves to blame.  Severe character flaws and psychological imbalances have left some open to suggestion, manipulation, and fraud.  Their hatred, though fueled in part by the socialization of the establishment, is still theirs to own.

The brutal ignorance on display in mainstream circles against the liberty-minded needs to be addressed.  In my view, the American public is being conditioned to see us as a convenient “enemy” which they can use to project all their internal grief and woe.  Our country is on the verge of collapse, economically, politically, and philosophically.  Corporatized elements of our government and the financial high priests of the international banking sector are behind this calamity, and of course, they don’t plan to take responsibility.  Who better to demonize as the catalyst for all the pain that is coming than the only people who have the awareness and the means to stand against the catastrophe?    

There is no doubt in my mind that a great conflict is near, between those of us who value liberty and constitutional protections, and those who would destroy them.  This battle is unlikely to be solved with words.  The anti-constitutionalist rhetoric is becoming so ruthless, so malicious, that it can only lead to a hardening of our own hearts, and an equally forceful response.

Most of us have seen all the mainstream magazines with front page headlines calling for the retirement of the Constitution.  Most of us know about the suggestions by media entities and political opportunists (including Joe Biden) for Barack Obama to bypass congress and the Constitution, implementing possible gun restriction, registration, and confiscation through “executive order” like a common dictator.  There is an obviously brash and violent effort amongst political players today to mold our government into a godlike entity.  But, this is not what concerns me most.  What concerns me is the subversive boiling poison that is leaking into our culture at the local level, creating freedom hating zombies.  Take, for instance, the anti-constitutionalist crusade by a New Hampshire representative against the New Hampshire Free State Project:

What causes someone to hate freedom-loving people so much that they would destroy their own liberties just to drive us away?  Is this not cutting off their own nose just to spite OUR face?  Or, do they even see the loss of freedom for themselves as a bad thing?

And how about Marine Corporal Joshua Boston, who after sending a letter to Dianne Feinstein stating he would not comply with unconstitutional gun restrictions, is now receiving death threats because of his membership in the NRA:

What is the source of the hatred towards constitutionalists?  Where does it originate?  Here are just some of the personal triggers and methodologies within the mind of the anti-freedom advocate which I believe have sullied them beyond repair…

The Anti-Constitutionalist Suffers From An Inferiority Complex

I have found in my role as a Liberty Movement analyst and through literally tens of thousands of debates that anti-constitution advocates are, for the most part, of limited intelligence.  These are the average useful idiots who know little of history, politics, economics, etc., but feel the desperate need to appear as though they are experts on everything.  This usually results in constant attempts to show off for anyone who will pay attention, usually with sound-bites they heard on the nightly news coupled with remedial attacks against the character of those who dare to step outside the mainstream. 

The problem is that deep down, they know they are not very bright.  And so, they seek to always travel with the herd on every issue, for if they cannot be smart, they can at least be accepted.  Ironically, if constitutionalism was being pushed by the mainstream, they would automatically change their tune. 

It is probable that they have run into a Liberty Movement proponent (most of whom are well versed in history, politics, and economics) at least once in their lives, went in for an attack, and were utterly destroyed.  Their inferiority exposed, they learn to detest anything associated with constitutionalism.         

The Anti-Constitutionalist Does Not Like The Idea Of A Law He Cannot Use To His Advantage

Not all anti-constitutionalists are dense.  A limited few are very intelligent, but morally bankrupt.  The Constitution is not just a legal document; it is also an emotional and spiritual document.  If one does not have a relationship with his own conscience and the concept of natural law, then he will discover little in the founding ideals of America that he agrees with.  Some people (usually corrupt politicians and judges) see the law as a weapon to be used against their ideological opponents, whereas constitutionalists see the law as a shield to protect us from such despots.  The Constitution and the Bill Of Rights are both designed to protect our Absolute Freedoms.  That is, freedoms that are inborn and which no person or government is qualified to give as a gift, or take as if they are a privilege.

Nothing angers those who seek power more than a legal framework which they are not allowed to touch, or shift, or “tweak” to suit their private ambitions.      

Constitutional protections are not meant to be subject to the “buts” and “what ifs” common in the lesser legal world.  They are not open to debate.  Our rights are not subject to the demands of the so-called “majority”.  Our rights are eternal, and unchangeable.  Anti-constitutionalists attempt to work around the absolutes of the document by implementing subversive law backed by flawed logic.  But, a law which destroys previous constitutional rights is not a law which any individual American is required to follow.  Even an amendment that undermines our civil liberties is not legally binding.  The freedoms put forth in the Constitution and the Bill Of Rights are SET IN STONE (and this includes the right to bear arms in common use of the military of our day).  They cannot be undone without destroying the very fabric of the republic.

The Anti-Constitutionalist Hates Those Who Go Against The Tide, Even If The Tide Is Drowning Us All

Some people are predisposed to be followers.  They do not want to take responsibility for their futures or even their own actions.  They do not like questions.  They do not like dilemmas.  They want to be left to wallow in their own private prisons, where they are comfortably enslaved.

I remember participating in an End The Fed rally in Pittsburgh in early 2008 which was, like most activist rallies, meant to expose the uneducated public to ideas they may not have heard before.  I found it interesting that around a quarter of the people who strolled by our picket line automatically sneered, as if by reflex, even though they had probably never heard our position, or even heard of the Fed.  It dawned on me that they were not angered by our political or economic views.  Instead they were angered by the mere fact that we were there.  We were vocal, and defiant, and a disruption to their daily robot-like routine.  They hated us because we were ruining their fantasy of disconnectedness. 

Constitutionalists are predominantly individualists.  We do not cater to collectivist fairy tales.  We do not seek to roll with the tide just for the sake of finding our “place” within the machine.  We do not care about “fitting in” with the mainstream.  This is often confounding and infuriating to those who have labored their whole lives to please “the group”.  They accuse us of being “isolationists” in response.  What they do not comprehend is that illusion and delusion have isolated THEM, while the truth has brought constitutionalists together. 

Constitutionalists Are Not Politically Correct

For the past few decades our society has become engrossed with the idea of “proper language and behavior”.  Of course, their idea of “proper” usually involves ignoring the reality of a thing.  For a Constitutionalist, a spade is a spade, and we tend to call it like we see it.  We don’t bother ourselves with superficial niceties that get in the way of legitimate debate or legitimate change.  We are not “pleasant” and tolerant with those who would kill our freedoms.   We do not pull punches.

We are direct, and sometimes, brutal in our analysis. 

In some parts of the Western world (especially the UK) language has become a game, a game of self censorship and deceit.  This game has made its way to the United States in recent years, and Constitutionalists don’t play.  We know that every overtly collectivist society begins with the fear of open expression.  And so, our blunt honesty rattles those invested in the PC culture.  Their ultimate and ideal revenge would be to see us painted as social malcontents; like people who smoke in public, or wear a mullet…

Constitutionalists Are Passionate In Their Beliefs

A large percentage of men and women in this world have never been truly passionate about anything.  They simply eat, breath, and defecate their way through life, scrounging about the squalor of a broken system for whatever brief moments of comfort they can find.  They have never explored their inner workings or suffered the hardship of individuation.  They have never been forced to seek out an inner strength, a personal treasure, which guides them to a greater purpose.  Everything they think they believe in has been conditioned into them.  Their uniqueness is suppressed, and their characters shallow.  They have never loved an idea, or a principle.

Constitutionalists LOVE liberty and the mechanics of freedom.  We love the values of a sovereign republic and the opportunities that such a system provides when collectivists are removed from the picture.  There is no question or doubt in our minds; we would fight and die to protect the pillars of the Constitution. 

When confronted with this kind of passion, the average person is shocked and sometimes appalled.  The idea of unshakable will is frightening to them.  They are so used to compromising in every aspect of their lives that when they run into an uncompromising man, they reel in horror. 

That which they see as “fanaticism” is instead an excitement, a boundless joy, a fervent desire to protect something universal and precious.  What they see as “extreme”, we see as essential.

The Anti-Constitutionalist Thinks He Knows What’s Best For All Of Us

Most people who seek to deny and destroy constitutional liberties tend to lean towards a collectivist philosophy.  They are usually socialist, or a variation (Marxist, Fascist), and can be professed members of either major political party.  They believe that their vision of a perfect cultural system is the “correct” vision.  They see the Constitution as “archaic” or “outdated”.  They see it as nothing more than an obstacle to progress which must be toppled.

The “perfect world” that the collectivist strives for functions on centralization: the removal of options until there are no choices left for the common man except those which the collectivist wants him to have.  This world usually suffers from limited free speech, limited civic participation, zero tolerance for dissent, near zero privacy from government eyes, a completely disarmed populous, unaccountable leadership, and the encouragement of informer networks and betrayal for profit.  The goal is to intimidate the whole of a nation into dependence on the system, until every necessity from food to self defense is parceled out by the state.  

Collectivists understand one thing very clearly; an America without the Constitution is destined to become a centralized country. 

They will, of course, claim this is a gross exaggeration.  They will claim that this time will be different.  That the collectivist experiments of the past, which produced nothing but destruction and genocide of their own populations, are nothing similar to what they are espousing.  They will pretend as if their vision is new, progressive, and far more practical than the vision of the Founding Fathers.   In the end though, all they are promoting is a system as old as history; the feudal kingdom.  The mercantile oligarchy.  The militarized state.

At the height of their vicious sabotage of the republic, they will demonize our very heritage, claiming that it was a sham.  That we were never able to “live up to our beliefs anyway”.  That we are “hypocrites”, and this somehow negates the reverence we give to the Constitution.  Unfortunately for them, we know better.  We understand that the principles of the Constitution are not something we grasp at all times, but rather, something to which we aspire to, and grow into as our nation matures.  They require patience, and wisdom.  They force us to question our own “brilliance”, and our own egos.  They anchor us, preventing us from being swept away in the storms of fear.

There has never been and there will never be a better method of law and governance than that method which defends the individualism and freedom of the people.  The most fantastic of human accomplishments, in technology as well as in philosophy, spring from the nurturing waters of liberty.  Free minds and hearts create.  They refuse to be contained, and the Constitution gives us license to ensure that they will never be contained, even to the point of revolution. 

To deny constitutionalism, is to endorse oppression.  May we forever rebel against the agents of “progress”.  May we forever give them something to hate.

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Two People Shot In California High School

With gun tzar Joe Biden expected to propose his "gun recommendations" to Obama by next Tuesday, a proposal which will certainly involve some additional measure of gun control, the last thing the nation needed was more gas being poured into the fire today. Yet that is precisely what it got following news that two people had been shot, one of which reportedly a student, at Taft Union High School in the San Joaquin Valley in California earlier. From AP: "A student was shot and wounded at a San Joaquin Valley high school Thursday and a suspect was taken into custody, officials said. The shooting occurred about 9 a.m. at Taft Union High School, an oil and agricultural community about 120 miles northwest of Los Angeles. The student who was shot was flown to a hospital in Bakersfield, said Ray Pruitt, spokesman for the Kern County Sheriff’s Department. There was no immediate word on the victim’s condition. “We have a suspect in custody,” Pruitt said, adding that the person was believed to be a student. Pruitt said it’s believed a shotgun was used in the attack. KERO-TV Bakersfield reported that the station received phone calls from people inside the school who hid in closets."

Reuters adds: "A California ABC affiliate reported that sheriff's deputies were going room-by-room to secure the school and that two people had been shot, but had no immediate word on their condition. It said the shooter had been apprehended by police." Needless to say this will merely inflame tensions over both the cause of such incidents, as well as the mandated response, yet will hardly lead to an amicable resolution for people on both sides of the argument.

Meanwhile, USA today reports:

Vice President Biden said Thursday that he plans to deliver his gun violence task force's recommendations to President Obama by early next week.

"I have committed to him that I will have the recommendations to him by Tuesday," Biden said.

The vice president's comments came at the start of a meeting with representatives of hunters and wildlife interest groups. Biden was tapped to develop a broad set of recommendations for Obama in the aftermath of last month's shooting tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

The vice president said he is considering several recommendations he has heard repeatedly from stakeholders — including instituting universal background checks and limiting size of high-capacity magazines.

"There is a surprising, so far, recurrence of suggestions that we have universal background checks," Biden said.

Later Thursday afternoon, Biden and other senior administration officials will meet with representatives from gun rights groups, including James Baker, legislative director of the powerful National Rifle Association (NRA).

Biden, along with Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, are also scheduled to meet with entertainment industry executives later Thursday.

At this rate February is shaping up to be quite an active month: the debt ceiling, the sequester, possibly more tax hikes, and to top it all: gun control. At least the market is convinced that all will be promptly and effectively resolved, if few others.

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Learning to Love Torture, Zero Dark Thirty-Style

Seven easy, onscreen steps to making US torture and detention policies once again palatable.

On January 11th, 11 years to the day after the Bush administration opened its notorious prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s deeply flawed movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, opens nationwide. The filmmakers and distributors are evidently ignorant of the significance of the date -- a perfect indication of the carelessness and thoughtlessness of the film, which will unfortunately substitute for actual history in the minds of many Americans.

The sad fact is that Zero Dark Thirty could have been written by the tight circle of national security advisors who counseled President George W. Bush to create the post-9/11 policies that led to Guantanamo, the global network of borrowed “black sites” that added up to an offshore universe of injustice, and the grim torture practices -- euphemistically known as “enhanced interrogation techniques” -- that went with them.  It’s also a film that those in the Obama administration who have championed non-accountability for such shameful policies could and (evidently did) get behind. It might as well be called Back to the Future, Part IV, for the film, like the country it speaks to, seems stuck forever in that time warp moment of revenge and hubris that swept the country just after 9/11.

As its core, Bigelow’s film makes the bald-faced assertion that torture did help the United States track down the perpetrator of 9/11. Zero Dark Thirty -- for anyone who doesn’t know by now -- is the story of Maya (Jessica Chastain), a young CIA agent who believes that information from a detainee named Ammar will lead to bin Laden. After weeks, maybe months of torture, he does indeed provide a key bit of information that leads to another piece of information that leads… well, you get the idea. Eventually, the name of bin Laden’s courier is revealed. From the first mention of his name, Maya dedicates herself to finding him, and he finally leads the CIA to the compound where bin Laden is hiding.  Of course, you know how it all ends.

However compelling the heroine’s determination to find bin Laden may be, the fact is that Bigelow has bought in, hook, line, and sinker, to the ethos of the Bush administration and its apologists. It’s as if she had followed an old government memo and decided to offer in fictional form step-by-step instructions for the creation, implementation, and selling of Bush-era torture and detention policies.

Here, then, are the seven steps that bring back the Bush administration and should help Americans learn how to love torture, Bigelow-style.

First, Rouse Fear. From its opening scene, Zero Dark Thirty equates our post-9/11 fears with the need for torture. The movie begins in darkness with the actual heartbreaking cries and screams for help of people trapped inside the towers of the World Trade Center: “I’m going to die, aren’t I?... It’s so hot. I’m burning up...” a female voice cries out. As those voices fade, the black screen yields to a full view of Ammar being roughed up by men in black ski masks and then strung up, arms wide apart.

The sounds of torture replace the desperate pleas of the victims. “Is he ever getting out?” Maya asks. “Never,” her close CIA associate Dan (Jason Clarke) answers.  These are meant to be words of reassurance in response to the horrors of 9/11. Bigelow’s first step, then, is to echo former Vice-President Dick Cheney’s mantra from that now-distant moment in which he claimed the nation needed to go to “the dark side.”  That was part of his impassioned demand that, given the immense threat posed by al-Qaeda, going beyond the law was the only way to seek retribution and security.

Bigelow also follows Cheney’s lead into a world of fear.  The Bush administration understood that, for their global dreams, including a future invasion of Iraq, to become reality, fear was their best ally. From Terre Haute to El Paso, Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine, Americans were to be regularly reminded that they were deeply and eternally endangered by terrorists.

Bigelow similarly keeps the fear monitor bleeping whenever she can. Interspersed with the narrative of the bin Laden chase, she provides often blood-filled footage from terrorist attacks around the globe in the decade after 9/11: the 2004 bombings of oil installations in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, that killed 22; the 2005 suicide bombings in London that killed 56; the 2008 Marriott Hotel bombing in Islamabad that killed 54 people; and the thwarted Times Square bombing of May, 2010. We are in constant jeopardy, she wants us to remember, and uses Maya to remind us of this throughout.

Second, Undermine the Law. Torture is illegal under both American and international law.  It was only pronounced “legal” in a series of secret memorandums produced by the Bush Justice Department and approved at the highest levels of the administration. (Top officials, including Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, evidently even had torture techniques demonstrated for them in the White House before green-lighting them.)  Maintaining that there was no way Americans could be kept safe via purely legal methods, they asked for and were given secret legal authority to make torture the go-to option in their Global War on Terror. Yet Bigelow never even nods toward this striking rethinking of the law. She assumes the legality of the acts she portrays up close and personal, only hedging her bets toward the movie’s end when she indicates in passing that the legal system was a potential impediment to getting bin Laden. “Who the hell am I supposed to ask [for confirmation about the courier], some guy at Gitmo who’s all lawyered up?” asks Obama’s national security advisor in the filmic run-up to the raid.

Just as new policies were put in place to legalize torture, so the detention of terror suspects without charges or trials (including people who, we now know, were treated horrifically despite being innocent of anything) became a foundational act of the administration. Specifically, government lawyers were employed to create particularly tortured (if you’ll excuse the word) legal documents exempting detainees from the Geneva Conventions, thus enabling their interrogation under conditions that blatantly violated domestic and international laws.

Zero Dark Thirty accepts without hesitation or question the importance of this unconstitutional detention policy as crucial to the torture program. From the very first days of the war on terror, the U.S. government rounded up individuals globally and began to question them brutally. Whether they actually had information to reveal, whether the government had any concrete evidence against them, they held hundreds -- in the end, thousands -- of detainees in U.S. custody at secret CIA black sites worldwide, in the prisons of allied states known for their own torture policies, at Bagram Detention Center in Afghanistan, and of course at Guantanamo, which was the crown jewel of the Bush administration’s offshore detention system.

Dan and Maya themselves not only travel to secret black sites to obtain valuable information from detainees, but to the cages and interrogation booths at Bagram where men in those now-familiar orange jumpsuits are shown awaiting a nightmare experience.  Bigelow's film repeatedly suggests that it was crucially important for national security to keep a pool of potential information sources -- those detainees -- available just in case they might one day turn out to have information.

Third, Indulge in the Horror: Torture is displayed onscreen in what can only be called pornographic detail for nearly the film’s first hour. In this way, Zero Dark Thirty eerily mimics the obsessive, essentially fetishistic approach of Bush’s top officials to the subject.  Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney's former Chief of Staff David Addington, and John Yoo from the Office of Legal Counsel, among others, plunged into the minutiae of “enhanced interrogation” tactics, micro-managing just what levels of abuse should and should not apply, would and would not constitute torture after 9/11.

In black site after black site, on victim after victim, the movie shows acts of torture in exquisite detail, Bigelow’s camera seeming to relish its gruesomeness: waterboarding, stress positions, beatings, sleep deprivation resulting in memory loss and severe disorientation, sexual humiliation, containment in a small box, and more. Whenever she gets the chance, Bigelow seems to take the opportunity to suggest that this mangling of human flesh and immersion in brutality on the part of Americans is at least understandable and probably worthwhile.  The film’s almost subliminal message on the subject of torture should remind us of the way in which a form of sadism-as-patriotic-duty filtered down to the troops on the ground, as evidenced by the now infamous 2004 photos from Abu Ghraib of smiling American soldiers offering thumbs-up responses to their ability to humiliate and hurt captives in dog collars.

Fourth, Dehumanize the Victims. Like the national security establishment that promoted torture policies, Bigelow dehumanizes her victims. Despite repeated beatings, humiliations, and aggressive torture techniques of various sorts, Ammar never becomes even a faintly sympathetic character to anyone in the film. As a result, there is never anyone for the audience to identify with who becomes emotionally distraught over the abuses. Dehumanization was a necessary tool in promoting torture; now, it is a necessary tool in promotingZero Dark Thirty, which desensitizes its audience in ways that should be frightening to us and make us wonder who exactly we have become in the years since 9/11.

Fifth, Never Doubt That Torture Works.  Given all this, it’s a small step to touting the effectiveness of torture in eliciting the truth. “In the end, everybody breaks, bro’: it’s biology,” Dan says to his victim.  He also repeats over and over, “If you lie to me, I hurt you” -- meaning, “If I hurt you, you won’t lie to me.” Maya concurs, telling Ammar, bruised, bloodied, and begging for her help, that he can stop his pain by telling the truth.

How many times does the American public need to be told that torture did notyield the results the government promised? How many times does it need to be said that waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, 183 times obviously didn’t work? How many times does it need to be pointed out that torture can -- and did -- produce misleading or false information, notably in the torture of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the Libyan who ran an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and who confessed under torture that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?    

Sixth, Hold No One Accountable. The Obama administration made the determination that holding Bush administration figures, CIA officials, or the actual torturers responsible for what they did in a court of law was far more trouble than it might ever be worth. Instead, the president chose to move onand officially never look back. Bigelow takes advantage of this passivity to suggest to her audience that the only downside of torture is the fear of accountability. As he prepares to leave Pakistan, Dan tells Maya, “You gotta be real careful with the detainees now. Politics are changing and you don’t want to be the last one holding the dog collar when the oversight committee comes…”

The sad truth is that Zero Dark Thirty could not have been produced in its present form if any of the officials who created and implemented U.S. torture policy had been held accountable for what happened, or any genuine sunshine had been thrown upon it. With scant public debate and no public record of accountability, Bigelow feels free to leave out even a scintilla of criticism of that torture program. Her film is thus one more example of the fact that without accountability, the pernicious narrative continues, possibly gaining traction as it does.

Seventh, Employ the Media. While the Bush administration had the Fox television series 24 as a weekly reminder that torture keeps us safe, the current administration, bent on its no-accountability policy, has Bigelow’s film on its side. It’s the perfect piece of propaganda, with all the appeal that naked brutality, fear, and revenge can bring.

Hollywood and most of its critics have embraced the film. It has already been named among the best films of the year, and is considered a shoe-in for Oscar nominations. Hollywood, that one-time bastion of liberalism, has provided the final piece in the perfect blueprint for the whitewashing of torture policy.  If that isn’t a happily-ever-after ending, what is?

Debate: With Chávez Ailing, Venezuela’s Longstanding Divisions Threaten New Political Upheaval

Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based policy forum on Western Hemisphere affairs. He is also an adjunct professor of Latin American politics at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

Juan Gonzalez: Venezuela has postponed today’s presidential inauguration as Hugo Chávez remains hospitalized in Cuba after complications from a fourth cancer operation. The 58-year-old Chávez, who was first elected in 1998, has not been seen in public nor heard from since his surgery on December 11.

The postponement of the inauguration has set off a political crisis in Venezuela. On Wednesday, Venezuela’s top court ruled that Chávez could begin a new term today and be sworn in later before the court. Vice President Nicolás Maduro, who is now in charge of the day-to-day government, praised the ruling.

VICE PRESIDENT NICOLÁS MADURO: [translated] In the name of the legitimate government of the commander president, who was re-elected by the Venezuelan people, the leader of this motherland, the government obeys the decision of the Supreme Court of Justice. Their word and their voice is sacred.

Amy Goodman: Opposition politicians in Venezuela have argued delaying President Chávez’s swearing-in for a new term leaves no one legally in charge of Venezuela once the current term ends today. They’ve called for the appointment of a caretaker president and new elections. Henrique Capriles, who lost October’s presidential election to Chávez, took aim at Venezuela’s judicial system.

HENRIQUE CAPRILES: [translated] The Supreme Court decided to resolve a problem for the ruling party. So what can I now say to Venezuelans? I am an example—and excuse me for speaking in first person, but I am an example of how one must fight against a judicial system that doesn’t work.

Juan Gonzalez: Supporters of Chávez have called for a huge rally outside the presidential palace in Caracas today. Allied leaders, including Uruguay’s José Mujica, Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, are expected to attend.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration has embarked on a discreet, but concerted, weeks-long diplomatic initiative to open channels of communication with the Venezuelan government in the absence of Chávez. In 2002, Chávez survived a coup that toppled him briefly. He has long asserted that that coup was orchestrated by the United States.

Amy Goodman: For more on Venezuela, we’re joined by two guests. Michael Shifter is president of the Inter-American Dialogue, also an adjunct professor of Latin American politics at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. And from Claremont, California, we’re joined by Miguel Tinker Salas, a professor at Pomona College, born in Venezuela, author of The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela. His new book, forthcoming, Venezuela: What Everyone Needs to Know.

Michael Shifter, Miguel Tinker Salas, we welcome you both to Democracy Now!Michael Shifter, talk about what isn’t happening today, the inauguration, and what you feel needs to take place, which side you take now.

Michael Shifter: Well, thank you very much.

I think that it’s not a surprise that the inauguration is not taking place today. I think that President Chávez clearly is very ill. I think there are going to be new elections. I think the government basically wants some time to figure out its strategy, to consolidate the authority of Nicolás Maduro, who is the key figure now, who I think will be the candidate of the government in the elections against Capriles. I don’t know if it’s going to take place in a month or two months, but it seems to me that that’s the scenario.

And it strikes me that the important thing in this situation are the politics. The Chávez government controls the executive, obviously, the judicial branch and also the National Assembly. So, they just—they won an election in October. They won regional elections in December. Chávez has enormous compassion—generates enormous compassion and sympathy among the Venezuelan people, so the government has the upper hand. But as we just heard, Henrique Capriles is beginning to come out and make some statements, because I think—I think people are getting ready for an election. I think the government probably has the edge at this point, but that’s the situation that we’re in.

Juan Gonzalez: And, Miguel Tinker Salas, you’ve questioned whether there is a constitutional crisis, as much of the press reporting has made out, or whether this is really more a strategy of the opposition and external opponents of the Chávez government. Could you talk about that?

Miguel Tinker Salas: Sure. I mean, if this was Panama, Costa Rica, any other country, Honduras, we would not be having this conversation. The reality is, those constitutions are very similar to the Venezuelan constitution, which clearly states in Article 231 that if the president cannot be inaugurated before the National Assembly on January 10th, he can be or she can be sworn in at a subsequent time before the Supreme Court, so that the issue is not a constitutional crisis, although I think the opposition would like to create a constitutional crisis. And we’re seeing a lot of echo of that in the national press and the international press.

The reality is that in Venezuela there is a transition, no doubt about that, but the opposition would like to strike while the iron is hot. They see Chávez weak. They see the Chávez movement possibly weak. They’ve lost two subsequent elections. And what they’re really looking for is an opportunity to expand their base of support. And the challenge for them is that they really—as they have in the past, they’ve cut their nose to spite their face. In the past, they have really engaged in a series of undemocratic actions, and they’re risking, at this point, also drawing on the sympathy vote that Chávez will have and the Chavistas will have. So I think that they’re very—in a very precarious position, but I don’t think we have a constitutional crisis in Venezuela. I think we have a series of positions that are trying to precipitate one, but I don’t see a crisis at this point.

Amy Goodman: We’re going to come back to this discussion and talk about what Hugo Chávez has meant for Venezuela over more than a decade. We’re speaking with Miguel Tinker Salas of Pomona College and Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, D.C. Stay with us.

Warning shot: Gun violence lands US lowest life expectancy among rich nations

(Reuters / Jessica Rinaldi)

(Reuters / Jessica Rinaldi)

Widespread gun ownership and lax firearms controls were deemed major reasons for the US topping a list of violent deaths in wealthy nations. The study comes amid a fiery gun control debate, triggered by the fatal school shooting at Sandy Elementary.

­The 378-page survey by a panel of experts from the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, listed unintentional injuries, quite often caused by guns, among reasons why people in America die young more often than in other countries.

“The prevalence of firearms in the United States looms large as an explanation for higher death rates from violence, suicidal impulses, and accidental shootings,” read the recent study, based on a broad review of mortality and health studies and statistic.

The blame placed on firearms – that in the US are often being stored unlocked at home –comes amid an increasingly divided battle over American gun regulation.  Fiery debate on the issue was triggered anew by the deadly shooting in a Newtown school. The massacre on December 14 claimed lives of 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Conn. – 20 of whom were children.

The study highlights “dramatic” numbers of arms possessions in the US.

For example, the United States has the highest rate of firearm ownership among peer countries — 89 civilian-owned firearms for every 100 Americans, and the US is home to about 35 to 50 per cent of the world's civilian-owned firearms, the report noted.

“One behavior that probably explains the excess lethality of violence and unintentional injuries in the United States is the widespread possession of firearms and the common practice of storing them (often unlocked) at home,” said the survey.

The United States has about six violent deaths per 100,000 residents, says the report, that also reviewed Canada, Japan, Australia and much of Western Europe. None of the 16 other countries examined in the study came anywhere close to that figure. Finland, which is said to have slightly more than two violent deaths per 100,000 residents, was closest to the US in the table.

“Although US youth may be no more violent than those in other countries, they are more likely to carry a firearm. In a survey of high school students in Boston, 5 percent reported carrying a firearm,” showed the study.

The researches listed homicide as the second leading cause of death among people aged 15-24, adding that the large majority of those homicides often involve firearms.

“The presence of a firearm in the home is a risk factor for suicide: fully 52 percent of all US suicides involve a firearm,” researchers found out. 

The survey revealed that the life expectancy for men in the United States ranked the lowest among the 17 countries reviewed, at 75.6 years, while women ranked second lowest at 80.7 years.

To explain this, the researchers examined three categories: the US health care system, harmful behaviors and social and economic conditions.

Thus, in addition to the impact of gun violence, Americans consume the most calories among peer countries and are involved in more accidents involving alcohol and drug use. AIDS, infant mortality and unintentional injuries have been also listed among reasons of lower life expectancy.

“With lives and dollars at stake, the United States cannot afford to ignore this problem,” the report said.

­

Gun control debate reloaded

­The horrific Newtown shooting has once again sparked debates over the nation's gun laws. Many politicians and public figures called for new restrictions, whilst gun rights defenders claim the ban on arms violates the second Amendment and will not stop shooters, because the “real problem is the criminal”.

Vice- President Joe Biden, whose leading a panel on the issue, formed after 20 schoolchildren and six adults were killed on December 14, kicked off a series of meetings on gun violence Wednesday. It will negotiate with gun-control advocates and gun-rights supporters.

His group is expected to recommend to Congress the reinstatement of an assault weapons ban that expired in 2004.

President Obama has vowed to make gun control his priority as soon as he begins his second term on January 20.

The president said he believes that most Americans would support the reinstatement of a ban on the sale of military-style assault weapons as well as background checks on buyers before all gun purchases.

How and Why the US Could Default

Having gotten through the fiscal cliff debacle by the skin of its teeth (somehow passing a deal that both raises taxes AND the deficit), the US political class is now playing chicken with the debt ceiling.

The media, as it likes to do, continues to rave about social issues (gun control being the latest), ignoring the fact that the US would be in technical default already if Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner hadn’t already raided various funds for some $200 billion.

We’re not here to debate social issues, but it’s telling that a US default, something that would affect every American, gets less airtime than assault rifles, which affect less than 5% of the population.

The market, is already giving us hints of what the likely outcome will be. Despite start of the year buying and a seasonal bias, the rallies of the last few days have been very weak, usually peaking out mid-day and then retreating.

More telling however is the big picture view of the S&P 500 where it is tracing out virtually the exact same pattern as it staged going into the failed debt ceiling talks of 2011.

Here’s the S&P 500’s recent action:

Here’s the market action going into the 2011 debt ceiling debacle:

Here’s what followed:

History doesn’t necessarily repeat, but it often rhymes. And the fiscal cliff situation has made it clear that when it comes to issues such as cutting the deficit and debt, US politicians are totally clueless. Remember, Congress hasn't passed a budget in four years, which incidentally goes a long ways towards explaining why we're about to breach the debt ceiling again. The notion that these folks are somehow going to "get religion" about the debt situation will very likely prove to be as misguided as the hope that the fiscal cliff deal would do anything to help the economy.

On that note, we’ve recently prepared a Free Special Report outlining how to prepare for this as well as the coming economic collapse. It’s called: Preparing Your Portfolio For Obama’s Economic Nightmare and it outlines several investments that will profit from Obama and Congress’ misguided economic policies, including one targeted at potentially huge returns when the US breaks through its debt ceiling again.

You can pick up your FREE copy here:

http://gainspainscapital.com/obama-nightmare/

Best Regards

Graham Summers

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‘Hagel unlikely to back Iran war’

New US nominee for secretary of defense, Chuck Hagel, is unlikely to throw his weight behind any scenario for military strike against Iran, an American politician tells Press TV.

“I think if [Chuck] Hagel gets appointed or confirmed by the Senate for the Defense Department, I think that will be a plus from Iran’s point of view because I do not think he would get involved in any plan to go to war with Iran,” said former US Senator in San Francisco Mike Gravel in an exclusive interview with Press TV.

On January 7, US President Barack Obama nominated Hagel as his next defense secretary despite political uproar over the nomination.

“Hagel would not be a friend of Israel. He would not be an enemy but he would certainly be a lot more circumspect with our relationship with Israel,” Gravel pointed out.

The US politician however noted, “The tragedy is that this new [US national security] team is not going to change Obama’s posture to speak with respect to American imperialism, but it could mean a plus with respect to Iran in a couple of instances.”


Hagel left the Senate in 2008. He sometimes spoke against Israel, voted against sanctions on Iran, and even made blunt comments about the influence of the "Jewish lobby" in Washington.

The 66-year-old was the first Republican senator to publicly criticize the war in Iraq, calling it the worst foreign policy blunder since the Vietnam War, and has consistently opposed any plan to launch a military strike against Iran.

ASH/SS

Between a Rock and a Hard Place, or Up Against the Wall?

A friend who teaches in the social sciences–but not economics–wrote:

“Did you read this Marty Feldstein piece in the WSJ yesterday?  I know bupkes about Fed policy, but it seems to me the Fed is between a rock and a hard place.  It continues to buy U.S. securities (in part, by printing money) to keep the economy afloat.  But Feldstein suggests this is all going to come crashing down.  Do you agree? Who should I turn to for an alternative perspective?”

Feldstein warns that both quantitative easing and a softer line on inflation by the Fed are likely to “confuse the general public and undermine confidence in the bank’s commitment to price stability.”  In particular — and I think this what alarmed my friend — was Feldstein’s concern that:

“Because of the Fed’s purchases of bonds and mortgage-backed securities, commercial banks have $1.4 trillion more in reserves than is legally required by the size of their balance sheets. The banks can use these excess reserves to create loans and deposits, which will increase the money supply and fuel inflation…[T]he day will come when aggregate demand is increasing, companies want to borrow, and the banks are willing to lend aggressively….The final problem with the Fed’s unconventional policy is perhaps the most obvious. By keeping long-term interest rates low, it removes pressure on Congress and the Obama administration to deal with budget deficits…The Fed, in short, has killed the bond vigilantes before they could have forced Congress to act.” 

So from Feldstein’s perspective the Fed is interfering with healthy price signals from the bond market to both private agents and the Federal government.  The “bond market vigilantes” schtick is a retort to Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong.

Official U.S. unemployment is 7.8 percent and the employment-to-population ratio is around 6 percentage points below its 2000 peak — lower than it’s been anytime since 1984.  I just went to a session at the American Economics Association meetings in San Diego where Jesse Rothstein argued persuasively that the issue is strictly aggregate demand (not a growing taste for vacations). There is a lot of slack in this economy.

The Federal Reserve isn’t between a rock and a hard place: it’s up against a wall because it can’t lower interest rates below zero.  (In principle, the Fed could tax reserves which would effectively offer banks a negative interest rate for leaving money at the Fed rather than lending it out.)

Feldstein’s worry that the banks are poised for a wild lending binge seems far-fetched in the current climate. And if the banks were headed out for a binge, it’s clear from the last two major  bubbles that regulation, not interest rates, can stop the party.  (Who cares if you are paying 5.5 percent or 6.6 percent if you “know” that your house will appreciate between 25 and 30 percent per year?)

As for creative uses for 1.4 trillion in reserves, blog contrtibutors Heidi Garrett-Peltier, James Heintz, Robert Pollin, and Jeannette Wicks-Lim have a great take on what could be possible if some of the funds that banks are hoarding got pushed out into loans for infrastructure and green investment.

The Grilling that Brennan Deserves

As Washington’s pundit class sees it, Defense Secretary-designee Chuck Hagel deserves a tough grilling over his hesitancy to go to war with Iran and his controversial detection of a pro-Israel lobby operating in the U.S. capital, but prospective CIA Director John Brennan should get only a few polite queries about his role helping to create and sustain Dick Cheney’s “dark side.”

During the upcoming confirmation hearings of these two nominees for President Barack Obama’s national security team, we all may get a revealing look into the upside-down world of Washington’s moral and geopolitical priorities, where too much skepticism about rushing to war is disqualifying and complicity in war crimes is okay, maybe even expected.

Still, there is at least a hope that Brennan’s confirmation hearing might provide an opening for the Senate Intelligence Committee to force out the secret legal justifications and the operational procedures for the lethal drone program that has expanded under Obama, including successfully targeting for death U.S. citizen and al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen.

Over the past few years, senior administration officials have praised the rigorous standards applied to these life-or-death decisions by Brennan and his counterterrorism team, but have refused to release the constitutional rationales for the President exerting these extraordinary powers or to explain exactly the methodology of selecting targets.

Presumably, some committee member will ask Brennan about such nitpicky things as constitutional due process and the Bill of Rights even if the panel will have to scurry into a classified session to hear the answers. But there is still a chance that Brennan or one of the senators will blurt something out, shedding light on one of the darkest corners of the ongoing war against al-Qaeda and other Islamic militants.

Yet, what hits closest to home for many of my Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) colleagues and me is Brennan’s earlier role, under President George W. Bush and CIA Director George Tenet, in corrupting the CIA’s analysis directorate into fabricating fraudulent intelligence to “justify” war on Iraq. From the perspective of CIA analysts who worked by a very different ethos, such treachery is truly unacceptable.

Brennan, as Tenet’s chief of staff and then the CIA’s Deputy Executive Director, had a front-row seat for all this. Former CIA colleagues who served with Brennan before and during the war with Iraq assert that there is absolutely no possibility that Brennan could have been unaware of the deliberate corruption of intelligence analysis.

Brennan’s confirmation hearing, with the nominee under oath, might be the best opportunity to hear his explanation of what he did when he faced two conflicting allegiances – his career advancement on one side and his duty to the nation as an intelligence officer on the other.

Phony Intelligence

After a five-year investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee, the pre-Iraq-war “intelligence” was described by committee chair Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, as “uncorroborated, contradicted, or even non-existent.”

Hagel, then a senator from Nebraska and a member of the committee, was one of two Republicans voting to approve the Senate report, making it bipartisan and presumably annoying some of his more partisan brethren who resisted admitting to the lies that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney used to take the country to war.

Hagel also has co-chaired Obama’s Intelligence Advisory Board, giving him even more insights into the challenges of rebuilding a professional intelligence service, one that puts a commitment to objective analysis over pleasing the boss. If only Brennan could show such a commitment.

A principal objection to Brennan’s return to the CIA is that he has rarely displayed any rigorous discipline in his approach to the truth. One of his most famous deviations from reality was his gilding-the-lily presentation of Seal Team 6’s killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden on May 1, 2011, in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Just hours after Osama bin Laden was killed, Brennan gave the press this rendition of what had happened and how bin Laden had died: “He was engaged in a firefight with those that entered the area of the house he was in. … Just thinking about that from a visual perspective: here is bin Laden … living in this million-dollar-plus compound … in an area that is far removed from the front …  hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield. I think it really just speaks to just, to how false his narrative has been over the years.”

Even giving Brennan the benefit of the doubt about the “fog of war” and such, his spin suggested not so much a lack of still-fuzzy details but an assembling of fake details, his own false narrative if you will. Brennan’s account was more agit-prop than an attempt to tell the story straight.

It was not enough to let the facts speak for themselves – Americans were surely not going to be sympathetic to the man they blame for the 9/11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 innocent people – but Brennan still chose to further belittle bin Laden as a coward hiding behind one of his wives while seeking to save himself.

Later, White House spokesman Jay Carney clarified some of Brennan’s inaccuracies. Bin Laden was not armed; he did not use one of his wives as a shield; and there was no firefight to speak of, only an initial exchange of gunfire between the U.S. commandos and one of bin Laden’s couriers in an adjacent building.

There were other details that came out subsequently, including that bin Laden’s 12-year-old daughter was in the room and watched as he was shot and killed, according to the London Guardian. Pakistani officials said bin Laden’s daughter had been hit in the ankle moments before the American assault team reached the room where they found and killed her father, and she then passed out.

Given the recent sorry history of CIA directors participating in what amount to propaganda and disinformation campaigns aimed as much at the American people as any foreign enemy, a nominee for CIA director should not have a record of making stuff up or misleading the public.

Ducking Hard Truth

Another Brennan example of ducking hard truths was his claim in June 2011 that during the previous year, “there has not been a single collateral death” from CIA drone strikes in Pakistan. Far more credible reporting shows that there have been hundreds of people killed simply for being in the vicinity of an al-Qaeda or Taliban suspect.

Yet, some administration officials are so touchy on this point that they suggest that dissenters might be terrorist sympathizers. On Feb. 5, 2012, the New York Times’ Scott Shane reported the following quote from an anonymous “senior American counterterrorism official”:

“One must wonder why an effort that has so carefully gone after terrorists … has been subjected to so much misinformation. Let’s be under no illusions – there are a number of elements who would like nothing more than to malign these efforts and help Al Qaeda succeed.” So, raising tough questions means you’re with the terrorists.

Brennan had similar problems with forthrightness when he was assigned to explain to a press conference on Jan. 8, 2010, how the infamous “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab almost downed an airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009.

Clearly, Brennan did not expect to be asked a real question, like what motivates an upper-class Muslim youth from Nigeria to do such a thing, but a tenacious 89-year-old Helen Thomas was still in the White House press corps and was one of the very few journalists (as distinct from the stenographers) willing to pose such questions.

Thomas asked why Abdulmuttalab did what he did, a question of human motivation that is rarely part of the Washington conversation.

Thomas: “And what is the motivation? We never hear what you find out on why.”

Brennan: “Al Qaeda is an organization that is dedicated to murder and wanton slaughter of innocents. … They attract individuals like Mr. Abdulmuttalab and use them for these types of attacks. He was motivated by a sense of religious sort of drive. Unfortunately, al Qaeda has perverted Islam, and has corrupted the concept of Islam, so that he’s (sic) able to attract these individuals. But al Qaeda has the agenda of destruction and death.”

Thomas: “And you’re saying it’s because of religion?”

Brennan: “I’m saying it’s because of an al Qaeda organization that used the banner of religion in a very perverse and corrupt way.”

Thomas: “Why?”

Brennan: “I think this is a — long issue, but al Qaeda is just determined to carry out attacks here against the homeland.”

Thomas: “But you haven’t explained why.”

The why would be the sort of question you might wish a CIA director would want answered – and answered honestly – since enemy motivation is a crucial element in winning a war or, more importantly, avoiding one.

Just Boilerplate

But all the American public gets is boilerplate about how al-Qaeda evildoers are perverting a religion and exploiting impressionable young men. Or, as Brennan suggests, some “militants” are just hard-wired for things like knocking down aircraft over Detroit with themselves on board.

There is almost no discussion about why so many people in the Muslim world object to U.S. policies so strongly that they are inclined to resist violently and even resort to suicide attacks. Perhaps, the U.S. and Western proclivity toward intervening in their affairs over many decades – propping up corrupt dictators and favoring Israel over the Palestinians – has left some Muslims looking for any way to strike back, even self-destructive acts of terror.

Maybe today, one of the reasons for the number of “militants” willing to attack Americans might have something to do with drones buzzing over Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen,  Somalia and other locales – and with distant “pilots” getting clearance from Brennan and his associates to push some button and obliterate some unsuspecting target.

Despite the American people’s legitimate right to know what’s being done in their name, Brennan gets thin-skinned when criticized or asked tough questions. Four years ago, when President Obama was first considering Brennan to head the CIA, Brennan faced questions about what he did for the Bush/Cheney “dark side” and promptly withdrew his name. In a bitter letter, he blamed “strong criticism in some quarters, prompted by [his] previous service with the” CIA.

Yet, Brennan’s 25-year career at the CIA would seem to be fair game in evaluating whether he should run the place. His former managers in CIA’s analysis directorate tell me he was a bust as an analyst.

Instead, like former CIA Director (and more recently Defense Secretary) Robert Gates, Brennan’s career zoomed upwards after he caught the attention of key White House officials – in Brennan’s case, George Tenet who held the top intelligence advisory job under President Bill Clinton before he was made CIA deputy director and then director.

Of course, the tradeoff for that kind of advancement often is your integrity, both as an intelligence officer and as a public servant. Indeed, it’s hard to conceive how someone could have flourished in the corrupt world of U.S. intelligence, especially since its descent into the post-9/11 “dark side,” without selling out one’s professionalism and morality.

Those who stood their ground and demonstrated integrity found themselves out on the street or marginalized as “soft on terror” – or maybe they were considered suspiciously finicky when it came to “quaint and obsolete” notions like the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Conventions and the rule of law.

But don’t worry. Endorsing the nomination of Brennan on Wednesday, the editors of the Washington Post tell usthat, although “the administration’s current strategy of countering al-Qaeda in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia with drone strikes is unsustainable … the strikes are certainly legal under U.S. and international law … [even though they] are problematic, given the backlash they have caused in Pakistan.”

Still, it might be nice if the American people could see the secret legal justifications underpinning Brennan’s last four years as keeper of the “kill lists.”

RGIII and the Crisis of Liberalism in the United States

Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize–winning liberal political columnist, wrote that he knows who is to blame for Washington Redskins superstar quarterback Robert Griffin III’s horrific knee injury. He has seen the culprit and it is us. Reaching for a cliché with more age than the jokes at the White House Correspondents Dinner, Robinson writes, “If you are a football fan and are appalled by what happened Sunday and want to find someone to blame, look in the mirror.”

At first I shrugged off this analysis as a top columnist venturing out of his comfort zone to discuss a topic that had all of Washington buzzing, and falling flat. But Robinson’s analysis actually reveals more than the liberal lion intended. It may say little about how RGIII was hurt, but it says so much about the Washington consensus liberalism that Robinson so ably represents.

There was a time when progressives, as a point of principle, made an effort to side with the people against the tyrannical and corrupt. The best of Bob Herbert, Jimmy Breslin or Molly Ivins always makes clear that the fish rots from the head and that the Beltway wisdom that “you get the government you deserve” served only to shield those in positions of power. But times have changed. Now, if you criticize President Barack Obama, if you say that armed drones and kill-lists shouldn’t be part of US foreign policy, or that a negotiated austerity is nothing to cheer, or criticize anyone but Republicans, twenty-first-century liberals like Robinson see their role as blaming you for hobbling the president, weakening his hand and making the situation worse.

This shift of liberalism’s focus is seen so clearly in Robinson’s analysis of what happened to RGIII last Sunday. Robinson writes that the transcendent rookie was injured because “it is the fans—in the stands and in front of their television sets—who have made football our national sport. Risk and injury are not just a part of the game, they are at its heart.” This analysis might seem to make sense to some on the face of it, but it’s really just hot air that actually obscures the role that powerful people played in making RGIII’s injury an inevitability.

If Eugene Robinson would only turn his gaze away from all of us, he’d see that fault actually starts not in the stands but in the owner’s box with Redskins boss Dan Snyder. Snyder is a billionaire and despite years of terrible decisions, mediocre finishes and a franchise brand that’s racist as all hell, the Redskins are the third most valuable organization in the National Football League. Even though Snyder holds this reservoir of resources, the field on Sunday was in a condition that would shame a public high school. As Chris Chase ofUSA Today wrote, “FedEx Field’s turf was a dangerous embarrassment on Sunday. Before the game even started, there were bald patches between the hashmarks and sloppy turf near midfield. Once play began, conditions quickly got worse. Multiple Redskins slipped on the team’s first possession. When their feet slid, chunks of grass would fly up like after a golfer hitting a 9-iron…. Players didn’t need cleats, they needed work boots.”

The quality of the natural grass turf claimed not only RGIII but also Seahawks pass rushing specialist Chris Clemons, who tore his ACL and is now out of action indefinitely. The conditions at FedEx Field have been an issue for years, with Minnesota Vikings superstar Adrian Peterson tearing every ligament in his knee last season on the same turf. The league should have long ago sanctioned Dan Snyder for putting players at risk. Now, his penny-pinching has jeopardized the face and future of the franchise. If nothing else, this nationally televised OSHA violation should have been front and center in Eugene Robinson’s column, but neither the field nor Snyder are even mentioned.

Then there is Coach Mike Shanahan. Robinson’s column is actually framed as a defense of Shanahan’s decision to keep RGIII in the game after a first-quarter injury made the already ailing quarterback a limping, ineffective mess. The column is actually titled, “Don’t blame Shanahan for leaving RGIII in the game.” Shanahan, in Robinson’s mind, was just enacting the will of the fans to see RGIII squeezed dry until he was twitching husk on the stadium’s torn-up turf. This is beyond garbage. I watched the game with people who bleed the team colors of burgundy and gold, and they were screaming at the television after the first quarter to take RGIII out of the game. They were suffering with every limp, every hobble and every agonizing step the quarterback took. They wanted him out of there not just because he was completely ineffective and the team has an able backup in Kirk Cousins. They knew that he is the future of this team and that future needed to be protected. They’ve also grown to love the rookie and didn’t want to see him in pain. The imperative to sit RGIII was obvious to everyone but Shanahan. Former Washington Wizards Etan Thomas, in a terrific column on the Post’s website called “Robert Griffin III: An Open Letter” describes the reaction of his 7-year-old super-fan son Malcolm who said, “If RGIII is hurt and playing, couldn’t he get hurt more? Look at his face daddy. He is in pain. Why is he still playing if he is in that much pain?” Shanahan froze and didn’t protect his player, costing his team the game and perhaps costing the franchise its star. After the game, the veteran coach was even worse, saying that he kept RGIII in the game because the 22-year-old demanded to keep playing. What a profile in courage. As sports columnist Tom Boswell wrote in the Post, “If ever a veteran coach needed to accept responsibility for the reins of a player, it was Shanahan over Griffin in this game. Yet he simply passed the buck to his player.”

Even worse, USA Today is reporting that Mike Shanahan has openly misrepresented what team orthopedist Dr. James Andrews said to him about RGIII’s knee. As they reported, “Andrews insisted he never cleared Griffin to return to a game in which Griffin initially injured his knee, even though coach Mike Shanahan again tried to lay the responsibility on him.” If this is true, then Mike Shanahan should never work in the NFL again. If it’s true, it’s also a horrific example of a person in authority abusing their power. Once again, this is something Eugene Robinson could have discussed. Instead, just as Shanahan passed the buck to RGIII, Robinson passed the buck onto us.

Yes, football is a game unsafe at any speed. Yes, it’s governed by a toxic macho ethos that makes injuries like we saw Sunday inevitable. But there are real flesh-and-blood people we can hold to account for what took place. There was a time when we could count on liberals with a public platform to be a part of this fight. That era is starting to look as outdated as calling a team the “Redskins” or as much past its prime as a certain 60-year-old coach. If there is going to be a real fight against power and privilege, not just in sports but in politics, it might be time to champion some new fighters.

Debt Ceiling and Guns: Using Presidential Authority to the Fullest

Anyone who thinks congressional Republicans will roll over on the debt ceiling or gun control or other pending hot-button issues hasn’t been paying attention.

But the President can use certain tools that come with his office – responsibilities enshrined in the Constitution and in his capacity as the nation’s chief law-enforcer — to achieve some of his objectives.

On the debt ceiling, for example, he might pay the nation’s creditors regardless of any vote on the debt ceiling – based on the the Fourteenth Amendment’s explicit directive (in Section 4) that “the validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.”

Or, rather than issue more debt, the President might use a loophole in a law (31 USC, Section 5112) allowing the Treasury to issue commemorative coins – minting a $1 trillion coin and then depositing it with the Fed.

Both gambits would almost certainly end up in the Supreme Court, but not before they’ve been used to pay the nation’s bills. (It’s doubtful any federal court, including the Supremes, would enjoin a President from protecting the full faith and credit of the United States).

Or consider guns. As Vice President Joe Biden said Wednesday, “there are executive orders, executive action that can be taken” that don’t require congressional approval.

The President probably needs new legislation to reinstate a ban on the sale of military-style assault weapons, stop the sale of high-capacity ammunition clips, and require background checks on all gun buyers.

But he has wide authority to use gun laws already on the books as the basis for regulations or executive orders strengthening gun enforcement. 

There’s ample precedent. After a mass school shooting in Stockton, California, in 1989, George H.W. Bush issued an executive order, pursuant to the 1968 Gun Control Act, that banned imports of certain assault weapons unless used for sporting purposes. Years later, Bill Clinton by executive order banned imports of almost five dozen different assault weapons that had been modified to get through that “sporting purposes” exemption. President Obama could go even further.

To take another example, the National Firearms Act of 1934 gives a president broad powers to oversee gun dealers. By executive order, the President could tighten that oversight.

Under his law-enforcement authority the President could also issue executive orders improving information sharing among state and local law enforcement authorities about illegal gun purchases,tracking gun buyers’ history of mental illness, and maintaining data on gun sales for longer periods.

The Administration has already issued a regulation designed to prevent sales of semi-automatic rifles to Mexican drug cartels. It requires stores in states bordering Mexico to notify federal law enforcement officials when someone buys two or more of a particular type of high-caliber, semi-automatic rifle with a detachable magazine. That regulation, too, could be expanded upon.

No doubt such executive orders and regulations would be challenged in the federal courts (the regulation on semi-automatic rifles is now in a federal appeals court that’s expected to rule on its legality within the next few months).

But it’s a fair argument that when the nation is jeopardized – whether in danger of defaulting on its debts or succumbing to mass violence – a president is justified in using his authority to the fullest.

The mere threat of taking such actions – using the President’s executive authority to pay the nation’s bills or broadly interpret gun laws already on the books – could be useful in pending negotiations with congressional Republicans.

They have not shied away from using whatever means available to them to get their way. The President should not be reluctant to play hardball, either.

‘Stay for our sake’: US urges Britain to remain in EU

British Prime Minister Cameron listens as U.S. President Obama speaks. (Reuters / Eddie Keogh)

British Prime Minister Cameron listens as U.S. President Obama speaks. (Reuters / Eddie Keogh)

Amid growing concerns that the UK may drop out of the EU, the Obama administration has publicly stated that it is in US interests to see Britain as part of the bloc. Many see the move as interference in the national debate.

The comments from Washington come days before British Prime Minister David Cameron is set to deliver a speech in which he is expected to promise to hold a referendum over Britain’s place in the 27-member bloc.

Philip Gordon, assistant secretary for European Affairs at the State Department, warned that there would be consequences for Britain if it quits the union or plays lesser role in it.

"We welcome an outward-looking European Union with Britain in it. We benefit when the EU is unified, speaking with a single voice, and focused on our shared interests around the world and in Europe. We want to see a strong British voice in that European Union. That is in the American interest," he said during a visit to London on Wednesday.

Washington officials have made similar warnings in private in recent weeks, but this marked the first time a named senior member of Obama’s government has spoken on the record about the risks posed by Britain’s EU-membership debate.

Cameron has been largely in favor of the UK staying within the EU, but believes there is a need to redefine the relationship in light of moves towards further integration by countries using the euro single currency. The premier suggested "fresh consent" for any new deal that emerges as a result of negotiations with other EU countries.

"The US wants an outward-looking EU with Britain in it, and so do we," a spokeswoman for the PM’s Downing Street office responded to the US comments, according to Reuters.

However, the opposition Labour Party's foreign affairs spokesman Douglas Alexander pointed out that the US comments raised concerns about Britain's role in Europe.

"There is today a real risk of Britain sleepwalking towards exit because of a prime minister motivated more by the need for party unity than by the interests of the country," he said.

It comes after anti-EU members of Cameron's ruling Conservatives demanded a new UK role inside the bloc, or a referendum on whether Britain should leave the Union altogether. Many MPs are calling for the premier to carry out a referendum on the question of whether the UK remains in the EU or not, a so-called ‘in-out vote,' which Cameron doesn’t support.

According to a Times poll in June, 82 per cent of people would like a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. ComRes poll made for the Independent in December 2011 stated that 52 per cent of British people would agree that the eurocrisis provided an ideal opportunity for the UK to quit the bloc. Twenty-six per cent of Britons disagreed, while the remaining 22 per cent couldn’t agree or disagree. It should be pointed out that Conservative voters (58 per cent) were more likely than Labour (45 per cent) voters to agree that Britain should leave the EU.

Some argue that if Britain turns its back on the EU, its biggest trading partner, it may then compensate by drawing closer ties with the US.

Meanwhile, British business leaders have warned that a UK exit from Europe will leave it outside a possible future trade deal between the US and the EU.

American motivation

As Washington makes clear its view on the issue, many have accused the US of only looking out for its own interests.

“America wants Britain to stay in the EU because it only wants to deal with one centralized political state, not have the inconvenience of dealing with different democratic governments. Obama and the US Government couldn’t care less about our national interests or democratic rights. They just want an easy life,” British MEP Gerard Batten said on his website.

And according to Batten, it’s time the UK ignored outside opinion and made its own decisions.

“Britain needs to be a truly independent country, not just from the EU, but from the USA as well. We need to start running our own country for our own benefit,” he said.

7 Ways “Zero Dark Thirty” Excuses Torture

Zero Dark Thirty could not have been produced if the officials involved in U.S. torture policy had been held accountable.

January 10, 2013  |  

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On January 11th, 11 years to the day after the Bush administration opened its  notorious prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,  Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s deeply flawed movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, opens nationwide. The filmmakers and distributors are evidently ignorant of the significance of the date -- a perfect indication of the carelessness and thoughtlessness of the film, which will unfortunately substitute for actual history in the minds of many Americans.

The sad fact is that  Zero Dark Thirty could have been written by the tight circle of national security advisors who counseled President George W. Bush to create the post-9/11 policies that led to Guantanamo, the global network of borrowed “ black sites” that added up to an offshore universe of injustice, and the  grim torture practices -- euphemistically known as “enhanced interrogation techniques” -- that went with them.  It’s also a film that those in the Obama administration who have championed non-accountability for such shameful policies could and ( evidently did) get behind. It might as well be called  Back to the Future, Part IV, for the film, like the country it speaks to, seems stuck forever in that time warp moment  of revenge and hubris that swept the country just after 9/11.

As its core, Bigelow’s film makes the bald-faced assertion that torture  did help the United States track down the perpetrator of 9/11.  Zero Dark Thirty -- for anyone who doesn’t know by now -- is the story of Maya (Jessica Chastain), a young CIA agent who believes that information from a detainee named Ammar will lead to bin Laden. After weeks, maybe months of torture, he does indeed provide a key bit of information that leads to another piece of information that leads… well, you get the idea. Eventually, the name of bin Laden’s courier is revealed. From the first mention of his name, Maya dedicates herself to finding him, and he finally leads the CIA to the compound where bin Laden is hiding.  Of course, you know how it all ends.

However compelling the heroine’s determination to find bin Laden may be, the fact is that Bigelow has bought in, hook, line, and sinker, to the ethos of the Bush administration and its apologists. It’s as if she had followed an old government memo and decided to offer in fictional form step-by-step instructions for the creation, implementation, and selling of Bush-era torture and detention policies.

Here, then, are the seven steps that bring back the Bush administration and should help Americans learn how to love torture, Bigelow-style.

First, Rouse Fear. From its opening scene,  Zero Dark Thirty equates our post-9/11 fears with the need for torture. The movie begins in darkness with the actual heartbreaking cries and screams for help of people trapped inside the towers of the World Trade Center: “I’m going to die, aren’t I?... It’s so hot. I’m burning up...” a female voice cries out. As those voices fade, the black screen yields to a full view of Ammar being roughed up by men in black ski masks and then strung up, arms wide apart.

The sounds of torture replace the desperate pleas of the victims. “Is he ever getting out?” Maya asks. “Never,” her close CIA associate Dan (Jason Clarke) answers.  These are meant to be words of reassurance in response to the horrors of 9/11. Bigelow’s first step, then, is to echo former Vice-President Dick Cheney’s mantra from that now-distant moment in which he  claimed the nation needed to go to “the dark side.”   That was part of his impassioned demand that, given the immense threat posed by al-Qaeda, going beyond the law was the only way to seek retribution and security.