NEWS2U International NewsConnecting the Dots

2012-02-12T21:12:00.000-05:00

FBI in the market for app to monitor social networks

By Zeljka Zorz
Help Net Security
January 27, 2012

The US FBI is looking into the possibility of using an "Open Source and social media alert, mapping, and analysis application" for increasing its situational awareness, and to that effect has issued a request for information to determine if there are companies that could provide them with it.

"This must be a secure, light weight web application portal, using mash-up technology," it says in the request. "The application must have the ability to rapidly assemble critical open source information and intelligence that will allow[FBI's]Strategic Information and Operations Center [SOIC] to quickly vet, identify, and geo-locate breaking events, incidents and emerging threats. The product must have the capacity to allow the user to retain control of cached and real-time proprietary data; the ability to share it with selected partners, and[…]the ability to adapt quickly to changing threats to maintain the strategic and tactical advantage."

The FBI wants the application to be able to search and scrape social networking and news sites (Twitter, Facebook, CNN, MSNBC, and others) for breaking events, crisis and threats; to automatically filter the data according to definable parameters; to notify the users about these events and show them on maps (Google Maps, ESRI, Yahoo Maps, and others) according to priority; and to be able to quickly summarize threats and incidents and send out these summaries to FBI management and field offices.

Special interest has been shown for information that can be collected from social sites, so the application must be able to "instantly search and monitor key words and strings in all 'publicly available' tweets across the Twitter Site and other 'publicly available' social networking sites/forums (i.e. Facebook, MySpace, etc.)," because "social media will be a valued source of information to the SIOC intelligence analyst in a crisis because it will be both eyewitness and first response to the crisis."

Source:
http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=12302
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2012-01-30T07:36:00.001-05:00

How Swedes and Norwegians Broke the Power of the
‘1 Percent’

By George Lakey
NationofChange.org
Jan. 28,2012

While many of us are working to ensure that the Occupy movement will have a lasting impact, it’s worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different.

Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty. When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation. Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment. Unlike the Norwegians, the Swedes didn’t find oil, but that didn’t stop them from building what the latest CIA World Factbook calls “an enviable standard of living.”

Neither country is a utopia, as readers of the crime novels by Stieg Larsson, Kurt Wallender and Jo Nesbro will know. Critical left-wing authors such as these try to push Sweden and Norway to continue on the path toward more fully just societies. However, as an American activist who first encountered Norway as a student in 1959 and learned some of its language and culture, the achievements I found amazed me. I remember, for example, bicycling for hours through a small industrial city, looking in vain for substandard housing. Sometimes resisting the evidence of my eyes, I made up stories that “accounted for” the differences I saw: “small country,” “homogeneous,” “a value consensus.” I finally gave up imposing my frameworks on these countries and learned the real reason: their own histories.

Then I began to learn that the Swedes and Norwegians paid a price for their standards of living through nonviolent struggle. There was a time when Scandinavian workers didn’t expect that the electoral arena could deliver the change they believed in. They realized that, with the 1 percent in charge, electoral “democracy” was stacked against them, so nonviolent direct action was needed to exert the power for change.

In both countries, the troops were called out to defend the 1 percent; people died. Award-winning Swedish filmmaker Bo Widerberg told the Swedish story vividly in Ådalen 31, which depicts the strikers killed in 1931 and the sparking of a nationwide general strike. (You can read more about this case in an entry by Max Rennebohm in the Global Nonviolent Action Database.)

The Norwegians had a harder time organizing a cohesive people’s movement because Norway’s small population—about three million—was spread out over a territory the size of Britain. People were divided by mountains and fjords, and they spoke regional dialects in isolated valleys. In the nineteenth century, Norway was ruled by Denmark and then by Sweden; in the context of Europe Norwegians were the “country rubes,” of little consequence. Not until 1905 did Norway finally become independent.

When workers formed unions in the early 1900s, they generally turned to Marxism, organizing for revolution as well as immediate gains. They were overjoyed by the overthrow of the czar in Russia, and the Norwegian Labor Party joined the Communist International organized by Lenin. Labor didn’t stay long, however. One way in which most Norwegians parted ways with Leninist strategy was on the role of violence: Norwegians wanted to win their revolution through collective nonviolent struggle, along with establishing co-ops and using the electoral arena.

In the 1920s strikes increased in intensity. The town of Hammerfest formed a commune in 1921, led by workers councils; the army intervened to crush it. The workers’ response verged toward a national general strike. The employers, backed by the state, beat back that strike, but workers erupted again in the ironworkers’ strike of 1923–24.

The Norwegian 1 percent decided not to rely simply on the army; in 1926 they formed a social movement called the Patriotic League, recruiting mainly from the middle class. By the 1930s, the League included as many as 100,000 people for armed protection of strike breakers—this in a country of only 3 million!

The Labor Party, in the meantime, opened its membership to anyone, whether or not in a unionized workplace. Middle-class Marxists and some reformers joined the party. Many rural farm workers joined the Labor Party, as well as some small landholders. Labor leadership understood that in a protracted struggle, constant outreach and organizing was needed to a nonviolent campaign. In the midst of the growing polarization, Norway’s workers launched another wave of strikes and boycotts in 1928.

The Depression hit bottom in 1931. More people were jobless there than in any other Nordic country. Unlike in the U.S., the Norwegian union movement kept the people thrown out of work as members, even though they couldn’t pay dues. This decision paid off in mass mobilizations. When the employers’ federation locked employees out of the factories to try to force a reduction of wages, the workers fought back with massive demonstrations.

Many people then found that their mortgages were in jeopardy. (Sound familiar?) The Depression continued, and farmers were unable to keep up payment on their debts. As turbulence hit the rural sector, crowds gathered nonviolently to prevent the eviction of families from their farms. The Agrarian Party, which included larger farmers and had previously been allied with the Conservative Party, began to distance itself from the 1 percent; some could see that the ability of the few to rule the many was in doubt.

By 1935, Norway was on the brink. The Conservative-led government was losing legitimacy daily; the 1 percent became increasingly desperate as militancy grew among workers and farmers. A complete overthrow might be just a couple years away, radical workers thought. However, the misery of the poor became more urgent daily, and the Labor Party felt increasing pressure from its members to alleviate their suffering, which it could do only if it took charge of the government in a compromise agreement with the other side.

This it did. In a compromise that allowed owners to retain the right to own and manage their firms, Labor in 1935 took the reins of government in coalition with the Agrarian Party. They expanded the economy and started public works projects to head toward a policy of full employment that became the keystone of Norwegian economic policy. Labor’s success and the continued militancy of workers enabled steady inroads against the privileges of the 1 percent, to the point that majority ownership of all large firms was taken by the public interest. (There is an entry on this case as well at the Global Nonviolent Action Database.)

The 1 percent thereby lost its historic power to dominate the economy and society. Not until three decades later could the Conservatives return to a governing coalition, having by then accepted the new rules of the game, including a high degree of public ownership of the means of production, extremely progressive taxation, strong business regulation for the public good and the virtual abolition of poverty. When Conservatives eventually tried a fling with neoliberal policies, the economy generated a bubble and headed for disaster. (Sound familiar?)

Labor stepped in, seized the three largest banks, fired the top management, left the stockholders without a dime and refused to bail out any of the smaller banks. The well-purged Norwegian financial sector was not one of those countries that lurched into crisis in 2008; carefully regulated and much of it publicly owned, the sector was solid.

Although Norwegians may not tell you about this the first time you meet them, the fact remains that their society’s high level of freedom and broadly-shared prosperity began when workers and farmers, along with middle class allies, waged a nonviolent struggle that empowered the people to govern for the common good.

ABOUT GEORGE LAKEY
George Lakey is Visiting Professor at Swarthmore College and a Quaker. He has led 1,500 workshops on five continents and led activist projects on local, national, and international levels. Among many other books and articles, he is author of “Strategizing for a Living Revolution” in David Solnit’s book Globalize Liberation (City Lights, 2004). His first arrest was for a civil rights sit-in and most recent was with Earth Quaker Action Team while protesting mountain top removal coal mining.

Source:
http://www.nationofchange.org/how-swedes-and-norwegians-broke-power-1-percent-1327762223
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2012-01-25T07:29:00.000-05:00

Full Text: President Obama's State Of The Union Address

January 24, 2012

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, members of Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow Americans:

Last month, I went to Andrews Air Force Base and welcomed home some of our last troops to serve in Iraq. Together, we offered a final, proud salute to the colors under which more than a million of our fellow citizens fought – and several thousand gave their lives.

We gather tonight knowing that this generation of heroes has made the United States safer and more respected around the world. For the first time in nine years, there are no Americans fighting in Iraq. For the first time in two decades, Osama bin Laden is not a threat to this country. Most of al Qaeda’s top lieutenants have been defeated. The Taliban’s momentum has been broken, and some troops in Afghanistan have begun to come home.

These achievements are a testament to the courage, selflessness, and teamwork of America’s Armed Forces. At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They’re not consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together.

Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example. Think about the America within our reach: A country that leads the world in educating its people. An America that attracts a new generation of high-tech manufacturing and high-paying jobs. A future where we’re in control of our own energy, and our security and prosperity aren’t so tied to unstable parts of the world. An economy built to last, where hard work pays off, and responsibility is rewarded.

We can do this. I know we can, because we’ve done it before. At the end of World War II, when another generation of heroes returned home from combat, they built the strongest economy and middle class the world has ever known. My grandfather, a veteran of Patton’s Army, got the chance to go to college on the GI Bill. My grandmother, who worked on a bomber assembly line, was part of a workforce that turned out the best products on Earth.

The two of them shared the optimism of a Nation that had triumphed over a depression and fascism. They understood they were part of something larger; that they were contributing to a story of success that every American had a chance to share – the basic American promise that if you worked hard, you could do well enough to raise a family, own a home, send your kids to college, and put a little away for retirement.

The defining issue of our time is how to keep that promise alive. No challenge is more urgent. No debate is more important. We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by. Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules. What’s at stake are not Democratic values or Republican values, but American values. We have to reclaim them.

Let’s remember how we got here. Long before the recession, jobs and manufacturing began leaving our shores. Technology made businesses more efficient, but also made some jobs obsolete. Folks at the top saw their incomes rise like never before, but most hardworking Americans struggled with costs that were growing, paychecks that weren’t, and personal debt that kept piling up.

In 2008, the house of cards collapsed. We learned that mortgages had been sold to people who couldn’t afford or understand them. Banks had made huge bets and bonuses with other people’s money. Regulators had looked the other way, or didn’t have the authority to stop the bad behavior.

It was wrong. It was irresponsible. And it plunged our economy into a crisis that put millions out of work, saddled us with more debt, and left innocent, hard-working Americans holding the bag. In the six months before I took office, we lost nearly four million jobs. And we lost another four million before our policies were in full effect.

Those are the facts. But so are these. In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005. American manufacturers are hiring again, creating jobs for the first time since the late 1990s. Together, we’ve agreed to cut the deficit by more than $2 trillion. And we’ve put in place new rules to hold Wall Street accountable, so a crisis like that never happens again.

The state of our Union is getting stronger. And we’ve come too far to turn back now. As long as I’m President, I will work with anyone in this chamber to build on this momentum. But I intend to fight obstruction with action, and I will oppose any effort to return to the very same policies that brought on this economic crisis in the first place.

No, we will not go back to an economy weakened by outsourcing, bad debt, and phony financial profits. Tonight, I want to speak about how we move forward, and lay out a blueprint for an economy that’s built to last – an economy built on American manufacturing, American energy, skills for American workers, and a renewal of American values.

This blueprint begins with American manufacturing.

On the day I took office, our auto industry was on the verge of collapse. Some even said we should let it die. With a million jobs at stake, I refused to let that happen. In exchange for help, we demanded responsibility. We got workers and automakers to settle their differences. We got the industry to retool and restructure. Today, General Motors is back on top as the world’s number one automaker. Chrysler has grown faster in the U.S. than any major car company. Ford is investing billions in U.S. plants and factories. And together, the entire industry added nearly 160,000 jobs.

We bet on American workers. We bet on American ingenuity. And tonight, the American auto industry is back.

What’s happening in Detroit can happen in other industries. It can happen in Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Raleigh. We can’t bring back every job that’s left our shores. But right now, it’s getting more expensive to do business in places like China. Meanwhile, America is more productive. A few weeks ago, the CEO of Master Lock told me that it now makes business sense for him to bring jobs back home. Today, for the first time in fifteen years, Master Lock’s unionized plant in Milwaukee is running at full capacity.

So we have a huge opportunity, at this moment, to bring manufacturing back. But we have to seize it. Tonight, my message to business leaders is simple: Ask yourselves what you can do to bring jobs back to your country, and your country will do everything we can to help you succeed.

We should start with our tax code. Right now, companies get tax breaks for moving jobs and profits overseas. Meanwhile, companies that choose to stay in America get hit with one of the highest tax rates in the world. It makes no sense, and everyone knows it.

So let’s change it. First, if you’re a business that wants to outsource jobs, you shouldn’t get a tax deduction for doing it. That money should be used to cover moving expenses for companies like Master Lock that decide to bring jobs home.

Second, no American company should be able to avoid paying its fair share of taxes by moving jobs and profits overseas. From now on, every multinational company should have to pay a basic minimum tax. And every penny should go towards lowering taxes for companies that choose to stay here and hire here.

Third, if you’re an American manufacturer, you should get a bigger tax cut. If you’re a high-tech manufacturer, we should double the tax deduction you get for making products here. And if you want to relocate in a community that was hit hard when a factory left town, you should get help financing a new plant, equipment, or training for new workers.

My message is simple. It’s time to stop rewarding businesses that ship jobs overseas, and start rewarding companies that create jobs right here in America. Send me these tax reforms, and I’ll sign them right away.

We’re also making it easier for American businesses to sell products all over the world. Two years ago, I set a goal of doubling U.S. exports over five years. With the bipartisan trade agreements I signed into law, we are on track to meet that goal – ahead of schedule. Soon, there will be millions of new customers for American goods in Panama, Colombia, and South Korea. Soon, there will be new cars on the streets of Seoul imported from Detroit, and Toledo, and Chicago.

I will go anywhere in the world to open new markets for American products. And I will not stand by when our competitors don’t play by the rules. We’ve brought trade cases against China at nearly twice the rate as the last administration – and it’s made a difference. Over a thousand Americans are working today because we stopped a surge in Chinese tires. But we need to do more. It’s not right when another country lets our movies, music, and software be pirated. It’s not fair when foreign manufacturers have a leg up on ours only because they’re heavily subsidized.

Tonight, I’m announcing the creation of a Trade Enforcement Unit that will be charged with investigating unfair trade practices in countries like China. There will be more inspections to prevent counterfeit or unsafe goods from crossing our borders. And this Congress should make sure that no foreign company has an advantage over American manufacturing when it comes to accessing finance or new markets like Russia. Our workers are the most productive on Earth, and if the playing field is level, I promise you – America will always win.

I also hear from many business leaders who want to hire in the United States but can’t find workers with the right skills. Growing industries in science and technology have twice as many openings as we have workers who can do the job. Think about that – openings at a time when millions of Americans are looking for work.

That’s inexcusable. And we know how to fix it.

Jackie Bray is a single mom from North Carolina who was laid off from her job as a mechanic. Then Siemens opened a gas turbine factory in Charlotte, and formed a partnership with Central Piedmont Community College. The company helped the college design courses in laser and robotics training. It paid Jackie’s tuition, then hired her to help operate their plant.

I want every American looking for work to have the same opportunity as Jackie did. Join me in a national commitment to train two 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, 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 local businesses are looking for right now, from data management to high-tech manufacturing.

And I want to cut through the maze of confusing training programs, so that from now on, people like Jackie have one program, one website, and one place to go for all the information and help they need. It’s time to turn our unemployment system into a reemployment system that puts people to work.

These reforms will help people get jobs that are open today. But to prepare for the jobs of tomorrow, our commitment to skills and education has to start earlier.

For less than one percent of what our Nation spends on education each year, we’ve convinced nearly every State in the country to raise their standards for teaching and learning – the first time that’s happened in a generation.

But challenges remain. And we know how to solve them.

At a time when other countries are doubling down on education, tight budgets have forced States to lay off thousands of teachers. We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000. A great teacher can offer an escape from poverty to the child who dreams beyond his circumstance. Every person in this chamber can point to a teacher who changed the trajectory of their lives. Most teachers work tirelessly, with modest pay, sometimes digging into their own pocket for school supplies – just to make a difference.

Teachers matter. So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let’s offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility: To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.

We also know that when students aren’t allowed to walk away from their education, more of them walk the stage to get their diploma. So tonight, I call on every State to require that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn eighteen.

When kids do graduate, the most daunting challenge can be the cost of college. At a time when Americans owe more in tuition debt than credit card debt, this Congress needs to stop the interest rates on student loans from doubling in July. Extend the tuition tax credit we started that saves middle-class families thousands of dollars. And give more young people the chance to earn their way through college by doubling the number of work-study jobs in the next five years.

Of course, it’s not enough for us to increase student aid. We can’t just keep subsidizing skyrocketing tuition; we’ll run out of money. States also need to do their part, by making higher education a higher priority in their budgets. And colleges and universities have to do their part by working to keep costs down. Recently, I spoke with a group of college presidents who’ve done just that. Some schools re-design courses to help students finish more quickly. Some use better technology. The point is, it’s possible. So let me put colleges and universities on notice: If you can’t stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down. Higher education can’t be a luxury – it’s an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford.

Let’s also remember that hundreds of thousands of talented, hardworking students in this country face another challenge: The fact that they aren’t yet American citizens. Many were brought here as small children, are American through and through, yet they live every day with the threat of deportation. Others came more recently, to study business and science and engineering, but as soon as they get their degree, we send them home to invent new products and create new jobs somewhere else.

That doesn’t make sense.

I believe as strongly as ever that we should take on illegal immigration. That’s why my Administration has put more boots on the border than ever before. That’s why there are fewer illegal crossings than when I took office.

The opponents of action are out of excuses. We should be working on comprehensive immigration reform right now. But if election-year politics keeps Congress from acting on a comprehensive plan, let’s at least agree to stop expelling responsible young people who want to staff our labs, start new businesses, and defend this country. Send me a law that gives them the chance to earn their citizenship. I will sign it right away.

You see, an economy built to last is one where we encourage the talent and ingenuity of every person in this country. That means women should earn equal pay for equal work. It means we should support everyone who’s willing to work; and every risk-taker and entrepreneur who aspires to become the next Steve Jobs.

After all, innovation is what America has always been about. Most new jobs are created in start-ups and small businesses. So let’s pass an agenda that helps them succeed. Tear down regulations that prevent aspiring entrepreneurs from getting the financing to grow. Expand tax relief to small businesses that are raising wages and creating good jobs. Both parties agree on these ideas. So put them in a bill, and get it on my desk this year.

Innovation also demands basic research. Today, the discoveries taking place in our federally-financed labs and universities could lead to new treatments that kill cancer cells but leave healthy ones untouched. New lightweight vests for cops and soldiers that can stop any bullet. Don’t gut these investments in our budget. Don’t let other countries win the race for the future. Support the same kind of research and innovation that led to the computer chip and the Internet; to new American jobs and new American industries.

Nowhere is the promise of innovation greater than in American-made energy. Over the last three years, we’ve opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration, and tonight, I’m directing my Administration to open more than 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources. Right now, American oil production is the highest that it’s been in eight years. That’s right – eight years. Not only that – last year, we relied less on foreign oil than in any of the past sixteen years.

But with only 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves, oil isn’t enough. This country needs an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy – a strategy that’s cleaner, cheaper, and full of new jobs.

We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly one hundred years, and my Administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy. Experts believe this will support more than 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade. And I’m requiring all companies that drill for gas on public lands to disclose the chemicals they use. America will develop this resource without putting the health and safety of our citizens at risk.

The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy. And by the way, it was public research dollars, over the course of thirty years, that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock – reminding us that Government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground.

What’s true for natural gas is true for clean energy. In three years, our partnership with the private sector has already positioned America to be the world’s leading manufacturer of high-tech batteries. Because of federal investments, renewable energy use has nearly doubled. And thousands of Americans have jobs because of it.

When Bryan Ritterby was laid off from his job making furniture, he said he worried that at 55, no one would give him a second chance. But he found work at Energetx, a wind turbine manufacturer in Michigan. Before the recession, the factory only made luxury yachts. Today, it’s hiring workers like Bryan, who said, “I’m proud to be working in the industry of the future.”

Our experience with shale gas shows us that the payoffs on these public investments don’t always come right away. Some technologies don’t pan out; some companies fail. But I will not walk away from the promise of clean energy. I will not walk away from workers like Bryan. I will not cede the wind or solar or battery industry to China or Germany because we refuse to make the same commitment here. We have subsidized oil companies for a century. That’s long enough. It’s time to end the taxpayer giveaways to an industry that’s rarely been more profitable, and double-down on a clean energy industry that’s never been more promising. Pass clean energy tax credits and create these jobs.

We can also spur energy innovation with new incentives. The differences in this chamber may be too deep right now to pass a comprehensive plan to fight climate change. But there’s no reason why Congress shouldn’t at least set a clean energy standard that creates a market for innovation. So far, you haven’t acted. Well tonight, I will. I’m directing my Administration to allow the development of clean energy on enough public land to power three million homes. And I’m proud to announce that the Department of Defense, the world’s largest consumer of energy, will make one of the largest commitments to clean energy in history – with the Navy purchasing enough capacity to power a quarter of a million homes a year.

Of course, the easiest way to save money is to waste less energy. So here’s another proposal: Help manufacturers eliminate energy waste in their factories and give businesses incentives to upgrade their buildings. Their energy bills will be $100 billion lower over the next decade, and America will have less pollution, more manufacturing, and more jobs for construction workers who need them. Send me a bill that creates these jobs.

Building this new energy future should be just one part of a broader agenda to repair America’s infrastructure. So much of America needs to be rebuilt. We’ve got crumbling roads and bridges. A power grid that wastes too much energy. An incomplete high-speed broadband network that prevents a small business owner in rural America from selling her products all over the world.

During the Great Depression, America built the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge. After World War II, we connected our States with a system of highways. Democratic and Republican administrations invested in great projects that benefited everybody, from the workers who built them to the businesses that still use them today.

In the next few weeks, I will sign an Executive Order clearing away the red tape that slows down too many construction projects. But you need to fund these projects. Take the money we’re no longer spending at war, use half of it to pay down our debt, and use the rest to do some nation-building right here at home.

There’s never been a better time to build, especially since the construction industry was one of the hardest-hit when the housing bubble burst. Of course, construction workers weren’t the only ones hurt. So were millions of innocent Americans who’ve seen their home values decline. And while Government can’t fix the problem on its own, responsible homeowners shouldn’t have to sit and wait for the housing market to hit bottom to get some relief.

That’s why I’m sending this Congress a plan that gives every responsible homeowner the chance to save about $3,000 a year on their mortgage, by refinancing at historically low interest rates. No more red tape. No more runaround from the banks. A small fee on the largest financial institutions will ensure that it won’t add to the deficit, and will give banks that were rescued by taxpayers a chance to repay a deficit of trust.

Let’s never forget: Millions of Americans who work hard and play by the rules every day deserve a Government and a financial system that do the same. It’s time to apply the same rules from top to bottom: No bailouts, no handouts, and no copouts. An America built to last insists on responsibility from everybody.

We’ve all paid the price for lenders who sold mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them, and buyers who knew they couldn’t afford them. That’s why we need smart regulations to prevent irresponsible behavior. Rules to prevent financial fraud, or toxic dumping, or faulty medical devices, don’t destroy the free market. They make the free market work better.

There is no question that some regulations are outdated, unnecessary, or too costly. In fact, I’ve approved fewer regulations in the first three years of my presidency than my Republican predecessor did in his. I’ve ordered every federal agency to eliminate rules that don’t make sense. We’ve already announced over 500 reforms, and just a fraction of them will save business and citizens more than $10 billion over the next five years. We got rid of one rule from 40 years ago that could have forced some dairy farmers to spend $10,000 a year proving that they could contain a spill – because milk was somehow classified as an oil. With a rule like that, I guess it was worth crying over spilled milk.

I’m confident a farmer can contain a milk spill without a federal agency looking over his shoulder. But I will not back down from making sure an oil company can contain the kind of oil spill we saw in the Gulf two years ago. I will not back down from protecting our kids from mercury pollution, or making sure that our food is safe and our water is clean. I will not go back to the days when health insurance companies had unchecked power to cancel your policy, deny you coverage, or charge women differently from men.

And I will not go back to the days when Wall Street was allowed to play by its own set of rules. The new rules we passed restore what should be any financial system’s core purpose: Getting funding to entrepreneurs with the best ideas, and getting loans to responsible families who want to buy a home, start a business, or send a kid to college.

So if you’re a big bank or financial institution, you are no longer allowed to make risky bets with your customers’ deposits. You’re required to write out a “living will” that details exactly how you’ll pay the bills if you fail – because the rest of us aren’t bailing you out ever again. And if you’re a mortgage lender or a payday lender or a credit card company, the days of signing people up for products they can’t afford with confusing forms and deceptive practices are over. Today, American consumers finally have a watchdog in Richard Cordray with one job: To look out for them.

We will also establish a Financial Crimes Unit of highly trained investigators to crack down on large-scale fraud and protect people’s investments. Some financial firms violate major anti-fraud laws because there’s no real penalty for being a repeat offender. That’s bad for consumers, and it’s bad for the vast majority of bankers and financial service professionals who do the right thing. So pass legislation that makes the penalties for fraud count.

And tonight, I am asking my Attorney General to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorneys general to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis. This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners, and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans.

A return to the American values of fair play and shared responsibility will help us protect our people and our economy. But it should also guide us as we look to pay down our debt and invest in our future.

Right now, our most immediate priority is stopping a tax hike on 160 million working Americans while the recovery is still fragile. People cannot afford losing $40 out of each paycheck this year. There are plenty of ways to get this done. So let’s agree right here, right now: No side issues. No drama. Pass the payroll tax cut without delay.

When it comes to the deficit, we’ve already agreed to more than $2 trillion in cuts and savings. But we need to do more, and that means making choices. Right now, we’re poised to spend nearly $1 trillion more on what was supposed to be a temporary tax break for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. Right now, because of loopholes and shelters in the tax code, a quarter of all millionaires pay lower tax rates than millions of middle-class households. Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.

Do we want to keep these tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans? Or do we want to keep our investments in everything else – like education and medical research; a strong military and care for our veterans? Because if we’re serious about paying down our debt, we can’t do both.

The American people know what the right choice is. So do I. As I told the Speaker this summer, I’m prepared to make more reforms that rein in the long term costs of Medicare and Medicaid, and strengthen Social Security, so long as those programs remain a guarantee of security for seniors.

But in return, we need to change our tax code so that people like me, and an awful lot of Members of Congress, pay our fair share of taxes. Tax reform should follow the Buffett rule: If you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes. And my Republican friend Tom Coburn is right: Washington should stop subsidizing millionaires. In fact, if you’re earning a million dollars a year, you shouldn’t get special tax subsidies or deductions. On the other hand, if you make under $250,000 a year, like 98 percent of American families, your taxes shouldn’t go up. You’re the ones struggling with rising costs and stagnant wages. You’re the ones who need relief.

Now, you can call this class warfare all you want. But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense.

We don’t begrudge financial success in this country. We admire it. When Americans talk about folks like me paying my fair share of taxes, it’s not because they envy the rich. It’s because they understand that when I get tax breaks I don’t need and the country can’t afford, it either adds to the deficit, or somebody else has to make up the difference – like a senior on a fixed income; or a student trying to get through school; or a family trying to make ends meet. That’s not right. Americans know it’s not right. They know that this generation’s success is only possible because past generations felt a responsibility to each other, and to their country’s future, and they know our way of life will only endure if we feel that same sense of shared responsibility. That’s how we’ll reduce our deficit. That’s an America built to last.

I recognize that people watching tonight have differing views about taxes and debt; energy and health care. But no matter what party they belong to, I bet most Americans are thinking the same thing right now: Nothing will get done this year, or next year, or maybe even the year after that, because Washington is broken.

Can you blame them for feeling a little cynical?

The greatest blow to confidence in our economy last year didn’t come from events beyond our control. It came from a debate in Washington over whether the United States would pay its bills or not. Who benefited from that fiasco?

I’ve talked tonight about the deficit of trust between Main Street and Wall Street. But the divide between this city and the rest of the country is at least as bad – and it seems to get worse every year.

Some of this has to do with the corrosive influence of money in politics. So together, let’s take some steps to fix that. Send me a bill that bans insider trading by Members of Congress, and I will sign it tomorrow. Let’s limit any elected official from owning stocks in industries they impact. Let’s make sure people who bundle campaign contributions for Congress can’t lobby Congress, and vice versa – an idea that has bipartisan support, at least outside of Washington.

Some of what’s broken has to do with the way Congress does its business these days. A simple majority is no longer enough to get anything – even routine business – passed through the Senate. Neither party has been blameless in these tactics. Now both parties should put an end to it. For starters, I ask the Senate to pass a rule that all judicial and public service nominations receive a simple up or down vote within 90 days.

The executive branch also needs to change. Too often, it’s inefficient, outdated and remote. That’s why I’ve asked this Congress to grant me the authority to consolidate the federal bureaucracy so that our Government is leaner, quicker, and more responsive to the needs of the American people.

Finally, none of these reforms can happen unless we also lower the temperature in this town. We need to end the notion that the two parties must be locked in a perpetual campaign of mutual destruction; that politics is about clinging to rigid ideologies instead of building consensus around common sense ideas.

I’m a Democrat. But I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That Government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more. That’s why my education reform offers more competition, and more control for schools and States. That’s why we’re getting rid of regulations that don’t work. That’s why our health care law relies on a reformed private market, not a Government program.

On the other hand, even my Republican friends who complain the most about Government spending have supported federally-financed roads, and clean energy projects, and federal offices for the folks back home.

The point is, we should all want a smarter, more effective Government. And while we may not be able to bridge our biggest philosophical differences this year, we can make real progress. With or without this Congress, I will keep taking actions that help the economy grow. But I can do a whole lot more with your help. Because when we act together, there is nothing the United States of America can’t achieve.

That is the lesson we’ve learned from our actions abroad over the last few years.

Ending the Iraq war has allowed us to strike decisive blows against our enemies. From Pakistan to Yemen, the al Qaeda operatives who remain are scrambling, knowing that they can’t escape the reach of the United States of America.

From this position of strength, we’ve begun to wind down the war in Afghanistan. Ten thousand of our troops have come home. Twenty-three thousand more will leave by the end of this summer. This transition to Afghan lead will continue, and we will build an enduring partnership with Afghanistan, so that it is never again a source of attacks against America.

As the tide of war recedes, a wave of change has washed across the Middle East and North Africa, from Tunis to Cairo; from Sana’a to Tripoli. A year ago, Qadhafi was one of the world’s longest-serving dictators – a murderer with American blood on his hands. Today, he is gone. And in Syria, I have no doubt that the Assad regime will soon discover that the forces of change can’t be reversed, and that human dignity can’t be denied.

How this incredible transformation will end remains uncertain. But we have a huge stake in the outcome. And while it is ultimately up to the people of the region to decide their fate, we will advocate for those values that have served our own country so well. We will stand against violence and intimidation. We will stand for the rights and dignity of all human beings – men and women; Christians, Muslims, and Jews. We will support policies that lead to strong and stable democracies and open markets, because tyranny is no match for liberty.

And we will safeguard America’s own security against those who threaten our citizens, our friends, and our interests. Look at Iran. Through the power of our diplomacy, a world that was once divided about how to deal with Iran’s nuclear program now stands as one. The regime is more isolated than ever before; its leaders are faced with crippling sanctions, and as long as they shirk their responsibilities, this pressure will not relent. Let there be no doubt: America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal. But a peaceful resolution of this issue is still possible, and far better, and if Iran changes course and meets its obligations, it can rejoin the community of nations.

The renewal of American leadership can be felt across the globe. Our oldest alliances in Europe and Asia are stronger than ever. Our ties to the Americas are deeper. Our iron-clad commitment to Israel’s security has meant the closest military cooperation between our two countries in history. We’ve made it clear that America is a Pacific power, and a new beginning in Burma has lit a new hope. From the coalitions we’ve built to secure nuclear materials, to the missions we’ve led against hunger and disease; from the blows we’ve dealt to our enemies; to the enduring power of our moral example, America is back.

Anyone who tells you otherwise, anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about. That’s not the message we get from leaders around the world, all of whom are eager to work with us. That’s not how people feel from Tokyo to Berlin; from Cape Town to Rio; where opinions of America are higher than they’ve been in years. Yes, the world is changing; no, we can’t control every event. But America remains the one indispensable nation in world affairs – and as long as I’m President, I intend to keep it that way.

That’s why, working with our military leaders, I have proposed a new defense strategy that ensures we maintain the finest military in the world, while saving nearly half a trillion dollars in our budget. To stay one step ahead of our adversaries, I have already sent this Congress legislation that will secure our country from the growing danger of cyber-threats.

Above all, our freedom endures because of the men and women in uniform who defend it. As they come home, we must serve them as well as they served us. That includes giving them the care and benefits they have earned – which is why we’ve increased annual VA spending every year I’ve been President. And it means enlisting our veterans in the work of rebuilding our Nation.

With the bipartisan support of this Congress, we are providing new tax credits to companies that hire vets. Michelle and Jill Biden have worked with American businesses to secure a pledge of 135,000 jobs for veterans and their families. And tonight, I’m proposing a Veterans Job Corps that will help our communities hire veterans as cops and firefighters, so that America is as strong as those who defend her.

Which brings me back to where I began. Those of us who’ve been sent here to serve can learn from the service of our troops. When you put on that uniform, it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white; Asian or Latino; conservative or liberal; rich or poor; gay or straight. When you’re marching into battle, you look out for the person next to you, or the mission fails. When you’re in the thick of the fight, you rise or fall as one unit, serving one Nation, leaving no one behind.

One of my proudest possessions is the flag that the SEAL Team took with them on the mission to get bin Laden. On it are each of their names. Some may be Democrats. Some may be Republicans. But that doesn’t matter. Just like it didn’t matter that day in the Situation Room, when I sat next to Bob Gates – a man who was George Bush’s defense secretary; and Hillary Clinton, a woman who ran against me for president.

All that mattered that day was the mission. No one thought about politics. No one thought about themselves. One of the young men involved in the raid later told me that he didn’t deserve credit for the mission. It only succeeded, he said, because every single member of that unit did their job – the pilot who landed the helicopter that spun out of control; the translator who kept others from entering the compound; the troops who separated the women and children from the fight; the SEALs who charged up the stairs. More than that, the mission only succeeded because every member of that unit trusted each other – because you can’t charge up those stairs, into darkness and danger, unless you know that there’s someone behind you, watching your back.

So it is with America. Each time I look at that flag, I’m reminded that our destiny is stitched together like those fifty stars and those thirteen stripes. No one built this country on their own. This Nation is great because we built it together. This Nation is great because we worked as a team. This Nation is great because we get each other’s backs. And if we hold fast to that truth, in this moment of trial, there is no challenge too great; no mission too hard. As long as we’re joined in common purpose, as long as we maintain our common resolve, our journey moves forward, our future is hopeful, and the state of our Union will always be strong.

Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.

Source:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremybogaisky/2012/01/24/full-text-president-obamas-state-of-the-union-address/print/
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2012-01-19T21:33:00.003-05:00

Anonymous downs government and music industry sites in largest attack ever in MegaUpload and SOPA retaliation

RT.com
January 20, 2012

Hacktivists with the collective Anonymous are waging an attack on the website for the White House after successfully breaking the sites for the FBI, Department of Justice, Universal Music Group, RIAA and Motion Picture Association of America.

In response to today’s federal raid on the file sharing service Megaupload, hackers with the online collective Anonymous have broken the websites for the FBI, Department of Justice, Universal Music Group, RIAA, Motion Picture Association of America and Warner Music Group.

“It was in retaliation for Megaupload, as was the concurrent attack on Justice.org,” Anonymous operative Barrett Brown tells RT on Thursday afternoon.

Only hours before the DoJ and Universal sites went down, news broke that Megaupload, a massive file sharing site with a reported 50 million daily users, was taken down by federal agents. Four people linked to Megaupload were arrested in New Zealand and an international crackdown led agents to serving at least 20 search warrants across the globe.

The latest of sites to fall is FBI.gov, which finally broke at around 7:40 pm EST Thursday evening.

Less than an hour after the DoJ and Universal sites came down, the website for the RIAA, or Recording Industry Association of America, went offline as well. Shortly before 6 p.m EST, the government's Copyright.gov site went down as well. Thirty minutes later came the site for BMI, or Broadcast Music, Inc, the licensing organization that represents some of the biggest names in music.

Also on Thursday, MPAA.org returned an error as Anonymous hacktivists managed to bring down the website for the Motion Picture Association of America. The group, headed by former senator Chris Dodd, is an adamant supporter of both PIPA and SOPA legislation.

Universal Music Group, or UMG, is the largest record company in the United States and under its umbrella are the labels Interscope-Geffen-A&M, the Island Def Jam Motown Music Group and Mercury Records.

Brown adds that “more is coming” and Anonymous-aligned hacktivists are pursuing a joint effort with others to “damage campaign raising abilities of remaining Democrats who support SOPA.”

Although many members of Congress have just this week changed their stance on the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, the raid on Megaupload Thursday proved that the feds don’t need SOPA or its sister legislation, PIPA, in order to pose a blow to the Web.

Brown adds that operatives involved in the project will use an “experimental campaign” and search engine optimization techniques “whereby to forever saddle some of these congressmen with their record on this issue.”

Source:
http://rt.com/usa/news/anonymous-doj-universal-sopa-235/
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2012-01-18T07:56:00.003-05:00

Millions of Americans oppose SOPA and PIPA because these bills would censor the Internet and slow economic growth in the U.S.

Two bills before Congress, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, would censor the Web and impose harmful regulations on American business. Millions of Internet users and entrepreneurs already oppose SOPA and PIPA.

The Senate will begin voting on January 24th. Please let them know how you feel. Sign this petition urging Congress to vote NO on PIPA and SOPA before it is too late.

https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/sopa-pipa/

STOP SOPA

http://news2umedia.blogspot.com/2011_12_01_archive.html#55969514831571283
http://onecandleinthedark.blogspot.com
http://www.cbsyousuck.com
http://www.justart.net

A rapidly growing community

Opposition to the Protect IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) grows with each day. This brief list is just a sampling of businesses. Visit the Center for Democracy and Technology’s list for a more complete look at the individuals, organizations, experts and legislators that know how bad this legislation could be.

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2012-01-09T21:03:00.000-05:00

New Bill Known As Enemy Expatriation Act Would Allow Government To Strip Citizenship Without Conviction

By Stephen D. Foster Jr.
AddictingInfo.org
January 6, 2012

First, Congress considered the National Defense Authorization Act, sections of which gave the President the authority to use the military to arrest and indefinitely detain Americans without trial or charge.

The language was revised because of strong condemnation from the American people. But now a new bill has emerged that poses yet another threat to the American citizenry.

Congress is considering HR 3166 and S. 1698 also known as the Enemy Expatriation Act, sponsored by Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Charles Dent (R-PA).

This bill would give the US government the power to strip Americans of their citizenship without being convicted of being “hostile” against the United States. In other words, you can be stripped of your nationality for “engaging in, or purposefully and materially supporting, hostilities against the United States.”

Legally, the term “hostilities” means any conflict subject to the laws of war but considering the fact that the War on Terror is a little ambiguous and encompassing, any action could be labeled as supporting terrorism. Since the Occupy movement began, conservatives have been trying to paint the protesters as terrorists.

The new law would change a part of US Code 1481 which can be read in full here. Compare 3166 to 1481 and the change is small. The new section makes no reference to being convicted as it does in section (7).

So even though the language of the NDAA has been revised to exclude American citizens, the US government merely has to strip Americans of their citizenship and the NDAA will apply. And they will be able to do so without convicting the accused in a court of law.

I hope I’m wrong, but it sounds to me like this is a loophole for indefinitely detaining Americans.

Once again, you just have to be accused of supporting hostilities which could be defined any way the government sees fit. Then the government can strip your citizenship and apply the indefinite detention section of the NDAA without the benefit of a trial.

This certainly must be questioned by American citizens. The way these defense obsessed Republicans think, our rights are always in danger of being taken away.

To read the full text of the bill, go here.

Source:
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/01/06/new-bill-known-as-enemy-expatriation-act-would-allow-government-to-strip-citizenship-without-conviction/
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2012-01-02T09:49:00.000-05:00

40 Hard Questions That The American People Should Be Asking Right Now

The Economic Collapse
December 2011
[emphasis added]

If you spend much time watching the mainstream news, then you know how incredibly vapid it can be. It is amazing how they can spend so much time saying next to nothing. There seems to be a huge reluctance to tackle the tough issues and the hard questions.

Perhaps I should be thankful for this, because if the mainstream media was doing their job properly, there would not be a need for the alternative media. Once upon a time, the mainstream media had a virtual monopoly on the dissemination of news in the United States, but that has changed.

Thankfully, the Internet in the United States is free and open (at least for now) and people that are hungry for the truth can go searching for it. Today, an increasing number of Americans want to understand why our economy is dying and why our national debt is skyrocketing. An increasing number of Americans are deeply frustrated with what is going on in Washington D.C. and they are alarmed that we seem to get closer to becoming a totalitarian police state with each passing year.

People want real answers about our foreign policy, about our corrupt politicians, about our corrupt financial system, about our shocking moral decline and about the increasing instability that we are seeing all over the world, and they are not getting those answers from the mainstream media.

If the mainstream media will not do it, then those of us in the alternative media will be glad to tackle the tough issues.

The following are 40 hard questions that the American people should be asking right now....

#1 If Iran tries to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, what will that do to the price of oil and what will that do to the global economy?

#2 If Iran tries to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, will the United States respond by launching a military strike on Iran?

#3 Why is the Federal Reserve bailing out Europe? And why are so few members of Congress objecting to this?

#4 The U.S. dollar has lost well over 95 percent of its value since the Federal Reserve was created, the U.S. national debt is more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was created and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has a track record of incompetence that is absolutely mind blowing. So what possible justification is there for allowing the Federal Reserve to continue to issue our currency and run our economy?

#5 Why does the euro keep dropping like a rock? Is this a sign that Europe is heading for a major recession?

#6 Why are European banks parking record-setting amounts of cash at the European Central Bank? Is this evidence that banks don't want to lend to one another and that we are on the verge of a massive credit crunch?

#7 If the European financial system is going to be just fine, then why is the UK government preparing feverishly for the collapse of the euro?

#8 What did the head of the IMF mean when she recently said that we could soon see conditions "reminiscent of the 1930s depression"?

#9 How in the world can Mitt Romney say with a straight face that the individual health insurance mandate that he signed into law as governor of Massachusetts was based on "conservative principles"? Wouldn't that make the individual mandate in Obamacare "conservative" as well?

#10 If the one thing that almost everyone in the Republican Party seems to agree on is that Obamacare is bad, then why is the candidate that created the plan that much of Obamacare was based upon leading in so many of the polls?

#11 What did Mitt Romney mean when he stated that he wants “to eliminate some of the differences, repeal the bad, and keep the good” in Obamacare?

#12 If no Republican candidate is able to accumulate at least 50 percent of the delegates by the time the Republican convention rolls around, will that mean that the Republicans will have a brokered convention that will enable the Republican establishment to pick whoever they want as the nominee?

#13 Why are middle class families being taxed into oblivion while the big oil companies receive about $4.4 billion in specialized tax breaks a year from the federal government?

#14 Why have we allowed the "too big to fail" banks to become even larger?

#15 Why has the United States had a negative trade balance every single year since 1976?

#16 Back in 1970, 25 percent of all jobs in the United States were manufacturing jobs. Today, only 9 percent of all jobs in the United States are manufacturing jobs. How in the world could we allow that to happen?

#17 If the United States has lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs a month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, then why don't our politicians do something about it?

#18 If you can believe it, more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities in the United States have permanently closed down since 2001. So exactly what does that say about our economy?

#19 Why was the new Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial on the National Mall made in China? Wasn't there anyone in America that could make it?

#20 If low income jobs now account for 41 percent of all jobs in the United States, then how are we going to continue to have a vibrant middle class?

#21 Why do the poor just keep getting poorer in the United States today?

#22 How can the Obama administration be talking about an "economic recovery" when 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be "low income" or are living in poverty?

#23 Why has the number of new cars sold in the U.S. declined by about 50 percent since 1985?

#24 How can we say that we have a successful national energy policy when the average American household will spend a whopping $4,155 on gasoline by the end of this year?

#25 Why does it take gigantic mountains of money to get a college education in America today? According to the Student Loan Debt Clock, total student loan debt in the United States will surpass the 1 trillion dollar mark in early 2012. Isn't there something very wrong about that?

#26 Why do about a third of all U.S. states allow borrowers who don’t pay their bills to be put in jail?

#27 If it costs tens of billions of dollars to take care of all of the illegal immigrants that are already in this country, why did the Obama administration go around Congress and grant "backdoor amnesty" to the vast majority of them? Won't that just encourage millions more to come in illegally?

#28 Why are gun sales setting new all-time records in America right now?

#29 Why are very elderly women being strip-searched by TSA agents at U.S. airports? Does that really keep us any safer?

#30 The last words of Steve Jobs were "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow." What did he mean by that?

#31 How in the world did scientists in Europe decide that it was a good idea for them to create a new "killer bird flu" that is very easy to pass from human to human?

#32 If our founding fathers intended to set up a limited central government, then why does the federal government just continue to get bigger and bigger?

#33 Are we on the verge of an absolutely devastating retirement crisis? On January 1st, 2011 the very first of the Baby Boomers started to reach the age of 65. Now more than 10,000 Baby Boomers will be turning 65 every single day for the next two decades. So where in the world are we going to get all the money we need to pay them the retirement benefits that we have promised them?

#34 If the federal government stopped all borrowing today and began right at this moment to repay the U.S. national debt at a rate of one dollar per second, it would take over 440,000 years to pay off the U.S. national debt. So does anyone out there actually still believe that the U.S. national debt will be paid off someday?

#35 If the U.S. economy is getting better, then why are an all-time record 46 million Americans now on food stamps?

#36 How can we say that we have the greatest economy on earth when we have a child poverty rate that is more than twice as high as France and one out of every four American children is on food stamps?

#37 Since 1964, the reelection rate for members of the U.S. House of Representatives has never fallen below 85 percent. So are the American people really that stupid that they would keep sending the exact same Congress critters back to Washington D.C. over and over and over?

#38 What does it say about our society that nearly one-third of all Americans are arrested by the time they reach the age of 23?

#39 Why do so many of our politicians think that it is a good idea to allow the U.S. military to arrest American citizens on American soil and indefinitely detain them without a trial?

#40 A new bill being considered by the U.S. House of Representatives would give the U.S. government power to shut down any website that is determined to "engage in, enable or facilitate" copyright infringement. Many believe that the language of the new law is so vague that it would allow the government to permanently shut down any website that even links very briefly to "infringing material". Prominent websites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube would be constantly in danger of being given a "death penalty". The American people need to ask their members of Congress this question: Do you plan to vote for SOPA (The Stop Online Piracy Act)? If the answer is yes, that is a clear indication that you should never cast a single vote for that member of Congress ever again.

[added link]
SOPA Bill Delayed until 2012
http://money.cnn.com/2011/12/22/technology/sopa_vote/index.htm

Source:
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/40-hard-questions-that-the-american-people-should-be-asking-right-now
______________________

2011-12-30T00:01:00.004-05:00

2011-12-23T15:36:00.004-05:00

Forensic Examiner Found No Match of Cables on Manning’s Laptop to WikiLeaks’

By Kim Zetter
Wired.com
December 19, 2011

FT. MEADE, Maryland — A day after a government forensic expert testified that he’d found thousands of diplomatic cables on the Army computer of suspected WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning, he was forced to admit under cross-examination that none of the cables he compared to the ones WikiLeaks released matched.

Special Agent David Shaver, a forensic investigator with the Army’s Computer Crimes Investigations Unit, testified Sunday that he’d found 10,000 U.S. diplomatic cables in HTML format on the soldier’s classified work computer, as well as a corrupted text file containing more than 100,000 complete cables that had been converted to base-64 encoding.

Six months after Manning was arrested for allegedly leaking documents to WikiLeaks, the site began publishing 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables that ranged in date from December 1966 to the end of February 2010. But Shaver said none of the documents that he found on Manning’s computer, and that he then compared to those that WikiLeaks published, matched the WikiLeaks documents.

Shaver wasn’t asked how many cables he compared to the WikiLeaks cables, or which dates those cables had, he just said he matched “some of them.” In re-direct examination, however, he noted that the CSV file in which the cables were contained was corrupted and suggested this might indicate that it had not been possible to pass those cables to WikiLeaks for this reason. The defense objected to this assumption, however, noting that Shaver could not speculate on why the cables were not among those released by WikiLeaks.

The cross-examination of Shaver focused on establishing that there might have been legitimate reasons for the State Department cables to be on Manning’s computers, since intelligence analysts were given access to them to do their job. One of Manning’s superiors testified earlier in the hearing that he had sent a link to Manning and other analysts directing them to the location where they could find the cables.

The defense also established that it’s possible Manning’s computer could have been used by someone else — it was already established in previous testimony that he shared his work computers with another soldier — and also raised questions about the possibility that other soldiers knew Manning’s password and therefore could have logged into his computer using his credentials and user profile.

In addition to the State Department cables found on Manning’s computer, Shaver also testified Sunday that he’d found links between evidence on Manning’s laptop and two other WikiLeaks releases: the so-called “Collateral Murder” Apache helicopter video and Gitmo prisoner assessments.

Last April, WikiLeaks began publishing a trove of more than 700 Guantanamo Bay prisoner assessment reports.

Shaver discovered scripts for Wget — a web-scraping tool — on Manning’s computer that pointed to a Microsoft SharePoint server holding copies of the Gitmo documents. He ran the scripts to download the documents, then downloaded the ones that WikiLeaks had published, compared them and found they were the same, Shaver testified.

He also said he found two copies of the Apache video on Manning’s work computer in unallocated space.

But Shaver was forced to admit on Monday that he was not aware that soldiers in the secure facility Manning worked in had been viewing that controversial video and talking about in December 2009, months before WikiLeaks published it. That, the defense seemed to suggest, would explain why a copy might be on Manning’s computer.

A second government forensic witness, a private contractor named Mark Johnson who works for Mantech International, testified that he examined the forensic image of Manning’s personal laptop, a Macbook Pro. On that computer he discovered chat logs of conversations that Manning allegedly had with former hacker Adrian Lamo. Johnson revealed that the Adium chat program was installed on Manning’s computer and was used to conduct the chat with Lamo.

In a screen shot of the chat log shown in court, Manning’s name was completely spelled out, as opposed to Lamo’s version of the chat logs — which the hacker gave authorities in May 2010 — and showed Manning’s chats under the name Bradass87.

Manning’s former roommate at Forward Operating Base Hammer also testified on Monday to say that he and Manning shared a room from October 2009, when they first deployed to Iraq, up until the time Manning was arrested in May 2010.

Specialist Eric Baker, a military police officer, said that he and Manning rarely talked. But he told the court that Manning “used the computer quite often” and said that when he’d wake up in the middle of the night Manning would be on the computer. He never saw what was on Manning’s screen, he told the court.

Source:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/cables-match-laptop-manning/
_________________

2011-12-19T23:50:00.000-05:00

Stop American Censorship
This week, a bill that would create America’s first Internet censorship system is going to a full committee for a vote, and is likely to pass. This week, millions of us will protest censorship, censoring our own posts and asking you to call Congress.

We need your help - please make a call right now.

__________________________________

Stop Online Piracy Act vote delayed

By David Kravets
Wired.com
Dec 16, 2011

The House Judiciary Committee considering whether to send the Stop Online Piracy Act to the House floor abruptly adjourned Friday with no new vote date set—a surprise given that the bill looked certain to pass out of committee today.

The committee's chairman and chief sponsor of the legislation, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), agreed to further explore a controversial provision that lets the Attorney General order changes to core internet infrastructure in order to stop copyright infringement.

Smith said the hearing would resume at the "earliest practical day that Congress is in session." Hours later, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) tweeted that the committee would resume action Wednesday.

The abrupt halt to Friday's proceeding, which followed a marathon-long, 11-hour hearing Thursday, was based on a motion from Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah). He urged Smith to postpone the session until technical experts could be brought in to testify whether altering the internet's domain-naming system to fight websites deemed "dedicated" to infringing activity would create security risks.

Just yesterday, Smith said that was not necessary, despite a signed letter by many of the internet's core engineers saying the bill's approach was technically flawed.

The legislation mandates that ISPs alter records in the net's system for looking up website names, known as DNS, so that users couldn't navigate to the site. Or, if ISPs choose not to introduce false information into DNS at the urging of the Justice Department, they instead would be required to employ some other method, such as deep-packet inspection, to prevent American citizens from visiting infringing sites.

ISPs, could, for instance, adopt tactics used by the Great Chinese Firewall to sniff for traffic going to a blacklisted site and simply block it.

But a host of security researchers and tech policy experts, including Stewart Baker, the former Department of Homeland Security policy director, said the plan "would still do great damage to internet security."

On Thursday, Chaffetz and a host of other lawmakers asked Smith to stop the hearing so that the committee could bring in experts to testify. But Smith had refused, and the committee voted 22-12 to leave the DNS redirect and firewall provisions intact.

The committee heard from the Motion Picture Industry Association of America at a SOPA hearing last month, but has never called an expert on internet architecture. It was not immediately clear who Smith would ultimately line up.

Michael O'Leary, an MPAA vice president, had testified last month before the committee that security concerns were "overstated."

Putting false information into the DNS system—the equivalent of the net’s phonebook—would be ineffective, frustrate security initiatives and lead to software workarounds, according to a paper co-signed by security experts Steve Crocker of Shinkuro, David Dagon of Georgia Tech, Dan Kaminsky of DKH, Danny McPherson of Verisign and Paul Vixie of Internet Systems Consortium. The paper was lodged into the committee's record on Thursday.

"These actions would threaten the Domain Name System’s ability to provide universal naming, a primary source of the internet’s value as a single, unified, global communications network," they wrote.

Also lodged into the record was an open letter from 83 prominent internet engineers, including Vint Cert, John Gilmore and L. Jean Camp.

"The US government has regularly claimed that it supports a free and open internet, both domestically and abroad. We cannot have a free and open Internet unless its naming and routing systems sit above the political concerns and objectives of any one government or industry," they wrote.

In the security context, they maintain the bill would break the internet's universal character and hamper US government-supported efforts to rollout out DNS-SEC, which is intended to prevent hackers from hijacking the net through fake DNS entries.

The measure, meanwhile, also grants private companies the ability to de-fund websites they allege to be trafficking in unauthorized copyright and trademark goods. Rights holders may ask judges to order ad networks and banks to stop doing business with a site dedicated to infringing activities.

The legislation also gives legal immunity to financial institutions and ad networks that choose to boycott the rogue sites even without having been ordered to do so.

Smith’s legislation targets sites with foreign domains, not American-based ones ending in .com, .org and .net.

Source:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/12/stop-online-piracy-act-vote-delayed-probably-well-into-2012.ars
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2011-12-13T08:13:00.000-05:00

Obama will sign NDAA 1031 Citizen Imprisonment Law in a few days

Congress is pressing ahead with a massive $662 billion defense bill that requires military custody

Obama required the Indefinite Detainment Bill to INCLUDE U.S. Citizens as part of the wording!...Senator Levin

Dec. 11, 2011

Well now we know, for those who have been holding out "hope" that Obama will veto the 1031 Indefinite Detainment Bill against holding U.S. Citizens without rights to a trial or lawyer or charges for the rest of their lives.... It was Obama who required the bill have the language of U.S. Citizens being held without rights in the bill!

Video of Levin on Senate floor revealing it was Obama who demanded U.S. Citizens be part of the language of the Indefinite Detention in 1031 Bill:

As soon as Congressional conference negotiations conclude, the President will sign NDAA 1031 into law, permitting citizen imprisonment without evidence or trial.

The bill that passed Congress does not exempt citizens. Section 1031 reads, "A covered person under this section" includes "any person who has committed a belligerent act". We only have to be accused, because we don't get a trial.

- Confusingly, Obama threatened a veto for 1032, but NOT 1031. 1032 is unrelated to imprisoning citizens without a trial. He has never suggested using a veto to stop Section 1031 citizen imprisonment -- in fact, it was requested by the Obama administration. Watch the video for proof.

- The Feinstein Amendment 1031(e) is dangerously misleading. Don't be fooled: In the text of 1031(e), "Nothing in this section shall be construed...", the only word that matters is "construed" because the Supreme Court are the only ones with the power to construe the law. The Feinstein Amendment 1031(e) permits citizens to be imprisoned without evidence or a trial forever, if the Supreme Court does not explicity strike down 1031.

- Any time you hear the words, "requirement for military custody" this refers to 1032 NOT 1031. We must not confuse these two sections. In its statements, the Obama administration has actually contributed to the confusion about 1032's "requirement for military custody", which is completely unrelated to Section 1031 citizen imprisonment without trial. These tricky, misleading words appear even in major news stories. Don't fall for it!

If we act urgently to tell our friends, family, and colleagues, we may still be able to prevent this. Here is what we can do:

1) Americans must know about this to stop it. Urgently pass this petiton as widely as possible: http://www.change.org/petitions/stop-ndaa-section-1031-citizen-imprisonment-l...

2) To spread this C-SPAN video evidence, Thumbs Up and comment on this video. People deserve to watch this before he signs it.

3) Congress can still block the law before conference negotiations conclude. Write and call your Representative and Senator telling them to stop NDAA Section 1031 and the dangerously misleading Feinstein Amendment 1031(e).

Contact your Representative: http://writerep.house.gov/writerep/
Contact your Senator: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

4) Write and call the White House to tell the President you won't sit by and watch NDAA Section 1031 and the dangerously misleading Feinstein Amendment 1031(e) become law: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questions-and-comments

Sources:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLiKvSz_wX8&feature=player_embedded
http://sherriequestioningall.blogspot.com/2011/12/senator-levin-revealed-it-was-obama-who.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/13/national-defense-authorization-act-ndaa-obama-detainee-policy_n_1145407.html
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2011-12-04T18:45:00.000-05:00

Why young voters love Ron Paul

It's not because they're potheads. It's because they're sick of America's militaristic misadventures

By David Sirota
Salon.com
Nov. 28, 2011
[emphasis added]

Despite a sustained campaign by the Washington media and political establishment to marginalize him, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, is still a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. That has a lot to do with the support he’s receiving from young voters. In almost every survey and activist straw poll, Paul draws big numbers from voters between the ages of 18 and 29.

The laziest way to explain the counterintuitive phenomenon of youth rallying around the GOP’s oldest candidate is to insist that it’s about kids’ silly college fling with unrealistic libertarianism or that it’s about kids’ affinity for drug use — and more specifically, Paul’s support for legislation that would let states legalize marijuana.

This degrading mythology ignores the possibility that young people support Paul’s libertarianism for its overall critique of our government’s civil liberties transgressions (transgressions, by the way, now being openly waged against young people), nor does the narrative address the possibility that young people support Paul’s drug stance not because they want to smoke weed, but because they see the War on Drugs as a colossal waste of resources. Instead, Paul is presented as merely a fringe protest candidate, and the young people who support him are depicted as just dumb idealists, hedonistic pot smokers or both.

One problem with this fantastical tale, of course, is that it insults the intelligence and motivation of young voters. But another, even more troubling facet of this tale is how it uses speculative apocrypha and stereotyping about ideology and drugs to suppress concrete social survey data about the far-more-likely foreign policy motivations of young Ron Paul supporters.

Paul, of course, is one of the only presidential candidates in contemporary American history in either party to overtly question our nation’s invade-bomb-and-occupy first, ask-questions later doctrine and to admit what the Central Intelligence Agency acknowledges: namely, that our military actions can result in anti-Americanism fervor and terrorist blowback.

Predictably, Paul’s foreign-policy honesty has generated Washington media scorn (most recently and explicitly, as Glenn Greenwald points out, from CBS News’ Bob Schieffer). No doubt, that scorn has much to do with that media being disproportionately older, more establishment-worshipping and more hyper-militaristic than the general population. But far away from D.C. green rooms in Real America — and especially among younger voters — Paul’s foreign policy positions are generating the opposite of scorn.

Indeed, as a new Pew Research Center report suggests, these positions are almost certainly a driving force behind the support for his candidacy.

The new study tracks how younger voters are now strongly rejecting traditional American hubris in favor of Paul’s more empirical views on foreign policy. For instance, it finds that while older citizens embrace American exceptionalism in insisting our culture is inherently superior, younger voters do not. But the key finding as it relates to Paul’s candidacy has to do with blowback, which Paul frequently discusses on the campaign trail. As Pew reports (emphasis mine):

Two-thirds of Millennials (66 percent) say that relying too much on military force to defeat terrorism creates hatred that leads to more terrorism. A slim majority of Gen Xers (55 percent) agree with this sentiment, but less than half (46 percent) of Boomers agree and the number of Silents who share this view is 41 percent. A plurality of Silents (45 percent) believe that using overwhelming force is the best way to defeat terrorism and 43 percent of Boomers share that view.

These findings have been largely ignored by the media and political establishment. That’s predictable. These poll numbers undermine the dominant fairy tale that Americans universally support status-quo militarism — and so they are largely omitted from the media discussion of the presidential election. It’s the same thing for Paul’s foreign policy positions in general — they are either ignored or mocked by a political and media culture that is ideologically invested in marginalizing them.

Nonetheless, there are two good pieces of news in all this.

First, whereas in earlier eras such establishment hostility to a politician’s position could prevent that candidate from making a serious run for president, polls show Paul’s foreign-policy message is likely getting through to a key demographic, giving him a genuine shot at his party’s nomination.

Second, whether Paul eventually wins the GOP nomination or not, the trends embedded in his current electoral coalition will affect our politics long after his candidacy is over — and even if you don’t support Paul’s overall candidacy, that’s a decidedly positive development for those who favor a new foreign policy. (A brief side note: This article is in no way a personal endorsement of Paul’s overall campaign — I have serious problems with some of his economic positions.)

With the defense budget bankrupting our budget and with our imperialist foreign policy making us less safe, the younger generation’s rejection of hubris and hyper-militarism — and that generation’s willingness to support candidates in both parties who similarly reject that militarism — provides a rare ray of hope in these political dark ages. And not just a fleeting hope — but a long-term one.

As the Pew data show, the younger generation, whose foreign policy views were shaped not by World War II triumphalism but by grinding quagmires like Iraq and Afghanistan, has a far more realistic view of America’s role in the modern world. While that position may shift somewhat over the years, the numbers are striking enough to suggest an impending cultural break from the past. As the younger generation assumes more powerful positions in society and more electoral agency in our democracy, the possibility of such a break gives us reason to believe America can create a new foreign policy paradigm in our lifetime.

Source:
http://www.salon.com/2011/11/28/why_young_voters_love_ron_paul/
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2011-11-29T19:06:00.000-05:00

A Revelation; The Fed Grants $7.77 Trillion in Secret Bank Loans – The Fed Works for Banks, Not The Rest of America

Kucinich’s NEED Act Would Reclaim Monetary Authority for the People, Save Homes and Put Americans Back to Work

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

November 29, 2011 3:28 PM
CONTACT: Congressman Dennis Kucinich
Nathan White (202)225-5871

Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a longtime advocate for reform of the Federal Reserve, is sharply criticizing the Federal Reserve today after Bloomberg news reported that the Federal Reserve secretly committed nearly $8 trillion in support to American and international financial institutions during the 2008 bailout. Kucinich recorded a video for his website before going to the floor of the House of Representatives to call upon Congress to reclaim its Constitution primacy over monetary policy.

Kucinich also called threats by ratings agency to downgrade U.S. debt a threat to our national sovereignty.

See Kucinich on the floor of the U.S. House HERE.

See Kucinich’s web address HERE.

“The Federal Reserve extended extraordinary support to financial institutions that crashed the economy with reckless speculation, and on that support many of the firms made billions in profit and paid obscene bonuses.

The Fed asked for nothing from these firms in return and that is because the Federal Reserve works first and foremost for the welfare of private financial institutions, not the American economy."

“The message that emerges from these revelations for Americans who have lost their jobs, lost their homes, or watched their retirement nest eggs disappear is that we have unlimited resources available for the banks, but nothing for the American people,” Kucinich stated.

The Bloomberg report is the result of a court-ordered release of over 29,000 pages of Federal Reserve documents and records of more than 21,000 transactions. Through direct lending, loan guarantees and enhanced lending limits, the Federal Reserve supported national and international financial firms with as much as $7.77 trillion as of March 2009. The $7.77 trillion provided dwarfs the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) cap mandated by Congress.

Congressman Kucinich introduced legislation that would impose transparency on the Federal Reserve. The National Emergency Employment Defense (NEED) Act, HR 2990, would incorporate the Federal Reserve within the United States Treasury. The bill would establish fiscal integrity, reassert Congressional sovereignty and allow the federal government to correct crippling national deficiencies in infrastructure repairs and education nationwide by spending money into circulation without increasing the national debt or causing inflation.

Learn more about the NEED Act here.

Source:
http://kucinich.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=270489
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2011-11-24T11:12:00.001-05:00

THE REAL STORY OF THANKSGIVING

by Susan Bates
Hill & Holler Column
susanbates@webtv.net

Most of us associate the holiday with happy Pilgrims and Indians sitting down to a big feast. And that did happen - once.

The story began in 1614 when a band of English explorers sailed home to England with a ship full of Patuxet Indians bound for slavery. They left behind smallpox which virtually wiped out those who had escaped. By the time the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts Bay they found only one living Patuxet Indian, a man named Squanto who had survived slavery in England and knew their language. He taught them to grow corn and to fish, and negotiated a peace treaty between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Nation. At the end of their first year, the Pilgrims held a great feast honoring Squanto and the Wampanoags.

But as word spread in England about the paradise to be found in the new world, religious zealots called Puritans began arriving by the boat load. Finding no fences around the land, they considered it to be in the public domain. Joined by other British settlers, they seized land, capturing strong young Natives for slaves and killing the rest. But the Pequot Nation had not agreed to the peace treaty Squanto had negotiated and they fought back. The Pequot War was one of the bloodiest Indian wars ever fought.

In 1637 near present day Groton, Connecticut, over 700 men, women and children of the Pequot Tribe had gathered for their annual Green Corn Festival which is our Thanksgiving celebration. In the predawn hours the sleeping Indians were surrounded by English and Dutch mercenaries who ordered them to come outside. Those who came out were shot or clubbed to death while the terrified women and children who huddled inside the longhouse were burned alive. The next day the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared "A Day Of Thanksgiving" because 700 unarmed men, women and children had been murdered.

Cheered by their "victory", the brave colonists and their Indian allies attacked village after village. Women and children over 14 were sold into slavery while the rest were murdered. Boats loaded with a many as 500 slaves regularly left the ports of New England. Bounties were paid for Indian scalps to encourage as many deaths as possible.

Following an especially successful raid against the Pequot in what is now Stamford, Connecticut, the churches announced a second day of "thanksgiving" to celebrate victory over the heathen savages. During the feasting, the hacked off heads of Natives were kicked through the streets like soccer balls. Even the friendly Wampanoag did not escape the madness. Their chief was beheaded, and his head impaled on a pole in Plymouth, Massachusetts -- where it remained on display for 24 years.

The killings became more and more frenzied, with days of thanksgiving feasts being held after each successful massacre. George Washington finally suggested that only one day of Thanksgiving per year be set aside instead of celebrating each and every massacre. Later Abraham Lincoln decreed Thanksgiving Day to be a legal national holiday during the Civil War -- on the same day he ordered troops to march against the starving Sioux in Minnesota.

This story doesn't have quite the same fuzzy feelings associated with it as the one where the Indians and Pilgrims are all sitting down together at the big feast. But we need to learn our true history so it won't ever be repeated. Next Thanksgiving when you gather with your loved ones to Thank God for all your blessings, think about those people who only wanted to live their lives and raise their families. They also took time out to say "thank you" to Creator for all their blessings.

It is sad to think that this happened, but it is important to understand all of the story and not just the happy part. Today the town of Plymouth Rock has a Thanksgiving ceremony each year in remembrance of the first Thanksgiving. There are still Wampanoag people living in Massachusetts.

In 1970, they asked one of them to speak at the ceremony to mark the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrim's arrival.

Here is part of what was said:

"Today is a time of celebrating for you -- a time of looking back to the first days of white people in America. But it is not a time of celebrating for me. It is with a heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People. When the Pilgrims arrived, we, the Wampanoags, welcomed them with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end. That before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a tribe. That we and other Indians living near the settlers would be killed by their guns or dead from diseases that we caught from them. Let us always remember, the Indian is and was just as human as the white people.

Although our way of life is almost gone, we, the Wampanoags, still walk the lands of Massachusetts. What has happened cannot be changed. But today we work toward a better America, a more Indian America where people and nature once again are important."

More History About Thanksgiving... An Introduction to History

By Chuck Larsen

This is a particularly difficult introduction to write. I have been a public schools teacher for twelve years, and I am also a historian and have written several books on American and Native American history. I also just happen to be Quebeque French, Metis, Ojibwa, and Iroquois. Because my Indian ancestors were on both sides of the struggle between the Puritans and the New England Indians and I am well versed in my cultural heritage and history both as an Anishnabeg (Algokin) and Hodenosione (Iroquois), it was felt that I could bring a unique insight to the project.

For an Indian, who is also a school teacher, Thanksgiving was never an easy holiday for me to deal with in class. I sometimes have felt like I learned too much about "the Pilgrims and the Indians." Every year I have been faced with the professional and moral dilemma of just how to be honest and informative with my children at Thanksgiving without passing on historical distortions, and racial and cultural stereotypes.

The problem is that part of what you and I learned in our own childhood about the "Pilgrims" and "Squanto" and the "First Thanksgiving" is a mixture of both history and myth.

But the THEME of Thanksgiving has truth and integrity far above and beyond what we and our forebearers have made of it. Thanksgiving is a bigger concept than just the story of the founding of the Plymouth Plantation.

So what do we teach to our children?

We usually pass on unquestioned what we all received in our own childhood classrooms. I have come to know both the truths and the myths about our "First Thanksgiving," and I feel we need to try to reach beyond the myths to some degree of historic truth. This text is an attempt to do this.

At this point you are probably asking, "What is the big deal about Thanksgiving and the Pilgrims?" "What does this guy mean by a mixture of truths and myth?"

That is just what this introduction is all about. I propose that there may be a good deal that many of us do not know about our Thanksgiving holiday and also about the "First Thanksgiving" story. I also propose that what most of us have learned about the Pilgrims and the Indians who were at the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth Plantation is only part of the truth. When you build a lesson on only half of the information, then you are not teaching the whole truth. That is why I used the word myth. So where do you start to find out more about the holiday and our modern stories about how it began?

A good place to start is with a very important book, "The Invasion of America," by Francis Jennings. It is a very authoritative text on the settlement of New England and the evolution of Indian/White relations in the New England colonies. I also recommend looking up any good text on British history. Check out the British Civil War of 1621-1642, Oliver Cromwell, and the Puritan uprising of 1653 which ended parliamentary government in England until 1660.

The history of the Puritan experience in New England really should not be separated from the history of the Puritan experience in England. You should also realize that the "Pilgrims" were a sub sect, or splinter group, of the Puritan movement. They came to America to achieve on this continent what their Puritan bretheran continued to strive for in England; and when the Puritans were forced from England, they came to New England and soon absorbed the original "Pilgrims."

As the editor, I have read all the texts listed in our bibliography, and many more, in preparing this material for you. I want you to read some of these books. So let me use my editorial license to deliberately provoke you a little.

When comparing the events stirred on by the Puritans in England with accounts of Puritan/Pilgrim activities in New England in the same era, several provocative things suggest themselves:

1. The Puritans were not just simple religious conservatives persecuted by the King and the Church of England for their unorthodox beliefs. They were political revolutionaries who not only intended to overthrow the government of England, but who actually did so in 1649.

2. The Puritan "Pilgrims" who came to New England were not simply refugees who decided to "put their fate in God's hands" in the "empty wilderness" of North America, as a generation of Hollywood movies taught us. In any culture at any time, settlers on a frontier are most often outcasts and fugitives who, in some way or other, do not fit into the mainstream of their society.

This is not to imply that people who settle on frontiers have no redeeming qualities such as bravery, etc., but that the images of nobility that we associate with the Puritans are at least in part the good "P.R." efforts of later writers who have romanticized them.(1) It is also very plausible that this unnaturally noble image of the Puritans is all wrapped up with the mythology of "Noble Civilization" vs. "Savagery."(2) At any rate, mainstream Englishmen considered the Pilgrims to be deliberate religious dropouts who intended to found a new nation completely independent from non-Puritan England. In 1643 the Puritan/Pilgrims declared themselves an independent confederacy, one hundred and forty-three years before the American Revolution.

They believed in the imminent occurrence of Armegeddon in Europe and hoped to establish here in the new world the "Kingdom of God" foretold in the book of Revelation. They diverged from their Puritan brethren who remained in England only in that they held little real hope of ever being able to successfully overthrow the King and Parliament and, thereby, impose their "Rule of Saints" (strict Puritan orthodoxy) on the rest of the British people. So they came to America not just in one ship (the Mayflower) but in a hundred others as well, with every intention of taking the land away from its native people to build their prophesied "Holy Kingdom."(3)

3. The Pilgrims were not just innocent refugees from religious persecution. They were victims of bigotry in England, but some of them were themselves religious bigots by our modern standards.

The Puritans and the Pilgrims saw themselves as the "Chosen Elect" mentioned in the book of Revelation. They strove to "purify" first themselves and then everyone else of everything they did not accept in their own interpretation of scripture. Later New England Puritans used any means, including deceptions, treachery, torture, war, and genocide to achieve that end.(4) They saw themselves as fighting a holy war against Satan, and everyone who disagreed with them was the enemy.

This rigid fundamentalism was transmitted to America by the Plymouth colonists, and it sheds a very different light on the "Pilgrim" image we have of them. This is best illustrated in the written text of the Thanksgiving sermon delivered at Plymouth in 1623 by "Mather the Elder." In it, Mather the Elder gave special thanks to God for the devastating plague of smallpox which wiped out the majority of the Wampanoag Indians who had been their benefactors. He praised God for destroying "chiefly young men and children, the very seeds of increase, thus clearing the forests to make way for a better growth", i.e., the Pilgrims.(5) In as much as these Indians were the Pilgrim's benefactors, and Squanto, in particular, was the instrument of their salvation that first year, how are we to interpret this apparent callousness towards their misfortune?

4. The Wampanoag Indians were not the "friendly savages" some of us were told about when we were in the primary grades. Nor were they invited out of the goodness of the Pilgrims' hearts to share the fruits of the Pilgrims' harvest in a demonstration of Christian charity and interracial brotherhood.

The Wampanoag were members of a widespread confederacy of Algonkian-speaking peoples known as the League of the Delaware. For six hundred years they had been defending themselves from my other ancestors, the Iroquois, and for the last hundred years they had also had encounters with European fishermen and explorers but especially with European slavers, who had been raiding their coastal villages.(6) They knew something of the power of the white people, and they did not fully trust them. But their religion taught that they were to give charity to the helpless and hospitality to anyone who came to them with empty hands.(7)

Also, Squanto, the Indian hero of the Thanksgiving story, had a very real love for a British explorer named John Weymouth, who had become a second father to him several years before the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth. Clearly, Squanto saw these Pilgrims as Weymouth's people.(8) To the Pilgrims the Indians were heathens and, therefore, the natural instruments of the Devil.

Squanto, as the only educated and baptized Christian among the Wampanoag, was seen as merely an instrument of God, set in the wilderness to provide for the survival of His chosen people, the Pilgrims. The Indians were comparatively powerful and, therefore, dangerous; and they were to be courted until the next ships arrived with more Pilgrim colonists and the balance of power shifted.

The Wampanoag were actually invited to that Thanksgiving feast for the purpose of negotiating a treaty that would secure the lands of the Plymouth Plantation for the Pilgrims. It should also be noted that the INDIANS, possibly out of a sense of charity toward their hosts, ended up bringing the majority of the food for the feast.(9)

5. A generation later, after the balance of power had indeed shifted, the Indian and White children of that Thanksgiving were striving to kill each other in the genocidal conflict known as King Philip's War. At the end of that conflict most of the New England Indians were either exterminated or refugees among the French in Canada, or they were sold into slavery in the Carolinas by the Puritans. So successful was this early trade in Indian slaves that several Puritan ship owners in Boston began the practice of raiding the Ivory Coast of Africa for black slaves to sell to the proprietary colonies of the South, thus founding the American-based slave trade.(10)

Obviously there is a lot more to the story of Indian/Puritan relations in New England than in the thanksgiving stories we heard as children. Our contemporary mix of myth and history about the "First" Thanksgiving at Plymouth developed in the 1890s and early 1900s. Our country was desperately trying to pull together its many diverse peoples into a common national identity.

To many writers and educators at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one, this also meant having a common national history. This was the era of the "melting pot" theory of social progress, and public education was a major tool for social unity. It was with this in mind that the federal government declared the last Thursday in November as the legal holiday of Thanksgiving in 1898.

In consequence, what started as an inspirational bit of New England folklore, soon grew into the full-fledged American Thanksgiving we now know. It emerged complete with stereotyped Indians and stereotyped Whites, incomplete history, and a mythical significance as our "First Thanksgiving."

But was it really our FIRST American Thanksgiving?

Now that I have deliberately provoked you with some new information and different opinions, please take the time to read some of the texts in our bibliography. I want to encourage you to read further and form your own opinions. There really is a TRUE Thanksgiving story of Plymouth Plantation. But I strongly suggest that there always has been a Thanksgiving story of some kind or other for as long as there have been human beings.

There was also a "First" Thanksgiving in America, but it was celebrated thirty thousand years ago.(11) At some time during the New Stone Age (beginning about ten thousand years ago) Thanksgiving became associated with giving thanks to God for the harvests of the land.

Thanksgiving has always been a time of people coming together, so thanks has also been offered for that gift of fellowship between us all. Every last Thursday in November we now partake in one of the OLDEST and most UNIVERSAL of human celebrations, and THERE ARE MANY THANKSGIVING STORIES TO TELL.

As for Thanksgiving week at Plymouth Plantation in 1621, the friendship was guarded and not always sincere, and the peace was very soon abused. But for three days in New England's history, peace and friendship were there.

So here is a story for your children. It is as kind and gentle a balance of historic truth and positive inspiration as its writers and this editor can make it out to be. I hope it will adequately serve its purpose both for you and your students, and I also hope this work will encourage you to look both deeper and farther, for Thanksgiving is Thanksgiving all around the world.

Chuck Larsen Tacoma Public Schools September, 1986

(1) See Berkhofer, Jr., R.F., "The White Man's Indian," references to Puritans, pp. 27, 80-85, 90, 104, & 130.

(2) See Berkhofer, Jr., R.F., "The White Man's Indian," references to frontier concepts of savagery in index. Also see Jennings, Francis, "The Invasion of America," the myth of savagery, pp. 6-12, 15-16, & 109-110.

(3) See Blitzer, Charles, "Age of Kings," Great Ages of Man series, references to Puritanism, pp. 141, 144 & 145-46. Also see Jennings, Francis, "The Invasion of America," references to Puritan human motives, pp. 4-6, 43- 44 and 53.

(4) See "Chronicles of American Indian Protest," pp. 6-10. Also see Armstrong, Virginia I., "I Have Spoken," reference to Cannonchet and his village, p. 6. Also see Jennings, Francis, "The Invasion of America," Chapter 9 "Savage War," Chapter 13 "We must Burn Them," and Chapter 17 "Outrage Bloody and Barbarous."

(5) See "Chronicles of American Indian Protest," pp. 6-9. Also see Berkhofer, Jr., R.F., "The White Man's Indian," the comments of Cotton Mather, pp. 37 & 82-83.

(6) See Larsen, Charles M., "The Real Thanksgiving," pp. 3-4. Also see Graff, Steward and Polly Ann, "Squanto, Indian Adventurer." Also see "Handbook of North American Indians," Vol. 15, the reference to Squanto on p. 82.

(7) See Benton-Banai, Edward, "The Mishomis Book," as a reference on general "Anishinabe" (the Algonkin speaking peoples) religious beliefs and practices. Also see Larsen, Charles M., "The Real Thanksgiving," reference to religious life on p. 1.

(8) See Graff, Stewart and Polly Ann, "Squanto, Indian Adventurer." Also see Larsen, Charles M., "The Real Thanksgiving." Also see Bradford, Sir William, "Of Plymouth Plantation," and "Mourt's Relation."

(9) See Larsen, Charles M., "The Real Thanksgiving," the letter of Edward Winslow dated 1622, pp. 5-6.

(10) See "Handbook of North American Indians," Vol. 15, pp. 177-78. Also see "Chronicles of American Indian Protest," p. 9, the reference to the enslavement of King Philip's family. Also see Larsen, Charles, M., "The Real Thanksgiving," pp. 8-11, "Destruction of the Massachusetts Indians."

(11) Best current estimate of the first entry of people into the Americas confirmed by archaeological evidence that is datable.

Source:
Manataka American Indian Council
http://www.manataka.org/page269.html

2011-11-23T11:29:00.002-05:00

Buy Nothing Day!
Nov 25 / 26

#OCCUPYXMAS

2011-11-07T17:25:00.001-05:00

The Globalization of Protest

By Joseph E. Stiglitz
Nation of Change
Nov. 7, 2011
[emphasis added]

The protest movement that began in Tunisia in January, subsequently spreading to Egypt, and then to Spain, has now become global, with the protests engulfing Wall Street and cities across America. Globalization and modern technology now enables social movements to transcend borders as rapidly as ideas can.

And social protest has found fertile ground everywhere: a sense that the “system” has failed, and the conviction that even in a democracy, the electoral process will not set things right – at least not without strong pressure from the street.

In May, I went to the site of the Tunisian protests; in July, I talked to Spain’s indignados; from there, I went to meet the young Egyptian revolutionaries in Cairo’s Tahrir Square; and, a few weeks ago, I talked with Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York. There is a common theme, expressed by the OWS movement in a simple phrase: “We are the 99%.”

That slogan echoes the title of an article that I recently published, entitled “Of the 1%, for the 1%, and by the 1%,” describing the enormous increase in inequality in the United States: 1% of the population controls more than 40% of the wealth and receives more than 20% of the income.

And those in this rarefied stratum often are rewarded so richly not because they have contributed more to society – bonuses and bailouts neatly gutted that justification for inequality – but because they are, to put it bluntly, successful (and sometimes corrupt) rent-seekers.

This is not to deny that some of the 1% have contributed a great deal. Indeed, the social benefits of many real innovations (as opposed to the novel financial “products” that ended up unleashing havoc on the world economy) typically far exceed what their innovators receive.

But, around the world, political influence and anti-competitive practices (often sustained through politics) have been central to the increase in economic inequality. And tax systems in which a billionaire like Warren Buffett pays less tax (as a percentage of his income) than his secretary, or in which speculators, who helped to bring down the global economy, are taxed at lower rates than those who work for their income, have reinforced the trend.

Research in recent years has shown how important and ingrained notions of fairness are. Spain’s protesters, and those in other countries, are right to be indignant: here is a system in which the bankers got bailed out, while those whom they preyed upon have been left to fend for themselves. Worse, the bankers are now back at their desks, earning bonuses that amount to more than most workers hope to earn in a lifetime, while young people who studied hard and played by the rules see no prospects for fulfilling employment.

The rise in inequality is the product of a vicious spiral: the rich rent-seekers use their wealth to shape legislation in order to protect and increase their wealth – and their influence.

The US Supreme Court, in its notorious Citizens United decision, has given corporations free rein to use their money to influence the direction of politics. But, while the wealthy can use their money to amplify their views, back on the street, police wouldn’t allow me to address the OWS protesters through a megaphone.

The contrast between overregulated democracy and unregulated bankers did not go unnoticed. But the protesters are ingenious: they echoed what I said through the crowd, so that all could hear. And, to avoid interrupting the “dialogue” by clapping, they used forceful hand signals to express their agreement.

They are right that something is wrong about our “system.” Around the world, we have underutilized resources – people who want to work, machines that lie idle, buildings that are empty – and huge unmet needs: fighting poverty, promoting development, and retrofitting the economy for global warming, to name just a few. In America, after more than seven million home foreclosures in recent years, we have empty homes and homeless people.

The protesters have been criticized for not having an agenda. But this misses the point of protest movements. They are an expression of frustration with the electoral process. They are an alarm.

The anti-globalization protests in Seattle in 1999, at what was supposed to be the inauguration of a new round of trade talks, called attention to the failures of globalization and the international institutions and agreements that govern it. When the press looked into the protesters’ allegations, they found that there was more than a grain of truth in them. The trade negotiations that followed were different – at least in principle, they were supposed to be a development round, to make up for some of the deficiencies highlighted by protesters – and the International Monetary Fund subsequently undertook significant reforms.

So, too, in the US, the civil-rights protesters of the 1960’s called attention to pervasive institutionalized racism in American society. That legacy has not yet been overcome, but the election of President Barack Obama shows how far those protests moved America.

On one level, today’s protesters are asking for little: a chance to use their skills, the right to decent work at decent pay, a fairer economy and society. Their hope is evolutionary, not revolutionary. But, on another level, they are asking for a great deal: a democracy where people, not dollars, matter, and a market economy that delivers on what it is supposed to do.

The two are related: as we have seen, unfettered markets lead to economic and political crises. Markets work the way they should only when they operate within a framework of appropriate government regulations; and that framework can be erected only in a democracy that reflects the general interest – not the interests of the 1%. The best government that money can buy is no longer good enough.

Source:
http://www.nationofchange.org/globalization-protest-1320504140
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2011-10-30T21:31:00.000-05:00

Police Violence Sparks General Strike Idea Within 'Occupy Wall Street'

By Kenneth Rapoza
Forbes
Oct 27, 2011
[emphasis added]

The Occupy Wall Street movement is going for broke following a rash of police violence reports, especially one in Oakland, Calif this week.

The movement’s adhoc headquarters at Adbusters magazine in Vancouver are testing the waters with its roughly 93,000 list serve members to gauge interest in calling for a General Strike on Nov. 2. The idea came from Occupy Oakland.

The magazine posted the note on its blogpage Thursday evening, saying the movement entered an “ominous phase” following Tuesday’s police attack that injured a protester in Oakland.

Unfortunately for the police, the protester happened to be an Iraq war veteran named Scott Olson, critically injured by Oakland law enforcement with pictures of his bloody head making the rounds on line.

The news about Oakland traveled around the world early this week, and now some within the movement think it provides them with a reason to escalate the protest into attempting a general strike next week, something that has not been tried in the U.S. since pre-World War II.

On Wednesday, three thousand protestors reclaimed the square at Oscar Grant Plaza in Oakland, reestablishing their encampment and held a meeting that called for a General Strike, Adbusters said. The decision was not made by any one within the magazine.

From Adbusters: “There are signs of occupations in other cities taking up Oakland’s call. A tantalizing possibility hangs in the air: Could a wildcat general strike spread across the nation? Are we witnessing the first clues of how a soft regime change might begin in America?”

One of the last general strikes in U.S. history occurred in 1946 in Oakland, when 100,000 workers from 142 unions including workers from factories, industries, services, retail stores, transportation systems and more declared a “work holiday” and walked off their jobs. The general strike lasted until city and labor leaders settled on a compromise agreement, returning workers to their jobs on December 5.

General strikes are usually for political goals or economic goals and tends to gain momentum from the ideological sympathies of the movement’s participants. It is also characterized by participation of workers in a multitude of workplaces, and tends to involve entire communities.

Source:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2011/10/27/following-police-violence-occupy-wall-street-tests-general-strike-idea/
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2011-10-28T00:41:00.000-05:00

What Really Happened in Libya
Libya and beyond: How did we get there and what happens next?

By Rep. Dennis Kucinich
Reader Supported News

August 24, 2011

[emphasis added]

Libyan rebels have entered Tripoli. As gun battles break out across the city, it is timely to enter into a discussion as to how the rebels arrived there. It is time to review the curious role of NATO and the future of US interventionism.

A negotiated settlement in Libya was deliberately avoided for months while NATO, in violation of UN Security Council (UNSC) Resolutions 1970 and 1973, illegally pursued regime change. NATO chose sides, intervened in a civil war and morphed into the air force for the rebels, who could not have succeeded but for NATO's attacks.

NATO acted with impunity. The NATO command recklessly bombed civilians in the name of saving civilians. Usurping the United Nation's traditional role, NATO looked the other way as the arms embargo was openly violated by U.N. member nations.

NATO's top commanders may have acted under color of international law but they are not exempt from international law. If members of the Gaddafi Regime are to be held accountable, NATO's top commanders must also be held accountable through the International Criminal Court for all civilian deaths resulting from bombing. Otherwise we will have witnessed the triumph of a new international gangsterism.

The reasons for the US/NATO intervention in Libya keep changing. First it was about the potential for a massacre in Benghazi. When the massacre did not materialize and once the war against Libya was underway, the reasons for intervention changed.

We were reminded Libya had spent 'forty years under a tyrant.' We were urged to remember the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland, which occurred 23 years ago this December 21st. Yet almost 20 years later, on November 18, 2008 the Associated Press reported that President George Bush called Colonel Gaddafi personally "to voice his satisfaction that Libya has settled a long-standing dispute over terrorist attacks, including the bombing of a Pan Am jet over Scotland."

On December 19, 2003 Libya voluntarily gave up its nuclear weapon-making capability and on January 6, 2004 ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Its relationship with the US on the mend, Libya then opened up to international investment and began the wholesale privatization of its industries, leading to massive unemployment and dissatisfaction with the state of things, particularly among younger Libyans.

I mention this not to sympathize with Colonel Gaddafi's brutality or to minimize the great tragedy of Flight 103. But if the US had come to terms with Gaddafi's past violence, why does the Obama Administration invoke it as justification for an attack on Libya? One conclusion could be that the reasons for the March 2011 attack were bogus.

Once into the war, the Administration promptly passed off nominal responsibility for the war to NATO, after beginning the war without congressional authorization. NATO became the beneficiary of US funds, US war planes, US drones, US bombs, and US intelligence assets.

NATO violated UNSC resolutions. The Obama Administration violated the US Constitution by bypassing Congress on the war.

These are not mere academic matters. They have moved the world community from the rule of law to the rule of force and have set a precedent for NATO to become the new global-cop. Far from bringing a new level of security to the world scene, NATO has brought a new level of insecurity and unaccountability.

The question of the reason for United States' involvement in Libya remains.

Was the United States' Central Intelligence Agency involved in planning for regime change prior to events in February and March in Benghazi? Did the CIA and its assets have a role in fomenting a civil war?

Was the United States, through participation in the overthrow of the regime, furthering the aims of international oil corporations in pursuit of control over one of the world's largest oil resources?

Did the United States at the inception of the war against Libya align itself with elements of al Qaeda, while elsewhere continuing to use the threat of al Qaeda as a reason for US military intervention, presence and occupation?

The foreign policy objectives of the Obama Administration are cloudy.

Pledges to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are in doubt. The Iraq War is supposed to be over at the end of this year, yet that promise appears to be fading. The US presence in Afghanistan appears to be open-ended. The latest reports describe a US commitment in Afghanistan through 2024. This raises the question as to whether the Administration has full control over the military and intelligence apparatus.

In the case of Libya, now that NATO, with the help of the US, has brought the rebels into the streets of Tripoli to fight, what follows? What's the plan? Who governs and for whose sake? Will Libya become NATO's protectorate?

It is not only the Gaddafi compound in Tripoli that will be left in ruins by NATO's actions; it will also be the Obama Administration's relationship with the African Union (AU). The AU and its member nations have been repeatedly rebuffed by the US in its efforts to bring about a peaceful, negotiated settlement for the regime's transition out of power.

While the US, through NATO, has been bombing Libya, China has spent time building commercial opportunities across the African continent.

As the Administration indulges itself with wars in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan - spending hundreds of billions of dollars on military adventurism - the United States has massive economic problems at home. Resources which should be spent creating jobs in America are going to perpetuate war abroad. Resources which should be used to build bridges in America continue to be used to bomb bridges elsewhere.

Millions of Americans are begging for a chance to earn their daily bread while the government spends its money on daily bombing. While the government has yet to produce a viable jobs program to put millions of unemployed back to work, the waste of resources on war is guaranteed to continue: The Iraq and Afghanistan wars are NOT to subject to spending caps in the budget. The American people get myths, rhetoric and unemployment while war profiteers get the gold. Can you imagine what the people of Libya will get?

Source:
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/7156-what-really-happened-in-libya
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2011-10-18T06:45:00.000-05:00

Ron Paul Plan To Restore America

Press Conference
Oct. 17, 2011

The Ron Paul 2012 Presidential Campaign announced the release of Dr. Paul's "Plan to Restore America," an ambitious federal government spending, tax and reform blueprint that as President he will implement.

The plan, authored by Paul's campaign staff at his direction, promises to restore the federal government to its former Constitutionally-limited, smaller-government and less-burdensome place. The plan cuts $1 trillion in federal spending during the first year of a Paul Presidency and delivers a balanced budget in year three of a Paul Presidency.

"Ron Paul's plan is the only one that seriously addresses the economic and budgetary problems our nation faces. It cuts $1 trillion in one year, and slashes regulations and taxes so our economy can grow and create jobs," said Ron Paul 2012 National Campaign Chairman Jesse Benton, a plan co-author.

"It's the only plan offered by a presidential candidate that actually balances the budget and begins to pay down the debt. And it's the only plan being offered that tries to reign in the Federal Reserve and get inflation under control."

Cuts totaling $1 trillion during the first year of a Paul Presidency would be achieved by eliminating five federal cabinet departments -- the Departments of Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, Interior and Education. Cuts of this scale will also be accomplished by a Paul Presidency abolishing the Transportation Security Administration and returning responsibility for security to private property owners, abolishing corporate subsidies, stopping foreign aid, ending foreign wars, and returning most other spending to 2006 levels.

To view Dr. Paul's "Plan to Restore America" in full, please click here:
http://www.ronpaul2012.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/RestoreAmericaPlan.pdf
__________________________

2011-10-15T14:54:00.000-05:00

Obama deploys troops to Uganda

President Barack Obama is deploying about 100 “combat-equipped” troops to Uganda to help find rebel leader Joseph Kony and counter his notorious Lord's Resistance Army, part of an effort to finally hunt down the self-styled prophet who has terrorised people across four central African countries.

Who is Joseph Kony?

What the US manhunt for LRA leaders reveals about Obama's war strategy

Obama is sending Special Operations Forces to central Africa to track down a brutal guerrilla group. Surgical strikes at enemy leaders are emerging as the preferred US strategy.

Source:
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2011/1015/What-US-manhunt-for-LRA-leaders-reveals-about-Obama-s-war-strategy
_________________

LRA leader Joseph Kony
Why Obama sent US troops to Uganda to get him

The feared group LRA is responsible for the murder and rape of thousands in Central Africa. Siding with interventionist advisers, Obama sent the US troops to help remove Joseph Kony from the battlefield.

Source:
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2011/1014/LRA-leader-Joseph-Kony-Why-Obama-sent-US-troops-to-Uganda-to-get-him
_________________

2011-10-11T18:29:00.000-05:00

Security Fail #2!

Get hacked, don't tell: drone base didn't report virus

By Noah Shachtman

Wired.com

Oct. 11, 2011

Officials at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada knew for two weeks about a virus infecting the drone “cockpits” there. But they kept the information about the infection to themselves—keeping the unit that’s supposed to serve as the Air Force’s cybersecurity specialists in the dark. The network defenders at the 24th Air Force learned of the virus by reading about it in Danger Room.

The virus, which records the keystrokes of remote pilots as their drones fly over places like Afghanistan, is now receiving attention at the highest levels; the four-star general who oversees the Air Force’s networks was briefed on the infection this morning. But for weeks, it stayed (you will pardon the expression) below the radar: a local problem that local network administrators were determined to fix on their own.

“It was not highlighted to us,” says a source involved with Air Force network operations. “When your article came out, it was like, ‘What is this?’”

The drones are still flying over warzones from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Yemen. There’s no sign, yet, that the virus either damaged any of the systems associated with the remotely-piloted aircraft or transmitted sensitive information outside the military chain of command—although three military insiders caution that a full-blown, high-level investigation into the virus is only now getting underway.

Nevertheless, the virus has sparked a bit of a firestorm in military circles. Not only were officials in charge kept out of the loop about an infection in America’s weapon and surveillance system of choice, but the surprise surrounding that infection highlights a flaw in the way the US military secures its information infrastructure: There’s no one in the Defense Department with his hand on the network switch. In fact, there is no one switch to speak of.

The four branches of the US armed forces each has a dedicated unit that, in theory, is supposed to handle cyber defense for the entire service. The 24th Air Force, for example, “is the operational warfighting organization that establishes, operates, maintains and defends Air Force networks,” according to a military fact sheet. These units are then supposed to provide personnel and information to US Cyber Command, which is supposed to oversee the military’s overall network defense.

In practice, it’s not that simple. Unlike most big private enterprises, the 24th doesn’t have a centralized system for managing and monitoring its networks.

There’s no place at the 24th’s San Antonio headquarters where someone could see all the digital traffic hurtling through the service’s pipes. In fact, most of the major commands within the Air Force don’t have formal agreements carry the other’s network traffic. (The 24th Air Force did not immediately respond to requests to comment for this article.)

“We’d never managed the entire Air Force network as a single enterprise,” Vince Ross, the program manager of the Air Force Electronic Systems Center’s Cyber Integration Division, said in March. “That meant there was no centralized management of the network, that systems and hardware weren’t standardized, and that top-level commanders didn’t have complete situational awareness.”

The plan is to one day integrate all that infrastructure into a single Air Force network. But for now, it’s largely cybersecurity by the honor system. Each base and each unit in the Air Force has its own geek squad. They only call for help if there’s a broader network problem, or if they’re truly stumped.

That didn’t happen when a so-called “keylogger” virus hit Creech more than two weeks ago.

“Nothing was ever reported anywhere. They just didn’t think it was important enough,” says a second source involved with operating the Air Force’s networks. “The incentive to share weaknesses is just not there.”

Not even when that weakness hits the robotic weapons that have become the lynchpin for American military operations around the planet.

Source:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/drone-virus-kept-quiet/

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2011-10-09T20:09:00.001-05:00

Security Fail!

Computer virus hits US Predator and Reaper drone fleet

A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other war zones.

By Noah Shachtman
Wired.com
10/07/2011

The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military’s Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech’s computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the US military’s most important weapons system.

“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”

Military network security specialists aren’t sure whether the virus and its so-called “keylogger” payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks. The specialists don’t know exactly how far the virus has spread. But they’re sure that the infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech. That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet to someone outside the military chain of command.

Drones have become America’s tool of choice in both its conventional and shadow wars, allowing US forces to attack targets and spy on its foes without risking American lives.

Since President Obama assumed office, a fleet of approximately 30 CIA-directed drones have hit targets in Pakistan more than 230 times; all told, these drones have killed more than 2,000 suspected militants and civilians, according to the Washington Post. More than 150 additional Predator and Reaper drones, under US Air Force control, watch over the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. American military drones struck 92 times in Libya between mid-April and late August. And late last month, an American drone killed top terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki — part of an escalating unmanned air assault in the Horn of Africa and southern Arabian peninsula.

But despite their widespread use, the drone systems are known to have security flaws. Many Reapers and Predators don’t encrypt the video they transmit to American troops on the ground. In the summer of 2009, US forces discovered “days and days and hours and hours” of the drone footage on the laptops of Iraqi insurgents. A $26 piece of software allowed the militants to capture the video.

The lion’s share of US drone missions are flown by Air Force pilots stationed at Creech, a tiny outpost in the barren Nevada desert, 20 miles north of a state prison and adjacent to a one-story casino. In a nondescript building, down a largely unmarked hallway, are a series of rooms, each with a rack of servers and a “ground control station,” or GCS. There, a drone pilot and a sensor operator sit in their flight suits in front of a series of screens. In the pilot’s hand is the joystick, guiding the drone as it soars above Afghanistan, Iraq, or some other battlefield.

Some of the GCSs are classified secret and used for conventional warzone surveillance duty.

The GCSs handling more exotic operations are top secret. None of the remote cockpits are supposed to be connected to the public internet, which means they are supposed to be largely immune to viruses and other network security threats.

But time and time again, the so-called “air gaps” between classified and public networks have been bridged, largely through the use of discs and removable drives.

In late 2008, for example, the drives helped introduce the agent.btz worm to hundreds of thousands of Defense Department computers. The Pentagon is still disinfecting machines, three years later.

Use of the drives is now severely restricted throughout the military. But the base at Creech was one of the exceptions, until the virus hit. Predator and Reaper crews use removable hard drives to load map updates and transport mission videos from one computer to another. The virus is believed to have spread through these removable drives. Drone units at other Air Force bases worldwide have now been ordered to stop their use.

In the meantime, technicians at Creech are trying to get the virus off the GCS machines. It has not been easy. At first, they followed removal instructions posted on the website of the Kaspersky security firm. “But the virus kept coming back,” a source familiar with the infection says. Eventually, the technicians had to use a software tool called BCWipe to completely erase the GCS’ internal hard drives. “That meant rebuilding them from scratch” — a time-consuming effort.

The Air Force declined to comment directly on the virus. “We generally do not discuss specific vulnerabilities, threats, or responses to our computer networks, since that helps people looking to exploit or attack our systems to refine their approach,” says Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, a spokesman for Air Combat Command, which oversees the drones and all other Air Force tactical aircraft. “We invest a lot in protecting and monitoring our systems to counter threats and ensure security, which includes a comprehensive response to viruses, worms, and other malware we discover.”

However, insiders say that senior officers at Creech are being briefed daily on the virus.

“It’s getting a lot of attention,” the source says. “But no one’s panicking. Yet.”

Source:
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/10/exclusive-computer-virus-hits-drone-fleet.ars
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2011-10-01T14:12:00.002-05:00

With Death of Anwar al-Awlaki, Has U.S. Launched New Era of Killing U.S. Citizens Without Charge?

DemocracyNow.org
Sept. 30, 2011

The United States has confirmed the killing of the radical Yemeni-American cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, in northern Yemen. The Obama administration says Al-Awlaki is one of the most influential al-Qaeda operatives on its 'most wanted' list.

In response to news of al-Awlaki’s death, constitutional scholar Glenn Greenwald and others argue the assassination of U.S. citizens without due process has now has become a reality. "One of the bizarre aspects of it is that media and government reports try to sell al-Awlaki as some grand terrorist mastermind … describing him as the new bin Laden. The United States government needs a terrorist mastermind to replace Osama bin Laden to justify this type of endless war … For a while, al-Awlaki was going to serve that function,"

Greenwald says. "If you are somebody that believes the President of the United States has the power to order your fellow citizens murdered, assassinated, killed without a shred of due process … then you are really declaring yourself to be as pure of an authoritarian as it gets."

Transcript of Interview

JUAN GONZALEZ:
Shortly before we went on the air this morning, senior U.S. administration officials confirm the killing of the radical Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in northern Yemen. The United States says Awlaki is one of the most influential Al Qaeda operatives on its most wanted list. News of the death was first announced by Yemen’s Defense Ministry in a text message sent to journalists the ministry wrote, "The terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki has been killed along with some of his companions," but did not provide further details.

In a separate email statement, the Yemeni government reported Awlaki was targeted and killed about 90 miles east of the capital Sanaa. The statement said the attack was launched at 9:55 a.m. local time. Despite the Yemeni government’s claims its forces successfully targeted Awlaki in a raid near the capital, sources on the ground say he was likely killed in a U.S. air-strike. Awlaki was previously targeted in U.S. bombing of Yemen earlier this year.

Well, for more, we turn to Glenn Greenwald, constitutional law attorney and political and legal blogger for salon.com. He joins us via Democracy Now! video-stream from Brazil. He first reported in January of last year that the Obama administration had compiled a hit list of American citizens whom it had ordered assassinated without any due process. One of those Americans was Anwar al-Awlaki, despite substantial doubt among the Yemen experts about whether he had an operational role in Al Qaeda Glenn Greenwald, welcome to DEMOCRACY NOW!

GLENN GREENWALD:
Good to be here.

JUAN GONZALEZ:
Well Glenn, your reaction, first of all, to this news and what it means in terms of any new precedence now set by this administration in the targeting of U.S. citizens?

GLENN GREENWALD:
Let’s begin with the fact Anwar al-Awlaki is a U.S. citizen. He was ordered assassinated by the President of the United States without presenting any evidence of any kind as to his guilt, without attempting to indict him in any way or comply with any of the requirements of the Constitution that say that you can’t deprive someone of life without due process of law.

The president ordered him killed wherever he was found, including far away from a battle field, no matter what it was he was doing at the time. And if you’re somebody who believes that the president of the United States has the power to order your fellow citizens murdered, assassinated, killed without even a shred of due process, without having to have charged him with a crimes or indict him and prove in a court he’s actually guilty, then you’re really declaring yourself to be as pure of an authoritarian as it gets.

Remember that there was great controversy that George Bush asserted the power simply to detain American citizens without due process or simply to eavesdrop on their conversations without warrants. Here you have something much more severe. Not eavesdropping on American citizens, not detaining them without due process, but killing them without due process, and yet many Democrats and progressives, because it’s President Obama doing it, have no problem with it and are even in favor of it.

To say that the President has the right to kill citizens without due process is really to take the constitution and to tear it up into as many little pieces as you can and then burn it and step on it.

JUAN GONZALEZ:
Well, for those in the audience not familiar with him, give us the sketch of who Al-Awlaki is and what the alleged terrorist plots that he was involved with are.

GLENN GREENWALD:
Well, he, as I said, was born in the United States and went to college in the United States and, for a long time, was considered by the U.S. government and the media to be a moderate Muslim cleric. In fact the Pentagon invited him to a lunch in the wake of 9/11 in order to talk to him and other Muslim leaders about how to root out extremism in the Muslim community.

The Washington Post had him host his own chat about the meaning of various Muslim holidays and the like. So, for a long time he was viewed as this, sort of, moderate figure. He became increasingly radicalized, like a lot of people have, over the last decade, as the United States has continued to slaughter Muslim men, women and children in multiple countries around the world, and he definitely became much more hostile in his sermons to the United States, and began arguing that it wasn’t just the duty but the right of Muslims to not just be passive receivers of violence by the U.S., but also to begin to attack the United States back as a means of deterring further violence.

And so, he definitely became a great concern to the U.S. because he was so effective in communicating these ideas in English to large parts of the English speaking Muslim world. And, of course, expressing those ideas that the United States is engaged in aggression against the Muslim world and that Muslims have the right or even the duty to fight back rather than getting passively slaughtered, whether you agree with those ideas are not, or think they’re horrible ideas, they’re obviously rights you have to express under the First Amendment of the Constitution.

The government began claiming that it wasn’t just his messages and his ideas that were bothering them and making them want to kill him, but the fact he started to have an operational role in various plots, such as the attempt by Abdulmutallab to detonate a bomb in a jet over Detroit over Christmas. They claim that he was involved in the attack by Nidal Hasan on the Fort Hood base that killed 14 American service members. The problem with that is that, there’s been no evidence presented that he’s actually been involved in any of those plots. He is not been indicted or charged. If he has been involved in those plots, then the solution is to charge him with those crimes, bring him before a court of justice, and prove his guilt; not simply to order him killed as though the President is judge, jury, and executioner.

JUAN GONZALEZ:
Now, his father had attempted, or started a court proceeding to try to enjoin the Obama administration from carrying out any attack on his son. Could you talk about that and where that is?

GLENN GREENWALD:
Sure, well, Awlaki, himself, was incapable of suing to vindicate his rights because, had he popped his head up at any time, as we proved today, he would have been killed by the Unites States government, which sought on several occasions before today to kill him. So, his father brought suit on his behalf, represented by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, asking a court to enjoin the President from murdering his son without due process, and in response the Obama administration made numerous claims, mostly arguing courts have no right to interfere in the decisions the president makes about who is an enemy combatant using standard Bush-Cheney theories about how this is a military operation that the court shouldn’t be involved in it.

They argued that whom the president decides to assassinate is a state secret. And that courts have no business meddling in or judging or adjudicating the president’s choices in that regard. A federal court, several months ago, accepted the argument that this was really a political and military number, and not a legal or constitutional or judicial question for courts to resolve. Although, the judge said there are very difficult questions raised because of what an extraordinary step this is for the president to order American citizens killed. He said it’s really up to the Congress to stop it or for the president to make decisions on his own. That, I believe that is being appealed; the appeal is pending, but, obviously, it’s now it is too late. There’s no point in trying to obtain an injunction now that Awlaki has been killed by President Obama.

JUAN GONZALEZ:
And the Bizarre irony of the government in Yemen which is clearly illegitimate by any international standards, facing a huge popular rebellion among its own people, being involved, to some degree or other, with the United States in this killing?

GLENN GREENWALD:
Well, President Saleh, who, of course, has been slaughtering his own citizens by the dozens over the last several months, and is still, you know—-has been a longtime ally of the United States. The State Department has issued some very meek statements, suggesting that there should be a democratic transition. But, we’ve continued to work with President Saleh, the U.S. government has, to try and kill those people that we want dead in Yemen, including Awlaki, and this is widely viewed as an attempt by President Saleh to, sort of, offer an olive branch to the United States; we will help to kill the American citizen within our borders whom you want dead in exchange for your continuing to support our regime.

Of course, the United States has been trying to claim to the Arab world that it is on the right side of the Arab Spring, and yet just yesterday, of course, in Bahrain, numerous medical professionals, doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, were imprisoned for the crime of treating protesters who were shot by government forces just two weeks after the U.S. government announced that it plans to ship to Bahrain huge amounts of new weapons.

Here, our long time ally, President Saleh, is not only now slaughtering his own citizens, but helping the United States government murder its own. So, it’s a pretty difficult sell to people in the Muslim world to claim that we’re on the right side of the Arab Spring when we not only continue to embrace the people who kill their own citizens, but now kill our citizens as well.

JUAN GONZALEZ:
I want to read to you a quote from the editor of The Yemeni Post, Hakim Al Masmari. He said, "The Yemeni government will face a lot of criticism, especially in the south, for allowing US drones to attack Yemeni civilians. But it will not be a blow to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula from any perspective. We don’t feel they will suffer, because Awlaki did not have any real role in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula."

GLENN GREENWALD:
Right,well, one of the bizarre aspects of this is that media and government reports have tried to sell Awlaki is some kind of grand terrorist mastermind. There’s even lots of articles you can find online and major publications describing him as the new Bin Laden.

The United States government needs a terrorist mastermind to replace Bin Laden to justify this type of endless war that President Obama, the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner, is insisting on not just continuing, but escalating. And for a while, Awlaki was the person to going to serve that function. But, the problem is, if you the read experts in Yemen, like Gregory Johnson and others, they mock the idea Awlaki was some kind of a leader of Al Qaeda and even question whether he had any operational role at all in any of these plots.

He was clearly a cleric who developed some audience and was popular, particularly among English-speaking Muslim youth because of his ability to communicate with them. But, the idea that he was some high up in Al Qaeda or this is a blow to the operational capability of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is absolutely ludicrous. And if you read Yemen experts, you’ll see that that’s true. The problem is that American political culture is such that evidence doesn’t make a difference.

Trials and due process are very pre-9/11. What we believe is that if the president stands up and says, someone is a terrorist, that’s all we need to know; they are therefore there are guilty because the leader has accused him of being that, and as long as the Aides then go and leak to the media, which they have done, that he played a significant operational role and was a big Al Qaeda leader, we won’t need to see evidence. We’ll just stand up and blindly click our heels and accept it’s true, and then cheered the fact he’s been murdered based on as unproven claims.

JUAN GONZALEZ:
Glenn, what can people who are concerned about this extraordinary extension of the powers of a president to basically ignore any kind of due process with our American citizens, what can they do?

GLENN GREENWALD:
Well, one thing that is obvious, is that voting for Democrats as opposed to Republicans doesn’t help. In fact, if you read The New York Times article from 2010 confirming that Awlaki is on the hit list, it makes clear that there’s been no instances where George Bush ordered American citizens targeted for assassination, that this is extraordinary and perhaps an unprecedented step under the Democratic president.

What people in the Arab world did, when their leaders did things like imprison them, let alone kill them, and their fellow citizens without trials, is they went out into the streets and protested and demanded that it stop. It’s hard to see how voting for one of these two parties is going to end these extraordinary excesses in violations of the constitution; it clearly doesn’t.

Something outside of that system is necessary to address it. That’s been proven. So, I think if Americans cared about the constitutional rights the pretended to care about under George Bush, Democrats in particular, they would be very vocally protesting and objecting to this. But, the problem is that, the opportunity to use these issues as a means to undermine Republican politicians is now gone, and so, many people who, three years ago, were pretending to care about these things, no longer do.

So, the question that American citizens have to ask themselves, is whether they believe in the principles of liberty and rights that they have learned were protected by the Constitution? That’s just a piece of paper—-the Constitution—-it cannot protect those rights, only the citizenry can ensure that those rights are not trampled on; and the question is whether citizens actually believe in those.

JUAN GONZALEZ:
Finally, Glenn Greenwald, we’re getting reports that U.S. government confirming that it was a joint operation with the Yemeni government. Your sense of whether you believe this was a drone strike largely carried out by the United States?

GLENN GREENWALD:
Well, there’s no question I believe that the United States played a significant role. I mean, the United States have been wanting to kill Awlaki for a long time. The Yemeni government has not wanted to kill him, in part, because if it does, it will trigger lots of unrest and resentment, and that’s the last thing, especially at this point, that it wants.

So, I believe that this has been done by an air strike, certainly the Yemeni government would not have the ability to carry that out on its own. The fact U.S. government confirmed so quickly that he was dead and accepting responsibility, I think, is fairly definitive proof that the U.S. played a very significant role, if not the lead role, in extinguishing the life of its own citizen without due process.

JUAN GONZALEZ:
Glenn Greenwald, I want thank you for being with us, constitutional law attorney, political and legal blogger for Salon.com. We’re going to break, and when we come back, we’re going to take a look at a new film on the American teacher.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Source:
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/30/with_death_of_anwar_al_awlaki
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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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2011-09-16T20:31:00.001-05:00

The American Dream

____________

2011-09-08T18:44:00.000-05:00

Text of President Obama's Jobs address to Congress

Sept. 8, 2011

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Members of Congress, and fellow Americans:

Tonight we meet at an urgent time for our country. We continue to face an economic crisis that has left millions of our neighbors jobless, and a political crisis that has made things worse.

This past week, reporters have been asking "What will this speech mean for the President? What will it mean for Congress? How will it affect their polls, and the next election?"

But the millions of Americans who are watching right now: they don't care about politics. They have real life concerns. Many have spent months looking for work. Others are doing their best just to scrape by - giving up nights out with the family to save on gas or make the mortgage; postponing retirement to send a kid to college.

These men and women grew up with faith in an America where hard work and responsibility paid off. They believed in a country where everyone gets a fair shake and does their fair share - where if you stepped up, did your job, and were loyal to your company, that loyalty would be rewarded with a decent salary and good benefits; maybe a raise once in awhile. If you did the right thing, you could make it in America.

But for decades now, Americans have watched that compact erode. They have seen the deck too often stacked against them. And they know that Washington hasn't always put their interests first.

The people of this country work hard to meet their responsibilities. The question tonight is whether we'll meet ours. The question is whether, in the face of an ongoing national crisis, we can stop the political circus and actually do something to help the economy; whether we can restore some of the fairness and security that has defined this nation since our beginning.

Those of us here tonight can't solve all of our nation's woes. Ultimately, our recovery will be driven not by Washington, but by our businesses and our workers. But we can help. We can make a difference. There are steps we can take right now to improve people's lives.

I am sending this Congress a plan that you should pass right away. It's called the American Jobs Act. There should be nothing controversial about this piece of legislation. Everything in here is the kind of proposal that's been supported by both Democrats and Republicans - including many who sit here tonight. And everything in this bill will be paid for. Everything.

The purpose of the American Jobs Act is simple: to put more people back to work and more money in the pockets of those who are working. It will create more jobs for construction workers, more jobs for teachers, more jobs for veterans, and more jobs for the long-term unemployed. It will provide a tax break for companies who hire new workers, and it will cut payroll taxes in half for every working American and every small business. It will provide a jolt to an economy that has stalled, and give companies confidence that if they invest and hire, there will be customers for their products and services. You should pass this jobs plan right away.

Everyone here knows that small businesses are where most new jobs begin. And you know that while corporate profits have come roaring back, smaller companies haven't. So for everyone who speaks so passionately about making life easier for "job creators," this plan is for you.

Pass this jobs bill, and starting tomorrow, small businesses will get a tax cut if they hire new workers or raise workers' wages. Pass this jobs bill, and all small business owners will also see their payroll taxes cut in half next year. If you have 50 employees making an average salary, that's an $80,000 tax cut. And all businesses will be able to continue writing off the investments they make in 2012.

It's not just Democrats who have supported this kind of proposal. Fifty House Republicans have proposed the same payroll tax cut that's in this plan. You should pass it right away.

Pass this jobs bill, and we can put people to work rebuilding America. Everyone here knows that we have badly decaying roads and bridges all over this country. Our highways are clogged with traffic. Our skies are the most congested in the world.

This is inexcusable. Building a world-class transportation system is part of what made us an economic superpower. And now we're going to sit back and watch China build newer airports and faster railroads? At a time when millions of unemployed construction workers could build them right here in America?

There are private construction companies all across America just waiting to get to work. There's a bridge that needs repair between Ohio and Kentucky that's on one of the busiest trucking routes in North America. A public transit project in Houston that will help clear up one of the worst areas of traffic in the country. And there are schools throughout this country that desperately need renovating. How can we expect our kids to do their best in places that are literally falling apart? This is America. Every child deserves a great school — and we can give it to them, if we act now.

The American Jobs Act will repair and modernize at least 35,000 schools. It will put people to work right now fixing roofs and windows; installing science labs and high-speed Internet in classrooms all across this country. It will rehabilitate homes and businesses in communities hit hardest by foreclosures. It will jumpstart thousands of transportation projects across the country. And to make sure the money is properly spent and for good purposes, we're building on reforms we've already put in place. No more earmarks. No more boondoggles. No more bridges to nowhere. We're cutting the red tape that prevents some of these projects from getting started as quickly as possible. And we'll set up an independent fund to attract private dollars and issue loans based on two criteria: how badly a construction project is needed and how much good it would do for the economy.

This idea came from a bill written by a Texas Republican and a Massachusetts Democrat. The idea for a big boost in construction is supported by America's largest business organization and America's largest labor organization. It's the kind of proposal that's been supported in the past by Democrats and Republicans alike. You should pass it right away.

Pass this jobs bill, and thousands of teachers in every state will go back to work. These are the men and women charged with preparing our children for a world where the competition has never been tougher. But while they're adding teachers in places like South Korea, we're laying them off in droves. It's unfair to our kids. It undermines their future and ours. And it has to stop. Pass this jobs bill, and put our teachers back in the classroom where they belong.

Pass this jobs bill, and companies will get extra tax credits if they hire America's veterans. We ask these men and women to leave their careers, leave their families, and risk their lives to fight for our country. The last thing they should have to do is fight for a job when they come home.

Pass this bill, and hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged young people will have the hope and dignity of a summer job next year. And their parents, low-income Americans who desperately want to work, will have more ladders out of poverty.

Pass this jobs bill, and companies will get a $4,000 tax credit if they hire anyone who has spent more than six months looking for a job. We have to do more to help the long-term unemployed in their search for work. This jobs plan builds on a program in Georgia that several Republican leaders have highlighted, where people who collect unemployment insurance participate in temporary work as a way to build their skills while they look for a permanent job. The plan also extends unemployment insurance for another year. If the millions of unemployed Americans stopped getting this insurance, and stopped using that money for basic necessities, it would be a devastating blow to this economy. Democrats and Republicans in this Chamber have supported unemployment insurance plenty of times in the past. At this time of prolonged hardship, you should pass it again — right away.

Pass this jobs bill, and the typical working family will get a fifteen hundred dollar tax cut next year. Fifteen hundred dollars that would have been taken out of your paycheck will go right into your pocket. This expands on the tax cut that Democrats and Republicans already passed for this year. If we allow that tax cut to expire — if we refuse to act — middle-class families will get hit with a tax increase at the worst possible time. We cannot let that happen. I know some of you have sworn oaths to never raise any taxes on anyone for as long as you live. Now is not the time to carve out an exception and raise middle-class taxes, which is why you should pass this bill right away.

This is the American Jobs Act. It will lead to new jobs for construction workers, teachers, veterans, first responders, young people and the long-term unemployed. It will provide tax credits to companies that hire new workers, tax relief for small business owners, and tax cuts for the middle-class. And here's the other thing I want the American people to know: the American Jobs Act will not add to the deficit. It will be paid for. And here's how:

The agreement we passed in July will cut government spending by about $1 trillion over the next ten years. It also charges this Congress to come up with an additional $1.5 trillion in savings by Christmas. Tonight, I'm asking you to increase that amount so that it covers the full cost of the American Jobs Act. And a week from Monday, I'll be releasing a more ambitious deficit plan — a plan that will not only cover the cost of this jobs bill, but stabilize our debt in the long run.

This approach is basically the one I've been advocating for months. In addition to the trillion dollars of spending cuts I've already signed into law, it's a balanced plan that would reduce the deficit by making additional spending cuts; by making modest adjustments to health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid; and by reforming our tax code in a way that asks the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations to pay their fair share. What's more, the spending cuts wouldn't happen so abruptly that they'd be a drag on our economy, or prevent us from helping small business and middle-class families get back on their feet right away.

Now, I realize there are some in my party who don't think we should make any changes at all to Medicare and Medicaid, and I understand their concerns. But here's the truth. Millions of Americans rely on Medicare in their retirement. And millions more will do so in the future. They pay for this benefit during their working years. They earn it. But with an aging population and rising health care costs, we are spending too fast to sustain the program. And if we don't gradually reform the system while protecting current beneficiaries, it won't be there when future retirees need it. We have to reform Medicare to strengthen it.

I'm also well aware that there are many Republicans who don't believe we should raise taxes on those who are most fortunate and can best afford it. But here is what every American knows. While most people in this country struggle to make ends meet, a few of the most affluent citizens and corporations enjoy tax breaks and loopholes that nobody else gets. Right now, Warren Buffet pays a lower tax rate than his secretary - an outrage he has asked us to fix. We need a tax code where everyone gets a fair shake, and everybody pays their fair share. And I believe the vast majority of wealthy Americans and CEOs are willing to do just that, if it helps the economy grow and gets our fiscal house in order.

I'll also offer ideas to reform a corporate tax code that stands as a monument to special interest influence in Washington. By eliminating pages of loopholes and deductions, we can lower one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. Our tax code shouldn't give an advantage to companies that can afford the best-connected lobbyists. It should give an advantage to companies that invest and create jobs here in America.

So we can reduce this deficit, pay down our debt, and pay for this jobs plan in the process. But in order to do this, we have to decide what our priorities are. We have to ask ourselves, "What's the best way to grow the economy and create jobs?"

Should we keep tax loopholes for oil companies? Or should we use that money to give small business owners a tax credit when they hire new workers? Because we can't afford to do both. Should we keep tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires? Or should we put teachers back to work so our kids can graduate ready for college and good jobs? Right now, we can't afford to do both.

This isn't political grandstanding. This isn't class warfare. This is simple math. These are real choices that we have to make. And I'm pretty sure I know what most Americans would choose. It's not even close. And it's time for us to do what's right for our future.

The American Jobs Act answers the urgent need to create jobs right away. But we can't stop there. As I've argued since I ran for this office, we have to look beyond the immediate crisis and start building an economy that lasts into the future - an economy that creates good, middle-class jobs that pay well and offer security. We now live in a world where technology has made it possible for companies to take their business anywhere. If we want them to start here and stay here and hire here, we have to be able to out-build, out-educate, and out-innovate every other country on Earth.

This task, of making America more competitive for the long haul, is a job for all of us. For government and for private companies. For states and for local communities — and for every American citizen. All of us will have to up our game. All of us will have to change the way we do business.

My administration can and will take some steps to improve our competitiveness on our own. For example, if you're a small business owner who has a contract with the federal government, we're going to make sure you get paid a lot faster than you do now. We're also planning to cut away the red tape that prevents too many rapidly-growing startup companies from raising capital and going public. And to help responsible homeowners, we're going to work with Federal housing agencies to help more people refinance their mortgages at interest rates that are now near 4 percent — a step that can put more than $2,000 a year in a family's pocket, and give a lift to an economy still burdened by the drop in housing prices.

Other steps will require congressional action. Today you passed reform that will speed up the outdated patent process, so that entrepreneurs can turn a new idea into a new business as quickly as possible. That's the kind of action we need. Now it's time to clear the way for a series of trade agreements that would make it easier for American companies to sell their products in Panama, Colombia, and South Korea — while also helping the workers whose jobs have been affected by global competition. If Americans can buy Kias and Hyundais, I want to see folks in South Korea driving Fords and Chevys and Chryslers. I want to see more products sold around the world stamped with three proud words: "Made in America."

And on all of our efforts to strengthen competitiveness, we need to look for ways to work side-by-side with America's businesses. That's why I've brought together a Jobs Council of leaders from different industries who are developing a wide range of new ideas to help companies grow and create jobs.

Already, we've mobilized business leaders to train 10,000 American engineers a year, by providing company internships and training. Other businesses are covering tuition for workers who learn new skills at community colleges. And we're going to make sure the next generation of manufacturing takes root, not in China or Europe, but right here, in the United States of America. If we provide the right incentives and support — and if we make sure our trading partners play by the rules — we can be the ones to build everything from fuel-efficient cars to advanced biofuels to semiconductors that are sold all over the world. That's how America can be number one again. That's how America will be number one again.

Now, I realize that some of you have a different theory on how to grow the economy. Some of you sincerely believe that the only solution to our economic challenges is to simply cut most government spending and eliminate most government regulations.

Well, I agree that we can't afford wasteful spending, and I will continue to work with Congress to get rid of it. And I agree that there are some rules and regulations that put an unnecessary burden on businesses at a time when they can least afford it. That's why I ordered a review of all government regulations. So far, we've identified over 500 reforms, which will save billions of dollars over the next few years. We should have no more regulation than the health, safety, and security of the American people require. Every rule should meet that common sense test.

But what we can't do — what I won't do — is let this economic crisis be used as an excuse to wipe out the basic protections that Americans have counted on for decades. I reject the idea that we need to ask people to choose between their jobs and their safety. I reject the argument that says for the economy to grow, we have to roll back protections that ban hidden fees by credit card companies, or rules that keep our kids from being exposed to mercury, or laws that prevent the health insurance industry from shortchanging patients. I reject the idea that we have to strip away collective bargaining rights to compete in a global economy. We shouldn't be in a race to the bottom, where we try to offer the cheapest labor and the worst pollution standards. America should be in a race to the top. And I believe that's a race we can win.

In fact, this larger notion that the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everyone's money, let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they're on their own — that's not who we are. That's not the story of America.

Yes, we are rugged individualists. Yes, we are strong and self-reliant. And it has been the drive and initiative of our workers and entrepreneurs that has made this economy the engine and envy of the world.

But there has always been another thread running throughout our history — a belief that we are all connected; and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation.

We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. But in the middle of a Civil War, he was also a leader who looked to the future — a Republican president who mobilized government to build the transcontinental railroad; launch the National Academy of Sciences; and set up the first land grant colleges. And leaders of both parties have followed the example he set.

Ask yourselves — where would we be right now if the people who sat here before us decided not to build our highways and our bridges; our dams and our airports? What would this country be like if we had chosen not to spend money on public high schools, or research universities, or community colleges? Millions of returning heroes, including my grandfather, had the opportunity to go to school because of the GI Bill. Where would we be if they hadn't had that chance?

How many jobs would it have cost us if past Congresses decided not to support the basic research that led to the Internet and the computer chip? What kind of country would this be if this Chamber had voted down Social Security or Medicare just because it violated some rigid idea about what government could or could not do? How many Americans would have suffered as a result?

No single individual built America on their own. We built it together. We have been, and always will be, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all; a nation with responsibilities to ourselves and with responsibilities to one another. Members of Congress, it is time for us to meet our responsibilities.

Every proposal I've laid out tonight is the kind that's been supported by Democrats and Republicans in the past. Every proposal I've laid out tonight will be paid for. And every proposal is designed to meet the urgent needs of our people and our communities.

I know there's been a lot of skepticism about whether the politics of the moment will allow us to pass this jobs plan — or any jobs plan. Already, we're seeing the same old press releases and tweets flying back and forth. Already, the media has proclaimed that it's impossible to bridge our differences. And maybe some of you have decided that those differences are so great that we can only resolve them at the ballot box.

But know this: the next election is fourteen months away. And the people who sent us here — the people who hired us to work for them — they don't have the luxury of waiting fourteen months. Some of them are living week to week; paycheck to paycheck; even day to day. They need help, and they need it now.

I don't pretend that this plan will solve all our problems. It shouldn't be, nor will it be, the last plan of action we propose. What's guided us from the start of this crisis hasn't been the search for a silver bullet. It's been a commitment to stay at it — to be persistent — to keep trying every new idea that works, and listen to every good proposal, no matter which party comes up with it.

Regardless of the arguments we've had in the past, regardless of the arguments we'll have in the future, this plan is the right thing to do right now. You should pass it. And I intend to take that message to every corner of this country. I also ask every American who agrees to lift your voice and tell the people who are gathered here tonight that you want action now. Tell Washington that doing nothing is not an option. Remind us that if we act as one nation, and one people, we have it within our power to meet this challenge.

President Kennedy once said, "Our problems are man-made — therefore they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants."

These are difficult years for our country. But we are Americans. We are tougher than the times that we live in, and we are bigger than our politics have been. So let's meet the moment. Let's get to work, and show the world once again why the United States of America remains the greatest nation on Earth. Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.

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2011-08-22T09:38:00.000-05:00

ENI leads Libya oil race as Gaddafi nears end

Big Oil Moving Back Into Libya

By Svetlana Kovalyova
Reuters
Aug 22, 2011

Libya's leading foreign oil producer, Eni of Italy led the charge back into Libya on Monday as rebels swept into the Libyan capital Tripoli hailing the end of Muammar Gaddafi's rule.

Gaddafi's fall will reopen the doors to Africa's largest oil reserves with new players such as Qatar's national oil company and trading house Vitol set to compete with established European and U.S. companies.

Shares in European companies Italy's Eni , Austria's OMV and France's Total rose by 3-5 percent despite a $2 fall in the price of oil LCOc1 on hopes the firms would be able to quickly re-establish output from Libya.

Italy's Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said staff from Eni had arrived to look into a restart of oil facilities in the east of the country even as fighting between government troops and the rebels continued in Tripoli in the west.

"The facilities had been made by Italians, by (oil field services group) Saipem , and therefore it is clear that Eni will play a No. 1 role in the future," Frattini told state TV RAI.

OPEC member Libya was producing about 2 percent of global oil output or 1.6 million barrels per day before the war and has reserves to sustain that levels of production for 80 years.

OMV said it was not in any talks yet.

"We are observing the current situation and further developments very closely. At the moment we are not holding any bilateral talks with the (National) Transitional Council," an OMV spokesman said.

Other major player in pre-war Libya France's Total and Germany's Wintershall declined comment.

Analysts and industry observers have said Eni and Total could emerge as the big winners in post-war Libya due to their countries' heavy support for the rebels.

Big support from Qatar as well as oil trader Vitol, neither producers in Libya before the war, may also guarantee a chunk of reserves and influence goes to new players.

"Qatar will be a big player, Vitol might be an important one. Shell (RDSa.L) is also looking to boost its role," said a Western risk consultant with knowledge of negotiations.

Most global oil majors have taken a much more cautious approach to events in Libya with BP , not yet a producer in Libya, saying it was planning to return to explore but giving no timeframe.

"We fully intend to return to Libya to fulfil our contract when conditions allow," said a spokesman for BP, which did not have production in Libya before the war.

U.S. companies such as Marathon , ConocoPhillips , Hess , Occidental have pulled out of Libya at the start of the year and have had little direct involvement in the events there since then.

"They are just sitting and waiting and trying to figure out who will run the place," said the risk consultant who is advising some U.S. firms on Libya.

Source:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/22/libya-oil-idUSL5E7JM10T20110822
_____________________

2011-08-17T19:32:00.003-05:00

What About Ron?

By David Weigel
Slate
Aug. 16, 2011

Had 73 votes gone the other way, Ron Paul would have beaten Michele Bachmann in Ames. He would have been the Winner of the Ames Straw Poll. He got more votes in Ames that Mitt Romney got when he won the thing in 2007.

And yet nobody's talking about Paul after Ames. I mentioned his showing in the lede of my story on it, and I put up some photos of Ron, Rand Paul, and the massive crowd that came to see them. Everybody else? Not so much. Ames was the official start of the horse race, and Paul isn't being included in the horse race.

This seemed to piss off Ron Paul's army of supporters -- who, last time around, added up to one million Republican voters. Worse, it pissed off Jon Stewart.

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Can we give the media a pass on this? Look: The problem didn't start with Ron Paul. And it's not clear that it's actually a problem. Pretend that political coverage is coverage of 10 high school football teams. Three teams have a chance to win it all; maybe one has a chance to get a perfect record for the year. There's another team that's pioneered a lot of the techniques that the other teams are using to win. (In the analogy, maybe decrying the Federal Reserve is the equivilent of the halfback option play.) This team is only set to win a few games, though. It will get less attention than the winning teams.

"Is that supposed to be a defense of why Paul isn't being covered?" No, it's an explanation. It's only meant to explain why Paul isn't covered, not why Huntsman or Santorum are. Paul got 11,000 caucus votes in 2007, and almost 4,700 votes this time, just at Ames. He's on track to score at least 15 percent of the vote in the caucuses.

Anyway, there might be a simpler reason for this.

Source:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2011/08/16/what_about_ron_.html
__________________

2011-08-10T21:00:00.006-05:00

Over 1,000 Arrested in U.K. as Anger over Inequality, Racism Boils Over into "Insurrection"

Democracy Now
Aug, 10, 2011

Unrest continues to spread across England after protests erupted Saturday in London when police shot to death Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black man. Mobs firebombed police stations and set shops on fire in London, Manchester, Salford, Liverpool, Nottingham and Birmingham. After waiting for several days, Prime Minister David Cameron has cut short his vacation and recalled Parliament from summer recess.

Scotland Yard has ordered its officers to deploy every available force to stop the unrest, including water cannons and possibly the use of plastic bullets. London has been flooded with 16,000 officers, the largest police presence in the city’s history.

We go to London to speak with journalist Darcus Howe, a longtime critic of police brutality in black and West Indian communities across the U.K., and author and blogger Richard Seymour of the popular British site "Lenin’s Tomb." "There is a mass insurrection. And I’m not talking about rioting; I’m talking about an insurrection that comes from the depths of society, from the consciousness, collectively, of the young blacks and whites, but overwhelmingly black, as a result of the consistent stopping and searching young blacks without cause," says Howe of the uprising.

Seymour notes that anti-terror legislation has led to an unprecedented number of stops, predominantly of youth of color, but protests against the stops have been largely ignored by the British media. "A political establishment, a media, and a state system that gives people…the impression that they won’t be listened to, unless they force themselves onto your attention, is going to lead to riots," says Seymour. [includes rush transcript]

Guests:

Darcus Howe, broadcaster and columnist who lives in Brixton, South London. His TV work includes White Tribe, in which he put Anglo-Saxon Britain under the spotlight. Howe organized the 20,000-strong Black People’s March in 1981, claiming official neglect and inefficient policing of the investigation of the New Cross Fire, in which 13 black teenagers died.

Richard Seymour, one of Britain’s most popular bloggers based in London. He blogs at Lenin’s Tomb. He is author of The Liberal Defence of Murder and The Meaning of David Cameron.

AMY GOODMAN: Unrest continues to spread across Britain, after protests erupted Saturday in London, when police shot to death a young black man who was a suspected gang member, they said. Mobs firebombed police stations and set shops on fire in London, Manchester, Salford, Liverpool, Nottingham and Birmingham.

After waiting for several days, Prime Minister David Cameron has cut short his Italian vacation and recalled Parliament to respond to the situation. Scotland Yard has ordered its officers to deploy every available force, including possible use of plastic bullets, to stop the riots. London yesterday was flooded with 16,000 police officers, the biggest police presence in the capital in history.

Meanwhile, the Independent Police Complaints Commission, the IPCC, found that Mark Duggan, the 29-year-old black man whose death triggered the riots, did not fire on the police before he was shot.

RACHEL CERFONTYNE: One of the main developments that I can share is the tests we commissioned from the Forensic Science Service have so far confirmed that the bullet lodged in the MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] radio is a jacketed round. This is a police-issue bullet, and whilst it is still subject to DNA analysis, it is consistent with having been fired from an MPS Heckler & Koch MP5.

AMY GOODMAN: A representative for Mark Duggan’s family said they were very sorry his death had led to the riots. Helen Shaw of the human rights group Inquest said his family is distressed at the unrest.

HELEN SHAW: The family want everyone to know that the disorder going on has nothing to do with finding out what has happened to Mark. They also want everyone to know that they are deeply distressed by the disorder affecting so many communities across the country.

AMY GOODMAN: Links between Duggan’s death and the unrest were rejected by British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who characterized the disorder as, quote, "needless, opportunistic theft and violence, nothing more, nothing less."

Well, as protests enter their fourth day, with more than 760 people arrested in London, at least 50 people have been arrested over trouble in Manchester and Salford, where crowds of youths have set fire to buildings and cars, while almost a hundred have been arrested over disorder which broke out across the West Midlands.

We go to London, where we’re joined by Darcus Howe, a broadcaster and columnist who lives in Brixton, South London. His TV work includes White Tribe, in which he put Anglo-Saxon Britain under the spotlight. Howe organized the 20,000-strong Black People’s March in 1981, claiming official neglect and inefficient policing of the investigation of the New Cross Fire in which 13 black teenagers died.

We’re also joined in London by Richard Seymour, one of Britain’s most popular bloggers. He blogs at "Lenin’s Tomb." He’s author of The Liberal Defence of Murder and The Meaning of David Cameron.
We’re going to go first to Darcus Howe. Talk about what is happening in your country right now, what is happening in Britain.

DARCUS HOWE: There is a mass insurrection. And I’m not talking about rioting; I’m talking about an insurrection that comes from the depths of society, from the consciousness, collectively, of the young blacks and whites, but overwhelmingly black, as a result of the consistent stopping and searching young blacks without cause. They changed the law. Before, you had to provide evidence that you were looking at this character, doing this and bouncing ladies and pushing his hand in a handbag, before they stop and search you.

They moved that clean out and replaced it with anti-terror legislation, that you could stop and search anybody, anytime, anywhere. And my grandson is 14 years old, and I asked him, I said, "Nathan, how many times have you been stopped and searched?" He said, "Papa, I can’t count, it’s so many." And that anger has been simmering beneath the surface, because when you have hundreds of thousands of young people acting simultaneously, the issue has to be simultaneously experienced. And so, when Mark Duggan was executed, they all had empathy with it and issues in their minds about what life is and what it is not.

The second practical thing is they’re on holidays. The school year is over. And anybody who’s been cooped up in a classroom in your teens for a term, you want out. And you feel freedom of—a spiritual freedom. You breathe widely, hahhh, and you say, "School over, monkey turn over." So, that is a moment. I don’t think it would have happened in January or the middle of October or anything. It’s summer. It’s warm. In fact, some of the nights were quite hot.

And Mark Duggan lost his life. The Operation Trident—we have known Operation Trident for a long time. They came to investigate murders, and they did absolutely brilliantly. And I have been all open in saying it’s a fine squad. Now, everything is changing in the Metropolitan Police. It is perhaps one of the most disgraced organization in the United Kingdom at the moment. And it’s headless—no commissioner, no deputy commissioner. So all these guys who are head of these operations—special operations, special ops, Razorback, Operation Razorback, Operation Trident—they’re all over the place, jostling to draw the attention of the authorities to get that big job and the deputy. And so, they go to Tottenham, where the first explosion took place, without telling the commander of that area. They were carrying that Glock Heckler pistol. That is a murderous weapon. It is the most murderous weapon you can ever put in your hands. In bright, broad daylight, among ordinary people, and they blew his chest away. Up to—they said that he had a pistol. Now they’re saying the extra pistol wasn’t his. We don’t know.

So, two things. When they demonstrated, the family, to the police station, the commander, he could not come out and say anything, because he was fussing all around trying to get in contact with his men on the ground. Nobody knew. And they did that and went their way. And so, the degeneration of the Metropolitan Police, the competition for the job of Metropolitan commissioner and deputy commissioner, that competition is on. And each one, they want to—each commander would like to go to the extreme and put up his hand and beat his chest and say, "I qualify." And that is the spirit at Scotland Yard.

AMY GOODMAN: Richard Seymour—

DARCUS HOWE: And it was inevitable that—

AMY GOODMAN: I’d like to bring Richard Seymour into the discussion, Darcus.

DARCUS HOWE: Yeah, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: I’d like to bring Richard Seymour in and go back to the beginning, Mark Duggan, the killing of Mark Duggan, the 29-year-old black man, just to clearly understand—and you have written about this—what the police initially said and then what has come out over time, further angering people. Richard Seymour?

RICHARD SEYMOUR: Right. First of all, the circumstances of the killing are that they allowed people to believe that Mark Duggan had a weapon and that he shot that weapon at police officers, and that, therefore, you would conclude they fired back in self-defense. That’s absolutely untrue. The IPCC, the Independent Police Complaints Commission, has confirmed that the bullet that was fired and lodged in a police radio was a police bullet. So, it would be an interesting question, who fired that bullet and why? Which among the officers did so? But it certainly wasn’t Mark Duggan. So, they lied.

But in addition to that, they didn’t inform the family. They let the family find out from the media. And they didn’t send round a family liaison officer to speak to the family. None of the usual procedures, in this highly unusual circumstance, was followed. So, generally speaking, there was a backlash, a reaction against the police, as a result of this.

I just want to say also, in connection with this, Darcus mentioned the competition for the top jobs in the Metropolitan Police. It’s important to note the backdrop here. This is the deep crisis that has shaken the Metropolitan Police in the context of the hacking scandal, in relation to the relationships between top Metropolitan Police officials and the News of the World, News International empire. That has created a deep crisis within the police. It’s an ideological crisis as much as anything else. And so, this is, I expect, one of the reasons for the disarray that they’re in at the moment. And it will be wide. They are reaching for new weapons just today. David Cameron has allowed the police to use water cannon against rioters for the first time in this country.

AMY GOODMAN: Just to explain, that’s the Murdoch scandal that you’re talking about that took out—

RICHARD SEYMOUR: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —the top leadership of Scotland Yard. But the protest at the police station the night of Mark Duggan’s killing by the police?

RICHARD SEYMOUR: Yeah. Well, I mean, this was, until a certain amount of provoc
ation by the police, largely peaceful. I mean, it was a protest led by local community activists wanting answers, wanting dialogue with the police, and not getting it, and being fogged off. And the real flashpoint came, according to eyewitnesses, when a 16-year-old girl, who was shouting at the police, lines of riot police, demanding answers from them, was assaulted. She was beaten by several of them with batons and riot shields. Some of you may have seen the footage. It definitely shows that she’s on the ground. She’s getting a few hefty kicks, as well. Several independent eyewitnesses have verified this. So, I would say that the police have done more than enough to provoke this situation, which obviously raises the question of why anybody thinks that the police, having provoked it, have any solutions to resolving it.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to our discussion. Richard Seymour blogs at "Lenin’s Tomb." Darcus Howe is a broadcaster, a columnist, who lives in Brixton. His TV work includes a number of pieces over the decades, and he’s particularly known for his criticism of police brutality issues in the communities in which he lives and covers. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Linton Kwesi Johnson, "Man Free (For Darcus Howe)." Linton Kwesi Johnson did this song for our guest, Darcus Howe. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Our guests: Darcus Howe, broadcaster, columnist; Richard Seymour blogs at "Lenin’s Tomb." They’re both joining us from London.

Darcus Howe, that song, the significance of it? And give us the history of your community, of Brixton, and how you feel this might fit into that history, what is taking place today. Now more than a thousand people have been arrested across Britain.

DARCUS HOWE: It’s very repetitive of what happened in Brixton in 1981, the exact same thing. They were beating up, stop and search—Operation Swamp, it was—and actually swamped the entire community and searched anything that moved that was male and that was black. It was a clear distinction. And that exploded, I think, about 40 yards from my house. I was editor of The Journal. I led a demonstration of 20,000 people only weeks before. So I thought, the best thing—I told Mrs. Howe, "Let’s go to the office up the street and sit in there." And a serial of policemen lined up in front my office. So when I was asked, "Where you were when the riot was on?" I said, "You ask the police. They have my record of not only where I was, but everything I said on my phone."

And there’s a spontaneity. But the weakness is always the commentators, the press. It comes like a thief in the night to them, because they deal only with what has happened, not what is likely to happen, which is a kind of speculative truth. So they’re always surprised. And whenever there’s surprise, they look for people to blame, to cover up their own inadequacies. Whenever there’s surprise, they create a plot and a plan of some people—I don’t know if they were from Mars or what—as a result. And it is spontaneous.

Now, after Brixton, the riots snaked, as it is doing now exactly, through Birmingham, Manchester, all over, Leeds, Bradford. It even included a place in the south called Cirencester, of which I know nothing. I didn’t know any black people live there, in Gloucestershire. And so, the snake is traveling along the same path that it did in 1981.

AMY GOODMAN: And what do these communities have in common, Darcus?

DARCUS HOWE: There is absolutely no difference. There is no difference, in the minutest detail, the insurrection and the looting. I think there’s much more looting now, because they’re on school holidays. And one of the things about young people—because I was young once. I like—whatever in fashion, I must have it; otherwise I won’t get a girlfriend. This is the spirit of youth.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted—I wanted to get your comment, Darcus Howe—

DARCUS HOWE: Trousers, sneakers.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to get your comment on the London mayor, Boris Johnson, who walked through the streets of Clapham in South London with a broom on Tuesday, as residents launched a clean-up operation in one of the worst-hit areas of the violence. He criticized those seeking to justify the unrest.

MAYOR BORIS JOHNSON: It’s time we stop hearing all this, you know, nonsense about how there are deep sociological justifications for wanton criminality and destruction of people’s property. Whatever people’s grievances may be, it does not justify smashing up someone’s shop, wrecking their livelihood, and kicking them out of a job. That is not the way to behave. That’s not the way to have an economic recovery in this city.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the London mayor, Boris Johnson. Do you condemn the unrest, Darcus Howe? Do you—the riots that are destroying a lot of the communities and the business within the poorest communities of Britain right now?

DARCUS HOWE: Americans will remember the anger of black Americans at a certain point in history. Rap Brown celebrated that explosion, several explosions in Chicago [inaudible] every day. He says, "Burn, baby, burn!" That was his slogan. And it was approved by radical whites and blacks. They have a reason for it. Secondly, they’re very poor now. I have never known young people to be poor as they are now, in the midst of an avalanche of advertisements and celebrity, with the latest sneakers and top, and bouncing around with their little hats on their head. And they cannot get the money to buy it, so they rip off the front of the stores and steal it.

I am not an Anglican Christian. My father was. He was a priest. And therefore, I don’t walk around with 10 Commandments and use them at sharp, historical, political moments in the history of a tribe, in the history of a country, in the history of an inner city. They stole it, and they stole it. I don’t make any fuss when they have a lot of MPs and members of the House of Lords in jail for stealing. I don’t make a statement about democracy because a handful of them are thieves. So, this denigration of Boris’s people, because we’re all his citizens—and you look at one and speak about them in a certain way. But Boris is—Boris is Boris.

AMY GOODMAN: The Mayor of London.

DARCUS HOWE: He’s a highly educated man. He loves Greek civilization and all of that, but Boris doesn’t have—and he’d better be careful, because the Olympics are next year in the London inner city.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask Richard Seymour about one of the pieces in The Guardian written by Caroline Davies, who says, "A total of 333 people have died in or following police custody over the past 11 years, but no officer has ever been successfully prosecuted." That’s according to the government; it’s according to a watchdog report. "Prosecutions were recommended against 13 officers based on 'relatively strong evidence of misconduct or neglect', but none resulted in a guilty verdict." This is quite remarkable. Three hundred thirty-three people have died in or following police custody over the last 11 years? This is more than two people a month over the last more than decade. Can you talk about the significance of this, Richard?

RICHARD SEYMOUR: Yeah. I mean, first of all, there has been, over the last generation or so, some efforts to overcome the antagonisms between the police and black communities in Britain, but that didn’t, obviously, get rid of institutional racism. Institutional racism was acknowledged in the outcome of the Lawrence Inquiry, but the steps undertaken to deal with it were obviously inadequate. And the result of that has been that there has been a disproportionate amount of stop and search of young black men, a disproportionate amount of harassment and violence, and of course, as you mentioned, deaths in police custody.

But it’s worth mentioning that it’s not just deaths in police custody. There are—there have been a number of recent notorious deaths outside of police custody, including that of Ian Tomlinson at a G20 protest, and including that of the artist Smiley Culture, who, they said, stabbed himself in the kitchen while police were visiting with him to discuss allegations of drugs. And I don’t think anybody really believes that, but there were peaceful protests in response to that, quite large protests by the local community. And to be honest, they were largely—in fact, completely—ignored by the media. They were a very important democratic moment, but just completely ignored.

And that puts these riots in an interesting light, because when one of the young people was asked by a reporter, "Do you really think the rioting is the right way to go about getting what you want?" he said, "Yes, because if we weren’t rioting, you wouldn’t be talking to us." A political establishment, a media, and a state system that gives people that impression, that gives people the impression that they won’t be listened to unless they force themselves onto your attention, is going to lead to riots.

AMY GOODMAN: Darcus Howe, do you have a sense that the feeling of people’s frustration, of the poverty, the austerity that’s being raised, goes across race, that you’re talking about the poor whites, as well, but also that it’s a class issue, but also that there are those that are taking advantage of a moment of frustration to riot, to steal?

DARCUS HOWE: Hello? Let me say this. I write a column, a fortnightly column, in the only black newspaper in the United Kingdom. And last week, before any Mark Duggan or anything—I write not from events only, from my historical sense, from my speculative truth. And I wrote, "I hope Amy Winehouse is floating in the stars, speaking in the air of authority, saying, 'No, no, no.'" That was a warning. I am not anybody with special qualities, that I could divine what is happening tomorrow. I am not some of those people who do it by magic, and you pay them a little and know what’s going to happen tomorrow. I wrote that specifically because of not only what my grandson was telling me, but the sound of his voice. You can—it hit another pitch. And his friends and his mom and my friends’ children, there was a sense that the lid was going to blow and blow sky-high. So I was not in any way surprised.

Who had to be surprised? Those who govern. So they could do nothing to stop it, because it doesn’t—they don’t know if it’s there. They don’t even know if black people are there. The Parliament, they didn’t even know what was there. It was there for all those who were paying attention, would see and listen to people, not question them and say, "Are you going to be rioting tomorrow?" No, you just ask questions. And then suddenly they burst out, as though they’re completely fed up. I assure you and your viewers I knew something was on the agenda. The police did not know. I was in no surprise when Trident killed Duggan, none whatsoever. And I’m not surprised that they’re going to use—I’m not surprised that they have weapons on the street now, armed police, and much more than normal. You mightn’t see it; it might be tucked in a car somewhere.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what you feel—

DARCUS HOWE: I’m not surprised that they’re tapping the phones of all of us who have been outspoken. And it’s no surprise, if I come down the road late and, no, they don’t see anybody else, to dive on me and pick me up and fancy a story. That is where we are now.

AMY GOODMAN: Darcus Howe, what do you think needs to be done?

DARCUS HOWE: And I’m not [inaudible] or anything. That’s what we are now.

AMY GOODMAN: What would you—Darcus, what would you—

DARCUS HOWE: Hmm?

AMY GOODMAN: —want to see happening right now? How do you think this should all be resolved? We’re talking about four days of this uprising, of the riots, of the fires, of more than a thousand people arrested, police out in the largest presence in history now in the streets of London and others. What do you think needs to happen right now?

DARCUS HOWE: There has to be an overture made to young blacks, saying, "Peace." And you could do that with making clear that you disassociate yourself—I’m talking about the Prime Minister now—disassociate themselves with Operation Trident and dissolve it, dissolve Operation Razorback, which is terrorizing communities right now.

And the other thing, the genuine black intellectuals and working-class unionists, and so on, should hold an international conference within the next six months to lay out precisely the state of society. We must have black Americans there. We must have broadcasters from all over the world and discuss the future of a civilization within a civilization, and make that absolutely clear. We invite delegates from Africa, we invite delegates from the Caribbean, and say this is not the country that Cameron boasts of—and how, beneath the surface, the terror and the disrespect—on the question of race, mainly—and we have to resolve it. We have to resolve it, and resolve it in a civilized way.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to leave it there.

DARCUS HOWE: Not go with a demonstration to the House of Lords or Parliament and to your MP and whatever. We have to lift it sky-high and let the entire civilization of this world know that what they’re doing in Afghanistan is much of what they do to kill people here. I’m not angry, but I’m deadly serious. Every time I walk the street, my eyes are scanning the landscape for rogue police officers. And that’s—I warn my children to do that, and my grandchildren.

AMY GOODMAN: Darcus Howe, I want to thank you for being with us—

DARCUS HOWE: I’m going to see them next Sunday.

AMY GOODMAN: Broadcaster and columnist who lives in Brixton, South London. Also, Richard Seymour, who blogs at "Lenin’s Tomb," both of them speaking to us from London. This is Democracy Now! Of course, we’ll continue to cover what is happening there, the unrest throughout the country.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Source:

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/10/over_1_000_arrested_in_uk

________________________

2011-08-07T10:26:00.001-05:00

WikiLeaks Cables Show US Strategy for Regime Change in Syria as Protesters are Massacred

By Kevin Gosztola
Firedoglake
August 5, 2011

In the aftermath of a massacre in Hama, Syria state media broadcasted images of “burnt, buildings, makeshift barricades and deserted streets strewn with rubble,” according to the New York Times and claimed the revolt in Syria has ended. Meanwhile, The Guardian reports tens of thousands have taken to the streets all over the country and are continuing a five-months old uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke at a press conference and said the Syrian government has killed more than 2,000 people in its brutal crackdown on protests in the past months. She told the press the US was extending sanctions against a “prominent businessman and MP,” who allegedly has close ties to Assad. This marked the “fourth round of US sanctions against Syria aimed at pressuring Assad’s government to ease its bloody crackdown against unarmed protesters,” according to The Guardian. However, numerous Syrian protesters and some US senators are dissatisfied, as the sanctions do not target Syria’s oil and gas sector.

As protests continue and the brutal crackdown on protests wears on, US State Embassy cables released by the media organization WikiLeaks provide a greater understanding of the Washington power politics that have led to this moment.

For the past five to six years, the US policy toward Syria has used what could be called a two-pronged strategy to push for regime change. The US has supported “civil society” activists or external opposition organizations. It has also worked to delegitimize, destabilize and isolate the country through the application of sanctions and various other measures, which could be applied to exploit vulnerabilities.

A cable from December 13, 2006, opens with the conclusion that the Syrian government has ended 2006 “in a position much stronger domestically and internationally than it did [in] 2005.” It features a collection of possible actions that could be taken to undermine the Assad regime.

The vulnerabilities listed include: the Rafiq Hariri investigation and tribunal (Hariri was a Lebanese Prime Minister who was assassinated in a major car bombing); the alliance with Tehran; the regime’s “inner circle”; divisions in the military-security services; the corrupt Baathist elites; previous failures of reform; the economy; the Kurds; extremists and the “Khaddam factor” (Abdul Halim Khaddam is an exiled former Syrian Vice President, whose name appears in a number of the cables released thus far.)

Some of the proposed actions for exploiting these vulnerabilities are outlined in the cable:

ENCOURAGE RUMORS AND SIGNALS OF EXTERNAL PLOTTING:
The regime is intensely sensitive to rumors about coup-plotting and restlessness in the security services and military. Regional allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia should be encouraged to meet with figures like Khaddam and Rifat Asad as a way of sending such signals, with appropriate leaking of the meetings afterwards. This again touches on this insular regime,s paranoia and increases the possibility of a self-defeating over-reaction.

THE KHADDAM FACTOR
…We should continue to encourage the Saudis and others to allow Khaddam access to their media outlets, providing him with venues for airing the SARG,s dirty laundry. We should anticipate an overreaction by the regime that will add to its isolation and alienation from its Arab neighbors…

HIGHLIGHT KURDISH COMPLAINTS: Highlighting Kurdish complaints in public statements, including publicizing human rights abuses will exacerbate regime,s concerns about the Kurdish population. Focus on economic hardship in Kurdish areas and the SARG,s long-standing refusal to offer citizenship to some 200,000 stateless Kurds. This issue would need to be handled carefully, since giving the wrong kind of prominence to Kurdish issues in Syria could be a liability for our efforts at uniting the opposition, given Syrian (mostly Arab) civil society’s skepticism of Kurdish objectives.

PLAY ON SUNNI FEARS OF IRANIAN INFLUENCE: There are fears in Syria that the Iranians are active in both Shia proselytizing and conversion of, mostly poor, Sunnis. Though often exaggerated, such fears reflect an element of the Sunni community in Syria that is increasingly upset by and focused on the spread of Iranian influence in their country through activities ranging from mosque construction to business. Both the local Egyptian and Saudi missions here, (as well as prominent Syrian Sunni religious leaders), are giving increasing attention to the matter and we should coordinate more closely with their governments on ways to better publicize and focus regional attention on the issue.

This is clearly manipulative and underhanded. It shouldn’t be surprising that the Assad regime would want to crack down violently on any protests. The shadiness of US relations with Syria is only amplified if you look at the other aspect of the US push for regime change: the public funding of opposition groups.

The US Doesn’t Undermine Countries, It Transforms Them

In April, the Washington Post reported on the funding of opposition groups revealed in the cables and highlighted a group called the Movement for Justice and Development (MJD). It noted it was closely affiliated with the London-based satellite channel Barada TV, which started broadcasting in April 2009 but “ramped up operations to cover the mass protests in Syria.” The cables showed “as much as $6 million” had been “funneled” to the group “since 2006 to operate the satellite channel and finance other activities inside Syria.”

A cable from March 11, 2009, shows why the US might want to work with the MJD:

MJD’s effort to expand its base in Syria is noteworthy in that it is a moderate Islamist organization that publicly eschews any ideological agenda aside from ending the Asad regime through democratic reform. XXXXXXXXXXXX That said, we have heard numerous unconfirmed rumors by very nervous democracy-reform advocates that the SARG may have penetrated the MJD. XXXXXXXXXXXX MJD’s role in organizing an opposition television platform for broadcasting into Syria would make it a high priority target for Syria’s security services.

At the time that the cable was written, the group had been banned from Syria. But, that didn’t hurt the allure of cooperating with such a group to bring “democratic change” to Syria.

According to the cable, the group “doesn’t believe in Sharia law.” Throughout 2008, it “participated in symposiums” in Europe in the United States. It is a member of the Damascus Declaration, a unity statement made by Syrian opposition in 2005 that called the Assad regime, “authoritarian, totalitarian and cliquish,` and called for peaceful reform through dialogue. They did not have a cooperative relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood. And they were working with the Middle East Partnership Initiative, run by the US State Department, on a satellite channel that the Ford Foundation was allegedly helping to finance.

It is unclear how much of a role the MJD has had in the current protests in Syria, especially since they were mostly a group of exiles in 2009, however, the National Salvation Front of Syria founded by Khaddam has been organizing support for the Syrian opposition. Through conferences held in Istanbul, Turkey and lobbying efforts, which have been aimed at getting the US to impose greater sanctions on Syria, this group has been working to keep the opposition from being entirely crushed by Assad’s regime.

Syrian Dissident Unhappy with US Foreign Policy

While the Arab Spring has been viewed as a spontaneous moment in history that spurred a domino effect leading multiple populations in the Middle East and North Africa to mount uprisings against repressive dictatorial regimes, the cables show that opposition had been looking for the right moment to topple Assad for at least the past five years. But, US diplomatic efforts to undercut Assad only hurt the opposition the US was claiming to support.

As the Syrian government became aware of US funding of non-governmental organizations and opposition groups, the regime only turned more repressive. A figure in Syria, whose name is redacted from a November 2008 cable, criticized the US policy saying it had “united Islamist nationalists and secular Arab nationalists,” exactly what the US had not planned. And, Syrian opposition chided US foreign policy.

XXXXXXXXXXXX expressed disappointment that the U.S. has driven Syria in a direction not good for the country, but very good for the regime. The regime senses that the U.S. has played its hand very badly, using its war on terror in a counterproductive way. Instead of isolating the Islamists and creating the kind of dynamic social ferment and gradual upheaval that was evident in the USSR and Eastern Europe in the mid- and late-1980′s, the U.S. has created conditions that have united, in Syria at least, Islamist nationalists and secular Arab nationalists. According to XXXXXXXXXXXX , the U.S. has succeeded in making Syria a hero in the Islamic world. U.S. support for the opposition has not been effective The fact that Ba’ath Party thugs, with some security services support, could beat up a group of opposition activists, intellectuals, and cultural figures peacefully protesting the continuation of Emergency Law was a far more important signal than the USD five million that the U.S. set aside to support the opposition, noted XXXXXXXXXXXX

It’s Not “Regime Change” But Rather “Behavior Reform”

It is clear the Bush Administration was committed to bringing about regime change. Under President Barack Obama, it appears the US has not fully committed to the same of kind of destabilization efforts. The Obama Administration appears to have instead adopted a policy that is indicative of the sort of American exceptionalism rife within the Washington establishment.

On April 28, 2009, a cable describing a “new policy front” was sent out. US Chargé d’Affaires ad interim to Syria Maura Connelly suggested the “primary Syrian external opposition organization” had completely collapsed. Thus, the suggestion was put forth that the US do less work trying to foster “regime change” and more toward “encouraging ‘behavior reform.’”

…The U.S. attempt to politically isolate the SARG raised stumbling blocks to direct Embassy involvement in civil society programming. As a result, the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) and the Bureau of Human Rights and Labor (DRL) took the lead in identifying and funding civil society and human rights projects. Though the Embassy has had direct input on a few of these efforts, especially with DRL, most of the programming has proceeded without direct Embassy involvement…

The cable lists off Freedom House, American Bar Association, American University, Internews and work done by MEPI with the Aspen Strategic Initiative Institute, Democracy Council of California, Regents of the University of New Mexico and the International Republican Institute (IRI). It highlighted how the most sensitive MEPI-sponsored programs are funded and noted the Syria government would “view any US funds going to illegal political groups as tantamount to supporting regime change.”

It suggests concerns Syria could address if it wanted to be seen in a more positive light. This aspect of the US “behavior reform” strategy appears to be rather consistent with the rhetoric of the State Department during the current uprising. Then, Connelly wrote:

…Action on any one of the following five concerns might shift the SARG’s image into a more positive light. (1) The release of specific imprisoned high-profile civil society and human rights activists; (2) credible movement to resolve the citizenship status of stateless Kurds; (3) loosening media restrictions, including Internet censorship; (4) lifting travel bans on Syrian citizens; and (5) following up on promises to establish a “Senate” that would create a legislative space for opposition politicians to work in…

Finally, the cable on this Orwellian-sounding policy of “behavior reform” suggests further Americanization or Westernization could possibly help achieve US goals in Syria as well (like exporting more KFCs and Gap stores).

Sanctions Help Regime Control Political Opinion

Publicly, the State Department has claimed it is pressing a “message” both to Assad, his regime and to American partners that “the time for democratic change is already underway in Syria.” They have consistently indicated support for the protesters right to “peacefully assemble” (a phrase that each time uttered by a State Department spokesperson becomes even more meaningless).

They have proposed further sanctions, however, cables released by WikiLeaks indicate opposition groups have seen few benefits from sanctions. A cable from November 25, 2008, featuring the views of a Syrian dissident, suggests sanctions have been an easy justification for stifling political organizing in Syria:

Like many Syrians we have met, XXXXXXXXXXXX, XXXXXXXXXXXX, and XXXXXXXXXXXXi decried the U.S. sanctions against Syria as hurting the Syrian people more than anyone else. XXXXXXXXXXXX argued the sanctions had become a tool for controlling popular opinion in the SARG’s hands. The Asad regime held up the sanctions as an example of how the West opposed the people of Syria, thereby reinforcing the idea that Asad and the Ba’ath Party alone had the Syrian people’s interests at heart, XXXXXXXXXXXX said.

XXXXXXXXXXXX added that the West demanded reform, but it actually prefered an Asad regime to an alternative government, primarily because the West feared any alternative would be Islamist and/or violent, or simply would not willingly follow the policies of the West. He argued the West was afraid of a fully democratic country anywhere in the Middle East. Both, who spent five years in prison for his role in the Damascus Spring and is now involved with the Damascus Declaration, and XXXXXXXXXXXX, who is XXXXXXXXXXXX’s lawyer and the president of the XXXXXXXXXXXX, echoed XXXXXXXXXXXX’s sentiments in their own comments. XXXXXXXXXXXX argued the “regime always uses this relationship with the West to project an image of importance…It allows him (Asad) to tell people: ‘see, I’m needed and the West isn’t interested in these (human rights) issues.’”

“We Cannot Stand Idly By When a Tyrant Tells His People That There Will Be No Mercy”

If one reads these cables and draws the conclusion that the US bears some responsibility for egging Assad on, then it appears the US might have an obligation to launch a “humanitarian intervention” into Syria, perhaps, one like the “humanitarian intervention” that continues to wear on Libya.

Recall, the American people were told we had a kind of moral duty to intervene in Libya. President Barack Obama declared on March 19:

I am deeply aware of the risks of any military action, no matter what limits we place on it. I want the American people to know that the use of force is not our first choice and it’s not a choice that I make lightly. But we cannot stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people that there will be no mercy, and his forces step up their assaults on cities like Benghazi and Misurata, where innocent men and women face brutality and death at the hands of their own government.

More than 2,000 have died as a result of a “tyrant.” It certainly seems like the Assad regime has adopted a policy of “no mercy.” Yet, the Obama administration has yet to forcefully call for Assad to step down.
As with Mubarak and President Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen, the administration supports “a transition” and hopes the dictator, who is actively brutalizing his people, will relinquish control voluntarily and step down.

They seem to think they can through words and sanctions impose “behavior reform.” And so, there has not been, to use another Orwellian-sounding term, any indication that a “kinetic military action” will be launched.
That is not to say that the US should be arming any Syrian rebels. The rebels the US has supported (and possibly armed) in Libya are now dealing with “tribal hostilities” within their ranks, meaning they are now assassinating and killing one another.

What this shows is US diplomacy, which has included funding Syrian opposition groups and covertly supporting actions that could advance regime change in Syria, is a toxic elixir that not only has failed to give the opposition the support it needs to topple Assad but has also significantly influenced the regime’s decision to unleash its military and security forces on the Syrian people. In short, efforts to advance American hegemony through the buildup of “civil society” and the so-called advancement of “human rights” have failed and innocent civilians are paying the price.

Source:
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2011/08/05/wikileaks-cables-the-us-strategy-to-push-for-regime-change-in-syria/
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2011-08-03T06:49:00.000-05:00

Egypt's Mubarak goes on trial in hospital bed

By Hamza Hendawi
Associated Press
August 3, 2011

An ailing, 83-year-old Hosni Mubarak, lying ashen-faced on a hospital bed inside a metal defendants cage with his two sons standing protectively beside him in white prison uniforms, pleaded innocent to charges of corruption and complicity in the killing of protesters at the start of his historic trial on Wednesday.

The spectacle, aired live on state television, was a stunning moment for Egyptians, many of whom savored the humiliation of the man who ruled with unquestionable power for 29 years. After widespread skepticism that Egypt's military rulers would allow it, the scene went a long way to satisfy one of the key demands that has united protesters since Feb. 11, when Mubarak fell following an 18-day uprising.

"This is the dream of Egyptians, to see him like this, humiliated like he humiliated them for the last 30 years," said Ghada Ali, the mother of a 17-year old girl in the city of Alexandria who was shot to death during the crackdown.

"I want to see their heart explode like my daughter's heart exploded from their single bullet," Ali told The Associated Press, breaking down in sobs.

It was the first time Egyptians have seen Mubarak since Feb. 10, when he gave a defiant TV address refusing to resign.

In the courtroom, a prosecutor read the charges against Mubarak — that he was an accomplice along with this then-interior minister in the "intentional and premeditated murder of peaceful protesters" and that he and his sons received gifts from a prominent businessman in return for guaranteeing him a lowered price in a land deal with the state.

"Yes, I am here," Mubarak said from his bed, raising his hand slightly when the judge asked him to identify himself and enter a plea. "I deny all these accusations completely," he said into a microphone, wagging his finger.

The emotions swirling around the trial were on display outside the heavily secured Cairo police academy where the trial was held. A crowd of Mubarak supporters and hundreds of relatives of slain protesters and other Mubarak opponents massed at the gates, scuffling sporadically. They threw stones and bottles at each other while riot police with shields and helmets tried to keep them apart. About 50 supporters pounded on the steel gate trying to get into the compound, chanting "We Love you, Mubarak!" until police charged at the with electrified batons and dispersed them.

For many Egyptians, the trial is a chance at retribution for decades of oppressive rule in which opponents were tortured, corruption was rife, poverty spread and political life was stifled. But for others, Mubarak was a symbol of stability.

At the session's start, Mubarak, a sheet pulled up to his chest, was wheeled on a hospital bed into the defendant's cage, made of iron bars and a metal mesh. Though he was pale and his eyes were ringed with red, he appeared alert and aware of what was going on. He showed little discernible emotion. With him in the cage were his nine co-defendants, including his two sons — one-time heir apparent Gamal and wealthy businessman Alaa — his former interior minister Habib el-Adly, and six top former police officials.

From time to time, Mubarak craned his head to see the proceedings. Other times, he crooked his elbow over his face as if in exhaustion. While the other defendants sat on wooden benches in the cage, Gamal and Alaa in their white prison uniforms stood next to their father's bed, at one point with their arms crossed on their chest seemingly trying to block the court camera's view of their father. The two sons each carried a copy of the Quran and leaned over to talk tot heir father.

Defendants are traditionally held in cages during trials in Egypt. About an hour after the session began, there was a recess and the defendants were led out of the cage. Much of the session dealt with procedural matters, as the three-judge panel officially took the names of the lawyers involved in the case and heard motions from them.

Up to the last minute, many Egyptians had doubted that Mubarak would actually appear at the trial. It was inconceivable that the man who vowed to rule the country until his last breath and who kept a near total grip on the levers of power, whose name once crowned public buildings around the country, could actually be brought to trial.

The skepticism remain up until the moment early Wednesday when Mubarak was taken from his hospital room in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh to a military plane that flew him to a military airport in Cairo.

From there, he was transferred by helicopter to the police academy where the trial was held.

An official told state news agency MENA that Mubarak will stay at a hospital within the police academy compound during the trial to ensure that he attends the sessions. Mubarak has been living in Sharm since he was ousted and has been under arrest in a hospital there since April, reportedly suffering from heart problems. Doctors have reported that he is growing increasingly depressed.

Mostafa el-Naggar, one of the leading youth activists who organized the anti-Mubarak uprising, called it "a moment no Egyptian ever thought was possible."

"I have many feelings. I am happy, satisfied. I feel this a real success for the revolution, and I feel that the moment of real retribution is near," he told The Associated Press.

The courtroom itself was divided. Relatives of the defendants sat in rows of seats near the defendants cage, made of iron bars and mesh. A fence running through the middle of the chamber divided them from the rest of the audience of around 300 people, including a few relatives of protesters killed in the uprising, kept far enough that they cannot shout or throw anything at the former leader.

The Mubarak supporters outside were furious over the humiliation of their former leader, throwing stones at the screen showing the session.

"We will demolish and burn the prison if they convict Mubarak," they screamed at hundreds of police and army troops backed by armored personnel carriers.

"He is our president and he is going to be found innocent," said one woman in the crowd, Tahami Luteifi.

The trial came only after heavy pressure by activists on the now ruling military — one of the few demands that still unites the disparate protest movement. It answers, at least partially, a growing clamor in Egypt for justice not only for the wrongs of Mubarak's authoritarian regime but also for the violent suppression of the largely peaceful uprising, in which 850 protesters were killed.

In February, as protests raged around him, Mubarak vowed he would die on Egyptian soil. The last time Egyptians saw him, he appeared on state TV, handing most of his powers to his vice president but refusing to resign. He proclaimed he was "adamant to continue to shoulder my responsibility."

The next day, his resignation was announced and Mubarak fled to a palatial residence in Sharm el-Sheikh.

The ruling generals who took power from him — and who were all appointed by Mubarak before the uprising — appeared reluctant to prosecute him, but protests flared anew, pressuring action.

In April, Mubarak was moved to a Sharm el-Sheikh hospital and put under arrest while his sons and former cronies were held in Cairo's Torah Prison.

The prosecution is an unprecedented moment in the Arab world, the first time a modern Mideast leader has been put on trial fully by his own people.

The closest event to it was former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's trial, but his capture came at the hands of U.S. troops in 2003 and his special tribunal was set up with extensive consultation with American officials and international experts. Tunisia's deposed president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, has been tried and convicted several times since his fall several weeks before Mubarak's, but all in absentia as he remains in exile in Saudi Arabia.

Mubarak, el-Adly, and six top police officers are charged in connection with the killings of protesters. All eight could face the death penalty if convicted. The charge sheet said that Mubarak "allowed (el-Adly) to use live ammunition" in the crackdown on protesters.

Separately, Mubarak and his two sons face charges of corruption. According to the prosecutors, the father and sons received five villas worth nearly $7 million from prominent businessman Hussein Salem in return for using their influence to get him a lower price for state land to build a resort complex in Sharm el-Sheikh.

Near Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the protesters, a dozen people swarmed around newspapers at a stand, reading headlines about the trial. One man spit on a picture of Mubarak on a front page.

"When he is in the cage and we know he is there, then we know we have started to put our feet on the path of justice," said the newspaper seller, Nabil Hassan, 65. "If he and his accomplices are in court, he becomes one of the people no different from anyone else facing justice. I have faith in Egyptian judges."

Source:
http://old.news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110803/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_egypt_mubarak_trial
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2011-07-23T14:58:00.004-05:00

Updated: As Norwegian Oil Production Continues to Mercilessly Plummet, A Bomb Goes off in Front of the Ministry of Petroleum in Norway

Inteldaily
July 23, 2011

Update 4: Norway police arrived at island 40 minutes after being called

Update 3: Both Mr Breivik’s Facebook and Twitter entries are only a few days old.

Update 2: CNN posts information in contradiction with ABC News:
Breivik had no military background.

Update 1: The Norwegian “involved” in the shootings and the bombing is a military veteran. Scroll down to his bio for more info.

News sources citing that the bomb targeted the Ministry of Petroleum and related links

Norway bomb blast targeted oil ministry – reportsThe bombing that rocked Oslo, Norway, on Friday appeared to target the nation’s Ministry of Petroleum and Energy, according to local media reports. The explosion blew out the windows of a large government office building and damaged several others, including one that holds the prime minister’s office, according to the Washington Post.

The Norwegian Ministry of Petroleum and Energy in Oslo was the target of a deadly bombing Friday afternoon, causing severe damage to the building and threatening the lives of both government officials and civilians

Police fear Norway shooting and bomb blast connected
Why did Norway not join the European Union? Iceland, Switzerland, Norway and Croatia have yet to join the European Union — they eventually will. All production and consumption will be centrally controlled in an age of energy decline.

Norwegian oil extraction peaked in 2001 and continues to fall off the cliff

From The Energy Bulletin

Oil Production Projections for Norway

The alleged lone perpetrator is a narcissistic, conservative, Christian fundamentalist, important-person-wannabe

Norwegian gunman’s name: Anders Behring Breivik, Military Veteran (ABC NEWS, video below)

Targets of the shooting: Youth league of the Norwegian Labour Party
A copy of his facebook page is accessible here.
Relationship status: Single
Ostensible occupation: Director of Breivik Geofarm
Income statement: Click here

Personal photos of Breivik:

Images from the scene of the shooting

*could be doctored, unverifiable
The person in the yellow box is said to be Anders Breivik

Video of the blast scene

Source:
http://inteldaily.com/2011/07/norway-bombing-and-shootin/
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2011-07-18T11:07:00.000-05:00

How Do You Hide an Oil Spill? Ask China

By Gordon G. Chang
Forbes
July 17, 2011

On Friday, China’s State Oceanic Administration reported that an oil spill in June from two wells in Bohai Bay has polluted 4,250 square kilometers—1,650 square miles—of sea, an area six times the size of Singapore. Moreover, another 3,400 square kilometers had been contaminated to a lesser degree, according to the agency.

ConocoPhillips, the Houston-based operator of the wells in the Penglai 19-3 field, says only 1,500 barrels of oil had been released in the incidents and that both leaks have been brought under control.

Beijing, as of the 13^th of this month, maintained that oil was still coming out of the wells.

Estimates of the coverage of the slick, spreading from China’s largest offshore oil field, have been rapidly growing in recent days. At the moment, reports put its size at 18 times the area polluted by last year’s spill in the port of Dalian, acknowledged as China’s worst oil leakage.

Analysts say that Chinese authorities have regrettably backtracked from their openness exhibited during the Dalian disaster. Yet that spill started with a massive explosion that was impossible to hide. This year, Beijing—characteristically—tried to cover up the June incidents.

According to the South China Morning Post, ConocoPhillips immediately reported the first spill to the State Oceanic Administration on June 4, the day it occurred. Its partner in the Penglai field, China National Offshore Oil Corporation, said nothing to the public until July 1, despite the fact that large numbers of dead fish were washing up on nearby shores. When SOA got around to saying something on July 5, it fibbed. “There is no visible floating oil on the sea and the leak is now under control,” said a spokesman—although one official conceded that oil was still visible.

Unfortunately, Beijing gets no credit for coming clean. The July announcements, after all, were prompted by whistle-blowing reports on Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like service in China, of the leakages.

Sources attribute the online postings to employees of CNOOC, as the state oil giant is known.

CNOOC denied it had tried to cover up the spills.

At the moment, it’s not clear whether ConocoPhillips actively worked to suppress news of the two spills or whether it is a victim of the attempt by CNOOC and the State Oceanic Administration to keep the matter from public view. But whatever its culpability, the American company is going to take the fall for events that have been made much more controversial, and emotional, by the ill-fated cover up.

CNOOC disclaimed any liability for the damage, and the State Oceanic Administration blames ConocoPhillips. On July 5, the agency imposed the maximum fine on the Houston firm, 200,000 yuan, for the spill.

ConocoPhillips said there were “no reports of impact to wildlife, fishing, or shipping activities.”

That’s not how anyone else sees it, however. The oil producer could face compensation claims for as much as three times the immediate economic loss. Many Chinese are taking the BP compensation fund, established after last year’s horrendous spill in the Gulf of Mexico, as the benchmark for ConocoPhillips. Think of its liability running into the billions of yuan.

As a foreign company, ConocoPhillips is “politically defenseless.” “ConocoPhillips will pay,” said Zhao Hongshun, general manager of Qin Island Marine Fisheries, to the South China Morning Post.

“They are Americans.”

Qin Island, an aquaculture farm that is the closest to the June spills, has a lot to lose. That firm suffered a loss after a 2008 spill caused by Sinopec, one of the three large state oil companies. Zhou’s Qin Island has yet to see any compensation for that disaster.

In China, only foreigners, whether or not culpable, pay.

Source:
http://news.yahoo.com/hide-oil-spill-ask-china-001601268.html
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2011-07-01T20:42:00.001-05:00

Roger Ailes’ Secret Nixon-Era Blueprint for Fox News

by John Cook
Gawker Media
June 30, 2011

Republican media strategist Roger Ailes launched Fox News Channel in 1996, ostensibly as a "fair and balanced" counterpoint to what he regarded as the liberal establishment media.

But according to a remarkable document buried deep within the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, the intellectual forerunner for Fox News was a nakedly partisan 1970 plot by Ailes and other Nixon aides to circumvent the "prejudices of network news" and deliver "pro-administration" stories to heartland television viewers.

The memo—called, simply enough, "A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News"— is included in a 318-page cache of documents detailing Ailes' work for both the Nixon and George H.W. Bush administrations that we obtained from the Nixon and Bush presidential libraries.

Through his firms REA Productions and Ailes Communications, Inc., Ailes served as paid consultant to both presidents in the 1970s and 1990s, offering detailed and shrewd advice ranging from what ties to wear to how to keep the pressure up on Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the first Gulf War.

The documents—drawn mostly from the papers of Nixon chief of staff and felon H.R. Haldeman and Bush chief of staff John Sununu—reveal Ailes to be a tireless television producer and joyful propagandist. He was a forceful advocate for the power of television to shape the political narrative, and he reveled in the minutiae constructing political spectacles—stage-managing, for instance, the lighting of the White House Christmas tree with painstaking care.

He frequently floated ideas for creating staged events and strategies for manipulating the mainstream media into favorable coverage, and used his contacts at the networks to sniff out the emergence of threatening narratives and offer advice on how to snuff them out—warning Bush, for example, to lay off the golf as war in the Middle East approached because journalists were starting to talk.

There are also occasional references to dirty political tricks, as well as some positions that seem at odds with the Tea Party politics of present-day Fox News: Ailes supported government regulation of political campaign ads on television, including strict limits on spending. He also advised Nixon to address high school students, a move that caused his network to shriek about "indoctrination" when Obama did it more than 30 years later.

All 318 pages are available here. First, some highlights:

The Idea Behind Fox News Channel Originated in the Nixon White House

"A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News" (read it here) is an unsigned, undated memo calling for a partisan, pro-GOP news operation to be potentially paid for and run out of the White House. Aimed at sidelining the "censorship" of the liberal mainstream media and delivering prepackaged pro-Nixon news to local television stations, it reads today like a detailed precis for a Fox News prototype.

From context provided by other memos, it's apparent that the plan was hatched during the summer of 1970. And though it's not clear who wrote it, the copy provided by the Nixon Library literally has Ailes' handwriting all over it—it appears he was routed the memo by Haldeman and wrote back his enthusiastic endorsement, refinements, and a request to run the project in the margins.

The 15-page plan begins with an acknowledgment that television had emerged as the most powerful news source in large part because "people are lazy" and want their thinking done for them:

Today television news is watched more often than people read newspapers, than people listen to the radio, than people read or gather any other form of communication. The reason: People are lazy. With television you just sit—watch—listen. The thinking is done for you.

With that in mind, the anonymous GOP official urged the creation of a network "to provide pro-Administration, videotape, hard news actualities to the major cities of the United States." Aware that the national television networks were the enemy, the writer proposed going around them by sending packaged, edited news stories and interviews with politicians directly to local television stations.

This is a plan that places news of importance to localities (Senators and representatives are newsmakers of importance to their localities) on local television news programs while it is still news. It avoids the censorship, the priorities, and the prejudices of network news selectors and disseminators.

This was before satellite, so the idea was that this GOP news outlet would record an interview with a Republican lawmaker in the morning, rush the tape to National Airport via truck, where it is edited into a package en route, and flown to the lawmaker's district in time to make the local news. Local stations, the writer surmised, would be happy to take the free programming.

The plan is spectacularly detailed—it was no idle pipe dream. The writer estimated that it would cost $310,000 to launch and slightly less than that to run each year, sketched out a 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. schedule with shooting times, editing times, flight times, and arrival times, and estimated that the editing truck—"Ford, GMC, or IHS chassis; V8 engine; 5 speed transmission; air conditioning; Weight: 22,000GVW"—could be "build from chassis in 60 days." In other words, they were serious.

According to Ailes' copious margin notes, he thought it was an "excellent idea" that didn't go far enough and might encounter some "flap about news management."

Basically a very good idea. It should be expanded to include other members of the administration such as cabinet involved in activity with regional or local interest. Also could involve GOP governors when in DC. Who would purchase equipment and run operation—White House? RNC? Congressional caucus? Will get some flap about news management.

And Ailes thought he'd be just the guy to run such a project, telling Haldeman he wanted in:

Bob—if you decide to go ahead we would as a production company like to bid on packaging the entire project. I know what has to be done and we could test the feasibility for 90 days without making a commitment beyond that point.

A November 1970 memo recounting a meeting between Ailes, Haldeman, and two of Haldeman's aides shows that Ailes got the gig, and that Haldeman had proposed a name:

With regard to the news programming effort as proposed last summer, Ailes feels this is a good idea and that we should be going ahead with it. Haldeman suggested the name 'Capitol News Service' and Ailes will probably be doing more work in this area.

The idea as initially envisioned doesn't appear to have gotten off the ground. But Ailes obviously did do "more work in this area," first with something called Television News Incorporated (TVN), a right-wing news service Ailes worked on in the early 1970s after he got fired by the White House. According to Rolling Stone, TVN was financed by conservative beermonger Joseph Coors, and its mandate sounds exactly like a privately funded version of Capitol News Service: "[TVN] was designed to inject a far-right slant into local news broadcasts by providing news clips that stations could use without credit—and at a fraction of the true costs of production." Ailes was "the godfather behind the scenes" of TVN, Rolling Stone reported, and it was where he first encountered the motto that would make his career: "Fair and balanced."

Though it died in 1975, TVN was obviously an early trial run for the powerhouse Fox News would become. The ideas were the same—to route Republican-friendly stories around the gatekeepers at the network news divisions. In Nixon's day, the only way to do that was to pump stories directly to local stations. By 1996, cable television offered a much more powerful alternative. And the whole project began—on the taxpayer's dime—in the White House under the direction of a Watergate felon. One can only imagine how Fox News would report a similar scheme hatched in the Obama White House.

Dirty Tricks

Some of the documents hint obliquely at Ailes' involvement in Nixonian black ops, though none of the ones that ballooned into Watergate. In a 1970 memo to Haldeman (read it here), he wrote "to guard our flank I would like to see us get one of our people inside the Wallace organization immediately," adding that he would "discuss this in more detail in person." The "Wallace organization" was almost certainly a reference to former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, whose 1968 third-party campaign for president as a segregationist won five southern states and almost cost Nixon the election.

At the time Ailes was writing, Wallace was preparing a 1972 run; Ailes apparently sought to infiltrate the campaign in order to gather intelligence or perhaps to sabotage it if it became necessary. Wallace ran for the Democratic nomination, but an attempted assassination in May 1972 left him paralyzed and thwarted any later independent run.

Another apparent dirty trick that never got off the ground involves a 1970 television production Ailes was working on as a response to an anti-war CBS News special. The idea appears to have been to interview pro-war Democrats—including Sens. John Stennis and John McClellan—ostensibly for a news show of some kind (it's not clear from the memo what format the final product would take).

But the program was in fact being directed by Ailes and financed by the Tell it to Hanoi Committee, a pro-war Nixon front group. A June 1970 memo (read it here) from someone apparently hired by Ailes to put the show together explained that he was pulling the plug because "the fact that this presentation is White House directed, unbeknownst to the Democrats on the show, presents the possibility of a leak that could severely embarrass the White House and damage significantly its already precarious relationship with the Congress. Should two powerful factors like Stennis and McClellan discover they are dupes for the administration the scandal could damage the White House for a long time to come."

Regulating Campaigns

Given the enthusiasm in right-wing circles—including on Fox News—for the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which dealt an enormous blow to the federal government's prerogative to regulate the role of money in political campaigns, Ailes used to hold some rather contrary views on political campaigns. In a June 1971 speech called "CANDIDATE + MONEY + MEDIA = VOTES" (read it here), Ailes argued forcefully for the role of television in political campaigns while lamenting the rise of the canned political ad:

I am in favor of limiting the number of commercials shown shown on TV during a campaign, and in fact would favor a clause requiring no less than 35% of broadcast monies available to a candidate be spent on buying program time instead of commercial time.

That's a radically intrusive proposal, and I'm not aware of anyone serious on either side of the political spectrum who advocates it today. Ailes even goes so far as to endorse the British model of banning political ads except during the three weeks preceding an election:

Three weeks is much too short for this country but, on the other hand, the fatiguing situation we have now with seven semi-announced candidates a year and a half away from the election running around the country Monday morning quarterbacking is also going too far. In my opinion, if the news media would quit trying to create false excitement by covering all potential presidential candidates in terms of a popularity poll, which is meaningless at this stage, they would be taking a giant step forward in journalistic responsibility.

We're about a year-and-a-half away from the 2012 presidential election right now. We've got a bunch of "semi-announced" candidates in the running. I wonder if Fox News is trying to generate any excitement around them by covering them in terms of a popularity poll?

Lighting the Christmas Tree

Ailes' December 1970 memo (read it here) outlining Nixon's role in lighting the White House Christmas tree is a masterwork in political pageantry. Rather than simply throwing a switch, Ailes recommended that "at the end, instead of bringing a child up to the president to light the tree, he walk down to the children seated in front, pick up a small boy, stand him on his chair and ask him to light the tree" because "this simple gesture will do much to humanize him with all the parents."

Ailes' memo scripts the entire event—Nixon is to pick the boy in the "sixth seat of the front row on the right side" and "the president should face camera (2) and keep his arm around the boy"—and recommends that applause be banned since most of the audience will be wearing mittens or gloves and it will therefore "sound like a herd of elephants." Hilariously, the memo includes this bit of megalomaniacal wisdom from Nixon press secretary Ron Zeigler:

Ziegler indicated to me that it is important the president ask the child to help him light the tree and both throw the switch together. Otherwise, the press will play up the boy's name as lighting the Christmas tree.

Don't let the six-year-old steal the spotlight!

Eliminating Poverty and Pollution by 1980

In a 1969 memo (read it here), Ailes argued that the major issue facing the American people was "quality of life," and urged Nixon to devote the rest of his administration to easing it. His solution? Declare the end of poverty and pollution:

He should make a major address on this and state publicly that poverty, air and water pollution will be eliminated in America totally by 1980. This is similar to Kennedy's challenge for the moon. It isn't met in this administration but when it's reached he gets the credit.

When poverty is finally defeated decades or centuries from now, Americans will no doubt look back on the Nixon White House with pride and admiration.

Ailes can be forgiven for inaccurately predicting the end of pollution—his job was just to come up with useful things for Nixon to say. What's less forgivable is his galactically wrong assessment of Nixon's prospects in his 1972 re-election effort. For someone whose job it was to understand public sentiment, Ailes' advice was exactly wrong: "Unless a single major event captures the headlines close to that election we will not see a landslide of any kind.... It will probably be a very close contest." In 1972, Nixon won 60% of the popular vote and carried every state save Massachusetts and Washington, D.C.

Nixon's Address to High School Students

When Barack Obama announced early in his administration that he would conduct a live nationwide address to high school and students, Fox News hyperventilated and described it as an attempt to "indoctrinate children to support him politically." When Richard Nixon decided to address high school and college students in 1970, as this memo to Haldeman from deputy assistant to the president Dwight L. Chapin makes clear (read it here), Roger Ailes produced the event:

Roger Ailes is developing a plan which he is going to phone in to me tomorrow morning.... Ailes likes the idea of having the president originate live from one of the schools and then shift to the other schools to answer questions.

"I will look into the president's ties."

Among Ailes' chief duties, according to this 1970 memo he wrote to Haldeman (read it here), was selecting Nixon's ties:

I will view the videotape of the HEW Veto to see if there were any shimmers from the design on the tie. My preliminary investigation, however, shows that there were none and whoever reported it may have a set that is not scanning properly. I will look into the president's ties and select those that can definitely be used.

Firing Roger

Ailes stopped his consulting for the White House some time in 1971—he was essentially fired by Nixon after he was quoted disparaging the president in Joe McGinniss' The Selling of the President 1968. But he was a feared figure, known back then for the cut-throat brand of corporate politics that has served him so well at News Corp. While he was being eased out and replaced with two new Hollywood men, Bill Carruthers and Mark Goode, Chapin warned Haldeman in a memo (read it here) that Ailes could go rogue if he wasn't handled properly:

I have a gut feeling we are bordering on disaster if we do not get Roger Ailes in and squared away soon. If we can handle Roger in a proper way and quickly, I think we can avoid any bad feelings. If Roger finds out that Carruthers and Mark Goode are coming on his own, he just may launch a small offensive which I doubt that we need very much at this time.

An undated memo (read it here) laying out talking points for Haldeman in a meeting with Ailes shows the White House trying to let him down gently:

We have not been able to build the relationship between you and the president which we had hoped to see. It is no one's fault. We face this sort of thing everyday. There are different directions that we can go which I think you can explore and which will continue to reap you rewards. The president wants to try a new direction and feels we should not only have a new approach, but new people.

The consolation prizes offered by Haldeman included a consulting gig with the Republican National Committee; a talk show featuring Martha Mitchell, the wife of Attorney General John Mitchell; or the "development of a TV series with a pro-administration plot."

A Megatonnage Dose of Media Hammering

Most of the records in the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library detailing Ailes' work for the first Bush administration have not been released yet. But the documents that the library did provide in response to our request show Ailes helping Bush navigate a perilous political environment that should be familiar to Obama: A lingering recession, a crisis in the Middle East, and a persistent sense fed by a hostile news outlets that the president is out of touch.

So in August of 1990, days after Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Kuwait, Ailes wrote a memo (read it here) to Bush's chief of staff John Sununu warning that the press was preparing to paint Bush as disengaged and shrewdly laying out a plan to combat the perception:

I have had at least half a dozen calls very recently from the press trying to lead me into discussions like, 'fiddling while Rome burns,' 'golfing while Americans are being taken hostage,' etc. The only reason this is of concern to me is that I notice the networks beginning to show more and more footage of the president in the golf cart. It is very clear that they have a point of view which does not represent a fair picture of how the president is handling the crisis... It is my judgment that the American people simply don't believe this about George Bush, and therefore there will not be a major repercussion. On the other hand, I know first hand what a megatonnage dose of media hammering the same message can do.... Do a little more fishing and less golfing.

Ailes, of course, knows from using golf to paint a president as remote and out of touch. Here are some recent Fox News headlines: "Obama Finds Time for NCAA Bracket, Golf Amid Global Turmoil," "Obama Chooses Golf Over Funeral," and "Barack Obama Plays Golf More Times than George W. Bush."
In a November 1990 memo to Sununu (read it here), Ailes lays out Bush's wardrobe in detail—"it is my judgment that he should not wear helmets or hats"—and recommends using military resources to concoct a fake briefing between Bush and his commanders in order to "heighten the drama for the news media."

For ceremonial functions, the president should dress in suit and tie and be the president of the United States. In the field he should where khaki slacks, open shirts, long sleeves with the sleeves rolled up. It is my judgment that he should not wear helmets or hats. A fatigue jacket would be fine in the field with soldiers on Thanksgiving Day.
[snip]
I am sure he will schedule a briefing session with a commander in the field. If the session is scheduled for one hour, and lasted for five hours, it will heighten the drama for the news media and intensify the pressure on Hussein.

All in all, the documents show Ailes to be an engaged, brilliant, and often catty adviser with an obsessive, almost evangelical focus on the power of television to manipulate people for political purposes. It's almost as though, frustrated by the failure of candidates and presidents to hew closely enough to his political instructions, Ailes founded a network to demonstrate their practical application—see, this is how you use golf to undermine a president.

And they show a sustained effort across two White House administrations to undermine and control the press—an effort that, were it revealed to be taking place inside the Obama White House, would send Ailes and his televised outrage machine into epic fits of apoplexy.
Ailes did not respond to a request for comment.

Read the Ailes Files

Source:
http://gawker.com/5814150/
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2011-06-29T17:51:00.004-05:00

Real Cause for Gaddafi's Expulsion?
He Wanted Gold Currency

by Russia Today

May 05, 2011

Some believe it [the NATO/US-led Libyan invasion] is about protecting civilians, others say it is about oil, but some are convinced intervention in Libya is all about Gaddafi's plan to introduce the gold dinar, a single African currency made from gold, a true sharing of the wealth.

Gaddafi did not give up. In the months leading up to the military intervention, he called on African and Muslim nations to join together to create this new currency that would rival the dollar and euro. They would sell oil and other resources around the world only for gold dinars.

It is an idea that would shift the economic balance of the world.

"If Gaddafi had an intent to try to re-price his oil or whatever else the country was selling on the global market and accept something else as a currency or maybe launch a gold dinar currency, any move such as that would certainly not be welcomed by the power elite today, who are responsible for controlling the world's central banks," says Anthony Wile, founder and Chief Editor of the Daily Bell.

"So yes, that would certainly be something that would cause his immediate dismissal and the need for other reasons to be brought forward from moving him from power."

And it has happened before.

In 2000, Saddam Hussein announced Iraqi oil would be traded in euros, not dollars. Some say sanctions and an invasion followed because the Americans were desperate to prevent OPEC from transferring oil trading in all its member countries to the euro.

A gold dinar would have had serious consequences for the world financial system, but may also have empowered the people of Africa, something black activists say the US wants to avoid at all costs.
Some say the US and its NATO allies literally could not afford to let that happen.

Corresponding Stories

Gaddafi Planned Gold Dinar, Now Under Attack
http://www.thedailybell.com/2228/Gaddafi-Planned-Gold-Dinar-Now-Under-Attack.html

Qaddafi: World Mathaba Conference on Gold Dinar and Single African Currency
http://www.mathaba.net/news/?x=626678

'Arab Spring false flag from start, Libya ultimate goal all along'
(This interview covers a lot of ground but is very revealing)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3T8_cH2n9CI

Why We Killed Saddam (nothing to do with Kuwait, WMDs, or 911)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxIGbKlzwKo

Source:
http://thedailybell.com/2226/Real-Cause-for-Gaddafis-Expulsion-Wanted-Gold-Currency.html
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2011-06-19T08:06:00.004-05:00

Obama rejects top lawyers' legal views on Libya

by Glenn Greenwald
Salon
June 18, 2011
[emphasis added]

The growing controversy over President Obama's illegal waging of war in Libya got much bigger last night with Charlie Savage's New York Times scoop. He reveals that top administration lawyers -- Attorney General Eric Holder, OLC Chief Caroline Krass, and DoD General Counsel Jeh Johnson -- all told Obama that his latest, widely panned excuse for waging war without Congressional approval (that it does not rise to the level of "hostilities" under the War Powers Resolution (WPR)) was invalid and that such authorization was legally required after 60 days: itself a generous intepretation of the President's war powers.

But Obama rejected those views and (with the support of administration lawyers in lesser positions: his White House counsel and long-time political operative Robert Bauer and State Department "legal adviser" Harold Koh) publicly claimed that the WPR does not apply to Libya.

As Savage notes, it is, in particular, "extraordinarily rare" for a President "to override the legal conclusions of the Office of Legal Counsel and to act in a manner that is contrary to its advice."

Just imagine if George Bush had waged a war that his own Attorney General, OLC Chief, and DoD General Counsel all insisted was illegal (and did so by pointing to the fact that his White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and a legal adviser at State agreed with him). One need not imagine this, though, because there is very telling actual parallel to this lawless episode:

In 2007, former Bush Deputy Attorney General James Comey testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee about an amazing event. Bush's then-Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, had blocked Comey from testifying for two years -- once Democrats took over Congress, that obstruction was no longer possible -- and it quickly became apparent why Gonzales was so desperate to suppress these events.

Comey explained that, in 2004, shortly after he became Deputy AG, he reviewed the NSA eavesdropping program Bush had ordered back in 2001 and concluded it was illegal.  Other top administration lawyers -- including Attorney General John Ashcroft and OLC Chief Jack Goldsmith -- agreed with Comey, and told the White House they would no longer certify the program's legality. It was then that Bush dispatched Gonzales and Andy Card to Ashcroft's hospital room to try to extract an approval from the very sick Attorney General, but, from his sickbed, Ashcroft refused to overrule Comey.

Bush decided to reject the legal conclusions of his top lawyers and ordered the NSA eavesdropping program to continue anyway, even though he had been told it was illegal (like Obama now, Bush pointed to the fact that his own White House counsel (Gonzales), along with Dick Cheney's top lawyer, David Addington, agreed the NSA program was legal). In response, Ashcroft, Comey, Goldsmith, and FBI Director Robert Mueller all threatened to resign en masse if Bush continued with this illegal spying, and Bush -- wanting to avoid that kind of scandal in an election year -- agreed to "re-fashion" the program into something those DOJ lawyers could approve (the "re-fashioned" program was the still-illegal NSA program revealed in 2005 by The New York Times; to date, we still do not know what Bush was doing before that that was so illegal as to prompt resignation threats from these right-wing lawyers).

That George Bush would knowingly order an eavesdropping program to continue which his own top lawyers were telling him was illegal was, of course, a major controversy, at least in many progressive circles.  Now we have Barack Obama not merely eavesdropping in a way that his own top lawyers are telling him is illegal, but waging war in that manner (though, notably, there is no indication that these Obama lawyers have the situational integrity those Bush lawyers had [and which Archibald Cox, Eliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus had before them] by threatening to resign if the lawlessness continues).

There's another significant and telling parallel between Obama's illegal war and the Bush eavesdropping scandal. One of the questions frequently asked about the NSA scandal was why Bush and Cheney decided to eavesdrop in violation of the law rather than having Congress approve their program; in the wake of 9/11, both parties in Congress were as subservient as could be, and would have offered zero resistance to requests by the administration for increased eavesdropping powers (the same question was asked of Bush's refusal to seek Congressional approval for the detention and military commissions regime at Guantanamo).

The answer to that question ultimately became clear: they did not want to seek Congressional approval, even though they easily could have obtained it, because they wanted to establish the "principle" that the President is omnipotent in these areas and needs nobody's permission (neither from Congress nor the courts) to do what the President wants.

The exact same question emerges here. From the start, the GOP leadership was vocally supportive of the war in Libya. In fact, John McCain was demanding the war begin before Obama even committed to it, while Lindsey Graham was urging the war be waged more aggressively. On the eve of the war, GOP House Speaker John Boehner -- while calling on Obama to be clear about the mission -- issued a statement declaring:  "The United States has a moral obligation to stand with those who seek freedom from oppression and self-government for their people. It's unacceptable and outrageous for Qadhafi to attack his own people, and the violence must stop."

Indeed, Obama's most valuable allies on Libya from the start (as is true for his war in Afghanistan and other Terrorism policies) have been Republican leaders. As The Washington Post reported in early June, Boehner -- acting as an "unlikely ally" of Obama -- introduced a meaningless resolution as a means of preventing passage of a more meaningful anti-Libya resolution: namely, Rep. Kucinich's bill to compel withdrawal within 15 days. Moreover, most of the GOP House leadership just this week voted (along with Democratic leaders) against Brad Sherman's amendment to cut off funds for Libya if Obama refuses to comply with the WPR. Right-wing support for Obama's Libya policy continues to be strong, as yesterday Bill Kristol and other assorted neocons issued a letter urging steadfast support for the war.

It should go without saying that even if the GOP had refused to support the war, that would not remotely be an excuse for violating the law and waging it without Congressional approval. Obviously, the law (and the Constitution) does not require Congressional approval for wars only where Congress favors the wars, but in all instances (it should also go without saying that a belief in the morality of this war is not an excuse for waging it illegally, any more than Bush followers' claims that warrantless eavesdropping and torture were beneficial excused their illegality).  All that aside, what is undeniable is that Obama could have easily obtained Congressional approval for this war -- just as Bush could have for his warrantless eavesdropping program -- but consciously chose not to, even to the point of acting contrary to his own lawyers' conclusions about what is illegal.

Other than the same hubris -- and a desire to establish his power to act without constraints -- it's very hard to see what motivated this behavior.  Whatever the motives are, it's clear that he's waging an illegal war, as his own Attorney General, OLC Chief and DoD General Counsel have told him.

For more on the absurdity and lawlessness of Obama's excuse-making in refusing to obtain Congressional approval, see The Atlantic's James Fallows and The New Yorker's Amy Davidson.

UPDATE:  Also in The New York Times this morning, Scott Shane describes the still-escalating war on whistleblowers being waged by the Obama administration, including the press-freedom-threatening prosecution of WikiLeaks. As sysprog astutely observes in comments: "if the Administration and Congress are successful in squelching the publication of secrets, that may prevent future scoops like today's by Charlie Savage."

That, of course, is precisely the point of this war: to suffocate one of the only remaining avenues for learning what the government actually does, as opposed to what they want the public to believe they do. As Thomas Jefferson long ago observed: avenues of disclosure are "the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions."

Source:
http://www.salon.com/news/libya/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/2011/06/18/libya
_________________

2011-06-14T19:49:00.000-05:00

The Rise of the Second-String Psychopaths

by David Schwartz
CommonDreams.org
June 5, 2011

The great writer Kurt Vonnegut titled his final book A Man without a Country. He was the man; the country was the United States of America. Vonnegut felt that his country had disappeared right under his – and the Constitution’s – feet, through what he called “the sleaziest, low-comedy Keystone Cops-style coup d’état imaginable.” He was talking about the Bush administration. Were Vonnegut still alive in the post-Bush era, he would not have felt that his country had returned.

How had our country disappeared?

Vonnegut proposed that among the contributing factors was that it had been invaded – as if by the Martians – by people with a particularly frightening mental illness. People with this illness were termed psychopaths. (The term nowadays is anti-social personality disorder.) These are terms for people who are smart, personable, and engaging, but who have no consciences. They are not guided by a sense of right or wrong. They seem to be unaffected by the feelings of others, including feelings of distress caused by their actions. Straying from a decent way of treating people, or violating ethical codes causes no anxiety, the anxiety which is what causes the rest of us to moderate our more greedy impulses. If most children feel anxiety when they are pilfering the forbidden cookie jar, psychopaths feel just fine. They can devour the cookies, shatter the jar as evidence and stuff it in the trash can. When accused, they can argue with apparent sincerity that the cookie jar has been missing for at least a week. There suffer no remorse, no guilt, no shame. They are free to do anything, no matter how harmful.

Psychopaths can be very tricky to recognize. As psychiatrist Dr. Hervey Cleckly wrote in his classic The Mask of Sanity in 1941, psychopaths are not technically insane. They don’t have a psychosis, like schizophrenia. They are experts in appearing normal. They can act the role of a caring, concerned executive, even though they actually do not seem to experience such feelings. If they hurt somebody, they don’t modify their behavior.

The United States corporate and government spheres have become, Vonnegut suggested, a perfect habitat for psychopaths. What has allowed so many psychopaths to rise so high in corporations, and then government, he wrote,

“is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin’ day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they don’t give a fuck what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich!"

In a country in which much of human culture has been rendered into machines for the manufacture of money, psychopaths are the ideal leaders. They are very focused. They are outcome oriented. They are frequently charming, and usually very bright and able. They can lay off thousands of people, or deny people health care, or have them waterboarded, and it does not disturb their sleep. They can be impressively confident.

Psychopaths can be dynamic leaders of enterprises, but are handicapped by their lack of feelings for relationships. They may be accomplished captains of industry, or senators, or surgeons, but their families are frequently abused and miserable. Most psychotherapists have seen the wives or husband or children of such accomplished people.

Since psychopaths are usually very smart, they can be quite competent at impersonating regular human beings in positions of power. Since they don’t care how their actions affect people, they can rise to great height in enterprises dealing with power and money. They can manufacture bombs or run hospitals. Whatever the undertaking, it is all the same to them. It’s just business.

The economic system that remains after the destruction of American local cultures has created an excellent employment picture for psychopaths. But the opportunities open to them are now so vast that there is apparently now an actual labor shortage. At least that is the only explanation I can find for the rise of a cadre of psychopathic leaders who resemble the usual type in all ways but one: they’re simply not that smart. One has only to look at right-wing not-so-Christian fundamentalists to see the peculiar emergence of a second-string of psychopaths.

The US has been endowed with abundant resources, and there have always been a more than sufficient supply of psychopaths of the first intellectual grade to supply corporate suites and their subsidiary, the Congress. Why is there now a downgrade to the dumb ones, like the lowering of standards for military recruits to deal with a shortage of cannon fodder?

It is no secret that the Koch brothers and others of the super-rich seem to have undertaken a final push to consolidate control through the conversion of a marginally democratic to an essentially fascist state; extreme right-wing, authoritarian, and demagogic.

This kind of government is ideal for control of a populace by the moneyed elite. To carry this out requires the employment of many ‘kept’ politicians to excite and misdirect scared and angry – and ignorant – voters. Lest the citizenry realize who stole their money and storm their castles with torches, the rapacious elite need politicians who will carry out the work of re-directing anger at teachers, or labor unions, or the poor. I can only conclude that the people who now own the country couldn’t find any first-rate psychopaths to carry out their work. Or maybe the smart ones were all occupied. So they had to go to second-stringers, people who could actually believe what they were told to say.

We are a country who has become second-best, even in the quality of our psychopaths.

Source:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/05-1
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2011-06-07T23:20:00.000-05:00

Wikileaks: No bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square, cables claim

Secret cables from the United States embassy in Beijing have shown there was no bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square when China put down student pro-democracy demonstrations 22 years ago.

By Malcolm Moore
Shanghai
The Telegraph UK
June 4, 2011

The cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and released exclusively by The Daily Telegraph, partly confirm the Chinese government's account of the early hours of June 4, 1989, which has always insisted that soldiers did not massacre demonstrators inside Tiananmen Square.

Instead, the cables show that Chinese soldiers opened fire on protesters outside the centre of Beijing, as they fought their way towards the square from the west of the city.

Three cables were sent from the US embassy on June 3, in the hours leading up to the suppression, as diplomats realised that the final showdown between the protesters and soldiers was looming.

The cables described the "10,000 to 15,000 helmeted armed troops" moving into the city, some of whom were "carrying automatic weapons".

Meanwhile, "elite airborne troops" and "tank units" were said to be moving up from the south.

The army came up against "an elaborate system of blockades", described in a cable from May 21, 1989, which allowed students to "control much of central Beijing".

Diplomats observed that "there were buses turned sideways to form roadblocks" and students had vowed the army would not be able to cross. "But we doubt it", one cable added. Students also used teams of motorcycle couriers to communicate with the roadblocks, sending reinforcements where needed.

As the troops moved in, the cables stated that diplomatic staff were repeatedly warned to "stay at home" unless involved in front-line reporting. "The situation in the centre of the city is very confused," said a cable from June 3. "Political officers at the Beijing Hotel reported that troops are pushing a large crowd east on Chang'an avenue. Although these troops appear not to be firing on the crowd, they report firing behind the troops coming from the square".

Inside the square itself, a Chilean diplomat was on hand to give his US counterparts an eyewitness account of the final hours of the pro-democracy movement.

"He watched the military enter the square and did not observe any mass firing of weapons into the crowds, although sporadic gunfire was heard. He said that most of the troops which entered the square were actually armed only with anti-riot gear – truncheons and wooden clubs; they were backed up by armed soldiers," a cable from July 1989 said.

The diplomat, who was positioned next to a Red Cross station inside Tiananmen Square, said a line of troops surrounded him and "panicked" medical staff into fleeing. However, he said that there was "no mass firing into the crowd of students at the monument".

According to internal Communist party files, released in 2001, 2,000 soldiers from the 38th army, together with 42 armoured vehicles, began slowly sweeping across the square from north to south at 4.30am on June 4. At the time, around 3,000 students were sitting around the Monument to the People's Heroes on the southern edge of the giant square, near Chairman Mao's mausoleum.

Leaders of the protest, including Liu Xiaobo, the winner of last year's Nobel Peace prize, urged the students to depart the square, and the Chilean diplomat relayed that "once agreement was reached for the students to withdraw, linking hands to form a column, the students left the square through the south east corner." The testimony contradicts the reports of several journalists who were in Beijing at the time, who described soldiers "charging" into unarmed civilians and suggests the death toll on the night may be far lower than the thousands previously thought.

In 2009, James Miles, who was the BBC correspondent in Beijing at the time, admitted that he had "conveyed the wrong impression" and that "there was no massacre on Tiananmen Square. Protesters who were still in the square when the army reached it were allowed to leave after negotiations with martial law troops [ ...] There was no Tiananmen Square massacre, but there was a Beijing massacre".

Instead, the fiercest fighting took place at Muxidi, around three miles west of the square, where thousands of people had gathered spontaneously on the night of June 3 to halt the advance of the army.

According to the Tiananmen Papers, a collection of internal Communist party files, soldiers started using live ammunition at around 10.30pm, after trying and failing to disperse the crowd with tear gas and rubber bullets. Incredulous, the crowd tried to escape but were hampered by its own roadblocks.

The cables also reveal the extent to which the student democracy protests had won popular support, and how for several weeks the protesters effectively occupied the whole of central Beijing, posing an existential challenge to the Communist party.

One cable, from May 21, 1989, reports that an anonymous caller had told the US consulate in Shenyang that Ni Zhifu, the chairman of China's labour unions, had condemned martial law in the capital and warned that unless the students were treated with more respect he would lead a general workers' strike that would cripple China.

Source:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8555142/Wikileaks-no-bloodshed-inside-Tiananmen-Square-cables-claim.html
________________

2011-05-26T17:46:00.000-05:00

There’s a Secret Patriot Act, Senator Says

By Spencer Ackerman
Wired.com
May 25, 2011

You think you understand how the Patriot Act allows the government to spy on its citizens. Sen. Ron Wyden says it’s worse than you know.

Congress is set to reauthorize three controversial provisions of the surveillance law as early as Thursday.

Wyden (D-Oregon) says that powers they grant the government on their face, the government applies a far broader legal interpretation — an interpretation that the government has conveniently classified, so it cannot be publicly assessed or challenged. But one prominent Patriot-watcher asserts that the secret interpretation empowers the government to deploy ”dragnets” for massive amounts of information on private citizens; the government portrays its data-collection efforts much differently.

“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,” Wyden told Danger Room in an interview in his Senate office. “When you’ve got that kind of a gap, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.”

What exactly does Wyden mean by that? As a member of the intelligence committee, he laments that he can’t precisely explain without disclosing classified information. But one component of the Patriot Act in particular gives him immense pause: the so-called “business-records provision,” which empowers the FBI to get businesses, medical offices, banks and other organizations to turn over any “tangible things” it deems relevant to a security investigation.

“It is fair to say that the business-records provision is a part of the Patriot Act that I am extremely interested in reforming,” Wyden says. “I know a fair amount about how it’s interpreted, and I am going to keep pushing, as I have, to get more information about how the Patriot Act is being interpreted declassified. I think the public has a right to public debate about it.”

That’s why Wyden and his colleague Sen. Mark Udall offered an amendment on Tuesday to the Patriot Act reauthorization.

The amendment, first reported by Marcy Wheeler, blasts the administration for “secretly reinterpret[ing] public laws and statutes.” It would compel the Attorney General to “publicly disclose the United States Government’s official interpretation of the USA Patriot Act.” And, intriguingly, it refers to “intelligence-collection authorities” embedded in the Patriot Act that the administration briefed the Senate about in February.

Wyden says he “can’t answer” any specific questions about how the government thinks it can use the Patriot Act. That would risk revealing classified information — something Wyden considers an abuse of government secrecy. He believes the techniques themselves should stay secret, but the rationale for using their legal use under Patriot ought to be disclosed.

“I draw a sharp line between the secret interpretation of the law, which I believe is a growing problem, and protecting operations and methods in the intelligence area, which have to be protected,” he says.

Surveillance under the business-records provisions has recently spiked. The Justice Department’s official disclosure on its use of the Patriot Act, delivered to Congress in April, reported that the government asked the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for approval to collect business records 96 times in 2010 — up from just 21 requests the year before. The court didn’t reject a single request. But it “modified” those requests 43 times, indicating to some Patriot-watchers that a broadening of the provision is underway.

“The FISA Court is a pretty permissive body, so that suggests something novel or particularly aggressive, not just in volume, but in the nature of the request,” says Michelle Richardson, the ACLU’s resident Patriot Act lobbyist. “No one has tipped their hand on this in the slightest. But we’ve come to the conclusion that this is some kind of bulk collection. It wouldn’t be surprising to me if it’s some kind of internet or communication-records dragnet.” (Full disclosure: My fiancée works for the ACLU.)

The FBI deferred comment on any secret interpretation of the Patriot Act to the Justice Department. The Justice Department said it wouldn’t have any comment beyond a bit of March congressional testimony from its top national security official, Todd Hinnen, who presented the type of material collected as far more individualized and specific: “driver’s license records, hotel records, car-rental records, apartment-leasing records, credit card records, and the like.”

But that’s not what Udall sees. He warned in a Tuesday statement about the government’s “unfettered” access to bulk citizen data, like “a cellphone company’s phone records.” In a Senate floor speech on Tuesday, Udall urged Congress to restrict the Patriot Act’s business-records seizures to “terrorism investigations” — something the ostensible counterterrorism measure has never required in its nearly 10-year existence.

Indeed, Hinnen allowed himself an out in his March testimony, saying that the business-record provision “also” enabled “important and highly sensitive intelligence-collection operations” to take place. Wheeler speculates those operations include “using geolocation data from cellphones to collect information on the whereabouts of Americans” — something our sister blog Threat Level has reported on extensively.

It’s worth noting that Wyden is pushing a bill providing greater privacy protections for geolocation info.

For now, Wyden’s considering his options ahead of the Patriot Act vote on Thursday. He wants to compel as much disclosure as he can on the secret interpretation, arguing that a shadow broadening of the Patriot Act sets a dangerous precedent.

“I’m talking about instances where the government is relying on secret interpretations of what the law says without telling the public what those interpretations are,” Wyden says, “and the reliance on secret interpretations of the law is growing.”

Source:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/05/secret-patriot-act/
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2011-05-15T08:53:00.003-05:00

The Destruction of Economic Facts

Renowned Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto argues that the financial crisis wasn't just about finance—it was about a staggering lack of knowledge

By Hernando de Soto
Business Week
April 28, 2011
[emphasis added]

During the second half of the 19th century, the world's biggest economies endured a series of brutal recessions. At the time, most forms of reliable economic knowledge were organized within feudal, patrimonial, and tribal relationships. If you wanted to know who owned land or owed a debt, it was a fact recorded locally—and most likely shielded from outsiders. At the same time, the world was expanding. Travel between cities and countries became more common and global trade increased. The result was a huge rift between the old, fragmented social order and the needs of a rising, globalizing market economy.

To prevent the breakdown of industrial and commercial progress, hundreds of creative reformers concluded that the world needed a shared set of facts. Knowledge had to be gathered, organized, standardized, recorded, continually updated, and easily accessible—so that all players in the world's widening markets could, in the words of France's free-banking champion Charles Coquelin, "pick up the thousands of filaments that businesses are creating between themselves."

The result was the invention of the first massive "public memory systems" to record and classify—in rule-bound, certified, and publicly accessible registries, titles, balance sheets, and statements of account—all the relevant knowledge available, whether intangible (stocks, commercial paper, deeds, ledgers, contracts, patents, companies, and promissory notes), or tangible (land, buildings, boats, machines, etc.). Knowing who owned and owed, and fixing that information in public records, made it possible for investors to infer value, take risks, and track results. The final product was a revolutionary form of knowledge: "economic facts."

Over the past 20 years, Americans and Europeans have quietly gone about destroying these facts.

The very systems that could have provided markets and governments with the means to understand the global financial crisis—and to prevent another one—are being eroded.

Governments have allowed shadow markets to develop and reach a size beyond comprehension. Mortgages have been granted and recorded with such inattention that homeowners and banks often don't know and can't prove who owns their homes. In a few short decades the West undercut 150 years of legal reforms that made the global economy possible.

The results are hardly surprising.

In the U.S., trust has broken down between banks and subprime mortgage holders; between foreclosing agents and courts; between banks and their investors—even between banks and other banks. Overall, credit (from the Latin for "trust") continues to flow steadily, but closer examination shows that nongovernment credit has contracted. Private lending has dropped 21 percent since 2007. Outstanding loans to small businesses dropped more than 6 percent over the past year, while lending to large businesses, measured in commercial loans of more than $1 million, fell nearly 9 percent.

The importance of economic facts may not be obvious to Americans.

"What does the fish know about the water in which it swims?" asked Albert Einstein. But it's easy to grasp from the perspective of the developing and former communist countries where I live and work. In these countries, most of our assets and relationships are in the informal sector, outside the legal economy. Because they're not recorded in public memory systems, they cannot be written up as facts and are, in effect, invisible. All we have are shadow markets.

Without standardization, the values of assets and relationships are so variable that they can't be used to guarantee credit, to generate mortgages and bundle them into securities, to represent them in shares to raise capital. Nor do they fit the standard slots required to enter global markets. That's why credit crunches and massive unemployment are chronic conditions for most people forced to operate in the informal economy. These are the ones you see protesting in the streets of Arab countries or living in tents surrounding Port-au-Prince. We know only too well that facts don't speak for themselves: They have to be constructed through legal processes and kept transparent. They have to be defended, too.

When then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson initiated his Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in September 2008, I assumed the objective was to restore trust in the market by identifying and weeding out the "troubled assets" held by the world's financial institutions. Three weeks later, when I asked American friends why Paulson had switched strategies and was injecting hundreds of billions of dollars into struggling financial institutions, I was told that there were so many idiosyncratic types of paper scattered around the world that no one had any clear idea of how many there were, where they were, how to value them, or who was holding the risk. These securities had slipped outside the recorded memory systems and were no longer easy to connect to the assets from which they had originally been derived. Oh, and their notional value was somewhere between $600 trillion and $700 trillion dollars, 10 times the annual production of the entire world.

Three years later there's still plenty to be concerned about.

Governments have worked to enact major financial and regulatory reforms, such as the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act ushered through Congress in 2010 by former Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Representative Barney Frank (D-Mass.). Dodd-Frank has sought to move derivatives into clearinghouses where more data about them can be collected. It's a step in the right direction. But if you believe in the value of public memory and economic facts, the reforms leave a number of problems outstanding.

First, various groups of derivatives end users, such as nonfinancial companies and sovereign wealth funds, are likely to be exempted from the clearing process—from 40 percent of them, according to Craig Pirrong of the University of Houston's Bauer College of Business, to 70 percent, according to Michael Greenberger, a former Commodities Futures Trading Commission director.

Second, the information collected would be available only to regulators because certain business data are considered "proprietary."

Third, the $700 trillion worth of derivatives that ignited the recession are not covered by Dodd-Frank.

Warren Buffett successfully lobbied for their exclusion, saying it would be tantamount to rewriting old contracts and would force healthy derivatives players such as his own Berkshire Hathaway to post collateral on old deals.

Fourth, the clearing system is not likely to be fully operational for another 5 to 10 years.

Fifth, many clearinghouses do not have the kind of complete information required by traditional public memory systems: incentives for recording that asset owners can't resist; standard classifications to facilitate identifying and governing the assets; universal access to the information; integration or linkages with other recording systems; provisions to protect third parties from negative externalities; identification of all asset holders and interested parties; limited liability provisions to improve accountability.

That's a lot of failure to digest in a single paragraph. So let's look sector by sector at the sorry state of facts in the financial system.

1) Mortgage Bundling. Banks that have tried to foreclose on nonperforming mortgages have discovered that in many cases they can't collect the debts. Why? Because some companies that pooled, packaged, and converted those mortgages into liquid securities had dispensed with the usual procedures to record mortgage owners and passed the property to a shell company called MERS, which pretended to own the mortgages. The intent was to streamline what many real estate experts recognize are outdated, disaggregated, and cumbersome processes. The result, however, is that today, says professor Christopher L. Peterson of the University of Utah, "about 60 percent of the U.S.'s residential mortgages are now recorded in the name of MERS rather than the bank, trust, or company that actually has a meaningful economic interest in the repayment of the debt. For the first time in the nation's history, there is no longer an authoritative, public record of who owns land in each county."

Already the lack of facts is being felt around the U.S.: Courts from Kansas to New York have decided that foreclosures have been improper, and some authorities can't figure out whom to tax. Without facts, credit will continue to be scarce, the value of bonds backed by mortgages will be at best doubtful, the value of houses is likely to slide further, foreclosure backlogs should increase, and banks will see their balance sheets burdened by more nonperforming paper.

2) Default Swaps. The leverage that created so many bad mortgages and the derivatives to help finance them would not have been possible without "credit default swaps" (CDSs)—ingenious derivative instruments that allowed lenders to insure their risks against defaults and pass them on to others. In principle, widening the market should be a good thing. But these risks have slipped outside the public memory systems, making it very difficult to know who ultimately bears the risk and where it is.

Robert Engle, a Nobel laureate who teaches economics at New York University, has said that proposals for reforming CDSs by Western governments are "good as far as they go, but they don't go far enough." European central banker Alexandre Lamfalussy and others have so far been unsuccessful at trying to collect information or even at creating a "risk office" at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). In the last quarter of 2010, various BIS publications noted that statistics on international debt still had too many gaps and overlaps—and that banks, fearful over their proprietary obligations, were reluctant to provide information.

3) Exemptions. When the recession sent the prices of financial holdings spiraling downward, some banks and financiers were exempted from the U.S.'s long-established "mark-to-market" accounting standards, which force firms to report the value of their assets at current market prices. It's reasonable to establish value other than through market prices, according to proponents, if the market is unusually depressed. But such a privilege creates the ability to destroy facts by hiding losses, increasing the price of assets to levels at which no one will buy. In the U.S., the Financial Accounting Standards Board and the Securities and Exchange Commission are reviewing accounting rules, while Congress has been holding hearings on the subject. Meantime, businesses are left to figure out reality on the basis of connections, influence, and private information. Just like we do in developing and former communist countries.

4) Off-Balance-Sheet Accounting. The modern balance sheet can be traced to Luca Pacioli, the 15th century mathematician and father of accounting. In the 1990s governments began destroying Pacioli's legacy by allowing companies in financial difficulty to pass facts concerning debts from their public balance sheet to a less visible memory system called a special purpose entity (SPE) (or to sweep debt information into the balance sheet's footnotes in words so obtuse that the statements cease being factual). Such "off-balance-sheet accounting" makes companies appear more profitable, despite their debts. By the time Enron closed its doors in 2002, it had created some 3,500 SPEs.

According to Frank Partnoy, a professor of securities law at the University of San Diego and one of the most insightful observers of the financial crisis, "abusive off-balance-sheet accounting" was its major cause. Yes, the Sarbanes-Oxley reforms were an effort to counter such abuses, and principles-based accounting where companies are told what they can do rather than how to do it may be steps in the right direction. But until we get the facts, we won't know what to repair.

5) Government Use of Swaps and Repo Markets. Greece is the most notorious example of a country using derivative-based currency swaps to swell the value of government assets by pushing national debts into the future. Gustavo Piga, a professor of economics at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, revealed this fact-destroying practice: A country issues a debt in one currency—dollars, let's say—at fictional exchange rates that it swaps for a euro debt for a certain period of time. Thus it gets an inflow of money that makes the ledger look positive because the actual debt appears as a swap that has produced income. Governments and banks can also distort facts by getting short-term funds against their assets in the so-called repo market, which, as a result of new rules in the past decade, they don't have to report as loans in their memory systems. This is apparently how Lehman Brothers made it look like it had some $50 billion less in loans outstanding than it really did.

Europeans outlawed interest-rate swaps in 2008, though Piga has pointed out numerous loopholes. And it is hardly promising that Bloomberg News was forced to sue the European Central Bank for refusing to release information on Greece's derivatives transactions. Dodd-Frank is essentially silent on the issue of repo markets. Gary Norton at the Brookings Institution has argued that we still do not have the vaguest idea of the size of the repo market.

6) Rating Agencies. Originally created to get and communicate the facts regarding the trustworthiness of businesses through a ratings scale, ratings agencies were an innovative way to get an abbreviated picture about a given business. But their reputation suffered when highly rated companies barely survived the outbreak of the recession or had to be rescued.

There seems to be more of a consensus about how to reform the ratings system. Dodd-Frank provides for an Office of Credit Ratings, though it has yet to be staffed. Europe, too, has established a new regulating agency, European Securities and Markets Authority, responsible for creating a central data repository to track rating agencies and their performance.

Important, too, is to consider whether overreliance on ratings based on co-variance formulas is a trustworthy substitute for facts. Any reform effort must keep in mind the difference between facts, which can be tested for truth, and opinions, such as ratings, which can't. Facts are not simply about transparency; facts are about empirical truth.

If we can agree that the recession wasn't about bubbles but about the organization of knowledge, we can move on to restoring the systems that allowed the global economy to expand more in the last 60 years than in the previous 2,000.

We are now staring at a legal and political challenge. A legal challenge because American and European governments allowed economic activity to cross the line from the rule-bound system of property rights, where facts can be established, into an anarchic legal space, where arbitrary interests can trump facts and paper swirls out of control. The rule of law is much more than a dull body of norms: It is a huge, thriving information and management system that filters and processes local data until it is transformed into facts organized in a way that allows us to infer if they hang together and make sense.

Mainly, though, it's a political challenge. Politicians must raise the financial crisis to commanding heights, where the entrenched institutional problems of a failing order can be addressed. Markets were never intended to be anarchic: It has always been government's role to police standards, weights and measures, and
records, and not condone legalized sleight of hand in the shadows of the informal economy. To understand and repair one of mankind's greatest achievements—the creation of economic facts through public memory—is the stuff of nation-builders.

Source:
http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/11_19/b4227060634112.htm
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2011-05-08T17:32:00.002-05:00

The DeVos Family: Meet the Super-Wealthy Right-Wingers Working With the Religious Right to Kill Public Education

By Rachel Tabachnick
AlterNet
May 6, 2011

Since the 2010 elections, voucher bills have popped up in legislatures around the nation. From Pennsylvania to Indiana to Florida, state governments across the country have introduced bills that would take money from public schools and use it to send students to private and religious institutions.

Vouchers have always been a staple of the right-wing agenda. Like previous efforts, this most recent push for vouchers is led by a network of conservative think tanks, PACs, Religious Right groups and wealthy conservative donors. But "school choice," as they euphemistically paint vouchers, is merely a means to an end. Their ultimate goal is the total elimination of our public education system.

The decades-long campaign to end public education is propelled by the super-wealthy, right-wing DeVos family. Betsy Prince DeVos is the sister of Erik Prince, founder of the notorious private military contractor Blackwater USA (now Xe), and wife of Dick DeVos, son of the co-founder of Amway, the multi-tiered home products business.

By now, you've surely heard of the Koch brothers, whose behind-the-scenes financing of right-wing causes has been widely documented in the past year. The DeVoses have remained largely under the radar, despite the fact that their stealth assault on America's schools has the potential to do away with public education as we know it.

Right-Wing Privatization Forces

The conservative policy institutes founded beginning in the 1970s get hundreds of millions of dollars from wealthy families and foundations to develop and promote free market fundamentalism. More specifically, their goals include privatizing social security, reducing government regulations, thwarting environmental policy, dismantling unions -- and eliminating public schools.

Whatever they may say about giving poor students a leg up, their real priority is nothing short of the total dismantling of our public educational institutions, and they've admitted as much. Cato Institute founder Ed Crane and other conservative think tank leaders have signed the Public Proclamation to Separate School and State, which reads in part that signing on, "Announces to the world your commitment to end involvement by local, state, and federal government from education."

But Americans don't want their schools dismantled. So privatization advocates have recognized that it's not politically viable to openly push for full privatization and have resigned themselves to incrementally dismantling public school systems. The think tanks’ weapon of choice is school vouchers.

Vouchers are funded with public school dollars but are used to pay for students to attend private and parochial (religious-affiliated) schools. The idea was introduced in the 1950s by the high priest of free-market fundamentalism, Milton Friedman, who also made the real goal of the voucher movement clear: “Vouchers are not an end in themselves; they are a means to make a transition from a government to a free-market system."

The quote is in a 1995 Cato Institute briefing paper titled “Public Schools: Make Them Private.”

Joseph Bast, president of Heartland Institute, stated in 1997, “Like most other conservatives and libertarians, we see vouchers as a major step toward the complete privatization of schooling. In fact, after careful study, we have come to the conclusion that they are the only way to dismantle the current socialist regime.” Bast added, “Government schools will diminish in enrollment and thus in number as parents shift their loyalty and vouchers to superior-performing private schools.”

But Bast's lofty goals have not panned out. That's because, quite simply, voucher programs do not work.

The longest running voucher program in the country is the 20-year-old Milwaukee School Choice Program.

Standardized testing shows that the voucher students in private schools perform below the level of Milwaukee’s public school students, and even when socioeconomic status is factored in, the voucher students still score at or below the level of the students who remain in Milwaukee’s public schools. Cleveland’s voucher program has produced similar results. Private schools in the voucher program range from excellent to very poor. In some, less than 20 percent of students reach basic proficiency levels in math and reading.

Most Americans do not want their tax dollars to fund private and sectarian schools.

Since 1966, 24 of 25 voucher initiatives have been defeated by voters, most by huge margins. Nevertheless, the pro-privatization battle continues, organized by an array of 527s, 501(c)(3)s, 501(c)(4)s, and political action committees. At the helm of this interconnected network is Betsy DeVos, the four-star general of the pro-voucher movement.

The DeVos Family Campaign for Privatization of Schools

The DeVoses are top contributors to the Republican Party and have provided the funding for major Religious Right organizations. And they spent millions of their own fortune promoting the failed voucher initiative in Michigan in 2000, dramatically outspending their opposition. Sixty-eight percent of Michigan voters rejected the voucher scheme. Following this defeat, the DeVoses altered their strategy.

Instead of taking the issue directly to voters, they would support bills for vouchers in state legislatures. In 2002 Dick DeVos gave a speech on school choice at the Heritage Foundation. After an introduction by former Reagan Secretary of Education William Bennett, DeVos described a system of “rewards and consequences” to pressure state politicians to support vouchers.

“That has got to be the battle. It will not be as visible,” stated DeVos. He described how his wife Betsy was putting these ideas into practice in their home state of Michigan and claimed this effort has reduced the number of anti-school choice Republicans from six to two. The millions raised from the wealthy pro-privatization contributors would be used to finance campaigns of voucher supporters and purchase ads attacking opposing candidates.

Media materials for Betsy DeVos’ group All Children Matter, formed in 2003, claimed the organization spent $7.6 million in its first year, “impacting state legislative elections in 10 targeted states” and a won/loss record of 121/60.

Dick DeVos also explained to his Heritage Foundation audience that they should no longer use the term public schools, but instead start calling them “government schools.” He noted that the role of wealthy conservatives would have to be obscured. “We need to be cautious about talking too much about these activities,” said DeVos, and pointed to the need to “cut across a lot of historic boundaries, be they partisan, ethnic, or otherwise.”

Reinventing Vouchers

Like DeVos, several free-market think tanks have also issued warnings that vouchers appear to be an “elitist” plan. There's reason for their concern, given the long and racially charged history of vouchers.

School vouchers drew little public interest until Brown v. Board of Education and the court-ordered desegregation of public schools. Southern states devised voucher schemes for students to leave public schools and take the public funding with them.

Author Kevin Michael Kreuse explains how this plan was supposed to work in White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. “At the heart of the plan to defend school segregation, for instance, stood a revolutionary scheme called the ‘private-school plan.’ In 1953, a full year before Brown, Governor Talmadge advanced a constitutional amendment giving the General Assembly the power to privatize the state’s entire system of public education. In the event of court-ordered desegregation, school buildings would be closed, and students would receive grants to attend private, segregated schools.”

Given the racist origins of vouchers, advocates of privatization have had to do two things: obscure the fact that the pro-privatization movement is backed primarily by white conservatives, and emphasize the support of African American and Democratic lawmakers where it exists.

In 2000, Howard Fuller founded the Black Alliance for Education Options. The group was largely funded by John Walton and the Bradley Foundation. Walton, a son of Walmart founder Sam Walton, contributed millions to the Betsy DeVos-led All Children Matter organization, including a bequest after his death in a plane crash in 2004.

A report by People for the American Way questions whose interest was being served in the partnership between the Alliance and conservative foundations. The summary of the report reads, “Over the past nine months, millions of Americans have seen lavishly produced TV ads featuring African American parents talking about school vouchers. These ads and their sponsor, the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), portray vouchers as an effort to help low-income kids. But a new report explores the money trail behind BAEO, finding that it leads directly to a handful of wealthy right-wing foundations and individuals that have a deep agenda -- not only supporting the school voucher movement, but also backing anti-affirmative action campaigns and other efforts that African American organizations have opposed or considered offensive.”

Black Commentator.com was more blunt, describing vouchers as “The Right’s Final Answer to Brown” and tracking the history of vouchers from die-hard segregationists to the Heritage Foundation’s attempt to attach vouchers to federal legislation in 1981. The article stated, “The problem was, vouchers were still firmly (and correctly) associated with die-hard segregationists. Memories of white “massive resistance” to integration remained fresh, especially among blacks, who had never demanded vouchers -- not even once in all of the tens of thousands of demonstrations over the previous three decades.”

The article continues, “Former Reagan Education Secretary William Bennett understood what was missing from the voucher political chemistry: minorities. If visible elements of the black and Latino community could be ensnared in what was then a lily-white scheme, then the Right’s dream of a universal vouchers system to subsidize general privatization of education, might become a practical political project. More urgently, Bennett and other right-wing strategists saw that vouchers had the potential to drive a wedge between blacks and teachers unions, cracking the Democratic Party coalition. In 1988, Bennett urged the Catholic Church to 'seek out the poor, the disadvantaged…and take them in, educate them, and then ask society for fair recompense for your efforts' -- vouchers. The game was on.”

In this winning formula, vouchers or “scholarships” are advertised as the only hope for under served and urban minority children. Those who dare to defend public education from voucher schemes are, ironically, implied to be racist. Glossy brochures published by the DeVos-led entity All Children Matter show smiling faces of little children as well as those of the African American and Democratic politicians who have joined the campaign. Kevin Chavous, a former D.C. city councilman who takes credit for “shepherding” vouchers in D.C. and New Orleans, served as senior advisor to All Children Matters and now leads the BAEO and sits on the board of the DeVos-led AFC and Democrats for Education Reform.

All Children Matter was fined $5.2 million dollars in Ohio for breaking campaign finance laws, and lost an appeal in early 2010. The fine has not been paid. The DeVos-led organization also received bad press due to a fine in Wisconsin for failing to register their PAC as well as complaints in other states. In 2010 the entity began working under the name American Federation for Children (AFC) and registered new affiliate PACs across the nation, just in time for the 2010 elections.

The 2010 effort included a state that was not even included in Dick DeVos’ list of potential targets when he spoke to the Heritage Foundation in 2002 -- Pennsylvania. An affiliate of AFC registered a PAC in Pennsylvania in March 2010 and less than a year later a voucher bill, SB-1, was sponsored in the Senate.
Throughout this well-coordinated campaign, the Pennsylvania press never once mentioned the name Betsy DeVos.

The Religious Right Foot Soldiers

The strategy in Pennsylvania in 2010, like efforts in other states, benefited from years of previous efforts to build alliances in the voucher movement. The conservative policy institutes have limited reach in the general public. In order to win the battle for hearts and minds, a larger public relations effort is required. The Religious Right fills this role with their tremendous broadcast capability and growing access to churches and homes. The partnership between free market fundamentalists and social conservatives is often contentious, but they share a common goal -- to end secular public education. The free marketers object to the “public” aspect while the Religious Right objects to the “secular” component of public education.

A significant forum that brings together free-market power brokers and Religious Right leaders is the Council for National Policy (CNP), a secretive group that has met several times annually behind closed doors since 1981. Richard DeVos described CNP as bringing together the “donors and the doers.” This partnership gives the Religious Right access to major funders, including Richard Mellon Scaife, who are not social conservatives.

Many of the free-market think tanks are secular, but there is a trend toward merging free-market fundamentalism with right-wing religious ideology. The Acton Institute is described by religious historian Randall Balmer as an example of the merging of corporate interests with advocates of “dominion theology.”

Dominionism is the belief that Christians must take control over societal and government institutions. The Acton Institute funds events featuring dominionist leaders including Gary North, who claims that the bible mandates free market capitalism or “Biblical Capitalism.”

Betsy DeVos has served on the board of Acton, which is also funded by Scaife, Bradley and Exxon Mobil. A shared goal of this unlikely group of libertarians and theocrats is their battle against environmental regulation.

One of the Acton Institute fellows leads a group of Religious Right organizations called the Cornwall Alliance, which is currently marketing a DVD titled Resisting the Green Dragon. The pseudo-documentary describes global warming as a hoax and claims environmentalism is a cult attacking Christianity. Another shared goal of the free marketers and Christian dominionists is eradicating secular public education.

Gary North explains why getting students out of public schools is key to the Christian dominionist camp. “So let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.”

And the Christian Right has been busy enacting this vision. One of the first goals of the Christian Coalition was to take control of 500 local public school boards, and it's a strategy the Religious Right has continued. One prominent example is Cynthia Dunbar, one of the members of the Texas State Board of Education which made controversial changes to the state’s social studies curriculum in 2010. Dunbar, who was advised by right-wing self-styled "historian" David Barton, is author of One Nation Under God and has described sending children to public schools as “throwing them into the enemy’s flames, even as the children of Israel threw their children to Moloch.”

In addition to getting Trojan horses on school boards, the Religious Right has played a significant role in disseminating anti-public school propaganda and forming alliances to support vouchers for private schools. Family Research Council (FRC), one of the entities funded by the Prince and DeVos families, documents the effort in Pennsylvania to cultivate a partnership between Protestants and Catholics who wanted public funding for their sectarian schools.

The data accompanying proposed bill SB-1, indicates that the majority of the public school funds that will be spent on vouchers will pay tuition for students already enrolled in private schools. In Milwaukee 80 percent of voucher program schools are religiously affiliated, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. In Cleveland, 52 percent of the students in the 29 Catholic diocesan schools are using taxpayer-funded vouchers, according to the Plain Dealer.

FRC’s Web site includes a 1999 speech by one of Pat Robertson’s biographers, in which he describes the school choice alliance in Pennsylvania of Protestant and Catholic leaders along with the Commonwealth Foundation and REACH Alliance. Commonwealth is a state think tank funded by the Scaife foundations.

REACH Alliance is the statewide pro-voucher activist organization funded by the DeVos-led Alliance for School Choice (now also renamed American Federation for Children). This alliance is further described in the speech as forming "ties to black legislators based in Philadelphia, including Dwight Evans. This was big news for the Pennsylvania education reform movement because Evans is a powerful legislator and community leader."

Evans would indeed become key to expanding vouchers in the Philadelphia area, and he and state Senator Anthony Williams (not to be confused with the D.C. mayor by the same name), both Democrats, serve as directors of the BAEO.

The Battle for Pennsylvania

By the 2010 election, the groundwork had been laid and the heavy artillery brought into the state of Pennsylvania. First, a PAC was registered in March 2010 by Republican strategist Joe Watkins under the name Students First. Affiliated with the DeVos and Chavous-led AFC, the PAC shared the name with the organization founded by Michelle Rhee, a star of the popular pro-privatization movie Waiting for Superman.

The Web site of Students First PAC touts the African-American Watkins' experience as an adviser to a president and pastor. There is no mention of the fact that the president was George W. Bush. The bio also neglects to include Watkins' ties to the Republican Party or his role in attack ads run on Fox News against presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008.

Students First PAC received over $6 million in donations for use in the 2010 elections, much of that donated by three mega-donors whose names were unfamiliar to most Pennsylvanians. The three mega-donors, Joel Greenberg, Jeffrey Yass and Arthur Dantchik, also contributed over a million dollars to the AFC-affiliated PAC in Indiana and $6,000 dollars each to the gubernatorial campaign of Scott Walker. The Indiana PAC total was raised to almost $6 million by a few contributors, including Betsy DeVos herself and several Walton family members. Most of that money did not stay in Indiana but was distributed to affiliated PACs in six other states, including over a million sent back to Pennsylvania’s Students First.

Much of the Students First money went to the long-shot gubernatorial campaign of Anthony Williams. Williams lost in the primaries, but he brought statewide attention to his primary campaign cause -- school vouchers. Among Students First’s millions of expenditures was a $575 payment for conference registration to the Council for National Policy.

Pennsylvania press did not pay much attention to the background of the donors of the unprecedented millions pouring into the election in support of a single issue, describing them simply as supporters of school choice.

Greenberg serves on the board of the Betsy DeVos-led AFC; Yass on the board of the pro-privatization think tank Cato Institute; and Dantchik on the board of the Institute for Justice, which describes itself as a merry band of libertarian litigators and is perhaps best known for its battles against affirmative action. It’s funded by Koch, Bradley, Olin, Scaife and Walton foundations and has now become a champion of school vouchers.

The organization was credited by Dick DeVos in his 2002 speech as serving a significant role through challenges to the Blaine Amendments in numerous states, which disallow public funds to be spent supporting religious schools.

Money continues to be spent on attack ads against both Republican and Democratic senators opposed to SB-1. The Scaife-funded Commonwealth Foundation has created a webpage to pressure wavering Republicans. The Koch-funded FreedomWorks sponsored mailers attacking Republican state Senator Stewart Greenleaf. The mailer is headlined, “There’s a battle in Harrisburg over our children’s future. Who will win? Our children or the powerful teacher’s union?” A Students First PAC mailer attacks Democratic state Senator Daylin Leach as opposing the bill because, “he is listening to teacher union leaders who oppose SB-1 and have contributed a fortune to people like Leach.”

Much of the Indiana PAC money was also used in media campaigns, including funds sent to Florida for media purchases. AFC was the sole funder of a pro-voucher group that ran ads in Jewish publications attacking Dan Gelber, a Jewish candidate for Florida attorney general who opposed vouchers. Full page “wanted ads” were purchased in Jewish publications accusing Gelber of “crimes against Jewish education.” Other ads purchased just prior to the election described Gelber as “Toxic to Jewish Education” in red Halloween-style letters.

Dick DeVos’ model for “rewards and consequences” as described in his 2002 speech, is at work in Pennsylvania, Florida, and elsewhere, and it's a project funded by a few mega-donors. The voucher warriors with their unlimited funding are trying to create the absurd impression that they are the altruistic David in battle against the teachers’ union Goliath.

Betsy DeVos has announced that Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker are scheduled to speak at the National Policy Summit of the American Federation for Children on May 9.

Walker wants to expand vouchers in Milwaukee despite the program's failure, made clear by disappointing standardized test results. Walker’s response? To halt the testing. Pennsylvania voucher supporters have already taken care of the pesky issue of accountability by defeating an amendment that would require the students using vouchers to take standardized tests.

During the AFC’s summit, it’s doubtful there will be speeches about eradicating public education but there will certainly be public relations-produced media everywhere, showing the beautiful faces of the little children these voucher proponents are supposedly saving. And Betsy DeVos, the four-star general of the voucher wars, will continue to advance a stealth campaign against American communities and working families -- the battle to eradicate public education.

© 2011 Independent Media Institute.
All rights reserved.

Source:
http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/150868/the_devos_family%3A_meet_the_super-wealthy_right-wingers_working_with_the_religious_right_to_kill_public_education/?page=entire
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2011-05-04T19:45:00.001-05:00

Was Osama captured before being shot?

A Pakistani report suggests he was, but the CIA categorically denies it

by Justin Elliot
Salon.com
May 4, 2011

Here's a quick note on the story floating around that, contra the White House, Osama bin Laden was captured by U.S. commandos before being shot to death.

Legitimate doubt has been cast on the official narrative of the raid ever since the Obama administration changed major details of what it claims happened. (A Pentagon official, for example, said Monday that bin Laden was firing a gun at U.S. forces from behind a human shield when he was killed. Now the White House says he was not armed and there was no human shield.)

The possibility that bin Laden was captured was raised in a report by an Arab news agency citing Pakistani officials describing an interview with bin Laden's young daughter, who was apparently at the compound:

The daughter has claimed that she watched as her father was captured alive and shot before being dragged to a US military helicopter, Arabic news network al-Arabiya quoted Pakistani officials as saying.

That, in turn, reminded me of a curious formulation used by President Obama at a public event Monday night:

But last night, as Americans learned that the United States had carried out an operation that resulted in the capture and death of Osama bin Laden, we -- (applause) -- you know, I think we experienced the same sense of unity that prevailed on 9/11.

Emphasis added. The reference to the "capture" of bin Laden could easily be a misstatement. But given all the confusion and conflicting claims about what happened, this is worth clearing up. A White House spokesman declined to comment, referring me to the CIA.

The CIA told NBC that it was "categorically" denying the Pakistan-sourced report that bin Laden was captured before being killed.

But still no word from the CIA on Obama's use of the word "capture." If I hear back I'll update this post.
Here, for the record, is the official Pentagon narrative on what happened -- with no reference to bin Laden being captured:

On the first floor of bin Laden’s building, two Al Qaeda couriers were killed along with a woman who was killed in cross-fire. Bin Laden and his family were found on the second and third floor of the building. There was concern that bin Laden would oppose the capture operation and indeed he resisted.

In the room with bin Laden, a woman – bin Laden’s wife – rushed the U.S. assaulter and was shot in the leg but not killed. Bin Laden was then shot and killed. He was not armed.
Following the firefight, the non-combatants were moved to a safe location as the damaged helicopter was detonated.

Source:
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/05/04/bin_laden_captured_reports/index.html

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