2011-08-31 "Rick Perry's secret plan to save blue states from the red states; The Texas governor's states-first approach would overwhelmingly benefit Democratic areas" by Robert Reich
[http://robertreich.org/post/5244220848]
Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was secretary of labor during the Clinton administration.
---
Of all the nonsense Texas Governor Rick Perry spews about states’ rights and the 10th amendment, his dumbest is the notion that states should go it alone. “We’ve got a great Union,” he said at a Tea Party rally in Austin in April 2009. “There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that.”
The core of his message isn’t outright secession, though. It’s that the locus of governmental action ought to be at the state rather than the federal level. “It is essential to our liberty,” he writes in his book, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington, “that we be allowed to live as we see fit through the democratic process at the local and state level.”
Perry doesn’t like the Federal Reserve Board. He hates the Internal Revenue Service even more. Presumably if he had his way taxpayers would pay states rather than the federal government for all the services and transfer payments they get.
This might be a good deal for Texas. According to the most recent data from the Tax Foundation, the citizens of Texas receive only 94 cents from the federal government for every tax dollar they send to Washington.
But it would be a bad deal for most other red states. On average, citizens of states with strong Republican majorities get back more from the federal government than they pay in. Kentucky receives $1.51 from Washington for every dollar its citizens pay in federal taxes. Alabama gets back $1.66. Louisiana receives $1.78. Alaska, $1.84. Mississippi, $2.02. Arizona, $1.19. Idaho, $1.21. South Carolina, $1.35. Oklahoma, $1.36. Arkansas, $1.41. Montana, $1.47, Nebraska, $1.10. Wyoming, $1.11. Kansas, $1.12.
On the other hand, fiscal secession would be a boon to most blue states. The citizens of California – harder hit by the recession than most – receive from Washington only 78 cents for every tax dollar they send to Washington. New Yorkers get back only 79 cents on every tax dollar they send in. Massachusetts, 82 cents. Michigan, 92 cents. Oregon, 98 cents.
In other words, blue states are subsidizing red states. The federal government is like a giant sump pump – pulling dollars out of liberal enclaves like California, New York, Massachusetts, and Oregon – and sending them to conservative places like Montana, Idaho, Oklahoma, Arizona, Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Old South.
As a practical matter, then, Rick Perry’s fight to save America from Washington is really a secret plan to save blue states from red states.
Perry, it turns out, is a closet liberal.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
2011-08-31 "Inside the Spy Unit That NYPD Says Doesn't Exist" by ADAM GOLDMAN and MATT APUZZO from "Associated Press"
NEW YORK-
Working with the CIA, the New York Police Department maintained a list of "ancestries of interest" and dispatched undercover officers to monitor Muslim businesses and social groups, according to new documents that offer a rare glimpse inside an intelligence program the NYPD insists doesn't exist.
The documents add new details to an Associated Press investigation that explained how undercover NYPD officers singled out Muslim communities for surveillance and infiltration.
The Demographics Unit, a squad of 16 officers fluent in a total of at least five languages, was told to map ethnic communities in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut and identify where people socialize, shop and pray.
Once that analysis was complete, according to documents obtained by the AP, the NYPD would "deploy officers in civilian clothes throughout the ethnic communities."
The architect of this and other programs was a veteran CIA officer who oversaw the program while working with the NYPD on the CIA payroll. It was an unusual arrangement for the CIA, which is prohibited from spying inside the U.S.
After the AP report, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the NYPD has kept the city safe and does not take religion into account in its policing. The NYPD denied the Demographics Unit exists.
"There is no such unit," police spokesman Paul Browne said before the first AP story ran. "There is nothing called the Demographics Unit."
Internal police documents show otherwise. An NYPD presentation, delivered inside the department, described the mission and makeup of the Demographics Unit. Undercover officers were told to look not only for evidence of terrorism and crimes but also to determine the ethnicity of business owners and eavesdrop on conversations inside cafes.
A police memorandum from 2006 described an NYPD supervisor rebuking an undercover detective for not doing a good enough job reporting on community events and "rhetoric heard in cafes and hotspot locations."
How law enforcement agencies, both local and federal, can stay ahead of Islamic terrorists without using racial profiling techniques has been hotly debated since 9/11. Singling out minorities for extra scrutiny without evidence of wrongdoing has been criticized as discriminatory. Not focusing on Muslim neighborhoods has been equally criticized as political correctness run amok. The documents describe how the nation's largest police force has come down on that issue.
Working out of the police department's offices at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, the Demographics Unit maintained a list of 28 countries that, along with "American Black Muslim," it considered "ancestries of interest." Nearly all are Muslim countries.
Police used census data and government databases to map areas it considered "hot spots" as well as the ethnic neighborhoods of New York's tri-state area, the documents show.
Undercover officers known as "rakers" — a term the NYPD also denied existed — were then told to participate in social activities such as cricket matches and visit cafes and clubs, the documents show.
Police had a list of "key indicators" of problems. It included obvious signs of trouble such as criminal activity and extremist rhetoric by imams. But it also included things commonly seen in neighborhoods, such as community centers, religious schools and "community bulletin boards (located in houses of worship)."
Rakers were also used to monitor neighborhood sentiment. After CIA drone attacks in Pakistan for instance, current and former officials said, undercover officers would move through Pakistani neighborhoods to listen for angry rhetoric or anti-American comments.
At least one lawyer inside the police department has raised concerns about the Demographics Unit, current and former officials told the AP. Because of those concerns, the officials said, the information gathered from the unit is kept on a computer at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, not in the department's normal intelligence database. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the intelligence programs.
The AP independently authenticated the NYPD presentation through an interview with one official who saw it and by reviewing electronic data embedded in the file. A former official who had not seen the presentation said the content of the presentation was correct. For the internal memo, the AP verified the names and locations mentioned in the document, and the content is consistent with a program described by numerous current and former officials.
In an email Tuesday night, Browne disputed the AP's original story, saying the NYPD only follows leads and does not simply trawl communities.
"We do not employ undercovers or confidential informants unless there is information indicating the possibility of unlawful activity," Browne wrote.
That issue has legal significance. The NYPD says it follows the same guidelines as the FBI, which cannot use undercover agents to monitor communities without first receiving an allegation or indication of criminal activity.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the CIA sent a respected veteran officer, Lawrence Sanchez, to New York, where he worked closely with the NYPD. Officials said he was instrumental in creating programs such as the Demographics Unit and met regularly with unit supervisors to guide the effort. After a two-year rotation in New York, Sanchez took a leave of absence, came off the agency's payroll and became the NYPD's second-ranking intelligence official. He formally left the agency in 2007 and stayed with the NYPD until last year.
The CIA recently dispatched another officer to work in the Intelligence Division for what officials described as a management sabbatical. A U.S. official familiar with the NYPD-CIA partnership said Sanchez's time in New York was a unique assignment created in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. But the official said the current officer's job was much different and was an opportunity for him to learn from an organization outside the CIA.
Both the CIA said and the NYPD have said the agency is not involved in domestic spying and said the partnership is the kind of counterterrorism collaboration Americans expect.
The NYPD Intelligence Division has unquestionably been essential to the city's best counterterrorism successes, including the thwarted plot to bomb the subway system in 2004. Undercover officers also helped lead to the guilty plea of two men arrested on their way to receive terrorism training in Somalia.
"We throw 1,200 police officers into the fight every day to make sure the same people or similarly inspired people who killed 3,000 New Yorkers a decade ago don't come back and do it again," Browne said earlier this month when asked about the NYPD's intelligence tactics.
The Demographics Unit had officers who spoke Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu, according to the police presentation. The undercover officers were divided into teams based on ethnicity. Arab officers could blend into Arab neighborhoods and Southwest Asian officers, those from Pakistan and Afghanistan, could more easily blend into those neighborhoods.
Rep. Yvette Clarke, a Democrat who represents much of Brooklyn and sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, said the NYPD can protect the city without singling out specific ethnic and religious groups. She joined Muslim organizations in calling for a Justice Department investigation into the NYPD Intelligence Division. The department said it would review the request for an investigation.
Clarke acknowledged that the 2001 terrorist attacks made Americans more willing to accept aggressive tactics, particularly involving Muslims. But she said Americans would be outraged if police infiltrated Baptist churches looking for evangelical Christian extremists.
"There were those who, during World War II, said, 'Good, I'm glad they're interning all the Japanese-Americans who are living here,'" Clarke said. "But we look back on that period with disdain."
———
Online:
View the NYPD documents: http://bit.ly/q5iIXL and http://bit.ly/mVNdD8
NEW YORK-
Working with the CIA, the New York Police Department maintained a list of "ancestries of interest" and dispatched undercover officers to monitor Muslim businesses and social groups, according to new documents that offer a rare glimpse inside an intelligence program the NYPD insists doesn't exist.
The documents add new details to an Associated Press investigation that explained how undercover NYPD officers singled out Muslim communities for surveillance and infiltration.
The Demographics Unit, a squad of 16 officers fluent in a total of at least five languages, was told to map ethnic communities in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut and identify where people socialize, shop and pray.
Once that analysis was complete, according to documents obtained by the AP, the NYPD would "deploy officers in civilian clothes throughout the ethnic communities."
The architect of this and other programs was a veteran CIA officer who oversaw the program while working with the NYPD on the CIA payroll. It was an unusual arrangement for the CIA, which is prohibited from spying inside the U.S.
After the AP report, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the NYPD has kept the city safe and does not take religion into account in its policing. The NYPD denied the Demographics Unit exists.
"There is no such unit," police spokesman Paul Browne said before the first AP story ran. "There is nothing called the Demographics Unit."
Internal police documents show otherwise. An NYPD presentation, delivered inside the department, described the mission and makeup of the Demographics Unit. Undercover officers were told to look not only for evidence of terrorism and crimes but also to determine the ethnicity of business owners and eavesdrop on conversations inside cafes.
A police memorandum from 2006 described an NYPD supervisor rebuking an undercover detective for not doing a good enough job reporting on community events and "rhetoric heard in cafes and hotspot locations."
How law enforcement agencies, both local and federal, can stay ahead of Islamic terrorists without using racial profiling techniques has been hotly debated since 9/11. Singling out minorities for extra scrutiny without evidence of wrongdoing has been criticized as discriminatory. Not focusing on Muslim neighborhoods has been equally criticized as political correctness run amok. The documents describe how the nation's largest police force has come down on that issue.
Working out of the police department's offices at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, the Demographics Unit maintained a list of 28 countries that, along with "American Black Muslim," it considered "ancestries of interest." Nearly all are Muslim countries.
Police used census data and government databases to map areas it considered "hot spots" as well as the ethnic neighborhoods of New York's tri-state area, the documents show.
Undercover officers known as "rakers" — a term the NYPD also denied existed — were then told to participate in social activities such as cricket matches and visit cafes and clubs, the documents show.
Police had a list of "key indicators" of problems. It included obvious signs of trouble such as criminal activity and extremist rhetoric by imams. But it also included things commonly seen in neighborhoods, such as community centers, religious schools and "community bulletin boards (located in houses of worship)."
Rakers were also used to monitor neighborhood sentiment. After CIA drone attacks in Pakistan for instance, current and former officials said, undercover officers would move through Pakistani neighborhoods to listen for angry rhetoric or anti-American comments.
At least one lawyer inside the police department has raised concerns about the Demographics Unit, current and former officials told the AP. Because of those concerns, the officials said, the information gathered from the unit is kept on a computer at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, not in the department's normal intelligence database. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the intelligence programs.
The AP independently authenticated the NYPD presentation through an interview with one official who saw it and by reviewing electronic data embedded in the file. A former official who had not seen the presentation said the content of the presentation was correct. For the internal memo, the AP verified the names and locations mentioned in the document, and the content is consistent with a program described by numerous current and former officials.
In an email Tuesday night, Browne disputed the AP's original story, saying the NYPD only follows leads and does not simply trawl communities.
"We do not employ undercovers or confidential informants unless there is information indicating the possibility of unlawful activity," Browne wrote.
That issue has legal significance. The NYPD says it follows the same guidelines as the FBI, which cannot use undercover agents to monitor communities without first receiving an allegation or indication of criminal activity.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the CIA sent a respected veteran officer, Lawrence Sanchez, to New York, where he worked closely with the NYPD. Officials said he was instrumental in creating programs such as the Demographics Unit and met regularly with unit supervisors to guide the effort. After a two-year rotation in New York, Sanchez took a leave of absence, came off the agency's payroll and became the NYPD's second-ranking intelligence official. He formally left the agency in 2007 and stayed with the NYPD until last year.
The CIA recently dispatched another officer to work in the Intelligence Division for what officials described as a management sabbatical. A U.S. official familiar with the NYPD-CIA partnership said Sanchez's time in New York was a unique assignment created in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. But the official said the current officer's job was much different and was an opportunity for him to learn from an organization outside the CIA.
Both the CIA said and the NYPD have said the agency is not involved in domestic spying and said the partnership is the kind of counterterrorism collaboration Americans expect.
The NYPD Intelligence Division has unquestionably been essential to the city's best counterterrorism successes, including the thwarted plot to bomb the subway system in 2004. Undercover officers also helped lead to the guilty plea of two men arrested on their way to receive terrorism training in Somalia.
"We throw 1,200 police officers into the fight every day to make sure the same people or similarly inspired people who killed 3,000 New Yorkers a decade ago don't come back and do it again," Browne said earlier this month when asked about the NYPD's intelligence tactics.
The Demographics Unit had officers who spoke Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu, according to the police presentation. The undercover officers were divided into teams based on ethnicity. Arab officers could blend into Arab neighborhoods and Southwest Asian officers, those from Pakistan and Afghanistan, could more easily blend into those neighborhoods.
Rep. Yvette Clarke, a Democrat who represents much of Brooklyn and sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, said the NYPD can protect the city without singling out specific ethnic and religious groups. She joined Muslim organizations in calling for a Justice Department investigation into the NYPD Intelligence Division. The department said it would review the request for an investigation.
Clarke acknowledged that the 2001 terrorist attacks made Americans more willing to accept aggressive tactics, particularly involving Muslims. But she said Americans would be outraged if police infiltrated Baptist churches looking for evangelical Christian extremists.
"There were those who, during World War II, said, 'Good, I'm glad they're interning all the Japanese-Americans who are living here,'" Clarke said. "But we look back on that period with disdain."
———
Online:
View the NYPD documents: http://bit.ly/q5iIXL and http://bit.ly/mVNdD8
2011-08-31 "Where Have You Gone Jack Welch? CEO Pay Rises While Stature Fades" by Daniel Gross
[http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/where-gone-jack-welch-ceo-pay-rise-while-193022445.html]
The Institute for Policy Studies released a report Wednesday that shows many large companies pay more to CEOs in compensation than they did in corporate income taxes to the federal government in 2010.
Of the 100 top paid CEOs, 25 of them earned more than their companies' tax bill, including the CEOs of Bank of New York Mellon, Verizon, eBay, GE and Boeing. And astonishingly, the report found that the gap between CEO and average U.S. worker pay rose from a ratio of 263-to-1 in 2009 to 325-to-1 last year.
The release of the report has helped contribute to a highly toxic environment for CEOs — worse than I've seen in twenty years of covering business.
Because they are problem solvers, CEOs are frequently welcome in public life. Not now.
Steve Pearlstein, normally mild-mannered Washington Post business columnist, uncorked a scorcher against America's executive class, blaming them for the Tea Party, the debt ceiling debacle, poor infrastructure — everything but Hurricane Irene.
Over the past decade, the main problems they seem to have been working on are increasing their own compensation and reducing the amount of taxes their companies pay. CEOs get paid a lot because they work so hard to deliver for shareholders. But America's shareholders have received a big helping of nothing from public companies in the past decade.
The S&P 500, as this very long-term chart shows [not included], is basically where it was in the fall of 1998. We're frequently told we must be sensitive to CEOs' prerogatives because they're the ones who create jobs. But in July 2001, there were 109.156 million private sector payroll jobs, down from 110.737 million in July 2001. And every time CEOs ask for a specific policy that tells us will enhance growth — like the big foreign earnings tax amnesty in 2004, or financial deregulation — it doesn't quite turn out.
They hold themselves out as the pie enlargers, but eat most of the pieces themselves, leaving everybody else with crumbs. When columnists or politicians point this out, they complain that they're being persecuted.
Quick. Name a widely admired CEO -- besides Apple's Steve Jobs, whose resignation last week caused outpourings of admiration, including from me. Jobs enriched common shareholders who had the foresight to buy shares at $8 in the fall of 2002 hung on for the rise to near $400. And he did it for much of the time while taking home $1 a year in salary. Look at the most recent proxy, and his compensation for each of 2007, 2008, and 2009, was precisely one dollar — no bonus, no options, no nothing.
[http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/where-gone-jack-welch-ceo-pay-rise-while-193022445.html]
The Institute for Policy Studies released a report Wednesday that shows many large companies pay more to CEOs in compensation than they did in corporate income taxes to the federal government in 2010.
Of the 100 top paid CEOs, 25 of them earned more than their companies' tax bill, including the CEOs of Bank of New York Mellon, Verizon, eBay, GE and Boeing. And astonishingly, the report found that the gap between CEO and average U.S. worker pay rose from a ratio of 263-to-1 in 2009 to 325-to-1 last year.
The release of the report has helped contribute to a highly toxic environment for CEOs — worse than I've seen in twenty years of covering business.
Because they are problem solvers, CEOs are frequently welcome in public life. Not now.
Steve Pearlstein, normally mild-mannered Washington Post business columnist, uncorked a scorcher against America's executive class, blaming them for the Tea Party, the debt ceiling debacle, poor infrastructure — everything but Hurricane Irene.
Over the past decade, the main problems they seem to have been working on are increasing their own compensation and reducing the amount of taxes their companies pay. CEOs get paid a lot because they work so hard to deliver for shareholders. But America's shareholders have received a big helping of nothing from public companies in the past decade.
The S&P 500, as this very long-term chart shows [not included], is basically where it was in the fall of 1998. We're frequently told we must be sensitive to CEOs' prerogatives because they're the ones who create jobs. But in July 2001, there were 109.156 million private sector payroll jobs, down from 110.737 million in July 2001. And every time CEOs ask for a specific policy that tells us will enhance growth — like the big foreign earnings tax amnesty in 2004, or financial deregulation — it doesn't quite turn out.
They hold themselves out as the pie enlargers, but eat most of the pieces themselves, leaving everybody else with crumbs. When columnists or politicians point this out, they complain that they're being persecuted.
Quick. Name a widely admired CEO -- besides Apple's Steve Jobs, whose resignation last week caused outpourings of admiration, including from me. Jobs enriched common shareholders who had the foresight to buy shares at $8 in the fall of 2002 hung on for the rise to near $400. And he did it for much of the time while taking home $1 a year in salary. Look at the most recent proxy, and his compensation for each of 2007, 2008, and 2009, was precisely one dollar — no bonus, no options, no nothing.
2011-08-31 "Verizon under pressure to return $800K in funds allegedly taken in Dept. of Education scam" by Ben Chapman
[http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2011/08/31/2011-08-31_verizon_urged_to_give_back_scam_profits.html]
Telecom giant Verizon is under growing pressure to return $800,000 in profits allegedly obtained through accused Education Department swindler Willard Lanham.
Tuesday, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer led a group of elected officials and advocates in calling on the company to return the funds.
"Any company that does business with our city on the scale of Verizon should be a model corporate citizen. You must return the money now," said Stringer.
Verizon is implicated in a city investigation against Lanham, who is accused of bilking the Education Department out of $3.6 million. Lanham was contracted to wire public schools for the Internet.
The telecom giant "facilitated" Lanham's theft, according to an April report by special schools investigator Richard Condon.
The swirling controversy didn't stop the Education Department from this month awarding Verizon a $120 million contract to provide phone and Internet service to city schools.
Verizon spokesman John Bonomo insisted that the company did not participate in Lanham's schemes and said it is willing to return any inappropriate profits.
Education Department spokeswoman Deidrea Miller said the agency is in talks to recover the funds.
"We are currently in discussions with Verizon regarding repayment of the overcharges," said Miller.
[http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2011/08/31/2011-08-31_verizon_urged_to_give_back_scam_profits.html]
Telecom giant Verizon is under growing pressure to return $800,000 in profits allegedly obtained through accused Education Department swindler Willard Lanham.
Tuesday, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer led a group of elected officials and advocates in calling on the company to return the funds.
"Any company that does business with our city on the scale of Verizon should be a model corporate citizen. You must return the money now," said Stringer.
Verizon is implicated in a city investigation against Lanham, who is accused of bilking the Education Department out of $3.6 million. Lanham was contracted to wire public schools for the Internet.
The telecom giant "facilitated" Lanham's theft, according to an April report by special schools investigator Richard Condon.
The swirling controversy didn't stop the Education Department from this month awarding Verizon a $120 million contract to provide phone and Internet service to city schools.
Verizon spokesman John Bonomo insisted that the company did not participate in Lanham's schemes and said it is willing to return any inappropriate profits.
Education Department spokeswoman Deidrea Miller said the agency is in talks to recover the funds.
"We are currently in discussions with Verizon regarding repayment of the overcharges," said Miller.
Monday, August 29, 2011
2011-08-29 "Kansas Fighting Disclosure of Who Helped Write Abortion Restrictions" by Jessica P.
[http://www.care2.com/causes/kansas-fighting-disclosure-of-who-helped-write-abortion-restrictions.html]
As part of a crusade to made abortion legal-in-name-only, the Kansas legislature issued a host of new, mandatory restrictive guidelines that all clinics providing abortion services must follow and then gave clinics just a few weeks to comply or lose their licensing. Abortion rights advocates challenged the new restrictions right away and the state of Kansas is fighting back-hard [http://www.kansascity.com/2011/08/27/3104463/kansas-balks-at-disclosing-how.html#ixzz1WKxq4SJN].
Kansas is so intent in outlawing abortion entirely that it is willing to battle over commonplace legislative history requests. Lawyers for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment and the attorney general want to prevent two abortion clinics from learning how those rules were crafted and have asked a judge to limit the scope of what information is shared with the clinic’s lawyers.
The discovery dispute is framed at challenging “overly broad” requests for information that the state argues will not lead to relevant evidence. The state has also denied open records requests from both The Kansas City Star and The Associated Press, which asked for similar documents related to the drafting of these rules.
Abortion providers want the opportunity to question Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt and Secretary of Health and Environment Robert Moser about the new rules, including what steps were taken in developing them and who was involved in researching and writing them. They are also asking for records related to meetings and communications between the governor’s office and anti-choice groups Kansans for Life and Operation Rescue.
The state is arguing that legislative immunity protects them from disclosing this information in the context of litigation but have yet to provide a justification for denying the open records request.
Discovery objections are commonplace and typically used in conjunction with a disclosure of information — a party will object to a request to preserve the objection for trial while simultaneously providing the information requested. That is because the standard for what is discoverable in the context of litigation is extremely broad. Here the state’s position is unusually aggressive, suggesting the requests are likely to lead to some damaging information for the state.
The anti-abortion tactics already drew scrutiny when it was disclosed that the state had hired lawyers tied to the infamous Koch Brothers to defend its plan to strip Planned Parenthood of funding, which of course just begs the question of what, or who, is the state trying to hide?
[http://www.care2.com/causes/kansas-fighting-disclosure-of-who-helped-write-abortion-restrictions.html]
As part of a crusade to made abortion legal-in-name-only, the Kansas legislature issued a host of new, mandatory restrictive guidelines that all clinics providing abortion services must follow and then gave clinics just a few weeks to comply or lose their licensing. Abortion rights advocates challenged the new restrictions right away and the state of Kansas is fighting back-hard [http://www.kansascity.com/2011/08/27/3104463/kansas-balks-at-disclosing-how.html#ixzz1WKxq4SJN].
Kansas is so intent in outlawing abortion entirely that it is willing to battle over commonplace legislative history requests. Lawyers for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment and the attorney general want to prevent two abortion clinics from learning how those rules were crafted and have asked a judge to limit the scope of what information is shared with the clinic’s lawyers.
The discovery dispute is framed at challenging “overly broad” requests for information that the state argues will not lead to relevant evidence. The state has also denied open records requests from both The Kansas City Star and The Associated Press, which asked for similar documents related to the drafting of these rules.
Abortion providers want the opportunity to question Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt and Secretary of Health and Environment Robert Moser about the new rules, including what steps were taken in developing them and who was involved in researching and writing them. They are also asking for records related to meetings and communications between the governor’s office and anti-choice groups Kansans for Life and Operation Rescue.
The state is arguing that legislative immunity protects them from disclosing this information in the context of litigation but have yet to provide a justification for denying the open records request.
Discovery objections are commonplace and typically used in conjunction with a disclosure of information — a party will object to a request to preserve the objection for trial while simultaneously providing the information requested. That is because the standard for what is discoverable in the context of litigation is extremely broad. Here the state’s position is unusually aggressive, suggesting the requests are likely to lead to some damaging information for the state.
The anti-abortion tactics already drew scrutiny when it was disclosed that the state had hired lawyers tied to the infamous Koch Brothers to defend its plan to strip Planned Parenthood of funding, which of course just begs the question of what, or who, is the state trying to hide?
2011-08-29 "Armstrong Williams: “The Wealthy Are A True Minority”" by Robin M.
[http://www.care2.com/causes/armstrong-williams-wealthy-are-a-true-minority.html]
Somehow, despite being uncovered as a paid shill who in the past has been hired by groups to push their propaganda under the guise of writing columns [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56330-2005Jan7.html], conservative writer Armstrong Williams is still being given column space to pontificate about the state of the U.S. government. His latest lament? How difficult the rich in this country have it. After all, they have been given the daunting responsibility for caring for a large portion of the country’s wealth, a challenging task indeed.
Armstrong writes [http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/152-uncategorized/178559-the-poor-get-poorer-and-the-rich-get-richer]: “The wealthy are a true minority in the world and are often criticized and ridiculed for their success in spite of the fact that everyone, given the choice, would rather try it rich than continue being poor.” But before you think he is really referring to those hard working, nose to the grindstone rich, he closes his piece by discussing inherited wealth — something that takes no more effort than the fortune to be born into the right family. “I don’t know where it originated, but the cliché ‘the poor get poorer and the rich get richer’ has been in use for some time, implying that the poor will never rise out of poverty. Is this true? Why do people stay mired in poverty while others can pass on generational wealth?”
Is it really the result of hard work not to squander away a fortune, when provided with million dollar annual bonuses or multimillion dollar inheritances? And is it harder work than working two or more jobs in an attempt to bring yourself out of poverty? Plus, doesn’t calling the rich the “true minority” both belittle the struggles of real minorities and place a group of people who are in many ways the most privileged in the world in a status of somehow being victimized?
[http://www.care2.com/causes/armstrong-williams-wealthy-are-a-true-minority.html]
Somehow, despite being uncovered as a paid shill who in the past has been hired by groups to push their propaganda under the guise of writing columns [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56330-2005Jan7.html], conservative writer Armstrong Williams is still being given column space to pontificate about the state of the U.S. government. His latest lament? How difficult the rich in this country have it. After all, they have been given the daunting responsibility for caring for a large portion of the country’s wealth, a challenging task indeed.
Armstrong writes [http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/152-uncategorized/178559-the-poor-get-poorer-and-the-rich-get-richer]: “The wealthy are a true minority in the world and are often criticized and ridiculed for their success in spite of the fact that everyone, given the choice, would rather try it rich than continue being poor.” But before you think he is really referring to those hard working, nose to the grindstone rich, he closes his piece by discussing inherited wealth — something that takes no more effort than the fortune to be born into the right family. “I don’t know where it originated, but the cliché ‘the poor get poorer and the rich get richer’ has been in use for some time, implying that the poor will never rise out of poverty. Is this true? Why do people stay mired in poverty while others can pass on generational wealth?”
Is it really the result of hard work not to squander away a fortune, when provided with million dollar annual bonuses or multimillion dollar inheritances? And is it harder work than working two or more jobs in an attempt to bring yourself out of poverty? Plus, doesn’t calling the rich the “true minority” both belittle the struggles of real minorities and place a group of people who are in many ways the most privileged in the world in a status of somehow being victimized?
2011-08-29 "Federal Government Less Popular Than Oil and Gas Industry" by Robin M.
[http://www.care2.com/causes/federal-government-less-popular-than-oil-and-gas-industry.html]
The federal government has reached a level of unpopularity few could have imagined.
It is now less popular than the oil and gas industry.
According to the latest Gallup Polling [http://www.gallup.com/poll/149216/Americans-Rate-Computer-Industry-Best-Federal-Gov-Worst.aspx], only 17 percent of Americans have a positive view of the federal government, compared to 20 percent who have a favorable view of the oil and gas industry. Also down in the bottom of the list were the real estate industry (23 percent), the health care industry (27 percent) and the banking industry (30 percent).
Suddenly, lawyers aren’t looking nearly so bad.
With the majority of the industries that have the most effect on day to day life for most Americans being seen mainly as the enemy — bad governing, high gas prices, bad housing market, skyrocketing medical costs and rising consumer debt — it isn’t surprising at all that fewer that 10 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the economy, as Rasmussen reports [http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/business/indexes/rasmussen_consumer_index/rasmussen_consumer_index]. The big surprise instead is likely just that there are even 9 percent who still do see the economy as good.
[http://www.care2.com/causes/federal-government-less-popular-than-oil-and-gas-industry.html]
The federal government has reached a level of unpopularity few could have imagined.
It is now less popular than the oil and gas industry.
According to the latest Gallup Polling [http://www.gallup.com/poll/149216/Americans-Rate-Computer-Industry-Best-Federal-Gov-Worst.aspx], only 17 percent of Americans have a positive view of the federal government, compared to 20 percent who have a favorable view of the oil and gas industry. Also down in the bottom of the list were the real estate industry (23 percent), the health care industry (27 percent) and the banking industry (30 percent).
Suddenly, lawyers aren’t looking nearly so bad.
With the majority of the industries that have the most effect on day to day life for most Americans being seen mainly as the enemy — bad governing, high gas prices, bad housing market, skyrocketing medical costs and rising consumer debt — it isn’t surprising at all that fewer that 10 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the economy, as Rasmussen reports [http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/business/indexes/rasmussen_consumer_index/rasmussen_consumer_index]. The big surprise instead is likely just that there are even 9 percent who still do see the economy as good.
Sunday, August 28, 2011
2011-08-28 "Who Runs the World ? – Network Analysis Reveals ‘Super Entity’ of Global Corporate Control" by Michael Ricciardi
[http://planetsave.com/2011/08/28/who-runs-the-world-network-analysis-reveals-super-entity-of-global-corporate-control/]
In the first such analysis ever conducted, Swiss economic researchers have conducted a global network analysis of the most powerful transnational corporations (TNCs). Their results have revealed a core of 737 firms with control of 80% of this network, and a “super entity” comprised of 147 corporations that have a controlling interest in 40% of the network’s TNCs. [Note to the reader: see the very end of this article for a ranking of the top 50 'control holders']
When we hear conspiracy theorist talk about this or that powerful group (or alliance of said groups) “pulling strings” behind the scenes, we tend to dismiss or minimize such claims, even though, deep down, we may suspect that there’s some degree of truth to it, however distorted by the theorists’ slightly paranoid perception of the world. But perhaps our tendency to dismiss such claims as exaggerations (at best) comes from our inability to get even a slight grip on the complexity of global corporate ownership; it’s all too vast and complicated to get any clear sense of the reality.
But now we have the results of a global network analysis (Vitali, Glattfelder, Battiston) that, for the first time, lays bare the “architecture” of the global ownership network. In the paper abstract, the authors state:
“We present the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network, along with the computation of the control held by each global player. We find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure* and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic “super-entity” that raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers.” [emphasis added] * This “bow tie” structure is similar to the structure of the WWW (analyzing for most influential/most trafficked websites); see diagram below.
Data from previous studies neither fully supported nor completely disproved the idea that a small handful of powerful corporations dominate much or most of the world’s commerce. The researchers acknowledge previous attempts to analyze such networks, but note that these were limited in scope to national networks which “neglected the structure of control at a global level.”
What was needed, assert the researchers, was a complex network analysis.
“A quantitative investigation is not a trivial task because firms may exert control over other firms via a web of direct and indirect ownership relations which extends over many countries. Therefore, a complex network analysis is needed in order to uncover the structure of control and its implications. “
To start their analysis, the researchers began with a list of 43,060 TNCs which were taken from a sample of 30 million “economic actors” contained in the Orbis 2007 database [see end note]. TNCs were identified according to the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) definition of a transnational corporation [see end note]. They next applied a recursive search algorithm which singled out the “network of all the ownership pathways originating from and pointing to these TNCs.”
The resulting TNC network includes 600,508 nodes and 1,006,987 ownership ties.
In terms of the connectivity of the network, the researchers found that it consists of many small connected components, but the largest one (encompassing 3/4 of all nodes) “contains all the top TNCs by economic value, accounting for 94.2% of the total TNC operating revenue.”
Two generalized characteristics were identified:
1] A strongly connected component (SCC), that is, a set of firms in which every member owns directly and/or indirectly shares in every other member. The emergence of such a structure can be explained as a means of preventing take-overs, reducing transaction costs, risk sharing and increasing trust between “groups of interest.”
and
2] The largest connect[ed] component contains only one dominant, strongly connected component (comprised of 1347 nodes). This network, like the WWW, has a bow tie structure. What’s more, they found that this component, or core, is also very densely connected; on average, members of this core have ties to 20 other members. “Top actors” occupy the center of the bow tie. In fact, a randomly chosen TNC in the core has about 50% chance of also being among the top holders, as compared to, for example, 6% for the “in” section. [emphasis added]
“As a result, about 3/4 of the ownership of firms in the core remains in the hands of firms of the core itself. In other words, this is a tightly-knit group of corporations that cumulatively hold the majority share of each other.”
In examining the details of this core, the analysis also showed that only 737 top holders accumulate 80% of the control over the value of all TNCs (in the analyzed network). Further,
“…despite its small size, the core holds collectively a large fraction of the total network control. In detail, nearly 4/10 of the control over the economic value of TNCs in the world is held, via a complicated web of ownership relations, by a group of 147 TNCs in the core, which has almost full control over itself. The top holders within the core can thus be thought of as an economic “super-entity” in the global network of corporations.” [emphasis added]
Concerning the implications of this super entity, the researchers asked two fundamental questions: First, what are the implications for market competition, and, second, what are the implications for economic stability?
Regarding the first question, the authors assert that no matter the origin of the SCC, due to its high degree of TNC network control, “it weakens market competition”.
It is clear just from the history of anti-trust laws in this country (the U.S.) that concentrated ownership stifles free market competition and innovation, reduces over-all employment, and leads to excessive pricing.
In regards to the second question, the researchers note that “the existence of such a core in the global market was never documented before and thus, so far, no scientific study demonstrates or excludes that this international ‘super-entity’ has ever acted as a bloc.“
However, there is historical data — such as within the airline, auto and steel industries — supporting this possibility.
“…top holders are at least in the position to exert considerable control, either formally (e.g., voting in shareholder and board meetings) or via informal negotiations.”
Additionally, recent studies (Stiglitz J.E., 2010, Battiston S. et al, 2009) have shown that densely connected financial networks are highly susceptible to systemic risk. Despite the fact that such networks may seem robust in good economic times, in times of crisis however, member firms tend to enter ‘distress mode’ simultaneously. This was seen recently in the 2008 (“near”) financial collapse (note: 3/4 of the network core in this analysis are financial intermediaries).
Calling their findings “remarkable”, they suggest that because “international data sets as well as methods to handle large networks became available only very recently, [this] may explain how this finding could go unnoticed for so long.”
While the researchers acknowledge that verifying whether the implications of their findings “hold true for the global economy” is beyond the scope of their current research, they assert that their unprecedented attempt to uncover the structure of corporate control is “a necessary precondition for future investigations.”
The paper, The network of global corporate control (Vitali, Glattfelder, Battiston) was published July 26, 2011, on arXiv.org
End Notes:
The Orbis 2007 marketing database [http://www.orbisglobal.com/] comprises about 37 million economic actors, both physical persons and firms located in 194 countries, and roughly 13 million directed and weighted ownership links (equity relations). This data set is intended to track control relationships rather than patrimonial relationships. Whenever available, the percentage of ownership refers to shares associated with voting rights. Accordingly, we select those companies which hold at least 10% of shares in companies located in more than one country. Overall we obtain a list of 43,060 TNCs located in 116 different countries, with 5675 TNCs quoted in stock markets.
The definition of TNCs given by the OECD [http://www.oecd.org/] states that they “…comprise companies and other entities established in more than one country and so linked that they may coordinate their operations in various ways…”
Diagrams: (source) The network of global corporate control (Vitali, Glattfelder, Battiston) [http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.5728]
Strongly Connected Component (SCC); layout of the SCC (1318 nodes and 12,191 links). Node size scales logarithmically with operation revenue, node color with network control (from yellow to red). Link color scales with weight.
A bow-tie consists of in-section (IN), out-section (OUT), strongly connected component or core (SCC), and tubes and tendrils (T&T).
Bow-tie structure of the largest connected component (LCC) and other connected components (OCC). Each section volume scales logarithmically with the share of its TNCs operating revenue. In parenthesis, percentage of operating revenue and number of TNCs
Zoom on some major TNCs in the financial sector. Some cycles are highlighted. Note: data for this analysis comes from the 2007 Orbis database -- prior to the 2008 financial crisis, thus, firms such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros. are included.
Top 50 Control-Holders Ranking:
{source: the following is quoted directly from the research paper]
This is the first time a ranking of economic actors by global control is presented. Notice that many actors belong to the financial sector (NACE codes starting with 65,66,67) and many of the names are well-known global players.
The interest of this ranking is not that it exposes unsuspected powerful players. Instead, it shows that many of the top actors belong to the core. This means that they do not carry out their business in isolation but, on the contrary, they are tied together in an extremely entangled web of control. This finding is extremely important since there was no prior economic theory or empirical evidence regarding whether and how top players are connected.
Shareholders are ranked by network control (according to the threshold model, TM). Columns indicate country, NACE industrial sector code, actor’s position in the bow-tie sections, cumulative network control. Notice that NACE codes starting with 65,66, or 67 belong to the financial sector.
Rank , Economic actor name, Country, NACE code, Network Cumul. Network position, control (TM, %)
1 BARCLAYS PLC GB 6512 SCC 4.05
2 CAPITAL GROUP COMPANIES INC, THE US 6713 IN 6.66
3 FMR CORP US 6713 IN 8.94
4 AXA FR 6712 SCC 11.21
5 STATE STREET CORPORATION US 6713 SCC 13.02
6 JP MORGAN CHASE & CO. US 6512 SCC 14.55
7 LEGAL & GENERAL GROUP PLC GB 6603 SCC 16.02
8 VANGUARD GROUP, INC., THE US 7415 IN 17.25
9 UBS AG CH 6512 SCC 18.46
10 MERRILL LYNCH & CO., INC. US 6712 SCC 19.45
11 WELLINGTON MANAGEMENT CO. L.L.P. US 6713 IN 20.33
12 DEUTSCHE BANK AG DE 6512 SCC 21.17
13 FRANKLIN RESOURCES, INC. US 6512 SCC 21.99
14 CREDIT SUISSE GROUP CH 6512 SCC 22.81
15 WALTON ENTERPRISES LLC US 2923 T&T 23.56
16 BANK OF NEWYORKMELLON CORP. US 6512 IN 24.28
17 NATIXIS FR 6512 SCC 24.98
18 GOLDMAN SACHS GROUP, INC., THE US 6712 SCC 25.64
19 T. ROWEPRICE GROUP, INC. US 6713 SCC 26.29
20 LEGG MASON, INC. US 6712 SCC 26.92
21 MORGAN STANLEY US 6712 SCC 27.56
22 MITSUBISHI UFJ FINANCIAL GROUP, INC. JP 6512 SCC 28.16
23 NORTHERN TRUST CORPORATION US 6512 SCC 28.72
24 SOCIÉTÉ GÉNÉRALE FR 6512 SCC 29.26
25 BANK OF AMERICA CORPORATION US 6512 SCC 29.79
26 LLOYDS TSB GROUPPLCGB 6512 SCC 30.30
27 INVESCOPLCGB 6523 SCC 30.82
28 ALLIANZSE DE 7415 SCC 31.32
29 TIAA US 6601 IN 32.24
30 OLD MUTUAL PUBLIC LIMITED COMPANY GB 6601 SCC 32.69
31 AVIVAPLC GB 6601 SCC 33.14
32 SCHRODERSPLC GB 6712 SCC 33.57
33 DODGE & COX US 7415 IN 34.00
34 LEHMAN BROTHERS HOLDINGS, INC. US 6712 SCC 34.43
35 SUN LIFE FINANCIAL, INC. CA 6601 SCC 34.82
36 STANDARDLIFEPLCGB 6601 SCC 35.2
37 CNCE FR 6512 SCC 35.57
38 NOMURA HOLDINGS, INC. JP 6512 SCC 35.92
39 THE DEPOSITORY TRUST COMPANY US 6512 IN 36.28
40 MASSACHUSETTS MUTUAL LIFE INSUR. US 6601 IN 36.63
41 INGGROEP N.V. NL 6603 SCC 36.96
42 BRANDES INVESTMENT PARTNERS, L.P. US 6713 IN 37.29
43 UNICREDITO ITALIANO SPA IT 6512 SCC 37.61
44 DEPOSIT INSURANCE CORPORATION OF JP JP 6511 IN 37.93
45 VERENIGING AEGON NL 6512 IN 38.25
46 BNPPARIBAS FR 6512 SCC 38.56
47 AFFILIATED MANAGERS GROUP, INC. US 6713 SCC 38.88
48 RESONA HOLDINGS, INC. JP 6512 SCC 39.18
49 CAPITAL GROUP INTERNATIONAL, INC. US 7414 IN 39.48
50 CHINA PETROCHEMICAL GROUP CO. CN 6511 T&T 39.78
[http://planetsave.com/2011/08/28/who-runs-the-world-network-analysis-reveals-super-entity-of-global-corporate-control/]
In the first such analysis ever conducted, Swiss economic researchers have conducted a global network analysis of the most powerful transnational corporations (TNCs). Their results have revealed a core of 737 firms with control of 80% of this network, and a “super entity” comprised of 147 corporations that have a controlling interest in 40% of the network’s TNCs. [Note to the reader: see the very end of this article for a ranking of the top 50 'control holders']
When we hear conspiracy theorist talk about this or that powerful group (or alliance of said groups) “pulling strings” behind the scenes, we tend to dismiss or minimize such claims, even though, deep down, we may suspect that there’s some degree of truth to it, however distorted by the theorists’ slightly paranoid perception of the world. But perhaps our tendency to dismiss such claims as exaggerations (at best) comes from our inability to get even a slight grip on the complexity of global corporate ownership; it’s all too vast and complicated to get any clear sense of the reality.
But now we have the results of a global network analysis (Vitali, Glattfelder, Battiston) that, for the first time, lays bare the “architecture” of the global ownership network. In the paper abstract, the authors state:
“We present the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network, along with the computation of the control held by each global player. We find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure* and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic “super-entity” that raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers.” [emphasis added] * This “bow tie” structure is similar to the structure of the WWW (analyzing for most influential/most trafficked websites); see diagram below.
Data from previous studies neither fully supported nor completely disproved the idea that a small handful of powerful corporations dominate much or most of the world’s commerce. The researchers acknowledge previous attempts to analyze such networks, but note that these were limited in scope to national networks which “neglected the structure of control at a global level.”
What was needed, assert the researchers, was a complex network analysis.
“A quantitative investigation is not a trivial task because firms may exert control over other firms via a web of direct and indirect ownership relations which extends over many countries. Therefore, a complex network analysis is needed in order to uncover the structure of control and its implications. “
To start their analysis, the researchers began with a list of 43,060 TNCs which were taken from a sample of 30 million “economic actors” contained in the Orbis 2007 database [see end note]. TNCs were identified according to the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) definition of a transnational corporation [see end note]. They next applied a recursive search algorithm which singled out the “network of all the ownership pathways originating from and pointing to these TNCs.”
The resulting TNC network includes 600,508 nodes and 1,006,987 ownership ties.
In terms of the connectivity of the network, the researchers found that it consists of many small connected components, but the largest one (encompassing 3/4 of all nodes) “contains all the top TNCs by economic value, accounting for 94.2% of the total TNC operating revenue.”
Two generalized characteristics were identified:
1] A strongly connected component (SCC), that is, a set of firms in which every member owns directly and/or indirectly shares in every other member. The emergence of such a structure can be explained as a means of preventing take-overs, reducing transaction costs, risk sharing and increasing trust between “groups of interest.”
and
2] The largest connect[ed] component contains only one dominant, strongly connected component (comprised of 1347 nodes). This network, like the WWW, has a bow tie structure. What’s more, they found that this component, or core, is also very densely connected; on average, members of this core have ties to 20 other members. “Top actors” occupy the center of the bow tie. In fact, a randomly chosen TNC in the core has about 50% chance of also being among the top holders, as compared to, for example, 6% for the “in” section. [emphasis added]
“As a result, about 3/4 of the ownership of firms in the core remains in the hands of firms of the core itself. In other words, this is a tightly-knit group of corporations that cumulatively hold the majority share of each other.”
In examining the details of this core, the analysis also showed that only 737 top holders accumulate 80% of the control over the value of all TNCs (in the analyzed network). Further,
“…despite its small size, the core holds collectively a large fraction of the total network control. In detail, nearly 4/10 of the control over the economic value of TNCs in the world is held, via a complicated web of ownership relations, by a group of 147 TNCs in the core, which has almost full control over itself. The top holders within the core can thus be thought of as an economic “super-entity” in the global network of corporations.” [emphasis added]
Concerning the implications of this super entity, the researchers asked two fundamental questions: First, what are the implications for market competition, and, second, what are the implications for economic stability?
Regarding the first question, the authors assert that no matter the origin of the SCC, due to its high degree of TNC network control, “it weakens market competition”.
It is clear just from the history of anti-trust laws in this country (the U.S.) that concentrated ownership stifles free market competition and innovation, reduces over-all employment, and leads to excessive pricing.
In regards to the second question, the researchers note that “the existence of such a core in the global market was never documented before and thus, so far, no scientific study demonstrates or excludes that this international ‘super-entity’ has ever acted as a bloc.“
However, there is historical data — such as within the airline, auto and steel industries — supporting this possibility.
“…top holders are at least in the position to exert considerable control, either formally (e.g., voting in shareholder and board meetings) or via informal negotiations.”
Additionally, recent studies (Stiglitz J.E., 2010, Battiston S. et al, 2009) have shown that densely connected financial networks are highly susceptible to systemic risk. Despite the fact that such networks may seem robust in good economic times, in times of crisis however, member firms tend to enter ‘distress mode’ simultaneously. This was seen recently in the 2008 (“near”) financial collapse (note: 3/4 of the network core in this analysis are financial intermediaries).
Calling their findings “remarkable”, they suggest that because “international data sets as well as methods to handle large networks became available only very recently, [this] may explain how this finding could go unnoticed for so long.”
While the researchers acknowledge that verifying whether the implications of their findings “hold true for the global economy” is beyond the scope of their current research, they assert that their unprecedented attempt to uncover the structure of corporate control is “a necessary precondition for future investigations.”
The paper, The network of global corporate control (Vitali, Glattfelder, Battiston) was published July 26, 2011, on arXiv.org
End Notes:
The Orbis 2007 marketing database [http://www.orbisglobal.com/] comprises about 37 million economic actors, both physical persons and firms located in 194 countries, and roughly 13 million directed and weighted ownership links (equity relations). This data set is intended to track control relationships rather than patrimonial relationships. Whenever available, the percentage of ownership refers to shares associated with voting rights. Accordingly, we select those companies which hold at least 10% of shares in companies located in more than one country. Overall we obtain a list of 43,060 TNCs located in 116 different countries, with 5675 TNCs quoted in stock markets.
The definition of TNCs given by the OECD [http://www.oecd.org/] states that they “…comprise companies and other entities established in more than one country and so linked that they may coordinate their operations in various ways…”
Diagrams: (source) The network of global corporate control (Vitali, Glattfelder, Battiston) [http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.5728]
Strongly Connected Component (SCC); layout of the SCC (1318 nodes and 12,191 links). Node size scales logarithmically with operation revenue, node color with network control (from yellow to red). Link color scales with weight.
A bow-tie consists of in-section (IN), out-section (OUT), strongly connected component or core (SCC), and tubes and tendrils (T&T).
Bow-tie structure of the largest connected component (LCC) and other connected components (OCC). Each section volume scales logarithmically with the share of its TNCs operating revenue. In parenthesis, percentage of operating revenue and number of TNCs
Zoom on some major TNCs in the financial sector. Some cycles are highlighted. Note: data for this analysis comes from the 2007 Orbis database -- prior to the 2008 financial crisis, thus, firms such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros. are included.
Top 50 Control-Holders Ranking:
{source: the following is quoted directly from the research paper]
This is the first time a ranking of economic actors by global control is presented. Notice that many actors belong to the financial sector (NACE codes starting with 65,66,67) and many of the names are well-known global players.
The interest of this ranking is not that it exposes unsuspected powerful players. Instead, it shows that many of the top actors belong to the core. This means that they do not carry out their business in isolation but, on the contrary, they are tied together in an extremely entangled web of control. This finding is extremely important since there was no prior economic theory or empirical evidence regarding whether and how top players are connected.
Shareholders are ranked by network control (according to the threshold model, TM). Columns indicate country, NACE industrial sector code, actor’s position in the bow-tie sections, cumulative network control. Notice that NACE codes starting with 65,66, or 67 belong to the financial sector.
Rank , Economic actor name, Country, NACE code, Network Cumul. Network position, control (TM, %)
1 BARCLAYS PLC GB 6512 SCC 4.05
2 CAPITAL GROUP COMPANIES INC, THE US 6713 IN 6.66
3 FMR CORP US 6713 IN 8.94
4 AXA FR 6712 SCC 11.21
5 STATE STREET CORPORATION US 6713 SCC 13.02
6 JP MORGAN CHASE & CO. US 6512 SCC 14.55
7 LEGAL & GENERAL GROUP PLC GB 6603 SCC 16.02
8 VANGUARD GROUP, INC., THE US 7415 IN 17.25
9 UBS AG CH 6512 SCC 18.46
10 MERRILL LYNCH & CO., INC. US 6712 SCC 19.45
11 WELLINGTON MANAGEMENT CO. L.L.P. US 6713 IN 20.33
12 DEUTSCHE BANK AG DE 6512 SCC 21.17
13 FRANKLIN RESOURCES, INC. US 6512 SCC 21.99
14 CREDIT SUISSE GROUP CH 6512 SCC 22.81
15 WALTON ENTERPRISES LLC US 2923 T&T 23.56
16 BANK OF NEWYORKMELLON CORP. US 6512 IN 24.28
17 NATIXIS FR 6512 SCC 24.98
18 GOLDMAN SACHS GROUP, INC., THE US 6712 SCC 25.64
19 T. ROWEPRICE GROUP, INC. US 6713 SCC 26.29
20 LEGG MASON, INC. US 6712 SCC 26.92
21 MORGAN STANLEY US 6712 SCC 27.56
22 MITSUBISHI UFJ FINANCIAL GROUP, INC. JP 6512 SCC 28.16
23 NORTHERN TRUST CORPORATION US 6512 SCC 28.72
24 SOCIÉTÉ GÉNÉRALE FR 6512 SCC 29.26
25 BANK OF AMERICA CORPORATION US 6512 SCC 29.79
26 LLOYDS TSB GROUPPLCGB 6512 SCC 30.30
27 INVESCOPLCGB 6523 SCC 30.82
28 ALLIANZSE DE 7415 SCC 31.32
29 TIAA US 6601 IN 32.24
30 OLD MUTUAL PUBLIC LIMITED COMPANY GB 6601 SCC 32.69
31 AVIVAPLC GB 6601 SCC 33.14
32 SCHRODERSPLC GB 6712 SCC 33.57
33 DODGE & COX US 7415 IN 34.00
34 LEHMAN BROTHERS HOLDINGS, INC. US 6712 SCC 34.43
35 SUN LIFE FINANCIAL, INC. CA 6601 SCC 34.82
36 STANDARDLIFEPLCGB 6601 SCC 35.2
37 CNCE FR 6512 SCC 35.57
38 NOMURA HOLDINGS, INC. JP 6512 SCC 35.92
39 THE DEPOSITORY TRUST COMPANY US 6512 IN 36.28
40 MASSACHUSETTS MUTUAL LIFE INSUR. US 6601 IN 36.63
41 INGGROEP N.V. NL 6603 SCC 36.96
42 BRANDES INVESTMENT PARTNERS, L.P. US 6713 IN 37.29
43 UNICREDITO ITALIANO SPA IT 6512 SCC 37.61
44 DEPOSIT INSURANCE CORPORATION OF JP JP 6511 IN 37.93
45 VERENIGING AEGON NL 6512 IN 38.25
46 BNPPARIBAS FR 6512 SCC 38.56
47 AFFILIATED MANAGERS GROUP, INC. US 6713 SCC 38.88
48 RESONA HOLDINGS, INC. JP 6512 SCC 39.18
49 CAPITAL GROUP INTERNATIONAL, INC. US 7414 IN 39.48
50 CHINA PETROCHEMICAL GROUP CO. CN 6511 T&T 39.78
Saturday, August 27, 2011
2011-08-27 "Texan Taxpayers Foot The Bill For Perry’s Presidential Run" by Robin M.
[http://www.care2.com/causes/texan-taxpayers-foot-the-bill-for-perrys-presidential-run.html]
Running for president is a very, very expensive business. You have campaign workers, media buys, travel, security, polling, and a wide variety of other costs that can number in the hundreds of thousands of dollars a month.
Luckily, for Texas Governor Rick Perry, he’s found a way to defray some of those expenses. Charge them to his constituents.
According to the Washington Post [http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/perrys-travel-security-costs-will-stay-secret-until-after-2012/2011/08/22/gIQANIZBjJ_story.html?wprss=rss_campaigns], Perry has brought on Texas law enforcement to help out with his security, scouting out the sites that events will be held at ahead of time, providing extra enforcement while he’s in attendance. The costs for those additional hours are of course being passed on to the state budget, and paid for with the state’s gas tax and vehicle registration fees.
How much are these extra security costing the state? Well, conveniently enough, no one knows. Records of the governor’s security costs have been kept under wraps for years, with the Department of Safety declaring that releasing the info could jeopardize Perry’s safety.
Presumably, they don’t just mean because Texans would be so angry to see how much money it is that he might get hurt.
Those records will be concealed even longer, despite numerous attempts to get them released, thanks to a bill passed in the special session that states they must be kept closed another 18 months. Which just happens to be until after the 2012 election has ended.
What is Perry keeping secret, and how much is his protection really running? It may be a long time before we ever find out, but it looks like Texans will need to keep doing a lot of driving to cover it.
[http://www.care2.com/causes/texan-taxpayers-foot-the-bill-for-perrys-presidential-run.html]
Running for president is a very, very expensive business. You have campaign workers, media buys, travel, security, polling, and a wide variety of other costs that can number in the hundreds of thousands of dollars a month.
Luckily, for Texas Governor Rick Perry, he’s found a way to defray some of those expenses. Charge them to his constituents.
According to the Washington Post [http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/perrys-travel-security-costs-will-stay-secret-until-after-2012/2011/08/22/gIQANIZBjJ_story.html?wprss=rss_campaigns], Perry has brought on Texas law enforcement to help out with his security, scouting out the sites that events will be held at ahead of time, providing extra enforcement while he’s in attendance. The costs for those additional hours are of course being passed on to the state budget, and paid for with the state’s gas tax and vehicle registration fees.
How much are these extra security costing the state? Well, conveniently enough, no one knows. Records of the governor’s security costs have been kept under wraps for years, with the Department of Safety declaring that releasing the info could jeopardize Perry’s safety.
Presumably, they don’t just mean because Texans would be so angry to see how much money it is that he might get hurt.
Those records will be concealed even longer, despite numerous attempts to get them released, thanks to a bill passed in the special session that states they must be kept closed another 18 months. Which just happens to be until after the 2012 election has ended.
What is Perry keeping secret, and how much is his protection really running? It may be a long time before we ever find out, but it looks like Texans will need to keep doing a lot of driving to cover it.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Christian Dominionism is Fascism
2011-08-25 "Rachel Tabachnick talks dominionism on Fresh Air (and why you should be paying attention)" by Alan Bean
[http://friendsofjustice.wordpress.com/2011/08/25/rachel-tabachnick-talks-dominionism-on-fresh-air-and-why-you-should-be-paying-attention/]
Are Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann part of a movement determined to forcibly Christianize every aspect of American culture?
If so, why does a blog dedicated to ending mass incarceration care one way or the other?
If Rachel Tabachnick is anything to go by, the answer to the first question is ‘yes’. Tabachnick knows more about the dominionist strain within contemporary evangelicalism than just about anybody and you simply must check out her recent interview with Terry Gross of Fresh Air. [https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=139781021])
I am still thinking through my answer to the “so what” question (and will have more to say on the subject as my thinking clarifies); but the rough outline of an answer came to me yesterday when a reporter asked me why Louisiana (unlike Texas and Mississippi) has done nothing to reform its criminal justice system.
The avuncular visage of Burl Cain sprang to mind. Cain is slowly transforming the Angola prison plantation into a spiritual rehabilitation center. Inmates (90% of them in for life) are repeatedly invited to get right with Jesus. Life becomes a whole lot easier if they take the offer.
Then I thought of Ann Richards, the progressive Texas Governor who, during her ill-fated re-election campaign against George W. Bush, told the voters that she wanted to build more prisons so folks with addiction issues could get rehabilitated.
Burl Cain and his Louisiana fan club want to lock up more people every year so earnest evangelists can have a captive audience.
Friends of Justice works in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, three states that are gradually backing away from the punitive consensus that has controlled the American judicial system for more than three decades. Texas was embarrassed into rethinking mass incarceration through a series of scandals: Tulia (the bizarre drug bust that gave birth to Friends of Justice), Hearne (the American Violet story), the Dallas Sheetrock scandal, the Houston crime lab, the Texas Youth Commission fiasco, an incredible string of DNA exonerations in Dallas County and Governor Perry’s botched attempt to silence the Texas Forensic Science Commission. Thanks to a series of modest reforms, the Texas prison population has now plateaued in the 160,000 range (it was 40,000 in 1980) and will likely stay there for the foreseeable future.
Mississippi experienced a 3.5% drop in its prison population in a single year by deciding that inmates must only serve 25% of sentences before being eligible for parole (it had been 85%).
The old “lock ‘em up” mentality is beginning to soften even in the state that boasts the highest incarceration rate in the free world. Folks in Louisiana want to lock up as many people as possible out of a misdirected sense of compassion. After all, isn’t it better to find Jesus in jail than to live an unregenerate life in the free world? We don’t hate criminals in Louisiana; we just want what’s best for them.
This is precisely the kind of theocratic logic that politicians like Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann have embraced. They want to Christianize the nation (by force if necessary) the way Burl Cain has Christianized the Angola plantation. And if the liberals presently controlling Hollywood, the recording industry, the public school system, the evening news and the political life of the nation don’t want to be Christianized, that’s just too bad. Michelle, Sarah, Rick et al are God’s anointed apostles. At Angola, to oppose Burl Cain is to oppose God; the New Apostolic Reformation wants to extend this kind of thinking to every aspect of our national life.
Do the politicians currently feeding at the trough of radical religion really believe that the eclectic vitality of a diverse nation can be homogenized by the blood of the Lamb? Maybe not. But they want to push the political envelope as far in that direction as the public will allow. In these strange times, it’s smart politics.
If you think I’m overstating the case, please read Ms. Tabachnick’s conversation with Terry Gross.
The Evangelicals Engaged In Spiritual Warfare
August 24, 2011 - TERRY GROSS, host:
This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross.
An emerging Christian movement that seeks to take dominion over politics, business and culture in preparation for the end times and the return of Jesus is establishing a presence in American politics. The leaders are considered apostles and prophets, gifted by God for this role.
The International Apostolic and Prophetic Movement was named the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, by its leading architect, C. Peter Wagner. My guest, Rachel Tabachnick, has been researching and writing about this movement. She says although the movement is larger than the network of apostles organized by Wagner, and not all those connected with the movement describe themselves as part of Wagner’s NAR, the apostles and prophets of the movement have an identifiable ideology that separates them from other Evangelicals.
Two ministries in the movement, The Call, led by Lou Engle, and the International House of Prayer, led by Mike Bickle, helped organize Rick Perry’s recent prayer rally, where apostles and prophets from around the nation spoke or appeared on stage.
The Kenyan pastor who anointed Sarah Palin at the Wasilla Assembly of God Church in 2005 while praying for Jesus to protect her from the spirit of witchcraft is also part of this movement.
My guest, Rachel Tabachnick, researches the impact of the religious right and end-time narratives on American politics. She writes for the website Talk To Action.
Rachel Tabachnick, welcome to FRESH AIR. For people who haven’t heard about the New Apostolic Reformation, and I’d say that’s the majority of the people, overwhelmingly, what are some of the basic beliefs or goals of this group?
Ms. RACHEL TABACHNICK: I would say the basic belief began with the idea of dominionism, and dominionism is simply that Christians of this belief system must take control over all the various institutions of society and government. They have some unusual concepts of what they call spiritual warfare that have not been seen before in other groups.
Spiritual warfare is a common term in Evangelicalism and in Christianity, but they have some unique approaches and unique spins on this that distinguish them from other groups.
GROSS: And that literally have to do with casting demons out of people and religious and…
Ms. TABACHNICK: They use this in terms of evangelizing. So whereas we might be accustomed with the idea of saving souls, of missionaries or evangelical work to save individual souls; they believe that they can, through this demon warfare, take control over entire communities, or perhaps nations or people groups, an ethnic group, a religious group and so forth, because they believe that they are doing spiritual warfare at this higher level against these demonic principalities, what they call demonic principalities.
GROSS: So I’ve been reading about the New Apostolic Reformation. Tell me if you think that I’ve gotten this right at all. My understanding is that they are a group that believes in the end times, that there will be a second coming of Christ, that certain things need to be accomplished on Earth before he comes, and that it’s their job – it’s the job of the apostles to listen to what Jesus is telling them so that they can get the world ready for his second coming. Yes?
Ms. TABACHNICK: Yes, what this group believes is that they must re-organize Protestant Christianity under their leadership. So instead of having all of these different denominations in Protestantism, they would unify the church, the Protestant Church, into one body under the leadership of their apostles.
And then the other thing that distinguishes them is this idea that in order to do this, they must take control over society and government and that they will do this in large part through this warfare that they are conducting with demons.
GROSS: So how does this new movement, the New Apostolic Reformation, connect to American politics?
Ms. TABACHNICK: This is a very political movement. In fact, I would call it a religio-political movement in that it has networked across the United States in something that looks like a hybrid between a religious denomination and a political party.
For example, they have what are called prayer warrior networks in all 50 states, and they have very strong opinions about the direction they want the country to take. They teach what is called dominionism. And the idea of dominionism, or dominion theology, is that all areas of society and government should come under the control of God through these apostles and prophets, and that all of these areas of society should represent Christian and biblical values.
They have interesting campaigns. One that’s been very successful for the last few years is called the Seven Mountains campaign. And what this means is they teach that they are reclaiming the seven mountains of culture and society. And those mountains are arts and entertainment, business, education, family, government, media and religion.
And business is considered to be one of the most important mountains to reclaim control because this is the way that they finance the other mountains.
GROSS: So when they want to, like, reclaim government or politics, what does that mean?
Ms. TABACHNICK: They teach, quite literally, that these mountains have fallen under the control of demonic influences in society. And therefore, they must reclaim them for God in order to bring about the kingdom of God on Earth.
GROSS: And what are some of the major issues that they think are important?
Ms. TABACHNICK: Well, the typical religious right hot-button issues, if you will, anti-abortion, anti-gay rights – but they also have a laissez-faire market ideology, the belief that government should not be involved in social safety nets, that the country is becoming socialist, if not communist – so a Tea Party mentality.
GROSS: And I think that they also advocate – tell me if I’m wrong here – the privatization of schools – the school system.
Ms. TABACHNICK: Yes. All of the typical, you know, what we’ve come to call Tea Party issues of very small government. And in the case of the apostles, they believe this because they believe that a large government or government that handles the safety net is taking away what is the domain of the church and of Christianity.
GROSS: And what kind of authority do they want in government?
Ms. TABACHNICK: They want the authority to align government with what they believe is the kingdom of God, with biblical values in their interpretation.
Let me back up and say something about dominionism. Dominionism is very different than having strong beliefs or even having very strong beliefs about one’s Evangelical values. Dominionism is very controversial inside of the conservative and Evangelical world. It’s a specific theology that states that somehow God lost control of the Earth when Satan tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden and that humans must help God regain control of the Earth. And the way that they do this is by taking dominion over society and government.
The apostles and prophets have an interesting twist on this. They’re not the only dominionist movement out there. Some people may be familiar with Rushdoony and Christian Reconstructionism. This is a different brand of dominionism.
And the apostles teach what’s called strategic-level spiritual warfare with the idea being that the reason why there is sin and corruption and poverty on the Earth is because the Earth is controlled by a hierarchy of demons under the authority of Satan.
And so they teach that not just evangelizing souls one by one, as we’re accustomed to hearing about, they teach that they will go into a geographic region or to a people-group and conduct these spiritual-warfare activities in order to remove the demons from the entire population or the demonic control over the entire population. And this is what they’re doing that’s quite different than other conservative Evangelical or fundamentalist groups of the past.
GROSS: My guest is Rachel Tabachnick. She writes about the impact of the religious right and end-time narratives on American politics. She has written about the New Apostolic Reformation for the website Talk To Action. We’ll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
(Soundbite of music)
GROSS: Let me re-introduce you. For our listeners just tuning in, my guest is Rachel Tabachnick. She’s a researcher and writer who focuses on the impact of the religious right on politics and of end-times narratives on politics.
So one of the reasons why the New Apostolic Reformation is of interest now is because several of the apostles from that movement were connected to the recent Rick Perry rally in Texas, the prayer rally, which was called The Response. A couple of apostles helped organize the rally. Several others endorsed it. So what is Rick Perry’s connection to the New Apostolic Reformation?
Ms. TABACHNICK: Well, looking at the event, not only were there apostles who endorsed it and participated in it, but although the event was funded, it was sponsored by the American Family Association, it was organized and led throughout by people from the New Apostolic Reformation.
And this included numerous leading apostles who were seen all through the event. The coordinators and people who led each section were from an event called The Call and which is associated with the International House of Prayer in Kansas City.
So actually the event, from beginning to end, was a new apostolic event. And the major topics at these events, there are three major topics that you see as they take this event around the world, and that is usually anti-abortion, anti-gay rights and the conversion of Jews in order to advance the end times. And this was very visible at Perry’s event, as these apostles led all of these different prayers and repentance ceremonies at The Response.
FLATOW: You refer to the importance of Messianic Judaism in the end-times narrative that the apostles subscribe to, and you could hear that if you knew what to listen for at the Rick Perry rally when Rabbi Marty Waldman spoke and was introduced by Don Finto. And in introducing him, Finto said Waldman is the son of Holocaust survivors, but he’s come to acknowledge his own messiah. What does that mean?
Ms. TABACHNICK: Marty Waldman is a quite-well-known messianic rabbi in Texas. And by messianic, we mean Jews who have converted to Christianity, but they retain aspects – they retain a Jewish identity. So they may even retain many aspects of Jewish practice.
GROSS: This is a group that’s known in the vernacular as Jews for Jesus.
Ms. TABACHNICK: Jews for Jesus is only one group. I would argue that the network that the apostles have right now supporting messianic Jews dwarfs Jews for Jesus. It’s a much more extensive network.
And what was interesting about this was that apostle Don Finto, who introduced the prayer and introduced Marty Waldman, is an elder statesman in the movement who spent the last more than a decade working to encourage churches to support messianic ministries.
And the reason is that they believe that messianic Jews have a much better chance of converting Israeli Jews or Jews in various locations around the world than Christian Evangelicals. And so what they’re doing is promoting internationally, through all types of events and in magazines in the movement, promoting the idea that churches should, financially and in other ways, support messianic ministries in order to advance the conversion of Jews to Christianity and bring about the end times and the return of Jesus to the Earth.
GROSS: Yeah, how does the conversion of Jews to Christianity bring about the end times?
Ms. TABACHNICK: This is a different end-time narrative than what many people may have been familiar with that comes out of fundamentalism where the believers are raptured prior to the horrors of the end time and the rule of the Antichrist.
And this, the believers remain on Earth, and that’s one thing that makes it quite different. But another difference is what is holding Jesus back from coming to Earth is that there has to be a tipping point where a certain number of Jews in Israel reach out and call for Jesus to come as their messiah. And so that’s what they were referring to at this Rick Perry event.
Both Don Finto and Marty Waldman, who were there, are involved in a network of apostles in this movement that have set up messianic training centers around the world, in places where there are significant Jewish populations.
GROSS: So I don’t really know what to make of this, the fact that two people spoke in kind of covert language about the importance of Jews converting to Christianity and recognizing Jesus as their savoir so that Christ can return back to Earth in his second coming, the fact that that was expressed at a Rick Perry rally. I have no idea whether any of that reflects Rick Perry’s own views or not.
Ms. TABACHNICK: I don’t think there’s any way to know what Perry believes personally. What I can tell you is that this is a part of a larger package of themes that we saw throughout the entire event.
The basic idea of this event, as all The Call events, like this was patterned after, is the idea that in preparation for the end times, barriers will be broken down, and those barriers will come down between denominations in Protestantism, between generations, racial groups, and everyone will come together for the end times as what they call one new man.
So the idea is that you were doing all of these activities all around the country, interesting ceremonies, reconciliation ceremonies, to break down these barriers to bring everybody together under the banner of Jesus for the end times.
So a significant component of that is that the resistance of Jews to conversion is blocking this utopian period in the end times, the millennial in the end times, when there will not be poverty and death and corruption, environmental degradation, all of those things will disappear under the rule of Jesus.
GROSS: Are there other things that were said at the Rick Perry that would need to have some background to actually understand because it is a kind of a separate language, do you know what I mean? Like you wouldn’t really understand it unless you knew the context.
Ms. TABACHNICK: Yes, all through the event. The three major themes were the same as we’ve seen in The Call events around the world: One, anti-abortion, which was expressed with the terms shedding of innocent blood; two, anti-gay rights, which was expressed in repenting of sexual immorality; and then third the theme of converting Jews.
Also, if you were watching the event, you would have noticed that it was very much about personal repentance and what they called corporate repentance of the entire country. And this – but the idea of repentance is that they are repenting of being tolerant of sin. So they are repenting of being tolerant of abortion and repenting of being tolerant of what they call sexual perversion.
GROSS: So we don’t really know what Rick Perry’s own beliefs are on these issues, but we do know that when he spoke at his prayer rally, he was surrounded on each side by two of the apostles. Tell us a little bit about those apostles.
Ms. TABACHNICK: Well, one is an apostle, Alice Patterson. The other is a well-known African-American pastor, C.L. Jackson. Alice Patterson wrote a book, published last year, when she describes the journey that they have been with Perry since 2002.
And in this book, she explains that the Democratic Party is controlled by a demonic structure, and their mission was to travel around the state and to explain to African-American leaders why they should not be in the Democratic Party.
And on this journey with them was – and now I’m talking about Alice Patterson and C.L. Jackson, Perry personally – but as they went around the state since 2002, they had with them David Barton.
And David Barton is well-known for his histories in which he claims that the founding fathers had no intention of separation of church and state. One of his early books was called “The Myth of Separation.”
And he has a history in which he credits Democrats with being the source of racism throughout American history and conservative Evangelicals as being the source of fighting against slavery and for civil rights.
So they traveled around Texas. So this – delivering this message to African-American churches. So the fact that Alice Patterson and C.L. Jackson were standing with Perry was indeed politically significant.
GROSS: Rachel Tabachnick will be back in the second half of the show. She’s been writing about the New Apostolic Reformation for the website Talk To Action. I’m Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
(Soundbite of music)
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. We’re talking about an emerging evangelical movement that seeks to take dominion over politics, business and culture in preparation for the end times and the return of Jesus. The movement, dubbed the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, is establishing a presence in American politics. Two ministries in the movement, The Call, led by Lou Engle, and the International House of Prayer, led by Mike Bickle, helped organize Rick Perry’s recent prayer rally.
My guest Rachel Tabachnick has been writing about the New Apostolic Reformation for the website Talk To Action.
One of the people you may recognize who’s connected to the movement is Thomas Muthee, the Kenyan pastor who anointed Sarah Palin at the Wasilla Assembly of God Church in 2005, while praying for Jesus to protect her from the spirit of witchcraft. A video of that went viral during the 2008 presidential campaign. I asked Tabachnick about Muthee’s connection to the NAR.
Ms. TABACHNICK: The New Apostolic Reformation has another campaign that’s been very successful and this is called Transformations. Transformation is the buzzword for bringing communities into dominion or gaining dominion over culture and government in a community. And the movement has put out transformation videos since 1999.
Thomas Muthee, who was what’s called anointing Sarah Palin in that grainy video, was a star of the first transformation movie. And what these movies did, they show vignettes of communities or locations around the globe which they believe have been transformed through the supernatural move of God. And the process is that they, the people in the community come together, repent, pray together, expel the demons from their community – which they describe in terms of witches and witchcraft – and then that the community undergoes a transformation in which there can be miraculous healing, the growth of very large vegetables and agricultural products, the end of corruption and crime.
What was totally missed by the press was the fact that Muthee was an international leader in the movement at the time and recognized because of his role in this series of videos. And people became quite fixated on the witchcraft part of it as opposed to looking at who Muthee was and understanding his role in a larger movement.
And then the other point I would make is that although this is a movement that has mostly organized independent charismatics – so that means charismatics who are not in a denomination – there are also Pentecostal churches, churches that are in denominations, that have embraced the very distinct ideology of the movement. And one of those churches is Wasilla Assembly of God where Sarah Palin attended for over 20 years, and leaders of the movement have been there frequently to speak. So who knows what Sarah Palin personally believes but she certainly had quite a bit of exposure to the movement.
GROSS: Now you write about this group that it looks multicultural because they’re reaching out to Native Americans, to African-Americans, Asian-American, Latinos. There are women apostles as well as men apostles, and they stress racial reconciliation. But you say they stress racial reconciliation while literally demonizing all other religions and belief systems. What do you mean?
Ms. TABACHNICK: One example would be in the transformation movies. In these vignettes, the participants do what’s called spiritual warfare and spiritual mapping in some of the movies. And this is an activity to isolate where the demons are and then to start doing what they call strategic level spiritual warfare against those demons.
Let me explain this concept of strategic level spiritual warfare. They teach that there are three levels of spiritual warfare. The first is ground level warfare, which is expulsion of demons exorcism, if you will, of demons from individuals. This is nothing new. We’ve seen this for centuries. They have a little – a controversial twist to it because they teach that born-again Christians can harbor these demons.
Then they have a second level called occult level spiritual warfare. This they say is fighting freemasonry, Eastern religions and witchcraft. Then there’s the third level, strategic level spiritual warfare, which is removing these principalities they call them, the most powerful demons that hold in spiritual bondage entire populations. And this might be a community, a geographic area, what they call a people group, an ethnic group or a religious group. They literally name these demons and then go on these excursions to fight these demons.
GROSS: So let me see if I understand this. Does that mean that these prayer groups are trying to exorcise mosques and get the demons out of mosques so that Muslims can convert to Christianity?
Ms. TABACHNICK: They see the demon as holding sway over a large area, so over not just the mosque but the entire people group. Let me give you a specific example about this and this is something that’s coming up this November. Several groups have come together for another The Call event which will be in Detroit on November 11th. And the purpose of this one is to fight the demonic spirit of Islam.
Now I was listening to a recording. They’re in preparation for this and this has been going on all throughout the year. And one of the leading apostles, and one who endorsed Perry’s event, was speaking in a conference call to a group, and they placed these recordings online, and explaining to them the way that they were preparing for The Call Detroit. And one of the things that they’re doing is they’re literally going and putting a stake in the ground with a verse from Jeremiah at every Masonic lodge in the state. They have a ceremony to fight the demons and then they put the stake in the ground.
This is the type of ceremony that’s been taking place all over the country. In all 50 states, ceremonies, which they call divorcing Baal – Baal being what the Israelites worshiped when they abandoned God in the Old Testament.
GROSS: So the event is in Detroit which is very near Dearborn, Michigan, which has I think the – or one of the largest populations of Muslims in the United States.
Ms. TABACHNICK: Mm-hmm.
GROSS: Is that significant?
Ms. TABACHNICK: Yes, that’s very significant. The purpose of that event is to fight the spirit of Islam. In other words, to conduct spiritual warfare against the demons which they claim hold Muslims in bondage and keep them from converting. Now, of course, this is expressed in terms of love. They say we don’t hate Muslims. We love Muslims but we hate that they are in spiritual bondage and don’t convert to Christianity.
GROSS: So do you think that the people at the rally intend to go to mosques or directly address Muslims in any way? Like I don’t know how much you know about what the plan is.
Ms. TABACHNICK: I don’t know of specific plans. I can give you examples from the past. In 2008, just before the election, they held one of The Call events in Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego. This was an event in support of Prop 8.
GROSS: Which was meant to make gay marriage illegal.
Ms. TABACHNICK: Correct. And so in the promotional material put out about the event, Lou Engle talked about that they had to come together and pray because this would unleash a spirit more demonic than Islam, was his words. And prior to that event they did have people who came into conflict with people in gay communities, because they did have people going out in the streets and evangelizing and so forth and there were some conflicts prior to that event.
And also I might add, by the end of that event which was another daylong event Lou Engle was calling for martyrs to the cause from the stage. So I am concerned about the ramifications of the event in Detroit.
GROSS: So when you say this event is intended to be spiritual warfare against the intent of Islam, are the organizers of this event publicly saying that?
Ms. TABACHNICK: Yes. And in fact another person who has been there preparing for this event is Retired Lieutenant General William Boykin who is now part of the Oak Initiative. He does not announce himself as an apostle but he’s a part of this Oak Initiative which includes many of the leading apostles. And he has been going to Michigan and speaking about the nine principles of warfare. One of these principles is offense instead of defense, and he is advising people that they have to act to prevent mosques from being built before they are actually constructed.
GROSS: My guest is Rachel Tabachnick. She writes about the impact of the religious right and end time narratives on American politics. We’ll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
(Soundbite of music)
GROSS: Now let me move on to Mike Bickle. He is the leader of what is known as the International House of Prayer and he was one of the organizers of Rick Perry prayer rally. And he is also semi-famous now for having described Oprah Winfrey as a forerunner of the harlot movement. He says she is winsome, kind, reasonable. She is utterly deceived. A classy woman, a cool woman but she has a spirit of deception and is one of the forerunners to the harlot movement. Just a brief translation of what you think he means by that.
Ms. TABACHNICK: He’s talking about the end times. And in the end times narrative there is what is called the Great Harlot or the Great Harlot of Mystery Babylon, and this is a demonic figure in the end times. Throughout Protestant history this has sometimes been described as being the Roman Catholic Church. But it represents the apostate religion of the end time.
I might add Mike Bickle is one of the major thinkers in the movement. And his embrace of this particular type of ideology, which goes back to the 1940s and 1950s in something called the Latter Rain Movement, but his embrace of this ideology predates the coalescing of the New Apostolic Reformation. Mike Bickle was part of what was referred to by others as the Kansas City Prophets at Metro Christian Fellowship in the 1980s and 1990s. And his embrace of this ideology was very controversial, even among other independent charismatics at that time.
GROSS: Now Mike Bickle has what he calls the God School. And on his website he has the literature from the God School which you can read or watch videos of, and I just want to quote some of that. This is from the chapter “The Harlot Babylon: The One World Religion.” He says an angel gave John one of the most significant prophecies related to the end times.
John saw a Harlot that will have two global networks. First, it will be a worldwide religious network of great tolerance that will bring together the major world religions into one unified network including Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, etcetera, teaching that every road will lead to God and that everybody is good.
Second, it will be a global economic network. In the middle of the final seven years of this age the Antichrist’s plan is to replace the harlot religion of tolerance with Antichrist worship. This new worldwide religion will be very strict without any toleration. All who refuse to worship the Antichrist will be killed. Satan’s purpose for the harlot religious system will be to weaken the convictions of the people of the major world religions to prepare them for Antichrist worship.
So if I understand him correctly, what he’s saying here is that it’s the Antichrist, who’s responsible for some people’s belief that all the world religions are good but that’s just the Antichrist’s deception.
Ms. TABACHNICK: Yes. And what they’re saying is you cannot tolerate tolerance and that you cannot tolerate religious pluralism. The narrative that he’s describing there has been a common narrative to American fundamentalism for over 100 years. But there’s one major difference in what Bickle is teaching there. In the fundamentalist narrative all of this happens – the seven years of Antichrist rule happens after the believers have been taken from the earth in the Rapture.
What Mike Bickle is teaching and – to this movement is that no, the believers will remain and they have to be ready to fight and they have to be ready to be martyrs. Now this is a very different end time narrative that creates a very different activism. If you are going to still be around and you have to fight that’s very different than believing that you will be raptured and you’ll just be watching from the grandstands of heaven.
Also Mike Bickle’s International House of Prayer is a very youth-oriented operation and what they’re doing is teaching youths that this will likely happen in their lifetime and that they must be prepared to be martyrs.
GROSS: Now we were talking about how demons figure very prominently in the New Apostolic Reformation. Lou Engle who is one of the apostles and was one of the organizers of the Rick Perry rally, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think he said that gays are possessed of demonic spirits.
Ms. TABACHNICK: Right. And in fact, in another The Call event Lou Engle spoke at length about how one of his sons has started an International House of Prayer in the Castro district of San Francisco, and that his son is now expelling demons from homosexuals, and supposedly then this cures them of their homosexuality.
GROSS: Tell us a little bit more about Lou Engle. And again, he’s also organizing the event on November 11th in Detroit.
Ms. TABACHNICK: Lou Engle has held these The Call events around the world. In fact he held one in 2008 in Jerusalem which coincided with the Global Day of Prayer. The Global Day of Prayer is also initiative of the New Apostolic Reformation movement.
Lou Engle also took The Call event to Uganda in May of 2010, where various people got on the stage and promoted the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda, which is still pending. It’s a very draconian bill that would allow for execution of certain offenses and would also allow for people who don’t report homosexual activity to be jailed.
The apostles have a long history in Uganda and have – and some of them have had close relationships with both political and religious leaders there. And in fact, an apostle in the movement in Uganda takes credit for promoting the Anti-Homosexuality Bill and was recognized by the Parliament of Uganda when the bill was introduced.
GROSS: Can I just end this interview on a kind of personal note, personal on your behalf? You said that you spent the first half of your life as a Southern Baptist and the second half as a Jew.
(Soundbite of laughter)
GROSS: So…
Ms. TABACHNICK: Yes.
GROSS: What changed?
Ms. TABACHNICK: I got married.
(Soundbite of laughter)
GROSS: Oh, OK. OK.
Ms. TABACHNICK: But having that background, having the Southern Baptist background and growing up in the Deep South, has helped me to be able to do this research. And it’s also helped me to realize something that might not be apparent to some other people looking at the movement, that this is quite radically different than the evangelicalism of my youth. And the things that we’ve been talking about are not representative of evangelicalism. They’re not representative of conservative evangelicalism. So I think that’s important to keep in mind.
This is a movement that is growing in popularity and I think one of the ways they have been able to do that is they’re not very identifiable to most people. They’re just presented as nondenominational or just Christian. But it is an identifiable movement now with an identifiable ideology.
GROSS: Well, I want to thank you so much for talking with us.
Ms. TABACHNICK: Thank you, Terry.
GROSS: Rachel Tabachnick has been writing about the New Apostolic Reformation for the website Talk To Action. You’ll find links to her recent articles on our website, freshair.npr.org.
We invited several people affiliated with the NAR to join us on FRESH AIR, but they were unable to do anything in time for today’s broadcast. Mike Bickle has agreed to join us at a future time. We hope to schedule that soon.
Coming up, rock critic Ken Tucker reviews John Doe’s new album.
This is FRESH AIR.
[http://friendsofjustice.wordpress.com/2011/08/25/rachel-tabachnick-talks-dominionism-on-fresh-air-and-why-you-should-be-paying-attention/]
Are Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann part of a movement determined to forcibly Christianize every aspect of American culture?
If so, why does a blog dedicated to ending mass incarceration care one way or the other?
If Rachel Tabachnick is anything to go by, the answer to the first question is ‘yes’. Tabachnick knows more about the dominionist strain within contemporary evangelicalism than just about anybody and you simply must check out her recent interview with Terry Gross of Fresh Air. [https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=139781021])
I am still thinking through my answer to the “so what” question (and will have more to say on the subject as my thinking clarifies); but the rough outline of an answer came to me yesterday when a reporter asked me why Louisiana (unlike Texas and Mississippi) has done nothing to reform its criminal justice system.
The avuncular visage of Burl Cain sprang to mind. Cain is slowly transforming the Angola prison plantation into a spiritual rehabilitation center. Inmates (90% of them in for life) are repeatedly invited to get right with Jesus. Life becomes a whole lot easier if they take the offer.
Then I thought of Ann Richards, the progressive Texas Governor who, during her ill-fated re-election campaign against George W. Bush, told the voters that she wanted to build more prisons so folks with addiction issues could get rehabilitated.
Burl Cain and his Louisiana fan club want to lock up more people every year so earnest evangelists can have a captive audience.
Friends of Justice works in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, three states that are gradually backing away from the punitive consensus that has controlled the American judicial system for more than three decades. Texas was embarrassed into rethinking mass incarceration through a series of scandals: Tulia (the bizarre drug bust that gave birth to Friends of Justice), Hearne (the American Violet story), the Dallas Sheetrock scandal, the Houston crime lab, the Texas Youth Commission fiasco, an incredible string of DNA exonerations in Dallas County and Governor Perry’s botched attempt to silence the Texas Forensic Science Commission. Thanks to a series of modest reforms, the Texas prison population has now plateaued in the 160,000 range (it was 40,000 in 1980) and will likely stay there for the foreseeable future.
Mississippi experienced a 3.5% drop in its prison population in a single year by deciding that inmates must only serve 25% of sentences before being eligible for parole (it had been 85%).
The old “lock ‘em up” mentality is beginning to soften even in the state that boasts the highest incarceration rate in the free world. Folks in Louisiana want to lock up as many people as possible out of a misdirected sense of compassion. After all, isn’t it better to find Jesus in jail than to live an unregenerate life in the free world? We don’t hate criminals in Louisiana; we just want what’s best for them.
This is precisely the kind of theocratic logic that politicians like Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann have embraced. They want to Christianize the nation (by force if necessary) the way Burl Cain has Christianized the Angola plantation. And if the liberals presently controlling Hollywood, the recording industry, the public school system, the evening news and the political life of the nation don’t want to be Christianized, that’s just too bad. Michelle, Sarah, Rick et al are God’s anointed apostles. At Angola, to oppose Burl Cain is to oppose God; the New Apostolic Reformation wants to extend this kind of thinking to every aspect of our national life.
Do the politicians currently feeding at the trough of radical religion really believe that the eclectic vitality of a diverse nation can be homogenized by the blood of the Lamb? Maybe not. But they want to push the political envelope as far in that direction as the public will allow. In these strange times, it’s smart politics.
If you think I’m overstating the case, please read Ms. Tabachnick’s conversation with Terry Gross.
The Evangelicals Engaged In Spiritual Warfare
August 24, 2011 - TERRY GROSS, host:
This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross.
An emerging Christian movement that seeks to take dominion over politics, business and culture in preparation for the end times and the return of Jesus is establishing a presence in American politics. The leaders are considered apostles and prophets, gifted by God for this role.
The International Apostolic and Prophetic Movement was named the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, by its leading architect, C. Peter Wagner. My guest, Rachel Tabachnick, has been researching and writing about this movement. She says although the movement is larger than the network of apostles organized by Wagner, and not all those connected with the movement describe themselves as part of Wagner’s NAR, the apostles and prophets of the movement have an identifiable ideology that separates them from other Evangelicals.
Two ministries in the movement, The Call, led by Lou Engle, and the International House of Prayer, led by Mike Bickle, helped organize Rick Perry’s recent prayer rally, where apostles and prophets from around the nation spoke or appeared on stage.
The Kenyan pastor who anointed Sarah Palin at the Wasilla Assembly of God Church in 2005 while praying for Jesus to protect her from the spirit of witchcraft is also part of this movement.
My guest, Rachel Tabachnick, researches the impact of the religious right and end-time narratives on American politics. She writes for the website Talk To Action.
Rachel Tabachnick, welcome to FRESH AIR. For people who haven’t heard about the New Apostolic Reformation, and I’d say that’s the majority of the people, overwhelmingly, what are some of the basic beliefs or goals of this group?
Ms. RACHEL TABACHNICK: I would say the basic belief began with the idea of dominionism, and dominionism is simply that Christians of this belief system must take control over all the various institutions of society and government. They have some unusual concepts of what they call spiritual warfare that have not been seen before in other groups.
Spiritual warfare is a common term in Evangelicalism and in Christianity, but they have some unique approaches and unique spins on this that distinguish them from other groups.
GROSS: And that literally have to do with casting demons out of people and religious and…
Ms. TABACHNICK: They use this in terms of evangelizing. So whereas we might be accustomed with the idea of saving souls, of missionaries or evangelical work to save individual souls; they believe that they can, through this demon warfare, take control over entire communities, or perhaps nations or people groups, an ethnic group, a religious group and so forth, because they believe that they are doing spiritual warfare at this higher level against these demonic principalities, what they call demonic principalities.
GROSS: So I’ve been reading about the New Apostolic Reformation. Tell me if you think that I’ve gotten this right at all. My understanding is that they are a group that believes in the end times, that there will be a second coming of Christ, that certain things need to be accomplished on Earth before he comes, and that it’s their job – it’s the job of the apostles to listen to what Jesus is telling them so that they can get the world ready for his second coming. Yes?
Ms. TABACHNICK: Yes, what this group believes is that they must re-organize Protestant Christianity under their leadership. So instead of having all of these different denominations in Protestantism, they would unify the church, the Protestant Church, into one body under the leadership of their apostles.
And then the other thing that distinguishes them is this idea that in order to do this, they must take control over society and government and that they will do this in large part through this warfare that they are conducting with demons.
GROSS: So how does this new movement, the New Apostolic Reformation, connect to American politics?
Ms. TABACHNICK: This is a very political movement. In fact, I would call it a religio-political movement in that it has networked across the United States in something that looks like a hybrid between a religious denomination and a political party.
For example, they have what are called prayer warrior networks in all 50 states, and they have very strong opinions about the direction they want the country to take. They teach what is called dominionism. And the idea of dominionism, or dominion theology, is that all areas of society and government should come under the control of God through these apostles and prophets, and that all of these areas of society should represent Christian and biblical values.
They have interesting campaigns. One that’s been very successful for the last few years is called the Seven Mountains campaign. And what this means is they teach that they are reclaiming the seven mountains of culture and society. And those mountains are arts and entertainment, business, education, family, government, media and religion.
And business is considered to be one of the most important mountains to reclaim control because this is the way that they finance the other mountains.
GROSS: So when they want to, like, reclaim government or politics, what does that mean?
Ms. TABACHNICK: They teach, quite literally, that these mountains have fallen under the control of demonic influences in society. And therefore, they must reclaim them for God in order to bring about the kingdom of God on Earth.
GROSS: And what are some of the major issues that they think are important?
Ms. TABACHNICK: Well, the typical religious right hot-button issues, if you will, anti-abortion, anti-gay rights – but they also have a laissez-faire market ideology, the belief that government should not be involved in social safety nets, that the country is becoming socialist, if not communist – so a Tea Party mentality.
GROSS: And I think that they also advocate – tell me if I’m wrong here – the privatization of schools – the school system.
Ms. TABACHNICK: Yes. All of the typical, you know, what we’ve come to call Tea Party issues of very small government. And in the case of the apostles, they believe this because they believe that a large government or government that handles the safety net is taking away what is the domain of the church and of Christianity.
GROSS: And what kind of authority do they want in government?
Ms. TABACHNICK: They want the authority to align government with what they believe is the kingdom of God, with biblical values in their interpretation.
Let me back up and say something about dominionism. Dominionism is very different than having strong beliefs or even having very strong beliefs about one’s Evangelical values. Dominionism is very controversial inside of the conservative and Evangelical world. It’s a specific theology that states that somehow God lost control of the Earth when Satan tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden and that humans must help God regain control of the Earth. And the way that they do this is by taking dominion over society and government.
The apostles and prophets have an interesting twist on this. They’re not the only dominionist movement out there. Some people may be familiar with Rushdoony and Christian Reconstructionism. This is a different brand of dominionism.
And the apostles teach what’s called strategic-level spiritual warfare with the idea being that the reason why there is sin and corruption and poverty on the Earth is because the Earth is controlled by a hierarchy of demons under the authority of Satan.
And so they teach that not just evangelizing souls one by one, as we’re accustomed to hearing about, they teach that they will go into a geographic region or to a people-group and conduct these spiritual-warfare activities in order to remove the demons from the entire population or the demonic control over the entire population. And this is what they’re doing that’s quite different than other conservative Evangelical or fundamentalist groups of the past.
GROSS: My guest is Rachel Tabachnick. She writes about the impact of the religious right and end-time narratives on American politics. She has written about the New Apostolic Reformation for the website Talk To Action. We’ll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
(Soundbite of music)
GROSS: Let me re-introduce you. For our listeners just tuning in, my guest is Rachel Tabachnick. She’s a researcher and writer who focuses on the impact of the religious right on politics and of end-times narratives on politics.
So one of the reasons why the New Apostolic Reformation is of interest now is because several of the apostles from that movement were connected to the recent Rick Perry rally in Texas, the prayer rally, which was called The Response. A couple of apostles helped organize the rally. Several others endorsed it. So what is Rick Perry’s connection to the New Apostolic Reformation?
Ms. TABACHNICK: Well, looking at the event, not only were there apostles who endorsed it and participated in it, but although the event was funded, it was sponsored by the American Family Association, it was organized and led throughout by people from the New Apostolic Reformation.
And this included numerous leading apostles who were seen all through the event. The coordinators and people who led each section were from an event called The Call and which is associated with the International House of Prayer in Kansas City.
So actually the event, from beginning to end, was a new apostolic event. And the major topics at these events, there are three major topics that you see as they take this event around the world, and that is usually anti-abortion, anti-gay rights and the conversion of Jews in order to advance the end times. And this was very visible at Perry’s event, as these apostles led all of these different prayers and repentance ceremonies at The Response.
FLATOW: You refer to the importance of Messianic Judaism in the end-times narrative that the apostles subscribe to, and you could hear that if you knew what to listen for at the Rick Perry rally when Rabbi Marty Waldman spoke and was introduced by Don Finto. And in introducing him, Finto said Waldman is the son of Holocaust survivors, but he’s come to acknowledge his own messiah. What does that mean?
Ms. TABACHNICK: Marty Waldman is a quite-well-known messianic rabbi in Texas. And by messianic, we mean Jews who have converted to Christianity, but they retain aspects – they retain a Jewish identity. So they may even retain many aspects of Jewish practice.
GROSS: This is a group that’s known in the vernacular as Jews for Jesus.
Ms. TABACHNICK: Jews for Jesus is only one group. I would argue that the network that the apostles have right now supporting messianic Jews dwarfs Jews for Jesus. It’s a much more extensive network.
And what was interesting about this was that apostle Don Finto, who introduced the prayer and introduced Marty Waldman, is an elder statesman in the movement who spent the last more than a decade working to encourage churches to support messianic ministries.
And the reason is that they believe that messianic Jews have a much better chance of converting Israeli Jews or Jews in various locations around the world than Christian Evangelicals. And so what they’re doing is promoting internationally, through all types of events and in magazines in the movement, promoting the idea that churches should, financially and in other ways, support messianic ministries in order to advance the conversion of Jews to Christianity and bring about the end times and the return of Jesus to the Earth.
GROSS: Yeah, how does the conversion of Jews to Christianity bring about the end times?
Ms. TABACHNICK: This is a different end-time narrative than what many people may have been familiar with that comes out of fundamentalism where the believers are raptured prior to the horrors of the end time and the rule of the Antichrist.
And this, the believers remain on Earth, and that’s one thing that makes it quite different. But another difference is what is holding Jesus back from coming to Earth is that there has to be a tipping point where a certain number of Jews in Israel reach out and call for Jesus to come as their messiah. And so that’s what they were referring to at this Rick Perry event.
Both Don Finto and Marty Waldman, who were there, are involved in a network of apostles in this movement that have set up messianic training centers around the world, in places where there are significant Jewish populations.
GROSS: So I don’t really know what to make of this, the fact that two people spoke in kind of covert language about the importance of Jews converting to Christianity and recognizing Jesus as their savoir so that Christ can return back to Earth in his second coming, the fact that that was expressed at a Rick Perry rally. I have no idea whether any of that reflects Rick Perry’s own views or not.
Ms. TABACHNICK: I don’t think there’s any way to know what Perry believes personally. What I can tell you is that this is a part of a larger package of themes that we saw throughout the entire event.
The basic idea of this event, as all The Call events, like this was patterned after, is the idea that in preparation for the end times, barriers will be broken down, and those barriers will come down between denominations in Protestantism, between generations, racial groups, and everyone will come together for the end times as what they call one new man.
So the idea is that you were doing all of these activities all around the country, interesting ceremonies, reconciliation ceremonies, to break down these barriers to bring everybody together under the banner of Jesus for the end times.
So a significant component of that is that the resistance of Jews to conversion is blocking this utopian period in the end times, the millennial in the end times, when there will not be poverty and death and corruption, environmental degradation, all of those things will disappear under the rule of Jesus.
GROSS: Are there other things that were said at the Rick Perry that would need to have some background to actually understand because it is a kind of a separate language, do you know what I mean? Like you wouldn’t really understand it unless you knew the context.
Ms. TABACHNICK: Yes, all through the event. The three major themes were the same as we’ve seen in The Call events around the world: One, anti-abortion, which was expressed with the terms shedding of innocent blood; two, anti-gay rights, which was expressed in repenting of sexual immorality; and then third the theme of converting Jews.
Also, if you were watching the event, you would have noticed that it was very much about personal repentance and what they called corporate repentance of the entire country. And this – but the idea of repentance is that they are repenting of being tolerant of sin. So they are repenting of being tolerant of abortion and repenting of being tolerant of what they call sexual perversion.
GROSS: So we don’t really know what Rick Perry’s own beliefs are on these issues, but we do know that when he spoke at his prayer rally, he was surrounded on each side by two of the apostles. Tell us a little bit about those apostles.
Ms. TABACHNICK: Well, one is an apostle, Alice Patterson. The other is a well-known African-American pastor, C.L. Jackson. Alice Patterson wrote a book, published last year, when she describes the journey that they have been with Perry since 2002.
And in this book, she explains that the Democratic Party is controlled by a demonic structure, and their mission was to travel around the state and to explain to African-American leaders why they should not be in the Democratic Party.
And on this journey with them was – and now I’m talking about Alice Patterson and C.L. Jackson, Perry personally – but as they went around the state since 2002, they had with them David Barton.
And David Barton is well-known for his histories in which he claims that the founding fathers had no intention of separation of church and state. One of his early books was called “The Myth of Separation.”
And he has a history in which he credits Democrats with being the source of racism throughout American history and conservative Evangelicals as being the source of fighting against slavery and for civil rights.
So they traveled around Texas. So this – delivering this message to African-American churches. So the fact that Alice Patterson and C.L. Jackson were standing with Perry was indeed politically significant.
GROSS: Rachel Tabachnick will be back in the second half of the show. She’s been writing about the New Apostolic Reformation for the website Talk To Action. I’m Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
(Soundbite of music)
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. We’re talking about an emerging evangelical movement that seeks to take dominion over politics, business and culture in preparation for the end times and the return of Jesus. The movement, dubbed the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, is establishing a presence in American politics. Two ministries in the movement, The Call, led by Lou Engle, and the International House of Prayer, led by Mike Bickle, helped organize Rick Perry’s recent prayer rally.
My guest Rachel Tabachnick has been writing about the New Apostolic Reformation for the website Talk To Action.
One of the people you may recognize who’s connected to the movement is Thomas Muthee, the Kenyan pastor who anointed Sarah Palin at the Wasilla Assembly of God Church in 2005, while praying for Jesus to protect her from the spirit of witchcraft. A video of that went viral during the 2008 presidential campaign. I asked Tabachnick about Muthee’s connection to the NAR.
Ms. TABACHNICK: The New Apostolic Reformation has another campaign that’s been very successful and this is called Transformations. Transformation is the buzzword for bringing communities into dominion or gaining dominion over culture and government in a community. And the movement has put out transformation videos since 1999.
Thomas Muthee, who was what’s called anointing Sarah Palin in that grainy video, was a star of the first transformation movie. And what these movies did, they show vignettes of communities or locations around the globe which they believe have been transformed through the supernatural move of God. And the process is that they, the people in the community come together, repent, pray together, expel the demons from their community – which they describe in terms of witches and witchcraft – and then that the community undergoes a transformation in which there can be miraculous healing, the growth of very large vegetables and agricultural products, the end of corruption and crime.
What was totally missed by the press was the fact that Muthee was an international leader in the movement at the time and recognized because of his role in this series of videos. And people became quite fixated on the witchcraft part of it as opposed to looking at who Muthee was and understanding his role in a larger movement.
And then the other point I would make is that although this is a movement that has mostly organized independent charismatics – so that means charismatics who are not in a denomination – there are also Pentecostal churches, churches that are in denominations, that have embraced the very distinct ideology of the movement. And one of those churches is Wasilla Assembly of God where Sarah Palin attended for over 20 years, and leaders of the movement have been there frequently to speak. So who knows what Sarah Palin personally believes but she certainly had quite a bit of exposure to the movement.
GROSS: Now you write about this group that it looks multicultural because they’re reaching out to Native Americans, to African-Americans, Asian-American, Latinos. There are women apostles as well as men apostles, and they stress racial reconciliation. But you say they stress racial reconciliation while literally demonizing all other religions and belief systems. What do you mean?
Ms. TABACHNICK: One example would be in the transformation movies. In these vignettes, the participants do what’s called spiritual warfare and spiritual mapping in some of the movies. And this is an activity to isolate where the demons are and then to start doing what they call strategic level spiritual warfare against those demons.
Let me explain this concept of strategic level spiritual warfare. They teach that there are three levels of spiritual warfare. The first is ground level warfare, which is expulsion of demons exorcism, if you will, of demons from individuals. This is nothing new. We’ve seen this for centuries. They have a little – a controversial twist to it because they teach that born-again Christians can harbor these demons.
Then they have a second level called occult level spiritual warfare. This they say is fighting freemasonry, Eastern religions and witchcraft. Then there’s the third level, strategic level spiritual warfare, which is removing these principalities they call them, the most powerful demons that hold in spiritual bondage entire populations. And this might be a community, a geographic area, what they call a people group, an ethnic group or a religious group. They literally name these demons and then go on these excursions to fight these demons.
GROSS: So let me see if I understand this. Does that mean that these prayer groups are trying to exorcise mosques and get the demons out of mosques so that Muslims can convert to Christianity?
Ms. TABACHNICK: They see the demon as holding sway over a large area, so over not just the mosque but the entire people group. Let me give you a specific example about this and this is something that’s coming up this November. Several groups have come together for another The Call event which will be in Detroit on November 11th. And the purpose of this one is to fight the demonic spirit of Islam.
Now I was listening to a recording. They’re in preparation for this and this has been going on all throughout the year. And one of the leading apostles, and one who endorsed Perry’s event, was speaking in a conference call to a group, and they placed these recordings online, and explaining to them the way that they were preparing for The Call Detroit. And one of the things that they’re doing is they’re literally going and putting a stake in the ground with a verse from Jeremiah at every Masonic lodge in the state. They have a ceremony to fight the demons and then they put the stake in the ground.
This is the type of ceremony that’s been taking place all over the country. In all 50 states, ceremonies, which they call divorcing Baal – Baal being what the Israelites worshiped when they abandoned God in the Old Testament.
GROSS: So the event is in Detroit which is very near Dearborn, Michigan, which has I think the – or one of the largest populations of Muslims in the United States.
Ms. TABACHNICK: Mm-hmm.
GROSS: Is that significant?
Ms. TABACHNICK: Yes, that’s very significant. The purpose of that event is to fight the spirit of Islam. In other words, to conduct spiritual warfare against the demons which they claim hold Muslims in bondage and keep them from converting. Now, of course, this is expressed in terms of love. They say we don’t hate Muslims. We love Muslims but we hate that they are in spiritual bondage and don’t convert to Christianity.
GROSS: So do you think that the people at the rally intend to go to mosques or directly address Muslims in any way? Like I don’t know how much you know about what the plan is.
Ms. TABACHNICK: I don’t know of specific plans. I can give you examples from the past. In 2008, just before the election, they held one of The Call events in Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego. This was an event in support of Prop 8.
GROSS: Which was meant to make gay marriage illegal.
Ms. TABACHNICK: Correct. And so in the promotional material put out about the event, Lou Engle talked about that they had to come together and pray because this would unleash a spirit more demonic than Islam, was his words. And prior to that event they did have people who came into conflict with people in gay communities, because they did have people going out in the streets and evangelizing and so forth and there were some conflicts prior to that event.
And also I might add, by the end of that event which was another daylong event Lou Engle was calling for martyrs to the cause from the stage. So I am concerned about the ramifications of the event in Detroit.
GROSS: So when you say this event is intended to be spiritual warfare against the intent of Islam, are the organizers of this event publicly saying that?
Ms. TABACHNICK: Yes. And in fact another person who has been there preparing for this event is Retired Lieutenant General William Boykin who is now part of the Oak Initiative. He does not announce himself as an apostle but he’s a part of this Oak Initiative which includes many of the leading apostles. And he has been going to Michigan and speaking about the nine principles of warfare. One of these principles is offense instead of defense, and he is advising people that they have to act to prevent mosques from being built before they are actually constructed.
GROSS: My guest is Rachel Tabachnick. She writes about the impact of the religious right and end time narratives on American politics. We’ll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
(Soundbite of music)
GROSS: Now let me move on to Mike Bickle. He is the leader of what is known as the International House of Prayer and he was one of the organizers of Rick Perry prayer rally. And he is also semi-famous now for having described Oprah Winfrey as a forerunner of the harlot movement. He says she is winsome, kind, reasonable. She is utterly deceived. A classy woman, a cool woman but she has a spirit of deception and is one of the forerunners to the harlot movement. Just a brief translation of what you think he means by that.
Ms. TABACHNICK: He’s talking about the end times. And in the end times narrative there is what is called the Great Harlot or the Great Harlot of Mystery Babylon, and this is a demonic figure in the end times. Throughout Protestant history this has sometimes been described as being the Roman Catholic Church. But it represents the apostate religion of the end time.
I might add Mike Bickle is one of the major thinkers in the movement. And his embrace of this particular type of ideology, which goes back to the 1940s and 1950s in something called the Latter Rain Movement, but his embrace of this ideology predates the coalescing of the New Apostolic Reformation. Mike Bickle was part of what was referred to by others as the Kansas City Prophets at Metro Christian Fellowship in the 1980s and 1990s. And his embrace of this ideology was very controversial, even among other independent charismatics at that time.
GROSS: Now Mike Bickle has what he calls the God School. And on his website he has the literature from the God School which you can read or watch videos of, and I just want to quote some of that. This is from the chapter “The Harlot Babylon: The One World Religion.” He says an angel gave John one of the most significant prophecies related to the end times.
John saw a Harlot that will have two global networks. First, it will be a worldwide religious network of great tolerance that will bring together the major world religions into one unified network including Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, etcetera, teaching that every road will lead to God and that everybody is good.
Second, it will be a global economic network. In the middle of the final seven years of this age the Antichrist’s plan is to replace the harlot religion of tolerance with Antichrist worship. This new worldwide religion will be very strict without any toleration. All who refuse to worship the Antichrist will be killed. Satan’s purpose for the harlot religious system will be to weaken the convictions of the people of the major world religions to prepare them for Antichrist worship.
So if I understand him correctly, what he’s saying here is that it’s the Antichrist, who’s responsible for some people’s belief that all the world religions are good but that’s just the Antichrist’s deception.
Ms. TABACHNICK: Yes. And what they’re saying is you cannot tolerate tolerance and that you cannot tolerate religious pluralism. The narrative that he’s describing there has been a common narrative to American fundamentalism for over 100 years. But there’s one major difference in what Bickle is teaching there. In the fundamentalist narrative all of this happens – the seven years of Antichrist rule happens after the believers have been taken from the earth in the Rapture.
What Mike Bickle is teaching and – to this movement is that no, the believers will remain and they have to be ready to fight and they have to be ready to be martyrs. Now this is a very different end time narrative that creates a very different activism. If you are going to still be around and you have to fight that’s very different than believing that you will be raptured and you’ll just be watching from the grandstands of heaven.
Also Mike Bickle’s International House of Prayer is a very youth-oriented operation and what they’re doing is teaching youths that this will likely happen in their lifetime and that they must be prepared to be martyrs.
GROSS: Now we were talking about how demons figure very prominently in the New Apostolic Reformation. Lou Engle who is one of the apostles and was one of the organizers of the Rick Perry rally, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think he said that gays are possessed of demonic spirits.
Ms. TABACHNICK: Right. And in fact, in another The Call event Lou Engle spoke at length about how one of his sons has started an International House of Prayer in the Castro district of San Francisco, and that his son is now expelling demons from homosexuals, and supposedly then this cures them of their homosexuality.
GROSS: Tell us a little bit more about Lou Engle. And again, he’s also organizing the event on November 11th in Detroit.
Ms. TABACHNICK: Lou Engle has held these The Call events around the world. In fact he held one in 2008 in Jerusalem which coincided with the Global Day of Prayer. The Global Day of Prayer is also initiative of the New Apostolic Reformation movement.
Lou Engle also took The Call event to Uganda in May of 2010, where various people got on the stage and promoted the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda, which is still pending. It’s a very draconian bill that would allow for execution of certain offenses and would also allow for people who don’t report homosexual activity to be jailed.
The apostles have a long history in Uganda and have – and some of them have had close relationships with both political and religious leaders there. And in fact, an apostle in the movement in Uganda takes credit for promoting the Anti-Homosexuality Bill and was recognized by the Parliament of Uganda when the bill was introduced.
GROSS: Can I just end this interview on a kind of personal note, personal on your behalf? You said that you spent the first half of your life as a Southern Baptist and the second half as a Jew.
(Soundbite of laughter)
GROSS: So…
Ms. TABACHNICK: Yes.
GROSS: What changed?
Ms. TABACHNICK: I got married.
(Soundbite of laughter)
GROSS: Oh, OK. OK.
Ms. TABACHNICK: But having that background, having the Southern Baptist background and growing up in the Deep South, has helped me to be able to do this research. And it’s also helped me to realize something that might not be apparent to some other people looking at the movement, that this is quite radically different than the evangelicalism of my youth. And the things that we’ve been talking about are not representative of evangelicalism. They’re not representative of conservative evangelicalism. So I think that’s important to keep in mind.
This is a movement that is growing in popularity and I think one of the ways they have been able to do that is they’re not very identifiable to most people. They’re just presented as nondenominational or just Christian. But it is an identifiable movement now with an identifiable ideology.
GROSS: Well, I want to thank you so much for talking with us.
Ms. TABACHNICK: Thank you, Terry.
GROSS: Rachel Tabachnick has been writing about the New Apostolic Reformation for the website Talk To Action. You’ll find links to her recent articles on our website, freshair.npr.org.
We invited several people affiliated with the NAR to join us on FRESH AIR, but they were unable to do anything in time for today’s broadcast. Mike Bickle has agreed to join us at a future time. We hope to schedule that soon.
Coming up, rock critic Ken Tucker reviews John Doe’s new album.
This is FRESH AIR.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
2011-08-24 "With CIA help, NYPD moves covertly in Muslim areas" by ADAM GOLDMAN and MATT APUZZO from "Associated Press",
Associated Press writers Tom Hays and Eileen Sullivan in Washington contributed to this report.
NEW YORK (AP) — Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the New York Police Department has become one of the nation's most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies, targeting ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government, an Associated Press investigation has found.
These operations have benefited from unprecedented help from the CIA, a partnership that has blurred the line between foreign and domestic spying.
The department has dispatched undercover officers, known as "rakers," into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program, according to officials directly involved in the program. They've monitored daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs. Police have also used informants, known as "mosque crawlers," to monitor sermons, even when there's no evidence of wrongdoing.
Neither the city council, which finances the department, nor the federal government, which has given NYPD more than $1.6 billion since 9/11, is told exactly what's going on.
Many of these operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD's intelligence unit.
A veteran CIA officer, while still on the agency's payroll, was the architect of the NYPD's intelligence programs. The CIA trained a police detective at the Farm, the agency's spy school in Virginia, then returned him to New York, where he put his new espionage skills to work inside the United States.
And just last month, the CIA sent a senior officer to work as a clandestine operative inside police headquarters.
In response to the story, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a leading Muslim civil rights organization, called on the Justice Department to investigate. The Justice Department said Wednesday night it would review the request.
"This is potentially illegal what they're doing," said Gadeir Abbas, a staff attorney with the organization.
The NYPD denied that it trolls ethnic neighborhoods and said it only follows leads. Police operations have disrupted terrorist plots and put several would-be killers in prison.
"The New York Police Department is doing everything it can to make sure there's not another 9/11 here and that more innocent New Yorkers are not killed by terrorists," NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said. "And we have nothing to apologize for in that regard."
AP's investigation is based on documents and interviews with more than 40 current and former New York Police Department and federal officials. Many were directly involved in planning and carrying out these secret operations for the department. Though most said the tactics were appropriate and made the city safer, many insisted on anonymity, because they were not authorized to speak with reporters about security matters.
In just two episodes showing how widely the NYPD cast its net, the department sought a rundown from the taxi commission of every Pakistani cab driver in the city, and produced an analytical report on every mosque within 100 miles, officials said.
One of the enduring questions of the past decade is whether being safe requires giving up some liberty and privacy. The focus of that debate has primarily been federal programs like wiretapping and indefinite detention. The question has received less attention in New York, where residents do not know for sure what, if anything, they have given up.
The story of how the NYPD Intelligence Division developed such aggressive programs begins with one man.
David Cohen arrived at the New York Police Department in January 2002, just weeks after the last fires had been extinguished at the debris field that had been the twin towers. A retired 35-year veteran of the CIA, Cohen became the police department's first civilian intelligence chief.
Cohen had an exceptional career at the CIA, rising to lead both the agency's analytical and operational divisions. He also was an extraordinarily divisive figure, a man whose sharp tongue and supreme confidence in his own abilities gave him a reputation as arrogant. Cohen's tenure as head of CIA operations, the nation's top spy, was so contentious that in 1997, The New York Times editorial page took the unusual step of calling for his ouster.
He had no police experience. He had never defended a city from an attack. But New York wasn't looking for a cop.
"Post-9/11, we needed someone in there who knew how to really gather intelligence," said John Cutter, a retired NYPD official who served as one of Cohen's top uniformed officers.
At the time, the intelligence division was best known for driving dignitaries around the city. Cohen envisioned a unit that would analyze intelligence, run undercover operations and cultivate a network of informants. In short, he wanted New York to have its own version of the CIA.
Cohen shared Commissioner Ray Kelly's belief that 9/11 had proved that the police department could not simply rely on the federal government to prevent terrorism in New York.
"If anything goes on in New York," one former officer recalls Cohen telling his staff in the early days, "it's your fault."
Among Cohen's earliest moves at the NYPD was making a request of his old colleagues at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. He needed someone to help build this new operation, someone with experience and clout and, most important, someone who had access to the latest intelligence so the NYPD wouldn't have to rely on the FBI to dole out information.
CIA Director George Tenet responded by tapping Larry Sanchez, a respected veteran who had served as a CIA official inside the United Nations. Often, when the CIA places someone on temporary assignment, the other agency picks up the tab. In this case, three former intelligence officials said, Tenet kept Sanchez on the CIA payroll.
When he arrived in New York in March 2002, Sanchez had offices at both the NYPD and the CIA's station in New York, one former official said. Sanchez interviewed police officers for newly defined intelligence jobs. He guided and mentored officers, schooling them in the art of gathering information. He also directed their efforts, another said.
There had never been an arrangement like it, and some senior CIA officials soon began questioning whether Tenet was allowing Sanchez to operate on both sides of the wall that's supposed to keep the CIA out of the domestic intelligence business.
"It should not be a surprise to anyone that, after 9/11, the Central Intelligence Agency stepped up its cooperation with law enforcement on counterterrorism issues or that some of that increased cooperation was in New York, the site of ground zero," CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood said.
Just as at the CIA, Cohen and Sanchez knew that informants would have to become the backbone of their operation. But with threats coming in from around the globe, they couldn't wait months for the perfect plan.
They came up with a makeshift solution. They dispatched more officers to Pakistani neighborhoods and, according to one former police official directly involved in the effort, instructed them to look for reasons to stop cars: speeding, broken tail lights, running stop signs, whatever. The traffic stop gave police an opportunity to search for outstanding warrants or look for suspicious behavior. An arrest could be the leverage the police needed to persuade someone to become an informant.
For Cohen, the transition from spying to policing didn't come naturally, former colleagues said. When faced with a decision, especially early in his tenure, he'd fall back on his CIA background. Cutter said he and other uniformed officers had to tell Cohen, no, we can't just slip into someone's apartment without a warrant. No, we can't just conduct a search. The rules for policing are different.
While Cohen was being shaped by the police department, his CIA background was remaking the department. But one significant barrier stood in the way of Cohen's vision.
Since 1985, the NYPD had operated under a federal court order limiting the tactics it could use to gather intelligence. During the 1960s and 1970s, the department had used informants and undercover officers to infiltrate anti-war protest groups and other activists without any reason to suspect criminal behavior.
To settle a lawsuit, the department agreed to follow guidelines that required "specific information" of criminal activity before police could monitor political activity.
In September 2002, Cohen told a federal judge that those guidelines made it "virtually impossible" to detect terrorist plots. The FBI was changing its rules to respond to 9/11, and Cohen argued that the NYPD must do so, too.
"In the case of terrorism, to wait for an indication of crime before investigating is to wait far too long," Cohen wrote.
U.S. District Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. agreed, saying the old guidelines "addressed different perils in a different time." He scrapped the old rules and replaced them with more lenient ones.
It was a turning point for the NYPD.
With his newfound authority, Cohen created a secret squad that would soon infiltrate Muslim neighborhoods, according to several current and former officials directly involved in the program.
The NYPD carved up the city into more than a dozen zones and assigned undercover officers to monitor them, looking for potential trouble.
At the CIA, one of the biggest obstacles has always been that U.S. intelligence officials are overwhelmingly white, their mannerisms clearly American. The NYPD didn't have that problem, thanks to its diverse pool of officers.
Using census data, the department matched undercover officers to ethnic communities and instructed them to blend in, the officials said. Pakistani-American officers infiltrated Pakistani neighborhoods, Palestinians focused on Palestinian neighborhoods. They hung out in hookah bars and cafes, quietly observing the community around them.
The unit, which has been undisclosed until now, became known inside the department as the Demographic Unit, former police officials said.
"It's not a question of profiling. It's a question of going where the problem could arise," said Mordecai Dzikansky, a retired NYPD intelligence officer who said he was aware of the Demographic Unit. "And thank God we have the capability. We have the language capability and the ethnic officers. That's our hidden weapon."
The officers did not work out of headquarters, officials said. Instead, they passed their intelligence to police handlers who knew their identities.
Cohen said he wanted the squad to "rake the coals, looking for hot spots," former officials recalled. The undercover officers soon became known inside the department as rakers.
A hot spot might be a beauty supply store selling chemicals used for making bombs. Or it might be a hawala, a broker that transfers money around the world with little documentation. Undercover officers might visit an Internet cafe and look at the browsing history on a computer, a former police official involved in the program said. If it revealed visits to radical websites, the cafe might be deemed a hot spot.
Ethnic bookstores, too, were on the list. If a raker noticed a customer looking at radical literature, he might chat up the store owner and see what he could learn. The bookstore, or even the customer, might get further scrutiny. If a restaurant patron applauds a news report about the death of U.S. troops, the patron or the restaurant could be labeled a hot spot.
The goal was to "map the city's human terrain," one law enforcement official said. The program was modeled in part on how Israeli authorities operate in the West Bank, a former police official said.
Mapping crimes has been a successful police strategy nationwide. But mapping robberies and shootings is one thing. Mapping ethnic neighborhoods is different, something that at least brushes against what the federal government considers racial profiling.
Browne, the NYPD spokesman, said the Demographic Unit does not exist. He said the department has a Zone Assessment Unit that looks for locations that could attract terrorists. But he said undercover officers only followed leads, disputing the account of several current and former police and federal officials. They do not just hang out in neighborhoods, he said.
"We will go into a location, whether it's a mosque or a bookstore, if the lead warrants it, and at least establish whether there's something that requires more attention," Browne said.
That conflicts with testimony from an undercover officer in the 2006 trial of Shahawar Matin Siraj, who was convicted of planning an attack on New York's subway system. The officer said he was instructed to live in Brooklyn and act as a "walking camera" for police.
"I was told to act like a civilian — hang out in the neighborhood, gather information," the Bangladeshi officer testified, under a false name, in what offered the first narrow glimpse at the NYPD's infiltration of ethnic neighborhoods.
Officials said such operations just made sense. Islamic terrorists had attacked the city on 9/11, so police needed people inside the city's Muslim neighborhoods. Officials say it does not conflict with a 2004 city law prohibiting the NYPD from using religion or ethnicity "as the determinative factor for initiating law enforcement action."
"It's not profiling," Cutter said. "It's like, after a shooting, do you go 20 blocks away and interview guys or do you go to the neighborhood where it happened?"
In 2007, the Los Angeles Police Department was criticized for even considering a similar program. The police announced plans to map Islamic neighborhoods to look for pockets of radicalization among the region's roughly 500,000 Muslims. Criticism was swift, and chief William Bratton scrapped the plan.
"A lot of these people came from countries where the police were the terrorists," Bratton said at a news conference, according to the Los Angeles Daily News. "We don't do that here. We do not want to spread fear."
In New York, current and former officials said, the lesson of that controversy was that such programs should be kept secret.
Some in the department, including lawyers, have privately expressed concerns about the raking program and how police use the information, current and former officials said. Part of the concern was that it might appear that police were building dossiers on innocent people, officials said. Another concern was that, if a case went to court, the department could be forced to reveal details about the program, putting the entire operation in jeopardy.
That's why, former officials said, police regularly shredded documents discussing rakers.
When Cohen made his case in court that he needed broader authority to investigate terrorism, he had promised to abide by the FBI's investigative guidelines. But the FBI is prohibited from using undercover agents unless there's specific evidence of criminal activity, meaning a federal raking program like the one officials described to the AP would violate FBI guidelines.
The NYPD declined to make Cohen available for comment. In an earlier interview with the AP on a variety of topics, Police Commissioner Kelly said the intelligence unit does not infringe on civil rights.
"We're doing what we believe we have to do to protect the city," he said. "We have many, many lawyers in our employ. We see ourselves as very conscious and aware of civil liberties. And we know there's always going to be some tension between the police department and so-called civil liberties groups because of the nature of what we do."
The department clashed with civil rights groups most publicly after Cohen's undercover officers infiltrated anti-war groups before the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. A lawsuit over that program continues today.
During the convention, when protesters were arrested, police asked a list of questions which, according to court documents, included: "What are your political affiliations?" ''Do you do any kind of political work?" and "Do you hate George W. Bush?"
"At the end of the day, it's pure and simple a rogue domestic surveillance operation," said Christopher Dunn, a New York Civil Liberties Union lawyer involved in the convention lawsuit.
Undercover agents like the rakers were valuable, but what Cohen and Sanchez wanted most were informants.
The NYPD dedicated an entire squad, the Terrorist Interdiction Unit, to developing and handling informants. Current and former officials said Sanchez was instrumental in teaching them how to develop sources.
For years, detectives used informants known as mosque crawlers to monitor weekly sermons and report what was said, several current and former officials directly involved in the informant program said. If FBI agents were to do that, they would be in violation of the Privacy Act, which prohibits the federal government from collecting intelligence on purely First Amendment activities.
The FBI has generated its own share of controversy for putting informants inside mosques, but unlike the program described to the AP, the FBI requires evidence of a crime before an informant can be used inside a mosque.
Valerie Caproni, the FBI's general counsel, would not discuss the NYPD's programs but said FBI informants can't troll mosques looking for leads. Such operations are reviewed for civil liberties concerns, she said.
"If you're sending an informant into a mosque when there is no evidence of wrongdoing, that's a very high-risk thing to do," Caproni said. "You're running right up against core constitutional rights. You're talking about freedom of religion."
That's why senior FBI officials in New York ordered their own agents not to accept any reports from the NYPD's mosque crawlers, two retired agents said.
It's unclear whether the police department still uses mosque crawlers. Officials said that, as Muslims figured out what was going on, the mosque crawlers became cafe crawlers, fanning out into the city's ethnic hangouts.
"Someone has a great imagination," Browne, the NYPD spokesman, said. "There is no such thing as mosque crawlers."
Following the foiled subway plot, however, the key informant in the case, Osama Eldawoody, said he attended hundreds of prayer services and collected information even on people who showed no signs of radicalization.
NYPD detectives have recruited shopkeepers and nosy neighbors to become "seeded" informants who keep police up to date on the latest happenings in ethnic neighborhoods, one official directly involved in the informant program said.
The department also has a roster of "directed" informants it can tap for assignments. For instance, if a raker identifies a bookstore as a hot spot, police might assign an informant to gather information, long before there's concrete evidence of anything criminal.
To identify possible informants, the department created what became known as the "debriefing program." When someone is arrested who might be useful to the intelligence unit — whether because he said something suspicious or because he is simply a young Middle Eastern man — he is singled out for extra questioning. Intelligence officials don't care about the underlying charges; they want to know more about his community and, ideally, they want to put him to work.
Police are in prisons, too, promising better living conditions and help or money on the outside for Muslim prisoners who will work with them.
Early in the intelligence division's transformation, police asked the taxi commission to run a report on all the city's Pakistani cab drivers, looking for those who got licenses fraudulently and might be susceptible to pressure to cooperate, according to former officials who were involved in or briefed on the effort.
That strategy has been rejected in other cities.
Boston police once asked neighboring Cambridge for a list of Somali cab drivers, Cambridge Police Chief Robert Haas said. Haas refused, saying that without a specific reason, the search was inappropriate.
"It really has a chilling effect in terms of the relationship between the local police department and those cultural groups, if they think that's going to take place," Haas said.
The informant division was so important to the NYPD that Cohen persuaded his former colleagues to train a detective, Steve Pinkall, at the CIA's training center at the Farm. Pinkall, who had an intelligence background as a Marine, was given an unusual temporary assignment at CIA headquarters, officials said. He took the field tradecraft course alongside future CIA spies then returned to New York to run investigations.
"We found that helpful, for NYPD personnel to be exposed to the tradecraft," Browne said.
The idea troubled senior FBI officials, who saw it as the NYPD and CIA blurring the lines between police work and spying, in which undercover officers regularly break the laws of foreign governments. The arrangement even made its way to FBI Director Robert Mueller, two former senior FBI officials said, but the training was already under way and Mueller did not press the issue.
NYPD's intelligence operations do not stop at the city line.
In June 2009, a New Brunswick, N.J., building superintendent opened the door to apartment No. 1076 and discovered an alarming scene: terrorist literature strewn about the table and computer and surveillance equipment set up in the next room.
The panicked superintendent dialed 911, sending police and the FBI rushing to the building near Rutgers University. What they found in that first-floor apartment, however, was not a terrorist hideout but a command center set up by a secret team of New York Police Department intelligence officers.
From that apartment, about an hour outside the department's jurisdiction, the NYPD had been staging undercover operations and conducting surveillance throughout New Jersey. Neither the FBI nor the local police had any idea.
The NYPD has gotten some of its officers deputized as federal marshals, allowing them to work out of state. But often, there's no specific jurisdiction at all.
Cohen's undercover squad, the Special Services Unit, operates in places such as New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, officials said. They can't make arrests and, if something goes wrong — a shooting or a car accident, for instance — the officers could be personally liable. But the NYPD has decided it's worth the risk, a former police official said.
With Police Commissioner Kelly's backing, Cohen's policy is that any potential threat to New York City is the NYPD's business, regardless of where it occurs, officials said.
That aggressiveness has sometimes put the NYPD at odds with local police departments and, more frequently, with the FBI. The FBI didn't like the rules Cohen played by and said his operations encroached on its responsibilities.
Once, undercover officers were stopped by police in Massachusetts while conducting surveillance on a house, one former New York official recalled. In another instance, the NYPD sparked concern among federal officials by expanding its intelligence-gathering efforts related to the United Nations, where the FBI is in charge, current and former federal officials said.
The AP has agreed not to disclose details of either the FBI or NYPD operations because they involve foreign counterintelligence.
Both Mueller and Kelly have said their agencies have strong working relationships and said reports of rivalry and disagreements are overblown. And the NYPD's out-of-state operations have had success.
A young Egyptian NYPD officer living undercover in New Jersey, for example, was key to building a case against Mohamed Mahmood Alessa and Carlos Eduardo Almonte. The pair was arrested last year at John F. Kennedy Airport en route to Somalia to join the terrorist group al-Shabab. Both pleaded guilty to conspiracy.
Cohen has also sent officers abroad, stationing them in 11 foreign cities. If a bomber blows himself up in Jerusalem, the NYPD rushes to the scene, said Dzikansky, who served in Israel and is the co-author of the forthcoming book "Terrorist Suicide Bombings: Attack Interdiction, Mitigation, and Response."
"I was there to ask the New York question," Dzikansky said. "Why this location? Was there something unique that the bomber had done? Was there any pre-notification. Was there a security lapse?"
All of this intelligence — from the rakers, the undercovers, the overseas liaisons and the informants — is passed to a team of analysts hired from some of the nation's most prestigious universities. Analysts have spotted emerging trends and summarized topics such as Hezbollah's activities in New York and the threat of South Asian terrorist groups.
They also have tackled more contentious topics, including drafting a report on every mosque in the area, one former police official said. The report drew on information from mosque crawlers, undercover officers and public information. It mapped hundreds of mosques and discussed the likelihood of them being infiltrated by al-Qaida, Hezbollah and other terrorist groups.
For Cohen, there was only one way to measure success: "They haven't attacked us," he said in a 2005 deposition. He said anything that was bad for terrorists was good for NYPD.
Though the CIA is prohibited from collecting intelligence domestically, the wall between domestic and foreign operations became more porous. Intelligence gathered by the NYPD, with CIA officer Sanchez overseeing collection, was often passed to the CIA in informal conversations and through unofficial channels, a former official involved in that process said.
By design, the NYPD was looking more and more like a domestic CIA.
"It's like starting the CIA over in the post-9/11 world," Cohen said in "Securing the City," a laudatory 2009 book about the NYPD. "What would you do if you could begin it all over again? Hah. This is what you would do."
Sanchez's assignment in New York ended in 2004, but he received permission to take a leave of absence from the agency and become Cohen's deputy, former officials said.
Though Sanchez's assignments were blessed by CIA management, some in the agency's New York station saw the presence of such a senior officer in the city as a turf encroachment. Finally, the New York station chief, Tom Higgins, called headquarters, one former senior intelligence official said. Higgins complained, the official said, that Sanchez was wearing both hats, sometimes acting as a CIA officer, sometimes as an NYPD official.
The CIA finally forced him to choose: Stay with the agency or stay with the NYPD.
Sanchez declined to comment to the AP about the arrangement, but he picked the NYPD. He retired last year and is now a consultant in the Middle East.
Last month, the CIA deepened its NYPD ties even further. It sent one of its most experienced operatives, a former station chief in two Middle Eastern countries, to work out of police headquarters as Cohen's special assistant while on the CIA payroll. Current and former U.S. officials acknowledge it's unusual but said it's the kind of collaboration Americans expect after 9/11.
Officials said revealing the CIA officer's name would jeopardize national security. The arrangement was described as a sabbatical. He is a member of the agency's senior management, but officials said he was sent to the municipal police department to get management experience.
At the NYPD, he works undercover in the senior ranks of the intelligence division. Officials are adamant that he is not involved in actual intelligence-gathering.
The NYPD has faced little scrutiny over the past decade as it has taken on broad new intelligence missions, targeted ethnic neighborhoods and partnered with the CIA in extraordinary ways.
The department's primary watchdog, the New York City Council, has not held hearings on the intelligence division's operations and former NYPD officials said council members typically do not ask for details.
"Ray Kelly briefs me privately on certain subjects that should not be discussed in public," said City Councilman Peter Vallone. "We've discussed in person how they investigate certain groups they suspect have terrorist sympathizers or have terrorist suspects."
The city comptroller's office has audited several NYPD components since 9/11 but not the intelligence unit, which had a $62 million budget last year.
The federal government, too, has done little to scrutinize the nation's largest police force, despite the massive federal aid. Homeland Security officials review NYPD grants but not its underlying programs.
A report in January by the Homeland Security inspector general, for instance, found that the NYPD violated state and federal contracting rules between 2006 and 2008 by buying more than $4 million in equipment through a no-bid process. NYPD said public bidding would have revealed sensitive information to terrorists, but police never got approval from state or federal officials to adopt their own rules, the inspector general said.
On Capitol Hill, where FBI tactics have frequently been criticized for their effect on civil liberties, the NYPD faces no such opposition.
In 2007, Sanchez testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee and was asked how the NYPD spots signs of radicalization. He said the key was viewing innocuous activity, including behavior that might be protected by the First Amendment, as a potential precursor to terrorism.
That triggered no questions from the committee, which Sanchez said had been "briefed in the past on how we do business."
The Justice Department has the authority to investigate civil rights violations. It issued detailed rules in 2003 against racial profiling, including prohibiting agencies from considering race when making traffic stops or assigning patrols.
But those rules apply only to the federal government and contain a murky exemption for terrorism investigations. The Justice Department has not investigated a police department for civil rights violations during a national security investigation.
"One of the hallmarks of the intelligence division over the last 10 years is that, not only has it gotten extremely aggressive and sophisticated, but it's operating completely on its own," said Dunn, the civil liberties lawyer. "There are no checks. There is no oversight."
The NYPD has been mentioned as a model for policing in the post-9/11 era. But it's a model that seems custom-made for New York. No other city has the Big Apple's combination of a low crime rate, a $4.5 billion police budget and a diverse 34,000-person police force. Certainly no other police department has such deep CIA ties.
Perhaps most important, nobody else had 9/11 the way New York did. No other city lost nearly 3,000 people in a single morning. A decade later, police say New Yorkers still expect the department to do whatever it can to prevent another attack. The NYPD has embraced that expectation.
As Sanchez testified on Capitol Hill: "We've been given the public tolerance and the luxury to be very aggressive on this topic."
Associated Press writers Tom Hays and Eileen Sullivan in Washington contributed to this report.
NEW YORK (AP) — Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the New York Police Department has become one of the nation's most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies, targeting ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government, an Associated Press investigation has found.
These operations have benefited from unprecedented help from the CIA, a partnership that has blurred the line between foreign and domestic spying.
The department has dispatched undercover officers, known as "rakers," into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program, according to officials directly involved in the program. They've monitored daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs. Police have also used informants, known as "mosque crawlers," to monitor sermons, even when there's no evidence of wrongdoing.
Neither the city council, which finances the department, nor the federal government, which has given NYPD more than $1.6 billion since 9/11, is told exactly what's going on.
Many of these operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD's intelligence unit.
A veteran CIA officer, while still on the agency's payroll, was the architect of the NYPD's intelligence programs. The CIA trained a police detective at the Farm, the agency's spy school in Virginia, then returned him to New York, where he put his new espionage skills to work inside the United States.
And just last month, the CIA sent a senior officer to work as a clandestine operative inside police headquarters.
In response to the story, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a leading Muslim civil rights organization, called on the Justice Department to investigate. The Justice Department said Wednesday night it would review the request.
"This is potentially illegal what they're doing," said Gadeir Abbas, a staff attorney with the organization.
The NYPD denied that it trolls ethnic neighborhoods and said it only follows leads. Police operations have disrupted terrorist plots and put several would-be killers in prison.
"The New York Police Department is doing everything it can to make sure there's not another 9/11 here and that more innocent New Yorkers are not killed by terrorists," NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said. "And we have nothing to apologize for in that regard."
AP's investigation is based on documents and interviews with more than 40 current and former New York Police Department and federal officials. Many were directly involved in planning and carrying out these secret operations for the department. Though most said the tactics were appropriate and made the city safer, many insisted on anonymity, because they were not authorized to speak with reporters about security matters.
In just two episodes showing how widely the NYPD cast its net, the department sought a rundown from the taxi commission of every Pakistani cab driver in the city, and produced an analytical report on every mosque within 100 miles, officials said.
One of the enduring questions of the past decade is whether being safe requires giving up some liberty and privacy. The focus of that debate has primarily been federal programs like wiretapping and indefinite detention. The question has received less attention in New York, where residents do not know for sure what, if anything, they have given up.
The story of how the NYPD Intelligence Division developed such aggressive programs begins with one man.
David Cohen arrived at the New York Police Department in January 2002, just weeks after the last fires had been extinguished at the debris field that had been the twin towers. A retired 35-year veteran of the CIA, Cohen became the police department's first civilian intelligence chief.
Cohen had an exceptional career at the CIA, rising to lead both the agency's analytical and operational divisions. He also was an extraordinarily divisive figure, a man whose sharp tongue and supreme confidence in his own abilities gave him a reputation as arrogant. Cohen's tenure as head of CIA operations, the nation's top spy, was so contentious that in 1997, The New York Times editorial page took the unusual step of calling for his ouster.
He had no police experience. He had never defended a city from an attack. But New York wasn't looking for a cop.
"Post-9/11, we needed someone in there who knew how to really gather intelligence," said John Cutter, a retired NYPD official who served as one of Cohen's top uniformed officers.
At the time, the intelligence division was best known for driving dignitaries around the city. Cohen envisioned a unit that would analyze intelligence, run undercover operations and cultivate a network of informants. In short, he wanted New York to have its own version of the CIA.
Cohen shared Commissioner Ray Kelly's belief that 9/11 had proved that the police department could not simply rely on the federal government to prevent terrorism in New York.
"If anything goes on in New York," one former officer recalls Cohen telling his staff in the early days, "it's your fault."
Among Cohen's earliest moves at the NYPD was making a request of his old colleagues at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. He needed someone to help build this new operation, someone with experience and clout and, most important, someone who had access to the latest intelligence so the NYPD wouldn't have to rely on the FBI to dole out information.
CIA Director George Tenet responded by tapping Larry Sanchez, a respected veteran who had served as a CIA official inside the United Nations. Often, when the CIA places someone on temporary assignment, the other agency picks up the tab. In this case, three former intelligence officials said, Tenet kept Sanchez on the CIA payroll.
When he arrived in New York in March 2002, Sanchez had offices at both the NYPD and the CIA's station in New York, one former official said. Sanchez interviewed police officers for newly defined intelligence jobs. He guided and mentored officers, schooling them in the art of gathering information. He also directed their efforts, another said.
There had never been an arrangement like it, and some senior CIA officials soon began questioning whether Tenet was allowing Sanchez to operate on both sides of the wall that's supposed to keep the CIA out of the domestic intelligence business.
"It should not be a surprise to anyone that, after 9/11, the Central Intelligence Agency stepped up its cooperation with law enforcement on counterterrorism issues or that some of that increased cooperation was in New York, the site of ground zero," CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood said.
Just as at the CIA, Cohen and Sanchez knew that informants would have to become the backbone of their operation. But with threats coming in from around the globe, they couldn't wait months for the perfect plan.
They came up with a makeshift solution. They dispatched more officers to Pakistani neighborhoods and, according to one former police official directly involved in the effort, instructed them to look for reasons to stop cars: speeding, broken tail lights, running stop signs, whatever. The traffic stop gave police an opportunity to search for outstanding warrants or look for suspicious behavior. An arrest could be the leverage the police needed to persuade someone to become an informant.
For Cohen, the transition from spying to policing didn't come naturally, former colleagues said. When faced with a decision, especially early in his tenure, he'd fall back on his CIA background. Cutter said he and other uniformed officers had to tell Cohen, no, we can't just slip into someone's apartment without a warrant. No, we can't just conduct a search. The rules for policing are different.
While Cohen was being shaped by the police department, his CIA background was remaking the department. But one significant barrier stood in the way of Cohen's vision.
Since 1985, the NYPD had operated under a federal court order limiting the tactics it could use to gather intelligence. During the 1960s and 1970s, the department had used informants and undercover officers to infiltrate anti-war protest groups and other activists without any reason to suspect criminal behavior.
To settle a lawsuit, the department agreed to follow guidelines that required "specific information" of criminal activity before police could monitor political activity.
In September 2002, Cohen told a federal judge that those guidelines made it "virtually impossible" to detect terrorist plots. The FBI was changing its rules to respond to 9/11, and Cohen argued that the NYPD must do so, too.
"In the case of terrorism, to wait for an indication of crime before investigating is to wait far too long," Cohen wrote.
U.S. District Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. agreed, saying the old guidelines "addressed different perils in a different time." He scrapped the old rules and replaced them with more lenient ones.
It was a turning point for the NYPD.
With his newfound authority, Cohen created a secret squad that would soon infiltrate Muslim neighborhoods, according to several current and former officials directly involved in the program.
The NYPD carved up the city into more than a dozen zones and assigned undercover officers to monitor them, looking for potential trouble.
At the CIA, one of the biggest obstacles has always been that U.S. intelligence officials are overwhelmingly white, their mannerisms clearly American. The NYPD didn't have that problem, thanks to its diverse pool of officers.
Using census data, the department matched undercover officers to ethnic communities and instructed them to blend in, the officials said. Pakistani-American officers infiltrated Pakistani neighborhoods, Palestinians focused on Palestinian neighborhoods. They hung out in hookah bars and cafes, quietly observing the community around them.
The unit, which has been undisclosed until now, became known inside the department as the Demographic Unit, former police officials said.
"It's not a question of profiling. It's a question of going where the problem could arise," said Mordecai Dzikansky, a retired NYPD intelligence officer who said he was aware of the Demographic Unit. "And thank God we have the capability. We have the language capability and the ethnic officers. That's our hidden weapon."
The officers did not work out of headquarters, officials said. Instead, they passed their intelligence to police handlers who knew their identities.
Cohen said he wanted the squad to "rake the coals, looking for hot spots," former officials recalled. The undercover officers soon became known inside the department as rakers.
A hot spot might be a beauty supply store selling chemicals used for making bombs. Or it might be a hawala, a broker that transfers money around the world with little documentation. Undercover officers might visit an Internet cafe and look at the browsing history on a computer, a former police official involved in the program said. If it revealed visits to radical websites, the cafe might be deemed a hot spot.
Ethnic bookstores, too, were on the list. If a raker noticed a customer looking at radical literature, he might chat up the store owner and see what he could learn. The bookstore, or even the customer, might get further scrutiny. If a restaurant patron applauds a news report about the death of U.S. troops, the patron or the restaurant could be labeled a hot spot.
The goal was to "map the city's human terrain," one law enforcement official said. The program was modeled in part on how Israeli authorities operate in the West Bank, a former police official said.
Mapping crimes has been a successful police strategy nationwide. But mapping robberies and shootings is one thing. Mapping ethnic neighborhoods is different, something that at least brushes against what the federal government considers racial profiling.
Browne, the NYPD spokesman, said the Demographic Unit does not exist. He said the department has a Zone Assessment Unit that looks for locations that could attract terrorists. But he said undercover officers only followed leads, disputing the account of several current and former police and federal officials. They do not just hang out in neighborhoods, he said.
"We will go into a location, whether it's a mosque or a bookstore, if the lead warrants it, and at least establish whether there's something that requires more attention," Browne said.
That conflicts with testimony from an undercover officer in the 2006 trial of Shahawar Matin Siraj, who was convicted of planning an attack on New York's subway system. The officer said he was instructed to live in Brooklyn and act as a "walking camera" for police.
"I was told to act like a civilian — hang out in the neighborhood, gather information," the Bangladeshi officer testified, under a false name, in what offered the first narrow glimpse at the NYPD's infiltration of ethnic neighborhoods.
Officials said such operations just made sense. Islamic terrorists had attacked the city on 9/11, so police needed people inside the city's Muslim neighborhoods. Officials say it does not conflict with a 2004 city law prohibiting the NYPD from using religion or ethnicity "as the determinative factor for initiating law enforcement action."
"It's not profiling," Cutter said. "It's like, after a shooting, do you go 20 blocks away and interview guys or do you go to the neighborhood where it happened?"
In 2007, the Los Angeles Police Department was criticized for even considering a similar program. The police announced plans to map Islamic neighborhoods to look for pockets of radicalization among the region's roughly 500,000 Muslims. Criticism was swift, and chief William Bratton scrapped the plan.
"A lot of these people came from countries where the police were the terrorists," Bratton said at a news conference, according to the Los Angeles Daily News. "We don't do that here. We do not want to spread fear."
In New York, current and former officials said, the lesson of that controversy was that such programs should be kept secret.
Some in the department, including lawyers, have privately expressed concerns about the raking program and how police use the information, current and former officials said. Part of the concern was that it might appear that police were building dossiers on innocent people, officials said. Another concern was that, if a case went to court, the department could be forced to reveal details about the program, putting the entire operation in jeopardy.
That's why, former officials said, police regularly shredded documents discussing rakers.
When Cohen made his case in court that he needed broader authority to investigate terrorism, he had promised to abide by the FBI's investigative guidelines. But the FBI is prohibited from using undercover agents unless there's specific evidence of criminal activity, meaning a federal raking program like the one officials described to the AP would violate FBI guidelines.
The NYPD declined to make Cohen available for comment. In an earlier interview with the AP on a variety of topics, Police Commissioner Kelly said the intelligence unit does not infringe on civil rights.
"We're doing what we believe we have to do to protect the city," he said. "We have many, many lawyers in our employ. We see ourselves as very conscious and aware of civil liberties. And we know there's always going to be some tension between the police department and so-called civil liberties groups because of the nature of what we do."
The department clashed with civil rights groups most publicly after Cohen's undercover officers infiltrated anti-war groups before the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. A lawsuit over that program continues today.
During the convention, when protesters were arrested, police asked a list of questions which, according to court documents, included: "What are your political affiliations?" ''Do you do any kind of political work?" and "Do you hate George W. Bush?"
"At the end of the day, it's pure and simple a rogue domestic surveillance operation," said Christopher Dunn, a New York Civil Liberties Union lawyer involved in the convention lawsuit.
Undercover agents like the rakers were valuable, but what Cohen and Sanchez wanted most were informants.
The NYPD dedicated an entire squad, the Terrorist Interdiction Unit, to developing and handling informants. Current and former officials said Sanchez was instrumental in teaching them how to develop sources.
For years, detectives used informants known as mosque crawlers to monitor weekly sermons and report what was said, several current and former officials directly involved in the informant program said. If FBI agents were to do that, they would be in violation of the Privacy Act, which prohibits the federal government from collecting intelligence on purely First Amendment activities.
The FBI has generated its own share of controversy for putting informants inside mosques, but unlike the program described to the AP, the FBI requires evidence of a crime before an informant can be used inside a mosque.
Valerie Caproni, the FBI's general counsel, would not discuss the NYPD's programs but said FBI informants can't troll mosques looking for leads. Such operations are reviewed for civil liberties concerns, she said.
"If you're sending an informant into a mosque when there is no evidence of wrongdoing, that's a very high-risk thing to do," Caproni said. "You're running right up against core constitutional rights. You're talking about freedom of religion."
That's why senior FBI officials in New York ordered their own agents not to accept any reports from the NYPD's mosque crawlers, two retired agents said.
It's unclear whether the police department still uses mosque crawlers. Officials said that, as Muslims figured out what was going on, the mosque crawlers became cafe crawlers, fanning out into the city's ethnic hangouts.
"Someone has a great imagination," Browne, the NYPD spokesman, said. "There is no such thing as mosque crawlers."
Following the foiled subway plot, however, the key informant in the case, Osama Eldawoody, said he attended hundreds of prayer services and collected information even on people who showed no signs of radicalization.
NYPD detectives have recruited shopkeepers and nosy neighbors to become "seeded" informants who keep police up to date on the latest happenings in ethnic neighborhoods, one official directly involved in the informant program said.
The department also has a roster of "directed" informants it can tap for assignments. For instance, if a raker identifies a bookstore as a hot spot, police might assign an informant to gather information, long before there's concrete evidence of anything criminal.
To identify possible informants, the department created what became known as the "debriefing program." When someone is arrested who might be useful to the intelligence unit — whether because he said something suspicious or because he is simply a young Middle Eastern man — he is singled out for extra questioning. Intelligence officials don't care about the underlying charges; they want to know more about his community and, ideally, they want to put him to work.
Police are in prisons, too, promising better living conditions and help or money on the outside for Muslim prisoners who will work with them.
Early in the intelligence division's transformation, police asked the taxi commission to run a report on all the city's Pakistani cab drivers, looking for those who got licenses fraudulently and might be susceptible to pressure to cooperate, according to former officials who were involved in or briefed on the effort.
That strategy has been rejected in other cities.
Boston police once asked neighboring Cambridge for a list of Somali cab drivers, Cambridge Police Chief Robert Haas said. Haas refused, saying that without a specific reason, the search was inappropriate.
"It really has a chilling effect in terms of the relationship between the local police department and those cultural groups, if they think that's going to take place," Haas said.
The informant division was so important to the NYPD that Cohen persuaded his former colleagues to train a detective, Steve Pinkall, at the CIA's training center at the Farm. Pinkall, who had an intelligence background as a Marine, was given an unusual temporary assignment at CIA headquarters, officials said. He took the field tradecraft course alongside future CIA spies then returned to New York to run investigations.
"We found that helpful, for NYPD personnel to be exposed to the tradecraft," Browne said.
The idea troubled senior FBI officials, who saw it as the NYPD and CIA blurring the lines between police work and spying, in which undercover officers regularly break the laws of foreign governments. The arrangement even made its way to FBI Director Robert Mueller, two former senior FBI officials said, but the training was already under way and Mueller did not press the issue.
NYPD's intelligence operations do not stop at the city line.
In June 2009, a New Brunswick, N.J., building superintendent opened the door to apartment No. 1076 and discovered an alarming scene: terrorist literature strewn about the table and computer and surveillance equipment set up in the next room.
The panicked superintendent dialed 911, sending police and the FBI rushing to the building near Rutgers University. What they found in that first-floor apartment, however, was not a terrorist hideout but a command center set up by a secret team of New York Police Department intelligence officers.
From that apartment, about an hour outside the department's jurisdiction, the NYPD had been staging undercover operations and conducting surveillance throughout New Jersey. Neither the FBI nor the local police had any idea.
The NYPD has gotten some of its officers deputized as federal marshals, allowing them to work out of state. But often, there's no specific jurisdiction at all.
Cohen's undercover squad, the Special Services Unit, operates in places such as New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, officials said. They can't make arrests and, if something goes wrong — a shooting or a car accident, for instance — the officers could be personally liable. But the NYPD has decided it's worth the risk, a former police official said.
With Police Commissioner Kelly's backing, Cohen's policy is that any potential threat to New York City is the NYPD's business, regardless of where it occurs, officials said.
That aggressiveness has sometimes put the NYPD at odds with local police departments and, more frequently, with the FBI. The FBI didn't like the rules Cohen played by and said his operations encroached on its responsibilities.
Once, undercover officers were stopped by police in Massachusetts while conducting surveillance on a house, one former New York official recalled. In another instance, the NYPD sparked concern among federal officials by expanding its intelligence-gathering efforts related to the United Nations, where the FBI is in charge, current and former federal officials said.
The AP has agreed not to disclose details of either the FBI or NYPD operations because they involve foreign counterintelligence.
Both Mueller and Kelly have said their agencies have strong working relationships and said reports of rivalry and disagreements are overblown. And the NYPD's out-of-state operations have had success.
A young Egyptian NYPD officer living undercover in New Jersey, for example, was key to building a case against Mohamed Mahmood Alessa and Carlos Eduardo Almonte. The pair was arrested last year at John F. Kennedy Airport en route to Somalia to join the terrorist group al-Shabab. Both pleaded guilty to conspiracy.
Cohen has also sent officers abroad, stationing them in 11 foreign cities. If a bomber blows himself up in Jerusalem, the NYPD rushes to the scene, said Dzikansky, who served in Israel and is the co-author of the forthcoming book "Terrorist Suicide Bombings: Attack Interdiction, Mitigation, and Response."
"I was there to ask the New York question," Dzikansky said. "Why this location? Was there something unique that the bomber had done? Was there any pre-notification. Was there a security lapse?"
All of this intelligence — from the rakers, the undercovers, the overseas liaisons and the informants — is passed to a team of analysts hired from some of the nation's most prestigious universities. Analysts have spotted emerging trends and summarized topics such as Hezbollah's activities in New York and the threat of South Asian terrorist groups.
They also have tackled more contentious topics, including drafting a report on every mosque in the area, one former police official said. The report drew on information from mosque crawlers, undercover officers and public information. It mapped hundreds of mosques and discussed the likelihood of them being infiltrated by al-Qaida, Hezbollah and other terrorist groups.
For Cohen, there was only one way to measure success: "They haven't attacked us," he said in a 2005 deposition. He said anything that was bad for terrorists was good for NYPD.
Though the CIA is prohibited from collecting intelligence domestically, the wall between domestic and foreign operations became more porous. Intelligence gathered by the NYPD, with CIA officer Sanchez overseeing collection, was often passed to the CIA in informal conversations and through unofficial channels, a former official involved in that process said.
By design, the NYPD was looking more and more like a domestic CIA.
"It's like starting the CIA over in the post-9/11 world," Cohen said in "Securing the City," a laudatory 2009 book about the NYPD. "What would you do if you could begin it all over again? Hah. This is what you would do."
Sanchez's assignment in New York ended in 2004, but he received permission to take a leave of absence from the agency and become Cohen's deputy, former officials said.
Though Sanchez's assignments were blessed by CIA management, some in the agency's New York station saw the presence of such a senior officer in the city as a turf encroachment. Finally, the New York station chief, Tom Higgins, called headquarters, one former senior intelligence official said. Higgins complained, the official said, that Sanchez was wearing both hats, sometimes acting as a CIA officer, sometimes as an NYPD official.
The CIA finally forced him to choose: Stay with the agency or stay with the NYPD.
Sanchez declined to comment to the AP about the arrangement, but he picked the NYPD. He retired last year and is now a consultant in the Middle East.
Last month, the CIA deepened its NYPD ties even further. It sent one of its most experienced operatives, a former station chief in two Middle Eastern countries, to work out of police headquarters as Cohen's special assistant while on the CIA payroll. Current and former U.S. officials acknowledge it's unusual but said it's the kind of collaboration Americans expect after 9/11.
Officials said revealing the CIA officer's name would jeopardize national security. The arrangement was described as a sabbatical. He is a member of the agency's senior management, but officials said he was sent to the municipal police department to get management experience.
At the NYPD, he works undercover in the senior ranks of the intelligence division. Officials are adamant that he is not involved in actual intelligence-gathering.
The NYPD has faced little scrutiny over the past decade as it has taken on broad new intelligence missions, targeted ethnic neighborhoods and partnered with the CIA in extraordinary ways.
The department's primary watchdog, the New York City Council, has not held hearings on the intelligence division's operations and former NYPD officials said council members typically do not ask for details.
"Ray Kelly briefs me privately on certain subjects that should not be discussed in public," said City Councilman Peter Vallone. "We've discussed in person how they investigate certain groups they suspect have terrorist sympathizers or have terrorist suspects."
The city comptroller's office has audited several NYPD components since 9/11 but not the intelligence unit, which had a $62 million budget last year.
The federal government, too, has done little to scrutinize the nation's largest police force, despite the massive federal aid. Homeland Security officials review NYPD grants but not its underlying programs.
A report in January by the Homeland Security inspector general, for instance, found that the NYPD violated state and federal contracting rules between 2006 and 2008 by buying more than $4 million in equipment through a no-bid process. NYPD said public bidding would have revealed sensitive information to terrorists, but police never got approval from state or federal officials to adopt their own rules, the inspector general said.
On Capitol Hill, where FBI tactics have frequently been criticized for their effect on civil liberties, the NYPD faces no such opposition.
In 2007, Sanchez testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee and was asked how the NYPD spots signs of radicalization. He said the key was viewing innocuous activity, including behavior that might be protected by the First Amendment, as a potential precursor to terrorism.
That triggered no questions from the committee, which Sanchez said had been "briefed in the past on how we do business."
The Justice Department has the authority to investigate civil rights violations. It issued detailed rules in 2003 against racial profiling, including prohibiting agencies from considering race when making traffic stops or assigning patrols.
But those rules apply only to the federal government and contain a murky exemption for terrorism investigations. The Justice Department has not investigated a police department for civil rights violations during a national security investigation.
"One of the hallmarks of the intelligence division over the last 10 years is that, not only has it gotten extremely aggressive and sophisticated, but it's operating completely on its own," said Dunn, the civil liberties lawyer. "There are no checks. There is no oversight."
The NYPD has been mentioned as a model for policing in the post-9/11 era. But it's a model that seems custom-made for New York. No other city has the Big Apple's combination of a low crime rate, a $4.5 billion police budget and a diverse 34,000-person police force. Certainly no other police department has such deep CIA ties.
Perhaps most important, nobody else had 9/11 the way New York did. No other city lost nearly 3,000 people in a single morning. A decade later, police say New Yorkers still expect the department to do whatever it can to prevent another attack. The NYPD has embraced that expectation.
As Sanchez testified on Capitol Hill: "We've been given the public tolerance and the luxury to be very aggressive on this topic."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)