United States Fascism

Uncle Sam as an abusive boy friend

2012-03-06T15:26:00.000-08:00

Militerized Local Police

2012-03-06T14:11:00.002-08:00

Drones like this ShadowHawk are used widely by the military, but civilian law enforcement and businesses are exploring their use as well.
Photo: Lance Bertolino / Associated Press

USA empire - House of Saud, protectors of Mecca, Medina and Sharia

2012-03-06T13:11:00.001-08:00

The USA is seen as the protector of the 3 holy cities through it's proxies (subsidiaries) of Israel and Saudi Arabia. The contrast between these two subsidiary governments is extreme.

Saudi Arabia is governed by an entity which operates a cult of personality and Command-Economics. Unlike socialism, which in it's various forms offered a better existence for the majority, the disastrous economics used by the House of Saud (with direction by secretive western academic economists) have withered away entire generations. Most of the people in Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas agree that Libya as governed by the Jamahiriya until 2012 was a better place to be than in the realm of the House of Saud and the Sharia Law used by them to enforce the political process of fascism...

Fayez Nureldine / AFP/Getty Images
Saudi security personnel stand in front of a huge poster of King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz during the annual Janadriyah Festival of Heritage and Culture on the outskirts of the capital Riyadh on February 8, 2012. AFP PHOTO/FAYEZ NURELDINE (Photo credit should read FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP/Getty Images)

Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, left, backs arming opponents of Syrian President Bashar Assad at a conference in Tunisia on Feb. 24. Though Saudi leaders are eager to opine about Iran's nuclear program or the carnage in Syria, they are reluctant to discuss their country's domestic problems.
Photo: Fethi Belaid / AFP/Getty Images

Headlines chosen by news journals using the services provided by monopolized global news media provide a contrast in headlines which might criticize such a powerful entity as the House of Saud and Saudi Arabia, protectors of Mecca & Medina and Sharia...

published 2012-03-04 "Joel Brinkley: Youth aren’t being served in Saudi Arabia" by "Turkish Daily News" [http://turkishcentralnews.com/archives/10027]
published in print as "Shariah law holds back Saudi youth" and online as "Saudi youths' future constrained by Shariah law" by the "San Francisco Chronicle"
Joel Brinkley, a professor of journalism at Stanford University, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent for the New York Times
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Thanks largely to Iran, gas prices are rising to heights unseen in years — $4 or more per gallon in some areas. And one nation more than any other stands to benefit from this.
That nation, of course, is Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer, an exceedingly wealthy state with a current-account balance of $151 billion, the world’s second largest.
So it seems a bit curious that Saudi Arabia has one of the world’s highest youth unemployment rates. At least 40 percent of Saudis under 30 years old reportedly have no job. What’s more, Saudi Arabia faces a mammoth housing shortage for these young people and others. Banque Saudi Fransi warns that the state will need 1.65 million new homes in the next three years, just to meet current demand.
This sounds like a typical story: A corrupt oil-sodden leadership steals all the money and provides nothing for its people — another example of the “oil curse” made famous in Nigeria.
But that’s not Saudi Arabia. Transparency International ranks more than two-thirds of the world’s nations as more corrupt than Saudi Arabia. Still, why do Saudis have to wait up to 18 years to get approval for a mortgage?
Saudi leaders don’t like to talk about any of this, the nation’s dark side. They prefer to opine about closing down Iran’s nuclear program or stopping the carnage in Syria — all worthy goals. Attending the “Friends of Syria” conference in Tunis last week, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal said he favored arming the Syrian opposition because “they have to protect themselves.”
It’s good to have the Saudis on the right side. But I haven’t heard al-Faisal or other members of the royal family talking much about the proposed mortgage law, intended to open the housing market. It has been marooned, “under study,” in government committees, for more than a decade now.
All of this is actually more than just a bit curious. These problems raise an important, even fundamental, question: In the modern era, can a fully Islamic state, like Saudi Arabia, function in way that serves its people? You see, the issue behind the housing, jobs and other problems is Islam.
“A lot of this is impacted by Sharia law,” said Patrick Ryan, who runs a private online Saudi information service. “You know, the Sharia prohibition of usury.”
Above all else, Saudi Arabia likes to think of itself as the custodian of Mecca and Medina, Islam’s holiest shrines. Not surprisingly, then, it’s the only state governed entirely by Sharia law in its most uncompromising form. And Islam forbids lending or borrowing money under any scheme that requires paying interest. In other words, mortgages.
A year ago, when Saudi youths stood up, demanding more rights like others across the Arab world, King Abdullah doled out $35 billion in benefits to mollify the demonstrators. It worked. And among his promises was a plan to build 500,000 new homes.
The problem is, how can young people, particularly, buy homes without a mortgage? The state does run a Sharia-certified, interest-free mortgage service, essentially a charity. But it can’t fund every new homeowner — especially since 60 percent of Saudi Arabia’s 28 million people are under 30 years old. That’s why potential homeowners must wait 18 years for a mortgage.
“It’s kind of a ripple effect; no mortgages, and no one is building homes,” Ryan said. Last year, the government took up the mortgage bill again, talked about it a bit, enacted a couple of incremental bits, but then tossed it back into the swamp where it remains today.
The jobs problem is similar. Saudi youths understandably feel privileged, special. They live in a wealthy state of great religious importance. They aren’t going to run restaurants, work construction or wrestle with oil rigs. Foreign workers, millions of them, take care of that.
Saudis expect to work as executives or government officials. That’s why the king is creating thousands of new federal positions. But he can’t possibly manufacture acceptable jobs for many millions of young people.
Those raddled older men who govern the state and find the proposed mortgage law repugnant probably won’t appreciate one statistic that helps tell the story. Saudi Arabia has a higher incidence of obesity than any but four other states, all of them tiny Pacific islands. Their combined populations are .009 percent of Saudi Arabia’s.
I wonder, then, is it a coincidence that 60 percent of the population is young and largely unemployed — while 36 percent is obese?

2012-03-06T12:48:00.002-08:00

Published 2012-03-04 "GOP's Wall Street patrons driving gas prices higher" by the "San Francisco Chronicle" newspaper

2012-02-20 "The Gas Wars" by Robert Reich
[http://robertreich.org/post/17980272636]
Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written thirteen books, including The Work of Nations, Locked in the Cabinet, Supercapitalism, and his most recent book, Aftershock. His "Marketplace" commentaries can be found on publicradio.com and iTunes. He is also Common Cause's board chairman.
---
Nothing drives voter sentiment like the price of gas – now averaging $3.56 a gallon, up 30 cents from the start of the year. It’s already hit $4 in some places. The last time gas topped $4 was 2008.
And nothing energizes Republicans like rising energy prices. Last week House Speaker John Boehner told Republicans to take advantage of voters’ looming anger over prices at the pump. On Thursday House Republicans passed a bill to expand offshore drilling and force the White House to issue a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. The tumult prompted the Interior Department to announce on Friday expanded oil exploration in the Arctic.
If prices at the pump continue to rise, expect more gas wars.
In fact, oil prices are rising for three reasons — none of which has to do with offshore drilling or the XL pipeline.
The first, on the supply side, is Iran’s decision to cut in oil exports to Britain and France in retaliation for sanctions put in place by the EU and United States. Iran’s threat to do this has been pushing up crude oil prices for weeks.
The second, on the demand side, is rising hopes for a global economic recovery – which would mean increased oil consumption. The American economy is showing faint signs of a recovery. Europe’s debt crisis appears to be easing. Greece’s pending bailout deal is calming financial nerves on both sides of the Atlantic, and the Bank of England and European Central Bank are keeping rates low. At the same time, China has decided to boost its money supply to spur growth there.
Neither of these would have much effect were it not for the third reason — overwhelming bets of hedge funds and other money managers that oil prices will rise on the basis of the first two reasons.
Speculators have pushed crude oil to $105.28 per barrel, up 35 percent since September. Brent crude, Europe’s benchmark, is now $120.37 a barrel – also worrisome because many East Coast refineries use imported oil.
Funny, I don’t hear Republicans rail against speculators. Could that have anything to do with the fact that hedge funds and money managers are bankrolling the GOP as never before?
But that’s okay. The gas wars may come to a screeching halt before too long, anyway. So many bets are being placed on rising oil prices that the slightest hint the speculators are wrong – almost any sign of expanding supply or declining demand – will set off a sharp drop in oil prices similar to the record one-day fall on May 5 of last year.

2012-03-05T17:04:00.000-08:00

2012-03-05 "Many forms of Occupy protests subjected to new bill making protests illegal" by Danny Weil
[http://dailycensored.com/2012/03/05/many-forms-of-occupy-protests-subjected-to-new-bill-making-protests-illegal/]
A bill passed last week in the US House of Representatives and the Senate would make it a felony to participate in many forms of protest associated with the Occupy Wall Street protests of last year. Several commentators have dubbed it the “anti-Occupy” law, but its implications are far broader.
The bill — H.R. 347, or the “Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011”—was passed by unanimous consent in the Senate. Only Ron Paul and two other Republicans voted against the bill in the House of Representatives (the bill passed 388-3). Not a single Democratic politician voted against the bill.
The virtually unanimous passage of H.R. 347 exposes the fact that, despite all their posturing, the Democrats and the Republicans stand shoulder to shoulder with the corporate and financial oligarchy that they work for.
One central provision of H.R. 347 would make it a criminal offense to “enter or remain in” an area designated as “restricted.”
The bill defines the areas that qualify as “restricted”, purposely in extremely vague, ambiguous and broad terms. For one thing, it replaces language prohibiting “willfully and knowingly” entering a “restricted area” with language prohibiting merely “willfully” entering a “restricted area.” This seemingly minor change dramatically increases the reach of the law. Another example, restricted areas can include “a building or grounds where the President or other person protected by the Secret Service is or will be temporarily visiting” and “a building or grounds so restricted in conjunction with an event designated as a special event of national significance.”
Even more onerous is the provision regarding events of “national significance.” What circumstances constitute events of “national significance” is left to the arbitrary and capricious discretion of the Department of Homeland Security. The occasion for virtually any large protest could be designated by the Department of Homeland Security as an event of “national significance”.
Looking forward one can see why the bill is being bandied about at this political juncture: included among such events would be the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, which have been classified as National Special Security Events (NSSE), thanks to a category created under the Clinton administration. These conventions have been the occasion for protests that have been subjected to ever increasing militarization and police repression. Under H.R. 347, future protests at such events could now be criminalized.
The standard punishment under the new law is a fine and up to one year in prison. If a weapon or serious physical injury (weapon is not defined) is involved, the penalty may be increased to up to ten years.
Also criminalized by the bill is conduct “that impedes or disrupts the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions” and “obstructs or impedes ingress or egress to or from any restricted building or grounds.” These provisions threaten to criminalize a broad range of protest activities that were previously perfectly legal.
There is historical precedence for such measures. Under the 'ancien regime' in France, steps were taken to ensure that the “unwashed masses” were kept out of sight whenever a carriage containing an important aristocrat or church official was passing through. Similarly, H.R. 347 creates for the US president and other top officials a protest-free bubble or “no-free-speech zone” that follows them wherever they go, making sure the discontented hoi poloi is contained and out of sight.
The Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act is plainly in violation of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, but don’t tell that to the current corporatists on the Supreme Court.
H.R. 347 comes directly on the heels of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which was signed by President Obama into law on December 31, 2011. The NDAA gives the president the power to order the incarceration of any person—including a US citizen—anywhere in the world without charge or trial.
An earlier version of the bill would have made it a felony just to “conspire” to engage in any of the conduct described above. The bill now awaits President Obama’s signature before it becomes the law of the land.
What lies behind the unprecedented attack on the US Constitution and Bill of Rights is a growing and unsettling awareness on behalf of the ruling class in this country that the protests that took place around the world against social inequality in 2011 will be back and in more powerful forms, especially as ‘austerity measures’ make the objective and subjective conditions of life more and more miserable for working people.

2012-02-29T13:43:00.000-08:00

2012-02-29 "Allow Failure To Fail: Bank of America teetering on the edge of collapse" by Matt Taibbi of Occupy Wall Street
[http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30717.htm]

There are two things every American needs to know about Bank of America.

The first is that it’s corrupt. This bank has systematically defrauded almost everyone with whom it has a significant business relationship, cheating investors, insurers, homeowners, shareholders, depositors, and the state. It is a giant, raging hurricane of theft and fraud, spinning its way through America and leaving a massive trail of wiped-out retirees and foreclosed-upon families in its wake.

The second is that all of us, as taxpayers, are keeping that hurricane raging. Bank of America is not just a private company that systematically steals from American citizens: it’s a de facto ward of the state that depends heavily upon public support to stay in business. In fact, without the continued generosity of us taxpayers, and the extraordinary indulgence of our regulators and elected officials, this company long ago would have been swallowed up by scandal, mismanagement, prosecution and litigation, and gone out of business. It would have been liquidated and its component parts sold off, perhaps into a series of smaller regional businesses that would have more respect for the law, and be more responsive to their customers.

But Bank of America hasn’t gone out of business, for the simple reason that our government has decided to make it the poster child for the “Too Big To Fail” concept. Because it is considered a “systemically important institution” whose collapse would have a major, Lehman-Brothers-style impact on the economy, two consecutive presidential administrations have taken extraordinary measures to keep Bank of America in business, despite a staggering recent legacy of corruption schemes, many of which were simply overlooked by regulators.

This is why the question of whether or not Bank of America should remain on public life support is so critical to all Americans, and not just those millions who have the misfortune to be customers of the bank, or own shares in the firm, or hold mortgages serviced by the company. This gigantic financial institution is the ultimate symbol of a new kind of corruption at the highest levels of American society: a tendency to marry the near-limitless power of the federal government with increasingly concentrated, increasingly unaccountable private financial interests.

The inevitable result of that new form of corruption is this bank, whose continued, state-supported existence should naturally outrage all Americans, be they conservative or progressive.

Conservatives should be outraged by Bank of America because it is perhaps the biggest welfare dependent in American history, with the $45 billion in bailout money and the $118 billion in state guarantees it’s received since 2008 representing just the crest of a veritable mountain of federal bailout support, most of it doled out by the Obama administration.

For instance, with its own credit rating hovering just above junk status, Bank of America has been allowed to borrow tens of billions of dollars against the government’s credit rating using little-known bailout programs with names like the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program. Since the crash of 2008, it’s also borrowed billions if not trillions in emergency, near-zero interest rate loans from the Federal Reserve – it took out $91 million in rolling low-interest financing from the Fed on just one day in January, 2009.

Conservatives believe that a commitment to free market principles and limited government will lead us out of our economic troubles, but Bank of America represents the opposite dynamic: a company that is kept protected from the judgments of the free market, and forces the state to expand to take on its debts.

Last summer, for instance, the Bank – in order to satisfy creditors who were nervous about the enormous quantity of risky assets on its balance sheet – decided to move some $73 trillion (that’s trillion, with a T) in exotic derivative bets from one end of the company into the federally-insured, depository side of the bank.

This move, encouraged by the Obama administration, put the American taxpayer on the hook for an entire generation of irresponsible gambles made by another failed investment firm that should have gone out of business, but was instead acquired by Bank of America with $25 billion in taxpayer help – Merrill Lynch.

When did we make it the job of the taxpayer to buy failed companies, and rescue companies from their own bad decisions? How is that conservative?

Meanwhile, if you’re a progressive, Bank of America is the ultimate symbol of modern predatory capitalism. This company has knowingly sold hundreds of billions of worthless securities to unions and pension funds (New York state filed two different lawsuits against Bank of America and its subsidiaries on behalf of its pension fund, one of which was settled for $624 million) brazenly overcharged its depositors (it was forced to pay customers $410 million in restitution for bogus overdraft charges), and repeatedly lied to its shareholders (most notoriously, it lied about billions in losses on Merrill Lynch’s books before asking shareholders to approve its merger with the firm).

Moreover, Bank of America has ruthlessly preyed upon millions of homeowners, throwing them out on the street on the strength of doctored, “robosigned” paperwork created through brazenly illegal practices they helped pioneer — the firm sped struggling families to foreclosure court using perjured affidavits produced in factory-like fashion by the hundreds or thousands every day, with full knowledge of management. Through the firm’s improper use of an unaccountable private electronic mortgage registry system called MERS, it also systematically evaded millions of dollars in local fees, forcing some communities to cut services and raise property taxes.

Even when caught and punished for its crimes by the authorities, Bank of America has repeatedly ignored court orders. It was one of five companies identified in two separate investigations earlier this year that were caught continuing the practice of robosigning, even after promising to stop in a legally binding consent decree. Last summer, the state of Nevada sought to terminate a settlement over mortgage abuses it had entered into with Bank of America after it found the company was brazenly violating the agreement, among other things raising payments and interest rates on mortgage customers, despite the fact that the settlement only allowed them to modify loans downward.

Over and over again, we see that leveling fines and punishments at this bank is not enough: it simply ignores them. It is the very definition of an unaccountable corporate villain.

Companies like Bank of America are a direct threat to national security, for many reasons. For one thing, they drive smaller, more honest banks out of business: since the market knows the federal government will never let Bank of America fail, it charges less to lend the bank money. That gives Bank of America, despite its near-junk credit rating, a competitive advantage over a smaller, regional bank that might have a better credit rating, but doesn’t have the implicit support of the federal government.

Worse still, stock market investor dollars that normally would go to more customer-friendly, more creative, and more commercially dependable firms will instead continue to flow to Too-Big-To-Fail behemoths like Bank of America, as buying stock in a company with implicit state support will be considered almost a safe-haven investment, like buying gold or Treasury bills.

This robs more deserving and ingenious entrepreneurs of scarce capital, and also encourages existing companies to pour resources not into better performance and increased productivity, but into lobbying and government influence. The result will be fewer Googles and Apples, more bad banks, and more campaign contributions for politicians.

Moreover, we’ve seen throughout our history that when criminal organizations are not punished, they tend to be encouraged to commit more crimes. Five years from now, our government’s decision to avoid jailing Bank of America executives for their roles in the vast robosigning program may result in a situation where no court document of any kind can be trusted, as companies will realize that it is cheaper and easier to simply invent legal affidavits than to draw them up properly and accurately.

What will your defense be against a future lawsuit for a credit card debt or a foreclosure, when your bank walks into court with a pile of invented documents? Will you wish then that you’d fought harder for Bank of America to be punished now?

And the state’s decision to allow Bank of America to pay a middling, $137 million fine for the rigging of bids for five years of municipal bond issues – a very serious crime that robbed taxpayers of millions in revenue, and incidentally is exactly the sort of thing we used to put mobsters in jail for, when the rigged contracts were for cement instead of bonds – may mean that down the road, all municipal bond issues will be rigged.

In recent years, Too-Big-To-Fail banks like Bank of America and Chase and Wells Fargo have been caught rigging the bids for financial services in dozens of municipalities nationwide. Worse, these same banks have repeatedly been let off the hook by regulators, who rarely seek jail sentences for the offenders, and more often simply apply fractional fines to the companies caught. This behavior, if left unchecked, will ultimately mean that we will all have to pay more for our roads, our traffic lights, our sewers, in fact all public services, as the banker’s secret bonus will soon become an institutionalized part of the invoice. And it’ll be our fault, because we didn’t do anything about it now.

The only way to prevent this kind of slide to total lawlessness is to break this unhealthy relationship between bank and government. It would be a great sign of America’s return to healthier capitalism if we could allow one of the worst of public-private monsters, Bank of America, to sink or swim on its own, in the free market.

We don’t want Bank of America to fail. Our position is, it already is insolvent, and already has failed – and only our tax dollars, and our government’s continued protection, is keeping that failure from becoming more common knowledge. There are many opinions about the nature of modern American capitalism. Some think the system is no longer able to meet the needs of ordinary people and needs to be radically overhauled, while others like it just the way it is.

But one thing that everyone on this spectrum of beliefs can agree upon is that our system doesn’t work when corrupt companies, companies that should fail in the free market, are kept alive by the government. When we allow that, what we get is a system that is neither capitalism nor socialist, but somewhere more miserably in between – a bureaucratic state in which profit is not tied to performance, but political power.

We have to break that cycle, and we can. Even with the enormous levels of state support, Bank of America has been teetering on the edge of collapse for years now. In December of 2011, its share price briefly dipped below $5, a near-fatal event in the firm’s history. The market has reacted violently to bad news about the bank on multiple occasions in the last year – after news of layoffs, after hints that the government might not bail the bank out completely in the event of a collapse, and after significant new lawsuits were filed. Each of these corrections nearly sent the company into a tailspin, but it was always rescued in the end by the widespread belief that Uncle Sam would bail it out in the event of a collapse.

We need to put a dent in that belief. We need to convince politicians and investors alike to allow failure to fail.

2012-02-26T20:08:00.001-08:00

2012-02-26 "NY mayor defends police" by David Caruso from "Associated Press"
[http://www.stltoday.com/news/national/ny-mayor-defends-police/article_ff3e4fd7-316e-5b5c-a4ff-1b2d9320c170.html]
NEW YORK • New York's mayor said his police department will do everything within its power to root out terrorists in the U.S., even if it means sending officers outside the city limits or placing law-abiding Muslims under scrutiny.
"We just cannot let our guard down again," Mayor Michael Bloomberg warned.
The mayor laid out his doctrine for keeping the city safe during his weekly radio show Friday following a week of criticism of a secret police department effort to monitor mosques in several cities and keep files on Muslim student groups at colleges in Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and upstate New York.
Several college administrators and politicians have complained that the intelligence-gathering — exposed in a series of stories by The Associated Press — pried too deeply into the lives of innocent people.
With about 1,000 officers dedicated to intelligence and counterterrorism, the New York Police Department has one of the most aggressive domestic intelligence operations in the U.S. Its methods have stirred debate over whether it violated the civil liberties of Muslims.
In perhaps his most vigorous defense yet of some of the NYPD's anti-terrorism efforts, Bloomberg said it is "legal," "appropriate" and "constitutional" for police to keep a close eye on Muslim communities that terrorists might use as a base to strike the city. And he said investigators must pursue "leads and threats wherever they come from," even across state lines.
"It would just be naive to think we should stop following threats when they get to the border," Bloomberg said.
Bloomberg said the NYPD would continue to do "everything that the law permits us to do" to detect terrorists operating in the U.S. before they have a chance to act. He warned of dire consequences if the city fails to detect plots.
"We are not going to repeat the mistakes that we made after the 1993 bombing," he said.
"We cannot slack in our vigilance. The threat was real. The threat is real. The threat is not going away."
Newark Mayor Corey Booker was among several New Jersey officials who said they were surprised and concerned to learn that the NYPD had broadly monitored Muslims and mosques in that state.
Bloomberg acknowledged that Booker himself hadn't been briefed by the NYPD, but said the Newark police department had been informed.
In any case, he said, it is "100 percent legal" for city police officers to operate in other states.
"You have to also remember an awful lot of the 9/11 hijackers stayed in New Jersey for extended periods of time, training, planning their attacks," Bloomberg said.

2012-02-26T11:16:00.002-08:00

2012-02-26 "Santorum says he doesn't believe in separation of church and state" by Lee-Anne Goodman from "Associated Press"
WASHINGTON - Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum said Sunday that he doesn't believe in the separation of church and state, adding that he was sickened by John F. Kennedy's assurances to Baptist ministers 52 years ago that he would not impose his Catholic faith on them.
"I don't believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute," Santorum, a devout Catholic, said in an interview from Michigan on ABC's "This Week."
"The First Amendment means the free exercise of religion and that means bringing people and their faith into the public square."
Santorum's latest foray into the hot-button, faith-based issues that so fire up the party's evangelical base comes as his chief rival for the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney, begins to pull ahead slightly in the state of Michigan, where he was born and raised.
Both Michigan and Arizona hold their primaries Tuesday.
While Romney's been battling Santorum in Michigan for the past two weeks, polls suggest he's got a comfortable lead in Arizona, a winner-take-all contest in terms of delegate allocation. Michigan's delegates, on the other hand, are rewarded based on results.
The former Massachusetts governor got a boost Sunday from Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, who endorsed him as "the man that can carry the day" on NBC's "Meet The Press."
"He has that pro-business background, and he has that political history that I think he would serve America the best."
Brewer's endorsement is considered a boon to Romney's insistence that he's the toughest in the Republican field on illegal immigration. Brewer has been a fierce defender of her state's strict immigration policies, and Romney called Arizona a "model" on the issue in the last Republican debate.
Romney is the native son of Michigan, however, where his father served both as governor and a car company executive. A loss there would be regarded as devastating to his campaign.
Nonetheless, both Romney and Santorum have said they opposed the federal government's bailout of the auto industry in the state where millions work for car manufacturers. Romney even penned a New York Times opinion piece four years ago with the headline: "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt."
Republican foes have seized upon that headline in advance of a speech by President Barack Obama on Tuesday to the United Auto Workers conference in Washington to celebrate "the rescue of Detroit."
The autoworkers plastered "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt" on 26 American-made vehicles at a Romney event in Detroit on Friday.
Beyond Michigan, however, Santorum's startling stances on social issues like birth control and religion are getting the most attention countrywide.
He's been unapologetic about some of his more controversial remarks, even reiterating Sunday his past remarks that Kennedy's 1960 speech in Houston made "me want to throw up."
"To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? What makes me throw up is someone who is now trying to tell people that you will do what the government says," Santorum said.
"That now we're going to turn around and impose our values from the government on people of faith."
America is all about embracing diversity, he added.
"What we saw in Kennedy's speech was just the opposite, and that's what's so upsetting about it," he said.

2012-02-25T19:51:00.000-08:00

The plan for a self-sufficient Union of North America continues...
2012-02-25 "Gulf of Mexico Agreement: Increased Oil Cooperation in a Time of War" by Dawn Paley
[http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3477-gulf-of-mexico-agreement-increased-oil-cooperation-in-a-time-of-war]
The U.S. is about to get a whole lot more involved in extracting Mexican oil, according to an agreement which promises to open up offshore oil and gas drilling in the Gulf Coast, signed Monday by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her Mexican counterpart Patricia Espinosa.
On top of pushing more underwater drilling into an area still recovering from the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, the deal foreshadows an even closer relationship between foreign oil companies and Mexico’s state owned oil company, Pemex. Though the tone of Monday’s meeting was rosy, the agreement signals increased U.S. involvement in the oil sector of a country at war.
“The government lacks the territorial control to guarantee security, as has been demonstrated in the gas deposits in the Burgos basin, and if federal authorities don’t have the capacity to provide security to companies on land, they will be far less able to do so in the high seas,” wrote Oscar Contreras Nava in the Gaceta, an online paper published out of Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas.[1]
According to the U.S. State Department, “The Agreement provides a legal framework for possible commercial activities at the maritime boundary and sets clear guidelines for transboundary developments....It establishes incentives for oil and gas companies to voluntarily enter into arrangements to jointly develop any transboundary reservoirs.”[2] The U.S. Department of the Interior notes this underwater area – some of which was previously under a drilling moratorium – contains up to 172 million barrels of oil and 304 billion cubic feet of natural gas.[3]
Exactly what kind of incentives the Transboundary Hydrocarbons Agreement will offer to the oil and gas sector is not yet known, as the deal won’t be made public until it is presented to the Mexican senate for approval next week.
“Mrs Clinton also stressed that it would allow US companies to work in partnership with the Mexican state oil company Pemex for the first time,” reported the BBC, suggesting an even cozier relationship between the oil companies of the two nations.[4]
But it will be far from the first time US companies have worked with Pemex: on the heels of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, the state owned oil company sought international participation in the exploitation of the Burgos basin, located just inland from the Gulf of Mexico. The Burgos basin has since experienced over a decade of activity on the part of U.S. and international oil service companies, including Schlumberger, Halliburton, and Weatherford International.
The U.S. Geological Survey said in 2003 that Burgos could contain more than six billion barrels of undiscovered oil, and over seven trillion cubic feet of gas.[5] The Burgos basin is centered around Reynosa, Tamaulipas, covering an area about the size of Ireland in a border region that has become one of the most dangerous parts of Mexico.
Much of the violence in Tamaulipas stems from the 2010 split between the Gulf Cartel and their armed enforcement wing, Los Zetas, as well as the deployment of 8,000 troops throughout the state.[6] Ciudad Mier, which sits atop the Burgos basin, experienced intense, midday gun battles that caused at least 400 families to flee in 2010.
“In Ciudad Mier, they shot up houses, and criminal groups burned the police station,” said one young man I interviewed last year in Reynosa. “It is a war between them, but unfortunately, we carry it, the people, human beings.”
Gun battles and kidnappings of oil workers have also forced Pemex to shut down oil production at drilling rigs in the Burgos basin. “Pemex hides cases [of kidnappings], there’s more than 20 people disappeared in our union,” said another man I talked to in Reynosa, who has been working for the company his entire working life. “They just are marked down as missing work,” he said.
A military base with least 650 soldiers was opened in Ciudad Mier in December of 2011. Theft of petroleum products by organized crime is also a common occurrence. As much as 40 per cent of natural gas condensate production from Burgos is rerouted and stolen. Last spring, Pemex filed a lawsuit in Houston against ten U.S. oil and pipeline companies for collaborating with organized crime to purchase condensate stolen from the Burgos basin in Mexico.
“The cartels built tunnels and even their own pipelines to facilitate the thefts,” reads the complaint filed by Pemex. “All of the Defendants have participated and profited—knowingly or unwittingly—in the trafficking of stolen condensate in the United States and have thereby encouraged and facilitated the Mexican organized crime groups that stole the condensate,” it states. [7]
The Burgos basin is just one of the oil and gas rich areas along Mexico’s north border. New discoveries of shale oil, recoverable through a process known as fracking, have recently been announced throughout northeast Mexico, including in the states of Coahuila, Chihuahua, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, San Luis Potosí and Veracruz.[8] These regions have all been militarized as part of war on drugs.
While the agreement signed Monday appears to apply only to companies active offshore, it signals an important step in Mexico-US oil cooperation. The future of Pemex is one of the key issues in federal elections coming up this July. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate Enrique Peña Nieto, who leads in polling, has indicated that if he’s elected, privatizing Pemex will be among his priorities. “We can do what Brazil did for its oil company, not at the beginning but later, if we open shares to the public,” he told Bloomberg News last November.[9]
The transboundary hydrocarbons agreement was signed in an “informal” meeting of G-20 foreign ministers, which took place in Los Cabos, the southernmost municipality on the Baja peninsula. The meeting was a precursor to the G-20 summit, which will take place in Los Cabos in June.

Notes:
[1] Contreras Nava, O. “Tendencias: Hay convenio pero no petróleo” Retrieved February 23, 2012 from: http://www.gaceta.mx/noticiasnews.aspx?idnota=42255
[2] US State Department. “U.S. – Mexico Transboundary Hydrocarbons Agreement.” Retrieved February 21, 2012 from: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2012/02/184235.htm
[3] US Department of Interior. “Sec. Salazar Joins Mexican President Calderon, Sec. Clinton, Mexican Officials to Announce Agreement Providing Access to Nearly 1.5 Million Acres of the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf.” Retrieved February 21, 2012 from: http://www.doi.gov/news/pressreleases/Sec-Salazar-Joins-Mexican-President-Calderon-Sec-Clinton-Mexican-Officials-to-Announce-Agreement-Providing-Access-to-Nearly-1-point-5-Million-Acres-of-the-US-Outer-Continental-Shelf.cfm
[4] BBC News. “US and Mexico agree Gulf of Mexico oil cooperation.” Retrieved February 21, 2012 from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-17108286
[5] USGS. “Assessment of Undiscovered Oil and Gas Resources of the Burgos Basin Province, Northeastern Mexico, 2003.” Retrieved February 21, 2012 from: http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2004/3007/fs-2004-3007.pdf
[6] Milenio. “Llegan 8 mil soldados a Tamaulipas para reforzar seguridad.” Retrieved February 17, 2012 from: http://www.zocalo.com.mx/seccion/articulo/llegan-8-mil-soldados-a-tamaulipas-para-reforzar-seguridad
[7] U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Houston Division. “Pemex Condensate Theft Ring Lawsuit (Complaint).” Retrieved February 24, 2012 from: http://www.archive.org/download/PemexCondensateTheftRingLawsuitcomplaint/PEP.PDF
[8] Noticias Televisa. “México descubre yacimientos de gas natural en frontera con EU.” Retrieved February 17, 2012 from: http://noticierostelevisa.esmas.com/nacional/355102/mexico-descubre-yacimientos-gas-natural-frontera-con-eu
[9] Krause-Jackson, F. Cattan, N. “Mexican Presidential Candidate Seeks Private Investment in Oil Industry.” Bloomberg News. Retrieved February 21, 2012 from: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-17/pena-nieto-pledges-mexican-oil-opening-calderon-found-elusive.html

2012-02-24T19:25:00.000-08:00

2012-02-24 "Number of Children Living Amid Poverty Has Surged This Decade: Study" from "Common Dreams"
[http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/02/24]
Nearly 8 million children in the United States were living in high-poverty areas in 2010—about 1.6 million more than there were just ten years ago—according to a new report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a private charitable organization whose primary mission is to foster public policies that help meet the needs of vulnerable children and families.
Based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS), the KIDS COUNT Data Snapshot shows that about 7.9 million children (roughly 11% of the population) are growing up in areas where at least "30% of residents live below the federal poverty level—about $22,000 per year for a family of four." Those numbers are up from 2000, when data showed 6.3 million kids (9% of the poulation) were living in economically depressed communities, which "often lack access to resources that are critical to healthy growth and development, including quality education, medical care and safe outdoor spaces."
“Kids in these high-poverty areas are at risk for health and developmental challenges in almost every aspect of their lives, from education to their chances for economic success as adults,” said Laura Speer, associate director for policy reform and data at the Casey Foundation. “Transforming disadvantaged communities into better places to raise children is vital to ensuring the next generation and their families realize their potential.”
And Speer, speaking with The Nation's Greg Kaufmann [http://www.thenation.com/blog/166435/week-poverty-screwed-unemployed-workers-and-rising-concentrated-poverty], said she finds the new data “particularly disturbing” because the long-term trends have taken such a turn for the worse.
“Poverty is re-concentrating,” Speer told The Nation. “There’s more segregation in terms of income in the US and this can have really bad impacts for kids.”
“Part of what we want to reinforce is the concept that children don’t grow up in isolation,” said Speer. “They are affected by both their family’s resources and also very much impacted by the community in which they live. The community is critically important because it really does for many kids equate to the opportunities that they have access to.”
And Reuters adds [http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/More+kids+living+high+poverty+communities/6202531/story.html]:
[begin excerpt]
The growth, a 25 per cent increase, reverses the trend just a decade ago that saw fewer children living in communities with high poverty rates, according to the non-profit group.
And three-quarters of those children live in such areas despite having at least one parent working, the study showed.
The findings reflect the hit the U.S. economy took during and after the 2007-2009 recession even as signs now point to recovery.
[end excerpt]
According to the ACS, almost all states saw the number of children in high-poverty neighborhoods climb. States with the highest rates were Mississippi (23 percent), New Mexico (20 percent), Louisiana (18 percent), Texas (17 percent) and Arizona (16 percent). Although the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico saw their rates decline over the same period, they continue to have higher rates—32 and 83 percent, respectively—than any state in the country.
The data also highlight the children most likely to live in areas of concentrated poverty. These include youth in the south and southwest, as well as those in urban and rural areas. African-American, American Indian and Latino children are six to nine times more likely to live in high-poverty communities than their white counterparts.

2012-02-22T06:06:00.002-08:00

2012-02-20T19:40:00.000-08:00

2012-02-20 "US Running on Myths, Lies, Deceptions and Distractions; Republican Hypocrisy; Democratic Complicity; The Press’s Malfeasance; and Why You Don’t Have a Job and if You Do, Why it Doesn’t Pay Squat" by John Atcheson from "Common Dreams"
[http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/02/20-0]
John Atcheson's writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the San Jose Mercury News, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, as well as in several wonk journals. He is the author of a fictional Trilogy that centers on climate change. The first book will be available on Amazon in the spring of 2012. Atcheson's book reviews are featured on Climateprogress.org.
---
The United States is headed for a plutocratic dystopia where a few gated communities sit like islands amidst a sea of bitterness, misery, and want.
Why?
Because the country is running on lies, myths, deceptions and distractions. Not surprisingly, they aren’t working very well for us.
Let’s run through a few of the most destructive lies and myths.

1. Corporations and the uber rich are the job creators: Uh, no. Corporations are sitting on over $2 trillion dollars in un-invested profits [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8uf-ZXLABE]. What jobs they are creating are in China and other countries – which, by the way, engaged in huge government funded stimulus programs when the Great Recession first hit. Which brings us to our next myth...

2. Government can’t create jobs: This particular whopper is just plain counterfactual. Obama’s much maligned stimulus program created some 3 million jobs [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-25/obama-s-economic-stimulus-program-created-up-to-3-3-million-jobs-cbo-says.html] and would have created more if he hadn’t caved to Republicans and limited its size and agreed to put 40% of it into unproductive tax cuts [http://www.earth.columbia.edu/sitefiles/file/Sachs%20Writing/2011/HuffPost_2011_RealJobsProgram_09_09_11.pdf]. In short, government does create jobs – no one else can or will when there’s not enough consumer demand to justify corporate expansion. And as long as the middle class’s wealth is getting siphoned off by the 1%, there will not be enough demand.

3. The deficit is our main problem, therefore we need an austerity budget: The story line from deficit hawks is that a deficit will spook bond markets and make it difficult for the US to borrow. But that hasn’t happened. In fact, demand is so high for our bonds, we’re able to borrow at record low interest rates. And while folks are practically lining up to buy our debt instruments, they’re eschewing investments in countries which instituted austerity plans. Yet the Obama Administration continues to join with the Republicans in insane hand wringing over deficits. Yes, we must bring down the deficit eventually, but not in the midst of a jobs crisis. In the long term, there are two ways to cut the deficit: grow our way out of it, or cut spending to the bone, and face a stagnating economy for the foreseeable future. If we’re to avoid the latter, right now we need government investment to stimulate growth.

4. Republicans actually care about deficits: Let’s put a stake in the heart of this one right now. Reagan and the two Bushes created more than 66% of the country's debt -- an amount equal to more than twice as much as all other President's combined (including Obama) [http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/09/20/5145120-chart-national-debt-by-president]. Did you hear any complaints while this record breaking debt was being wracked up? Not a word. Clinton, it’s worth remembering, had a surplus.

5. Republicans favor small government: In fact, the size of government exploded under Reagan and Bush II [http://www.brendagrantland.com/Blog/BlogRepublican.html], and we didn’t hear a peep out of Republicans. In the last thirty years, only Clinton reduced the size of government significantly, and he did so while declaring “the era of big government” to be over. What they really favor is weak government, which brings us to …

6. Regulations stifle the economy; deregulation unleashes economic growth: The fact is, laissez-faire, free market policies have failed miserably every time they’ve been tried. They have a nasty habit of causing grotesque income inequalities, huge market volatility and severe financial collapses. In fact, the Great Recession we are now climbing out of should have been strike 3 for the Free Marketeers. Strike 1 was the Panic of 1893 and the depression which followed it. Strike 2 was the Great Depression of the 30’s. In all three cases, these collapses were preceded by conservative, laissez-faire policies featuring deregulation, low taxes and weak governments.
Three tries – each resulting in severe income inequality and the catastrophic economic meltdowns they inevitably cause. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out this strategy doesn’t work.

7. Climate Change is “just a theory” and we can’t afford to address it: Leaving aside the fact that in the pantheon of science, “theories” are reserved for issues that are about as certain as the scientific method allows, the scientific consensus on global warming is as strong as it gets [http://www.ucsusa.org/ssi/climate-change/scientific-consensus-on.html]. And we know that the costs of not acting to prevent it are going to be far more than the cost of taking action, and it goes up with each year we delay. Thanks to Republican denial, Democratic complicity and press malfeasance, we’re literally sleepwalking into the worst catastrophe the human race has ever faced.

8. Republicans want to protect your freedom. Except when they want to tell you who you can sleep with, who you can marry, whether or not you can use birth control; when and whether you can choose to die; or when they want to tap your phone or detain you without due process, of course.

So why is it that these myths and lies – so easily disproven – persist. Indeed, why have they become conventional wisdom for many Americans, and why do they shape the national debate?
Here’s where the Democrats, distractions and the press’s malfeasance comes in.
Republicans throw up a lot of flack to keep people from focusing on the fact that they’re basically getting screwed by the 1%. Red meat issues like gay marriage, abortion and contraception, family values, and immigration do their part. Bald-faced lies like “Obama apologizes for America,” or he was born in Kenya contribute as well. But it only works because Democrats are too wimpy – or too complicit – to confront this bait-and-switch bullshit.
It doesn’t help that Democrats are feeding at the same corporate trough. No doubt that explains why they act like the class cowards and cringe in the last stall in the bathroom every time one of these faux issues get raised.
But the real culprit is the press – they’ve simply abrogated their responsibility to give people accurate, truthful information. Several weeks ago, New York Times “reader’s representative” Andy Brisbane actually asked readers whether reporters should be concerned with the truth. Honestly. He did.
We are now stuck with a media that puts “balance” or “objectivity” before truth. As Eric Sevareid said: “Our rigid formulae of so-called objectivity … have given the lie the same prominence and impact that truth is given; they have elevated the influence of fools to that of wise men; the ignorant to the level of the learned; the evil to the level of the good.”
This is more true today than it was then. And without a press devoted to honesty and accuracy, our ship of state runs on yarns, myths and the modern day equivalent of “bread and circuses,” and we are at the mercy of the evil, the foolish and the ignorant.
As long as that’s the case, the whims of the 1% will rule and your pay will continue to erode, or your job will exported to China or India or Honduras or anywhere the plutocrats are free to exploit workers and the environment. Or to places like Germany, where they don’t buy into the myths, and an active government role assures high-wage jobs and general prosperity.
At the end of the day, trying to run a country according to the rules of fantasy island isn’t a recipe for success. But it does serve the interests of the 1%.

2012-02-18T19:55:00.000-08:00

2012-02-18 "Canadian Government is 'Muzzling Its Scientists'" from "Common Dreams"
[http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/02/18-1]
The Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is underway this weekend in Vancouver, British Columbia.
The conservative Canadian government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper came under attack for 'muzzling' Canada's scientists.
A series of speakers at the AAAS meeting told the international science community that climate, environmental and health research that calls government policy into question is routinely suppressed. Prof Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria said, "The only information [the media] are given is that which the government wants, which will then allow a supporting of a particular agenda."
* * *
Pallab Ghosh writing in the BBC [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16861468]:
[begin excerpt]
The Canadian government has been accused of "muzzling" its scientists.
Speakers at a major science meeting being held in Canada said communication of vital research on health and environment issues is being suppressed.
But one Canadian government department approached by the BBC said it held the communication of science as a priority.
Prof Thomas Pedersen, a senior scientist at the University of Victoria, said he believed there was a political motive in some cases.
"The Prime Minister (Stephen Harper) is keen to keep control of the message, I think to ensure that the government won't be embarrassed by scientific findings of its scientists that run counter to sound environmental stewardship," he said.
"I suspect the federal government would prefer that its scientists don't discuss research that points out just how serious the climate change challenge is."
The Canadian government recently withdrew from the Kyoto protocol to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
The allegation of "muzzling" came up at a session of the AAAS meeting to discuss the impact of a media protocol introduced by the Conservative government shortly after it was elected in 2008.
The protocol requires that all interview requests for scientists employed by the government must first be cleared by officials. A decision as to whether to allow the interview can take several days, which can prevent government scientists commenting on breaking news stories.
Sources say that requests are often refused and when interviews are granted, government media relations officials can and do ask for written questions to be submitted in advance and elect to sit in on the interview.
-
'Orwellian' approach -
Andrew Weaver, an environmental scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, described the protocol as "Orwellian".
The protocol states: "Just as we have one department we should have one voice. Interviews sometimes present surprises to ministers and senior management. Media relations will work with staff on how best to deal with the call (an interview request from a journalist). This should include asking the programme expert to respond with approved lines."
Professor Weaver said that information is so tightly controlled that the public is "left in the dark".
"The only information they are given is that which the government wants, which will then allow a supporting of a particular agenda," he said.
The leak was obtained and reported three years ago by Margaret Munro, who is a science writer for Postmedia News, based in Vancouver. Speaking at the AAAS meeting, she said its effect was to suppress scientific debate on issues of public interest.
"The more controversial the story, the less likely you are to talk to the scientists. They (government media relations staff) just stonewall. If they don't like the question you don't get an answer."
Ms Munro cited several examples of what she described as the "muzzling" of scientists by the government.
The most notorious case is of that of Dr Kristi Miller, who is head of molecular genetics for the Department for Fisheries and Oceans. Dr Miller had been investigating why salmon populations in western Canada were declining.
The investigation, which was published in one of the leading scientific journals in the world, Science, seemed to suggest that fish might have been exposed to a virus associated with cancer.
The suggestion raised many questions, including whether the virus might have been imported by the local aquaculture industry.
-
Requests denied -
The journal felt this to be an important study and put out a press release, which it sent out to thousands of journalists across the world. Dr Miller was named as the principal contact.
However, the government declined all requests to interview Dr Miller. It said it was because she was due to give evidence to a judicial inquiry on the issue of falling fish stocks.
According to Ms Munro, because reporters were denied the opportunity to question Dr Miller about her work, important public policy issues went unanswered.
"You have a government that is micromanaging the message, obsessively. The Privy Council Office (which works for the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper) seems to vet everything that goes out to the media," she said.
A spokeswoman for Fisheries and Oceans Canada told BBC News: "The Department works daily to ensure it provides the public with timely, accurate, objective and complete information about our policies, programs, services and initiatives, in accordance with the Federal Government's Communications Policy.
"In 2011, Fisheries and Oceans publicly issued 286 science advisory reports documenting our research on Canada's fisheries; our scientists respond to approximately 380 science-based media calls every year."
Fisheries and Oceans Canada declined a request by the BBC to interview Kristi Miller for this article. Dr Miller told us she would have been willing to be interviewed had her department given her permission.
The AAAS meeting's discussion on muzzling is organized by freelance science reporter Binh An Vu Van. She says fellow journalists across Canada are finding it "harder and harder" to get access to government scientists.
Ms Vu Van claims that as well as "clear-cut cases of muzzling", such as the one involving Dr Miller, media relations officers use more subtle methods. She said that when she requests an interview, she has to enter into prolonged email correspondence to speak to a scientist she knows is ready and willing to be interviewed, often to be declined or offered another scientist she does not want to interview.
"It's so hard to get hold of scientists that a lot of my colleagues have given up," she explained.
Ms Munro cited another example of research published in another leading scientific journal, Nature, that was published last October.
Journalists were denied access to scientists working for the government agency Health Canada last year, when there was concern about radiation levels reaching the country's western coast from Japan following the explosion at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
An international team including several scientists from the government agency, Environment Canada, set out details of a hole that appeared in the ozone layer above the Arctic.
Ms Munro said she had called one of the scientists involved who she had dealt with several times in the past. He agreed to speak to her, but said that he had been told that her request had to be put to government media relations officials in Ottawa.
"So I phoned up Ottawa and they just said no you can't talk to the guy. A couple of weeks later, he was available but by then the story had been done. So they take them out of the news cycle," she said.
Ms Munro also claims that journalists were denied access to scientists working for the government agency Health Canada last year, when there was concern about radiation levels reaching the country's western coast from Japan following the explosion at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Ultimately, journalists obtained the information they sought from European agencies.
The Postmedia News journalist obtained documents relating to interview requests using Canada's equivalent of the Freedom of Information Act. She said the documents show interview requests move up what she describes as an "increasingly thick layer of media managers, media strategists, deputy ministers, then go up to the Privy Council Office, which decides 'yes' or 'no'".
"The government has never explained what the process is. They just imposed these changes and they expected us to sit back and take it," she explained.
Professor Andrew Weaver believes that the media protocol is being used by the Canadian government to "instruct scientists to deliver a certain message, thereby taking the heat out of controversial topics".
He added: "You can't have an informed discussion if the science isn't allowed to be communicated. Public relations message number one is that you have to set the conversation. You don't want to have a conversation on someone else's terms. And this is now being applied to science on discussions about oil sands, climate and salmon."
[end excerpt]

2012-02-15T15:42:00.000-08:00

The influence of the "Paleo-Conservatives" or "Libertarians" within the Republican Party was made concrete through the "Tea Party" movement and Ron Paul's electoral campaigns.
The direct association between Ron Paul and actual White-Nationalists (Nazis), and the inclusion of White-Nationalists with the Conservative PAC conference of early 2012-02, show how Fascist the Republican has become. Their primary interest is an established system of privatized government with all economic power to a minority of White-American Capitalists...

2012-02-15 "Ron Paul Is Secretly Taking Over The GOP — And It's Driving People Insane" by Grace Wyler
[http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-02-15/politics/31062266_1_paul-s-campaign-ron-paul-vote-count]
By now, it is clear that the Maine caucuses were a complete mess.
Evidence is mounting that Mitt Romney's 194-vote victory over Ron Paul was prematurely announced, if not totally wrong. Washington County canceled their caucus on Saturday on account of three inches of snow (hardly a blizzard by Maine standards), and other towns that scheduled their caucuses for this week have been left out of the vote count. Now, it looks like caucuses that did take place before Feb. 11 have also been left out of final tally.
As the full extent of the chaos unfolds, sources close to the Paul campaign tell Business Insider that it is looking increasingly like Romney's team might have a hand in denying Paul votes, noting that Romney has some admirably ruthless operatives on his side and a powerful incentive to avoid a fifth caucus loss this month.
According to the Paul campaign, the Maine Republican Party is severely under-reporting Paul's results — and Romney isn't getting the same treatment. For example, nearly all the towns in Waldo County — a Ron Paul stronghold – held their caucuses on Feb. 4, but the state GOP reported no results for those towns. In Waterville, a college town in Central Maine, results were reported but not included in the party vote count. Paul beat Romney 21-5 there, according to the Kennebec County GOP.
"It's too common," senior advisor Doug Wead told Business Insider. "If it was chaos, we would expect strong Romney counties to be unreported, and that's not what's happening."
The Maine Republican Party won't decide which votes it will count until the executive committee meets next month. But Wead points out that even if Mitt Romney holds on to his slim lead, it will be a Pyrrhic victory.
"He will have disenfranchised all of these people," Wead said. "It could be a costly victory — it is a mistake."
The (alleged) bias against Paul may also be the product of an organic opposition to the libertarian Congressman and his army of ardent fans. Paul volunteers tend to be young and relatively new to party politics, and their presence has many state GOP stalwarts feeling territorial.
"People feel threatened — they don't want to see a bunch of kids who may have voted for Barack Obama take over," Wead said. "They feel a sense of ownership over the party — but there has to be an accommodation."
But state party machinations are already starting to backfire. The Paul campaign believes it has won the majority of Maine's delegates — and the perceived election fraud has galvanized Paul supporters to demand their votes be counted in the state's straw poll 'beauty contest.'
Caucus chaos has also proved to be fertile ground for Paul's quiet takeover of the Republican Party. Since 2008, the campaign and Paul's Campaign for Liberty PAC have made a concerted effort to get Paul sympathists involved in the political process. Now, tumult in state party organizations has allowed these supporters to rise up the ranks.
"We like strong party leadership when it comes from us," Paul campaign chair Jesse Benton told Business Insider. "Our people work very hard to make sure that their voice is heard."
The fruits of this labor are evident in Iowa, where Paul's former state campaign co-chair A.J. Spiker was just elected as the new chairman of the Iowa Republican Party. Spiker replaces Matt Strawn, who stepped down over this year's Iowa caucus dustup. In Nevada, the state chair has also resigned over caucus disaster, and several Ron Paul supporters are well-positioned to step up to fill the void. These new leaders not only expand Paul's influence at the state level, but also help protect Paul and his hard-won delegates from state party machinations as the delegate-selection process moves to district and state conventions, and eventually the Republican National Convention this summer.
"We are always trying to bring people into the party," Benton said. "I think that is a very positive thing for Republicans. Ron is the person who can build the Republican base, bring new blood into the party. That's how you build the party."
In Maine, the caucus disaster has made the state GOP prime for a Ron Paul takeover. And that means that Paul's hard-won delegates will be protected as the delegate selection process
"We are taking over the party," Wead told BI. "That's the important thing — and that is what we are doing in Maine."

2012-02-14T13:18:00.000-08:00

2012-02-14 "Rahm's gift to the 1 percent: Pearl, a blogger who comments on the City Colleges of Chicago, looks at Mayor Rahm Emanuel's effort to hand over community colleges to the corporate agenda"
[http://citycollegeschicagoreinvention-truths.blogspot.com/2012/02/emanuel-to-16-of-7-city-colleges-to.html]
ON DECEMBER 12, 2011, Mayor Rahm Emanuel delivered a speech at a private meeting of the Economic Club of Chicago (ECC). There was no press. He was among friends--very rich friends. They told him so. In his introductory remarks, the new president of the ECC, John Cunning, was generous [http://www.econclubchi.org/Documents/Meeting/2502838f-fb9b-4962-9f3f-690906b18f3b.pdf]:
[begin excerpt]
Rahm rose to become the president's [Bill Clinton's] chief political advisor, and he scored many victories during his first White House tour, including securing the North American Treaty--the North American Free Trade Agreement passage. Rahm left the Clinton administration in 1998 to return to Chicago, embarking on a successful three-year stent [sic] as an investment banker. As a result, Rahm, you left the 99 percent and joined the 1 percent. Welcome aboard! Good to have you.
[end excerpt]
So Emanuel spoke frankly. He delivered on a silver platter the City Colleges of Chicago (CCC) to his business friends. In just a few minutes, the mayor reversed many months of denials by CCC Chancellor Cheryl Hyman regarding the conversion of the CCC system into trade schools.
"We are going to remake our community college system into a skills-based, vocational-based educational system," said Emanuel to a crowd full of corporate heads. He was quite explicit about his plans: "Every year we will modernize two new schools and match them with partners in the private sector, to train the workers for our factories, for our offices, for our hospitals, for our hotel industry and for our infrastructure."
Explicit, in a way he and the CCC administration have not been with the media, nor the faculty, staff and students of the CCC.
As a matter of fact, none of the press releases sent by the office of the mayor or the CCC administration regarding this speech contain any reference to the conversion of the CCC into a vocational school system. When Chicago Reader reporter Deanna Isaacs blogged about this speech, she listed the press release as her source [http://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2011/12/13/city-vocational-colleges-of-chicago]. On our "Reinvention Mirrors" posting regarding this matter, we also used this press release, which seemed to contain more of the usual recasting of programs already in place [http://www.cityofchicago.org/content/dam/city/depts/mayor/Press%20Room/Press%20Releases/2011/December/12.12.11College2CareersSpeech.pdf].
We were wrong. The announcements for Olive-Harvey and Malcolm X Colleges, even if they did not contain much additional meat, really described a sharp restructuring of the mission and curriculum of these colleges.
SINCE OUR initial posting at the City Colleges of Chicago Reinvention: The Truth blog [http://citycollegeschicagoreinvention-truths.blogspot.com/], we have been arguing that in line with the professed goals of the Obama administration, the CCC administration was getting ready to transform a significant part of the CCC into a job-training, vocational-schooling direction.
We emphasized that the most important (by far) Reinvention goal was the first one, which emphasized the generation of degrees with economic value. What we did not expect was that most of the system would be transformed in this direction.
Let's hear Emanuel again:
[begin excerpt]
Cities like Miami and Louisville have tried something similar--but in a single industry, with a single school. Miami matched a community college to train students in the healthcare sciences. Louisville has linked a community college with UPS to be a leader in logistics.
But this is Chicago. We need something bigger, more ambitious, and more comprehensive, something to match the diversity and depth of our economy, which is one of our strengths.
So tonight, I am announcing that we will tailor six of our community colleges to train students in a specific sector, where we know we can dominate the future.
[end excerpt]
In our posting titled "Reinvention: Local case of the national scheme to degrade community colleges," [http://citycollegeschicagoreinvention-truths.blogspot.com/2011/09/reinvention-local-case-of-national.html] we had connected the Reinvention to Obama's administration plan to transform community colleges into workforce development institutions to faithfully serve the needs of corporations, as part of his political agenda to convince the public that he was addressing the abysmal unemployment rate. As in tandem, Emanuel announces his vocationalization of the CCC in December, and a month later, in his State of the Union address, this is what Obama had to say [http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2012/01/25/2012-state-union-address-enhanced-version#transcript]:
[begin excerpt]
Join me in a national commitment to train 2 million Americans with skills that will lead directly to a job. My administration has already lined up more companies that want to help. Model partnerships between businesses like Siemens and community colleges in places like Charlotte, and Orlando, and Louisville are up and running. Now you need to give more community colleges the resources they need to become community career centers--places that teach people skills that businesses are looking for right now, from data management to high-tech manufacturing.
[end excerpt]
Emanuel's offer of the CCC to the corporations and businesses was made very attractive:
[begin excerpt]
In the same way that you help Booth and Kellogg [business schools at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University] prepare their graduates for careers in management and finance, we need you to partner with our community colleges--so that their curriculums meet the needs of the sectors that power the Chicago economy.
I'm not talking about hiring one person or even a partnership. It's more than that. This is about ensuring that the curriculum taught at community colleges provides the skills you need at your place of employment.
By making a diploma from our community colleges into a ticket to the workforce, we will make them a first option for job training and not a last resort.
I do not expect you to do this alone. Our community college leaders will be right there with you. And whatever you invest in our schools, you will get back many times over in the skills of your employees and your ability to grow.
[end excerpt]
Therefore it will be the business barons' employees who will be in charge of rewriting the curriculum at the CCC.
Emanuel minces no words in making it clear that he is talking about a two-tier higher education system. One for the children of the elite, plus a minority of working class students made up of those lucky enough to sneak in, who will be able to secure a bachelor's degree or more. Then there is the rest of our children, who will be led down a cattle chute into the lower rungs of the work universe. Again, we let Emanuel speak:
[begin excerpt]
Now don't get me wrong, Chicago and the state of Illinois have great institutions of higher learning. We know them: Northwestern, University of Chicago, University of Illinois, DePaul, Columbia College, Loyola, Roosevelt, UIC.
We have two of the top five business schools in the country in Booth and Kellogg. We have great law schools. In technology we have IIT [Illinois Institute of Technology], Fermi, Argonne labs and U of I.
Chicago is also the destination of choice for graduates from the Big Ten States, be they from Madison, Columbus, Ann Arbor, Iowa City, East Lansing, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Indianapolis, or South Bend.
What we have overlooked in the development of our workforce is the preparation of our own children. We have not developed the educational system that helps our economy grow.
[end excerpt]
The gloomy significance of this transformation was well spelled out by a participant of a discussion regarding this matter at The Harold Lounge (Harold Washington College's faculty discussion webpage [http://haroldlounge.com/2012/01/24/read-the-whole-thing-after-the-introductory-remarks-the-mayor-lays-out-his-vision-for-city-colleges-if-there-is-only-one-academic-school-left-in-a-seven-school-system-who-is-served/#comment-7159]):
[begin excerpt]
So, how will all of this effect our students? Well, the mayor and the chancellor are basically saying that our students are not capable of pursuing higher education, and should be satisfied with a vocational career. At least that way, they will be contributing members of society. This denigrates our students to the nth degree. Instead of providing access to higher education, which is the foundation and mission of community colleges, we will be limiting our students to low-level jobs, with little to no opportunity for career growth. This is social injustice at its finest.
I'm not against partnering with businesses to provide smooth transitions into careers for our students. I'm not against creating more vocational paths for our students. What I am against is the City Colleges of Chicago telling the students of Chicago that they can achieve no higher than that, that they should settle, that they shouldn't dream big, that they don't need to be educated, but trained with a specific set of skills--skills that limit their opportunities for career advancement or career change.
[end excerpt]
THIS IS not the first time that the mayor uses the argument of a skills mismatch between inadequate level of skills of unemployed workers and an alleged 100,000 skilled-job vacancies in Illinois that go unfilled despite the high unemployment rate. This same argument is raised nationally by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the Obama administration, but with a claim of more than half a million unfilled skilled job vacancies at the national level.
Bear in mind that this argument does not explain away the high unemployment numbers. Even if the 500,000 figure is accurate, this is way short of the over 13 million people looking for jobs, which excludes those who, demoralized, have given up searching for work. These figures come from surveys of manufacturers and other employers. However, there is controversy around the accuracy of this claim.
A 2005 report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) says that "Employers do complain about the skills of young worker and high-school-educated workers, but it is unclear whether they are dissatisfied mainly with workers' cognitive skills or rather with their effort and attitude." Furthermore, last September, Heidi Shierholz reported in the EPI's blog [http://www.epi.org/blog/country-lacking-workers-lacking/] that a comparison of unemployment rates across all skill sectors between 2007 and 2011 showed that "all education categories have seen their unemployment rates roughly double over the last four years." She added:
[begin excerpt]
This across-the-board deterioration in the demand for workers runs directly counter to the notion that there has been some transformation of the workplace over the last four years that has left millions of workers inadequately prepared for the currently available jobs.
[end excerpt]
John Schmitt, senior economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, writes that [http://noapparentmotive.org/blog/2011/09/20/what-skills-shortage/]:
If there really is a shortage of skilled workers, though, we'd expect to see skilled workers' wages rising.
But workers with some college (including those with associates degrees) or a bachelor's degree or even a master's degree suffered average real wage declines even steeper than those of high school graduates.
[begin excerpt]
If there really is a shortage of skilled workers, though, we'd expect to see skilled workers' wages rising.
But workers with some college (including those with associates degrees) or a bachelor's degree or even a master's degree suffered average real wage declines even steeper than those of high school graduates.
[end excerpt]
So if we have a shortage of skilled workers, it is a peculiar one.
Finally, renowned business journalist Doug Henwood and Philippa Dunne, co-editor of the The Liscio Report on the Economy, debunked [http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/03/an-explanation-where-none-is-needed/] the analysis of Minneapolis Fed President Narayana Kocherlakota, who claimed that the unemployment vs. vacancy rates data indicated a significant jobs skills mismatch, by using vacancy rates data extending back to the 1960s and showing that this is not the case.
So...if we do not have that scary a mismatch between unfilled skilled jobs and the number of unemployed, what really happens is that, as Heidi Shierholz says, "The U.S. doesn't lack the right workers, it lacks work."
Then, what is all this conversion of the CCC into vocational schools about?
IT IS about the money--about shifting the economic burden of training workers from businesses to students and taxpayers.
As MSNBC Senior Producer John Schoen explains [http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43465034/ns/business-eye_on_the_economy/t/funding-scarce-training-new-hires], "[T]here's less agreement on where the money will come from to train those jobless workers. Nobody, it seems, wants to pick up the tab." Then he goes on to quote Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce:
[begin excerpt]
The commitment between employer and employee has gone down. And (employers) don't want to take five years to get you ready. They want you ready to start working--and learning--the day you walk in the door. But they don't want to do qualifying training.
[end excerpt]
Businesses and corporations have been plundering us for several decades now. First, they began cutting our wages and benefits, then they began moving production from the North of the U.S. to the South. That was not enough. They proceeded with a major campaign to outsource production from the U.S. to other low-wage countries. Simultaneously, they went, with the complicity of politicians, to privatize public services.
These last two trends continue to advance to this day. But this is still not enough. Despite having their tax payments drastically reduced over the past three decades--to the extent that plenty of major corporations pay no taxes--now they want to transfer the cost of training their own workers to the students and to the tax-paying working class.
Make no mistake, when the Obama administration, business economists and the likes of Emanuel talk about the new trend of onshoring or insourcing jobs, they are talking about the U.S. becoming the cheap labor center of the advanced economies. The jobs that are currently being onshored are jobs coming at the expense of Canadian workers. Yes, manufacturing is being outsourced from Canada into the U.S., but only because our average wages have become so pitiful over the past four decades. The dynamics are brilliantly described by Doug Henwood [http://lbo-news.com/2012/01/06/that-jobs-report/]:
[begin excerpt]
American workers are very productive, but they earn a lot less. Caterpillar claims that its workers in Illinois cost the firm less than half as much as their comrades in Ontario. Over the last decade, unit labor costs--wages and benefits paid per dollar of output--have fallen by 13 percent in the U.S. They rose by 2 percent in Germany, 15 percent in Korea, and 18 percent in Canada. When you factor in transportation and other costs, U.S. workers in some sectors are starting to become competitive with China, where wages have been rising sharply for years and workers have developed a habit of striking and ransacking the boss's office.
The trend towards bringing factory work back to the U.S. even has a name: onshoring. A revival of manufacturing would be good in many ways, but one based largely on low wages and high levels of exploitation is not something to cheer.
[end excerpt]
So many of the jobs for which Emanuel wants young people to train are meant to be jobs with much lower wages and benefits than they would have been in the past. Jobs that some other day may be outsourced again, leaving millions of workers with a limited number of skills, looking again from outside the window.
During his ECC speech, Emanuel conflated the role of community colleges after World War II with what he is proposing as his new scheme.
[begin excerpt]
Community colleges were the catapult for the World War II generation coming home from the battlefield, the generation of Americans who became the most productive and economically expansive in American history. They can serve that same function in the 21st century.
Tonight, we charge our community colleges with a new mission: to train the workforce of today for the jobs of tomorrow; to give our students the ability to achieve a middle class standard of living; to provide our companies with the skilled workers they need.
[end excerpt]
This is misleading at the least, dishonest at its worst. After the Second World War, community colleges, under a President Harry Truman directive, became the democratizing bridges for working class students to secure bachelors degrees and join the ranks of the many teachers, engineers, etc. required to build the U.S. economy through the longest economic boom this country has ever had. Under Emanuel's plan, that bridge is destroyed, and a diverging road is being built into a vocational training cul-de-sac.
In this highly racially segregated city, the neighborhoods where the Olive-Harvey and Daley Colleges reside are overwhelmingly African American and Latino, respectively. The turning of these two colleges into strictly vocational schools severs the path for these students to go on to obtain a bachelor's degree or a profession. Even if not consciously intended, the outcome will be a racist tracking of Black and Latino young men and women away from a genuine higher education degree.
For the sake of our community colleges, for the sake of our children and our communities, it is time to stop Emanuel in his tracks.

2012-02-14T12:16:00.000-08:00

2012-02-14 "The War on Education: Scapegoating Teachers" by MOSHE ADLER
[http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/14/scapegoating-teachers/]
Moshe Adler teaches economics at Columbia University and at the Harry Van Arsdale Center for Labor Studies at Empire State College. He is the author of Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the Science That Makes Life Dismal (The New Press, 2010), which is available in paperback and as an e-book.
---
The first to discover that teachers make perfect scapegoats was George W. Bush. When he ran for president for the first time twelve years ago, Bush had a problem. He wanted lower taxes to be his rallying cry, but while taxes in Texas, the state where he was governor, were indeed low, the schools in Texas were notoriously bad.
The numbers are no better today: Texas ranks 47th in the county in literacy, 49th in verbal SAT scores and 46th in math scores. To blind the public to the evidence of what low taxes do, Bush produced evidence of a miracle: When it comes to education money is not what matters, he declared; what matters is holding teachers accountable. In Houston, Bush told voters, the superintendent of schools held teachers accountable, and as a result Houston saw a dramatic improvement in school quality, particularly when measured by high school graduation rates. So convincing was the miracle that as soon as he took office Congress agreed to pass the Bush tax cuts and the No Child Left Behind law.
Eight years later the “Texas miracle” was exposed. It turned out that the numbers had been cooked: Instead of the 1.5% drop-out rate that Houston had reported, the actual rate was somewhere between 25 and 50 percent. And in order to boost test results children who were considered weak in even just one subject were prevented
from entering the 10th grade, the year in which the tests were administered. But by then the truth no longer mattered because the ideas that taxes are not needed to run a democratic government and that teachers, not budgets, are responsible for the failure of schools had invaded the body politic.
When Bush ran for office the rate of unemployment was low and there was a surplus in the government coffers, rather than a deficit. Today the economic situation is dire and most Americans believe that inequality is the biggest problem that the country faces. Occupy Wall Street blames the 1% — but the 1% and their elected officials have found someone else to blame: Bad teachers are back.
A new study just out from economists at Harvard and Columbia would seem to offer the proof. The study does not claim that the measurement of teachers will produce better students–this was Bush’s claim and it has already been exposed–but instead that the measurement of teachers will make students richer as adults.
President Obama echoed themes from the study when in his State of the Union Address, instead of acknowledging Occupy Wall Street, he stuck it to teachers: ”A great teacher can offer an escape from poverty to the child who dreams beyond his circumstance,” he said. “Give them [schools] the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones…and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.”
Unlike the Texas miracle, the Harvard-Columbia revelations are not based on fraudulent numbers. But what is deeply problematic is the spin that the authors give to their findings. The study examined the incomes of adults who, as children in the 4th through the 8th grades, had teachers of different “Value Added” scores, with Value Added defined as improvement in the scores of students on standardized tests. The study claims that the individuals who had excellent teachers as children have higher incomes as adults; we will examine the validity of this claim below. But first we must ask what these higher incomes mean. When they were children, these individuals were poor. What the H-C authors fail to mention is that even when they had excellent teachers as children and therefore have higher incomes as adults, these individuals, despite their higher incomes, remain poor.
The devil is in the details: the average wage and salary of a 28 year old in the H-C study who had an excellent teacher was $20,509 in 2010 dollars, $182 higher than the average annual pay of all 28 year olds in the study. How does this compare to the average salary and wage of a 28 year old in this country? The authors excluded from their study people whose income was higher than $100,000. As we shall see, this exclusion is problematic; but to do the comparison we must do the same. The average salary and wage in 2010 of a 28 year old who earned less than $100,000 a year was $29,041, 42% higher than the income of a 28 year old in the H-C who had an excellent teacher. In other words, even if we accept the numbers that the authors of the H-C study choose to spin, having an excellent teacher cannot pull people out of poverty.
The exclusion of people with high incomes involved some 4,000 individuals, or 1.2% of the sample. The authors justify it by claiming that such people are outliers. But what if it turned out those high income earners had “bad” teachers? Including them in the study would have completely changed the results. Excluding a large number of the best performers from a study about the effect of teaching seems strange.
There’s more. While the H-C study found a statistically significant, if meaningless, relationship between the “value added” of teachers and incomes at age 28, the authors did not find a statistically significant result at age 30. Why? In the study the authors explain this by the small number of 30 year olds in their sample. In their interviews with the media and in public presentations the authors do not mention this result at all. Yet the number of 30 year olds in their sample is 61,639, and these are all students who went to school in the same city. Is this a small sample? To gain an appreciation for the size of the sample consider the fact that in order to estimate the unemployment rate that it publishes every month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics relies on a national survey of 60,000 households with an average of 1.95 adults in each. Surely if 120,000 peoples are a good size sample to study a labor force of 150 million people spread all over the country, a sample of 61,639 is a good size sample to study a population of fewer than 5 million elementary school students who all come from the same school system. By any measure the sample size is not only adequate, it is fantastically huge, and the result is not statistically significant.
But the statistically insignificant results for 30 year olds may have been inconvenient for the authors for another reason. An increase of $128 a year is small by any standard, so the authors resorted to estimating a lifetime increase in earnings due to this increase. To do that they assumed that the percentage increase in income, 0.9 of one percent, which they estimated for age 28, holds for each year of a person’s working life. And perhaps this is why the authors chose to ignore the results for the 30 year olds. All that their findings permit them to claim truthfully is that an excellent teacher increases average annual income by $128 at age 28, and that this effect disappears at age 30. But then there would have been nothing to report.
Doesn’t teacher quality matter? Not when it comes to explaining the deliberate assault on the wages of workers by executives with the support of most of our elected officials. A federal law permits states to pass the doublespeak Right to Work law. Boeing, a major recipient of government largess, has just moved production from Washington State to South Carolina because, according to Governor Nikki Haley, “We are fighting the unions every step of the way. We are a strong Right to Work state and going to stay that way.” The Supreme Court has recently ruled that executives can use shareholders’ money to their heart’s desire to influence elections. Executive pay remains totally out of control and totally unregulated. Government workers have lost the right to bargain collectively in several states. These are the laws that must be changed if we are to fight poverty. Does the president really believe that teachers can change all these laws by themselves when he says that “a great teacher can offer an escape from poverty?”
The attack on “bad teachers” is a dishonest diversion, and nothing more than a reincarnation of the Texas Miracle. The problem is the power of the 1%; the solution is to pass it to the 99%.

2012-02-14T11:22:00.000-08:00

2012-02-14 "Arizona GOP: Teachers Shall Not Teach “Profane” Books" by Kristina Chew
[http://www.care2.com/causes/arizona-gop-teach-profane-books-you-could-be-fired.html]
To say that a new bill in Arizona is draconian is to risk understatement. SB 1467 seeks to impose restrictions on the conduct of any teacher in a public school setting and not only in the classroom, but in their own homes. Under the law, those who teach at public schools would be prohibited from engaging in “speech or conduct that would violate the standards adopted by the Federal Communications Commission concerning obscenity, indecency and profanity if that speech or conduct were broadcast on television or radio.”
As written, SB 1467 is simply scary. As Stephen D. Foster, Jr., writes on Addicting Info, the bill in effect says that teachers “can’t do things that aren’t allowed on television.” Specifically, the FCC says that "It is a violation of federal law to air obscene programming at any time. It is also a violation of federal law to air indecent programming or profane language during certain hours."
Educators of students of all ages are included in SB 1467, from preschool, elementary, middle and high school teachers to those in vocational education programs. Professors at public community colleges or public universities would also be affected. For the first violation, an individual could be suspended for at least a week without compensation. A second violation would being a two-week suspension without compensation. A third violation would lead to the termination of an individual.
The sponsors of SB 1467 are five Republicans, Senator Al Melvin, Senator Andy Biggs, Senator Don Shooter, Senator Lori Klein and Senator Steve Smith. As Adam Peck on Think Progress points out [http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/13/423412/arizona-bill-would-likely-prohibit-teachers-and-professors-from-teaching-any-book-with-profanity/?mobile=nc], it was last summer that Klein “raised eyebrows when, during an interview with a reporter from the Arizona Republic, she took out a loaded handgun and pointed it at the reporter’s chest.” [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/11/lori-klein-arizona-gun-control-reporter-giffords_n_894973.html]

Regulating Free Speech in the Classroom — and Beyond -
Certainly the text of SB 1467 suggests that its authors have some concerns about free speech and, in particular, about imposing limits on it. Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights In Education notes that not only would the bill prohibit the teaching of sexuality “and other non-Victorian topics” but teachers — and university professors — could be penalized and even lose their jobs by teaching such classics as The Canterbury Tales, The Catcher in the Rye, Ulysses and “probably every work by an obscure English writer named William Shakespeare.” Forget about teaching film studies as you can be sure that “movies like The Godfather, The Graduate, Annie Hall, or for that matter, Pulp Fiction” would all be on the “don’t-show” list.
The last-named author uses “gadzooks” (“God’s hooks,” i.e., the nails on the cross on which Christ was crucified) and “zounds” (“God’s wounds”) in his plays — profane expressions in his time though not in ours. But if SB 1467′s sponsors feel Shakespeare should be regulated, who’s to stop them from reaching even further back than the late 16th – early 17th century, even past the last 14th century when The Canterbury Tales were written, to the ancient Greeks and Romans?
Plenty of works in the classical canon are decidedly raunchy, such as some poems by the 1st century BCE Roman poet Catullus. Others are fulsomely scatological, including the Greek comic writer Aristophanes’ Birds and Lysistrata, in which the female characters go on a sex strike to end a war. Greek tragedy is full of “indecent acts” — incest (Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex of course and also Euripides’ Hippolytus), filicide (Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Aulis) and matricide (Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers). Somehow I don’t think the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos, whose poetry is addressed to girls and woman — and whose poetry is a model for many Western poets — would pass the approval of the Arizona Senators.
If that’s not enough to sound appalling, Think Progress’s Peck underscores that SB 1467 would intrude on the private lives of teachers [http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/13/423412/arizona-bill-would-likely-prohibit-teachers-and-professors-from-teaching-any-book-with-profanity/?mobile=nc]:
SB 1467 doesn’t just ban public speech or conduct, but all speech and conduct. That means public school teachers in Arizona will be forbidden from engaging in any FCC-regulated activities no matter where they are. That means no sex, no going to the bathroom, no cursing and no showering. Ever.
SB 1467 is not only a violation of free speech and of privacy. It is an attempt to deny students the opportunity to learn about their cultural heritage of literature and ideas.
Arizona has already imposed a ban on ethnic studies. Now it seems the state wants to ban the Western tradition, too.

2012-02-13T11:47:00.000-08:00

2012-02-13 "Iris Photographs by Police, Not So Optional, Occupiers Among Others Subjected; Program extended despite objections" from "Common Dreams"
[http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/02/13-4]
In 2010 the NYPD began a new iris-photographing program. Officials began photographing the irises of suspects arrested for any reason as a routine procedure. Once an individual's iris is in the database, a hand-held scanning device can identify a 'suspect' in seconds.
The program has now been expanded across all five boroughs of New York, and many are now coming forward to protest the procedure; the NYPD has allegedly coerced some into this 'optional' scanning.
New York Times reports:
[begin excerpt]]
After her arrest at an Occupy Wall Street protest in December, Samantha Wilson expected to be booked, fingerprinted and subjected to a mug shot. But when a police officer raised a small device to her face and began photographing her eyes, she declined
Ms. Wilson, 32, said her refusal resulted in a threat from the officer.
“He said: ‘It’s not really optional. It’ll take you longer to get out of here if you don’t do it,’ ” she recalled.
The New York Police Department began photographing the irises of people arrested in Manhattan in 2010; officials said then that the images would help prevent suspects from escaping. But the program drew criticism from criminal defense lawyers and civil liberties experts who expressed concern that it could infringe on individuals’ privacy, especially in cases in which the charges were eventually dropped
More than a year later, as the program has been extended across the city, opponents have renewed their objections and accused officers of sometimes pressuring people to submit to the photographs — which are supposed to be optional — by keeping those who do not comply in custody longer. [...]
Concern over the program has taken several forms. Some opponents object to the fact that it was instituted without public announcement or comment. Others fear that cataloging eye data could place the innocent under a lasting cloud of suspicion.[...]
[Steven Banks, the attorney in chief for the Legal Aid Society] said it was problematic that the police were applying the program “without any legislative authorization to New Yorkers who may well be wrongfully accused of misconduct.” [...]
Megan Morris, a lawyer who has been helping coordinate the defense of people arrested in connection with Occupy Wall Street demonstrations for the National Lawyers Guild, said that dozens of the group’s clients had been held longer than usual after refusing iris photographs. [...]
[end excerpt]

2012-02-11T18:55:00.000-08:00

2012-02-11 "Blacklisting firm held file on oil industry academic" by Rory
[http://www.hazards.org/blacklistblog/2012/02/11/blacklisting-firm-held-file-on-oil-industry-academic/]
A secret blacklisting file opened on an academic who researched health and safety following the Piper Alpha oil rig disaster claims the offshore oil industry threatened to cut funding to his university if he “continued to cause problems”.
Investigative journalist Phil Chamberlain, writing in his Taking out the trash blog, reveals that Professor Charles Woolfson had published extensively on safety regimes in the North Sea while he was industrial relations professor at the University of Glasgow and wrote a well-regarded book, Paying The Piper. However, having his work reported in the media led drew him to the attention of The Consulting Association, which opened a file on him in 1995. The organisation was shut down by the Information Commissioner’s Office in 2009 and its records seized. Ian Kerr, the man paid to run the Association, was later fined £5,000 for breaching data protection laws.
“This is frankly an unwelcome surprise,” Prof Woolfson said in an interview with Chamberlain. “There is a clear intent to do me professional harm. This organisation and the industry obviously felt sufficiently threatened by critical academic research on safety to put me on a blacklist.” Six months after the file was opened on Woolfson, reports: “Funding from oil industry to Glasgow University may be cut if above activities continue, or there may be a reduction in his activities to prevent this happening.”
Jake Molloy from RMT’s offshore branch told Chamberlain “it is appalling that anybody should be targeted because they are talking about health and safety.” But he added: “I am aware of an incident where a journalist from a global journal became aware that a major oil company had contacted his employer and they were considering pulling all their adverts because of what he was writing. This is the nature of the business you are dealing with. The oil and gas industry is renowned for putting pressure on anybody who challenges or questions them.”

2012-02-10T12:26:00.000-08:00

2012-02-10 "U.S. shouldn't support Egypt's democracy backers" by Emad Mekay from "San Francisco Chronicle"
[http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/02/09/ED9J1N3RN0.DTL]
Emad Mekay is a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. He is the founder of the America in Arabic News Agency.
---
Washington's decision to defend a handful of Egyptian democracy activists by threatening the other 85 million people of Egypt, an ally for the past 35 years, is a misguided policy.
On one side, there is the solid U.S.-Egyptian cooperation on, for instance, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Arab-Israeli talks. On the other is a small circle of sloganeering politicians on the take from the U.S. government who are unpopular and discredited among their own people.
When these U.S.-funded politicians ran for office in Egypt's first real and democratic elections last month, they lost, leaving Washington with no leverage in the new Egypt. If Washington delivers on its threats to cut aid to Egypt, it is undermining whatever remains of U.S. influence.
WikiLeaks cables show that Washington's democracy push in Egypt was little more than a scam, an operation that shuffled money among a handful of favored embassy contacts who play U.S diplomats like puppets. These secularist politicians do not think the United States cares about democracy, but they keep coming back for more cash - hardly the type of activists you would fight for.
Worse, Washington mounted its efforts through questionable means.
A Feb. 26, 2009, cable shows the then-U.S. ambassador to Egypt, Margret Scobey, writing: "We would like to find a better, less confrontational way to support them."
In the same cable, she wrote: "The money should go to an outside, professional organization such as the National Endowment for Democracy, which has a long-term vision of promoting democracy and would not carry the same political baggage as using ESF (economic support funds)."
On one occasion in 2009, Washington appears to be funneling dollars to the leader of the Egyptian Organization of Human Rights, Hafez Abu Seada, through a U.S.-funded non-government agency in Morocco, apparently to wipe out the money trail. Some dictionaries call that money laundering.
Abu Seada is facing an investigation in Egypt for receiving foreign government funding without authorization. Several Americans are facing trial in Egypt for applying this policy. And for whose sake did the State Department cross ethical lines? For Egyptian politicians quoted in the diplomatic cables as warning other Egyptians about the United States - even after they've received U.S. support.
One of them is Hisham Kassem, who just weeks after he had won the 2007 Democracy Award from NED, is cited in an Oct. 30, 2007, diplomatic cable telling another embassy contact, Gameela Ismail, that in the United States, "nobody cares about democracy in Egypt" and that, "if you got arrested, there would not even be a statement released by the USG (U.S. government)."
With his lack of belief in U.S. democracy efforts, you would think Kassem would not ask for more U.S. support. But a June 21, 2009, cable reads: "Kassem urged the Obama administration to invest in building democratic institutions in Egypt."
Washington did. And Kassem now serves on the steering committee of one of NED's U.S.-funded initiatives - the World Movement for Democracy.
Paying any more U.S. tax dollars to duplicitous Egyptian politicians with suspect democracy credentials at the expense of a fruitful strategic relationship with Egypt is money down the drain. Oddly, Congress and the U.S. State Department are now fighting for that waste to go on.

2012-02-10T12:20:00.000-08:00

2012-02-10 "Eastwood 'halftime in America' ad inspires debate" by Carla Marinucci from "San Francisco Chronicle"
[http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/02/09/MNH71N4QQC.DTL]
San Francisco adman Jeff Goodby was watching the Super Bowl on Sunday - right in the stands - when his cell phone erupted with excited text messages: "Check out that Democratic ad!" and "See that Republican ad?"
The unlikely sensation was actor Clint Eastwood, a Republican, starring in a gritty, two-minute television commercial for Chrysler that went viral. As pictures of American workers flashed on the screen, the star who forged the phrase "make my day" kicked off a national political debate with a new tagline: "It's halftime in America."
Goodby, whose agency, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, has created award-winning ads and put the phrase "Got Milk?" into the national lexicon, said the memorable car spot about America "roaring back" was "beautiful and well done, an inspiration."
The national discussion of the commercial underscores the magic of advertising: how one well-crafted spot selling everyday products can distill the yearnings and dreams of average Americans in a way that political teams selling candidates can only hope to achieve.
But there are such moments. In 1984, San Francisco adman Hal Riney debuted "Morning in America," the iconic spot for President Ronald Reagan's re-election campaign, sending the message of a nation emerging "prouder and stronger and better" from its struggles through a recession.

Party mixer -
Goodby said the Oregon ad agency of Wieden+Kennedy, which created the Eastwood spot, also aimed to sell good feelings. The ad "did a good job of avoiding political overtones by using a Republican spokesperson," an actor with longtime GOP loyalties, Goodby added, and melding it with "a Democratic message" of economic comeback.
Talking up the rebound of the auto industry and a resurgent America was hardly political, he said: "What's not to agree with?"
Plenty, according to leading GOP backers and insiders including Karl Rove, who called the Eastwood ad "offensive," and who have eviscerated the Chrysler spot as thinly veiled political propaganda aimed at boosting President Obama's re-election agenda.
Bob Gardner, who heads San Francisco marketing firm the Advocacy Group and is a veteran of national GOP political campaigns, said of the spot aired before a record 111.3 million Super Bowl viewers: "At the end, it should have said, 'I'm Barack Obama and I approve of this message - and thank goodness I didn't have to pay for it.' "
The GOP's scathing reaction to the ad was in sharp contrast to praise from Democrats such as Obama senior adviser David Axelrod, who within minutes of the ad's debut tweeted that it was "powerful" - and praised Republican Eastwood for his involvement.
With California Democrats holding their statewide convention this weekend in San Diego, controversy over the Eastwood commercial's effectiveness raises a key question for Republicans and Democrats as the 2012 election approaches: Which party will more effectively seize a positive message in the presidential campaign?

Negative message -
"Republicans don't have a positive message. It's all about 'Obama's a bum,' " said state Democratic chair John Burton, who will address an estimated 3,000 party faithful this weekend.
Burton, who has known Eastwood for a long time, said his friend "was doing an ad about what he believes in - that people want to be positive; they want to be in favor of something, instead of against stuff."
Because Republican presidential candidates for months have been pounding the president for being "antireligion," "antibusiness" and "socialist," some Republicans worry that they're too attached to negative messaging as the nation's job and economic numbers appear to be on the uptick.
"They're using anything and everything to attack Obama - except, of course, a good candidate," said Goodby, who describes himself as "a registered Republican who votes Democratic."
Gardner, who created campaign spots for President Gerald Ford and then-Rep. Dick Cheney, praised the choice of Eastwood for the ad, calling him an American icon. But he argued that the ad's content was a different matter: It didn't sell cars as much as a "subliminal political message" that clearly pushed a Democratic line.
But Los Angeles marketing and advertising consultant Bruce Silverman, who served as creative director at three of the nation's largest ad agencies and produced Merrill Lynch's memorable "We're bullish on America" ad, challenged that notion.
The Eastwood spot and the "Morning in America" ad by Riney, who was Silverman's colleague at the Ogilvy & Mather ad agency, have clear parallels because Riney produced "one of those ads people remember for a lifetime ... because they touch the spirit," Silverman said.
"That ad represented a yearning," Silverman said. "America was down, it wasn't feeling good about itself. But America, by nature, is an optimistic country. We come through tough times, and Riney and his team really tapped into it."

Republican misstep -
Ruth Sherman, who heads a media training firm in Connecticut, said Republicans may have made a misstep by jumping on a spot with an "America is back" message.
"Everyone wants to be on the side of Clint Eastwood," said Sherman. "In fact, the car business is back; the auto industry has rebounded ... and for the time being, things are looking up in Detroit.
"So I do think Axelrod co-opting it was the right move, a very good pivot," she said. And Rove "made a mistake by not seizing on it himself and saying, 'This is exactly what we're saying.' "
Goodby said it's too early to tell how well the ad will sell cars or promote the idea that "it's halftime in America." But an ad that stands the test of time, he said, is "something that captures what people are thinking and caring about in a deep way, at a certain point in time."
While the goal of "It's Halftime in America" may have been to sell Chryslers, Goodby said, it may now be judged by something else.
"Let's see if it elects a president - or not," he said.

2012-02-08T10:56:00.000-08:00

2012-02-08 "CPAC Won't Renounce White Nationalist; Peter Brimelow, whose organization is designated as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is set to appear at CPAC this week. In a statement, the American Conservative Union says little" by Rosie Gray
[http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/cpac-wont-renounce-white-nationalist]
The American Conservative Union is standing by its decision to permit a panel at CPAC that includes a leading white nationalist figure, Peter Brimelow.
"CPAC is proud to have more than 150 sponsors and exhibitors this year," said spokeswoman Kristy Campbell in an email. "This panel was not organized by the ACU, and specific questions on the event, content or speakers should be directed to the sponsoring organization. Cosponsors and affiliated events do not necessarily represent the opinions of the American Conservative Union."
The group's Conservative Political Action Conference kicks off tomorrow with a host of important figures on the right, including presidential candidates and current legislators -- and with a lineup that tends to define the limits of the conservative movement. In the past, skirmishes over the inclusion of gay conservatives have been central, but this year's hottest debate appears to be over race.
Brimelow is the founder of VDARE.com, named after Virginia Dare, the first child born to English settlers in America. He's set to speak at a CPAC event called "The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the pursuit of diversity is weakening the American Identity."
The Southern Poverty Law Center describes Brimelow as a "White Nationalist" and his website as a hate site. Brimelow advocates against immigration and multiculturalism, which he has written "risks making America an alien nation."
His website publishes the work of white supremacist authors like Kevin MacDonald and Jared Taylor, a proponent of so-called "racial realism."
CPAC has faced sharp criticism since a liberal blog first noted Brimelow's presence [http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/cpac-set-host-white-nationalist-leader].

2012-02-12 "Andrew Breitbart Confronts Occupy Crowd At CPAC, Demands They ‘Stop Raping People’
video" by Frances Martel
[http://www.mediaite.com/tv/andrew-breitbart-confronts-occupy-crowd-at-cpac-demands-they-stop-raping-people/]
Perhaps moreso than many of the conference’s guests over the years, Andrew Breitbart has emerged as a uniquely revered figure at CPAC, partly for his ability to work the CPAC crowd over the job President Obama has done while in office. But much of it has to do with his work at CPAC outside of his speeches– his support of diversity in the conservative movement, his ability to engage just about anybody. Last night, Breitbart walked outside the hotel hosting the conference to attempt a chat with irate Occupy protesters, demanding they “behave yourselves” and “stop raping people.”
While there is a great deal of yelling going on in this video, Breitbart sticks to a few main sentences: “behave yourselves,” “you are freaks and animals,” and “stop raping people.” Meanwhile, some of the protesters can be clearly heard launching profanity at him until someone starts a chant of “racist, sexist, anti-gay; right wing bigots, go away.” Finally, the police show up and shield Breitbart from the crowd.
For those sympathetic to the Occupy movement, the image of Breitbart being held back while yelling the same sentences over and over at a somewhat bewildered crowd will resonate as more evidence that Breitbart is angry and not worth listening to. For those on the right, it will confirm exactly why they love him– he expresses absolutely no fear in standing before large crowds of people that view him negatively and telling them what many people have written and said in the safety of their homes: that many Occupy “camps” have serious problems with sexual harassment and unreported rape, that it is often entirely unclear what they are protesting; that ambiguous protests are annoying; that their image is sometimes aesthetically unappealing. This exchange isn’t really going to change anyone’s opinion on anything, but it is certainly a dramatic and inevitable confrontation of protest movements in the country.

2012-02-07T14:33:00.000-08:00

2012-02-07 "Occupy evictions include Pittsburgh, Miami and Portland, Maine; Occupy evictions have been occurring with some frequency over the past few months. A camp in Portland, Maine is one of the most recent among Occupy evictions" by David Sharp from "Associated Press" monopolized media newswire
[http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2012/0207/Occupy-evictions-include-Pittsburgh-Miami-and-Portland-Maine]
A tent city that's among the longest-lived Occupy protest encampments is coming down as part of a new wave of eviction orders against demonstrators aligned with the movement in communities including Miami, Washington and Pittsburgh.
Occupy Maine demonstrators removed several large tents over the weekend, and the city on Monday gave them additional time to remove the rest.
Demonstrators who established the encampment just two weeks after the Occupy Wall Street encampment set up shop in New York City vowed to continue their work to call attention to corporate excess and economic inequality.
"Just because the occupation is changing form doesn't mean it's going away," Heather Curtis, one of the campers, said Monday before she started hauling away her belongings from snow-covered Lincoln Park.
The encampments that were the heart of the movement are becoming scarcer. On Monday, a judge issued what appeared to be the final notice for Occupy Pittsburgh to leave. Over the past week, police began removing demonstrators in Miami; Austin, Texas; and Washington, D.C.
The voices are still making themselves heard, though.
On Monday, about 20 demonstrators disrupted a legislative budget hearing in Albany, N.Y., shouting that millionaires should be taxed more. Albany's camp was busted up in December.
Occupy Maine, which already has office space elsewhere in Portland, plans to continue getting its message out through other means, as well.
"You can only fight for so long and you realize at the end that it's a new beginning," said Deese Hamilton, one of the four named plaintiffs in a lawsuit aiming to keep protesters in Lincoln Park. Hamilton was homeless before joining with the Occupy protesters.
The campers were supposed to be out by Monday morning, and they dismantled four to five communal tents over the weekend. But 16 tents remained Monday morning, and the city granted the group's request for more time, giving them until Friday to finish the cleanup.
There was little activity in the morning. But by the afternoon, several people were raking, and others were taking down tents.
"They've asked for this amount of time in order to remove the remaining structures, so we're taking them at their word," said Nicole Clegg, city spokeswoman.
Occupy Maine started up Oct. 1 with a protest in Portland's Monument square and set up in Lincoln Park two days later.
Throughout the frigid Maine winter, when temperatures have dropped below zero, protesters rotated in and out to keep a constant presence, with those in the park keeping the cold at bay by huddling in communal tents equipped with propane heaters.
At one point, as many as 70 tents were set up in Lincoln Park, but that number had dropped by the time a state judge last week declined to grant Occupy Maine's request for injunction to prevent the city from enforcing an eviction notice issued Dec. 15.
Like in many other cities, Portland officials cited concerns about disturbances, public safety and sanitation at the park, which is supposed to close between 10 p.m. and 6:30 a.m.
In Portland, the demonstrators were largely peaceful. But some of the city's homeless moved in, along with associated problems of substance abuse and mental illness. Police said the number of calls to the park jumped after the demonstrators set up camp.
Most big occupy encampments — including the flagship at New York's Zuccotti Park and in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Oakland, Philadelphia and Portland, Ore. — were forcibly cleared late last year by officials who cited problems similar to Portland's.
In the first big wave of evictions, police acknowledged consulting and sharing information and tactics with colleagues elsewhere. The level of consultation this time around is not clear, although a Portland spokesman did acknowledge talks with officials in Bangor and Augusta, other Maine cities with an Occupy presence.
John Branson, attorney for Occupy Maine, argued that the Portland campers were demonstrating their rights to freedom of expression. He said campers will decide after they finish the cleanup whether they want to continue to pursue the lawsuit.
For now, they're concentrating on getting the park cleaned up, he said, and they plan to raise money to plant new grass and shrubbery in the spring.

Republican Party and the "Nazis"

2012-02-07T11:19:00.000-08:00

2012-02-07 "Ron Paul Linked To Racists?" by ThosPayne
[http://my.auburnjournal.com/detail/199801.html?fb_comment_id=fbc_10150526199236360_21307004_10150527456586360#f18d8a6fef96ca]
The international group of hacktivists called Anonymous exists to expose suppressed information that it feels should be made available to the public.
Lately, the group has been exposing the Las Zetas Mexican drug cartel by hacking into its computers and outing Zeta's business contracts, addresses, assets, and relationships with corrupt politicians and police.
In a separate crusade against American white supremacist groups Anonymous hacked into and then broke up the web accounts of a Southern California-based white power group known as American Third Position - or "A3P."
A3P is dedicated to mainstreaming white racist rule through its support of political candidates, much like David Duke tried to do back in the '90s.
It while raiding A3P's business and personal archives, Anonymous says, that it discovered documents revealing a surprisingly intimate relationship between A3P and current Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul; not just Ron Paul's campaign people, but Ron Paul himself.
Anonymous published the A3P archive with the following press release:
__________
"Fellow anons: we are pleased to bring you the dismantling of a major US-based white supremacist network known as the “American Third Position”(A3P). These racist losers have chapters across the US, operate several white power websites,forums and online stores, and are even running a candidate in the 2012 elections.
Although they try hard to maintain a professional public image to camouflage their vile racism, we’re now airing all their dirty laundry all over the internet. Contained in this major dump are several thousand private forum messages, personal emails, internal organization notes, names, phone numbers, home addresses and other information on all of their members and supporters...
In addition to finding the usual racist rants and interactions with other white power groups, we also found a disturbingly high amount of members who are involved in campaigning for Ron Paul. According to these messages, Ron Paul has regularly met with many A3P members- even engaging in conference calls with their board of directors.
Ron Paul’s racist politics and affiliations are already well known for being viciously anti-immigrant, anti-abortion and against gay marriage - not to mention having authored the racist “Ron Paul Papers” and receiving financial support from other white power groups. Hard to believe Ron Paul draws some support from the left and the Occupation movements, especially now that it is confirmed Ron Paul hangs out with straight up racist hate groups..."
______________
Anonymous also notes that Ron Paul receives financial support from other white supremacist groups, such as the online hate forum Stormfront (founded by Don Black, Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and member of the American Nazi Party).
Jamie Kelso owns the white supremacist websites WhiteNewsNow.com and TheWhiteRace.com. According to Kelso:
"Let's appreciate this big (Ron Paul) audience that's overwhelmingly white," Kelso said in an interview with the Southern Poverty Law Center. "This is our audience. This is our public. These are our people. If we can't persuade these people of the rightness of our cause, then we're finished."
An email from Kelso to fellow A3P member "Alexander Hamilton" advises: "Imbar is Ron Paul #2 man in Illinois. Owns his own manufacturing company. Young guy like you. Jeff (Imbar) and I have been buddies for years. We met up with Ron Paul in Ames, Iowa in Aug. 2007." Reiterating his commitment to Ron Paul's presidential campaign, Kelso says A3P members are part of Paul's team. "A couple of my buddies are among those dozen. 'Knucklehead' is my buddy, and Sr. Mod, named "Imbar" on WhiteNewsNow [a racist website owned by Kelso]. He's also Ron Paul's #2 man in Illinois, Chicago, where is a manufacturer. His name is Jeff".
William White of the National Socialist Movement reportedly revealed that:
"Both Congressman Paul and his aides regularly meet with members of the Stormfront set, American Renaissance, Institute for Historic Review, and others at the Tara Thai restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, usually on Wednesdays. I have attended these dinners, seen Paul and his aides there, and been invited to his offices in Washington to discuss policy." White added, "Paul is a White nationalist of the Stormfront type who has always kept his racial views and his views about world Judaism quiet because of his political position." (see International Business Times, 01-31-2012)
The complete A3P document dump can be accessed at Pirasec.com.
Persistent questions about Ron Paul's alleged racism and his questionable newsletters have been spotlighted by the media while Paul continues to seek the Republican nomination.
Of course, dinner meetings with Nazis and other white supremacists - even accepting their support - doesn't necessarily mean that Ron Paul himself is a racist.
Maybe it's time to find out what Ron Paul, as the potential Republican candidate for US President, honestly believes about racial equality in America.

2012-02-06T18:26:00.000-08:00

2012-02-06 "Citizens United good for wealthy, not for democracy" by E.J. Dionne Jr.
[http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/02/05/EDI31N2Q58.DTL]
We have seen the world created by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, and it doesn't work. Oh, yes, it works nicely for the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country, especially if they want to shroud their efforts to influence politics behind shell corporations. It just doesn't happen to work if you think we are a democracy and not a plutocracy.
Two years ago, Citizens United tore down a century's worth of law aimed at reducing the amount of corruption in our electoral system. It will go down as one of the most naive decisions ever rendered by the court.
The strongest case against judicial activism - against "legislating from the bench," as former President George W. Bush liked to say - is that judges are not accountable for the new systems they put in place, whether by accident or design.
The Citizens United justices were not required to think through the practical consequences of sweeping aside decades of work by legislators, going back to the passage of the landmark Tillman Act in 1907, who sought to prevent untoward influence-peddling and indirect bribery.
If ever a court majority legislated from the bench (with Bush's own appointees leading the way), it was the bunch that voted for Citizens United. Did a single justice in the majority even imagine a world of super PACs and phony corporations set up for the sole purpose of disguising a donor's identity? Did they think that a presidential candidacy might be kept alive largely through the generosity of a Las Vegas gambling magnate with important financial interests in China? Did they consider that the democratizing gains made in the last presidential campaign through the rise of small online contributors might be wiped out by the brute force of millionaires and billionaires determined to have their way?
"The appearance of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy." Those were Justice Anthony Kennedy's words in his majority opinion. How did he know that? Did he consult the electorate? Did he think this would be true just because he said it?
Justice John Paul Stevens' observation in his dissent reads far better than Kennedy's in light of subsequent events. "A democracy cannot function effectively," he wrote, "when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold."
But ascribing an outrageous decision to naivete is actually the most sympathetic way of looking at what the court did in Citizens United. A more troubling interpretation is that a conservative majority knew exactly what it was doing: that it set out to remake our political system by fiat in order to strengthen the hand of corporations and the wealthy. Seen this way, Citizens United was an attempt by five justices to push future electoral outcomes in a direction that would entrench their approach to governance.
In fact, this decision should be seen as part of a larger initiative by moneyed conservatives to rig the electoral system. How else to explain conservative legislation in state after state to obstruct access to the ballot by lower-income voters?
Those who doubt that Citizens United has created an entirely new political world with far broader openings for corruption should consult important news reports last week by Nicholas Confessore and Michael Luo in the New York Times and by T.W. Farnam in the Washington Post. Both accounts show how American politics has become a bazaar for the very wealthy and for increasingly aggressive corporations. We might consider having candidates wear corporate logos.
In the short run, Congress should do all it can within the limits of Citizens United to contain the damage it is causing. In the long run, we have to hope that a future Supreme Court will overturn this monstrosity, remembering that the first words of our Constitution are "We the People," not "We the Rich."

How is Fascism defined?

2012-02-06T11:13:00.000-08:00

The process of Fascism follows a certain set of characteristics conditioned on the personal moralities and lifestyles of the cartels and their economic bureaucrats.

These individuals use their monopolized media to spread false information about what "fascism" is. Fascist agents publish or repeat assertions that "fascism is leftist", that anybody working to defend the ecology, labor rights, or human rights are "fascists". Notice that these "fascists" are advocating for ideas which impact the profit making of the actual fascist cartels.

The following links are to articles showing EXACTLY how the USA has become fascism. These are written by capitalist conservatives:
[http://unitedstatesfascism.blogspot.com/2012/01/2012-01-19-pointless-capitalism-debate.html]
[http://unitedstatesfascism.blogspot.com/2012/02/2012-02-01-corruption-in-fascist.html]
[http://unitedstatesfascism.blogspot.com/2012/02/2012-02-02-how-us-fascism-comes-out-on.html]

However, the confusion stemming from the actual fascist propaganda cartels about what constitutes fascism is prevalent:

2012-01-22 "Fascism, socialism not interchangeable ideas" by Wolfgang Sailler of Salem
[http://www.statesmanjournal.com/article/20120123/OPINION/201230315/Fascism-socialism-not-interchangeable-ideas]
In his Jan. 12 letter, Tom Salzmann perpetuates an error equating fascism/naziism with socialism/communism.
On the face of it, the 25 point program of the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party) can be mistaken for a socialist program but that was only a cover to attract the innocent and hide the true aim of the movement which was corporatism. They (fascists) denounced Marxists and Social Democrats to the point of killing them as time went on.
In all fascist countries, the economy evolved into something like an oligopoly: Few very large corporations owned and run by an elite class of capitalists who were also influential party members or at least supported them. (This does sound like the machinations of some people of our time.)
Communism was based on the idea to share all productive means for the good of all. Similarities between the systems lie in the fact that both needed pressure from above to perpetuate themselves and ultimately ended in dictatorships that would not tolerate dissent.

2012-01-11 "Fascism really a left-wing ideology" by Tom R. Salzmann of Salem
[http://www.statesmanjournal.com/article/20120112/OPINION/201120331/Fascism-really-left-wing-ideology]
Have our wonderful American universities become seminaries for the indoctrination of old, tired, failed, left-wing ideologies taught by secular priests known as professors?
Evidence to support this view is conveyed by retired professor Jim King's Jan. 9 guest opinion, "Occupy reaches new phase of movement."
King writes that we have a "failed corporate capitalist system." I would remind the professor as kindly as I can that he was provided a comfortable, stable income for what he did by this "failed corporate capitalist system" and a secure retirement income as well, which makes it possible for him to leisurely sit back and spew forth his particular brand of propaganda. Instead of showing gratitude, he bites the hand that feeds him.
Contrary to what you may have been taught by professors or the media, fascism and communism are two sides of the same totalitarian coin. Nazi refers to National Socialism. They are both left-wing ideologies.
To call a conservative a fascist (as leftists frequently do — they don't know what it means, they just know it's an insult to people they don't like), reveals their bigotry and ignorance of history.

2012-01-21 "Fascism, socialism are close" by Dave Barker of Greenacres
[http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2012/jan/21/fascism-socialism-are-close]
I am afraid Nancy Runyan (“Conservatives need mirror” – Jan. 15) does not know her history or politics.
Fascism is not the polar opposite of socialism. It is its twin brother, and in all relevant aspects. The wrong-headed idea that fascism is somehow to the far right of communism was promoted by none other than Josef Stalin. He was trying to distinguish his workers-of-the-world dictatorship from the National Socialist dictatorship of Hitler.
The real polar opposite of this evil set of twins is the free-market libertarian who adheres to the belief that the only moral function of government is to provide an army for international protection, a police force for fraud and other crime, and a system of courts. Some libertarians would also include a bureau of standards for weights and measures. That’s it.
No mechanism of government for corporate cronies would even exist. For a mind-blowing education, I would encourage the reading of Jonah Goldberg’s excellent book “Liberal Fascism.”

"Corporate Facism and Nationalist Democracy Fail!" by Tracy Turner
[http://www.opednews.com/Diary/Corporate-Facism-and-Natio-by-Tracy-Turner-120113-105.html]
Market force greed does not equal freedom, democracy or bill of rights...
Wall Street, the banking sector and politicians talk about the money made from money economy as if that itself represents freedom and democracy. Aside from the market needing continuous adjustments that detract from it's boosters yeah-saying"
If the United States, fails to recognize that market forces and democracy are opposing forces, one of which devours the bill of rights, America as a democracy will fail, if it has not already failed.
Market economics corrupt corporate boards and the entire electoral process" Absolute corruption that erodes democracy absolutely. Fascist corporations buying the elected are the twin pillars of Oligarchy/Plutarchy/Fascism. The undermined pillars fall with a painful burden on the shoulders of the general populace of America, France, Greece, Italy and the United Kingdom. American corporations are setting an example, which now demands democracy exported by missile and gun-muzzle.
Why do we think our so-called enemies would want to be owned by Deutsch bank and Dutch Shell, with Disney-frosting-non-news on top? I did not see one TV station cover due-process getting stabbed in the back by corporate-run-government"
The market economy corrupts citizen's rights. Democracies run on ideas, not on greed and money. Greed and money destabilize the stable; impoverish the haves into have-nots. Market forces never overcome poverty. Truth never comes from the mouths of the paid for politicians. The Untied States of America has become a horse. The horse is wearing a saddle and saddlebags, which are multinational corporations and their bribery. The horse is also wearing blinders, which are whoever we are at war with today, to confuse the populace into being fleeced like silent lambs. All wool goes into the war effort, but only a few muted bleats are heard.

The following article uses an anti-Fascist law to claim that "liberal fascism" is happening.

Monopolized drug companies have long been protected from prosecution their habit of bribing doctors to promote the use of dangerous drugs without oversight. Now that a law has been put into place to save lives from this fascist business policy, the drug companies have produced propaganda claiming they are the victims to "fascism"!

2012-01-17 "The Face of Obamacare’s Incremental Liberal Fascism?" by Samuel R. Staley
[http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/288309/face-obamacares-incremental-liberal-fascism-samuel-r-staley]
If anyone was interested in how Obamacare might lead incrementally to the health-care industry’s form of “Liberal Fascism,” look no further than today’s New York Times article on the recently announced disclosure requirements for medical firms (“U.S. to Force Drug Firms to Report Money Paid to Doctors“), The goal, of course, is laudable — make doctors tell their patients if they receive compensation from drug and medical-device makers. After all, doctors respond to incentives like everyone else. But, as they say, the devil is in the details, and it’s the way the transparency effort is being implemented that opens the door to strangling innovation.
Rather than simply require doctors to disclose the information to their patients, Obamacare requires drug companies to provide to the government what payments they make to doctors for research, consulting, travel, and entertainment. This information will then be put on a web site so everyone can access it. And the government will ramp up staff to audit the information for accuracy and, presumably, monitor and enforce compliance. Voila! Instant bureaucracy. One has to wonder where all the “savings” from cheaper (and less effective?) procedures presumably incentivized by this disclosure will go.
  But perhaps the most telling part of the NYT reporting on the policy is the complete lack of reference to whether this will improve health outcomes. The Times reports that “researchers” (including its own reporting) have found that doctors that take money from drug companies tend “practice medicine differently” and prescribe more expensive and sometimes riskier medicines. But the real issue is whether there are improved outcomes for the patient, not whether it’s more or less expensive or even more risky. It’s the patient and the doctor that should decide the relative merits of the risk involved with any particular treatment.
  Moreover, by opening the door to providing detailed data about individual doctors, and making implicit assumptions about treatment (expensive and risky is presumptively “bad”), the mechanism used for reporting and enforcing transparency is clearly opening up a door to future regulation of doctor-patient relationships.
  Notably, the rules apply only to doctors providing Medicaid and Medicare services. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how this will eventually be applied to the entire profession if: 1) the program is deemed successful by politicians (and the nationwide individual mandate under Obamcare is ruled Constitutional), or 2) doctors withdraw from Medicaid and Medicare to avoid disclosure requirements, thereby limiting the services available to seniors and lower income households.”

2012-02-04T10:40:00.000-08:00

2012-02-04 "Republican candidates veer into extremism" by Haroon Siddiqui
[http://www.thestar.com/article/1126177--republican-candidates-veer-into-extremism]
You run for the leadership of the Conservative party from the right and the leadership of the Liberal party from the left but you try and govern from the middle. In America, the same axiom applied to the Republican and Democratic parties. But no longer.
In Washington, poisonous partisanship has left no middle with which to strike governing compromises. This is frightening because the American system, unlike a parliamentary democracy, is designed to function mostly on give and take between the executive and legislative branches. Absent that and you get gridlock.
Barack Obama heads a government that no longer governs, especially on domestic issues. His most decisive, and successful, moves have been on foreign policy where he has more manoeuvring room — the pullout from Iraq, the beginnings of a pullout from Afghanistan, the killing of Osama bin Laden, support for the Arab Spring, etc. But on the issue that matters most to voters, the economy, he has been stymied.
You may say that Washington was always hyperpartisan. In 1995-96, didn’t Newt Gingrich, then House speaker, shut down government rather than deal with Bill Clinton? Yes. But he did go on to work with the president on a series of economic and social reforms. That’s unimaginable today.
Whereas private money always influenced American politics, it never did to the extent it does now. The Supreme Court’s infamous 2010 decision against limits on corporate electoral funding has let rich individuals and corporations hijack the electoral process.
Gingrich gets $10 million from a pro-Israeli Los Vegas billionaire who liked his false assertion that Palestinians are “an invented people.” With the donation, he resurrected his candidacy in North Carolina and won.
Candidates say what donors want to hear. Sometimes they say bizarre things to attract donors. They do so not because they are dumb. They are performing for their paymasters.
Gingrich rails against “gay and secular fascism” or, alternatively, the “secular, liberal, socialist machine.” Both pose “as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.”
He, Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachman and Rick Perry don’t like Muslims, either. Sharia is around the corner, as was communism in the 1950s.
Santorum says young Muslims should be profiled — “absolutely.” America should dread all Muslims, not make the same mistake as Europe, which “is on the way to losing.” How so? “Islamic Europeans” (sic) have a higher birth rate than “westernized Europeans.”
“There is an existential threat out there. It is a threat that has challenged western civilization for 1,300 years. . . . In its most virulent form, it is back.”
To Perry, four Marines urinating on the bodies of three Taliban was just fine. “The idea that the administration would go after these young people for a criminal act is over the top.”
All candidates are for Israel all the time. Perry: “There should be no space between the U.S. and Israel, period.” Santorum: “All the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis.”
All candidates think Iran is the gravest threat to humanity. It should be bombed, its nuclear program subjected to more covert sabotage and its scientists assassinated.
Turkey, which has dared challenge some Israeli policies, is led by “Islamic terrorists,” Perry says. Its membership in NATO should be reassessed. (A strong western ally, Turkey responded curtly that it joined the alliance in 1952 “when Perry was 2 years old.”
Herman Cain couldn’t care less for foreign affairs. “Uzbeki-beki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan.”
As conservative commentator David Brooks says: “The Republican party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has (become) more of a psychological protest than a practical governing alternative.”
This year’s presidential and congressional elections will cost $6 billion. That’s not coffee and doughnut money. Most is going into promoting corporate and other interests, and in deceitful propaganda to demonize opponents.
In this cacophony, voters can’t quite keep track of the truth, let alone discern inconsistencies. Mitt Romney, who pioneered Obama-like health care in Massachusetts, is against the president’s plan. Gingrich who was for curbing carbon emissions is now against it.
In this field of bomb throwers, Romney is deemed a moderate. Yet he wants to recriminalize abortion, outlaw same-sex marriage, “double Guantanamo,” authorize torture, nearly outlaw tax increases and axe financial regulation.
Take all of the above and think which of those trends are creeping into Canada under Stephen Harper.

2012-02-03T12:41:00.000-08:00

2012-02-03 "Rep. Pompeo (R-Koch) Defends ‘Vilified’ Koch Brothers From ‘Nixonian’ Obama" by Zach Bernstein
[http://thinkprogress.org/green/2012/02/03/418215/rep-pompeo-r-koch-defends-vilified-koch-brothers-from-nixonian-obama/?mobile=nc]
After the Koch brothers secretly mobilized $100 million from fellow billionaires to unseat President Barack Obama last weekend [http://www.republicreport.org/2012/koch-meeting-indian-wells/] [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/03/koch-brothers-100-million-obama_n_1250828.html], Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) wrote an op-ed in Politico today [http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0212/72379.html] accusing the Obama administration of harassing the co-owners of Koch Industries and Pompeo’s greatest contributors [http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2010/09/21/119973/koch-mike-pompeo/]. Calling Charles and David Koch “U.S. citizens, taxpayers, entrepreneurs and employers,” Pompeo claimed that the administration is taking a “Nixonian approach to politics”:
[begin extract]
Liberal blogs and publications have published countless slanted pieces on Koch Industries, heavy on innuendo and light on facts.
The Obama administration has long been criticized for maintaining a de facto “enemies list” of its perceived political opponents, whether they are respected Supreme Court justices, disfavored reporters or private citizens who just want to keep their own doctors. The Democrats’ obsession with the Kochs as a political target is, indeed, additional evidence of a truly Nixonian approach to politics.
That the Obama administration and its allies use private citizens as symbols to be attacked and vilified is unfair and deeply threatening to our civic life and the rule of law.
[end extract]
In fact, the Koch brothers have made themselves very public figures. After Charles Koch founded the Cato Institute in 1977 [http://thehill.com/opinion/op-ed/208417-thank-a-koch-brother], David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian ticket he bankrolled in 1980 [http://server.theadvocates.org/celebrities/david-koch.html]. In person and through their latest front group, the astroturf organization Americans for Prosperity [http://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/06/nation/la-na-koch-brothers-20110206], the Kochs have “attacked and vilified” the Obama administration to a level that approaches “obsession”:
Charles Koch: Obama Is ‘Greatest Assault On American Freedom.’ In his letter inviting fellow conservative millionaires and billionaires to a secret Palm Springs retreat in January 2011, Charles Koch accused President Obama of “the greatest assault on American freedom and prosperity in our lifetimes.” [ThinkProgress] [http://images2.americanprogressaction.org/ThinkProgress/secretkochmeeting.pdf]
-
Charles Koch: Obama Is ‘Saddam Hussein.’ At another secret retreat in the fall of 2011, Charles Koch compared President Obama and the 2012 elections to Saddam Hussein and the Iraq War. “We have Saddam Hussein, this is the Mother of All Wars we’ve got in the next 18 months. For the life or death of this country.” [Mother Jones, 9/6/11] [http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/09/exclusive-audio-koch-brothers-seminar-tapes]
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David Koch: ‘Hardcore Socialist’ Obama Is ‘Scary To Me.’ “Obama’s a hardcore socialist,” David Koch told New York Magazine, “and he’s marvelous at pretending to be something other than that, but that is what I believe he truly is, a hardcore socialist. He’s scary to me.” [New York Magazine, 5/5/11] [http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/05/billionaire_conservative_david.html]
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‘Radical Global Warming Agenda.’ “President Obama is at again,” the Americans for Prosperity Regulation Reality Tour warns, with a “radical global warming agenda” by “unelected bureaucrats regulating our life,” “ignoring the entire democratic process all together.” Supposed threats of “EPA’s power grab” include “Grass Mileage Standards,” “Government Control of your Thermostat,” “Churches would need EPA Permits,” and The tour features “EPA Carbon Cops” who want to punish you if you “opened your refrigerator” or “drove a car.” [RegulationReality.com]
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‘We Might As Well Forget Freedom.’ The Americans for Prosperity Hot Air Tour says that “far left environmentalists” are “radicals” with a “radical Global Warming ideology that claims people are the problem” who “want GOVERNMENT to force us to drive less and live in smaller homes while killing jobs that help grow our economy” and “want GOVERNMENT dictating our lives.” [http://www.hotairtour.org/index.php?content=Fayett]
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According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Koch Industries is Pompeo’s largest campaign contributor [http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php?cycle=Career&cid=N00030744&type=I], having contributed $107,500 to his campaign from both individuals and its PAC, nearly three times more than any other single entity.
The brothers’ combined net worth is about $50 billion [http://thinkprogress.org/green/2011/09/21/324969/forbes-koch-brothers-now-worth-50-billion/], making them the fourth richest Americans individually; combined, they are richer than any American except for Bill Gates. Last weekend, the “private citizens” pledged $60 million of that wealth to defeat President Obama at their semi-annual retreat of right-wing millionaires and billionaires [http://www.republicreport.org/2012/koch-meeting-indian-wells/].

2012-02-02T18:05:00.000-08:00

2012-02-02 "Occupy Boise Faces Eviction" by Scott Ki from Boise State Public Radio
[http://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/2012/02/02/occupy-boise-faces-eviction/]
BOISE, ID – Occupy Wall Street sparked a national movement last fall that resonated in Idaho too. By November, Occupy Boise protestors had set up camp on state land and now some legislators want them off. What’s happening locally reflects a national struggle where First Amendment rights conflict with rules about camping on public land.
You can see that struggle play out in the nation’s capital at McPherson Square. It sits in the heart of downtown Washington, D.C. Its northern edge runs along K Street… ground zero for lobbyists and power brokers. Three blocks away is the White House. Occupy D.C. has camped in McPherson Square since October. National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis came under fire last week by some members of Congress for lax enforcement.
Jonathan Jarvis: “NPS regulations do not allow for camping within McPherson Square. However, temporary structures including tents are permissible as part of a demonstration and a 24-hour, round-the-clock vigil is also allowed.”
Camping is partly defined as sleeping, or preparing to sleep, according to Jarvis. The agency started to enforce this rule Monday. But many Occupy D.C. protestors are finding ways around the ban.
Tents still crowd McPherson Square. But protestors that fall asleep or have bedding or a camp stove in their tents risk arrest. Occupy D.C. is a hubbub of activity day and night. But in Idaho, Occupy Boise protestors are quieter.
A handful of them gather around a wood stove in a large tent. About a dozen others are outside in the sun doing chores. Some break up a wood pallet to feed the stove. A few take visitors on a tour of the site which sits on the grounds of the old Ada County Courthouse. …. Speaker of the House Lawerence Denney has a bird’s eye view of this mini tent city from the state Capitol:
Rep. Lawerence Denney: “It is right outside my window and I can look out there and I don’t think I’ve ever looked out the window when I’ve seen more than two or three people over there. You know, I think the Occupy is more tents than people.”
Mike Dooley: “It’s funny because, you know, I’ve seen reports on the news of people standing across the street and saying, you know, we haven’t seen any activity. But it’s freaking raining so we’re all in these big union tents keeping warm with our wood burning stoves.”
Dooley is homeless and from Boise. The 22-year old used to live in a shelter but preferred the relative freedom of Occupy. His future and those of other Occupy Boise protestors are in the hands of state lawmakers who gather in the Idaho Capitol across the street from their encampment. Some legislators want to ban camping on the Capitol Mall. The Idaho Department of Administration manages the land. Teresa Luna directs the agency. Idaho lawmakers asked her questions about Occupy Boise last week during a committee hearing for House Bill 404. Luna says she supports the bill which bans camping on lands her department manages.
Teresa Luna: “We’re not trying to end freedom of speech. We’re trying to end camping on admin. properties. We simply don’t have the authority nor the resources to deal with this type of activity not here on the Capitol Mall and certainly not on those properties we manage across the state.”
At that hearing and another, this Wednesday, nearly everyone who testified supported Occupy Boise protestors. Marley Luna, no relation to Teresa, spoke before state lawmakers last week. She spends her days at Occupy and works nights as an elder care worker.
Marley Luna: “One of the reasons that we’re here protesting is because we feel that the voices of the people get marginalized. And then they introduce this bill, House Bill 404, which does just that.”
Those violating the draft law would be guilty of an infraction and could be removed from the site. Occupy protestors, including Mike Dooley, have been planning what to do if the bill passes.
Dooley: “I can say that we do have plans. That we’re not just going to pack up and leave.”
The bill sailed through the House. But some state Senators want to change it to give more time for Occupy Boise to clear out. Right now, the legislation would take effect immediately once the governor signs it. But some lawmakers say that’s not fair and want to give protesters until July 1st to pack up their tents … and go home.

2012-02-02T11:10:00.000-08:00

2012-02-02 "Alienation Goes Global: Third World Capitalism" by ROBERT HUNZIKER
[http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/03/third-world-capitalism/]
Robert Hunziker earned an MA in economic history at DePaul University. He lives in Los Angeles.
---
How did this happen? America, the czar of capitalism, is becoming a third world country!
According to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau report 46.2 million Americans are poor. Of course, the naysaying dissenters claim poor families, as defined in the U.S., include households with adequate food most of the time, a home, a TV, a telephone, and likely a DVD and/or a PC, and a car. Not so bad after all! This is likely very true; however, consider the poverty threshold, as defined by the Census Bureau, for a family with two children in 2010 at $22,113; dissenting naysayers say: So what, over three billion people live on less than $2.50 per day. So, what’s up with this claim that 46.2 million people in America are poor? Are they really poor?
A typical family of four in America spends $664.20 per month on food, assuming they eat on a low-cost plan, according to the USDA statistics; a liberal plan is $1013.80/mo. This means the family has $1,178.55/mo. remaining for everything else like health insurance of $414/mo., which is the nationwide average monthly premium. Thus, the family of four has 764.55 remaining for items like car payments, and the average car payment in America is $475, but since these are the poor, let’s assume it is half this amount for an inferior car or $237.50/mo., and average car insurance according to a national index is $137.91/mo. and median monthly housing costs run about $700 for renters. Adding and subtracting all above= a negative $310.86 per month. Thus, the average family of four has to cut out $310.86/mo. from food, health insurance, transportation, or housing costs in order to break even. No wonder so many Americans do not have health insurance because if they eliminate health insurance, they have $103.14, or $3.44 per day, left over for washing clothes, dental, movies, shopping for clothing or shoes, books, magazines, gasoline, car repairs, emergency expenses and whatever else one desires. They really are poor!
Unfettered free market capitalism does not work! It is an outmoded socio-economic order that systemically fails the middle-to-the-bottom classes. The Council of Foreign Relations published a paper, “The Evolving Structure of the American Economy and the Employment Challenge” March 2011, arguing that free-market solutions do not work. Likewise, the World Bank issued a report in 2011, stating: “… countries must develop more legitimate, accountable and capable national institutions that provide citizen security, justice, and jobs.” And the IMF weighed in within the past year in a paper entitled, “Inequality, Leverage and Crisis,” stating extreme inequality between workers and rich was a reason for the current Great Recession and suggests radical changes in tax systems and debt relief for workers. The majestic temples of capitalism get it!
Is Karl Marx’s Theory of Alienation correct? It states alienation is a systemic result of the nature of capitalism whereby workers invariably lose control of their destinies subject to bourgeoisie control of means of production designed to extract the maximum amount of surplus value from workers within the state of industrialists’ competition. This is exactly what unfettered worldwide capitalistic free markets have engineered, exporting the value of labor to the lowest worldwide bidder, a la, China and India, Mexico, and SE Asia. This, in turn, has crushed the middle class in America and opened the door for enlargement of a permanent poor class of citizens, which, in turn, sparks political debate about affordable health care and engenders, in a boldly designed defensive manner, at Republican debates, how lower taxes in America will create more jobs. Taxes haven’t been this low in fifty years and more jobs were created under LBJ, whose average annual increase in jobs of +3.9%, according to BLS, is the highest of any president since WWII, when taxes were twice as high. What are they talking about?
The unfortunate fact is quite simply this: The Theory of Alienation has merit because capitalism, once turned free to set the rules, examples: distorted taxation policy that favors capital over labor and abolition of the Glass-Steagall Act, has crushed the dreams of middle America and turned lose rampant impoverishment of a third world order across the land. Middle class families feel poorer than ever and insecure about work, and the real poor are hopelessly at a loss. Is this capitalism at work?
Sixty percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. The bottom 80% of American households holds 7% of liquid financial assets. Over 40 million Americans are on food stamps. Stories of a collapsing middle class are rampant among America’s most cherished publications: Atlantic Monthly, Time, Arizona Republic, LA Times, NY Times, and a Pew Charitable Trust report in the Washington Post. These articles bemoan the crumbling state of America’s middle class.
Wall Street, however, is fine because it walks in ‘tall cotton,’ the international corporations that bottom-line benefit by access to pools of substandard labor conditions and clever offshore taxation schemes. As a result, and in combination with rules and governmental favors favoring financial capitalists, the rich get much richer. This is capitalism at work in today’s society, modern-day capitalism turned free, the invisible hand of the free market, as preached by prophets like Milton Friedman… let the free hand of the markets work and the trickle down theory will perform miracles… for whom? Recent history shows that Supply Side economics is more of a ‘gush up’ theory!
Meanwhile, America increasingly looks like a Banana Republic with a permanent class of poor, a shrinking and an increasingly poor/powerless middle class versus the enriched rich, the aristocrats who deftly control who assumes which public office, like presidente, and if Mitt Romney lucks out by winning the presidency, the incipient groundswell of dissent, e.g., Occupy movement and the Wisconsin coming-out of middle America against the establishment, will experience a renaissance. The Republicans want to lower taxes again which will do nothing for the poor or the middle of America but will tip the scales more in the direction of fat cats, who are supposed to use their new-found riches to grow America. Frankly, this has not worked very well ever since Reagan managed to strangle the nation with record debts (making the U.S. the world’s largest international debtor nation during his administration) while performing reverse Robin Hood economics, taking from the poor and middle classes and giving to the rich. The Reagan agenda continues to haunt the poor and the middle with little relief for a federal government starved for revenue as federal tax receipts as a percentage GDP are the lowest since the 1950s, referred to as ‘Starving the Beast’ by Supply Side republicans.
Whether a continuation of Obama in the White House will suffice to placate the poor and middle classes, serving to blunt future outbreaks of dissent by a downwardly spiraling citizenry is questionable. Most likely, nothing much will change other than continuation of the slow, grinding undercut of lifestyle for the poor and the middle classes in America, languidly leading down the path towards certain dissent/revolt by the masses, validating the ingeniousness of the Theory of Alienation!
Maybe the U.S. will be forced, to avoid rioting in the streets, to adopt what Denmark is famous for: The Danish Cooperative Movement, which is a means of economical organization under leadership of consumer and/or producer-controlled corporations wherein each individual member owns a part of the corporation. According to the Wall Street Journal, and the Heritage Foundation, Denmark ranks 11th among the world’s most free economies. According to U.S. Department of State data, “… its standard of living is among the highest in the world, with a GDP per capital of $58,500, making Denmark the 18th richest country in the world.” The overall tax burden in Denmark is 46%. The Economist claims Denmark is one of the most competitive economies in the world. The mixed economy, including a large welfare state, ranks as having the world’s highest level of income equality, and its living standards are above the European average. Maybe this is a viable alternative to retrograde Banana Republic status.

2012-02-02T10:32:00.000-08:00

2012-02-02 "How US Fascism Comes Out on Top Via 'Too-Big-to-Fail'?"
[http://thedailybell.com/3576/How-US-Fascism-Comes-Out-on-Top-Via-Too-Big-to-Fail]
'Too Big to Fail' Clearinghouse Hunt .. Regulators have notified some payment and clearing firms that they face a review to determine whether their failure could pose a risk to the economy. The Financial Stability Oversight Council, comprising top financial regulators and created by the Dodd-Frank financial-overhaul law, last month sent letters to so-called financial-market utilities—the minutes didn't specify which or how many—saying they are being considered for designation as systemically important. The council disclosed it had sent the letters in minutes from its last meeting, released Wednesday. – Wall Street Journal
Dominant Social Theme: Important businesses cannot be allowed to fail. If, in fact, government must prop them up and take them over, then so be it. Look how well GM is doing!
Free-Market Analysis: Is this how fascism comes to America? It would seem a steady drip, drip, drip of frenetic government activism is concretizing the fascist state the way lime solidifies cement.
Even in the 1980s under the Reagan administration, the media mythos of the US emphasized its marketplace affiliations. The idea was that US civilization was succeeding because it was market based. But this rhetoric seems to have been abandoned in the 2000s.
The US sociopolitical stance, more and more, is one of "bigness" in which large entities are seen as successful or important no matter the reality of their evolution or current status.
It is a kind of trick, of course. Those with access to the levers of power will always be able to create large facilities. The issue is actually the competence of these facilities and whether they fulfill the purposes for which they were created.
Many modern, large-scale entities, especially those with government affiliations, are anything but competent. This is an entirely logical perspective. Large entities are usually advantaged ones. And the more artificial advantages an entity receives, the less apt it is to be exposed to market forces.
The less operative market forces are, the more inefficient and hapless the enterprise becomes – entailing yet more bailouts and special advantages. It is soon a vicious circle, a feedback loop of incompetence and even futility.
Has it been planned that way? The Anglosphere power elite that wants to run the world via global government is not apparently interested in stability or efficiency. Its handful of immensely powerful and wealthy leaders are interested mainly in DESTABILIZATION, from what we can tell. Bigness is yet another resource within their tool kit.
The more the West – and the world – is destabilized, the easier it will be, seemingly from their point of view, to impose world government. Starving, homeless, sick, war-weary populations are apt to put up less resistance to a New World Order than healthy, engaged citizens.
If one was to try to build a New World Order – global government – the logical manifestations would be hunger, misery, pestilence and violence. The causative agent would be bigness – of every kind. The bigger the better – especially if that bigness is buttressed by a bureaucracy supported by taxes and divorced from competition.
And what better way to inculcate bigness than to declare that certain hitherto private entities are "too big to fail"? It is a perfect dominant social theme. These power elite-generated fear-based promotions are intended to separate middle classes from wealth and power while reinforcing globalist agencies.
In fact, the idea that certain businesses are "too big to fail" is merely an extension of the propagandistic effort that gave us our current catastrophic central banking economy, worldwide. State-monopoly central banking is supposed to be an antidote to economic collapse. But always, the power elite will make arguments that are entirely opposed to the reality it wants to inculcate.
If the elites are arguing that government regulations and government funding will somehow make private enterprise more stable, you can be sure the reverse is true. The modern world is based on this sort of sick propaganda, which constantly informs people of solutions that generate exactly the opposite results from those that are putatively intended.
This kind of propaganda-as-program was unleashed on the West at least a hundred years ago, from what we can tell. In hindsight, it seems increasingly evident that those who campaigned for monopoly central banking (like JP Morgan himself) probably had a hand in the Panic of '07 that ultimately led to the passage of the Federal Reserve Act 1913.
Since that time, US government intrusion into all sectors of private enterprise has only grown. Various government activities are routine now that would have generated an outcry even in the 20th century a decade or two ago.
The invasive practices of "Homeland Security" are just on example. Hardly a day goes by without some new and obvious outrage: a child is tasered, an elderly woman with cancer is strip-searched at the airport, innocent people are shot when a SWAT team raids the wrong house looking for marijuana cigarettes.
But as obvious and horrid as these episodes are, the main evolution of government intrusion takes place within the context of sociopolitical policies. When bigness and its justifications are enshrined as statist polity, then fascism itself has becomes the dominant "ism."
This is what is happening now in the United States. Fascism is taking over capitalism not just within the context of a business evolution but as a matter of course. This is no accident, in our view. Its expansion has been falsely justified and then enshrined as law. Here's some more from the article:
[begin excerpt]
A lot of attention has been paid to the law's provision directing regulators to give the designation to big banks and other financial firms, but it also includes a similar process for clearing and payments firms. The law automatically considers any bank with $50 billion or more in assets systemically important. Regulators haven't yet designated any other financial institutions thusly ...
The letters, sent in January, indicate regulators completed the first of a two-stage process to decide which financial-market utilities warrant tougher regulation. In the first step, regulators look at information they already have, such as an institution's exposure to counter-parties and links to other financial institutions, to determine which entities merit further scrutiny ...
Later, the council will vote on individual clearinghouses; a two-thirds majority is required to designate one as systemically important. Those that are ultimately designated so face heightened regulatory requirements and scrutiny. But they could gain new access to some of the Federal Reserve's loans, including the discount window.
[end excerpt]
It is hard even to begin to unpack the untruths in these three paragraphs. Clearinghouses are a necessary part of the financial process, but guaranteeing clearinghouses with federal money merely ensures that sooner or later there will be a cataclysmic financial disaster. (Ask any thinking person whether there is any facility in the world – government or otherwise – that can guarantee solvency and the answer should be "no.")
Now, those who have created central banks will argue that indeed government – or its agents – can ensure solvency but this is not true. A central bank can inflate away catastrophe via money printing but at some point that same money printing passes the costs of catastrophe onto hapless citizens who are burdened with higher prices and higher taxes as a result.
One trades financial instability for social instability. That's what is happening now, in fact. Extend the trend logically and one begins to perceive that while the financial system has been "stabilized" the social system has been DE-stabilized.
From the point of view of the power elite, social instability is perhaps preferable to financial instability. We reply: Be careful what you wish for.
Then there is the issue of regulation. Every regulation is a price fix, transferring wealth from those who have created it to those who have not and are unable to utilize it as efficiently. Regulations DISTORT economic activity and usually have results that are the opposite of what is intended.
Too-big-to-fail legislation is toxic on every level. It marries government to private industry, drains competition from the marketplace and ensures that the most important elements of the modern financial system are further constrained by regulatory fiat.
Of course, one could argue that the modern system – one that has been built on the monetary fraud of central banking – is not worth saving anyway. We would agree with that, in fact. The current financial system not only deserves to collapse, it DID collapse three years ago.
The dollar reserve system, from our point of view, is already dead. From what we can tell, central banks – at the behest of their controlling power elite – have injected some US$50 TRILLION into the system worldwide.
These horrible numbers are actually incomprehensible. The larger financial system is effectively frozen. It has not been allowed to shed its failing elements, and one could argue, in fact, that these failing facilities have been enshrined at the heart of the system's decisive economic dysfunction.
In other words, the very entities that are the most important to the system's current operation are the ones that should be allowed to fail. They exist only because the system – worldwide – is a kind of elite command-and-control operation that has little or nothing to do with free markets.
But as the current central banking system becomes more and more dysfunctional, the costs of keeping it going are rising exponentially. As we have pointed out, the current environment has a manifest logic, and it's not a pleasant one.
There is no economic justification for "too-big-to-fail" except the brutal logic that government funds must compensate for private failures. This will work for a while, but not forever. Eventually, the dysfunction will be too big even for governments' large pockets. In the meantime, we will have "isms" – specifically, growing fascism in the US. Europe, we would argue, is headed in the same direction.
Remove competition from the marketplace and you end up with a collection of enterprises that perform inconsequential functions incompetently. More importantly, you end up with a federalized private sector and a series of disastrous "public-private" partnerships.
The result is ruin – ruin of every kind. Militarism thrives in a fascist environment. So does a certain kind of ignorance, civic dysfunction and increasingly poverty and civil violence. Chaos looms. Of course, out of chaos ... order. A New World Order. That's obviously the plan.
But as we often point out, we would tend to believe that what we call the Internet Reformation will make the elite's main dream rather hard to achieve. The more that the powers-that-be plot to increase the dysfunction of the Western world and especially America, the more push back is generated, in our view. It may turn out that ordinary people in the Internet era are far more resistant to fascism – statism – than elites currently believe.
Conclusion: Will the world-spanning plans of the Anglosphere be realized? Just as too-big-too-fail is ultimately an insupportable concept, so is the idea of world government. They are both based on enormous economic fallacies and carry within their implementation the seeds of their own destruction.

2012-02-01T10:29:00.000-08:00

2012-02-01 "Corruption in Fascist Business Model" by Jim Willie CB from "GoldenJackass.com"
[http://news.goldseek.com/GoldenJackass/1328130000.php]
Few can define fascism. Many cannot recognize it. History provides shocking stories of its past episodes. But its root structural feature is the tight relationship between the state and large corporations of a nation, which permit enormous fraud and lead to grand inefficiency, even while aggression and war accompany its handiwork in an ugly fabric weave. Nowhere is the bond more scummy and corrupt than with the banking industry, not in general but in Wall Street where defense of the USDollar has come. That defense was contracted from the USGovt to Wall Street, whose ties developed into a vast network of corruption. That cozy relationship led to the gutting of Fort Knox and its gold bullion in the 1990 decade of so-called prosperity. The 0% gold leasing resulted in vast speculation schemes, private multi-$trillion profit, and absent collateral for the USDollar itself. The other cozy connection is with the defense contractors, where war generates colossal cash flows, some of which result in kickbacks to Congress. The Fascist Business Model is a cord to strangle the neck of a nation. The rage of nationalism, the eradication of liberties, the pursuit of conjured enemies, the constant sense of alert, the attack on enemies with alienation of allies, all tend to effectively conceal the theft and corruption. The other tell-tale infection is of inefficiency, where the most insolvent lead in policymaking, where the most connected are not the best in class, where the most corrupt are shielded by cronies in watchdog posts. These ordinary teams have dominated, not from capability according to the marketplace forces or Darwinism, but from connection to the power center.
The United States of America had been the beacon of capitalism and freedom. In the last 20 years, it has proven to be the epitome of anti-capitalism, shown mortal wounds from the NeoCon assault on liberty and the more recent collectivism assault typical of Soviet regimes. The global revolt against the USDollar is not just an organized movement to protect against a reserve currency suffering declining value. It is a movement also intended to avoid a climax in corruption, the likes of which modern history has never witnessed. The bright light from the beacon has attracted a deadly swarm of moths, which tragically have enveloped the light completely, masked its wondrous effect, and disguised the vile cobwebs of fascism. The historians all too well are aware that the final chapter of a capitalist nation is embedded in fascism, as its institutions suffer from profound corruption, as inefficiency depletes the wealth structures, as the system breaks down, as the rule of law vanishes.

CORRUPT BIG BANKS -
One must begin with the banks, whose leaders have formulated the plan at work. Perhaps their actions began in the removal of Kennedy in 1963, an obstacle in their path. Their plan was revealed more in the open with the abandonment of the Bretton Woods Accord, the basis of the gold standard. The most telling mark has been the Goldman Sachs grip on the USDept Treasury. The Rubin experience at the London gold desk was crucial. Goldman Sachs is a key Wall Street funnel toward the USCongress dole, the Financial Regulatory Bill being the backfire in reform that granted the bankers more powers. See the power to dissolve any financial firm that threatens the power structure, and see the protective cover given to firms deemed financially important. The TARP Fund congame was a clever ruse, a $700 billion segment of the congame. Hidden from view was the $138 billion reload of JPMorgan, given cover to handle Lehman private accounts by the Bankruptcy court that convened at 6am on a Saturday morning in Manhattan. The climax badge of dishonor and fraud was the phony bank accounting rules permitted by the Financial Accounting Standards Board, and blessed into law by the USCongress. The big banks in control of the USGovt were all hopelessly insolvent, but covered. Their quarterly earnings reports read like an Orwell chapter, riddled with Credit Value Adjustments and raids from the Loan Loss Reserves. Once in the news back in 2009, but not forgotten, the failure to deliver on USTreasury Bonds never went away, only the publicity and spotlight. Over $1 trillion remains a regular feature for the practice. Wall Street firms indeed found a source of income to replace their absent stock IPO and corporate bond issuance business. Sell USTBonds, take in income, and no bond delivery. What a business! The Facebook IPO is the exception, not the rule.

CORRUPT CENTRAL BANK -
A debate brews as to which body is the actual corner office at the helm of the central bank in charge, the New York Fed or the Federal Reserve itself. Who cares? They operate in secrecy and with impunity, according to their agenda. The FinReg Bill did shed some light on this control box, as the USFed $16 trillion so-called loans plus the $8 trillion additional loans were revealed in a string of unending grants at 0%. To be sure, the borrowers could purchase global assets in preparation for the next chapter. Two of their most important ongoing projects are the Exchange Stabilization Fund and the Working Group for Financial Markets. The ESFund is charged with defense of the USDollar, but its actual project load extends far and wide in interpreting what defense is essential. Their reach includes the FOREX currency market, the sovereign bond markets, the Gold market, the crude oil market, the S&P500 market, and much more. Entire books can be written about the ESF history, a cross between an adventure novel and a spy novel. The other group is more aptly named the Plunge Protection Team for its regular and frequent rescues at 10am and 3pm when the stock market reacts to the endless string of bad economic news, all deemed better than expected. The mantras focused on confidence and volatility obscure the underlying corporate insolvency, fraudulent accounting, and pursuit of lower valuations. The spy novel aspect is furthered by the global financial bodies. The Intl Monetary Fund and World Bank are commonly filled with non-banker agents operating with agendas to obtain financial information in foreign lands. They are routinely used as weapons to maintain dominance. The resentment overseas is huge.

CORRUPT REGULATORS -
The entire financial crisis in its fourth year (never to end until debt defaults) had its roots in the housing bubble and supporting mortgage finance bubble. The debt rating agencies granted AAA ratings to mortgage bonds of empty value, based upon the cockeyed notion that an included derivative in a package could protect like an insurance policy. It masked the worthless value instead, cover given by the regulatory system. The Gold & Silver market is without doubt the most corrupted in the world. The naked shorting by the Big Banks in New York and London is of such magnitude as to cause shock and disbelief. Certainly no action has been taken, or will be taken. The naked precious metals shorting is permitted by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The CFTC offers lipservice on position limits, on halting non-economic positions, and more. They simply obscure the process and muddy the waters, offering false hope to the silly observers who expect change, as they ignore the pattern of deceptions. The CFTC is composed of Wall Street henchmen, just like the Securities & Exchange Commission. The compulsory arbitration ploy is their calling card for injustice, like with USGovt contractors on foreign stations to handle crimes at the camps.
The latest regulatory lapse can be seen with the derivatives. As the Greek Govt Bond writedowns began in force, focus was drawn to the debt default event. The lapdog regulators at the Intl Swaps & Derivatives Assn saw fit to obediently order a redefinition of a default event. If voluntary, even coerced, the so-called bond haircut was not declared a default by the body charged with such enforcement, the ISDA itself. Payouts would start a chain reaction that would cause widespread bank failures. The non-payment of Credit Default Swaps was a travesty, one to perpetuate as Italy and Spain, even France, are next in big bond writedowns. The process actually exposes something much bigger, the unregulated shadow banking system of derivatives. Policies were written, huge cash flows were developed, fees were taken, but no payouts will be permitted. In essence, Rome is burning but no home fire insurance awards will be paid. In my opinion, the CDSwaps and ISDA corruption will result in court challenges to force insurance payouts, will result in subterfuge directed against the big banks that underwrote the bad faith insurance contracts, and will result in more motivated revolt against the USDollar itself.

CORRUPT MORTGAGE BUSINESS -
The housing bust was bad enough, what with the lost equity, the lost home ATM machine for essentials and frivolities alike, the American dream turned nightmare. The mortgage bond bust was bad enough, what with the lost bank reserves, their lost ability to function as credit engine to the USEconomy, the ruined intermediary banking cable lines. The twin damage was the basis of my September 2008 forecast for an economic disintegration and eventual USGovt debt default. The forecast was a direct consequence of the entire USEconomy having grown intentionally dependent upon the housing & mortgage bubbles. That path is still in effect, the grip of the leash on the fascist dog held tighter with each passing month and year. They can kick the can down the road while walking the vicious dog, but the road has become narrow and the can has gone nuclear. The inner workings of the housing & mortgage debacle must bring attention to the MERS title database and the profound fraud bound in the mortgage bonds and Fannie Mae, the clearinghouse. The Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems enabled the same home titles to be used in multiple fashion, since run by Wall Street extensions. The MERS permitted easy fast title transfers as the bonds changed hands rapidly. Since 2009, the database has been denied legal standing in home foreclosure challenges, labeled a corrupt practice by several state courts. No remedy is even pursued. The practice of using home mortgage payment streams in duplicate fashion was common and rife within the system. The crowning blow to corruption exposure has been the continued mortgage contract fraud. The courts have been very occupied with resolutions and punishments.
The reason home loans have never had their balances adjusted for the benefit of the embattled undewater homeowner is simple. Hardly the unwillingness of banks to take losses, but rather the reluctance of the big banks to have exposed the colossal fraud in both duplicate income stream on the mortgage bonds but also counterfeit bonds. So Fannie Mae & Freddy Mac were nationalized, put safely under the roof of the USGovt. The corrupt tagteam firms are the clearinghouse for several $trillion fraud schemes in convenient manner. The Fannie Mae thefts of $1.5 billion from 1988 to 2000 remain well documented, complete with retaliations, the finger of accusation pointed at the White House. When the Hat Trick Letter was started in 2004, certain people were locked in debate, as the Jackass argued that the USGovt harbors the largest criminal syndicate organizations on earth. That perception and accusation has been very clearly confirmed, acknowledge by the informed, toward which some remain oblivious. The newer phenomenon noticed is that too many people prefer to ignore the facts and cling to fantasy, in order to protect their comfort level.

CORRUPT WARS -
War is never good for an economy. It costs much money. It costs materials. It costs lives. It results in destruction. No trickle down effect of efficiency results, despite the propaganda about jobs. Relations are harmed, as allies are often alienated. The endless undeclared wars since 2003 have cost the USGovt $4 trillion in the last ten years. The creation of enemies and threats, even locations to spread freedom, have been at best highly questionable and at worst a total farce wrapped in fabrication. The chief end product in Iraq is crude oil, whose supply has been guaranteed by the war. Little publicized were the ample array of oil contracts with China and other nations, all torn to shreds after the liberation and annexation. Remember the odd story of yellow painted wooden bars and copper bars found in the Iraqi Central Bank. All false stories, as their central bank was looted of its gold bullion by US forces. The prevalent war service contractors led by Halliburton remain a fixture. Despite numerous court cases proving fraud and over-charges, they continue with a monopoly on the contract service. Recall the missing $5 billion from the Iraqi Reconstruction Fund. It was never found. The USGovt agencies never looked for it. The sitting president called it an acceptable loss given the magnitude of funds flow and importance of the war. Little known was a $2.3 billion transfer from the same fund by former agency head George Tenet. Suspicions swirl that the funds were directed toward groups designed to bring about a global totalitarian government, whose guiding light is a former Secretary of State and New York University political science professor with a funny accent.
Two indelible marks come from the wars. They further the dominant global narcotics role for USGovt agencies, and the deep Wall Street dependence upon money laundering and fees. Some banks have pled guilty to money laundering, like Wachovia, but the fines were less than 1/30-th of a penny per dollar involved. The US press provides regular and frequent devoted cover for the wars. The other indelible mark is the motive for liberating certain nations. The Libyan War was brief, but the bounty was great. The London and New York banks benefited from the 144 tonnes of gold bullion seized. It will likely never be returned to the Libyan people, regardless of any coalition government formed or pledge toward freedom put to parchment. My open question continues to focus on how much gold bullion Syria has. Probably not much at all, since no oil or mineral wealth. Sand has low value. Another more recent question is how widespread the practice will become for oil trade settlement with Iran in gold payments. See India and Iran.

CORRUPT EXCHANGE TRADED FUNDS -
The Wall Street and London bankers set up the precious metals Exchange Traded Funds. They were clever. They have duped many people, including the hopeless scribe Adam Hamilton. He could not read a prospectus, not a balance sheet, nor an inventory report to save his soul. To be sure, he is a good man, but as a forensic analyst, he is Mr Magoo in human form, almost a poster boy for the gold cartel dupes alongside Dennis Gartman. The backdoor looting of inventory from both the GLD gold fund and the SLV silver fund are well documented. Shares are shorted, probably by their custodians, and metal bars are removed from inventory. Nothing complicated here. Lazy witless investors continue to invest in both GLD & SLV, without awareness of their deep corruption. They can buy gold and silver with a mere click, or so they believe. Instead, they divert demand from physical metal to the syndicate coffers, where the funds are used to short the metal, and to keep the supply lines coming to satisfy the rapidly growing demands for delivery. The other many Exchange Traded Funds do an exemplary job in controlling several important commodities. See the USO fund for managing the crude oil price. It has lost over 60% value relative to crude oil in the last decade. See the GDX fund for controlling the entire precious metal mining sector, managed by Goldman Sachs. The financial press assists the process by advertising and recommending the corrupted ETFunds, a valuable fixture in price controls. Many speculators use the GLD & SLV for their liquidity and ease of usage, ignoring their illegitimacy. The corrupt ETFunds go hand in hand with the flash trading corruption, also known as High Frequency Trading. It is insider trading by any other name, protected by FBI. See the Goldman Sachs unix box case three years ago that peeked at the order flow. The corrupt ETFunds go hand in hand with the naked shorting practice directed against mining stocks, organized by Wall Street firms and executed by associated hedge funds.

CORRUPT COMEX -
The MFGlobal failure and theft of private segregated accounts has indirectly exposed the corruption of the COMEX itself. The bankruptcy trustee has been tarnished, having confiscated futures account receipts, thus making proof of theft and quantity impossible. The MFGlobal case should have been treated as a brokerage firm collapse, thus granting highest priority to private accounts, and making them full. Instead, the case was treated as a financial firm collapse, thus putting the private accounts at the bottom of priorities, and rendering them pilfered. The MFGlobal thefts will eventually lead to the COMEX being vacated of participants, since accounts are no longer secure. Entire Compliance Departments are banning the usage of COMEX accounts in financial firms and risk management outfits, a signal of the end being nigh. In time, the COMEX will become a cash & carry supermarket, but distrusted even for that lowly mart function. They will be devoid of inventory, exposed as a corrupted paper factory attached as a vital appendage to Wall Street.

CORRUPT ECONOMIC DATA -
The entire system requires the constant banter of recovery, legitimacy, hope, and integrity. All are sorely lacking, glaringly lacking. The economic numbers have few honest series of data. My favorite honest series remains the income tax payroll withholdings, which screams of chronic recession in basic tones. Focus on three corrupted series. The Gross Domestic Product as calculated by the USGovt prefers the sequential method of comparing one quarter to the next, then multiplying by four. But ingrained are the fabled ample hedonics and imputations. Lifting the numbers from perceived quality improvements and the payments from right pocket to left pocket for individuals is laughable. The true GDP is half the size reported when stripped of nonsense fantasy. Its rate of change has been running at minus 2% to minus 5% growth (powerful recession) for the last four to six years. That explains the poor job growth and inability to make home loan payments. The Consumer Price Index routinely removes home rent when rising, includes home prices when falling, substitutes chicken for pork, sawdust for grains, stone pebbles for beans, and more. It also uses the same hedonics of quality improvements to suppress prices in the calculations. The GDP and CPI methods are interwoven exhibitions of statistical incest.
The Jobs Report is a joke each month perpetrated upon the American people. Inconsistencies abound. The mythical Birth-Death Model is handy for job creations, supposedly to reflect the uncounted small business sector. That sector is under great duress. Every March, a revision downward is made between 300 thousand and 700 thousand jobs, never noted by the financial press. The correction puts the series back into kilter. The USEconomy remains the weakest of all industrialized nations. Its corruption remains the highest in data reporting. See American Airlines for job cuts. See the Manhattan banking sector for job cuts. See state and local governments for job cuts. See college and university construction projects for job cuts.

GOLD COIL READY -
The coalition against the gold cartel is making its presence known. They come from the Eastern realm, not necessarily from China, according to word passed. They shun publicity, but their handiwork is clear, as the heavily defended 1650 level was over-run and trampled. The upcoming planned event of the Greek Govt Bond default will be an important chapter in modern history. The collateral damage to Spain, Italy, and France will not be controllable. The exposure from the denied CDSwap debt insurance payouts will mark a turning point in bank corruption. They took in $trillions in contract premium, earned $billions in fees, and have blocked all payouts by redefinitions and ISDA strongarm methods. The required recapitalization of the Western big banks is an unavoidable event. The task will require several $trillions. The backroom coverage of the CDS payouts, if ever done, will require tens of $trillions. What is clear is that Quantitative Easing is the mainstay policy, but also that Global QE will be widely recognized as the device to avoid systemic collapse. The Gold & Silver prices will rise accordingly, as the paper monetary system is ruined further. The dons and castle lords will attempt to replace the failed paper system with another paper system, having given away their plan at the Davos Economic Summit conference. What a great location to conduct 300 arrests, a missed opportunity every year.
A unusual note came from a distant but informed niche, his office in step with gold corners and their many developments. He has commented in the past on the gradual pace of corruption taking its toll on the current system. He wrote, "The system will collapse and files from regulators and law enforcement will be destroyed during the collapse. The 911 event was an orchestrated event within the reaction matrix, a mega trial run to see how people would react and how the system would deal with the destruction. It was also the site one of the biggest gold heists ever. ScotiaMoccatta's gold in the vaults at the WTC was completely looted, never to be recovered, a well documented but poorly known story. The coming collapse is not a question of if but when. Only hard assets such as precious metal, agricultural assets, and other essentials will survive. Pay little heed to banks, the CDS contracts, the mortgage fraud, and all the other schemes these banksters run. The Roman Empire's back was broken. This cartel's back will be broken too. So just sit back and relax if well positioned in gold & silver."

2012-01-31T15:30:00.000-08:00

2012-01-31 "Rhode Island Tea Party State Senator Who Introduced “Right-to-Work” is a 21-Year-Old College Student Whose Last Job Was Cracker Barrel Dishwasher"
[http://wepartypatriots.com/wp/2012/01/31/rhode-island-right-to-work-introduced-by-cracker-barrel-dishwasher/]
State Senator Nicholas Kettle has introduced legislation in Rhode Island that would place “Right-to-Work” restrictions on teachers unions [http://www.wpri.com/dpp/news/local_news/providence/rhode-island-lawmaker-senator-nicholas-kettle-to-introduce-teachers-right-to-work-bill]: “Teachers in Rhode Island deserve a choice,” Kettle said. “The National Education Association uses questionable tactics when dealing with our legislature…harming the reputation of many fine teachers and placing our children at the bottom of our priority list.”
Kettle, who is 21, is a prime example of the unqualified candidates that were swept in by Tea Party momentum at the state level in 2010 and the damage they can do once they are in “power.” Saying Kettle is “unqualified” may well be a glaring understatement. Before defeating 20 year political veteran Leo Blais by the narrow margin of 23 votes, Kettle had been employed as a dishwasher at Cracker Barrel.
This blog has nothing against Cracker Barrel (we love dumplings, in fact) and, quite obviously, nothing against starting at the bottom and working your way up.

But let’s get real.
Kettle appears to have employed a bit of the old bait and switch since becoming a member of the Rhode Island Senate. He has been called out by those he claimed to support on the campaign trail but ignored once he get to Providence. One of those groups is Rhode Island’s LGBT community. Kettle said he supported gay marriage to get votes and then promptly “changed his mind” once elected [http://www.anchorweb.org/news/ric-student-changes-politics-1.2477701#.TylgifnJnq0]. The Political Action Group Marriage Equality for Rhode Island responded by passing out fliers at Rhode Island College where Kettle is currently enrolled. Yes, the man that is trying to enact “Right-to-Work” in Little Rhodey is STILL STUDYING HISTORY.
Kettle has also had trouble watching what he says since his surprise election in 2010. He has used his position on the Housing and Municipal Government committee to insult homeless people [http://www.rifuture.org/state-senator-nicholas-kettle-has-learned-what-exactly.html]:
In an e-mail before the hearing, freshman Sen. Nicholas D. Kettle urged Tea Party supporters to question homeless advocates and “fill up the room before the homeless folks! Help me ask why this homeless person has better clothes than I,” he said.
Kettle promised to ask tough questions and called Tassoni’s hearings a “dog-and-pony show.”
But during the hearing, Kettle apologized for the message, after homeless advocate John Joyce read it aloud and asked why Kettle hated the homeless and the poor.
Kettle said he didn’t hate the homeless, but that he sent the e-mail “out of frustration” and because he thought the hearing was one-sided.
“Don’t apologize to me,” said Joyce, who was once homeless. “Apologize to the homeless people of the state.”
Every young adult is allowed to make mistakes as long as they learn lessons from them. Sure, Kettle apologized, but he also suggested that the only lesson he really learned was to “watch what you put in writing.”
Kettle will have to defend his record, or lack thereof, when he runs for re-election this November. Now that he’s 21, he can use the “guy you’d want to have a beer with” argument to rally his base. Or, at least, his classmates.

Scan of the "Stars" magazine which originally revealed the young fascists work history:

2012-01-31T15:26:00.000-08:00

2012-01-31 "ExxonMobil Makes $41 Billion, But Pays Estimated 17.6% Tax Rate, Lower Than Most Taxpayers (But Not Romney)" by Rebecca Leber
[http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/01/31/415337/exxonmobil-41-billion-but-pays-tax-rate-lower-than-most-taxpayers-but-not-romney/?mobile=nc]
ExxonMobil had the largest profits of the Big Five oil companies in 2011, raking in $41.1 billion for the year [http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/Files/news_release_earnings_4q11.pdf]. This 35 percent jump from last year is driven in large part by record-high oil prices. Today, the oil giant announced its fourth quarter profits of $9.4 billion, a 2 percent increase since 2010. Here are a few other facts about ExxonMobil:
• Exxon’s $41.1 billion in 2011 profit translates into nearly $5 million in profit every hour, or more than $1,300 every second. The annual profit comes near the record revenues of $46.23 billion in 2008.
• Stock buybacks for Q4 were $5.4 billion, and $ 21.60 billion for the year, equivalent to 53 percent of total 2011 profit. This enriches executives, the board of directors, and largest shareholders.
• Exxon pays a lower tax rate than the average American [http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/01/31/415337/economy/2011/05/11/165367/exxon-pays-less-taxes/]. Between 2008-2010, Exxon Mobil registered an average 17.6 percent federal effective corporate tax rate, while the average American paid a higher rate of 20.4 percent. [In 2010, Mitt Romney paid an effective tax rate of 13.9%.]
• The company paid no taxes to the U.S. federal government in 2009 [http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/01/31/415337/politics/2010/04/06/90299/exxon-tax/], despite 45.2 billion record profits. It paid $15 billion in taxes, but none in federal income tax.
• The oil giant uses offshore subsidiaries in the Caribbean to avoid paying taxes in the United States [http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2010/04/06/exxon-zero-taxes/].
• Exxon is sitting on $11 billion cash on hand as of September 30 [http://ir.exxonmobil.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=115024&p=irol-sec&seccat01.1_rs=21&seccat01.1_rc=10].
• Exxon spent nearly $13 million on lobbying expenditures in 2011 [http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000000129]. The company gave nearly another $900,000 in federal campaign contributions [http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/totals.php?id=D000000129&cycle=2012]. 92 percent of contributions went to Republicans.
• Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson made $29 million in 2010 (according to the latest records): He made $2.2 million in salary, a $3.4 million bonus, and stock awards valued at $15.5 million.
• Exxon is drawing out a legal battle for damages on a spill from 22 years ago. Exxon hasn’t paid $92 million in cleanup for the devastating Valdez Alaskan oil spill [http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/10/will-exxon-have-pay-ongoing-valdez-damage]. In its Sept. 30 court filing, Exxon argued the damages it agreed to pay only covers “restoration” and not additional “clean-up.”
• Far from a job creator, ExxonMobil — together with Chevron, Shell, and BP — reduced their U.S. workforce by 11,200 employees between 2005 and 2010 [http://democrats.naturalresources.house.gov/content/files/2011-09-08_RPT_OilProfitsPinkSlips.pdf].

2012-01-31T15:16:00.000-08:00

2012-01-31 "Why the GOP Loves Keystone XL and Wants Congress to Approve the Pipeline" by Mike Ludwig from "Truthout"
[http://www.truth-out.org/why-gop-loves-keystone-xl-and-wants-congress-approve-pipeline/1328022271]
Senate Republicans announced a bill on Monday that would allow Canadian oil company TransCanada to begin construction of its proposed $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline that would run 1,700 miles from Canada to Texas.
The bill's top sponsors - Sens. Richard Lugar (R-Indiana), John Hoeven (R-North Dakota), David Vitter (R-Louisiana) - are the same lawmakers who authored a provision in the payroll tax cut extension in December that required President Obama to approve or deny the pipeline within 60 days.
Blaming the deadline, President Obama rejected a permit for the project earlier this month because the State Department had recently decided to push back its final decision another year to allow officials in Nebraska time to explore alternative pipeline routes that avoid environmentally sensitive areas and a large freshwater aquifer.
Lugar's bill would allow TransCanada to begin construction in other states while Nebraska works to find an alternate route.
Obama said the rejection was not based on "merits" of the project, and in the past week, the president unveiled plans to expand domestic oil and gas production that include leasing 38 million underwater acres in the Gulf of Mexico.
On Sunday, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) told ABC news that the House would attach similar pipeline approval legislation to an infrastructure and jobs bill that will be introduced next week.

The GOP's Pipeline Politics -
The Republican obsession with the Keystone pipeline is exacerbating a political headache for Obama and fellow Democrats, whose voter base is split on the issue, with environmental groups and climate activists opposed to the pipeline and some labor unions supporting it.
Putting a bill on Obama's desk that would approve the pipeline could force the president to take a position on the controversial project during an election year. A veto would give the GOP more ammo to call Obama a job killer, who canceled a infrastructure project during tough economic times, but signing the bill would enrage the environmental movement that brought thousands to the White House to protest the pipeline last year.
When asked about the pipeline approval bill, White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters on Monday that he had no opinion on legislation that "may or may not come to pass" and took the opportunity to blame Republicans for politicizing the project and creating a deadline that forced Obama to reject it.
Neil Brown, a spokesperson for Senator Lugar, said the Keystone XL pipeline is worth supporting regardless of the surrounding politics.
"If you look at the numbers, it speaks for itself," said Brown, who pointed out that it's better to get oil from Canada than from politically unstable oil producing countries.
The pipeline would transport 830,000 barrels of oil a day, most of it heavy crude extracted from the Alberta tar sands, a process climate activists and environmentalists also oppose.
Lugar and his colleagues continue to claim the project would create 20,000 jobs, a number under heavy debate in the media. Independent researchers at Cornell University estimated the pipeline would directly create about 2,500 to 6,000 temporary construction jobs.

Big Oil's Deep Pockets -
Here's some other numbers to consider: the oil and gas industry is the top contributor to the campaign committees of Lugar's top co-sponsors, with Senator Vitton receiving $523,850 and Senator Hoeven receiving $263,289 since 2007.
At a protest at Boehner's district office in Ohio last week, environmentalists pointed out that the House speaker, who has hammered Obama for rejecting the pipeline, has received $1.2 million in contributions from "dirty" energy firms connected to coal, oil and gas production. According to Boehner's 2010 financial disclosure forms, filed last year, the speaker had $10,000 to $50,000 in investments in several energy firms involved in Alberta tar sands extraction, including Exxon Mobile and Canadian Natural Resources.
"It's quite amazing to watch how Capitol Hill works - to realize that many of these guys are less public servants and more employees of the oil industry," said author and 350.org founder Bill McKibben, who organized protests against the pipeline. "Two weeks ago the head of the American Petroleum Institute promised 'huge political consequences' if Obama didn't do what they wanted, and now they're trying to make good on the threat."
The bill that would approve the pipeline has 44 co-sponsors. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia is currently the only Democrat on the list.

Comment compilation from original web posting:

Pipelines are construction projects that require due process of review by appropriate governmental agencies and the public. Furthermore, the proposed Keystone XL pipeline is not your ordinary pipeline. It is a 1,700-mile, $7 billion behemoth that would bring 700,000 barrels per day of carbon-heavy tar-sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf Coast. Here are some disturbing facts:
1. Keystone XL is an export pipeline that will NOT reduce dependence on foreign oil, but transport cheap Canadian tar sands to American refineries on the Gulf Coast for tax-free export to markets in Europe and Latin America. Most of the refined fuel will never reach U.S. drivers' tanks. XL would not improve our energy security or independence from Mid-East oil imports, which can only be done through increased fuel efficiency.
2. Keystone XL WILL increase gas prices for Americans - especially farmers. It would remove the oversupply of discounted Canadian crude from U.S. Midwest markets, and provide an increase of billions in Canadian oil annual revenue. Per-gallon prices in the Midwest would rise by 20 cents/gallon, or 21% by 2013 from 2009 levels. This would be passed on to the public in the form of higher food prices.
3. TransCanada's jobs projections are vastly inflated. In South Dakota, of the construction jobs on the Keystone I pipeline (first phase of the system now bringing Alberta crude to Illinois), just 11% are estimated to be filled by South Dakotans - most of them for temporary, low-paying manual labor. Labor unions oppose XL, and call instead for jobs to repair, improve and expand water and sewage pipelines, bridges, tunnels, public transportation infrastructure, energy conservation and the electrical power grid that will help to reduce air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and improve energy efficiency. In short, XL will not boost local employment nor assure energy security.
4. A rupture in Keystone XL would cause a massive oil spill in America's agricultural heartland, over the source of fresh drinking water for 2 million people, and could devastate the environment. The U.S. Pipeline Safety Administration (PSA) has not yet conducted an in depth analysis of XL's safety. There have been 12 TransCanada spills on Keystone I in one year. Government-ordered tests indicated that defective steel may have been the cause. XL will cross the Missouri and Niobrara Rivers, the Ogallala aquifer, sage grouse habitat, walleye fisheries and more. PSA has not adequately accounted for threats to wildlife, increased pollution in distressed refinery communities, accelerated climate change and other issues.
5. Keystone XL will exacerbate North America's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. A Rockefeller Foundation report concluded that climate change, if not addressed, will be the greatest threat to national security. The State Department's Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) fails to adequately analyze XL's GHGs. Extraction and refinement of oil sands are more GHG-intensive than those of conventional oil. Although the EIS estimates that XL's annual GHGs could exceed those of Mideast crude by the equivalent of 2 to 4 coal-fired power plants, the EPA believes that the EIS estimate is short by as much as 20%. Thus, over its projected 50-year lifetime, XL could spew an extra 1.15 billion tons of GHGs into the atmosphere.
In short: The Keystone XL pipeline requires further review and deep study before being approved, if ever.
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Tar sands producers are pushing for the type of “safety procedure waivers” provided to BP, prior to the Gulf disaster of last year. Additionally, TransCanada – the Keystone XL producer is seeking permission to pump tar sands oil at pressures EXCEEDING normal safety limits, while using pipes made from thinner steel than are the industry standard. Tar sands crude oil often causes “false pressure warnings in pipelines” making the identification of a true leak almost impossible. Tar sands oil is also thicker than conventional oil and has higher concentrations of heavy metals, which require higher concentrations of energy and water to separate the oil from the sands. According to the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) report tar sands contain:
“15 to 20 times higher acid concentrations than conventional crude oil, five to 10 times as much sulfur, high concentrations of chloride salts and higher concentrations of abrasive quartz sand particles.”
Furthermore, the NRDC report explains, “This combination of chemical corrosion and physical abrasion can dramatically increase the rate of pipeline deterioration.” (Source: Tar Sands Pipelines Safety Risks Report, February 2011) The Guardian Environmental Network explained further, “In order to get it to flow through pipelines, raw tar sands bitumen is diluted with natural gas condensate and then moved in heated pipelines under high pressure. The study (NRDC report) asserts that the higher temperatures and higher internal pipeline pressures can create gas bubbles within the pipelines, deform the metal and lead to ruptures caused by pressure spikes.” So, when you combine the more highly corrosive tar sands crude oil with thinner steel – you have a recipe for a blowout disaster. In fact … just another Canadian tar sands pipeline built by Enbridge, experienced such a rupture.
The Enbridge Lakehead Pipeline Rupture took place along what was been benignly labeled “Line 6B.” This line feeds into the Great Lakes in Michigan and the ramifications for additional water contamination are dire. The rupture wasn’t a pinhole or a few inches in diameter – it was six and one-half feet long and has gushed in excess of 800,000 gallons of tar sands crude into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River system. Enbridge asked permission to use the same type of thinner steel that TransCanada is seeking permission to use. To make matters worse, Enbridge had begun applying for a permit to operate this pipeline at higher pressures than is scientifically advised. In terms of government oversight regarding the engineering and scientific safety questions – the agency charged with pipeline regulations, namely the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), fails to differentiate between crude oil and tar sands oil safety requirements. PHMSA law governing transport of these two compounds requiring different treatment – views them as identical. Ironic how the TSA (Transportation Safety Administration) frets more over a cancer patient sporting a colostomy bag being a danger to a plane of passengers than they do concerning inadequate pipeline safety of toxic tar sands oil – containing enormous amounts of known toxics and carcinogens
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Ahhh, and then there's the PIG (a robotic Pipeline Inspection Gauge) whose software has INTENTIONALLY flawed software to low ball any negative findings. Whistle blower pointed out the software problems, software stayed in. On purpose.

2012-01-30T21:24:00.000-08:00

"The Truth About the Conservative Mind: Why Reactionaries from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin Have Fought Real Liberty; Conservatism is a reaction to democratic movements, like OWS, that challenge the authority of elites" from "The Chronicle of Higher Education" by Corey Robin
[http://www.alternet.org/story/153919/the_truth_about_the_conservative_mind:_why_reactionaries_from_edmund_burke_to_sarah_palin_have_fought_real_liberty_?page=entire]
Corey Robin is an associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and CUNY's Graduate Center. He blogs at coreyrobin.com. This essay is adapted from his book The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, published by Oxford University Press.
The following is an adapted excerpt from Corey Robin's "The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin."
---
It's been a rotten few months for the nation's wealthiest 1 percent. From the senatorial candidacy of Elizabeth Warren to Occupy Wall Street, economic elites have faced a concerted attack on their riches and power, their arrogant and unaccountable ways. And you can hear it in their voices, or at least the voices of their spokesmen. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor declared, "I, for one, am increasingly concerned about the growing mobs occupying Wall Street and the other cities across the country." Mitt Romney told an audience in Florida that "I think it's dangerous—this class warfare." So rattled is George Will that he's been forced to pull out a playbook from an older time. All but calling Warren a Communist, he accused the Oklahoma-born scholarship kid of believing that the government "is entitled to socialize—i.e., conscript—whatever portion" of an individual's property "it considers its share."
After decades of "compassionate conservatism," "a thousand points of light," and "Morning in America," dark talk of class warfare on the right can seem like a strange throwback. So accustomed are we to the sunny Reagan and the populist Tea Party that we've forgotten a basic truth about conservatism: It is a reaction to democratic movements from below, movements like Occupy Wall Street that threaten to reorder society from the bottom up, redistributing power and resources from those who have much to those who have not so much. With the roar against the ruling classes growing ever louder, the right seems to be reverting to type. It thus behooves us to take a second look at the conservative tradition, not just its current incarnation but also across time, for that tradition provides us with an understanding of why the conservative responds to Occupy Wall Street as he does.
Since the modern era began, men and women in subordinate positions have marched against their superiors. They have gathered under different banners—the labor movement, feminism, abolition, socialism—and shouted different slogans: freedom, equality, democracy, revolution. In virtually every instance, their superiors have resisted them. That march and démarche of democracy is one of the main stories of modern politics. And it is the second half of that story, the démarche, that drives the development of ideas we call conservative. For that is what conservatism is: a meditation on, and theoretical rendition of, the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.
Despite the very real differences among them, workers in a factory are like secretaries in an office, peasants on a manor, slaves on a plantation—even wives in a marriage—in that they live and labor in conditions of unequal power. They submit and obey, heeding the demands of their managers and masters, husbands and lords. Sometimes their lot is freely chosen—workers contract with their employers, wives with their husbands—but its entailments seldom are. What contract, after all, could ever itemize the ins and outs, the daily pains and continuing sufferance, of a job or a marriage? Throughout American history, in fact, the contract has served as a conduit to unforeseen coercion and constraint. Employment and marriage contracts have been interpreted by judges to contain all sorts of unwritten and unwanted provisions of servitude to which wives and workers tacitly consent, even when they have no knowledge of such provisions or wish to stipulate otherwise.
Until 1980, for example, it was legal in every state for a husband to rape his wife. The justification for this dates back to a 1736 treatise by the British jurist Matthew Hale. When a woman marries, he argued, she implicitly agrees to give "up herself in this kind [sexually] unto her husband." Hers is a tacit, if unknowing, consent, "which she cannot retract" for the duration of their union. Having once said yes, she can never say no. As recently as 1957, a standard legal treatise could state, "A man does not commit rape by having sexual intercourse with his lawful wife, even if he does so by force and against her will." If someone tried to write into the marriage contract a requirement that express consent had to be given in order for sex to proceed, judges were bound by common law to ignore or override it. Implicit consent was a structural feature of the contract that neither party could alter. Through that contract, women were doomed to be the sexual servants of their husbands.
Every once in a while, however, the subordinates of this world contest their fates. They protest their conditions, join movements, make demands. Their goals may be minimal and discrete, but in voicing them, they raise the specter of a more fundamental change in power. They cease to be servants or supplicants and become agents, speaking and acting on their own behalf. More than the reforms themselves, it is this assertion of agency that vexes their superiors.
American labor history is filled with complaints from employers and government officials that unionized workers are independent and self-organizing. Indeed, so potent is their self-organization that it threatens to render superfluous the employer and the state. During the Great Upheaval of 1877, striking railroad workers in St. Louis took to running the trains themselves. Fearful that the public might conclude the workers were capable of managing the railroad, the owners tried to stop them, starting a strike of their own in order to prove it was the owners, and only the owners, who could make the trains run on time. During the Seattle general strike of 1919, workers went to great lengths to provide basic government services, including law and order. So successful were they that the mayor concluded it was the workers' ability to limit violence and anarchy that posed the greatest threat to the established order:
[begin excerpt]
The so-called sympathetic Seattle strike was an attempted revolution. ... True, there were no flashing guns, no bombs, no killings. Revolution, I repeat, doesn't need violence. The general strike, as practiced in Seattle, is of itself the weapon of revolution, all the more dangerous because quiet. ... That is to say, it puts the government out of operation.
[end excerpt]
Conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes. It provides the most consistent and profound argument for why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty; agency, the prerogative of elites. Such was the threat Edmund Burke saw in the French Revolution: not merely an expropriation of property or explosion of violence but an inversion of the obligations of deference and command. "The levelers," he claimed, "only change and pervert the natural order of things."
[begin excerpt]
The occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallowchandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person—to say nothing of a number of other more servile employments. Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule.
[end excerpt]
By virtue of membership in a polity, Burke allowed, men had certain rights—to the fruits of their labor, their inheritance, education, and more. But the one right he refused to concede to all men was a "share of power, authority, and direction" they might think they ought to have "in the management of the state."
One of the reasons the subordinate's exercise of agency agitates the conservative imagination is that it takes place in an intimate setting. Every great political blast—from the storming of the Bastille to the March on Washington—is set off by a private fuse: the contest for rights and standing in the family, the factory, and the field. Politicians and parties talk of constitution and amendment, natural rights and inherited privileges. But the real subject of their deliberations is the private life of power. "Here is the secret of the opposition to woman's equality in the state," Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote. "Men are not ready to recognize it in the home." Behind the riot in the street or debate in Parliament is the maid talking back to her mistress, the worker disobeying his boss. That is why our political arguments—not only about the family but also the welfare state, civil rights, and much else—can be so explosive: They touch upon the most personal relations of power.
When the conservative looks upon a democratic movement from below, this is what he sees: a terrible disturbance in the private life of power. "The real object" of the French Revolution, Burke told Parliament in 1790, is "to break all those connexions, natural and civil, that regulate and hold together the community by a chain of subordination; to raise soldiers against their officers; servants against their masters; tradesmen against their customers; artificers against their employers; tenants against their landlords; curates against their bishops; and children against their parents." Nothing to the Jacobins, he declared at the end of his life, was worthy "of the name of the publick virtue, unless it indicates violence on the private."
Historically, the conservative has sought to forestall the march of democracy in both the public and the private spheres, on the assumption that advances in the one necessarily spur advances in the other. Still, the more profound and prophetic stance on the right has been to cede the field of the public, if he must, but stand fast in the private. Allow men and women to become democratic citizens of the state; make sure they remain feudal subjects in the family, the factory, and the field.
No simple defense of one's own place and privileges, the conservative position stems from a genuine conviction that a world thus emancipated will be ugly, brutish, and dull. It will lack the excellence of a world where the better man commands the worse. This vision of the connection between excellence and rule is what brings together in postwar America that unlikely alliance of the capitalist, with his vision of the employer's untrammeled power in the workplace; the traditionalist, with his vision of the father's rule at home; and the statist, with his vision of a heroic leader pressing his hand upon the face of the earth. Each in his way subscribes to this statement, from the 19th century, of the conservative creed: "To obey a real superior ... is one of the most important of all virtues—a virtue absolutely essential to the attainment of anything great and lasting."
The notion that conservative ideas are a mode of reactionary practice is likely to raise some hackles. It has long been an axiom on the left that the defense of power and privilege is an enterprise devoid of ideas, that right-wing politics is an emotional swamp rather than a movement of considered opinion. Thomas Paine called counterrevolution "an obliteration of knowledge"; Lionel Trilling described American conservatism as a mélange of "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."
Conservatives, for their part, have tended to agree. Playing the part of the dull-witted country squire, conservatives have embraced the position of the historian F.J.C. Hearnshaw that "it is commonly sufficient for practical purposes if conservatives, without saying anything, just sit and think, or even if they merely sit." While the aristocratic overtones of that discourse no longer resonate, the conservative still holds on to the label of the untutored and the unlettered; it's part of his populist charm and demotic appeal. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Conservatism is an idea-driven praxis, and no amount of preening from the right or polemic from the left can reduce or efface the catalog of mind one finds there.
Others will be put off by this argument for a different reason: It threatens the purity and profundity of conservative ideas. For many, the word "reaction" connotes an unthinking, lowly grab for power. But reaction is not reflex. It begins from a position of principle—that some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others—and then recalibrates that principle in light of a challenge from below. This recalibration is no easy task, for such challenges tend by their very nature to disprove the principle. After all, if a ruling class is truly fit to rule, why and how has it allowed a challenge to its power to emerge? What does the emergence of the one say about the fitness of the other?
The conservative faces an additional hurdle: how to defend a principle of rule in a world where nothing is solid, all is in flux. From the moment conservatism came onto the scene as an intellectual movement, it has had to contend with the decline of ancient and medieval ideas of an orderly universe, in which permanent hierarchies of power reflected the eternal structure of the cosmos. The overthrow of the old regime reveals not only the weakness and incompetence of its leaders but also a larger truth about the lack of design in the world. Reconstructing the old regime in the face of a declining faith in permanent hierarchies has proven to be a difficult feat. Not surprisingly, it also has produced some of the most remarkable works of modern thought.
There is another reason to be wary of the effort to dismiss the reactionary thrust of conservatism, and that is the testimony of the tradition itself. From Burke's claim that he and his ilk had been "alarmed into reflexion" by the French Revolution to Russell Kirk's admission that conservatism is a "system of ideas" that "has sustained men ... in their resistance against radical theories and social transformation," the conservative has consistently affirmed that his is a knowledge produced in response to the left. Sometimes that affirmation has been explicit. Lord Salisbury, three times prime minister of Britain, wrote in 1859 that "hostility to Radicalism, incessant, implacable hostility, is the essential definition of Conservatism." In his classic The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, George Nash defined conservatism as "resistance to certain forces perceived to be leftist, revolutionary, and profoundly subversive of what conservatives at the time deemed worth cherishing, defending, and perhaps dying for." More recently, the Harvard political theorist Harvey Mansfield has declared, "I understand conservatism as a reaction to liberalism. It isn't a position that one takes up from the beginning but only when one is threatened by people who want to take away or harm things that deserve to be conserved."
Those are the explicit professions of the counterrevolutionary creed. More interesting are the implicit statements, where antipathy to radicalism and reform is embedded in the very syntax of the argument. Take Michael Oakeshott's famous definition in his essay "On Being Conservative":
[begin excerpt]
To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.
[end excerpt]
One cannot, it seems, enjoy fact and mystery, near and distant, laughter and bliss. One must choose. Far from affirming a simple hierarchy of preferences, Oakeshott's either/or signals that we are on existential ground, where the choice is between not something and its opposite but something and its negation. The conservative would enjoy familiar things in the absence of forces seeking their destruction, Oakeshott concedes, but his enjoyment "will be strongest when" it "is combined with evident risk of loss." And while Oakeshott suggests that such losses can be engineered by a variety of forces, the engineers invariably seem to work on the left. Marx and Engels are "the authors of the most stupendous of our political rationalisms," he writes elsewhere. "Nothing ... can compare with" their abstract utopianism.
There is more to this antagonistic structure of argument than the simple antinomies of partisan politics. As Karl Mannheim argued, what distinguishes conservatism from traditionalism—the universal "vegetative" tendency to remain attached to things as they are—is that conservatism is a deliberate, conscious effort to preserve or recall "those forms of experience which can no longer be had in an authentic way." Conservatism "becomes conscious and reflective when other ways of life and thought appear on the scene, against which it is compelled to take up arms in the ideological struggle."
Where the traditionalist takes the objects of his desire for granted, the conservative cannot. He seeks to enjoy them precisely as they are being—or have been—taken away. If he hopes to enjoy them again, he must fight for them in the public realm. He must speak of them in a language that is politically serviceable and intelligible. But as soon as those objects enter the medium of political speech, they cease to be items of lived experience and become incidents of an ideology. They get wrapped in a narrative of loss—in which the revolutionary or reformist plays a necessary part—and presented in a program of recovery. What was tacit becomes articulate, what was practice becomes polemic.
In defending hierarchical orders, the conservative invariably launches a counterrevolution, often requiring an overhaul of the very regime he is defending. "If we want things to stay as they are," in Lampedusa's classic formulation, "things will have to change." This program entails far more than clichés about preservation through renovation would suggest: Often it requires the most radical measures on the regime's behalf.
Indeed, some of the stuffiest partisans of order have been more than happy, when it has suited their purposes, to indulge in a bit of mayhem and madness. Kirk, the self-styled Burkean, wished to "espouse conservatism with the vehemence of a radical. The thinking conservative, in truth, must take on some of the outward characteristics of the radical, today: he must poke about the roots of society, in the hope of restoring vigor to an old tree half strangled in the rank undergrowth of modern passions." In God and Man at Yale, William F. Buckley declared conservatives "the new radicals."
There's a fairly simple reason for the embrace of radicalism on the right, and it has to do with the reactionary imperative that lies at the core of conservative doctrine. The conservative not only opposes the left; he also believes that the left has been in the driver's seat since, depending on who's counting, the French Revolution or the Reformation. If he is to preserve what he values, the conservative must declare war against the culture as it is. Though the spirit of militant opposition pervades the entirety of conservative discourse, Dinesh D'Souza has put the case most clearly:
[begin excerpt]
Typically, the conservative attempts to conserve, to hold on to the values of the existing society. But ... what if the existing society is inherently hostile to conservative beliefs? It is foolish for a conservative to attempt to conserve that culture. Rather, he must seek to undermine it, to thwart it, to destroy it at the root level. This means that the conservative must ... be philosophically conservative but temperamentally radical.
[end excerpt]
By now it should be clear that it is not the style or pace of change that the conservative opposes. Burkean theorists like to draw a distinction between evolutionary reform and radical change. The first is slow, incremental, and adaptive; the second is fast, comprehensive, and by design. But that distinction, so dear to Burke and his followers, is often less clear in practice than the theorist allows. In the name of slow, organic, adaptive change, self-declared conservatives opposed the New Deal (Robert Nisbet, Kirk, and Whittaker Chambers) and endorsed the New Deal (Peter Viereck, Clinton Rossiter, and Whittaker Chambers). "Even Fabian Socialists," Nash tartly observes, "who believed in 'the inevitability of gradualness' might be labeled conservatives."
More often the blurriness of the distinction has allowed the conservative to oppose reform on the grounds that it either will lead to revolution or is revolution. Any demand from or on behalf of the lower orders, no matter how tepid or tardy, is too much, too soon, too fast. Reform is revolution, improvement is insurrection. "It may be good or bad," a gloomy Lord Carnarvon wrote of the Second Reform Act of 1867—a bill 20 years in the making that tripled the size of the British electorate—"but it is a revolution."
Today's conservative may have made his peace with some emancipations past. Others, like labor unions and reproductive freedom, he still contests. But that does not alter the fact that when those emancipations first arose as issues, his predecessor was in all likelihood against them. Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, is one of today's few conservatives who acknowledge the history of conservative opposition to emancipation. Where other conservatives like to lay claim to the abolitionist or civil-rights mantle, Gerson admits that "honesty requires the recognition that many conservatives, in other times, have been hostile to religiously motivated reform," and that "the conservative habit of mind once opposed most of these changes." Indeed, as Samuel Huntington suggested a half-century ago, saying no to such movements in real time may be what makes someone a conservative throughout time.
Given the reactionary thruST of conservatism, Occupy Wall Street may turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to the right. Thoughtful conservatives have long understood the symbiotic relationship between the right's intellectual—and ultimately political—vitality and insurgencies from the left. Friedrich Hayek accurately observed that the political theory of capitalism "became stationary when it was most influential" and "progressed" only when it was "on the defensive." Frank Meyer, intellectual architect of the fusion strategy that brought together the libertarian and traditionalist wings of the Republican Party, noted that it was "ironic, though not historically unprecedented," that bursts "of creative energy" on the right "should occur simultaneously with a continuing spread of the influence of liberalism in the practical political sphere."
Conversely, conservative writers like David Frum and Andrew Sullivan have worried of late about the intellectual flabbiness of the contemporary right: A movement that once seemed the emblem of heterodoxy has succumbed to stale thinking and rote incantations. But if Occupy Wall Street turns out to be a movement rather than a moment—if it has real staying power; if it moves from public squares to private institutions; if it starts to divest the elite of their privileges and powers, not just in their offshore accounts but in their backyards and board rooms—it could provide the kind of creative provocation that once produced a Burke or a Hayek. The metaphor of occupation is threatening enough; one can only imagine what might happen were it made real. And while the mavens of the right would probably prefer four more years to four good books, they might want to rethink that. They wouldn't be in the position they're in—when, even out of power, they still govern the country—had their predecessors made the same choice.

2012-01-30T21:20:00.001-08:00

2012-01-30 "What Happened to Canada?" by Chris Hedges from "Truthdig"
[http://www.truth-out.org/what-happened-canada/1327935024]
What happened to Canada? It used to be the country we would flee to if life in the United States became unpalatable. No nuclear weapons. No huge military-industrial complex. Universal health care. Funding for the arts. A good record on the environment.
But that was the old Canada. I was in Montreal on Friday and Saturday and saw the familiar and disturbing tentacles of the security and surveillance state. Canada has withdrawn from the Kyoto Accords so it can dig up the Alberta tar sands in an orgy of environmental degradation. It carried out the largest mass arrests of demonstrators in Canadian history at 2010’s G-8 and G-20 meetings, rounding up more than 1,000 people. It sends undercover police into indigenous communities and activist groups and is handing out stiff prison terms to dissenters. And Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a diminished version of George W. Bush. He champions the rabid right wing in Israel, bows to the whims of global financiers and is a Christian fundamentalist.
The voices of dissent sound like our own. And the forms of persecution are familiar. This is not an accident. We are fighting the same corporate leviathan.
“I want to tell you that I was arrested because I am seen as a threat,” Canadian activist Leah Henderson wrote to fellow dissidents before being sent to Vanier prison in Milton, Ontario, to serve a 10-month sentence. “I want to tell you that you might be too. I want to tell you that this is something we need to prepare for. I want to tell you that the risk of incarceration alone should not determine our organizing.”
“My skills and experience—as a facilitator, as a trainer, as a legal professional and as someone linking different communities and movements—were all targeted in this case, with the state trying to depict me as a ‘brainwasher’ and as a mastermind of mayhem, violence and destruction,” she went on. “During the week of the G8 & G20 summits, the police targeted legal observers, street medics and independent media. It is clear that the skills that make us strong, the alternatives that reduce our reliance on their systems and prefigure a new world, are the very things that they are most afraid of.”
The decay of Canada illustrates two things. Corporate power is global, and resistance to it cannot be restricted by national boundaries. Corporations have no regard for nation-states. They assert their power to exploit the land and the people everywhere. They play worker off of worker and nation off of nation. They control the political elites in Ottawa as they do in London, Paris and Washington. This, I suspect, is why the tactics to crush the Occupy movement around the globe have an eerie similarity—infiltrations, surveillance, the denial of public assembly, physical attempts to eradicate encampments, the use of propaganda and the press to demonize the movement, new draconian laws stripping citizens of basic rights, and increasingly harsh terms of incarceration.
Our solidarity should be with activists who march on Tahrir Square in Cairo or set up encampamentos in Madrid. These are our true compatriots. The more we shed ourselves of national identity in this fight, the more we grasp that our true allies may not speak our language or embrace our religious and cultural traditions, the more powerful we will become.
Those who seek to discredit this movement employ the language of nationalism and attempt to make us fearful of the other. Wave the flag. Sing the national anthem. Swell with national hubris. Be vigilant of the hidden terrorist. Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver, responding to the growing opposition to the Keystone XL and the Northern Gateway pipelines, wrote in an open letter that “environmental and other radical groups” were trying to “hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda.” He accused pipeline opponents of receiving funding from foreign special interest groups and said that “if all other avenues have failed, they will take a quintessential American approach: sue everyone and anyone to delay the project even further.”
No matter that in both Canada and the United States suing the government to seek redress is the right of every citizen. No matter that the opposition to the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines has its roots in Canada. No matter that the effort by citizens in the U.S. and in Canada to fight climate change is about self-preservation. The minister, in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry like the energy czars in most of the other industrialized nations, seeks to pit “loyal” Canadians against “disloyal” Canadians. Those with whom we will build this movement of resistance will not in some cases be our own. They may speak Arabic, pray five times a day toward Mecca and be holding off the police thugs in the center of Cairo. Or they may be generously pierced and tattooed and speak Danish or they may be Mandarin-speaking workers battling China’s totalitarian capitalism. These are differences that make no difference.
“My country right or wrong,” G.K. Chesterton once wrote, is on the same level as “My mother, drunk or sober.”
Our most dangerous opponents, in fact, look and speak like us. They hijack familiar and comforting iconography and slogans to paint themselves as true patriots. They claim to love Jesus. But they cynically serve the function a native bureaucracy serves for any foreign colonizer. The British and the French, and earlier the Romans, were masters of this game. They recruited local quislings to carry out policies and repression that were determined in London or Paris or Rome. Popular anger was vented against these personages, and native group vied with native group in battles for scraps of influence. And when one native ruler was overthrown or, more rarely, voted out of power, these imperial machines recruited a new face. The actual centers of power did not change. The pillage continued. Global financiers are the new colonizers. They make the rules. They pull the strings. They offer the illusion of choice in our carnivals of political theater. But corporate power remains constant and unimpeded. Barack Obama serves the same role Herod did in imperial Rome.
This is why the Occupy Wall Street movement is important. It targets the center of power—global financial institutions. It deflects attention from the empty posturing in the legislative and executive offices in Washington or London or Paris. The Occupy movement reminds us that until the corporate superstructure is dismantled it does not matter which member of the native elite is elected or anointed to rule. The Canadian prime minister is as much a servant of corporate power as the American president. And replacing either will not alter corporate domination. As the corporate mechanisms of control become apparent to wider segments of the population, discontent will grow further. So will the force employed by our corporate overlords. It will be a long road for us. But we are not alone. There are struggles and brush fires everywhere. Leah Henderson is not only right. She is my compatriot.

2012-01-30T15:38:00.000-08:00

2012-01-30 "Indiana GOP Withdraws Drug Testing Bill Because Lawmakers Would Be Tested Too!" by Judy Molland
[http://www.care2.com/causes/indiana-gop-withdraws-drug-testing-bill-because-lawmakers-would-be-tested-too.html]
A bill proposed by one Indiana Republican has been withdrawn after its provision to drug test recipients of government largesse was widened to include lawmakers themselves [http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/01/28/indiana-welfare-drug-testing-bill-withdrawn-after-lawmakers-included/].
As Care2′s Robin Marty wrote here recently about a similar plan in Florida [http://www.care2.com/causes/drug-testing-welfare-recipients-is-compassionate.html], Florida quickly learned that regardless of the legality of their plan, the actual testing itself showed that despite the Republicans’ assumptions, very few welfare recipients actually were using drugs. In fact, the percentage of welfare recipients using drugs was actually lower than that of the regular population.

But Back To Indiana -
From Raw Story [http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/01/28/indiana-welfare-drug-testing-bill-withdrawn-after-lawmakers-included/]:
[begin excerpt]
Republican lawmaker Judd McMillan (R-Brookville) removed the bill from consideration by the Indiana General Assembly after Democratic colleagues amended it, but, the Republican says, he intends to reintroduce it on Monday once he has reworked it.
“I’ve only withdrawn it temporarily,” said McMillan, stating that he crafted the bill to elude questions of constitutionality with regards to illegal search and seizure, issues that caused a Florida judge to overturn a similar rule earlier this year.
[end excerpt]
McMillan’s bill includes a “tiered” testing system, by which some people can opt out of random testing, but will be tested if the government deems that there is “reasonable suspicion” that they may be engaged in drug use. Testing could be triggered by an applicant’s demeanor, arrest or conviction for a crime, or failure to make appointments mandated by the welfare office.

Republicans In More Than 30 States Have Tried To Create Welfare Drug Testing Programs -
No compelling evidence exists that individuals on public assistance or more likely to engage in drug use or other illegal behaviors and yet Republicans in more than 30 states have attempted to institute a drug testing requirement to receive benefits. Some laws have even attempted to make it impossible to collect food stamps or unemployment benefits without being tested.
From The Raw Story:
[begin excerpt]
The amendment to the Indiana bill was proposed by Rep. Ryan Dvorak (D-South Bend), who said, “After it passed, Rep. McMillin got pretty upset and pulled his bill. If anything, I think it points out some of the hypocrisy. If we’re going to impose standards on drug testing, then it should apply to everybody who receives government money.”
[end excerpt]
The Indiana General Assembly will reconvene on Monday morning.

Republicans Have Pursued Welfare Drug Testing In More Than 30 States -
In the past year Republican lawmakers have pursued welfare drug testing in more than 30 states and in Congress, and some bills have even targeted people who claim unemployment insurance and food stamps, despite scanty evidence the poor and jobless are disproportionately on drugs. Democrats in several states have countered with bills to require drug testing elected officials.
McMillan, for his part, said he’s coming back with a new bill on Monday, lawmaker testing included. He said he has no problem submitting to a test himself.
“I would think legislators that are here who are responsible for the people who voted them in, they should be more than happy to consent,” he said. “Give me the cup right now and I will be happy to take the test.”

2012-01-30T15:36:00.000-08:00

2012-01-30 "Rogers Challenges Truth in Advertising, Citing Civil Rights" by Joel Boyce
[http://www.care2.com/causes/rogers-challenges-truth-in-advertising-citing-civil-rights.html]
Canadian communications giant, Rogers, is going to court this summer in hopes of overturning a federal “truth in advertising” law [http://www.care2.com/causes/first-major-ad-taken-down-for-too-much-photoshopping.html], part of the Competition Act. Specifically, Rogers is challenging a section of the law requiring “adequate and proper” testing of its products before advertising claims on the efficacy of their performance can be made. Rogers is citing the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, claiming that the federal law violates the right of freedom of expression.
The federal law recently upped the stakes for offenders, increasing the first-time offence penalty from $250 thousand to $10 million in 2010 (it’s a penalty rather than a fine, since the law is civil and not criminal). In 2011, Bell Canada had to pay the $10 million penalty for misleading customers as to the true cost of their various communications services in advertising campaigns. Of course Rogers is accused of violating the act as well, when the Competition Bureau brought a case in late 2010 with regard to a recent campaign for their discount cellular phone service, Chatr.
The bureau investigated claims made by Rogers that their service had “fewer dropped calls than newer wireless carriers,” and that their customers have “no worries about dropped calls.” After reviewing technical data from multiple sources, Rogers service turned out to be no more reliable than its competition. Rogers’ new constitutional argument is the latest move in their ongoing battle against the bureau and this particular suit.
Of course it would be a cell phone company that does this. Remember Verizon and AT&T’s cell phone coverage battles of the last couple of years [http://flowingdata.com/2009/11/24/verizon-vs-att-battle-of-the-coverage-maps/]? It started with Verizon showing side-by-side coverage maps of their own nationwide coverage compared to AT&T’s. Then AT&T started their own ad campaigns where their coverage maps turned out to be much more solidly filled in than Verizon’s. I’m sure I’m not the only one who was sitting there confused as each company told a different story and held up contradictory data.
Who was lying? The solution turned out to be in the fine print. The reason each company had different coverage maps in their own campaigns is they were each focusing on different kinds of specific coverage. Verizon had the best 3G coverage, while AT&T was better with a different kind of coverage. Both companies did their best to mislead consumers, by focusing on the big maps and letting it slip that they represented data for very specific services rather than general network performance.
The moral of the story is that companies are out to make money, and advertising is a tool designed to separate you from that money. Consumers have a civil right not to be overtly lied to, but companies will constantly push the boundaries if they think they can get away with it. Selective statistics, graphs and charts are very useful tools to that end, since they imply that an advertisement has educational goals rather than propagandizing ones. They make a consumer think they are learning something when they are really being convinced of something.
Big surprise that Rogers feels that being legally impelled to tell the truth is a major constraint on its business plan. Or maybe it’s just that the they really, really don’t want to fork over that money.

2012-01-30T15:34:00.000-08:00

2012-01-30 "Who Are The Real Advocates For Oil?" by Joel Boyce
[http://www.care2.com/causes/who-are-the-real-advocates-for-oil.html]
If the world’s climate were not changing as a result of the greenhouse gases we’re adding to the atmosphere, there would still be several strong arguments against the use of fossil fuels. Burning coal and oil pollutes the air, contributing to smog and acid rain. Coal mines are notoriously dangerous to the miners, who may die quickly in mine collapses, or slowly, from black lung disease or certain cancers. Oil spill disasters are frequently epic in scale, the BP event practically destroying the Gulf of Mexico.
Yet the fossil fuel industry, especially “Big Oil,” has its defenders, as well. The question is: does anyone support the industry without receiving massive personal gain for doing so? It seems like the apologists for oil are industry execs themselves, or conservative politicians receiving massive campaign contributions. Are there any independent, objective observers with an argument against transitioning away from non-renewable fuel sources?
Let’s run through the list. This Maclean’s article [http://www2.macleans.ca/2012/01/20/crude-awakening/] quotes some of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s statements on the subject. The PM warned Canadian citizens as early as November that “significant American interests” were trying to screw up Enbridge’s Northern Pipeline Project. Harper knows that if there’s anyone Canadians are more suspicious of than the prime minister himself, it’s those damn Americans. His concerns seemed partly based on President Obama’s failure to commit to the Keystone XL project. (The president did indeed kill the project this month, but the reasoning was hardly based on environmental considerations. [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/corbin-hiar/keystone-xl-pipeline-future_b_1214605.html])
Harper has argued time and again that he is looking out for Canadian interests. With the power of the entire government of Canada behind him, he’s “stood up” against small environmental groups, declaring them enemies of the country when they haven’t fallen in line [http://www.care2.com/wp/causes/wp-admin/www.care2.com/causes/forestethics-declared-enemy-of-the-people-of-canada-for-criticism-of-oil-sands-projects.html]. But do most Canadians want more and more drilling, more and more tar sands, more and more pipelines? No! [http://www.care2.com/causes/half-of-canadians-oppose-keystone-xl-pipeline.html]
The PM has tried to marginalize critics of Canada’s oil projects, characterizing them as “environmental and other radical groups.” But is concern for the environmental and human health such a radical ideology? Especially in this day and age?
A major talking point with Harper and his ilk has been this odd new slogan, “ethical oil.” It started out with a book by Ezra Levant of the same title, which was focused on the further development of Alberta’s tar sands. Levant is a Sun News TV host. Sun Media is Canada’s major conservative media conglomerate.
Now there’s an advocacy group. Ethical Oil (with capital letters this time) has recently been attacking the BC not-for-profit, West Coast Environmental Law, unleashing a series of TV attack ads. But as West Coast writes in their response [http://wcel.org/resources/environmental-law-alert/ethical-oil-attack-ads-expose-un-fairness-vivian-krause], Ethical Oil is the group that a) commands enormous funding that most not-for-profits could not dream of, b) refuses to provide the financial transparency most not-for-profits willingly provide, for example in disclosing its mysterious funding sources, c) won’t even reveal the identity of its board of directors.
Ethical Oil accuses West Coast Environmental Law of secretly working for American interests, because they (openly) receive some funding from American environmental organizations. Whose interest does Ethical Oil represent? They attack the critics of tar sands development [http://www.care2.com/causes/big-oil-attacks-chiquita-for-denouncing-tar-sands.html], but on whose behalf? Would it surprise anyone to find they are completely funded by oil companies, have oil execs sitting on their board of directors, and disperse money for ad campaigns and political contributions under the identity of this third-party advocate?
And if the organization is indeed funded by oil companies for the ultimate purpose of promoting oil development, this isn’t really a non-profit in any meaningful sense of the word, is it? They don’t need to provide transparency; the situation is transparent enough as it is.
There are advocates for oil. But if you look closer, they’re really advocates for themselves.

2012-01-30T14:52:00.000-08:00

The proof is embedded in the image at the bottom. Click on the image to get a better picture of the link URLs.

2012-01-30T14:39:00.000-08:00

2012-01-30T11:30:00.000-08:00

2012-01-30 "Why Are so Many Americans in Prison? We ask if the US should reconsider its 'lock 'em up and throw away the key' approach to crime and punishment" by Al-Jazeera
[http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestoryamericas/2012/01/20121318318540671.html]

2012-01-30T11:29:00.000-08:00

2012-01-30 "Immobility Nation: For most people facing poverty today in the United States, the concept of America as the land of opportunity is just a fable" by Salvatore Babones
[http://www.otherwords.org/articles/immobility_nation]
Salvatore Babones is an American sociologist at the University of Sydney and an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow. His book on the American economy, Benchmarking America, is due out in 2013. www.ips-dc.org
---
America is becoming "a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by," President Barack Obama declared during his State of the Union address.
The numbers back him up. Executive compensation and the poverty rate are both at or near all-time highs.
Surprisingly, it was Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum who first made economic mobility an issue in the 2012 elections. Three months ago, he pointed out that children born to poor families rarely grow up to become rich, or even middle class.
"Believe it or not, studies have been done that show that in Western Europe, people at the lower parts of the income scale actually have a better mobility going up the ladder now than in America," he said during the October 19 Republican presidential debate in Las Vegas [http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2011/10/republican_las_vegas_cnn_debat.html].
In early January, when The New York Times picked up on Santorum's comments and explored the fact that American incomes are increasingly immobile across generations, it made a big splash in the media. Now, Obama's aspiration to "restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot" is going viral.
Santorum is right about mobility. Academic studies typically show that around 40-45 percent of income differences are transmitted from one U.S. generation to the next. This is about twice as high as the equivalent figures in Western Europe and Australia.
Unfortunately, American immobility is an even bigger problem than that.
In a highly technical report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, economist Bhashkar Mazumder shows that prior researchers have seriously underestimated the degree to which children inherit their parents' positions in society.
The new best estimate is that the intergenerational stickiness in income is around 60 percent. In other words, over half of a person's economic status in life is predetermined at birth.
Mazumder, the director of the Chicago Census Research Data Center, concludes that it would take an average of five generations for a family's offspring to rise from low income to middle income.
This doesn't mean that all of a poor family's descendants will be poor for six generations, but it does illustrate just how slowly family incomes change in America.
It wasn't always this way. Time was when opportunities for advancement in America were expanding, not contracting.
Another study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago [http://www.chicagofed.org/webpages/publications/working_papers/2005/wp_12.cfm] shows that intergenerational mobility increased continuously from 1940 to 1980. Only then did it start to fall.
By 2000 (the final year of the study covered), mobility in America was lower than where it had started in 1940.
Obama and Santorum are right to argue that the government has a responsibility to foster an economic environment that encourages intergenerational mobility. And the American people agree with them.
A 2011 poll from the Pew Charitable Trusts' Economic Mobility Project found that 83 percent of Americans "support a government role in promoting upward economic mobility."
The top three things Americans told Pew that the government should do? Provide all children with a quality education, promote job creation, and ensure equal opportunity — all of which Obama called for in his address.
In the end, the best way to promote upward mobility is to give people a helping hand. It's not enough to get government out of the way. Government can and should be part of the solution.

2012-01-29T21:17:00.000-08:00

2012-01-29 "DEA inquiries into medical marijuana industry include legislators" from "Missoulian" newspaper
Diane Sands is used to having her name taken in vain. That’s just part of being a liberal from Missoula in the Montana Legislature. But her name surfaced recently in a way that offended and troubled her at a profound level. A possible witness in a federal drug investigation was asked whether Sands might be part of a conspiracy to sell medical marijuana. The questions came from Drug Enforcement Administration agents from Billings who were investigating medical marijuana businesses, and Sands learned about the inquiry from the witness’ attorney. “So now, if you’re a state legislator who has been working on medical marijuana laws, you are somehow part of a conspiracy,” said Sands, who represents House District 95 in Missoula and works as development director for the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula. “It’s ridiculous, of course, but it’s also threatening to think that the federal government is willing to use its influence and try to chill discussion about this subject.” Sands isn’t the only one with concerns. At least one other legislator declined comment regarding DEA questions about the legislator’s duties out of concern over “additional harassment.” And the American Civil Liberties Union in Montana, which is itself full of attorneys, spoke with an outside attorney in regards to its advocacy work regarding marijuana. “When you hear this sort of thing, there’s a part of you that just gets irritated, but there’s a part of you that knows you have to, as an organization, make sure you’ve dotted the I’s and crossed the T’s,” said the ACLU’s executive director, Scott Crichton.
Sands and the ACLU aren’t actually worried about criminal charges. They’ve done nothing wrong other than advocate a point of view counter to the opinion held by federal law enforcement.   But both have played high-profile roles in the discussion over medical marijuana in Montana, and the ACLU has been vocal for years in its support for the legalization of marijuana. And they find abhorrent the idea that mere advocacy might be questioned. “It’s chilling, and it dredges up darker days from the ’50s and ’60s,” said Crichton. Sands is more blunt: “Can you say McCarthy? This sounds like stuff from the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joe McCarthy. So once you talk about medical marijuana in reasonable terms, you’re on some sort of list of possible conspirators.” Sands was chairwoman of an interim legislative committee that went to work before the 2011 Legislature to try to fashion a fix for Montana’s medical marijuana laws, which many viewed as responsible for the unregulated, Wild West atmosphere that seemed to be part of Montana’s medical marijuana industry. The committee’s efforts, which would have imposed new regulation but kept the industry substantially intact, ultimately were swept aside as the Republican-controlled Legislature enacted a far more rigorous regulatory scheme. In June, after the session ended, Sands suggested that the federal government “delist” medical marijuana – as it had done with wolves – and leave the issue to state control. Control is the issue. Medical marijuana businesses and advocates took heart when the Obama administration, through U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, appeared to suggest that the federal government wasn’t much interested in prosecuting marijuana cases.
As recently as December, Holder sounded a similar tone, when he answered questions from a member of Colorado’s congressional delegation.   “Where a state has taken a position, has passed a law and people are acting in conformity with the law – not abusing the law – that would not be a priority with the limited resources of our Justice Department,” Holder said. That statement is open to interpretation, and the government’s actions don’t precisely match Holder’s words. “I think you can draw an opinion on how the federal government feels about (Montana) when you consider that the government announced a series of raids just as the Montana Senate was voting on our medical marijuana laws,” Crichton said. “It’s no coincidence.” Those raids came on March 15, one day after the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to kill a bill that would have repealed the state’s initiative-passed medical marijuana law. More than 25 search warrants were served that day on medical marijuana businesses all over the state, and four civil seizure warrants looking to confiscate about $4 million were also executed. Now those cases are working their way through the legal system and, apparently, that’s where Diane Sands’ name surfaced in the DEA investigation. Neither the DEA nor the U.S. Attorney’s Office will say why Sands’ name came up. In fact, Montana U.S. Attorney Mike Cotter’s office answered questions about the incident by emailing a reporter a handful of opinions, memos and court decisions. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jessica Fehr said the office can’t respond to specific inquiries about cases, and declined to talk in general about the U.S. attorney’s goals in terms of prosecuting medical marijuana cases. And that leaves legislators like Sands irritated.   “All you really want from them is some sense of direction,” she said. “But you can’t get it. Instead, you get vague answers about policy, which you can only judge by the way those things seem to be put into action.” State legislative leaders wrote to Cotter in mid-April, requesting guidance on the state’s proposed regulatory scheme, and got a response that reiterated basic facts about federal law and said nothing about the state’s plan to regulate the industry.
“While the Department of Justice has not reviewed the specific legislative proposal for licensing and regulating medical marijuana that you indicate is being finalized, the Department has stated on many occasions that Congress placed marijuana in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act and, as such, growing, distributing, and possessing marijuana in any capacity, other than as part of a federally authorized research program, is a violation of federal law regardless of state laws that purport to permit such activities,” Cotter wrote. And that, Crichton said, is where the seemingly arbitrary nature of federal prosecution rears its head. “So, it’s all illegal, they’re saying, but it’s not all going to be prosecuted,” he said. “That’s a very difficult playing field for people to navigate.” In fact, John Masterson of Montana NORML, which works to reform marijuana laws, said he flatly tells people interested in the medical marijuana business to stand aside for now. “If people ask me now how to start a business, I just tell them to stay the hell away,” Masterson said. “There’s simply no way that you could go into business with any degree of certainty about what the federal government might do.” Sands’ name surfaced close to the time that other public officials’ names appeared in search warrant applications in federal medical marijuana cases. In a case involving former University of Montana football player Jason Washington, such an application was accidentally unsealed for several days and acquired by the Associated Press and the Missoulian. That affidavit revealed a possible plan by alleged conspirators to bribe public officials, including Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock and state Sen. Dave Lewis.   It’s precisely that sort of information that might lead to someone like Sands surfacing in a DEA investigation, DEA Special Agent Mike Turner said. Turner is a DEA spokesman in Denver, and he handles questions regarding actions taken by the Montana field offices of the DEA. Turner said he couldn’t comment on any particular case, but he said the DEA has a duty to track down names that emerge in investigations.
“Does that mean the person has done something wrong just because their name shows up?” Turner said. “Certainly not. But it’s our duty to investigate why it came up.”Turner said the DEA is not in the business of making political statements through name-dropping in its investigations. “We’re certainly not out there dropping people’s names with the intention of doing them harm,” he said. “We’re not in the business of scaring people.” On the other hand, Turner said anyone who is “profiting significantly” from the sale of marijuana should be concerned. “We’re not interested in sick people, but we are interested in people who are profiting significantly. If they are, they are fair game as long as there is a reasonable expectation for a successful prosecution.” Turner agreed that the debate surrounding medical marijuana is wracked by confusion, but he is clear about where the DEA’s interests fall. “It is true that we’ve got competing laws in place here with states with medical marijuana laws, but federal law is clear,” he said. “Marijuana is illegal under federal law. If you are involved in selling marijuana, trafficking marijuana, profiting from marijuana, you are in jeopardy. We get questions about what we’ll investigate and what we won’t, and we can’t give that answer. But if you’re involved with profiting from marijuana, you’re in jeopardy.” That might provide some small comfort to Sands, but she’s not convinced that the federal government and DEA aren’t in the business of sending harsh messages to those who disagree with them. “The bottom line is, there’s no reason for my name to come up,” she said. “So they can say what they want about who they are going to prosecute, but when a state has an ongoing discussion about its laws, and its lawmakers’ names are being brought up by federal agents, I will be hard to convince that there’s any other reason than to send a message.”

2012-01-29T20:32:00.001-08:00

2012-01-29 "Mitt and the White Horse Prophecy - A close look at the roots of Romney's -- and the Mormon church's -- political ambitions" by Sally Denton
[http://www.salon.com/2012/01/29/mitt_and_the_white_horse_prophecy/singleton/]
When Mitt Romney received his patriarchal blessing as a Michigan teenager, he was told that the Lord expected great things from him. All young Mormon men — the “worthy males” of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as it is officially known — receive such a blessing as they embark on their requisite journeys as religious missionaries. But at 19 years of age, the youngest son of the most prominent Mormon in American politics — a seventh-generation direct descendant of one of the faith’s founding 12 apostles—Mitt Romney had been singled out as a destined leader.
From the time of his birth — March 13, 1947 — through adolescence and into manhood, the meshing of religion and politics was paramount in Mitt Romney’s life. Called “my miracle baby” by his mother, who had been told by her physician that it was impossible for her to bear a fourth child, Romney was christened Willard Mitt Romney in honor of close family friend and one of the richest Mormons in history, J. Willard Marriott.
In 1962, when Mitt — as they decided to call him — was a sophomore in high school, his father, George W. Romney, was elected governor of Michigan. Throughout the early 1960s, Mitt collected petition signatures, campaigned at his father’s side, attended strategy sessions with his father’s political advisors, and interned at his father’s office during all three of his gubernatorial terms. He attended the 1964 Republican National Convention where his father led a challenge of moderates against the right-wing Barry Goldwater. Although he was fulfilling his spiritual obligation as a Mormon missionary in France in 1968 while his father was the front-running GOP presidential candidate, Mitt was kept apprised of the political developments back in the U.S.
Upon completion of his foreign mission, he immersed himself in the 1970 senatorial campaign of his mother, Lenore Romney, who was running against Phillip Hart in the Michigan general election. That same year, the Cougar Club — the all male, all white social club at Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City (blacks were excluded from full membership in the Mormon church until 1978) — was humming with talk that its president, Mitt Romney, would become the first Mormon president of the United States. “If not Mitt, then who?” was the ubiquitous slogan within the elite organization. The pious world of BYU was expected to spawn the man who would lead the Mormons into the White House and fulfill the prophecies of the church’s founder, Joseph Smith Jr., which Romney has avidly sought to realize.
Romney avoids mentioning it, but Smith ran for president in 1844 as an independent commander in chief of an “army of God” advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government in favor of a Mormon-ruled theocracy. Challenging Democrat James Polk and Whig Henry Clay, Smith prophesied that if the U.S. Congress did not accede to his demands that “they shall be broken up as a government and God shall damn them.” Smith viewed capturing the presidency as part of the mission of the church. He had predicted the emergence of “the one Mighty and Strong” — a leader who would “set in order the house of God” — and became the first of many prominent Mormon men to claim the mantle.
Smith’s insertion of religion into politics and his call for a “theodemocracy where God and people hold the power to conduct the affairs of men in righteous matters” created a sensation and drew hostility from the outside world. But his candidacy was cut short when he was shot to death by an anti-Mormon vigilante mob. Out of Smith’s national political ambitions grew what would become known in Mormon circles as the “White Horse Prophecy” — a belief ingrained in Mormon culture and passed down through generations by church leaders that the day would come when the U.S. Constitution would “hang like a thread as fine as a silk fiber” and the Mormon priesthood would save it.
Romney is the product of this culture. At BYU, he was idolized by fellow students and referred to, only half jokingly, as the “One Mighty and Strong.” He was the “alpha male” in the rarefied Cougar pack, according to Michael D. Moody, a BYU classmate and fellow member of the group. Composed almost exclusively of returned Mormon missionaries, the club members were known for their preppy blue blazers and enthusiastic athletic boosterism. Romney, who had been the assistant to the president of the French Mission where he was personally in charge of more than 200 missionaries, easily assumed a leadership position in the club.
Both political and religious, the Cougar Club raised funds for the school and its members emulated the campus-wide honor and dress codes, passionately disavowing the counterculture symbolism of long hair, bell-bottom jeans and antiwar slogans that were sweeping college campuses throughout America. They held monthly “Fireside testimonies” — Sacrament meetings at which each member testified to his belief that he lived in Heaven before being born on Earth, that he became mortal in order to usher in the latter days, and that he recognized Joseph Smith as the prophet, the Book of Mormon as the word of God, and the Mormon church as the one true faith.
Such regular testimonies encouraged the students to live devout lives and to resist the encroaching outside influences overtaking the nation at large. “It helps them cope with such external pressures as evolution-teaching professors and cranky anthropologists who expect answers that conflict with LDS teachings,” according to James Coates, author of “In Mormon Circles.”
They traditionally hosted frat-like parties (Greek fraternities were banned from the campus) to raise a few thousand dollars for the college’s sports teams. But Cougar president Romney drove the young men to aim higher, orchestrating a telethon that raised a stunning million dollars. Romney’s position as head of the club was widely seen as a calculated steppingstone for a career in national politics.
So it seemed disingenuous to his former club mates when, in a 2006 magazine interview, Romney denied his longtime political aspirations. “I have to admit I did not think I was going to be in politics,” he told the American Spectator. “Had I thought politics was in my future, I would not have chosen Massachusetts as the state of my residence. I would have stayed in Michigan where my Dad’s name was golden.”
Michael Moody says political success was an institutional value of the LDS church.
“The instructions in my [patriarchal] blessing, which I believed came directly from Jesus, motivated me to seek a career in government and politics,” he wrote in his 2008 book. Moody recently said that he ran for governor of Nevada in 1982 because he felt he had been divinely directed to “expand our kingdom” and help Romney “lead the world into the Millennium. Once a firm believer but now a church critic, Moody was indoctrinated with the White Horse Prophecy. Like Romney, Moody is a seventh-generation Mormon, steeped in the same intellectual and theological milieu.
“We were taught that America is the Promised Land,” he said in an interview.”The Mormons are the Chosen People. And the time is now for a Mormon leader to usher in the second coming of Christ and install the political Kingdom of God in Washington, D.C.”
In this scenario, Romney’s candidacy is part of the eternal plan and the candidate himself is fulfilling the destiny begun in what the church calls the “pre-existence.”
Several prominent Mormons, including conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck, have alluded to this apocalyptic prophecy. The controversial myth is not an official church doctrine, but it has also arisen in the national dialogue with the presidential candidacies of Mormons George Romney, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and now Mitt Romney.
“I don’t think the White Horse Prophecy is fair to bring up at all,” Mitt Romney told the Salt Lake Tribune when he was asked about it during his 2008 presidential bid. “It’s been rejected by every church leader that has talked about it. It has nothing to do with anything.”
Pundits and scholars, rabbis and bloggers, have repeatedly posed the question during Romney’s run: Is a candidate’s religion relevant? With a startling 50 percent increase of recently polled American voters claiming to know little or nothing about Mormonism, another 32 percent rejecting Mormonism as a Christian faith, a whopping 42 percent saying they would feel “somewhat or very uncomfortable” with a Mormon president, and a widespread sense that the religion is a cult, the issue is clearly more complicated than religious bigotry alone. Judging from poll results, Americans seem less prejudiced against a candidate’s faith than concerned about the unknown, apprehensive about any kind of fanaticism, and generally uneasy about a religion that is neither mainstream Judaic nor Christian.
Just as the Christian fundamentalism of former GOP candidates Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry informed their political ideology — and was therefore considered fair game in the national dialogue — so too does Mormonism define not only Mitt Romney’s character, but what kind of president he would be and what impulses would drive him in both domestic and foreign policy.
Romney’s religion is not a sideline, but a crucial element in understanding the man, the mission and the candidacy. He is the quintessential Mormon who embodies all of the basic elements of the homegrown American religion that is among the fastest growing religions in the world. Like his father before him, Romney has charted a course from missionary to businessman, from church bishop to politician — and to presidential candidate. The influence that Mormonism has had on him has dominated every step of the way.
The seeds of Romney’s unique brand of conservatism, often regarded with intense suspicion by most non-Mormon conservatives, were sown in the secretive, acquisitive, patriarchal, authoritarian religious empire run by “quorums” of men under an umbrella consortium called the General Authorities. A creed unlike any other in the United States, from its inception Mormonism encouraged material prosperity and abundance as a measure of holy worth, and its strict system of tithing 10 percent of individual wealth has made the church one of the world’s richest institutions.
A multibillion-dollar business empire that includes agribusiness, mining, insurance, electronic and print media, manufacturing, movie production, commercial real estate, defense contracting, retail stores and banking, the Mormon church has unprecedented economic and political power. Despite a solemn stricture against any act or tolerance of gambling, Mormons have been heavily invested and exceptionally influential in the Nevada gaming industry since the great expansion of modern Las Vegas in the 1950s. Valued for their unquestioning loyalty to authority as well as general sobriety — they are prohibited from imbibing in alcohol, tobacco or coffee — Mormons have long been recruited into top positions in government agencies and multinational corporations. They are prominent in such institutions as the CIA, FBI and the national nuclear weapons laboratories, giving the church a sphere of influence unlike any other American religion in the top echelons of government.
Romney, like his father before him who voluntarily tithed an unparalleled 19 percent of his personal fortune, is among the church’s wealthiest members. And like his father, grandfather and great-grandfathers before him, Mitt Romney was groomed for a prominent position in the church, which he manifested first as a missionary, then as a bishop, and then as a stake president, becoming the highest-ranking Mormon leader in Boston — the equivalent of a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church.
Called a “militant millennial movement” by renowned Mormon historian David L. Bigler, Mormonism’s founding theology was based upon a literal takeover of the U.S. government. In light of the theology and divine prophecies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, unamended by the LDS hierarchy, it would seem that the office of the American presidency is the ultimate ecclesiastical position to which a Mormon leader might aspire. So it is not the LDS cosmology that is relevant to Romney’s candidacy, but whether devout 21stcentury Mormons like Romney believe that the American presidency is also a theological position.
Since his first campaign in 2008, Romney has attempted to keep debate about his religion out of the political discourse. The issue is not whether there is a religious test for political office; the Constitution prohibits it. Instead, the question is whether, past all of the flip-flops on virtually every policy, he has an underlying religious conception of the presidency and the American government. At the recent GOP presidential debate in Florida, Romney professed that the Declaration of Independence is a theological document, not specific to the rebellious 13 colonies, but establishing a covenant “between God and man.” Which would suggest that Mitt Romney views the American presidency as a theological office.

2012-01-28T12:19:00.000-08:00

2012-01-30 "The Caging of America: Why do we lock up so many people? by Adam Gopnik
[http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik?printable=true&currentPage=all]
Six million people are under correctional supervision in the U.S.—more than were in Stalin’s gulags. Photograph by Steve Liss.

A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.
That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.
For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.
The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.
How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction? There’s a fairly large recent scholarly literature on the history and sociology of crime and punishment, and it tends to trace the American zeal for punishment back to the nineteenth century, apportioning blame in two directions. There’s an essentially Northern explanation, focussing on the inheritance of the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, and its “reformist” tradition; and a Southern explanation, which sees the prison system as essentially a slave plantation continued by other means. Robert Perkinson, the author of the Southern revisionist tract “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,” traces two ancestral lines, “from the North, the birthplace of rehabilitative penology, to the South, the fountainhead of subjugationist discipline.” In other words, there’s the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes.
William J. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School who died shortly before his masterwork, “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice,” was published, last fall, is the most forceful advocate for the view that the scandal of our prisons derives from the Enlightenment-era, “procedural” nature of American justice. He runs through the immediate causes of the incarceration epidemic: the growth of post-Rockefeller drug laws, which punished minor drug offenses with major prison time; “zero tolerance” policing, which added to the group; mandatory-sentencing laws, which prevented judges from exercising judgment. But his search for the ultimate cause leads deeper, all the way to the Bill of Rights. In a society where Constitution worship is still a requisite on right and left alike, Stuntz startlingly suggests that the Bill of Rights is a terrible document with which to start a justice system—much inferior to the exactly contemporary French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which Jefferson, he points out, may have helped shape while his protégé Madison was writing ours.
The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles. The Declaration of the Rights of Man says, Be just! The Bill of Rights says, Be fair! Instead of announcing general principles—no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be done—it talks procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason; you can’t accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence; and so on. This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice. You can get off if the cops looked in the wrong car with the wrong warrant when they found your joint, but you have no recourse if owning the joint gets you locked up for life. You may be spared the death penalty if you can show a problem with your appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence that you weren’t guilty in the first place and the jury got it wrong. Even clauses that Americans are taught to revere are, Stuntz maintains, unworthy of reverence: the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” was designed to protect cruel punishments—flogging and branding—that were not at that time unusual.
The obsession with due process and the cult of brutal prisons, the argument goes, share an essential impersonality. The more professionalized and procedural a system is, the more insulated we become from its real effects on real people. That’s why America is famous both for its process-driven judicial system (“The bastard got off on a technicality,” the cop-show detective fumes) and for the harshness and inhumanity of its prisons. Though all industrialized societies started sending more people to prison and fewer to the gallows in the eighteenth century, it was in Enlightenment-inspired America that the taste for long-term, profoundly depersonalized punishment became most aggravated. The inhumanity of American prisons was as much a theme for Dickens, visiting America in 1842, as the cynicism of American lawyers. His shock when he saw the Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia—a “model” prison, at the time the most expensive public building ever constructed in the country, where every prisoner was kept in silent, separate confinement—still resonates:
I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.
Not roused up to stay—that was the point. Once the procedure ends, the penalty begins, and, as long as the cruelty is routine, our civil responsibility toward the punished is over. We lock men up and forget about their existence. For Dickens, even the corrupt but communal debtors’ prisons of old London were better than this. “Don’t take it personally!”—that remains the slogan above the gate to the American prison Inferno. Nor is this merely a historian’s vision. Conrad Black, at the high end, has a scary and persuasive picture of how his counsel, the judge, and the prosecutors all merrily congratulated each other on their combined professional excellence just before sending him off to the hoosegow for several years. If a millionaire feels that way, imagine how the ordinary culprit must feel.
In place of abstraction, Stuntz argues for the saving grace of humane discretion. Basically, he thinks, we should go into court with an understanding of what a crime is and what justice is like, and then let common sense and compassion and specific circumstance take over. There’s a lovely scene in “The Castle,” the Australian movie about a family fighting eminent-domain eviction, where its hapless lawyer, asked in court to point to the specific part of the Australian constitution that the eviction violates, says desperately, “It’s . . . just the vibe of the thing.” For Stuntz, justice ought to be just the vibe of the thing—not one procedural error caught or one fact worked around. The criminal law should once again be more like the common law, with judges and juries not merely finding fact but making law on the basis of universal principles of fairness, circumstance, and seriousness, and crafting penalties to the exigencies of the crime.
The other argument—the Southern argument—is that this story puts too bright a face on the truth. The reality of American prisons, this argument runs, has nothing to do with the knots of procedural justice or the perversions of Enlightenment-era ideals. Prisons today operate less in the rehabilitative mode of the Northern reformers “than in a retributive mode that has long been practiced and promoted in the South,” Perkinson, an American-studies professor, writes. “American prisons trace their lineage not only back to Pennsylvania penitentiaries but to Texas slave plantations.” White supremacy is the real principle, this thesis holds, and racial domination the real end. In response to the apparent triumphs of the sixties, mass imprisonment became a way of reimposing Jim Crow. Blacks are now incarcerated seven times as often as whites. “The system of mass incarceration works to trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage,” the legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes. Young black men pass quickly from a period of police harassment into a period of “formal control” (i.e., actual imprisonment) and then are doomed for life to a system of “invisible control.” Prevented from voting, legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives, most will cycle back through the prison system. The system, in this view, is not really broken; it is doing what it was designed to do. Alexander’s grim conclusion: “If mass incarceration is considered as a system of social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic success.”
Northern impersonality and Southern revenge converge on a common American theme: a growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible. No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:
Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.
Brecht could hardly have imagined such a document: a capitalist enterprise that feeds on the misery of man trying as hard as it can to be sure that nothing is done to decrease that misery.
Yet a spectre haunts all these accounts, North and South, whether process gone mad or penal colony writ large. It is that the epidemic of imprisonment seems to track the dramatic decline in crime over the same period. The more bad guys there are in prison, it appears, the less crime there has been in the streets. The real background to the prison boom, which shows up only sporadically in the prison literature, is the crime wave that preceded and overlapped it.
For those too young to recall the big-city crime wave of the sixties and seventies, it may seem like mere bogeyman history. For those whose entire childhood and adolescence were set against it, it is the crucial trauma in recent American life and explains much else that happened in the same period. It was the condition of the Upper West Side of Manhattan under liberal rule, far more than what had happened to Eastern Europe under socialism, that made neo-con polemics look persuasive. There really was, as Stuntz himself says, a liberal consensus on crime (“Wherever the line is between a merciful justice system and one that abandons all serious effort at crime control, the nation had crossed it”), and it really did have bad effects.
Yet if, in 1980, someone had predicted that by 2012 New York City would have a crime rate so low that violent crime would have largely disappeared as a subject of conversation, he would have seemed not so much hopeful as crazy. Thirty years ago, crime was supposed to be a permanent feature of the city, produced by an alienated underclass of super-predators; now it isn’t. Something good happened to change it, and you might have supposed that the change would be an opportunity for celebration and optimism. Instead, we mostly content ourselves with grudging and sardonic references to the silly side of gentrification, along with a few all-purpose explanations, like broken-window policing. This is a general human truth: things that work interest us less than things that don’t.
So what is the relation between mass incarceration and the decrease in crime? Certainly, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, many experts became persuaded that there was no way to make bad people better; all you could do was warehouse them, for longer or shorter periods. The best research seemed to show, depressingly, that nothing works—that rehabilitation was a ruse. Then, in 1983, inmates at the maximum-security federal prison in Marion, Illinois, murdered two guards. Inmates had been (very occasionally) killing guards for a long time, but the timing of the murders, and the fact that they took place in a climate already prepared to believe that even ordinary humanity was wasted on the criminal classes, meant that the entire prison was put on permanent lockdown. A century and a half after absolute solitary first appeared in American prisons, it was reintroduced. Those terrible numbers began to grow.
And then, a decade later, crime started falling: across the country by a standard measure of about forty per cent; in New York City by as much as eighty per cent. By 2010, the crime rate in New York had seen its greatest decline since the Second World War; in 2002, there were fewer murders in Manhattan than there had been in any year since 1900. In social science, a cause sought is usually a muddle found; in life as we experience it, a crisis resolved is causality established. If a pill cures a headache, we do not ask too often if the headache might have gone away by itself.
All this ought to make the publication of Franklin E. Zimring’s new book, “The City That Became Safe,” a very big event. Zimring, a criminologist at Berkeley Law, has spent years crunching the numbers of what happened in New York in the context of what happened in the rest of America. One thing he teaches us is how little we know. The forty per cent drop across the continent—indeed, there was a decline throughout the Western world— took place for reasons that are as mysterious in suburban Ottawa as they are in the South Bronx. Zimring shows that the usual explanations—including demographic shifts—simply can’t account for what must be accounted for. This makes the international decline look slightly eerie: blackbirds drop from the sky, plagues slacken and end, and there seems no absolute reason that societies leap from one state to another over time. Trends and fashions and fads and pure contingencies happen in other parts of our social existence; it may be that there are fashions and cycles in criminal behavior, too, for reasons that are just as arbitrary.
But the additional forty per cent drop in crime that seems peculiar to New York finally succumbs to Zimring’s analysis. The change didn’t come from resolving the deep pathologies that the right fixated on—from jailing super predators, driving down the number of unwed mothers, altering welfare culture. Nor were there cures for the underlying causes pointed to by the left: injustice, discrimination, poverty. Nor were there any “Presto!” effects arising from secret patterns of increased abortions or the like. The city didn’t get much richer; it didn’t get much poorer. There was no significant change in the ethnic makeup or the average wealth or educational levels of New Yorkers as violent crime more or less vanished. “Broken windows” or “turnstile jumping” policing, that is, cracking down on small visible offenses in order to create an atmosphere that refused to license crime, seems to have had a negligible effect; there was, Zimring writes, a great difference between the slogans and the substance of the time. (Arrests for “visible” nonviolent crime—e.g., street prostitution and public gambling—mostly went down through the period.)
Instead, small acts of social engineering, designed simply to stop crimes from happening, helped stop crime. In the nineties, the N.Y.P.D. began to control crime not by fighting minor crimes in safe places but by putting lots of cops in places where lots of crimes happened—“hot-spot policing.” The cops also began an aggressive, controversial program of “stop and frisk”—“designed to catch the sharks, not the dolphins,” as Jack Maple, one of its originators, described it—that involved what’s called pejoratively “profiling.” This was not so much racial, since in any given neighborhood all the suspects were likely to be of the same race or color, as social, involving the thousand small clues that policemen recognized already. Minority communities, Zimring emphasizes, paid a disproportionate price in kids stopped and frisked, and detained, but they also earned a disproportionate gain in crime reduced. “The poor pay more and get more” is Zimring’s way of putting it. He believes that a “light” program of stop-and-frisk could be less alienating and just as effective, and that by bringing down urban crime stop-and-frisk had the net effect of greatly reducing the number of poor minority kids in prison for long stretches.
Zimring insists, plausibly, that he is offering a radical and optimistic rewriting of theories of what crime is and where criminals are, not least because it disconnects crime and minorities. “In 1961, twenty six percent of New York City’s population was minority African American or Hispanic. Now, half of New York’s population is—and what that does in an enormously hopeful way is to destroy the rude assumptions of supply side criminology,” he says. By “supply side criminology,” he means the conservative theory of crime that claimed that social circumstances produced a certain net amount of crime waiting to be expressed; if you stopped it here, it broke out there. The only way to stop crime was to lock up all the potential criminals. In truth, criminal activity seems like most other human choices—a question of contingent occasions and opportunity. Crime is not the consequence of a set number of criminals; criminals are the consequence of a set number of opportunities to commit crimes. Close down the open drug market in Washington Square, and it does not automatically migrate to Tompkins Square Park. It just stops, or the dealers go indoors, where dealing goes on but violent crime does not.
And, in a virtuous cycle, the decreased prevalence of crime fuels a decrease in the prevalence of crime. When your friends are no longer doing street robberies, you’re less likely to do them. Zimring said, in a recent interview, “Remember, nobody ever made a living mugging. There’s no minimum wage in violent crime.” In a sense, he argues, it’s recreational, part of a life style: “Crime is a routine behavior; it’s a thing people do when they get used to doing it.” And therein lies its essential fragility. Crime ends as a result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.” Conservatives don’t like this view because it shows that being tough doesn’t help; liberals don’t like it because apparently being nice doesn’t help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.
One fact stands out. While the rest of the country, over the same twenty-year period, saw the growth in incarceration that led to our current astonishing numbers, New York, despite the Rockefeller drug laws, saw a marked decrease in its number of inmates. “New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave,” Zimring observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison. The logic is self-evident if we just transfer it to the realm of white-collar crime: we easily accept that there is no net sum of white-collar crime waiting to happen, no inscrutable generation of super-predators produced by Dewar’s-guzzling dads and scaly M.B.A. profs; if you stop an embezzlement scheme here on Third Avenue, another doesn’t naturally start in the next office building. White-collar crime happens through an intersection of pathology and opportunity; getting the S.E.C. busy ending the opportunity is a good way to limit the range of the pathology.
Social trends deeper and less visible to us may appear as future historians analyze what went on. Something other than policing may explain things—just as the coming of cheap credit cards and state lotteries probably did as much to weaken the Mafia’s Five Families in New York, who had depended on loan sharking and numbers running, as the F.B.I. could. It is at least possible, for instance, that the coming of the mobile phone helped drive drug dealing indoors, in ways that helped drive down crime. It may be that the real value of hot spot and stop-and-frisk was that it provided a single game plan that the police believed in; as military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it’s a good plan. But one thing is sure: social epidemics, of crime or of punishment, can be cured more quickly than we might hope with simpler and more superficial mechanisms than we imagine. Throwing a Band-Aid over a bad wound is actually a decent strategy, if the Band-Aid helps the wound to heal itself.
Which leads, further, to one piece of radical common sense: since prison plays at best a small role in stopping even violent crime, very few people, rich or poor, should be in prison for a nonviolent crime. Neither the streets nor the society is made safer by having marijuana users or peddlers locked up, let alone with the horrific sentences now dispensed so easily. For that matter, no social good is served by having the embezzler or the Ponzi schemer locked in a cage for the rest of his life, rather than having him bankrupt and doing community service in the South Bronx for the next decade or two. Would we actually have more fraud and looting of shareholder value if the perpetrators knew that they would lose their bank accounts and their reputation, and have to do community service seven days a week for five years? It seems likely that anyone for whom those sanctions aren’t sufficient is someone for whom no sanctions are ever going to be sufficient. Zimring’s research shows clearly that, if crime drops on the street, criminals coming out of prison stop committing crimes. What matters is the incidence of crime in the world, and the continuity of a culture of crime, not some “lesson learned” in prison.
At the same time, the ugly side of stop-and-frisk can be alleviated. To catch sharks and not dolphins, Zimring’s work suggests, we need to adjust the size of the holes in the nets—to make crimes that are the occasion for stop-and-frisks real crimes, not crimes like marijuana possession. When the New York City police stopped and frisked kids, the main goal was not to jail them for having pot but to get their fingerprints, so that they could be identified if they committed a more serious crime. But all over America the opposite happens: marijuana possession becomes the serious crime. The cost is so enormous, though, in lives ruined and money spent, that the obvious thing to do is not to enforce the law less but to change it now. Dr. Johnson said once that manners make law, and that when manners alter, the law must, too. It’s obvious that marijuana is now an almost universally accepted drug in America: it is not only used casually (which has been true for decades) but also talked about casually on television and in the movies (which has not). One need only watch any stoner movie to see that the perceived risks of smoking dope are not that you’ll get arrested but that you’ll get in trouble with a rival frat or look like an idiot to women. The decriminalization of marijuana would help end the epidemic of imprisonment.
The rate of incarceration in most other rich, free countries, whatever the differences in their histories, is remarkably steady. In countries with Napoleonic justice or common law or some mixture of the two, in countries with adversarial systems and in those with magisterial ones, whether the country once had brutal plantation-style penal colonies, as France did, or was once itself a brutal plantation-style penal colony, like Australia, the natural rate of incarceration seems to hover right around a hundred men per hundred thousand people. (That doesn’t mean it doesn’t get lower in rich, homogeneous countries—just that it never gets much higher in countries otherwise like our own.) It seems that one man in every thousand once in a while does a truly bad thing. All other things being equal, the point of a justice system should be to identify that thousandth guy, find a way to keep him from harming other people, and give everyone else a break.
Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. “Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges” is usually the very best thing to do with a problem; keep chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to its heart. To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities. Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime.
“Oh, I have taken too little care of this!” King Lear cries out on the heath in his moment of vision. “Take physic, pomp; expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” “This” changes; in Shakespeare’s time, it was flat-out peasant poverty that starved some and drove others as mad as poor Tom. In Dickens’s and Hugo’s time, it was the industrial revolution that drove kids to mines. But every society has a poor storm that wretches suffer in, and the attitude is always the same: either that the wretches, already dehumanized by their suffering, deserve no pity or that the oppressed, overwhelmed by injustice, will have to wait for a better world. At every moment, the injustice seems inseparable from the community’s life, and in every case the arguments for keeping the system in place were that you would have to revolutionize the entire social order to change it—which then became the argument for revolutionizing the entire social order. In every case, humanity and common sense made the insoluble problem just get up and go away. Prisons are our this. We need take more care. ♦

2012-01-28T11:57:00.000-08:00

2012-01-25 "ForestEthics Declared “Enemy of the People of Canada” for Criticism of Oil Sands Projects"
by Lloyd Alter from "TreeHugger"
[http://www.treehugger.com/energy-policy/forestethics-declared-enemy-people-canada-its-criticism-oil-sands.html]
In his book, Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil [http://www.treehugger.com/culture/book-review-crude-world-by-peter-maass.html], Peter Maass showed how oil isn’t just environmentally dirty, it is an ethical and moral poison as well. Canadians are getting a taste of that poison right now, as the Prime Minister and his government unleash an unprecedented attack on those who oppose the Northern Gateway pipeline proposed to carry bitumen from the Alberta Tar Sands to the Pacific Coast [http://www.treehugger.com/fossil-fuels/northern-gateway-tar-sands-pipeline-decision-delayed-2013.html].
First we had the Minister of Natural Resources attacking those against the pipeline as “radical groups” [http://www.treehugger.com/energy-policy/canadas-minister-natural-resources-calls-anti-pipeline-protesters-radicals-supported-jet-setting-celebrities.html] who:
[begin extract]
use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest. They attract jet-setting celebrities with some of the largest personal carbon footprints in the world to lecture Canadians not to develop our natural resources.
[end extract]
Now it appears that they are using Canadian tax rules as a hakapik to club charitable organizations into silence and submission. Yesterday Andrew Frank, until recently the Communications Director for ForestEthics [http://forestethics.org/], released an open letter that made a series of claims:
[begin extract]
Today, I am taking the extraordinary step of risking my career, my reputation and my personal friendships, to act as a whistleblower and expose the undemocratic and potentially illegal pressure the Harper government has apparently applied to silence critics of the Enbridge Northern Gateway oil tanker/pipeline plan.
As I have detailed in a sworn affidavit, no less than three senior managers with TidesCanada and ForestEthics (a charitable project of Tides Canada), have informed me, as theSenior Communications Manager for ForestEthics, that Tides Canada CEO, Ross McMillan,was informed by the Prime Minister’s Office, that ForestEthics is considered an “Enemy of the Government of Canada,” and an “Enemy of the people of Canada.”
This language was apparently part of a threat by the Prime Minister’s Office to challenge the charitable status of Tides Canada if it did not agree to stop funding ForestEthics, specifically its work opposing oilsands expansion and construction of oilsands tanker/pipeline routes in Canada.
[end extract]
He was not planning on speaking out, but was apparently frustrated that nobody in the organizations involved was.
[begin extract]
After waiting more than two weeks for Tides Canada to go public with this story, it has become clear to me that the organization is too afraid of reprisals from the government to act. Tides is responsible for the employment of hundreds of Canadians and dozens of crucial environmental projects like the Great Bear Rainforest, and has been understandably paralyzed in challenging the Prime Minister’s Office on this matter. I on the other hand, am speaking out as a private citizen because I feel that the rights and civil liberties of my fellowCanadian citizens, including freedom of expression and freedom of speech, are at risk.
[end extract]
Read the entire open letter here [http://www.scribd.com/doc/79228736/Whistleblower-s-Open-Letter-to-Canadians].
Andrew Frank was immediately fired from ForestEthics. In a press conference call, co-founder Ziporah Berman said, “He was let go because he broke confidentiality and trust; any person who acts unilaterally as an individual, then it is unprofessional and a breach of trust.” She also describes the atmosphere among supporters and donors, the almost McCarthyite scare that is going around:
[begin extract]
Lets be clear, the tone of the Minister’s letter really do in a lot of ways harken back to another era, and people are extremely surprised and concerned. Canadians value democracy and free speech, and the government has overplayed its hand. Whatever you think about the pipeline, many agree that his government should be governing and not serving the oil industry…. and a lot of donors are getting scared that giving will result in reprisals, and this has made it difficult to plan.
[end extract]
Valerie Langer, Director of BC Forest Campaigns, said in a press release [http://forestethics.org/our-statement-on-recent-threats-to-canadian-civil-society-and-andrew-franks-open-letter]:
[begin extract]
We share these concerns with Andrew Frank, who is clearly concerned about the government trying to silence Canadians. Andrew worked with us for many years and was a valued part of this organization. He is no longer a member of ForestEthics’ staff because he violated the confidence of the organization, and we are unable to carry out our work without a solid foundation of trust between colleagues.
But the bigger picture remains: It is a dark and chilling day for Canadians when our government tries to silence and intimidate non profit organizations like ForestEthics, and the thousands of citizens and civil groups who, like us, are concerned about the direction this country is taking and are speaking out.
[end extract]
In Canada, donations to approved charitable organizations are tax deductible. Charitable status is hard to get, and the rules regarding what charities can actually do are controversial and open to interpretation. The Canada Revenue Ministry regulations [http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/chrts-gvng/chrts/plcy/cps/cps-022-eng.html#P147_14872] state that Charities may not participate in political activities, which include where the charity
[begin extract]
Explicitly communicates to the public that the law, policy, or decision of any level of government in Canada or a foreign country should be retained (if the retention of the law, policy or decision is being reconsidered by a government), opposed, or changed.
[end extract]
However it also makes very clear that a small proportion of political activity is inherent in almost every charity, so they set limits, usually 10% of the charity’s assets.
After the Minister of Natural Resources specifically attacked Tides Canada and “foreign jet-setters”, Tides responded [http://tidescanada.org/news/canadians-deserve-a-full-debate-on-our-energy-future/]:
[begin extract]
Merran Smith, director of Tides Canada’s Energy Initiative, says all Canadians deserve a voice in these conversations. “This contrived funding ‘debate’ is a red herring,” says Smith. “These are critical issues with long-term implications for Canada. We live in a democracy where all voices should be heard. It is totally appropriate for Tides Canada to support Canadian engagement in our public processes.”
[end extract]
It is not the least bit surprising to me that Stephen Harper would use the CRA and every tool at his disposal to stifle dissent; he is turning Canada into a Petro-state and turning himself into Hugo Chávez.
Alan Broadbent, a board member of Tides, summarized it nicely in the Globe and Mail [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/pipeline-politics-dont-demonize-the-charitable-sector/article2299266/]:
[begin extract]
Canada would be served better if the government let science speak, let the affected communities be heard, and let the full light of day shine. Demonizing the charitable and philanthropic sector is not in the national interest.
[end extract]

2012-01-28T11:12:00.000-08:00

2012-01-27 "Indiana Republicans Push Creationism In Public Schools" by Jessica Pieklo
[http://www.care2.com/causes/indiana-republicans-push-creationism-in-public-schools.html]
Republicans continue to parade their disdain for science all over state houses nationwide. This time it’s Indiana and the topic is creationism after an Indiana Senate panel approved a bill that would allow creationism to be taught in Indiana’s public schools [http://www.ibj.com/senate-panel-oks-creationism-teaching-bill/PARAMS/article/32182].
The Republican-controlled Senate Education Committee voted 8-2 on Wednesday to send the creationism in public schools bill to the full Senate for consideration. The bill allows schools to authorize “the teaching of various theories concerning the origin of life” and specifically mentions “creation science” as one such theory.
The bill advanced despite opposition from both the scientific and religious communities who pleaded with legislators to keep religion out of science classrooms. Purdue University professor of chemistry John Staver told the panel evolution is the only theory of life’s origins that relies on scientific investigations. He says creationism “is unquestionably a statement of a specific religion.”
If the religious community is split on whether or not teaching creationism the science curriculum in public schools is a good idea, don’t you think that’s a pretty good indication that it is not a good idea? And it’s not even as though critics are challenging the idea of creationism in schools in general. They are simply objecting to placing it in the science curriculum where students learn about the scientific process. If the theory to be taught can fit within this process then it deserves a place in the sciences. If it can’t then let the philosophy and humanities instructors deal with it.

2012-01-28T11:02:00.000-08:00

2012-01-27 "Twitter Censorship: #Fail" by Kristina Chew
[http://www.care2.com/causes/twitter-censorship-fail.html]
Twitter sparked an outcry — indeed, an #outcry and calls for a #TwitterBlackout– when it announced [http://blog.twitter.com/2012/01/tweets-still-must-flow.html] on Thursday that it now has “the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world.” That is, Twitter will now block certain messages in countries where certain content is considered illegal, when authorities make what is deemed a valid request. Users will know that something has been blocked on seeing “Tweet withheld” in a gray box, as well as a message that “This tweet from @username has been withheld in: [name of country].”
The response of a user from Sweden, Björn Nilsson, typified the feelings of many:
[begin excerpt]
“Thank you for the #censorship, #twitter, with love from the governments of #Syria, #Bahrain, #Iran, #Turkey, #China, #Saudi and friends.”
[end excerpt]
Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who was detained for 81 days by the Chinese government last year [http://www.care2.com/causes/china-detains-artist-ai-wei-wei.html], uses proxy services to post on Twitter which is banned in China. But Ai has tweeted that “If Twitter starts censoring, then I’ll stop tweeting.”
The Atlantic Wire points out there is actually a “pretty easy way to get around the whole ordeal.” Twitter censors tweets based on the country a user is located in. If you follow these instructions, you can find out how to change your location to a country with different censorship laws, to see a tweet that is censored in your own country.
The Atlantic Wire points out [http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/01/how-not-get-censored-twitter/47967/] there is actually a “pretty easy way to get around the whole ordeal.” Twitter censors tweets based on the country a user is located in. If you follow these instructions [https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169220], you can find out how to change your location to a country with different censorship laws, to see a tweet that is censored in your own country.
Twitter has always had to ”remove content that is illegal in one country or another, whether it is a copyright violation, child pornography or something else,” says the New York Times [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/28/technology/when-twitter-blocks-tweets-its-outrage.html?hp]. As Twitter representative Matt Graves told The Atlantic Wire, the company does “not proactively monitor or filter any content.” Twitter’s concern is not to censor what users tweet, but to comply with the censorship policies of different countries “just enough to get them off their backs” and to avoid having to shut down in some countries. The company will actually be posting removal requests on Chilling Effects, which is jointly run by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and several American universities.
While Twitter is taking what is a “logical step” as a global communication platform, it is, notes TechCrunch [http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/26/twitter-changes-the-contours-of-censorship-with-country-by-country-blocking/], an unfortunate sign that Twitter is conceding (if not kowtowing) to the policies of governments — including repressive regimes — around the world:
[begin extract]
Before this announcement, Twitter was a global platform on which something was either said or not said, on a global scale. Now, Twitter’s new power to enforce censorship depending on your country both legitimizes the blocks and concedes international territory specifically to countries that “have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression.” This diplomatic casting of the restriction of speech, from a company that is built around the idea of free communication, is troubling.
[end extract]
Jillian C. York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has described Twitter’s announcement as a “necessary evil.” The problem that Twitter has run into is one that internet companies are going to encounter as they seek to operate globally and in countries that restrict people’s rights to freedom of speech and expression. Politico [http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/72093.html] quotes Cynthia Wong, director of the Center for Democracy & Technology’s Global Internet Freedom project:
[begin extract]
“Companies are in a difficult position. Is it better for platforms to remain in a country even if some content is blocked?”
[end extract]
It is indeed a thin line that Twitter is walking. Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, notes that the change could alter the “usefulness of Twitter in authoritarian countries” and even render it “no longer helpful to a rebellion against oppressive governments.”
If such is the case, Twitter could be on its way to no longer being a “political tool.” Certainly will remain a platform to use to communicate with friends, share websites and articles, promote products and such. But as Twitter evolves into a global social and business platform, can it remain an agent of political change and human rights?

2012-01-28T10:53:00.000-08:00

2012-01-27 "North Carolina GOP: Public Hanging For Abortionists" by Jessica Pieklo
[http://www.care2.com/causes/north-carolina-gop-public-hanging-for-abortionists.html]
There’s something about a public hanging that strikes me as very oh, I don’t know, “cruel and unusual” and offensive to every last bit of human decency [http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/01/27/413611/north-carolina-gop-lawmaker-calls-for-bringing-back-public-hangings-starting-with-abortion-providers/]. Not so for North Carolina Republican Larry Pittman. In fact, Pittman things bringing back public hangings would be a great deterrent for “abortionists, rapists, and kidnappers.”
Pittman expressed this view in an email to every member of the North Carolina General Assembly. From Pittman’s email: “We need to make the death penalty a real deterrent again by actually carrying it out. Every appeal that can be made should have to be made at one time, not in a serial manner,” Pittman wrote in the email. “If murderers (and I would include abortionists, rapists, and kidnappers, as well) are actually executed, it will at least have the deterrent effect upon them. For my money, we should go back to public hangings, which would be more of a deterrent to others, as well.”
Criminalizing abortion is of course the very goal of the right, so it is no surprise to hear that a conservative lawmaker would view abortion providers as criminals. What is more telling is that Pittman’s position is quickly becoming the “center” for the right on the abortion issue. Last year alone Republicans in Nebraska, Iowa and South Carolina all pushed legislation that would essentially criminalize abortion and 2012 promises even more such measures.
And the harder to the right Republicans go on the abortion issue, the more violent their rhetoric. The more violent their rhetoric the more violent their actions. To call Pittman lumping abortion providers in with murderers and rapists as those who are first in line for a public hanging irresponsible would be generous.
Health care providers are not criminals, and it’s time conservatives get a grip and stop trying to treat them as such.

Banker's Dictatorship over USA

2012-01-27T13:06:00.000-08:00

2012-01-27 "What Would a “Good” Banking System Look Like? Banks Weren’t Meant to Be Like This" by MICHAEL HUDSON
[http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/27/banks-werent-meant-to-be-like-this/]
This article also appears in the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung.
MICHAEL HUDSON is a former Wall Street economist. A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), he is the author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (new ed., Pluto Press, 2002) and Trade, Development and Foreign Debt: A History of Theories of Polarization v. Convergence in the World Economy. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press. He can be reached via his website, mh@michael-hudson.com
---
In medieval times, wealthy bankers lent to kings and princes as their major customers. But now it is the banks that are needy, relying on governments for funding – capped by the post-2008 bailouts to save them from going bankrupt from their bad private-sector loans and gambles.
Yet the banks now browbeat governments – not by having ready cash but by threatening to go bust and drag the economy down with them if they are not given control of public tax policy, spending and planning. The process has gone furthest in the United States. Joseph Stiglitz characterizes the Obama administration’s vast transfer of money and pubic debt to the banks as a “privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. It is a ‘partnership’ in which one partner robs the other.” Prof. Bill Black describes banks as becoming criminogenic and innovating “control fraud.” High finance has corrupted regulatory agencies, falsified account-keeping by “mark to model” trickery, and financed the campaigns of its supporters to disable public oversight. The effect is to leave banks in control of how the economy’s allocates its credit and resources.
If there is any silver lining to today’s debt crisis, it is that the present situation and trends cannot continue. So this is not only an opportunity to restructure banking; we have little choice. The urgent issue is who will control the economy: governments, or the financial sector and monopolies with which it has made an alliance.
Fortunately, it is not necessary to re-invent the wheel. Already a century ago the outlines of a productive industrial banking system were well understood. But recent bank lobbying has been remarkably successful in distracting attention away from classical analyses of how to shape the financial and tax system to best promote economic growth – by public checks on bank privileges.

How banks broke the social compact, promoting their own special interests -
People used to know what banks did. Bankers took deposits and lent them out, paying short-term depositors less than they charged for risky or less liquid loans. The risk was borne by bankers, not depositors or the government. But today, bank loans are made increasingly to speculators in recklessly large amounts for quick in-and-out trading. Financial crashes have become deeper and affect a wider swath of the population as debt pyramiding has soared and credit quality plunged into the toxic category of “liars’ loans.”
The first step toward today’s mutual interdependence between high finance and government was for central banks to act as lenders of last resort to mitigate the liquidity crises that periodically resulted from the banks’ privilege of credit creation. In due course governments also provided public deposit insurance, recognizing the need to mobilize and recycle savings into capital investment as the industrial revolution gained momentum. In exchange for this support, they regulated banks as public utilities.
Over time, banks have sought to disable this regulatory oversight, even to the point of decriminalizing fraud. Sponsoring an ideological attack on government, they accuse public bureaucracies of “distorting” free markets (by which they mean markets free for predatory behavior). The financial sector is now making its move to concentrate planning in its own hands.
The problem is that the financial time frame is notoriously short-term and often self-destructive. And inasmuch as the banking system’s product is debt, its business plan tends to be extractive and predatory, leaving economies high-cost. This is why checks and balances are needed, along with regulatory oversight to ensure fair dealing. Dismantling public attempts to steer banking to promote economic growth (rather than merely to make bankers rich) has permitted banks to turn into something nobody anticipated. Their major customers are other financial institutions, insurance and real estate – the FIRE sector, not industrial firms. Debt leveraging by real estate and monopolies, arbitrage speculators, hedge funds and corporate raiders inflates asset prices on credit. The effect of creating “balance sheet wealth” in this way is to load down the “real” production-and-consumption economy with debt and related rentier charges, adding more to the cost of living and doing business than rising productivity reduces production costs.
Since 2008, public bailouts have taken bad loans off the banks’ balance sheet at enormous taxpayer expense – some $13 trillion in the United States, and proportionally higher in Ireland and other economies now being subjected to austerity to pay for “free market” deregulation. Bankers are holding economies hostage, threatening a monetary crash if they do not get more bailouts and nearly free central bank credit, and more mortgage and other loan guarantees for their casino-like game. The resulting “too big to fail” policy means making governments too weak to fight back.
The process that began with central bank support thus has turned into broad government guarantees against bank insolvency. The largest banks have made so many reckless loans that they have become wards of the state. Yet they have become powerful enough to capture lawmakers to act as their facilitators. The popular media and even academic economic theorists have been mobilized to pose as experts in an attempt to convince the public that financial policy is best left to technocrats – of the banks’ own choosing, as if there is no alternative policy but for governments to subsidize a financial free lunch and crown bankers as society’s rulers.
The Bubble Economy and its austerity aftermath could not have occurred without the banking sector’s success in weakening public regulation, capturing national treasuries and even disabling law enforcement. Must governments surrender to this power grab? If not, who should bear the losses run up by a financial system that has become dysfunctional? If taxpayers have to pay, their economy will become high-cost and uncompetitive – and a financial oligarchy will rule.

The present debt quandary -
The endgame in times past was to write down bad debts. That meant losses for banks and investors. But today’s debt overhead is being kept in place – shifting bad loans off bank balance sheets to become public debts owed by taxpayers to save banks and their creditors from loss. Governments have given banks newly minted bonds or central bank credit in exchange for junk mortgages and bad gambles – without re-structuring the financial system to create a more stable, less debt-ridden economy. The pretense is that these bailouts will enable banks to lend enough to revive the economy by enough to pay its debts.
Seeing the handwriting on the wall, bankers are taking as much bailout money as they can get, and running, using the money to buy as much tangible property and ownership rights as they can while their lobbyists keep the public subsidy faucet running.
The pretense is that debt-strapped economies can resume business-as-usual growth by borrowing their way out of debt. But a quarter of U.S. real estate already is in negative equity – worth less than the mortgages attached to it – and the property market is still shrinking, so banks are not lending except with public Federal Housing Administration guarantees to cover whatever losses they may suffer. In any event, it already is mathematically impossible to carry today’s debt overhead without imposing austerity, debt deflation and depression.
This is not how banking was supposed to evolve. If governments are to underwrite bank loans, they may as well be doing the lending in the first place – and receiving the gains. Indeed, since 2008 the over-indebted economy’s crash led governments to become the major shareholders of the largest and most troubled banks – Citibank in the United States, Anglo-Irish Bank in Ireland, and Britain’s Royal Bank of Scotland. Yet rather than taking this opportunity to run these banks as public utilities and lower their charges for credit-card services – or most important of all, to stop their lending to speculators and gamblers – governments left these banks operating as part of the “casino capitalism” that has become their business plan.
There is no natural reason for matters to be like this. Relations between banks and government used to be the reverse. In 1307, France’s Philip IV (“The Fair”) set the tone by seizing the Knights Templars’ wealth, arresting them and putting many to death – not on financial charges, but on the accusation of devil-worshipping and satanic sexual practices. In 1344 the Peruzzi bank went broke, followed by the Bardi by making unsecured loans to Edward III of England and other monarchs who died or defaulted. Many subsequent banks had to suffer losses on loans gone bad to real estate or financial speculators.
By contrast, now the U.S., British, Irish and Latvian governments have taken bad bank loans onto their national balance sheets, imposing a heavy burden on taxpayers – while letting bankers cash out with immense wealth. These “cash for trash” swaps have turned the mortgage crisis and general debt collapse into a fiscal problem. Shifting the new public bailout debts onto the non-financial economy threaten to increase the cost of living and doing business. This is the result of the economy’s failure to distinguish productive from unproductive loans and debts. It helps explain why nations now are facing financial austerity and debt peonage instead of the leisure economy promised so eagerly by technological optimists a century ago.
So we are brought back to the question of what the proper role of banks should be. This issue was discussed exhaustively prior to World War I. It is even more urgent today.

How classical economists hoped to modernize banks as agents of industrial capitalism -
Britain was the home of the Industrial Revolution, but there was little long-term lending to finance investment in factories or other means of production. British and Dutch merchant banking was to extend short-term credit on the basis of collateral such as real property or sales contracts for merchandise shipped (“receivables”). Buoyed by this trade financing, merchant bankers were successful enough to maintain long-established short-term funding practices. This meant that James Watt and other innovators were obliged to raise investment money from their families and friends rather than from banks.
It was the French and Germans who moved banking into the industrial stage to help their nations catch up. In France, the Saint-Simonians described the need to create an industrial credit system aimed at funding means of production. In effect, the Saint-Simonians proposed to restructure banks along lines akin to a mutual fund. A start was made with the Crédit Mobilier, founded by the Péreire Brothers in 1852. Their aim was to shift the banking and financial system away from debt financing at interest toward equity lending, taking returns in the form of dividends that would rise or decline in keeping with the debtor’s business fortunes. By giving businesses leeway to cut back dividends when sales and profits decline, profit-sharing agreements avoid the problem that interest must be paid willy-nilly. If an interest payment is missed, the debtor may be forced into bankruptcy and creditors can foreclose. It was to avoid this favoritism for creditors regardless of the debtor’s ability to pay that prompted Mohammed to ban interest under Islamic law.
Attracting reformers ranging from socialists to investment bankers, the Saint-Simonians won government backing for their policies under France’s Third Empire. Their approach inspired Marx as well as industrialists in Germany and protectionists in the United States and England. The common denominator of this broad spectrum was recognition that an efficient banking system was needed to finance the industry on which a strong national state and military power depended.

Germany develops an industrial banking system -
It was above all in Germany that long-term financing found its expression in the Reichsbank and other large industrial banks as part of the “holy trinity” of banking, industry and government planning under Bismarck’s “state socialism.” German banks made a virtue of necessity. British banks “derived the greater part of their funds from the depositors,” and steered these savings and business deposits into mercantile trade financing. This forced domestic firms to finance most new investment out of their own earnings. By contrast, Germany’s “lack of capital … forced industry to turn to the banks for assistance,” noted the financial historian George Edwards. “A considerable proportion of the funds of the German banks came not from the deposits of customers but from the capital subscribed by the proprietors themselves. As a result, German banks “stressed investment operations and were formed not so much for receiving deposits and granting loans but rather for supplying the investment requirements of industry.”
When the Great War broke out in 1914, Germany’s rapid victories were widely viewed as reflecting the superior efficiency of its financial system. To some observers the war appeared as a struggle between rival forms of financial organization. At issue was not only who would rule Europe, but whether the continent would have laissez faire or a more state-socialist economy.
In 1915, shortly after fighting broke out, the Christian Socialist priest-politician Friedrich Naumann published Mitteleuropa, describing how Germany recognized more than any other nation that industrial technology needed long‑term financing and government support. His book inspired Prof. H. S. Foxwell in England to draw on his arguments in two remarkable essays published in the Economic Journal in September and December 1917: “The Nature of the Industrial Struggle,” and “The Financing of Industry and Trade.” He endorsed Naumann’s contention that “the old individualistic capitalism, of what he calls the English type, is giving way to the new, more impersonal, group form; to the disciplined scientific capitalism he claims as German.”
This was necessarily a group undertaking, with the emerging tripartite integration of industry, banking and government, with finance being “undoubtedly the main cause of the success of modern German enterprise,” Foxwell concluded (p. 514). German bank staffs included industrial experts who were forging industrial policy into a science. And in America, Thorstein Veblen’s The Engineers and the Price System (1921) voiced the new industrial philosophy calling for bankers and government planners to become engineers in shaping credit markets.
Foxwell warned that British steel, automotive, capital equipment and other heavy industry was becoming obsolete largely because its bankers failed to perceive the need to promote equity investment and extend long‑term credit. They based their loan decisions not on the new production and revenue their lending might create, but simply on what collateral they could liquidate in the event of default: inventories of unsold goods, real estate, and money due on bills for goods sold and awaiting payment from customers. And rather than investing in the shares of the companies that their loans supposedly were building up, they paid out most of their earnings as dividends – and urged companies to do the same. This short time horizon forced business to remain liquid rather than having leeway to pursue long‑term strategy.
German banks, by contrast, paid out dividends (and expected such dividends from their clients) at only half the rate of British banks, choosing to retain earnings as capital reserves and invest them largely in the stocks of their industrial clients. Viewing these companies as allies rather than merely as customers from whom to make as large a profit as quickly as possible, German bank officials sat on their boards, and helped expand their business by extending loans to foreign governments on condition that their clients be named the chief suppliers in major public investments. Germany viewed the laws of history as favoring national planning to organize the financing of heavy industry, and gave its bankers a voice in formulating international diplomacy, making them “the principal instrument in the extension of her foreign trade and political power.”
A similar contrast existed in the stock market. British brokers were no more up to the task of financing manufacturing in its early stages than were its banks. The nation had taken an early lead by forming Crown corporations such as the East India Company, the Bank of England and even the South Sea Company. Despite the collapse of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, the run-up of share prices from 1715 to 1720 in these joint-stock monopolies established London’s stock market as a popular investment vehicle, for Dutch and other foreigners as well as for British investors. But the market was dominated by railroads, canals and large public utilities. Industrial firms were not major issuers of stock.
In any case, after earning their commissions on one issue, British stockbrokers were notorious for moving on to the next without much concern for what happened to the investors who had bought the earlier securities. “As soon as he has contrived to get his issue quoted at a premium and his underwriters have unloaded at a profit,” complained Foxwell, “his enterprise ceases. ‘To him,’ as the Times says, ‘a successful flotation is of more importance than a sound venture.’”
Much the same was true in the United States. Its merchant heroes were individualistic traders and political insiders often operating on the edge of the law to gain their fortunes by stock-market manipulation, railroad politicking for land giveaways, and insurance companies, mining and natural resource extraction. America’s wealth-seeking spirit found its epitome in Thomas Edison’s hit-or-miss method of invention, coupled with a high degree of litigiousness to obtain patent and monopoly rights.
In sum, neither British nor American banking or stock markets planned for the future. Their time frame was short, and they preferred rent-extracting projects to industrial innovation. Most banks favored large real estate borrowers, railroads and public utilities whose income streams easily could be forecast. Only after manufacturing companies grew fairly large did they obtain significant bank and stock market credit.
What is remarkable is that this is the tradition of banking and high finance that has emerged victorious throughout the world. The explanation is primarily the military victory of the United States, Britain and their Allies in the Great War and a generation later, in World War II.

The regression toward burdensome unproductive debts after World War I -
The development of industrial credit led economists to distinguish between productive and unproductive lending. A productive loan provides borrowers with resources to trade or invest at a profit sufficient to pay back the loan and its interest charge. An unproductive loan must be paid out of income earned elsewhere. Governments must pay war loans out of tax revenues. Consumers must pay loans out of income they earn at a job – or by selling assets. These debt payments divert revenue away from being spent on consumption and investment, so the economy shrinks. This traditionally has led to crises that wipe out debts, above all those that are unproductive.
In the aftermath of World War I the economies of Europe’s victorious and defeated nations alike were dominated by postwar arms and reparations debts. These inter-governmental debts were to pay for weapons (by the Allies when the United States unexpectedly demanded that they pay for the arms they had bought before America’s entry into the war), and for the destruction of property (by the Central Powers), not new means of production. Yet to the extent that they were inter-governmental, these debts were more intractable than debts to private bankers and bondholders. Despite the fact that governments in principle are sovereign and hence can annul debts owed to private creditors, the defeated Central Power governments were in no position to do this.
And among the Allies, Britain led the capitulation to U.S. arms billing, captive to the creditor ideology that “a debt is a debt” and must be paid regardless of what this entails in practice or even whether the debt in fact can be paid. Confronted with America’s demand for payment, the Allies turned to Germany to make them whole. After taking its liquid assets and major natural resources, they insisted that it squeeze out payments by taxing its economy. No attempt was made to calculate just how Germany was to do this – or most important, how it was to convert this domestic revenue (the “budgetary problem”) into hard currency or gold. Despite the fact that banking had focused on international credit and currency transfers since the 12th century, there was a broad denial of what John Maynard Keynes identified as a foreign exchange transfer problem.
Never before had there been an obligation of such enormous magnitude. Nevertheless, all of Germany’s political parties and government agencies sought to devise ways to tax the economy to raise the sums being demanded. Taxes, however, are levied in a nation’s own currency. The only way to pay the Allies was for the Reichsbank to take this fiscal revenue and throw it onto the foreign exchange markets to obtain the sterling and other hard currency to pay. Britain, France and the other recipients then paid this money on their Inter-Ally debts to the United States.
Adam Smith pointed out that no government ever had paid down its public debt. But creditors always have been reluctant to acknowledge that debtors are unable to pay. Ever since David Ricardo’s lobbying for their perspective in Britain’s Bullion debates, creditors have found it their self-interest to promote a doctrinaire blind spot, insisting that debts of any magnitude can and should be paid. They resist acknowledging a distinction between raising funds domestically (by running a budget surplus) and obtaining the foreign exchange to pay foreign-currency debt. Furthermore, despite the evident fact that austerity cutbacks on consumption and investment can only be extractive, creditor-oriented economists refused to recognize that debts cannot be paid by shrinking the economy. Or that foreign debts and other international payments cannot be paid in domestic currency without lowering the exchange rate.
The more domestic currency Germany sought to convert, the further its exchange rate was driven down against the dollar and other gold-based currencies. This obliged Germans to pay much more for imports. The collapse of the exchange rate was the source of hyperinflation, not an increase in domestic money creation as today’s creditor-sponsored monetarist economists insist. In vain Keynes pointed to the specific structure of Germany’s balance of payments and asked creditors to specify just how many German exports they were willing to take, and to explain how domestic currency could be converted into foreign exchange without collapsing the exchange rate and causing price inflation.
Tragically, Ricardian tunnel vision won Allied government backing. Bertil Ohlin and Jacques Rueff claimed that economies receiving German payments would recycle their inflows to Germany and other debt-paying countries by buying their imports. If income adjustments did not keep exchange rates and prices stable, then Germany’s falling exchange rate would make its exports sufficiently more attractive to enable it to earn the revenue to pay.
This is the logic that the International Monetary Fund followed half a century later in insisting that Third World countries remit foreign earnings and even permit flight capital as well as pay their foreign debts. It is the neoliberal stance now demanding austerity for Greece, Ireland, Italy and other Eurozone economies.
Bank lobbyists claim that the European Central Bank will risk spurring domestic wage and price inflation if it does what central banks were founded to do: finance budget deficits. Europe’s financial institutions are given a monopoly right to perform this electronic task – and to receive interest for what a real central bank could create on its own computer keyboard.
But why it is less inflationary for commercial banks to finance budget deficits than for central banks to do this? The bank lending that has inflated a global financial bubble since the 1980s has left as its legacy a debt overhead that can no more be supported today than Germany was able to carry its reparations debt in the 1920s. Would government credit have so recklessly inflated asset prices?

How debt creation has fueled asset-price inflation since the 1980s -
Banking in recent decades has not followed the productive lines that early economic futurists expected. As noted above, instead of financing tangible investment to expand production and innovation, most loans are made against collateral, with interest to be paid out of what borrowers can make elsewhere. Despite being unproductive in the classical sense, it was remunerative for debtors from 1980 until 2008 – not by investing the loan proceeds to expand economic activity, but by riding the wave of asset-price inflation. Mortgage credit enabled borrowers to bid up property prices, drawing speculators and new customers into the market in the expectation that prices would continue to rise. But hothouse credit infusions meant additional debt service, which ended up shrinking the market for goods and services.
Under normal conditions the effect would have been for rents to decline, with property prices following suit, leading to mortgage defaults. But banks postponed the collapse into negative equity by lowering their lending standards, providing enough new credit to keep on inflating prices. This averted a collapse of their speculative mortgage and stock market lending. It was inflationary – but it was inflating asset prices, not commodity prices or wages. Two decades of asset price inflation enabled speculators, homeowners and commercial investors to borrow the interest falling due and still make a capital gain.
This hope for a price gain made winning bidders willing to pay lenders all the current income – making banks the ultimate and major rentier income recipients. The process of inflating asset prices by easing credit terms and lowering the interest rate was self-feeding. But it also was self-terminating, because raising the multiple by which a given real estate rent or business income can be “capitalized” into bank loans increased the economy’s debt overhead.
Securities markets became part of this problem. Rising stock and bond prices made pension funds pay more to purchase a retirement income – so “pension fund capitalism” was coming undone. So was the industrial economy itself. Instead of raising new equity financing for companies, the stock market became a vehicle for corporate buyouts. Raiders borrowed to buy out stockholders, loading down companies with debt. The most successful looters left them bankrupt shells. And when creditors turned their economic gains from this process into political power to shift the tax burden onto wage earners and industry, this raised the cost of living and doing business – by more than technology was able to lower prices.

The EU rejects central bank money creation, leaving deficit financing to the banks -
Article 123 of the Lisbon Treaty forbids the ECB or other central banks to lend to government. But central banks were created specifically – to finance government deficits. The EU has rolled back history to the way things were three hundred years ago, before the Bank of England was created. Reserving the task of credit creation for commercial banks, it leaves governments without a central bank to finance the public spending needed to avert depression and widespread financial collapse.
So the plan has backfired. When “hard money” policy makers limited central bank power, they assumed that public debts would be risk-free. Obliging budget deficits to be financed by private creditors seemed to offer a bonanza: being able to collect interest for creating electronic credit that governments can create themselves. But now, European governments need credit to balance their budget or face default. So banks now want a central bank to create the money to bail them out for the bad loans they have made.
For starters, the ECB’s €489 billion in three-year loans at 1% interest gives banks a free lunch arbitrage opportunity (the “carry trade”) to buy Greek and Spanish bonds yielding a higher rate. The policy of buying government bonds in the open market – after banks first have bought them at a lower issue price – gives the banks a quick and easy trading gain.
How are these giveaways less inflationary than for central banks to directly finance budget deficits and roll over government debts? Is the aim of giving banks easy gains simply to provide them with resources to resume the Bubble Economy lending that led to today’s debt overhead in the first place?

Conclusion -
Governments can create new credit electronically on their own computer keyboards as easily as commercial banks can. And unlike banks, their spending is expected to serve a broad social purpose, to be determined democratically. When commercial banks gain policy control over governments and central banks, they tend to support their own remunerative policy of creating asset-inflationary credit – leaving the clean-up costs to be solved by a post-bubble austerity. This makes the debt overhead even harder to pay – indeed, impossible.
So we are brought back to the policy issue of how public money creation to finance budget deficits differs from issuing government bonds for banks to buy. Is not the latter option a convoluted way to finance such deficits – at a needless interest charge? When governments monetize their budget deficits, they do not have to pay bondholders.
I have heard bankers argue that governments need an honest broker to decide whether a loan or public spending policy is responsible. To date their advice has not promoted productive credit. Yet they now are attempting to compensate for the financial crisis by telling debtor governments to sell off property in their public domain. This “solution” relies on the myth that privatization is more efficient and will lower the cost of basic infrastructure services. Yet it involves paying interest to the buyers of rent-extraction rights, higher executive salaries, stock options and other financial fees.
Most cost savings are achieved by shifting to non-unionized labor, and typically end up being paid to the privatizers, their bankers and bondholders, not passed on to the public. And bankers back price deregulation, enabling privatizers to raise access charges. This makes the economy higher cost and hence less competitive – just the opposite of what is promised.
Banking has moved so far away from funding industrial growth and economic development that it now benefits primarily at the economy’s expense in a predator and extractive way, not by making productive loans. This is now the great problem confronting our time. Banks now lend mainly to other financial institutions, hedge funds, corporate raiders, insurance companies and real estate, and engage in their own speculation in foreign currency, interest-rate arbitrage, and computer-driven trading programs. Industrial firms bypass the banking system by financing new capital investment out of their own retained earnings, and meet their liquidity needs by issuing their own commercial paper directly. Yet to keep the bank casino winning, global bankers now want governments not only to bail them out but to enable them to renew their failed business plan – and to keep the present debts in place so that creditors will not have to take a loss.
This wish means that society should lose, and even suffer depression. We are dealing here not only with greed, but with outright antisocial behavior and hostility.
Europe thus has reached a critical point in having to decide whose interest to put first: that of banks, or the “real” economy. History provides a wealth of examples illustrating the dangers of capitulating to bankers, and also for how to restructure banking along more productive lines. The underlying questions are clear enough:
* Have banks outlived their historical role, or can they be restructured to finance productive capital investment rather than simply inflate asset prices?
* Would a public option provide less costly and better directed credit?
* Why not promote economic recovery by writing down debts to reflect the ability to pay, rather than relinquishing more wealth to an increasingly aggressive creditor class?
Solving the Eurozone’s financial problem can be made much easier by the tax reforms that classical economists advocated to complement their financial reforms. To free consumers and employers from taxation, they proposed to levy the burden on the “unearned increment” of land and natural resource rent, monopoly rent and financial privilege. The guiding principle was that property rights in the earth, monopolies and other ownership privileges have no direct cost of production, and hence can be taxed without reducing their supply or raising their price, which is set in the market. Removing the tax deductibility for interest is the other key reform that is needed.
A rent tax holds down housing prices and those of basic infrastructure services, whose untaxed revenue tends to be capitalized into bank loans and paid out in the form of interest charges. Additionally, land and natural resource rents – along with interest – are the easiest to tax, because they are highly visible and their value is easy to assess.
Pressure to narrow existing budget deficits offers a timely opportunity to rationalize the tax systems of Greece and other PIIGS countries in which the wealthy avoid paying their fair share of taxes. The political problem blocking this classical fiscal policy is that it “interferes” with the rent-extracting free lunches that banks seek to lend against. So they act as lobbyists for untaxing real estate and monopolies (and themselves as well). Despite the financial sector’s desire to see governments remain sufficiently solvent to pay bondholders, it has subsidized an enormous public relations apparatus and academic junk economics to oppose the tax policies that can close the fiscal gap in the fairest way.
It is too early to forecast whether banks or governments will emerge victorious from today’s crisis. As economies polarize between debtors and creditors, planning is shifting out of public hands into those of bankers. The easiest way for them to keep this power is to block a true central bank or strong public sector from interfering with their monopoly of credit creation. The counter is for central banks and governments to act as they were intended to, by providing a public option for credit creation.

2012-01-27T13:01:00.000-08:00

2012-01-27 "Free-Market Medicine—A Personal Account" by Michael Parenti
[http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2012-01-27/article/39198?headline=Free-Market-Medicine-A-Personal-Account--by-Michael-Parenti]
When I recently went to Alta Bates hospital for surgery, I discovered that legal procedures take precedence over medical ones. I had to sign intimidating statements about financial counseling, indemnity, patient responsibilities, consent to treatment, use of electronic technologies, and the like.
One of these documents committed me to the following: “The hospital pathologist is hereby authorized to use his/her discretion in disposing of any member, organ, or other tissue removed from my person during the procedure.” Any member? Any organ?
The next day I returned for the actual operation. While playing Frank Sinatra recordings, the surgeon went to work cutting open several layers of my abdomen in order to secure my intestines with a permanent mesh implant. Afterward I spent two hours in the recovery room. “I feel like I’ve been in a knife fight,” I told one nurse. “It’s called surgery,” she explained.
Then, while still pumped up with anesthetics and medications, I was rolled out into the street. The street? Yes, some few hours after surgery they send you home. In countries that have socialized medicine (there I said it), a van might be waiting with trained personnel to help you to your abode.
Not so in free-market America. Your presurgery agreement specifies in boldface that you must have “a responsible adult acquaintance” (as opposed to an irresponsible teenage stranger) take you home in a private vehicle. I kept thinking, what happens to those unfortunates who have no one to bundle them away? Do they languish endlessly in the hospital driveway until the nasty weather finishes them off?
You are not allowed to call a taxi. Were a taxi driver to cause you any harm, you could hold the hospital legally responsible. Again it’s a matter of liability and lawyers, not health and doctors.
One of the two friends who helped me up the steps to my house then went off to Walgreen’s to buy the powerful antibiotics I had to take every four hours for two days. I dislike how antibiotics destroy the “good bacteria” that our bodies produce, and how they help create dangerous strains of super-resistant bacteria. I kept thinking of a recent finding: excessive reliance on medical drugs kills more Americans than all illegal narcotics combined.
So why did I have to take antibiotics? Because, as everyone kept telling me, hospitals are seriously unsafe places overrun with Staph infections and other super bugs. It’s a matter of self-protection.
Two days after surgery I noticed a dark red discoloration on my lower abdomen indicating internal bleeding. I was supposed to get a follow-up call from a nurse who would check on how I was doing. But the call might never come because the staff was planning a walkout. “We have no contract,” one of them had told me when I was in the recovery room. So now the nurses are on strike---and I’m left on my own to divine what my internal bleeding is all about. What fun.
Fortunately, it didn’t turn out that way. A nurse did call me despite the walkout. Yes, she said, it was internal bleeding, but it was to be expected. My surgeon called later in the day to confirm this opinion. Death was not yet knocking.
A few days later, there were massive nurses strikes on both coasts. Among other things, the nurses were complaining about “being disrespected by a corporate hospital culture that demands sacrifices from patients and those who provide their care, but pays executives millions of dollars.” (New York Times, 16 December 2011). One cold-blooded management negotiator was quoted as saying, “We have the money. We just don’t have the will to give it to you” (ibid.).
As for the doctors, both my surgeon and my general practitioner (GP) are among the victims, not the perpetrators, of today’s corporate medical system. My GP explained that it is an endless fight to get insurance companies to pay for services they supposedly cover. Feeling less like a doctor and more like a bill collector, my GP found he could no longer engage in endless telephone struggles with insurance companies.
There are 1,500 medical insurance companies in America, all madly dedicated to maximizing profits by increasing premiums and withholding payments. The medical industry in toto is the nation’s largest and most profitable business, with an annual health bill of about $1 trillion.
Along with the giant insurance and giant pharmaceutical companies, the greatest profiteers are the Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs), notorious for charging steep monthly payments while underpaying their staffs and requiring their doctors to spend less time with each patient, sometimes even withholding necessary treatment.
I am without private insurance. And my Medicare goes just so far. Like many other doctors, my GP no longer accepts Medicare. For a number of years now, Medicare payments to physicians have remained relatively unchanged while costs of running a practice (staff, office space, insurance) have steadily increased. So now my GP’s patients have to pay in full upon every visit—which is not always easy to do.
Our health system mirrors our class system. At the base of the pyramid are the very poor. Many of them suffer through long hours in emergency rooms only to be turned away with a useless or harmful prescription. No wonder “the United States has the worst record among industrialized nations in treating preventable deaths” (Healthcare-NOW! 1 December 2011).
Too often the very poor get no care at all. They simply die of whatever illness assails them because they cannot afford treatment. An acquaintance of mine told me how her mother died of AIDS because she could not afford the medications that might have kept her alive.
In Houston I once got talking with a limousine driver, a young African-American man, who remarked that both his parents had died of cancer without ever receiving any treatment. “They just died,” he said with a pain in his voice that I can still hear.
Living just above the poor in the class pyramid are the embattled middle class. They watch medical coverage disappear while paying out costly amounts to the profit-driven insurance companies. I was able to get surgery at Alta Bates only because I am old enough to have Medicare and have enough disposable income to meet the co-payment.
For my out-patient operation, the hospital charged Medicare $19,466. Of this, Medicare paid $2,527. And I was billed $644. The hospital then writes off the unpaid balance thus saving considerable sums in taxes (amounting to an indirect subsidy from the rest of us taxpayers). Had I no Medicare coverage, I would have had to pay the entire $19,466.
I was informed by the hospital that the $19,466 charge covers only hospital costs for equipment, technicians, supplies, and room. So besides the $644, I will have to pay for any pathologists, surgical assistants, and anesthesiologists who performed additional services. I am waiting for the other shoe to drop.
How much does my surgeon earn? Not much at all. He gets about $400 to $500 for everything, including my pre-op and post-op visits and the surgery itself, an exacting undertaking that requires skills of the highest sort. He also has to maintain insurance, an office, an assistant, and an increasing load of paperwork.
My surgeon pointed out to me, “If you ask people how much I make on an operation like yours, they will say $4000 to $5000, and be wrong by a factor of ten.” He noted that in a recent speech President Obama criticized a surgeon for charging $30,000 to replace a knee cap. “The surgeon gets a minute fraction of that amount,” my doctor pointed out.
To make matters worse, there is talk about cutting Medicare payments to physicians by 27 percent. If this happens, it is going to be increasingly difficult to find a surgeon who will take Medicare. Still worse, the private insurance companies will join in squeezing the physicians for still more profits.
I was able to meet my payment ($644) not only because my operation was heavily subsidized by Medicare but because it was a one-day “ambulatory surgery.” I don’t know how I would fare if I had to undergo prolonged and extremely costly treatment.
So much for life in the middle class. At the very top of the class pyramid are the 1%, those who don’t have to worry about any of this, the superrich who have money enough for all kinds of state-of-the-art treatments at the very finest therapeutic centers around the world, complete with luxury suites with gourmet menus.
Among the medically privileged are members of Congress and the U.S. president. They pay nothing. They are treated at top-grade facilities. They enjoy, how shall we put it, socialized medicine. No conservative lawmakers have held fast to their free-market principles by refusing to accept this publicly funded, medical treatment.
John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, cheerfully announced that medical care is not a human right; it should be “market determined just like food and shelter.” Nobody has a higher opinion of John Mackey than I, and I think he is a greed-driven, union-busting bloodsucker. Nevertheless I will give him credit for candidly admitting his dedication to a dehumanized profit pathology.
The U.S. medical system costs many times more than what is spent in socialized systems, but it delivers much less in the way of quality care and cure. That’s the way it is intended to be. The goal of any free-market service---be it utilities, housing, transportation, education, or health care---is not to maximize performance but to maximize profits often at the expense of performance.
If profits are high, then the system is working just fine---for the 1%. But for us 99%, the profit lust is itself the heart of the problem.