The EverLasting Hurrah of the Golden Path



Jeff Huber's Revenge of the Surge:

...While visions of sugarplums danced in our heads, the Pentagon flew another escalation strategy under the radar. On the eve of Christmas Eve, Dexter Filkins of the New York Times reported "Taking a page from the successful experiment in Iraq, American commanders and Afghan leaders are preparing to arm local militias to help in the fight against a resurgent Taliban."

Merry Christmas, fellow citizens. Odds are now almost certain that your country will be in a state of war throughout your lifetimes, and possibly throughout your children's lifetimes as well...

It's hard to be surprised any more when the NYT echoes the Pentagon's G.I. jingo, but the experience of watching the newspaper of record cut and paste phrases like "a page from the successful experiment in Iraq" is aging poorly. From the outset, a key component of the surge strategy was the propaganda piece that would make it sound "successful" regardless of how it went.

As in the principles of war, "objective" is a prime tenet of information operations; but there's a difference between the way objectives work in warfare and how they're used in propaganda. In warfare—theoretically, anyway—the objective is supposed to be straightforward and tangible, and all operations and tactics should support the primary goal. In information operations, the objective, at least the stated one, is so vague and flexible that it doesn't need to have anything at all to do with the actual military operation. In fact, it's best if it doesn't; the less any statement meant for public consumption has to do with reality, the greater freedom of movement the information operator (aka "bull feather merchant" or "BFM") has.

When Bill Kristol pal Fred Kagan and the rest of the neocons at the American Enterprise Institute rammed their surge strategy past the Joint Chiefs' tonsils, the BFMs had to justify escalating the war to the public. Too many brass hats had admitted there was no military solution to the Iraq fiasco, so the "political unification" canard was adopted.

Political unification has proven to be as elusive as Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction; with the provincial elections just a stone's throw away, there's talk of a coup to oust Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki. That's been no problem for the BFMs, though; looking ahead, they nested the "security" piece of the puzzle in the original mission statement: establish security in order to allow political unity to come about. Since some measure of decreased violence has been achieved in Iraq, the BFMs can point to it as proof of the surge's success, and be reasonably confident no one will remember that improving security was the task, not the goal. They can also be fairly sure that not too many folks will ask hard questions about how that "security" was achieved.

In his three tours of duty in Iraq, David Petraeus has followed the same operational formula: he hands out a lot of weapons, bribes everybody he gave the weapons to not to use them, and transfers the heck out of Dodge before the time bombs he set blow off his successors' thumbs and noses (Hey, what's this?).

Four months after Petraeus turned over command of a "tamed" Mosul, the city's police chief defected and insurgents overran the city. When Petraeus was in charge of training Iraqi security forces, his recruits disappeared into the desert night along with about 190,000 AK-47 rifles and pistols. As commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq, he created "Awakening Councils," groups of former Sunni militants that Filkins says "are credited by American officials as one of the main catalysts behind the steep reduction in violence there." More that 100,000 of these former anti-U.S. guerillas have been armed to armpits and put on the dole so they won't attack Nuri al Maliki's government forces. Creating the Awakening Councils was the single dumbest thing—among a field of highly qualified contenders for the title—that we've done in Iraq, and now, it's one of the most compelling reasons for us to stay there forever: if we leave, the gravy spigot runs dry, and all our beautiful ugliness will melt out the drain pipe when the Sunni gunmen go back to their old line of business.

And thus it is that our catalyst of victory is the machinery of our failure; we've succeeded so well in Iraq that we must stay there always. Permanent occupation of Iraq was the operational and strategic objective all along, of course, even before 9/11, even before young Mr. Bush was selected to head the neoconservative ticket...

Well, of course. As it was in the beginning, is it now and ever shall be. Chaos is the plan.  ¶ 11:22 PM 0 comments links to this post

  "Tomorrow belongs to me"

Regarding Greenwald, Joe speaks. You listen:

...
The actions of the current American administration, as well as other examples of lesser atrocities (lesser in numbers only, that is) performed by many governments large and small since the end of WWII shows that we have failed in our mission of preventing aggressive war. The question is, how? How did we as Americans come to fall so low after having shown such nobility and such compassion to our former enemies? How did we go from reluctantly going to war with the powerful military empires of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, who were clear and present threats to world peace, to excitedly going to war with Iraq, who represented no realistic threat to our own safety or to world peace? How did we go from giving the leaders (those that remained) of these dangerous nations a fair trial to torturing and murdering a bunch of poor souls in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of whom were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Some on the right would accuse me of being an "America-hater" for pointing this out, but of course the ones that do the torturing are the ones who really do hate America, or at least they hate the noble ideals this country was founded on.

I've spoken before on how we seem to find it hard to believe that our own countrymen could be capable of such atrocities, which is why we find it difficult to prosecute them for their crimes. Maybe it's because our leaders, even if they came to power illegitimately, are an indication of who we are as a nation. They may not have had the overwhelming support of the American people, but enough of us were perfectly happy to cheer them on, for whatever reasons. As ashamed as I think these people should be, a great part of it is that we don't stress enough the things that make America great. We protect the symbols of America more than we protect the things those symbols represent. We worship the military as a thing unto itself, not for the things it defends. We make celebrities and heroes of wealthy people regardless of how they earned their wealth, celebrate corporations who make profit from war or exploitation, and look with disdain on people who band together to try to get their fair share of their hard work. The politicians and the media elites who live in their own well-protected world are just symptoms of the real problems in this country, and most of our time is spent just trying to get by.

We should also remember how we got to Nuremberg in the first place: millions dead, a continent brought to ruin, and two cities devastated by the most horrendous weapon ever devised. Those who rose to power in Germany, Italy, and Japan, who either believed or merely perpetuated, for political purposes, the idea that God was on their side, were not the kind of people who would give up that power without a fight. And while the methods being used by our current administration are subtler, less obvious, there's no reason to believe they wouldn't hesitate to go as far as they did. I for one would rather they never got the opportunity...

I've heard even some of the Oborg- the less purely assimilated and vestigially partisan- mutter that letting Bu$hCo-Cheneyburton off will only ensure the whole criminal cabal will be back in 2012, with Jebbie at the helm.

But it's far worse than that, as Glenn and Joe hit precisely. It's not just Bu$hCo-Cheneyburton, or the Republican party that's the problem. The problem is even bigger than the hundreds of thousands of Company private contractors they represent and the millions of corporate termites eating at the foundations of democracy.

It's a problem that required two world wars to sterilize out of Europe, but has grown back. It's a problem that has haunted the middle east for the last 5000 years, and the Mediterranean basin for the last 3000. It's a problem that has lived in the jungles and savannas and deserts of Africa for the last 100,000.

The problem is that modern man is the killer ape. It wasn't the bonobos that evolved to ascendency. You can argue successfully that there has always been a large component of civil social congenial co-operativity in our species. But every time it's the alpha ape that's seized power and twisted the co-operativity beyond constructive to destructive purposes.

We've got to get beyond it. If we survive much longer, we will. But we provide our own strongest selection pressure, so just what primate will be the fittest to survive depends on our own nature.  ¶ 8:58 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Good Question

Where Was George H. W. Bush on November 22, 1963 Anyway?  ¶ 4:48 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Keeping the Love Alive

The love of war, that is:

JERUSALEM -- In its efforts to stop amateur rockets from nagging the residents of some of its southern cities, Israel appears to have given new life to the fledging Islamic movement in Palestine.

For two years, the Islamic Resistance Movement (known by its Arabic acronym, Hamas) has been losing support internally and externally. This wasn't the case in the days after the party came to power democratically in early 2006; despite being unjustly ostracized by the international community for its anti-Israeli stance, Hamas enjoyed the backing of Palestinians and other Arabs. Having won a decisive parliamentary majority on an anti-corruption platform promising change and reform, Hamas worked hard to govern better than had Fatah, its rival and predecessor.

Things began to sour when Hamas violently seized control of Gaza, but even then, Hamas enjoyed considerable domestic support -- and much goodwill externally. Then the movement turned down every legitimate offer from its nationalist PLO rivals and Egyptian mediators to pursue reconciliation, and support for it began to slip.

...The lack of international support since the 2006 elections, followed by this rebuff to Gaza's only Arab neighbor, Egypt, compounded the deterioration of Hamas's internal support. By November, the survey showed, only 16.6 percent of Palestinians supported Hamas, compared with nearly 40 percent favoring Fatah. The decline in support for Hamas has been steady: A year earlier, the same pollster showed that Hamas's support was at 19.7 percent; in August 2007, it was at 21.6 percent; in March 2007, it was at 25.2 percent; and in September 2006, backing for the Islamists stood at 29.7 percent.

That's why, as the six-month cease-fire with Israel came to an end, Hamas calculated -- it seems correctly -- that it had nothing to gain by continuing the truce; if it had, its credentials as a resistance movement would have been no different from those of Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah. Unable to secure an open border and an end to the Israeli siege, while refusing to share or give up power to Abbas, Hamas could have had no route to renewed public favor.

For different reasons, Hamas and Israel both gave up on the cease-fire, preferring instead to climb over corpses to reach their political goals. One side wants to resuscitate its public support by appearing to be a heroic resister, while the other, on the eve of elections, wants to show toughness to a public unhappy with the nuisance of the Qassam rockets...

It's a true love of common interests, common goals, where endless war is the objective, and Chaos is the Plan.  ¶ 8:50 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Bait and Switched

Debbie Morgan catches on.

...How often is a piece of news rendered unfit for United States citizen consumption and replaced with or rewritten to include propaganda?

A set of articles written by Joe McDonald about China's concerns with the current United States economic situation were replaced with one US-friendly article. Both articles were similar in content. One of them was found on USA Today and the other on the Washington Post; the titles were, respectively, China urges Washington to protect its investments and China tells US to get economy in order. The title of the US-Friendly article, which appeared the next morning on both USA Today and the Washington Post at the link of the original articles, was China's sinking currency causes tensions with U.S.

Both articles cite a statement made at the most recent Strategic Economic Dialogue by Vice Premier Wang Qishan; "We hope the U.S. side will take the necessary measures to stabilize the economy and financial markets, as well as to guarantee the safety of China's assets and investments in the United States." The original articles show that China is deeply concerned about keeping their economy on track, quote the governor of the Chinese central bank, who criticized the United States for the global economic situation and holds the US accountable because of its "excessive consumption and high leverage." While the original articles stated that Wang did not elaborate on his comments, Beijing reportedly owns $585 Billion in US Treasury debt.

The research department at RTR Radio discovered that links to the McDonald articles, book marked the night before, had been switched for a totally different one, written by David Lynch. The team found, upon further investigation, that while the links were still the same, the McDonald articles had, indeed, been replaced by the Lynch one, which claims that the Chinese yaun's value had peaked against the US Dollar and its descent was complicating relations between the United States and China. The tone of the Lynch article paints a totally different picture from the original McDonald pieces, even stating that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson would "press Chinese officials for additional yuan gains," but instead found "Chinese officials more interested in lecturing than being lectured."..

Questions remain. How often does this kind of deception go on? How many times has it happened? Had I not experienced it first hand, I might not have believed it. Can we trust our mainstream media? My suggestion would be that when you find a piece of news that seems too controversial for the public, copy it, print it, take a screen shot of it, something" but don't let the mainstream media hide news from us! After all, how are we to make the right judgments if we don't have all the answers?

Answers: All the time, Countless, No, and finally, You aren't "supposed" to make correct judgements- that's up to our Dear Leaders.  ¶ 8:22 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Meet the New Boss, $ame Owners as the Old Boss

Michael Collins detects a trend:

A few defenders of President elect Barack Obama are attacking one of his most enlightened statements of the campaign -- the request for open dialog and criticism from his supporters. This occurred on his blog after he voted to support FISA legislation in the summer of 2008.

"I learned long ago, when working as an organizer on the South Side of Chicago, that when citizens join their voices together, they can hold their leaders accountable. I'm not exempt from that. I'm certainly not perfect, and expect to be held accountable too." Barack Obama, July 3, 2008

Responding to criticism of cabinet choices and, most recently, the selection of bigoted preacher Rev. Rick Warren to open the inauguration ceremonies, some Obama supporters are actually telling other supporters to "stop criticizing Obama!"

A Dec. 24 CNN poll showed that 82% of the public approves of the Obama transition efforts, while just 15% find them lacking.

If the well placed supporters can't tolerate negative feedback at 82% approval, what will happen when there's sizable public opposition for a broad based initiative? Sending twenty thousand U.S. troops to Afghanistan comes to mind.

During the cabinet appointment controversy, Obama's national deputy campaign manager, Steve Hildebrand, scolded the left in the Huffington Post. While this preceded the Warren appointment, Hildebrand's general argument was used by those apologizing for Obama's choice of Warren, as well.

Hildebrand starts out by arguing that, "This is not a time for the left wing of our Party to draw conclusions about the Cabinet and White House appointments." What time would that be? When we're all facing eviction? After the next new war we simply have to fight? When even more of those responsible for past failures are placed in positions of authority?

He then states the obvious: "After all, he was elected to be the president of all the people - not just those on the left." Always a helpful reminder. Then those on the left are told to back off. After listing the critical issues facing the country, Hildebrand says, "That's his job." Just let Obama do it. Citizens are supposed to butt out while the boss takes care of it?

He ends by telling us that Obama will be a great president if "he can work with Congress and the American people." Those who speak out are denying Obama his "greatness?"

This isn't about Obama or anybody's greatness. It's about a nation in serious trouble, partially because the "loyal opposition" sat on its hands for eight years without raising as much as a whimper while corporatist policies brought the nation to its knees.

These arguments don't square with the history of free speech and questioning authority in the United States. Free speech is an essential element of greater economic and social justice, i.e., real change...

We have the real change involved in considering Certs a breath mint instead of a candy mint.

Meanwhile, Cryptogon is busy documenting the change Bu$hie's Free Market policies may have intended all along: causing even greater damage to the Chinese and Russian economies than our own.

If your goal is to create a worldwide post-industrial feudal state, the last thing you want is competitors. A real global Free Market, like Change, makes a great spiel for the rubes. Like Freedom of Speech, or the Bill of Rights, you can't beat them as talking points. But just ask Cheney: the grown-ups in charge know better.  ¶ 11:12 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Worse than eating broccoli

Today The New York Pravda's Opinion section comes out with a new Official Story on Iraq, presented in a quaint and artsy businesslike format.



You betcha it's All Good News, campers: only 500 civilians killed in 2008! Hardly anybody made homeless! We're winning one for the Gipper! Or Dear Leader, anyway!

In The New York Pravda's Business section:

Quietly, as the United States presidential election and its aftermath have dominated the news, America’s three broadcast network news divisions have stopped sending full-time correspondents to Iraq.

“The war has gone on longer than a lot of news organizations’ ability or appetite to cover it,” said Jane Arraf, a former Baghdad bureau chief for CNN who has remained in Iraq as a contract reporter for The Christian Science Monitor.

Joseph Angotti, a former vice president of NBC News, said he could not recall any other time when all three major broadcast networks lacked correspondents in an active war zone that involved United States forces.

Except, of course, in Afghanistan, where about 30,000 Americans are stationed, and where until recently no American television network, broadcast or cable, maintained a full-time bureau...

“Americans like their wars movie length and with a happy ending,” Mr. Boettcher said. “If the war drags on and there is no happy ending, Americans start to squirm in their seats. In the case of television news, they began changing the channel when a story from Iraq appeared...”

Ah, the Free Market solution to justify ignoring the war: bad news doesn't sell.

That must be the reason for the coverage change, certainly not the Pentagon's control of what news stories are news.

That must be the reason for the differences in statistics.

Deaths per week:


The tally:
Deaths for 2008 to date: 8,969, not 500.



How are these numbers derived?

Iraq Body Count (IBC) records the violent civilian deaths that have resulted from the 2003 military intervention in Iraq. Its public database includes deaths caused by US-led coalition forces and paramilitary or criminal attacks by others.

IBC’s documentary evidence is drawn from crosschecked media reports of violent events leading to the death of civilians, or of bodies being found, and is supplemented by the careful review and integration of hospital, morgue, NGO and official figures.

Systematically extracted details about deadly incidents and the individuals killed in them are stored with every entry in the database. The minimum details always extracted are the number killed, where, and when.

Confusion about the numbers produced by the project can be avoided by bearing in mind that:

* IBC’s figures are not ‘estimates’ but a record of actual, documented deaths.
* IBC records solely violent deaths.
* IBC records solely civilian (strictly, ‘non-combatant’) deaths.
* IBC’s figures are constantly updated and revised as new data comes in, and frequent consultation is advised...

All this differs from the numbers in The New York Pravda, which are derived from the Pentagon, who essentially pull their numbers out of Robert Gates' ass.  ¶ 8:22 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Another Brick in the Wall

via Avedon via makethemaccountable, it looks like Oborg Prime has chosen another live one:

Since the 1980s, but particularly under the Bush administration, certain elements of the religious right, corporate culture and Republican right wing have argued that free public education represents either a massive fraud or a contemptuous failure. Far from a genuine call for reform, these attacks largely stem from an attempt to transform schools from a public investment to a private good, answerable not to the demands and values of a democratic society but to the imperatives of the marketplace. As the educational historian David Labaree rightly argues, public schools have been under attack in the last decade "not just because they are deemed ineffective but because they are public."[1] Right-wing efforts to disinvest in public schools as critical sites of teaching and learning and govern them according to corporate interests is obvious in the emphasis on standardized testing, the use of top-down curricular mandates, the influx of advertising in schools, the use of profit motives to "encourage" student performance, the attack on teacher unions and modes of pedagogy that stress rote learning and memorization...

The hidden curriculum is that testing be used as a ploy to de-skill teachers by reducing them to mere technicians, that students be similarly reduced to customers in the marketplace rather than as engaged, critical learners and that always underfunded public schools fail so that they can eventually be privatized. But there is an even darker side to the reforms initiated under the Bush administration and now used in a number of school systems throughout the country...

As the logic of the market and "the crime complex"[2] frame the field of social relations in schools, students are subjected to three particularly offensive policies, defended by school authorities and politicians under the rubric of school safety. First, students are increasingly subjected to zero-tolerance policies that are used primarily to punish, repress and exclude them. Second, they are increasingly absorbed into a "crime complex" in which security staff, using harsh disciplinary practices, now displace the normative functions teachers once provided both in and outside of the classroom.[3] Third, more and more schools are breaking down the space between education and juvenile delinquency, substituting penal pedagogies for critical learning and replacing a school culture that fosters a discourse of possibility with a culture of fear and social control...

Unfortunately, Obama has appointed as his secretary of education someone who actually embodies this utterly punitive, anti-intellectual, corporatized and test-driven model of schooling.

Barack Obama's selection of Arne Duncan for secretary of education does not bode well either for the political direction of his administration nor for the future of public education. Obama's call for change falls flat with this appointment, not only because Duncan largely defines schools within a market-based and penal model of pedagogy, but also because he does not have the slightest understanding of schools as something other than adjuncts of the corporation at best or the prison at worse...

Duncan, CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, presided over the implementation and expansion of an agenda that militarized and corporatized the third largest school system in the nation, one that is about 90 percent poor and nonwhite. Under Duncan, Chicago took the lead in creating public schools run as military academies, vastly expanded draconian student expulsions, instituted sweeping surveillance practices, advocated a growing police presence in the schools, arbitrarily shut down entire schools and fired entire school staffs. A recent report, "Education on Lockdown," claimed that partly under Duncan's leadership "Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has become infamous for its harsh zero tolerance policies. Although there is no verified positive impact on safety, these policies have resulted in tens of thousands of student suspensions and an exorbitant number of expulsions."[4] Duncan's neoliberal ideology is on full display in the various connections he has established with the ruling political and business elite in Chicago.[5]...

... In spite of what Duncan argues, the greatest threat to our children does not come from lowered standards, the absence of privatized choice schemes or the lack of rigid testing measures that offer the aura of accountability. On the contrary, it comes from a society that refuses to view children as a social investment, consigns 13 million children to live in poverty, reduces critical learning to massive testing programs, promotes policies that eliminate most crucial health and public services and defines rugged individualism through the degrading celebration of a gun culture, extreme sports and the spectacles of violence that permeate corporate controlled media industries. Students are not at risk because of the absence of market incentives in the schools. Young people are under siege in American schools because, in the absence of funding, equal opportunity and real accountability, far too many of them have increasingly become institutional breeding grounds for racism, right-wing paramilitary cultures, social intolerance and sexism.[13]...


[1] Cited in Alfie Kohn, "The Real Threat to American Schools," Tikkun (March-April 2001), p. 25. For an interesting commentary on Obama and his possible pick to head the education department and the struggle over school reform, see Alfie Kohn, "Beware School 'Reformers'," The Nation (December 29, 2008). Online: www.thenation.com/doc/20081229/kohn/print.

[2] This term comes form: David Garland, "The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society" (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

[3] For a brilliant analysis of the "governing through crime" complex, see Jonathan Simon, "Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear," (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2007).

[4] Advancement Project in partnership with Padres and Jovenes Unidos, Southwest Youth Collaborative, "Education on Lockdown: The Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track," (New York: Children & Family Justice Center of Northwestern University School of Law, March 24, 2005), p.31. On the broader issue of the effect of racialized zero tolerance policies on public education, see Christopher G. Robbins, "Expelling Hope: The Assault on Youth and the Militarization of Schooling" (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008). See also, Henry A. Giroux, "The Abandoned Generation" (New York: Palgrave, 2004).

[5] David Hursh and Pauline Lipman, "Chapter 8: Renaissance 2010: The Reassertion of Ruling-Class Power through Neoliberal Policies in Chicago" in David Hursh, "High-Stakes Testing and the Decline of Teaching and Learning" (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008)...

[13] Donna Gaines, "How Schools Teach Our Kids to Hate," Newsday (Sunday, April 25, 1999), p. B5...

There is more, much more, extensively documented.

You would think, with the economy of the nation crashing and burning, an advocate of the Chicago School of anything would have little creditability.

If the goal was anything but control, you might be right.  ¶ 10:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Et Tu, Klaatu?



The difference is so stark even the Editorial page of The New York Pravda noticed:

The remake of “The Day the Earth Stood Still” is a sentimentalized take on the 1951 classic. The new version has its uses, so see it. Then rent the original and watch it late at night — the way bleary-eyed adolescents did when it could be seen only on grainy broadcasts in the wee hours of the morning.

I compared the two earlier this month, watching the vintage version for the first time in at least 25 years. I was reminded of how deeply it had insinuated itself into the DNA of popular culture. I also thought of Norma Desmond, the fallen movie idol in “Sunset Boulevard,” who said of her spent career: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.”

Digital effects have revolutionized the monster, science-fiction and superhero genres, making the films larger than ever visually. But the same effects have whittled away at the acting space, making the movies smaller in the dramatic sense.

The minimalist — and altogether cool — effects in the 1951 film leave lots of room for the performers. Michael Rennie is aces as Klaatu, the brainy, handsome and thoroughly polite alien who threatens to eliminate every creature on the planet — kittens, puppies and cute little babies included — if earthlings become a danger to the galaxy.

Watching the movie as a middle-aged man, I saw what I lacked eyes to see as a 12-year-old. There is no shred of sentimentality in Rennie’s performance. He is a congenial exterminating angel, dropping round for tea to tell of horrors to come.

Rennie’s Klaatu is God-fearing, emotionally sophisticated, superior to but indistinguishable from the earthlings among whom he walks. That’s an open-minded characterization at the start of a decade dominated by red-baiting and fear of outlanders in general.

Keanu Reeves’s Klaatu is numbingly monotonic. He is emotionally underdeveloped, and suffers from a robotic flatness of affect. Instead, the scriptwriters gave him powers that are predictably demonstrated through pricey special effects that do not sustain dramatic momentum. With all this digital sleight of hand, the performers are reduced to the equivalent of bystanders at a fireworks show.

By making the new Klaatu emotionally naïve, the writers make him subject to earthling tears and cuddly puppy influences that would have cut no mustard with the Klaatu of old. This emotional vulnerability allows for a great deal of unjustified optimism about the human race’s ability to change its destructive behavior...

It gets worse. In the original, Klaatu was simply saying: look, we've made this race of police 'bots who react swiftly and sternly to unprovoked aggression in space. You cats had better mind your manners out there.

None of this inane prattle about "destroying the earth to save it" that's right out of the D.o'D. playbook. After all, it's our world. Global destruction was simply the bottom of the menu of things Gort could do if we insisted on being Asses in Space. You'll note Gort only takes out the weapons, not the soldiers, at first, and only two soldiers after they've killed Klaatu.

The differences in behavior are even more inane. In the new movie, ours is a liveable world the aliens want to preserve for "everyone"(?)- and the aliens want to go and sterilize it and repopulate it with "correct" lifeforms they've re-engineered derived from the original?

Why not let us sterilize it instead- if that's what we were going to do anyway?

Answer: Because it's not our world, any more than Iraq belongs to the Iraqis anymore...

But I digress. The original 1951 movie was a pop culture Molotov thrown at Allen Dulles' CIA, which was busy expanding the Invisible Empire with pre-emptive police action wars in Korea and VietNam. Some of the actors in the Day the Earth Stood Still were blacklisted during the McCarthy red scare.



The current movie is something else entirely, bankrolled and produced by a pseudo-environmental corporate wing of the same security industrial complex that feels entitled as Team Amerika, World Police, to destroy the Village to save it.

For themselves.  ¶ 9:27 AM 0 comments links to this post

  The Answer is "Follow the Money"



The question is Did Bush Sr. Kill Kennedy and Frame Nixon?. David Swanson reviews Russ Baker's latest, Family of Secrets:

Russ Baker's new book presents an account of the U.S. government that is both remarkably new and extensively documented. According to this account, George H. W. Bush, the father of the current president, devoted his career to secret intelligence work with the CIA many years before he became the CIA director, and the network of spies and petroleum plutocrats he began working with early on has played a powerful but hidden role in determining the direction of the U.S. government up to the current day.

New research and newly highlighted information assembled by Baker presents at least the strong possibility that Bush was involved in assassinating President Kennedy, and that Bush was involved in staging the Watergate break-in (and the break-in at Dan Ellsberg's psychiatrist's) with the purpose of having these break-ins exposed and the blame placed on President Nixon. In this account, those in on the get-Nixon plot included John Dean and Bob Woodward. While this retelling of history would make a certain Robert Redford movie look really, really silly, it would -- on the other hand -- make Woodward's performance during Watergate fit more coherently with everything he's known to have done before and since. It would also give new meaning to Dean's recent book title "Conservatives Without a Conscience." I would love to see either of these men's response to Baker's book...

Baker does not focus on Bush Jr.'s grandfather, Prescott Bush, and does not even mention his role in the plot to overthrow President Roosevelt in 1933 ( http://davidswanson.org/node/1337 ). Baker's focus is on Poppy, although Prescott and his anger toward Kennedy are in the background. It is not a completely new idea to suppose that Kennedy was killed because he angered the CIA and powerful Americans with business interests in Cuba. It is, as far as I know, new to show, as Baker extensively documents and then summarizes, that:

"Poppy Bush was closely tied to key members of the intelligence community including the deposed CIA head with a known grudge against JFK; he was also tied to Texas oligarchs who hated Kennedy's politics and whose wealth was directly threatened by Kennedy; this network was part of the military/intelligence elite with a history of using assassination as an instrument of policy.

"Poppy Bush was in Dallas on November 21 and most likely the morning of November 22. He hid that fact, he lied about knowing where he was, then he created an alibi based on a lead he knew was false. And he never acknowledged the closeness of his relationship with Oswald's handler George de Mohrenschildt.

"Poppy's business partner Thomas Devine met with de Mohrenschildt during that period, on behalf of the CIA.

"Poppy's eventual Texas running mate in the 1964 election, Jack Crichton, was connected to the military intelligence figures who led Kennedy's motorcade.

"Crichton and D. Harold Byrd, owner of the Texas School Book Depository building, were both connected to de Mohrenschildt -- and directly to each other through oil-business dealings.

"Byrd brought in the tenant that hired Oswald shortly before the assassination.

"Oswald got his job in the building through a friend of de Mohrenschildt's with her own intelligence connections -- including family ties to Allen Dulles."

You start to get a taste of the sort of case Baker builds. It's persuasive, but not conclusive. If you buy into the basic outlines of it, you come up against a history of American politics in which our top "elected" officials are not just chosen through a process openly corrupted by money and media and parties, but are also chosen through a process of covert ops...

The interesting thing about Baker's claims regarding Kennedy and Nixon is that they would suggest that the CIA actually succeeded at something, that -- in fact -- the CIA or members thereof managed to keep major secrets for decades...

This has seemed obvious. The mistakes the CIA have made all seem to reap a tidy profit. Follow the money and they don't seem mistakes at all for the people that end up holding the gold.

Russ Baker elaborates on this "Nixon made a deal with the Devil" theme here:

...Why did Richard Nixon repeatedly promote George H.W. Bush (Bush Sr., or Poppy, as he is known) for important political posts despite both his apparent lack of qualifications and Nixon's own privately-expressed doubts about Bush's mettle? Why, even when Nixon became so wary of so many of his appointees that he fired cabinet members en masse, did he continue to be solicitous of Bush Sr.?

Nixon named the obscure Poppy to be UN ambassador in 1970 and then chairman of the national Republican Party in 1972. Even earlier, in 1968, Nixon actually put Bush Sr. on his list of vice presidential running mate prospects – this not long after Poppy was first elected to the House of Representatives. Similarly, Nixon's replacement, Gerald Ford, sent Poppy off as envoy to China and later made him CIA director, though by most accounts he was an odd choice for both of these sensitive jobs.

In short, in the Nixon era, Poppy Bush was the man who always seemed to be around, yet also managed to stay out of the main story. Digging way back, I came upon evidence that Nixon felt beholden to the Bush family and to the interests it represented. The reason: Bush Sr.'s father, Senator Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush, apparently helped launch Nixon's political career in 1946 as a way of destroying his first opponent, liberal congressman Jerry Voorhis, an outspoken critic of the excesses of bankers and financiers. Given the current Wall Street disasters, and the role of Prescott's grandson in enabling them, this revelation has obvious contemporary relevance.

Once I understood this special Nixon-Bush relationship, which is basically missing from all major Nixon biographies, I began to ask what exactly Poppy had been doing during the Watergate years. This led to the discovery that the Watergate break-in was almost certainly just one of a series of illegal acts that were engineered by people around Nixon, but not by Nixon himself. Far from defending Nixon's interests, these people had been privately frustrated with him on a variety of fronts and were now looking to take him down.

Simply put, once Nixon attained the presidency, he struggled for his independence, and began doing things that displeased his former sponsors...

Where have I heard this before? Oh, yes:

...After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.  ¶ 9:43 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Ask the Correct Questions

Cryptogon is so inclined: Israel Attacks Gaza, Hundreds Dead: Who Made a Killing?

What did the Benazir Bhutto assassination and the latest Israeli attacks in Gaza have in common?

There was a strong move higher on gold immediately preceding both incidents, which were spaced one year apart, to the day.

Remember how gold moved before Bhutto was killed?

Check out this Bloomberg piece from yesterday (a day before the Israeli attack):

Gold prices rose the most in a week as mounting tensions in the Middle East and South Asia boosted the appeal of the precious metal as a haven.

Palestinian militants yesterday launched their biggest rocket attack on southern Israel in at least six months after a truce expired Dec. 19. Pakistani troops are being diverted from tribal areas near Afghanistan to the border with India, the Associated Press reported. Gold gained 4 percent this week.

“The only possible explanation for gold’s gains are the geopolitical tension in Gaza and in India and Pakistan,” said Leonard Kaplan, the president of Prospector Asset Management in Evanston, Illinois.

Gold futures for February delivery climbed $23.20, or 2.7 percent, to $871.20 an ounce on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange, the biggest gain for a most-active contract since Dec. 17. The metal is up 6.4 percent this month.

Yes, this is a Coincidence, but you might want to see, They Made a Killing: The Use of Knowledge of Covert Operations in the Stock Market, anyway, to see how this has worked in the past. Obviously, the Gaza attack isn’t a covert operation, but the point is the same...

Obviously they showed him the door because he was too crude, saying in public what the rest only said in private, but Rummy's chummies are still investing in terrorism futures, a niche of the Market that's still as profitable as ever.  ¶ 12:48 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Hookworm



The Cowboy wonders why no one has arrested Karl Rove for his latest venture- theatening Connell with death, and delivering on it.

One assumes Rove continues with his operations because some powerful people find them very useful.

Also, since he buried most of them, Rove knows where all the bodies are- and who paid to plant them.

He doubtless has massive evidence that could imcriminate most of Poppy's crime family- and others- and ways to disseminate it if he should go down.  ¶ 8:40 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Deafening the Playing Field



Nonlethally, of course:

...After the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, the United States took action by imposing a strict arms embargo on China. So how, exactly, was it legal for a U.S. company to sell China a powerful tool to incapacitate and injure protesters in advance of the Olympic Games in Beijing?

Reporting from a Beijing police equipment expo in April, journalist David Hambling noticed a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) produced by California-based American Technology Corporation (ATC) on prominent display. The LRAD works by emitting from a dish high-energy acoustic waves that are said to be, at close proximity, louder than a jet engine. It is capable of reaching 150 decibels, enough to incite panic, inflict pain, and even cause hearing loss among large crowds...

The country most likely to produce weapons of mass destruction that might be used against Americans is Amerika.

Of course, they were used here, too, but the Company probably just gave them to Dear Leader's BFF.  ¶ 9:33 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Who needs a taser when you have a phaser?



via Cryptogon:

The research arm of the US Department of Justice is working on two portable non-lethal weapons that inflict pain from a distance using beams of laser light or microwaves, with the intention of putting them into the hands of police to subdue suspects.

The two devices under development by the civilian National Institute of Justice both build on knowledge gained from the Pentagon’s controversial Active Denial System (ADS) - first demonstrated in public last year, which uses a 2-metre beam of short microwaves to heat up the outer layer of a person’s skin and cause pain...

The NIJ’s laser weapon has been dubbed Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response - PHaSR - and resembles a bulky rifle. It was created in 2005 by a US air force agency to temporarily dazzle enemies (see image, right), but the addition of a second, infrared laser makes it able to heat skin too.

The NIJ is testing the PHaSR in various scenarios, which may include prison situations as well as law enforcement.

The NIJ’s portable microwave-based weapon is less developed. Currently a tabletop prototype with a range of less than a metre, a backpack-sized prototype with a range of 15 metres will be ready next year, a spokesperson says.

The truly portable mini-ADS could prove the more useful, as microwaves penetrate clothing better than the infra-red beam, which is most effective on exposed skin. Although the spokesman says: “In LEC [Law Enforcement and Corrections] use there is always a little bit of skin to target...”

A new nonlethal weapon for the Man, and it most certainly will never be abused to parboil suspected perpetrators from a distance.



Certainly the nonlethal capabilities of this weapon must be why the two pictures I've found of it are from the German and the Chinese armies, because militaries are known for their tendency to invest time and money in weapons that won't hurt people.

The crime is, weapons manufacturers aren't just content to develop top secret devices for the United States military. Their lobbyists spend a lot of time and money to convince Congress to allow them to sell them to domestic police agencies and foreign militaries, too. It's what the Free Market is all about.  ¶ 4:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Strange v.3

It's nice to see the Companies are going to continue to run the Company, often with Saudi controlling interest:

The Wall Street Journal reported in its December 19 edition, that President-elect Barack Obama is slated to choose retired Vice Admiral Dennis Blair as his Director of National Intelligence (DNI).

Blair's choice as DNI would further cement Pentagon control over America's intelligence apparatus. Currently, Air Force Lt. General Michael V. Hayden, a former Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) is CIA Director while retired Vice Admiral and former chief at NSA, Mike McConnell is the current Director of the Office of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the chief of America's 16 spy agencies...

Agencies overseen by the ODNI include: the Central Intelligence Agency; Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency; Army Military Intelligence; Defense Intelligence Agency; Marine Corps Intelligence Activity; National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; National Reconnaissance Office; National Security Agency; Office of Naval Intelligence; the Department of Energy's Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence; the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence and Coast Guard Intelligence; the Department of Justice's Federal Bureau of Investigation and Drug Enforcement Administration; the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research; and the Treasury Department's Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.

Half of the agencies comprising the "Intelligence Community" over which the ODNI has statutory authority are embedded within the Pentagon. But this doesn't quite tell the tale. ODNI is headquartered in McClean, Virginia, the capitol of militarist corporate grift. It employs some 1,500 people, largely drawn from the world of private intelligence contractors where top secret and above security clearances are marketable commodities. As investigative journalist Tim Shorrock wrote in his essential study, Spies for Hire:

The bulk of this $50 billion [intelligence budget] is serviced by one hundred companies... The analogy between the intelligence industry and the military-industrial complex famously described by President Eisenhower in 1961 is fitting. By 2006, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 70 percent, or almost three-quarters, of the intelligence budget was spent on contracts. That astounding figure...means that the vast majority of the money spent by the Intelligence Community is not going into building an expert cadre within government but to creating a secret army of analysts and action officers inside the private sector. (Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008, pp. 12-13)

Among the firms embedded at ODNI are corporate heavy-hitters such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Booz Allen Hamilton and SAIC. A glance at the Project on Government Oversight's Federal Contractor Misconduct Database (FCMD) find all four firms prominently on display...

Blair served as the President of the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), which describes itself as "a non-profit corporation that administers three federally funded research and development centers to provide objective analyses of national security issues." However, according to the Journal,

he didn't recuse himself from involvement in a study of a contract for the F-22 fighter jet. At the time, he was sitting on the board of a subcontractor on that program, EDO Corp. The inspector general found in a 2006 report that Mr. Blair violated the institute's conflict-of-interest standards but didn't influence the outcome for the study. Mr. Blair resigned from IDA over the matter, and he also stepped down from the EDO board. (Siobhan Gorman, "Obama Picks Military Man, Blair, as Top Spymaster," The Wall Street Journal, December 19, 2008)


Sounds like more "change" from the "change president" to me! But other conflicts of interest are more troubling.

Iridium Satellite LLC, is a privately held firm based in Bethesda, Maryland and is one of a nexus of companies that have extensive contracts with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the ultra-spooky outfit that designs and flies America's fleet of military spy satellites. As ODNI, Blair would oversee NRO operations. As Tim Shorrock reported,

With an estimated $8 billion annual budget, the largest in the IC, contractors control about $7 billion worth of business at NRO, giving the spy satellite industry the distinction of being the most privatized part of the Intelligence Community (Spies for Hire, op. cit., p. 16)

Iridium, according to its website, maintains a "constellation" of "66 low-earth orbiting (LEO), cross-linked satellites operating as a fully meshed network and supported by multiple in-orbit spares. It is the largest commercial satellite constellation in the world..."

But what Admiral Blair and other Iridium board members are not likely to trumpet during Senate hearings, USA Today reported in 2003,

In an odd twist, the new Iridium is 24% owned by an investment firm controlled by Prince Khalid bin Abdullah bin Abdulrahman of Saudi Arabia.

The prince used to own a minority chunk of the old Iridium in partnership with the Saudi Binladen Group, the company run by Osama bin Laden's family. So in a way, some of the money that gave a start to the world's most notorious terrorist partly funded a communications system helping the U.S. military blast Saddam's army. Now that's globalization. (Kevin Maney, "Remember those 'Iridium's going to fail' jokes? Prepare to eat your hat," USA Today, April 9, 2003)

Depending on one's point of view there's nothing odd at all, just business as usual!

The company's board of directors include, among others, Chairman of Iridium Holdings LLC, Dan Colussy, former CEO of United Nuclear Corporation and Chairman and Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the defunct Pan American World Airlines. According to William Blum's definitive account, "Pan Am has a long history of collaboration with the CIA." Dennis Blair. Alvin B. "Buzzy" Krongard, the former Chairman of the Board of the investment banking firm Alex Brown Incorporated and Executive Director of the CIA. Steven Pfeiffer, a senior partner and Chair of the Executive Committee of the high-powered law firm of Fulbright & Jaworski. Tom Ridge, the former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and two-term Governor of Pennsylvania. Lest we forget, amongst Ridge's other "accomplishments" was his 1999 signing of a death warrant for framed-up journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, while Jamal's case was on appeal.

Pretty "smart" company Blair keeps! Which just goes to prove, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!

  ¶ 3:33 PM 1 comments links to this post

  You had to be there

Tom Tomorrow does the highlights of 2008:


  ¶ 2:49 PM 0 comments links to this post

  An Unconventional Warfare Christmas



Antifascist Calling:

On December 13, the whistleblowing website Wikileaks did investigative- and citizen journalists a great service by publishing [.pdf] the Army Special Operations Forces FM 3-05.130, titled Unconventional Warfare.

Published in September 2008, the 248-page document though unclassified, is restricted "to U.S. Government agencies and their contractors only to protect technical or operational information from automatic dissemination under the International Exchange Program or by other means." The Department of the Army urges recipients to "destroy by any method that will prevent disclosure of contents or reconstruction of the document." Wikileaks has guaranteed that the disappearance of this critical primary source into the bowels of the Pentagon will not occur...

Now, I realiize the ephemeral and changing nature of the Web- to say nothing of the Pentagon's desire to control what you read- makes it quite likely this link will disappear. If you'd like a copy of this interesting field manual, feel free to email me for it.

It's nothing you didn't already know, it's just amusing to see it written out in an Army field manual.

And Merry Christmas!  ¶ 8:25 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Silent Night for the Repo Men

It can't happen here, only in Britain, right:

The government has been accused of trampling on individual liberties by proposing wide-ranging new powers for bailiffs to break into homes and to use “reasonable force” against householders who try to protect their valuables.

Under the regulations, bailiffs for private firms would for the first time be given permission to restrain or pin down householders. They would also be able to force their way into homes to seize property to pay off debts, such as unpaid credit card bills and loans.

The government, which wants to crack down on people who evade debts, says the new powers would be overseen by a robust industry watchdog. However, the laws are being criticised as the latest erosion of the rights of the householder in his own home.

“These laws strip away tried and tested protections that make a person’s home his castle, and which have stood for centuries,” said Paul Nicolson, chairman of the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust, a London-based welfare charity. “They could clearly lead to violent confrontations and undermine fundamental liberties...”

...It is claimed these powers are already abused. In one case, an 89-year-old grandmother returned home to find a bailiff sitting in her chair having drawn up a list of her possessions. He was pursuing a parking fine owed by her son, who did not even live at the address.

  ¶ 1:41 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Take a Walk on the Wild Side

Imagine.  ¶ 10:22 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Christians In Action

Jesse Ventura tells some really interesting stories.  ¶ 4:33 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Shoes for Royalty

Chris Floyd deconstructs the motivation behind the shoes and the silence of the lambs.

Since his site goes down regularly due to frequent attacks, I've reproduced parts of it it here, but visit the original for the links:

...We've all had good fun with the image of George W. Bush dodging the shoes flung at him by an angry Iraqi journalist this weekend – who rightly denounced the Crawford Caligula as a "dog" and a killer of Iraqi innocents – but now, as As'ad AbuKhalil notes, a more serious question arises: what will happen to Muntathar al Zaidi, the correspondent for Baghdadiyah Television, who, alone of all the journalists Bush has seen in the past eight years, had the courage to call him the murderer that he is?

After flinging the shoes at Bush – who ducked behind the protective hand of his puppet, Iraqi PM Nouri al Maliki – Zaidi was set upon by Iraqi security forces, who dragged him into a nearby room, where his cries could be heard for several minutes, as McClatchy reports. Later, a reporter for a television station run by Maliki's party said that Zaidi had been kicked and beaten until “he was crying like a woman," the New York Times reports. He's now being held in one of the Green Zone government's notorious prisons where the local goon squads, having learned from two stern masters – the Bush Family's old protégé Saddam Hussein and Bush's very own handcrafted torture program – subject detainees to horrible abuses. Zaidi's employers, who are based in Cairo, have called for his release, and up to 100 lawyers from across the Arab world have offered to defend him.

The incident has been played down in most of the corporate American press – especially Zaidi's motivation. The New York Times noted only that he had "bad feelings about the coalition forces," but of course gave no reasons why he might have such feelings. It's the same old "motiveless malignancy" that we are told drives every critic of American power – they are just "evil," or "extreme" or "unhinged," etc.; their reactions never have the slightest thing to do with U.S. policy. Yet McClatchy, as usual, digs deeper and reports that Zaidi had been especially affected by the American bombing of the thickly populated civilian areas of Baghdad's Sadr City during one of the brutal pacification operations of the "surge" earlier this year. As Juan Cole notes:

"The frequent US bombing of civilian Iraqi cities that are already under US military occupation has been one of the most under-reported stories of the Iraq War."

It has indeed. It is virtually an un-reported story in the mainstream press. This savage air campaign (a flagrant war crime, by the way; but of course in these days of "continuity," no one cares about that) was a key component of what Barack Obama has called the "success beyond our wildest dreams" of Bush's "surge" – along with the U.S. death squad operations that Establishment court scribe Bob Woodward was allowed to reveal earlier this year. Meanwhile, that "wild success" – which engendered a sense of "triumphalism" among Bush's entourage on the trip to Baghdad, the NY Times reports – has produced such a peaceful, stable situation that Bush had to sneak into Iraq's capital city (having sneaked out of America's capital city), where he was humiliated before the entire world…. more than five full years after he proclaimed "Mission accomplished." (If this is the type of "wild success" Obama envisions for his own promised Bush-like surge in Afghanistan, then the prez-elect better prepare himself for a taste of shoe leather on one of his future visits to Kabul, as one of our commenters here astutely noted yesterday.)

...But you know what? Good American Liberals will tell you that Zaidi should be punished severely for his heinous crime...

...Whenever a liberal "of impeccable credentials" shouts "long prison sentence!" I reach for my deconstruction toolkit. First, a rhetorical question: Should Marylin Klinghoffer, of Achille Lauro fame, have gone to jail for a rather long time after she spat in the faces of the terrorists who murdered her husband? After all, no one wants to make light of or license the physical assault on any man, no matter how much he's deservedly hated. This is not how we do justice, unless we're in favor of something tending toward anarchy, or fascism....

Perlstein speaks from the gut. His insistence on a long prison sentence is visceral. He feels violated by a bit of lese majeste, a touch of desacralization, and a pinch of blasphemy. The sentiment behind it is reflexive deference to authority. Many Americans just can't shake their royalist instincts. I see it in the classroom and on campus every day. I see it in sidewalk demos -- my working definition of a royal subject is someone who demonstrates against the war on the sidewalk but takes over the whole fucking street for the Annual fire department parade. I see it in the blind worship for the military. I see it every four years when the bloke-in-chief moves into his new quarters and it's Lady Diana getting married all over again (or buried again, depending on your political affiliation). The horses, the cannons, the flybys, the pageantry, the gravitas of Tom Brokaw. When you've been brainwashed with that sort of crap all your life, it's awfully tough throwing your Rockports at Dear Leader.

That last sentence is why one of the best analysts of our foreign policy and its blowback will never reach the main$tream, and why Chris Floyd's is one of the most targeted sites for Company trolls and hackers in cyberspace.  ¶ 6:55 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Not Troops, "Advisors"

Not "combat soldiers" or "warfighters":

...combat troops, defined by the military as those whose primary mission is to engage the enemy with lethal force, will have to be out of Iraqi cities by June 30, 2009, the deadline under a recently approved status-of-forces agreement between the United States and Iraq.

The long answers open up some complicated, sleight-of-hand responses to military and political problems facing President-elect Barack Obama.

Even though the agreement with the Iraqi government calls for all American combat troops to be out of the cities by the end of June, military planners are now quietly acknowledging that many will stay behind as renamed “trainers” and “advisers” in what are effectively combat roles. In other words, they will still be engaged in combat, just called something else...

Obama might end the War by renaming it a Police Action, but that's too Cold War Retro. He might call it Humanitarian Aid, or maybe even rename the Marines the Peace Corps. They're equiped with guns, and depleted uranium munitions, but to educate the Iraqia and Afghanis.  ¶ 10:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

  On the Longest Night, a Question

If the Detroit CEOs can't fly in corporate jets, why should the robber barons of Wall Street be able to?

Happy Solstice. The days grow longer and the nights shorter from here.  ¶ 10:30 PM 2 comments links to this post

  Mission Creep

There are some ex-Bu$hies who are pretending to wonder what they have wrought.

An ex-ambassador for counter-narcotics in Afghanistan and deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement affairs, Thomas A. Schweich:

We no longer have a civilian-led government. It is hard for a lifelong Republican and son of a retired Air Force colonel to say this, but the most unnerving legacy of the Bush administration is the encroachment of the Department of Defense into a striking number of aspects of civilian government. Our Constitution is at risk.

President-elect Barack Obama's selections of James L. Jones, a retired four-star Marine general, to be his national security adviser and, it appears, retired Navy Adm. Dennis C. Blair to be his director of national intelligence present the incoming administration with an important opportunity -- and a major risk. These appointments could pave the way for these respected military officers to reverse the current trend of Pentagon encroachment upon civilian government functions, or they could complete the silent military coup d'etat that has been steadily gaining ground below the radar screen of most Americans and the media.

While serving the State Department in several senior capacities over the past four years, I witnessed firsthand the quiet, de facto military takeover of much of the U.S. government. The first assault on civilian government occurred in faraway places -- Iraq and Afghanistan -- and was, in theory, justified by the exigencies of war.

The White House, which basically let the Defense Department call the budgetary shots, vastly underfunded efforts by the State Department, the Justice Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development to train civilian police forces, build functioning judicial systems and provide basic development services to those war-torn countries. For example, after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Justice Department and the State Department said that they needed at least 6,000 police trainers in the country. Pentagon officials told some of my former staffers that they doubted so many would be needed. The civilians' recommendation "was quickly reduced to 1,500 [trainers] by powers-that-be above our pay grade," Gerald F. Burke, a retired major in the Massachusetts State Police who trained Iraqi cops from 2003 to 2006, told Congress last April. Just a few hundred trainers ultimately wound up being fielded, according to Burke's testimony.

Until this year, the State Department received an average of about $40 million a year for rule-of-law programs in Afghanistan, according to the department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs -- in stark contrast to the billions that the Pentagon got to train the Afghan army. Under then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Defense Department failed to provide even basic security for the meager force of civilian police mentors, rule-of-law advisers and aid workers from other U.S. agencies operating in Afghanistan and Iraq, driving policymakers to turn to such contracting firms as Blackwater Worldwide. After having set the rest of the U.S. government up for failure, military authorities then declared that the other agencies' unsuccessful police-training efforts required military leadership and took them over -- after brutal interagency battles at the White House.

The result of letting the Pentagon take such thorough charge of the programs to create local police forces is that these units, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, have been unnecessarily militarized -- producing police officers who look more like militia members than ordinary beat cops. These forces now risk becoming paramilitary groups, well armed with U.S. equipment, that could run roughshod over Iraq and Afghanistan's nascent democracies once we leave.

Or consider another problem with the rising influence of the Pentagon: the failure to address the ongoing plague of poppy farming and heroin production in Afghanistan. This fiasco was in large part the result of the work of non-expert military personnel, who discounted the corrosive effects of the Afghan heroin trade on our efforts to rebuild the country and failed to support civilian-run counter-narcotics programs. During my tenure as the Bush administration's anti-drug envoy to Afghanistan, I also witnessed JAG officers hiring their own manifestly unqualified Afghan legal "experts," some of whom even lacked law degrees, to operate outside the internationally agreed-upon, Afghan-led program to bring impartial justice to the people of Afghanistan. This resulted in confusion and contradiction...

Obviously this man does not understand exactly what the real objectives of the Fourth Branch of government really are. But let us continue, marveling at the Magoo-like vision this ex-ambassador and law enforcement official has:

...One can also see the Pentagon's growing muscle in the recent creation of the U.S. military command for Africa, known as Africom. This new command supposedly has a joint civilian-military purpose: to coordinate soft power and traditional hard power to stop al-Qaeda and its allies from gaining a foothold on the continent. But Africom has gotten a chilly reception in post-colonial Africa. Meanwhile, U.S. competitors such as China are pursuing large African development projects that are being welcomed with open arms. Since the Bush administration has had real successes with its anti-AIDS and other health programs in Africa, why exactly do we need a military command there running civilian reconstruction, if not to usurp the efforts led by well-respected U.S. embassies and aid officials?

And, of course, I need not even elaborate on the most notorious effect of the military's growing reach: the damage that the military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and such military prisons as Abu Ghraib have done to U.S. credibility around the world.

But these initial military takeovers of civilian functions all took place a long distance from home. "We are in a war, after all," Ronald Neumann, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, told me by way of explaining the military's huge role in that country -- just before the Pentagon seemingly had him removed in 2007 because of his admirable efforts to balance military and civilian needs. (I heard angry accounts of the Pentagon's role in Neumann's "retirement" at the time from knowledgeable diplomats, one of them very senior.) But our military forces, in a bureaucratic sense, soon marched on Washington itself.

As military officers sought to take over the role played by civilian development experts abroad, Pentagon bureaucrats quietly populated the National Security Council and the State Department with their own personnel (some civilians, some consultants, some retired officers, some officers on "detail" from the Pentagon) to ensure that the Defense Department could keep an eye on its rival agencies. Vice President Cheney, himself a former secretary of defense, and his good friend Rumsfeld ensured the success of this seeding effort by some fairly forceful means. At least twice, I saw Cheney staffers show up unannounced at State Department meetings, and I heard other State Department officials grumble about this habit. The Rumsfeld officials could play hardball, sometimes even leaking to the press the results of classified meetings that did not go their way in order to get the decisions reversed. After I got wind of the Pentagon's dislike for the approved interagency anti-drug strategy for Afghanistan, details of the plan quickly wound up in the hands of foreign countries sympathetic to the Pentagon view. I've heard other, similarly troubling stories about leaks of classified information to the press.

Many of Cheney's and Rumsfeld's cronies still work at the Pentagon and elsewhere. Rumsfeld's successor, Robert M. Gates, has spoken of increasing America's "soft power," its ability to attract others by our example, culture and values, but thus far, this push to reestablish civilian leadership has been largely talk and little action. Gates is clearly sincere about chipping away at the military's expanding role, but many of his subordinates are not.

The encroachment within America's borders continued with the military's increased involvement in domestic surveillance and its attempts to usurp the role of the federal courts in reviewing detainee cases. The Pentagon also resisted ceding any authority over its extensive intelligence operations to the first director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte -- a State Department official who eventually gave up his post to Mike McConnell, a former Navy admiral. The Bush administration also appointed Michael V. Hayden, a four-star Air Force general, to be the director of the CIA. National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley saw much of the responsibility for developing and implementing policy on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- surely the national security adviser's job -- given to Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, Bush's new "war czar." By 2008, the military was running much of the national security apparatus.

The Pentagon opened a southern front earlier this year when it attempted to dominate the new Merida Initiative, a promising $400 million program to help Mexico battle drug cartels. Despite the admirable efforts of the federal drug czar, John P. Walters, to keep the White House focused on the civilian law-enforcement purpose of the Merida Initiative, the military runs a big chunk of that program as well.

Now the Pentagon has drawn up plans to deploy 20,000 U.S. soldiers inside our borders by 2011, ostensibly to help state and local officials respond to terrorist attacks or other catastrophes. But that mission could easily spill over from emergency counterterrorism work into border-patrol efforts, intelligence gathering and law enforcement operations -- which would run smack into the Posse Comitatus Act, the long-standing law restricting the military's role in domestic law enforcement. So the generals are not only dominating our government activities abroad, at our borders and in Washington, but they also seem to intend to spread out across the heartland of America.

If President-elect Obama wants to reverse this trend, he must take four steps -- and very quickly:

1. Direct -- or, better yet, order -- Gates, Jones, Blair and the other military leaders in his Cabinet to rid the Pentagon's lower ranks of Rumsfeld holdovers whose only mission is to increase the power of the Pentagon.

2. Turn Gates's speeches on the need to promote soft power into reality with a massive transfer of funds from the Pentagon to the State Department, the Justice Department and USAID.

3. Put senior, respected civilians -- not retired or active military personnel -- into key subsidiary positions in the intelligence community and the National Security Council.

4. Above all, he should let his appointees with military backgrounds know swiftly and firmly that, under the Constitution, he is their commander, and that he will not tolerate the well-rehearsed lip service that the military gave to civilian agencies and even President Bush over the past four years.

In short, he should retake the government before it devours him and us -- and return civilian-led government to the people of the United States.

He should. In fact, he may even pretend to do so. But if he wants to live with the Praetorians, he won't. They work for the real Empire, and it's not run from the Oval Office.

Obama was only allowed to be elected because the military-industrial complex hasn't the slightest idea how to harness a civilian workforce, and it realizes it. Oh, they know all about slave labor. But slave labor everywhere can't produce the industrial wealth it takes to give those who would rule what they want.  ¶ 6:20 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Company Hearts Small Airplanes

Brad Blog:

...The Akron Beacon Journal is reporting that the private plane of the GOP's highly-placed "IT guru" Mike Connell's went down in Lake Township, Ohio on Friday evening. Connell was killed in the crash and is reported to have been the only person on board. There are no reports of anyone on the ground being hurt, though his plane crashed in a residential neighborhood.

Connell is a familiar name to readers of The BRAD BLOG as a key witness in the King-Lincoln v. Blackwell lawsuit regarding fraud in the 2004 Presidential Election in Ohio. That recently revived, long-standing lawsuit led to Connell's recent deposition on November 3, 2008, the day before this year's general election. According to plaintiff's lead attorney Cliff Arnebeck in July, a tipster had warned that Connell had been threatened by Karl Rove, as The BRAD BLOG reported at the time, in an attempt to intimidate him into "taking the fall" for Ohio election fraud not long after a motion was filed to lift the stay in that case.

Connell had been memorably described as a "high IQ Forrest Gump", by the attorneys for the plaintiffs in the Ohio fraud case, for his apparent penchant at the scene of "every single crime" from Florida 2000 to Ohio 2004 to the network firewall on a number of key Congressional committees to the case of the missing White House emails...

In late September, the federal judge in the Ohio case agreed to lift the stay, and in late October he compelled Connell to give a deposition to plaintiff attorneys on the Monday before the Tuesday general election.

Connell had been served with a subpoena to appear in the federal courtroom in Ohio at the same College Park, MD airport where his single engine plane reportedly took off from last night, on his final solo flight...

  ¶ 7:12 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Strange? Yes We Con!

Frank Rich on driving with our eyes closed:

...Madoff, of course, made up everything. When he turned himself in, he reportedly declared that his business was “all just one big lie.” (The man didn’t call his 55-foot yacht “Bull” for nothing.) As Brian Williams of NBC News pointed out, the $50 billion thought to have vanished is roughly three times as much as the proposed Detroit bailout. And no one knows how it happened, least of all the federal regulators charged with policing him and protecting the public. If Madoff hadn’t confessed — for reasons that remain unclear — he might still be rounding up new victims.

There is a moral to be drawn here, and it’s not simply that human nature is unchanging and that there always will be crooks, including those in high places. Nor is it merely that Wall Street regulation has been a joke. Of what we’ve learned about Madoff so far, the most useful lesson can be gleaned from how his smart, well-heeled clients routinely characterized the strategy that generated their remarkably steady profits. As The Wall Street Journal noted, they “often referred to it as a ‘black box.’ ”

In the investment world “black box” is tossed around to refer to a supposedly ingenious financial model that is confidential or incomprehensible or both. Most of us know the “black box” instead as that strongbox full of data that is retrieved (sometimes) after a plane crash to tell the authorities what went wrong. The only problem is that its findings arrive too late to save the crash’s victims. The hope is that the information will instead help prevent the next disaster.

The question in the aftermath of the Madoff calamity is this: Why do we keep ignoring what we learn from the black boxes being retrieved from crash after crash in our economic meltdown? The lesson could not be more elemental. If there’s a mysterious financial model producing miraculous returns, odds are it’s a sham — whether it’s an outright fraud, as it apparently is in Madoff’s case, or nominally legal, as is the case with the Wall Street giants that have fallen this year.

Wall Street’s black boxes contained derivatives created out of whole cloth, deriving their value from often worthless subprime mortgages. The enormity of the gamble went undetected not only by investors but by the big brains at the top of the firms, many of whom either escaped (Merrill Lynch’s E. Stanley O’Neal) or remain in place (Citigroup’s Robert Rubin) after receiving obscene compensation for their illusory short-term profits and long-term ignorance.

There has been no punishment for many of those who failed to heed this repeated lesson. Quite the contrary. The business magazine Portfolio, writing in mid-September about one of the world’s biggest insurance companies, observed that “now that A.I.G is battling to survive, it is its black box that may save it yet.” That box — stuffed with “accounting or investments so complex and arcane that they remain unknown to most investors” — was so huge that Washington might deem it “too big to fail.”

Sure enough — and unlike its immediate predecessor in collapse, Lehman Brothers — A.I.G. was soon bailed out to the tune of $123 billion. Most of that also disappeared by the end of October. But not before A.I.G. executives were caught spending $442,000 on a weeklong retreat to a California beach resort.

There are more black boxes still to be pried open, whether at private outfits like Madoff’s or at publicly traded companies like General Electric, parent of the opaque GE Capital Corporation, the financial services unit that has been the single biggest contributor to the G.E. bottom line in recent years. But have we yet learned anything? Incredibly enough, as we careen into 2009, the very government operation tasked with repairing the damage caused by Wall Street’s black boxes is itself a black box of secrecy and impenetrability.

Last week ABC News asked 16 of the banks that have received handouts from the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program the same two direct questions: How have you used that money, and how much have you spent on bonuses this year? Most refused to answer.

Congress can’t get the answers either. Its oversight panel declared in a first report this month that the Treasury is doling out billions “without seeking to monitor the use of funds provided to specific financial institutions.” The Treasury prefers instead to look at “general metrics” indicating the program’s overall effect on the economy. Well, we know what the “general metrics” tell us already: the effect so far is nil. Perhaps if we were let in on the specifics, we’d start to understand why.

In its own independent attempt to penetrate the bailout, the Government Accountability Office learned that “the standard agreement between Treasury and the participating institutions does not require that these institutions track or report how they plan to use, or do use, their capital investments.” Executives at all but two of the bailed-out banks told the G.A.O. that the “money is fungible,” so they “did not intend to track or report” specifically what happens to the taxpayers’ cash.

Nor is there any serious accounting for executive pay at these seminationalized companies. As Amit Paley of The Washington Post reported, a last-minute, one-sentence loophole added by the Bush administration to the original bailout bill gutted the already minimal restrictions on executive compensation. And so when Goldman Sachs, Henry Paulson’s Wall Street alma mater, says that it is not using public money to pay executives, we must take it on faith.

In the wake of the Madoff debacle, there are loud calls to reform the Securities and Exchange Commission, including from the president-elect. Under both Clinton and Bush, that supposed watchdog agency ignored repeated and graphic warnings of Madoff’s Ponzi scheme as studiously as Bush ignored Al Qaeda’s threats during the summer of 2001.

But fixing that one agency is no panacea. All the talk about restoring “confidence” and “faith” in capitalism will be worthless if we still can’t see what’s going on in the counting rooms. In his role as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Timothy Geithner, Barack Obama’s nominee for Treasury secretary, has been at the center of the action in the bailout’s black box, including the still-murky and conflicting actions (and nonactions) taken with Lehman and A.I.G. His confirmation hearings demand questions every bit as tough as those that were lobbed at the executives from Detroit’s Big Three.

On Friday, Geithner’s partner in bailout management, Paulson, asked Congress to give the Treasury the second half of the $700 billion bailout stash. But without transparency and accountability in Washington’s black box, as well as Wall Street’s, there will continue to be no trust in the system, no matter how many cops the S.E.C. puts on the beat...

I keep hearing the Oborg say that things won't change until there is Trust, Hope, and Unity, and Bipartisanship again.

I think they have it exactly backwards. The Administration has to provide good paying jobs doing public works to repair our infrastructure, develop renewable energy resources, and advance environmentally friendly peacetime technology if it wants to rescue the economy and create the Trust, Hope, and Unity again.

As long as there are Partisans looking to steal the farm there should be no Bipartisanship.

A feeling of Trust, Hope, and Unity without cause is what the cattle have on the way to the slaughterhouse.  ¶ 6:58 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Son of Agent Orange

I've had a request for more links about Roundup.



The Wikipedia entry is a good place to start. Since these entries have a bad habit of being changed- especially once the company trolls get wind of them- I'm going to exercise some Fair Use rights here:

...Glyphosate is an aminophosphonic analogue of the natural amino acid glycine and the name is a contraction of glycine, phospho- and -ate. It was first discovered to have herbicidal activity in 1970 by John E. Franz, a scientist who worked for the Monsanto company. Franz received the National Medal of Technology in 1987 from Ronald Reagan for his discoveries[2] and in 1990 received the Perkin Medal for Applied Chemistry.[3] Franz is an inductee of the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Glyphosate kills plants by inhibiting the enzyme 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase (EPSPS), which catalyzes the reaction of shikimate-3-phosphate (S3P) and phosphoenolpyruvate to form 5-enolpyruvyl-shikimate-3-phosphate (ESP). ESP is subsequently dephosphorylated to chorismate, which is an essential precursor in plants for the aromatic amino acids: phenylalanine, tyrosine and tryptophan.[4][5] These amino acids are used as building blocks in peptides and to produce secondary metabolites such as folates, ubiquinones and naphthoquinone. X-ray crystallographic studies of Glyphosate and EPSPS shows that glyphosate functions by occupying the binding site of the phosphoenol pyruvate, mimicking an intermediate state of the ternary enzyme substrates complex.[6] The shikimate pathway is not present in animals, which obtain aromatic amino acids from their diet. Glyphosate has also been shown to inhibit other plant enzymes[7][8] and also has been found to affect animal enzymes.[9]

Roundup has a United States Environmental Protection Agency‎ (EPA) Toxicity Class of III for oral and inhalation exposure,[10] but more recent studies suggest that IV is appropriate for oral, dermal, and inhalation exposure.[11] It has been rated as class I (Severe) for eye irritation, however.[11] A 2000 review of the available literature concluded that "under present and expected conditions of new use, there is no potential for Roundup herbicide to pose a health risk to humans".[11]

In 1996 Monsanto was accused of false and misleading advertising of glyphosate products, prompting a law suit by the New York State attorney general.[12]
On Fri Jan 20, 2007, Monsanto was convicted of false advertising of Roundup for presenting Roundup as biodegradable and claiming that it left the soil clean after use. Environmental and consumer rights campaigners brought the case in 2001 on the basis that glyphosate, Roundup's main ingredient, is classed as "dangerous for the environment" and "toxic for aquatic organisms" by the European Union. Monsanto France planned to appeal the verdict at the time. [13]

On two occasions the United States Environmental Protection Agency has caught scientists deliberately falsifying test results at research laboratories hired by Monsanto to study glyphosate.[14][15][16] In the first incident involving Industrial Biotest Laboratories, an EPA reviewer stated after finding "routine falsification of data" that it was "hard to believe the scientific integrity of the studies when they said they took specimens of the uterus from male rabbits".[17][18][19] In the second incident of falsifying test results in 1991, the owner of the lab (Craven Labs), and three employees were indicted on 20 felony counts, the owner was sentenced to 5 years in prison and fined 50,000 dollars, the lab was fined 15.5 million dollars and ordered to pay 3.7 million in restitution.[20][21][22] Craven laboratories performed studies for 262 pesticide companies including Monsanto.

Monsanto has stated that the studies have been repeated and that Roundup's EPA certification does not now use any studies from Craven Labs or IBT. Monsanto also claims that the Craven Labs investigation was started by the EPA after a pesticide industry task force discovered irregularities.[23]

Glyphosate itself is practically nontoxic by ingestion or by skin contact. The acute oral toxicity of Roundup is > 5,000 mg/kg in the rat.[24] It showed no toxic effects when fed to animals for 2 years, and only produced rare cases of reproductive effects when fed in extremely large doses to rodents and dogs. It has not demonstrated any increase in cancer rates in animal studies and is poorly absorbed in the digestive tract. Glyphosate has no significant potential to accumulate in animal tissue. [25][26]

Not only is glyphosate used as five different salts but commercial formulations of it contain surfactants, which vary in nature and concentration. As a result, human poisoning with this herbicide is not with the active ingredient alone but with complex and variable mixtures. [27]

A review of the toxicological data on Roundup shows that there are at least 58 studies of the effects of Roundup itself on a range of organisms.[28] This review concluded that "for terrestrial uses of Roundup minimal acute and chronic risk was predicted for potentially exposed nontarget organisms". It also concluded that there were some risks to aquatic organisms exposed to Roundup in shallow water. More recent research suggests glyphosate induces a variety of functional abnormalities in fetuses and pregnant rats.[29] Also in recent mammalian research, glyphosate has been found to interfere with an enzyme involved testosterone production in mouse cell culture[30] and to interfere with an estrogen biosynthesis enzyme in cultures of Human Placental cells.[31]

Studies have shown that the application of Roundup on wheat crops a week before harvesting results in higher glyphosate residue in the resulting grain and in the baked flour. [32]

The United States Environmental Protection Agency,[33] the EC Health and Consumer Protection Directorate, and the UN World Health Organization have all concluded that pure glyphosate is not carcinogenic. Opponents of glyphosate claim that Roundup has been found to cause genetic damage, citing Peluso et al.[34] The authors concluded that the damage was "not related to the active ingredient, but to another component of the herbicide mixture.

There is a reasonable correlation between the amount of Roundup ingested and the likelihood of serious systemic sequelae or death. Ingestion of >85 mL of the concentrated formulation is likely to cause significant toxicity in adults. Gastrointestinal corrosive effects, with mouth, throat and epigastric pain and dysphagia are common. Renal and hepatic impairment are also frequent and usually reflect reduced organ perfusion. Respiratory distress, impaired consciousness, pulmonary oedema, infiltration on chest x-ray, shock, arrythmias, renal failure requiring haemodialysis, metabolic acidosis and hyperkalaemia may supervene in severe cases. Bradycardia and ventricular arrhythmias are often present pre-terminally. Dermal exposure to ready-to-use glyphosate formulations can cause irritation and photo-contact dermatitis has been reported occasionally; these effects are probably due to the preservative Proxel (benzisothiazolin-3-one). Severe skin burns are very rare. Inhalation is a minor route of exposure but spray mist may cause oral or nasal discomfort, an unpleasant taste in the mouth, tingling and throat irritation. Eye exposure may lead to mild conjunctivitis, and superficial corneal injury is possible if irrigation is delayed or inadequate. [27]

Fish and aquatic invertebrates are more sensitive to Roundup than terrestrial organisms.[28] Glyphosate is generally less persistent in water than in soil, with 12 to 60 day persistence observed in Canadian pond water, yet persistence of over a year have been observed in the sediments of ponds in Michigan and Oregon.[10]
The EU classifies Roundup as R51/53 Toxic to aquatic organisms, may cause long-term adverse effects in the aquatic environment.[35]

Roundup is not registered for aquatic uses[36] and studies of its effects on amphibians indicate it is toxic to them.[37] Glyphosate formulations that are registered for aquatic use have been found to have negligible adverse effects on sensitive amphibians.[38]

When glyphosate comes into contact with the soil it can be rapidly bound to soil particles and be inactivated.[10] Unbound glyphosate can be degraded by bacteria.[39] Roundup has been shown to increase the disease rate in the crop following a sprayed crop, suggesting damaged soil flora. [40]
Low glyphosate concentrations can be found in many creeks and rivers in U.S. and Europe,[citation needed] and in the US glyphosate has been called "relatively persistent" by the EPA.[10]

The EU classifies Roundup as N - Dangerous for the environment [35]

In soils, half lives vary from as little as 3 days at a site in Texas, 141 days at a site in Iowa, to between 1 - 3 years in Swedish forest soils.[22] It appears that more northern sites have the longest soil persistences such as in Canada and Scandinavia.

However, the binding of glyphosate to particulates can be an advantage for the detoxification of industrial toxin-polluted streams containing a wide class of toxicants. Treatment of industrial wastewater using immobilized bacteria showed complete conversion of glyphosate to nontoxic aminomethylphosphonic acid.[41]

A recent study concluded that certain amphibians may be at risk from glyphosate use.[42] One study has shown an effect on growth and survival of earthworms.[43] The results of this study are in conflict with other data and has been criticized on methodological grounds.[28] In other studies nitrogen fixing bacteria have been impaired, and also crop plant susceptibility to disease has been increased.[44][45][46][47][48][49] [40]

Monsanto firmly denies any negative impact on anything, including wildlife, and has many studies it has funded to back up its position.[citation needed] They would also be quick to point out that any possible negative impact on earthworms and nitrogen fixing bacteria, etc., would be offset by greater yields[citation needed], which have not been proven, due to the elimination of weeds, and also would point to soil benefits from less mechanical cultivation of weeds by using Roundup and similar products...

An in-vitro study[50] has suggested glyphosate may have an effect on progesterone production in mammalian cells and affect mortality of placental cells in-vitro.[31] Whether these studies classify glyphosate as an endocrine disruptor is a matter of debate.

Some believe that in-vitro studies are insufficient, and are waiting to see if animal studies show a change in endocrine activity, since a change in a single cell line may not occur in an entire organism. Additionally, current in-vitro studies expose cell lines to concentrations orders of magnitude greater than would be found in real conditions, and through pathways that would not be experienced in real organism.

Others believe that in-vitro studies, particularly ones identifying not only an effect, but a chemical pathway, are sufficient evidence to classify glyphosate as an endocrine disruptor, on the basis that even small changes in endocrine activity can have lasting effects on an entire organism that may be difficult to detect through whole organism studies alone. Further research on the topic has been planned...

But doubtless not funded, except by Monsanto, which has already written up the results for you.

References

#1 US EPA 2000–2001 Pesticide Market Estimates Agriculture, Home and Garden
#2 Technology Administration Agency, US Department of Commerce
#3 Colby Stong, The Scientist 1990, 4(10):28
#4 Purdue University, Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture, Metabolic Plant Physiology Lecture notes, Aromatic amino acid biosynthesis, The shikimate pathway - synthesis of chorismate.
#5 Saccharomyces Genome Database - S. cerevisiae Pathway: chorismate biosynthesis
#6 E. Schönbrunn et al, Interaction of the herbicide glyphosate with its target enzyme 5-enolpyruvylshikimate 3-phosphate synthase in atomic detail, PNAS 2001,98:1376-1380
#7 (Su , L.Y. et al. 1992. The relationship of glyphosate treatment to sugar metabolism in sugarcane: New physiological insights. J. Plant Physiol. 140:168-173.)
#8 (Lamb, D.C. et al. 1998. Glyphosate is an inhibitor of plant cytochrome P450: Functional expression of Thlaspi arvensae cytochrome P45071B1/ reductase fusion protein in Escherichia coli. Biochem. Biophys. Res. Comm. 244:110114.)
#9 (Hietanen, E., K. Linnainmaa, and H. Vainio. 1983. Effects of phenoxy herbicides and glyphosate on the hepatic and intestinal biotransformation activities in the rat. Acta Pharma. et Toxicol. 53:103-112.)
#10 EPA ReRegistration Decision Fact Sheet for Glyphosate (EPA-738-F-93-011) 1993. [.pdf]
#11 Williams GM, Kroes R, Munro IC. (2000) Safety evaluation and risk assessment of the herbicide Roundup and its active ingredient, glyphosate, for humans. Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, 31 (2): 117-165. PMID 10854122.
#12 Attorney General of the State of New York. Consumer Frauds and Protection Bureau. Environmental Protection Bureau. 1996. In the matter of Monsanto Company, respondent. Assurance of discontinuance pursuant to executive law § 63(15). New York, NY, Nov
#13 Monsanto Fined in France for 'False' Herbicide Ads
#14 (US EPA Communications and Public Affairs 1991 Note to correspondents Washington DC Mar 1)
#15 (US EPA Communications and Public Affairs 1991 Press Advisory. EPA lists crops associated with pesticides for which residue and environmental fate studies were allegedly manipulated. Washington DC Mar 29)
#16 (U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Com. on Gov. Oper. 1984. Problems palgue the EPA pesticide registration activities. House Report 98-1147)
#17 (U.S. EPA 1978 Data validation. Memo from K LOcke, Toxicology Branch, to R Taylor, Registration Branch. Washington DC Aug 9)
#18 (U.S. EPA Office of pesticides and Toxic Substances 1983, Summary of the IBT review program. Washington D.C. July)
#19 Schneider, K. 1983. Faking it: The case against Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories. The Amicus Journal (Spring):14-26. Reproduced at Planetwaves
#20 (US Dept. of Justice. United States Attorney. Western District of Texas 1992. Texas laboratory, its president, 3 employees indicted on 20 felony counts in connection with pesticide testing. Austin TX Sept 29)
#21 (US EPA Communications, Education, And Public Affairs 1994 Press Advisory. Craven Laboratories, owner, and 14 employees sentenced for falsifying pesticide tests. Washington DC Mar 4)
#22 Glyphosate Factsheet (part 1 of 2) Caroline Cox / Journal of Pesticide Reform v.108, n.3 Fall98 rev.Oct00
#23 Backgrounder: Testing Fraud: IBT and Craven Labs, June 2005, Monsanto background paper on RoundUp [.pdf]
#24 Roundup PRO® Herbicide MSDS [.pdf]
#25 Extoxnet Pip - Glyphosate
#26 http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/glyphogen.pdf
#27 Glyphosate poisoning study by Bradberry SM, Proudfoot AT, Vale JA.for the National Poisons Information Service (Birmingham Centre) and West Midlands Poisons Unit, City Hospital, Birmingham, UK.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15862083
#28 JP Giesy, KR Solomon, S Dobson (2000). "Ecotoxicological Risk Assessment for Roundup Herbicide". Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology 167: 35-120
#29 Effect of the herbicide glyphosate on enzymatic activity...[Environ Res. 2001] - PubMed Result
#30 Walsh et al Roundup inhibits steroidogenesis by disrupting # steroidogenic acute regulatory (StAR) protein expression. Environ Health Perspect. 2000 108: 769–776.
#31 Richard et al, Differential Effects of Glyphosate and Roundup on Human Placental Cells and Aromatase, Environmental Health Perspectives Vol. 113, No.6, 716-720[.pdf]
#32 WHO Environmental health criteria # 159 http://www.inchem.org/documents/ehc/ehc/ehc159.htm#PartNumber:1
#33 US EPA Reregistration Eligibility Decision - Glyphosate [.pdf]
#34 Peluso M, Munnia A, Bolognesi C, Parodi S. Environ Mol Mutagen. 1998 31:55-9 PMID 9464316
#35 http://lscgw1.monsanto.com/esh/msdslib.nsf/2B20DAEB04E8631C0625689700650B45/$file/Roundup%20Ultra%203000-5059en-gb.pdf Roundup Material Safety Data sheet page 7, heading 16
#36 Monsanto Backgrounder 2005 Response to "The impact of insecticides and herbicides on the biodiversity and productivity of aquatic communities" [.pdf]
#37 Rick A. Relyea 2005 The impact of insecticides and herbicides on the biodiversity and productivity of aquatic communities Ecological Applications 15:618–627
#38 Wojtaszek et al Effects of vision herbicide on mortality, avoidance response, and growth of amphibian larvae in two forest wetlands Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry 23:832–842 2004 [.pdf]
#39 Balthazor, Terry M and Laurence Hallas (1986) Glyphosate-degrading microorganisms in industrial waste treatment biosystems. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 51:432-34.[.pdf]
#40 CROP ECOLOGY, MANAGEMENT & QUALITY published online 26 August 2005 by M. R. Fernandeza, F. Sellesa, D. Gehlb, R. M. DePauwa and R. P. Zentner.
#41 Adams, William, Laurence Hallas, and Michael Heitkamp. 1994. Microbes and their use to degrade N-phosphonomethylglycine in waste streams. United States Patent 5288635
#42 Bette Hileman. (2005) Common herbicide kills tadpoles. Chemical & Engineering News. Washington 83(15):11.
#43 (Springett & Gray 1992, Soil Biol. Biochem. 24 (12):1739-1744)
#44 (Santos & Flores 1995, Lett. Appl. Microbiol. 20:349-352)
#45 (Brammel & Higgins 1988, Can. J. Bot 66:1547-1555)
#46 (Johal & Rahe 1988, Molec. Plant Pathol. 32:267-281)
#47 (Mekwatanakarn & Sivassithamparam 1987, Biol. Fertil. Soils 5:175-180)
#48 (Kawate et al. 1997, Weed Sci. 45:739-743)
#49 (Bergvinson & Borden 1992, Can J. For. Res. 22:206-209)
#50 Walsh LP et al. Roundup inhibits steroidogenesis by disrupting steroidogenic acute regulatory (StAR) protein expression. Environ Health Perspect. 2000 Aug;108(8):769-76.
#51 ISU Weed Science Online - Are RR Weeds in Your Future II
#52 Glyphosate resistance is a reality that should scare some cotton growers into changing the way they do business
#53 More glyphosate resistant weeds
#54 Development and Characterization of a CP4 EPSPS-Based, Glyphosate-Tolerant Corn Event,G. R. Heck et al Crop Sci. 45:329-339 (2005).
#55 Molecular basis for the herbicide resistance of Roundup Ready crops, T. Funke et al, PNAS 2006 103:13010-13015
#56 Monsanto Company History
#57 USDA/APHIS Environmental Assessment - In response to Monsanto Petition 06-178-01p seeking a Determination of Non-regulated Status for + Roundup RReady2Yield Soybean MON 89788, OECD Unique Identifier MON-89788-1, U.S. Department of Agriculture Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service + Biotechnology Regulatory Services page 13 [.pdf]
#58 National Agriculture Statistics Service (2005) in Acreage eds. Johanns, M. & Wiyatt, S. D. 6 30, (U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Washington, DC). +
#59 Impact of glyphosate-tolerant soybean and glufosinate-tolerant corn production on herbicide losses in surface runoff. Shipitalo MJ, Malone RW, Owens LB. J Environ Qual. 2008 37(2):401-8 PMID 18268303
#60 http://www.chem.purdue.edu/courses/chm333/Roundup%20Article.pdf [.pdf]
#61 California Product/Label Database
#62 Glyphosate Roadside Vegetation Management Herbicide Fact Sheet [.pdf]
#63 New Super Strain of Coca Plant Stuns Anti-Drug Officials. Jeremy McDermott. The Scotsman (Scotland) 27 August 2004
#64 USDA National Agricultural Library, accessed 1 Nov 2007

Feel better now? I don't have time to reproduce all the links, so check on the Wikipedia site if you need them. To the correspondent that asserted "if the facts were out there, people would do something about this" I can only respond that the facts have been out there and published extensively for many years now.

They have shown themselves woefully unable to compete with corporate marketeering.

And the disasterous consequences of the action of Monsanto that wil reverberate across decades? We, our children, and our grandchildren will hear the lament "Who could have known?"  ¶ 9:09 AM 1 comments links to this post

  And the next head of the CIA was?

Cannonfire scoffs at the death of Deep Throat.  ¶ 9:03 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Business as usual

Paul Krugman says what everyone else in the main$tream has been avoiding:

The revelation that Bernard Madoff — brilliant investor (or so almost everyone thought), philanthropist, pillar of the community — was a phony has shocked the world, and understandably so. The scale of his alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme is hard to comprehend.

Yet surely I’m not the only person to ask the obvious question: How different, really, is Mr. Madoff’s tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?

The financial services industry has claimed an ever-growing share of the nation’s income over the past generation, making the people who run the industry incredibly rich. Yet, at this point, it looks as if much of the industry has been destroying value, not creating it. And it’s not just a matter of money: the vast riches achieved by those who managed other people’s money have had a corrupting effect on our society as a whole.

Let’s start with those paychecks. Last year, the average salary of employees in “securities, commodity contracts, and investments” was more than four times the average salary in the rest of the economy. Earning a million dollars was nothing special, and even incomes of $20 million or more were fairly common. The incomes of the richest Americans have exploded over the past generation, even as wages of ordinary workers have stagnated; high pay on Wall Street was a major cause of that divergence.

But surely those financial superstars must have been earning their millions, right? No, not necessarily. The pay system on Wall Street lavishly rewards the appearance of profit, even if that appearance later turns out to have been an illusion.

Consider the hypothetical example of a money manager who leverages up his clients’ money with lots of debt, then invests the bulked-up total in high-yielding but risky assets, such as dubious mortgage-backed securities. For a while — say, as long as a housing bubble continues to inflate — he (it’s almost always a he) will make big profits and receive big bonuses. Then, when the bubble bursts and his investments turn into toxic waste, his investors will lose big — but he’ll keep those bonuses.

O.K., maybe my example wasn’t hypothetical after all.

So, how different is what Wall Street in general did from the Madoff affair? Well, Mr. Madoff allegedly skipped a few steps, simply stealing his clients’ money rather than collecting big fees while exposing investors to risks they didn’t understand. And while Mr. Madoff was apparently a self-conscious fraud, many people on Wall Street believed their own hype. Still, the end result was the same (except for the house arrest): the money managers got rich; the investors saw their money disappear.

We’re talking about a lot of money here. In recent years the finance sector accounted for 8 percent of America’s G.D.P., up from less than 5 percent a generation earlier. If that extra 3 percent was money for nothing — and it probably was — we’re talking about $400 billion a year in waste, fraud and abuse.

But the costs of America’s Ponzi era surely went beyond the direct waste of dollars and cents.

At the crudest level, Wall Street’s ill-gotten gains corrupted and continue to corrupt politics, in a nicely bipartisan way. From Bush administration officials like Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who looked the other way as evidence of financial fraud mounted, to Democrats who still haven’t closed the outrageous tax loophole that benefits executives at hedge funds and private equity firms (hello, Senator Schumer), politicians have walked when money talked.

Meanwhile, how much has our nation’s future been damaged by the magnetic pull of quick personal wealth, which for years has drawn many of our best and brightest young people into investment banking, at the expense of science, public service and just about everything else?

Most of all, the vast riches being earned — or maybe that should be “earned” — in our bloated financial industry undermined our sense of reality and degraded our judgment.

Think of the way almost everyone important missed the warning signs of an impending crisis. How was that possible? How, for example, could Alan Greenspan have declared, just a few years ago, that “the financial system as a whole has become more resilient” — thanks to derivatives, no less? The answer, I believe, is that there’s an innate tendency on the part of even the elite to idolize men who are making a lot of money, and assume that they know what they’re doing.

After all, that’s why so many people trusted Mr. Madoff.

Now, as we survey the wreckage and try to understand how things can have gone so wrong, so fast, the answer is actually quite simple: What we’re looking at now are the consequences of a world gone Madoff.

Oh, they know what they're doing already, and generally whom they're doing, too. Madoff, a philanthropist made the mistake of telling his sons the facts of life, possibly as a way to cushion their psyches for the underworld he would leave for them as his inheritors. It's likely their response to contact the Feds was unanticipated by the old robber baron. But only to a doting and sentimental father: they possibly may have figured a way to profit from his arrest before they contacted the FBI.

After all, dragons are most likely to sire dragons.  ¶ 1:30 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Department of Monsanto: Son of Agent Orange is Coming to a Field Near You



Expect the price of food to rise, expect Roundup on everything, and expect Monsanto to approach its long cherished goal of ending all crops in Amerika that aren't genetically manipulated to be sterile and Roundup resistant.

Oh, by the way, your ethanol- in your car or your whiskey- will likely be that, too. Especially your car.

Why? Because Monsanto owns Tom Vilsack, the guy who thinks rural entrepreneurial development is a good idea.

Some of the terrible ideas Monsanto and Tom Vilsack actively promote are pre-emptive seed laws. Monsanto has heavily backed these laws across the country. Basically, they remove all local control of the kind of seed farmers can purchase, driving farms not affiliated with large agribusiness completely out of business.

As a professional scientist trained in molecular biology, I'm not intriniscally opposed to genetically manipulated organisms. But as a trained professional I can testify the kinds of genetically manipulated organisms being promoted by agribusiness are almost all really bad ideas. Sterile seed does not help poor farmers. It destroys the diversity of the global crop gene pool. Engineering pesticides, or pesticide resistance to allow large scale use of the these chemicals is also a an environmental and potential public health disaster.

These are the only kinds of genetically resistant organisms Monsanto has to offer.

Take a look at what's happening in Iraq if you think the Vilsack-Monsanto agenda has good points.

...Five years of occupation, more than $558 billion spent, 4,182 U.S. soldiers and 655,000 Iraqi civilians dead, and it now looks like Monsanto (NYSE.MON - $71.95) is going to be the real victor in Iraq thanks to a postwar document known as Order 81.

Part of the infamous 100 Orders, Order 81 mandates that Iraq’s commercial-scale farmers must now purchase "registered” seeds. These are available through agribusiness giants like Monsanto, Cargill Corporation (a private company) and the World Wide Wheat Company (also private), but Monsanto is far and away the most significant player in the registered seed market.

Monsanto’s seeds are “terminator” seeds. This means they are inherently sterile, and any seed they produce does not give birth to more plants.

The technology behind registered seed is called genetic modification, and genetically modified (GM) seeds supposedly can’t reproduce, though “drift,” via wind currents and bird consumption, has resulted in a great many instances where GM crops ended up in fields where they were not planted.

A classic example is Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser, whose canola fields inexplicably sprouted GM varieties from Monsanto. Monsanto promptly sued Schmeiser for patent infringement.

Originally developed to avert world hunger (at least according to Monsanto), these GM crops not only do not produce more than their non-modified cousins, but the herbicide Roundup, developed in tandem by Monsanto to treat GM fields, is becoming increasingly ineffective. This has led to more herbicide purchases among farmers, greater profits for Monsanto, increasingly smaller yields, and greater environmental pollution overall.

Roundup, a glyphosate, is the direct descendant of Agent Orange (also produced by Monsanto), and is especially toxic to marine animals. Glyphosates, known as endocrine disruptors, are being increasingly implicated in neurological disorders, DNA damage and even death. However, as often (and mistakenly) reported, Roundup does not contain pesticide. Pest control is part of the genetic modification of seeds...

...In India, where regional governmental studies show Monsanto’s GM cotton producing seven times less than an indigenous variety of cotton, farmers are drinking the toxic chemicals they formerly used to treat their fields in an effort to escape rising debt and poverty. This so-called “suicide by pesticide” is the final solution for farmers locked into Monsanto contracts that benefit no one but Monsanto.

In Columbia, where Monsanto’s RoundUp Ultra has been deployed in the war against drugs (under the name Plan Columbia), local communities and human right’s organizations are charging that Ultra is destroying indigenous food crops, water sources and indeed entire protected ecologies in the Andes. Ironically, cocaine production has jumped almost 10 percent since the plan's inception, moving higher into the mountains and decimating even more remote ecologies.

Monsanto’s share of this American taxpayer-funded drug eradication enterprise ($1.3 billion) is more than $25 million. Ultra, a concentrated version of Roundup with added surfactants to increase its toxicity, has been implicated in the deaths of a number of children. DynCorp International (NYSE.DCP - $10.83), the company doing the spraying, is under contract to the U.S. government.

Order 81, by first forcing Iraq’s farmers to use GM seeds, and then by declaring natural seeds an infringement on Monsanto technology, will result in the sorts of tragedies seen elsewhere in the developing world, reducing Iraq’s farmers to drinking field-grade herbicides to escape financial catastrophe.

Nor will the Iraqi people benefit in terms of more food. Order 81, mandated under the dystopian title "Plant Variety Protection,” turns the agricultural world on its head by defining indigenous crops as invasive and GM crops as uniform and stable. Moreover, the six varieties of wheat developed for Iraq are primarily used in pasta. Since the Iraqis don’t eat pasta, one can only assume these food crops are destined for Western nations, leaving the average Iraqi that much closer to starvation.

Order 81, carefully crafted to look like humanitarian legislation aimed at rescuing a country decimated by half a decade of war, is in fact a Monsanto power play under U.S. government sponsorship. Farmers who do not comply will have seeds, farm implements and even land seized...

I like that. The natural seed corn is an infringement on Monsanto copyrights. Sometimes real evil outdoes itself.  ¶ 6:04 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Swelling the Wanks

It's nice to know the Oborg Unibama is assimilating "religious leaders" who dig on assasination as a tool of foreign policy [tip o'teh tinfoil to Atrios again].

Hard to see how that could cause any blowback... [wank, wank, wank...]  ¶ 10:23 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Another Cowboy in the Cabinet

Just what we needed:


"Drill, baby, drill!"

...Mr. Salazar, wearing his customary ten-gallon hat and bolo tie, said that his job entails helping the nation address climate change through a “moon shot” on energy independence. But that would include not just the development of “green” energy sources like wind power, but also the continued domestic development of coal, oil and natural gas, fossil fuels that generate greenhouse gases when they are burned...

The more things change, the more they stay the strange.  ¶ 9:43 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Tell It to John Titor



All I have to say is, I hope they have the laser cannon set up by the time the Kzinti Armada arrive.  ¶ 9:47 PM 0 comments links to this post

  "Warning, Will Robinson, Danger!"



Big Time Dick approves:

In an exclusive interview with ABC News, a reflective Vice President Dick Cheney praised President-elect Barack Obama's national security team...

  ¶ 9:23 PM 0 comments links to this post

  We are Ruled by Sociopaths

Yglesias:

The harsh reality is that this was not a noble undertaking done for good reasons. It was a criminal enterprise launched by madmen cheered on by a chorus of fools and cowards. And it’s seen as such by virtually everyone all around the world — including but by no means limited to the Arab world. But it’s impolitic to point this out in the United States, and it’s clear that even a president-elect who had the wisdom not to be suckered in by the War Fever of 2002 has no intention of really acting to marginalize the bad actors. Which, I think, makes sense for his political objectives. But if Americans want to play a constructive role in world affairs, it’s vitally important for us to get in touch with the reality of what the past eight years of US foreign policy have been and how they’re seen and understood by people who aren’t stirred by the shibboleths of American patriotism.

Atrios adds:

...I don't expect Cheney's gang to ever care about the hell they unleashed in that country, but they were enabled by almost the entire population of Elite Washington. Even now simple inconvenient facts of that time are brushed aside in favor of the Official Narrative. The complete lack of repentance or honest accounting by our elites is a continuing reminder of just how corrupt and sick elite Washington is. I don't know how they live with themselves. They're obviously not like me or most of the people I know.

Most sane people aren't trying to take over the world, or steal it, Duncan. I have an old ex-girlfriend who dumped me 30-odd years ago when I got serious about college. Her answer to life was to marry a University of Chicago MBA who started a hedge fund, lost a couple of billion of other people's money, and is probably kicked back somewhere cushy these days.

But these people are the real exceptions in life. They're so rare, that they're able to convince themselves they're the elite. Pious sanctimony is a great insulator. The latent sociopath can cultivate it to enjoy the rewards of their plunder.  ¶ 9:10 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Better to Bail You Out With My Dear

Amit Paley on limiting CEO pay in the payout Bailout:

Congress wanted to guarantee that the $700 billion financial bailout would limit the eye-popping pay of Wall Street executives, so lawmakers included a mechanism for reviewing executive compensation and penalizing firms that break the rules.

But at the last minute, the Bush administration insisted on a one-sentence change to the provision, congressional aides said. The change stipulated that the penalty would apply only to firms that received bailout funds by selling troubled assets to the government in an auction, which was the way the Treasury Department had said it planned to use the money.

Now, however, the small change looks more like a giant loophole, according to lawmakers and legal experts. In a reversal, the Bush administration has not used auctions for any of the $335 billion committed so far from the rescue package, nor does it plan to use them in the future. Lawmakers and legal experts say the change has effectively repealed the only enforcement mechanism in the law dealing with lavish pay for top executives...

Bu$hie does take care of his Ba$e, doesn't he?  ¶ 1:56 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Why I Feel the Way I Feel About the Free Market

This story gets told best in pictures (and data) by Patrick Byrne.

It's a Horatio Alger story with all kinds of plucky entrepreneurs, winning hearts, minds, lungs, and spleens.  ¶ 9:53 PM 0 comments links to this post

  We Must All Learn Not to Spitzer Against the Wind

Lambert points out the opportunities inherent in the NSA's "Stellar Wind" program wherein they suck up all the data on the internets and look for possible terrorist activity using keywords.

Of course, sometimes the keywords include names of people making life a little difficult for the Company. In these cases, the NSA views it as a National Security matter to forward possibly incriminating data randomly gathered (one is certain) to the FBI.

Lambert has been running around with his hair on fire for several years now about this kind of thing, and so is able to come to some sound conclusions amidst the hysterics:

...Let's imagine -- implausible as it may seem -- a ruling class that isn't particularly concerned about obeying the law, is greatly concerned with getting away clean as The Big Shitpile implodes, and has come into possession of an extremely valuable intelligence source.

And let's further assume that, at the very highest levels, politics, government, finance, and intelligence are all seamlessly merged into a single group dynamic. Sort of like a polymorphically perverse Village High School where the Kool Kidz all know who's fucking who, and with what, but don't tell anyone else. Of course, in this scenario, you'd have to assume that crazy things happen like former heads of the CIA become President, or investment bankers become heads of the Treasury (and vice versa), or the talking heads on the teebee are all paid by the Pentagon. Or the President flies to Omaha to meet with the country's biggest billionaire*** on the very day of 9/11 itself. Or corporations and the government have merged. Or that they all go to the same parties.

So, third, wouldn't Our Betters use "Stellar Wind" to their advantage? You know they would. That's not foil; that's common sense.

Try walking a few steps in ruling class loafers (or stilettos). Think about what "Stellar Wind" means in terms of information and leverage. It means access to massive amounts of transactional data and, through record linkage, access to all email and phone conversations about the transactions.

1. Think of the opportunities for arbitrage. If you've got "Stellar Wind" data, you'd know what the market was going to do before it did it. It would be like playing poker while looking directly into your competitor's hand.

2. Think of the opportunities for blackmail. Just as we have to ask ourselves how many Madoffs there are, we should also ask ourselves how many Spitzers there are. We know that the Village is full of every kind of oddity -- not that there's anything wrong with (most of) that -- and it all has to be there in "Stellar Wind." It's like the "world is flat" version of oppo.

3. Think of the opportunities for scoping the Big Shitpile. Everybody's wringing their hands because the Big Shitpile is so complicated that nobody can unravel it. But "structured finance" is designed to be complicated, because, at least in many cases, it's designed to conceal fraud; think of the thousands of shell companies created by Enron, for example. But isn't it also the case that most con games are, at their heart, very simple? If that is true, than the data to prove it is in "Stellar Wind" somewhere -- because "Stellar Wind" hoovered up everything.

"Stellar Wind" was totally and massively abused. Spitzer isn't even the tip of the iceberg. Believe it. It's what these guys do...

I won't even begin to try to reproduce all the links in that quote, much less in the extensive post it came from. Needless to say, it's pretty interesting, and quite likely correct.

And I remember when Lambert used to accuse me of tinfoil hattery...  ¶ 9:26 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Try DIck Cheney

Six years after Commander Bunnypants made Afghanistan safe to grow 90% of the world's heroin, the trickle down is having some effect:

...“Parents expect their kids to experiment with alcohol, but never with heroin,” he said. “We want schools and parents to know if there is someone in the community who is involved or has been arrested so they can be on the lookout...”

Of course there is, and of course the last place the vigilant will look is in Washington, D.C.

The narcs run the most drugs. It's always been this way, and as long as there are black budget ops, it always will be this way. The target is the most creative and impressionable and sensitive of youth.

You know, the very people who might grow up to actually change things.  ¶ 6:35 AM 1 comments links to this post

  The Ponzilla



We've only just begun.

...Whatever the real story, it is clear that market makers are accessories to a scheme that is much, much bigger than Madoff.

The key players in this scheme are 20 or so mega-billionaire hedge fund managers, who operate with a supporting cast that includes not just market makers, but also smaller hedge funds, rogue prime brokerages, corrupt lawyers, dishonest journalists, bogus one-man credit rating agencies, dubious index trackers, bribed “experts,” skalawag statisticians, compromised professors, private investigators, crooked financial researchers, captured government regulators, hustlers, felons, thugs and mafiosi.

The mega-billionaires masterminded their scheme in the 1980s, and ever since, they and their progeny have been working together – raiding and destroying public companies for profit. In the rubble of these attacks (there are hundreds of examples) one can almost always find evidence of unrestrained naked short selling (people selling things that they do not possess – phantom stock, phantom bonds, phantom mortgage backed securities, phantom CDOs, all manner of phantom derivatives).

This is the organized exploitation of our national clearing and settlement system – a system that fails utterly to ensure that traders actually deliver that which they have sold. If the SEC and FBI are looking for a “Ponzi scheme” of “epic proportions” – this is it...

Emphatically, this is what they're trying very hard not to look for. If an observant financial outsider like me can spot this, it's not just the 500 lbs gorilla in the room- it's the 500,000 ton Godzilla emerging from the sea, heading towards Wall Street.



There are doubtless some feverish calls going on right now between Treasury and Justice. The CIA too- Madoff is also apparently a big fundraiser and benefactor of the State of Israel. It's likely there's a big National Security lid that's been slapped on this. It remains to be seen exactly how tight the lid will remain.

There's a lot of money to be made in some quarters if the global economy collapses.  ¶ 9:11 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Hearts, Minds, and Shoes

BAGHDAD, Dec. 14 -- Arriving in Baghdad today for a farewell visit, President Bush staunchly defended a war that has taken far more time, money and lives than anticipated, saying the conflict "has not been easy" but was necessary for U.S. security, Iraqi stability and "world peace."

But during a press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Bush received a taste of the immense resentment many Iraqis feel toward his policies: Just after Bush finished his remarks and said "Thank you" in Arabic, an Iraqi journalist took off his shoes and hurled them both at Bush, one after the other. The incident lent an air of chaos and farce to a trip intended to highlight improving security conditions in the war-torn country.

"This is a farewell kiss!" the man, identified as Muntadar al-Zaidi, a reporter with the Cairo-based network Al Baghdadia Television, yelled as he threw the shoes. Bush had to duck out of the way, and narrowly missed being hit, according to on-scene reports. Maliki reached out his hand to shield the president.

Zaidi started to yell "Dog, dog!" as he was surrounded by security agents, who tackled him to the floor and began to beat him. Zaidi was later removed from the ornate room where the press conference was taking place...

I resent that.

There has never been a dog as viciously evil as George W. Bush, as I am sure Muntadar al-Zaidi is experiencing even now whenever he regains consciousness.  ¶ 5:59 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Get real

He'd never announce that.



But he'll take care of the herd, at least.  ¶ 8:41 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Bipartisan Co-operation

Frank Rich says we can use a scapegoat like Blagojevich to take our main$tream minds off the far bigger crimes:

...If you want to trace the bipartisan roots of the morally bankrupt culture that has now found its culmination in our financial apocalypse, a good place to start is late 2001 and 2002, just as the White House contemplated inflating Saddam’s W.M.D. That’s when we learned about another scandal with cooked books, Enron. This was a supreme embarrassment for Bush, whose political career had been bankrolled by the Enron titan Kenneth Lay, or, as Bush nicknamed him back in Texas, “Kenny Boy.”

The chagrined president eventually convened a one-day “economic summit” photo op in August 2002 (held in Waco, Tex., lest his vacation in Crawford be disrupted). But while some perpetrators of fraud at Enron would ultimately pay a price, any lessons from its demise, including a need for safeguards, were promptly forgotten by one and all in the power centers of both federal and corporate governance.

Enron was an energy company that had diversified to trade in derivatives — financial instruments that were bets on everything from exchange rates to the weather. It was also brilliant in devising shell companies that kept hundreds of millions of dollars of debt off the company’s bottom line and away from the prying eyes of shareholders.

Regulators had failed to see the iceberg in Enron’s path and so had Enron’s own accountants at Arthur Andersen, a corporate giant whose parallel implosion had its own casualty list of some 80,000 jobs. Despite Bush’s post-Enron call for “a new ethic of personal responsibility in the business community,” the exact opposite has happened in the six years since. Warren Buffett’s warning in 2003 that derivatives were “financial weapons of mass destruction” was politely ignored. Much larger companies than Enron figured out how to place even bigger and more impenetrable gambles on derivatives, all the while piling up unseen debt. They built castles of air on a far grander scale than Kenny Boy could have imagined, doing so with sheer stupidity and cavalier, greed-fueled carelessness rather than fraud.

The most stupendous example as measured in dollars is Citigroup, now the recipient of potentially the biggest taxpayer bailout to date. The price tag could be some $300 billion — 20 times the proposed first installment of the scuttled Detroit bailout. Citigroup’s toxic derivatives, often tied to subprime mortgages, metastasized without appearing on the balance sheet. Both the company’s former chief executive, Charles O. Prince III, and his senior adviser, Robert Rubin, the former Clinton Treasury secretary, have said they didn’t know the size of the worthless holdings until they’d spiraled into the tens of billions of dollars.

Once again, regulators slept. Once again, credit-rating agencies, typified this time by Moody’s, kept giving a thumbs-up to worthless paper until it was too late. There was just so much easy money to be made, and no one wanted to be left out. As Michael Lewis concludes in his brilliant account of “the end” of Wall Street in Portfolio magazine: “Something for nothing. It never loses its charm.”

But if all bubbles and panics are alike, this one, the worst since the Great Depression, also carried the DNA of our own time. Enron had been a Citigroup client. In a now-forgotten footnote to that scandal, Rubin was discovered to have made a phone call to a former colleague in the Treasury Department to float the idea of asking credit-rating agencies to delay downgrading Enron’s debt. This inappropriate lobbying never went anywhere, but Rubin neither apologized nor learned any lessons. “I can see why that call might be questioned,” he wrote in his 2003 memoir, “but I would make it again.” He would say the same this year about his performance at Citigroup during its collapse.

The Republican side of the same tarnished coin is Phil Gramm, the former senator from Texas. Like Rubin, he helped push through banking deregulation when in government in the 1990s, then cashed in on the relaxed rules by joining the banking industry once he left Washington. Gramm is at UBS, which also binged on credit-default swaps and is now receiving a $60 billion bailout from the Swiss government.

It’s a sad snapshot of our century’s establishment that Rubin has been an economic adviser to Barack Obama and Gramm to John McCain. And that both captains of finance remain unapologetic, unaccountable and still at their banks, which have each lost more than 70 percent of their shareholders’ value this year and have collectively announced more than 90,000 layoffs so far...

So there it is. Blagojevich's error was in thinking small and trying to crawl on top of the relatively small world of Illinois politics.

To be on top in 21st Century Amerika, you have to use clean language, live like one Righteous, and cover your ass while spreading the wealth among the wealthy.

Our biggest gangsters are educated in the best schools, have the best friends, and disdain the appearance of gangsterism. Ask Hank Paulson.  ¶ 7:32 AM 0 comments links to this post

  The Two Trillion Dollar Question

Lambert asks the right question:

...The right question is how many Madoffs are out there that we don't know about? Because if there are 20, then 20 Maddoff Units equal One Paulson unit, or half of the two bailout trillion dollars Hank Paulson, for some reason, won't tell us what he did with. Eh?

It's obviously for National Security reason. There are a whole lot of Nationals who would feel very Insecure if they knew where all that money went.

Doubtless to "...a great philanthropist, a pillar of the community, the chairman of Nasdaq — all of that stuff...”

You know: someone who'd never steal anything. Small.  ¶ 9:44 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The End of the Beginning

Of so much... exploitation.  ¶ 11:03 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Big Bucks for Bugbots

More black budget bucks for Pentagon contractors:

...The U.S. military has been working for a while on tiny, buglike drones — to serve as miniature flying spies, Defense Department robot-makers say. But this video, from the Air Force Research Laboratory, shows that the military is also interested in turning these "Micro Air Vehicles," or MAVs, into biomorphic weapons that can lie in secret for weeks at a time — and then strike an adversary with lethal accuracy...

I'm sure these will strike Homeland Security's fancy, too, and make great target practice for everyone.  ¶ 7:58 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Restructuring the Republic

A possible life saver for millions, a bankroll for the Detroit Chrysler and GM CEOs, their owners at Cerberus, and Cerberus's masters at Citibank, and yet another death-knell for the integrity and Constitutional role of Congress, Bu$hie sez what his hayseed former sycophants in the Senate ordain doesn't matter.

When Der Decider Dicktates, the money moves...

...WASHINGTON (AFP) — The US Treasury said Friday it is "ready" to avert the collapse of the Big Three US automakers until Congress can address their problems, a spokeswoman said Friday.

"Because Congress failed to act, we will stand ready to prevent an imminent failure until Congress reconvenes and acts to address the long-term viability of the industry," Treasury spokeswoman Brookly McLaughlin said.

The announcement came shortly after the White House said it would consider tapping a 700-billion-dollar financial rescue fund administered by the Treasury "to prevent a collapse of troubled automakers" after lawmakers failed to pass an alternative.

"Given the current weakened state of the US economy, we will consider other options if necessary -- including use of the TARP program -- to prevent a collapse of troubled automakers," said spokeswoman Dana Perino, referring to the Troubled Asset Relief Program conceived to help financial services firms...

Poppy stands to lose money if the Big 3 go down.

The Bush administration yesterday moved to pull Detroit's automakers back from the brink, saying it would drop its opposition to tapping the $700 billion financial industry rescue package to help General Motors and Chrysler survive through year's end. ..

Let's see if the bailout actually helps the millions of families nationwide that stand to lose it all if this doesn't come through, or if it's just another handout to keep Bu$hie's - and Obama's- Ba$e solvent.

It's already too late to help many- except the bankers and corporate boards.



Meanwhile, over at the Wall Street Pravda, it seems some of the senior water bearers who didn't cash in are catching on:

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- Yes, we're dummies. You. Me. All 300 million of us. Clueless. We should be ashamed. We're obsessed about the slogans and rituals of "democracy," distracted by the campaign, polls, debates, rhetoric, half-truths and outright lies. McCain? Obama? Sorry to pop your bubble folks, but it no longer matters who's president.

Why? The real "game changer" already happened. Democracy has been replaced by Wall Street's new "disaster capitalism." That's the big game-changer historians will remember about 2008, masterminded by Wall Street's ultimate "Trojan Horse," Hank Paulson. Imagine: Greed, arrogance and incompetence create a massive bubble, cost trillions, and still Wall Street comes out smelling like roses, richer and more powerful!

Yes, we're idiots: While distracted by the "illusion of democracy" in the endless campaign, Congress surrendered the powers we entrusted to it with very little fight. Congress simply handed over voting power and the keys to trillions in the Treasury to Wall Street's new "Disaster Capitalists" who now control "democracy."

Why did this happen? We're in denial, clueless wimps, that's why. We let it happen. In one generation America has been transformed from a democracy into a strange new form of government, "Disaster Capitalism." Here's how it happened:

* Three decades of influence peddling in Washington has built an army of 42,000 special-interest lobbyists representing corporations and the wealthy. Today these lobbyists manipulate America's 537 elected officials with massive campaign contributions that fund candidates who vote their agenda.
* This historic buildup accelerated under Reaganomics and went into hyperspeed under Bushonomics, both totally committed to a new disaster capitalism run privately by Wall Street and Corporate America. No-bid contracts in wars and hurricanes. A housing-credit bubble -- while secretly planning for a meltdown.
* Finally, the coup de grace: Along came the housing-credit crisis, as planned. Press and public saw a negative, a crisis. Disaster capitalists saw a huge opportunity. Yes, opportunity for big bucks and control of America. Millions of homeowners and marginal banks suffered huge losses. Taxpayers stuck with trillions in debt. But giant banks emerge intact, stronger, with virtual control over government and the power to use taxpayers' funds. They're laughing at us idiots!

Amazing isn't it, Wall Street's Disaster Capitalists screwed up, likely planned or let happen this meltdown and recession. Yet America's clueless taxpayers just reward them by giving the screw-ups massive bailouts, control over more than $2 trillion of tax money, and the power to clean up the mess they made. Oh yes, we are dummies!

This end game was planned for years in secret war rooms on Wall Street, in Corporate America, in Washington and the Forbes 400. Democracy is too cumbersome. It had to be marginalized for Disaster Capitalism to take over. Reagan, Bush and Paulson were Wall Street's "Trojan Horses."

Naomi Klein summarizes the game in "Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism." This "new economy" generates enormous profits feeding off other peoples' misery: Wars, terror attacks, natural catastrophes, poverty, trade sanctions, subprime housing meltdowns and all kinds of economic, financial and political disasters. Natural (Katrina) or manmade (Iraq), either way "disaster capitalism" creates fortunes.
So you, me and the other 300 million better get out of denial. America is no longer a democracy. Voting is irrelevant. Best case scenario: We're a plutocracy, a government ruled by the wealthy, the richest 1%, the Forbes 400, the influential wealthy elite, while the other 99% are their "servants." Meanwhile, the inflation-adjusted income of wage-earners has declined for three decades.

Worst case scenario: America's no democracy and as a result of the meltdown and the surrender of our power to Wall Street's new Disaster Capitalism we are morphing into what one WWII dictator called "corporatism," a "merger of state and corporate power," kind of like what's going on now with Goldman Sachs' ex-boss as de facto president.

Yes, a strong charge. But like a lot of our readers, I don't like what's happening to America. I'm a patriot. I volunteered for the Marines. Served four years. Volunteered for Korea. I don't like how our freedoms, rights and value system are being subverted in the name of greed, arrogance, self-righteous intolerance and other false gods.
We know for the last eight years disaster capitalists ignored obvious warnings of a coming meltdown. They apparently planned it. They road the bull, got very rich. Now they have the ultimate disaster capitalist weapons, trillions in tax money, virtual control of government.

That's why I fear we're on the edge of a dangerous line between Wall Street's version of disaster capitalism and a toxic "merger of state and corporate power." The wolf is in sheep's clothing. Wall Street pretends we're a democracy. Yet America more closely resembles the kind of "corporatism" that Laurence W. Britt wrote about five years ago in Free Inquiry magazine.

We adapted his historical analysis of 14 key traits for today's discussion. Notice how they have a huge impact your investments and retirement:

1. Wall Street rich get first priority
Think "bailout." Wall Street's greedy con game spins out of control globally. Millions of homeowners misled, lose. Who gets hundreds of billions first? Wall Street's con men.

2. National security obsession
Think of the expansion of executive powers in the name of national security: Preemptive wars, wiretapping private citizens, Gitmo, torture; driven by a dark wealthy neocon elite.

3. Superpower with massive military
Think of our $3 trillion Iraq/Afghan War. Disaster capitalists love the thrill of military power. We outspend all nations, over half the federal budget to strut before the world.

4. Extreme nationalism
Signs are everywhere: Flags, lapel pins, "support the troops" slogans, all to get huge military budgets passed. Challenge them and you're un-American and unpatriotic.

5. Rally the masses by scapegoating enemies
Think "axis of evil," mushroom clouds, "Islamofascists," more terrorist attacks on the homeland. Propaganda creates "enemies" in the public's mind and distracts from real issues.

6. Corruption and cronyism
Think earmarks, no-bid defense contracts, paid mercenaries outnumbering military in Iraq, superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, biofuels, bridge to nowhere, millions donated to campaigns.

7. Obsession with crime
Think of prison-building as just another investment opportunity, rather than focusing on reforming our criminal justice system. Stoke irrational fear of criminals and extremists.

8. Labor and low wages
Think corporate earnings versus the wages paid to workers. No "trickling down," leaves more for tricklers: Rich insiders, stockholders. Wages dropping as CEO salaries skyrocket.

9. Contempt for human rights
Think of abuses of habeas corpus, loss of right to trial, bogus charges, plus "demonizing" the victims, all in the name of national defense and homeland security.

10. Mass media manipulation
Think of leaking false information, Joseph Wilson, Valerie Plame, Scooter Libby, Colin Powell's United Nation's testimony, Condoleezza Rice's mushroom clouds, WMDs, all to suppress the truth.

11. Obsession with sexism
Think of paternalism, antigays, antiabortion, subordinate women -- then codify the system as the law of the land reinforcing a male-dominated society, punish violators.

12. Disdain for intellectuals
Think of conservative intellectuals Francis Fukuyama and Bill Buckley. Contrast them to Sarah Palin and Joe Sixpack conservatism, Bush's funding cuts for arts and science education.


13. Religion in government
Think of all the faith-based programs versus antiscience in drug approvals, creationism vs. evolution, Ten Commandments enshrined in public buildings, public money to churches.

14. Fraudulent elections
Think of police and prosecutorial intimidation and threats to voters, challenging minority voters, ballots disappearing, party election officials committing outright fraud.

Yes, officially America is still a democracy. We have enough signs and rituals to support that illusion. But the truth is America has become a plutocracy run by and for the wealthy. And since Wall Street's Disaster Capitalism coup de grace, we are rapidly morphing into a dangerous new government.

Agreed, Mr. Farrell, most of us are idiots. But some are more useful than others, and some are more ignorant than others. Welcome to the sunlit world.  ¶ 7:15 AM 0 comments links to this post

  "The Great Unraveling"

What to call it? I think Krugman saw it coming a long time ago.  ¶ 8:58 PM 0 comments links to this post

  "Don't talk to them and they'll go away"

Michael Griffin, the techno-spook head of NASA, thinks he can classify all of NASA and keep Obama's transition team from evaluating it.

For how long, you ask? Perhaps just until he's through destroying all the records of what all those black budget dollars went for.  ¶ 8:47 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Science in charge of Energy Policy?

Doubtless there's shock among the Faithful.

Chu:

... Consider this. There’s about a 50 percent chance, the climate experts tell us, that in this century we will go up in temperature by three degrees Centigrade. Now, three degrees Centigrade doesn’t seem a lot to you, that’s 11° F. Chicago changes by 30° F in half a day. But 5° C means that … it’s the difference between where we are today and where we were in the last ice age. What did that mean? Canada, the United States down to Ohio and Pennsylvania, was covered in ice year round.

Five degrees Centigrade.

So think about what 5° C will mean going the other way. A very different world. So if you’d want that for your kids and grandkids, we can continue what we’re doing. Climate change of that scale will cause enormous resource wars, over water, arable land, and massive population displacements. We’re not talking about ten thousand people. We’re not talking about ten million people, we’re talking about hundreds of millions to billions of people being flooded out, permanently...



..I will leave you with this final image. This is — I was an undergraduate when this picture was taken by Apollo 8 — and it shows the moon and the Earth’s rise. A beautiful planet, a desolate moon. And focus on the fact that there’s nowhere else to go.

Which, among the Faithful, is not a bug but a feature. After all, without a captive populace, who would be their servants?  ¶ 6:41 AM 2 comments links to this post

  We live in "a world that is very dangerous"



It will continue to be so until we get rid of asshats like Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-TX), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

Torture is a dangerous technique to use because it's only good for giving the torturer what they want to hear. It's ineffective as an intelligence tool. It is effective only to generate propaganda- if you want to trust the word of people who would torture.

Then there's the side issue of its unConstitutionality and inhumanity.

Would the FBI kindly wiretap this creep like he was from Illinois? But forgive me. We're all on the NSA list; only people who try to make the banks use their bailout money to make loans get busted.

Sometimes, I forget.  ¶ 9:52 PM 2 comments links to this post

  Charity Work

Really, it's the least we can do.  ¶ 6:54 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Purely Coincidence

I'm not saying he wasn't as dirty as any other Chicago politician, but:

Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich Suspends State Business with Bank of America and Is Then Promptly Arrested by the FBI on Corruption Charges

and at Raw Story:

In a stinging note of support for the laid off workers that have taken up residency in Chicago's Republic Windows & Doors factory, the Governor of Illinois has suspended business with Bank of America until it reissues credit to the shuttered company.

Bank of America cut off credit to Republic Windows & Doors company last week, and workers, demanding severance pay, began staging sit-ins, effectively taking control of the building.

The governor's bold move comes immediately after President-elect Obama, himself a Chicago native, expressed sympathy for and agreement with the worker's plight and resulting actions.

“When it comes to the situation here in Chicago with the workers who are asking for their benefits and payments they have earned, I think they are absolutely right,” said Obama during a Sunday news conference. “What’s happening to them is reflective of what’s happening across this economy."

Bank of America, Chicago's second largest bank, has received over $15 billion in bailout funds from the federal government. During a Monday news conference, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich insisted that the money was intended to be used for purposes such as this...

Today:

The federal accusations against Mr. Blagojevich go beyond the Senate question into what the authorities here described as a “political corruption crime spree.”

Don't mess with the Company, they'll rip your lungs out, gov.  ¶ 9:44 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Strange v.2



Bailout, under the control of a loyal Bu$hie, under the brand name of the Oborg:

WASHINGTON — The White House and Democratic Congressional leaders said Monday that they were close to agreeing on the terms of a $15 billion government rescue of the American automobile industry that would be directed by one or more appointees of President Bush and would impose expansive federal oversight of the auto companies.

The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said she hoped that Mr. Bush’s appointee — or car czar, as the position has come to be known — would not need to be replaced by President-elect Barack Obama, raising the prospect that the outgoing and incoming administrations would cooperate in selecting someone...

Because, you know, if you're gonna be raped, you might as well lay back and enjoy it, sez the twins Nancy and Barney.  ¶ 6:49 AM 0 comments links to this post

  A smooth phase transition

Under the Obama administration, an ex-leader of the CIA will continue to run the Pentagon. An ex-Pentagon insider will continue to run the CIA.



And Aniken Skywalker has brought Balance to the Force.

Greenwald attempts to deconstruct the admonitions to the weak minded by Sith Lords of the Bu$h wing of the Company, but he, like Digby, ends up succumbing to another Jedi mind trick:

...the Right, far more than the Left, that has waged war against the CIA in recent years; the Left has largely defended the CIA against manipulation and abuse by the Bush White House...

Yes, the poor CIA, helpless, defenseless against the wiles of Lord Cheneyburton. Helpless like Tenet, like Hayden and Gates, one supposes. Mere flags in the wind blown by their masters.

Believe that and I've got a half-built Death Star I'd love to sell you.  ¶ 8:38 PM 0 comments links to this post

  "Just kill me. Please"

You can torture a man into saying just about anything.

Recall who is stil Der Decider.

I am sure the senior partners of Bu$hCo-Cheneyburton is very pleased at this plea. After all, dead men tell no tales. All the more reason to not allow this to proceed.  ¶ 8:15 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Bailout on the Half Shell

Congress wants to bailout Detroit to help the American Worker.

Well, maybe you know better. But maybe Obama doesn't, and that has led a few cognizant insiders to call for a Stabilization Oversight Council (SOC) to oversee the process. It's not just sloppy business plans in making and dealing cars that have screwed up the Big 3.

...While the bailout of several of our largest financial institutions have been rife with conflict and undue political influence, my hope was that Congress and the Administration would learn from its mistakes and not repeat them with the auto industry. Unfortunately, it appears that my hopes were unrealistic. Because if temporary steps are taken to bridge the auto industry until early 2009, without an appropriate restructuring of the businesses which are, for all intents and purposes, bankrupt, then one of the largest buyout firms on the planet will be (at least temporarily) bailed out with taxpayer money. The fund in question? Cerberus.

Make no mistake, Cerberus has friends in high places, and is throwing around its influence (and its cash) in order to protect its ~$2 billion investment in Chrysler and GMAC. According to the New York Times, Cerberus has spent $2 million of its own money this year lobbying on behalf of its auto interests while Chrysler itself has ponied up $5 million to play the influence game. Given that the industry can't pay its bills, this money by spent by them to get more money out of us that is essentially paid for - by us. This simply doesn't compute. Further, they have the nerve to intimate that their actions, which do not include putting in more cash to support Chrysler, are for the benefit of the employees and their investors...

...Cerberus's official position is so transparently self-serving as to border on inane. However, their operating assumption is that US taxpayer money is dumb money, and the way things seem to be going they appear to be right...

...How could Congress expect (the US taxpayer) to foot the bill if Cerberus itself isn't willing to pay-to-play? Answer: it's can't. And if it does, it is not representing its constituents best interests. Let's be clear: Detroit is bankrupt. It has been for quite some time, but the decades-long game of raising money, having a few good product cycles and delaying fundamental restructuring is finally over. There are no more "Hail Mary" passes to be caught; the embedded burdens of legacy pension and health care costs are simply too great, and the lack of adequate innovation and investment around fuel-efficient vehicles and technologies has doomed its product lines for a generation. Tossing more money into the auto industry without forcing a wholesale restructuring (that deals with the unmanageable costs and spurs innovation) is akin to handing Citigroup $25 billion without requiring transparency in its financial reporting (this was done already, of course). It is money that is simply wasted, fund that could retrain, retool, and educate hundreds of thousands of workers who would otherwise be displaced by an entire industry's failure. But this is not the discipline with which our various rescue programs have been implemented, to the peril of both the US taxpayer and employees of companies that are the "walking dead..."

...Stockholders and many debt-holders of the Big Three would be wiped out in an industry restructuring. Costs would be slashed. Health care and pension plans restructured. The emphasis would be on the workers, getting them prepared for new jobs in growing industries, and employing a portion of them in essential infrastructure projects to build US competitiveness. Existing assets would be sold, re-purposed, and re-used in a slimmed-down US auto industry that is focused on and motivated to bring new, fuel efficient cars to the global marketplace. It would leverage the tens of billions of dollars in venture-backed R&D that has gone into cleantech, and develop strong working relationships with the technology transfer areas of leading research institutions focused on green automotive technologies. And the US taxpayer would fund this transformation with an expected return on investment that an arms-length, "smart money" investor would require. This is a high-risk, growth capital play. Anything less is subsidizing those who don't deserve it and shortchanging our citizens. And this cannot happen...

Cannot? Well, Cerberus has been on these pages before.

Congress might give the CEOs the Spanish Inquisition, but you can bet it won't give the big money behind the Big 3 any examination whatsoever, because Citigroup not only has a piece of Bu$hie, it has a back door to program the Oborg.  ¶ 8:42 AM 0 comments links to this post

  50% Solution

Obama seems to be getting it half right:

WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama promised Saturday to create the largest public works construction program since the inception of the interstate highway system a half century ago as he seeks to put together a plan to resuscitate the reeling economy.

With jobs evaporating and the recession deepening, Mr. Obama began highlighting elements of the economic recovery program he is trying to fashion with Congressional leaders in hopes of being able to enact it shortly after being sworn in on Jan. 20. His address on Saturday followed the report on Friday indicating that the country lost 533,000 jobs in November alone, bringing the total number of jobs lost over the past year to nearly 2 million.

Mr. Obama’s remarks showcased his ambition to expand the definition of traditional work programs for the middle class, like infrastructure projects to repair roads and bridges, to include new-era jobs in technology and so-called green jobs that reduce energy use and global warming emissions. “We need action — and action now,” Mr. Obama said in an address broadcast Saturday morning on radio and YouTube...

And then comes the part:

Mr. Obama’s plan, if enacted, would be in part a government-directed industrial policy, with lawmakers and administration officials picking winners and losers among private projects and raining large amounts of taxpayer money on them...

Now I realize the whole tone of the Pravda piece is typical Hooverite free-market republican "let 'em pull themselves up by their bootstraps like I claim I did", but still somehow I think giving billions to private contractors is good news to Halliburton or its latest domestic corporate incarnation.

Of course, there's the realist out there saying the only way to get this past the Republicans and K Street is to set it up so they can skim off some cream. But somehow I think there are some Clintonista and Oborg out there poised to do the same.

Frank Rich names some Oborg names to watch out for, in fact:

... it’s the economic team that evokes trace memories of our dark best-and-brightest past. Lawrence Summers, the new top economic adviser, was the youngest tenured professor in Harvard’s history and is famous for never letting anyone forget his brilliance. It was his highhanded disregard for his own colleagues, not his impolitic remarks about gender and science, that forced him out of Harvard’s presidency in four years. Timothy Geithner, the nominee for Treasury secretary, is the boy wonder president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He comes with none of Summers’s personal baggage, but his sparkling résumé is missing one crucial asset: experience outside academe and government, in the real world of business and finance. Postgraduate finishing school at Kissinger & Associates doesn’t count.

Summers and Geithner are both protégés of another master of the universe, Robert Rubin. His appearance in the photo op for Obama-transition economic advisers three days after the election was, to put it mildly, disconcerting. Ever since his acclaimed service as Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, Rubin has labored as a senior adviser and director at Citigroup, now being bailed out by taxpayers to the potential tune of some $300 billion. Somehow the all-seeing Rubin didn’t notice the toxic mortgage-derivatives on Citi’s books until it was too late. The Citi may never sleep, but he snored.

Geithner was no less tardy in discovering the reckless, wholesale gambling that went on in Wall Street’s big casinos, all of which cratered while at least nominally under his regulatory watch. That a Hydra-headed banking monster like Citigroup came to be in the first place was a direct byproduct of deregulation championed by Rubin and Summers in Clinton’s Treasury Department (where Geithner also served). The New Deal reform they helped repeal, the Glass-Steagall Act, had been enacted in 1933 in part because Citigroup’s ancestor, National City Bank, had imploded after repackaging bad loans as toxic securities in the go-go 1920s.

Well, nobody’s perfect. Given that John McCain’s economic team was headlined by Carly Fiorina and Joe the Plumber, the country would be dodging a fiscal bullet even if Obama had picked Suze Orman. But I keep wondering why the honeymoon hagiography about the best and the brightest has been so over the top. Washington’s cheerleading for our new New Frontier cabinet superstars has seldom been interrupted by tough questions about Summers’s Harvard career or Geithner’s record at the Fed. For that, it’s best to turn to the business press: Andrew Ross Sorkin at The New York Times, for one, has been relentless in trying to ferret out Geithner’s opaque role in the catastrophic decision to let Lehman Brothers fail.

No doubt the Pavlovian ovations for the Obama team are in part a reaction to our immediate political past. After eight years of a presidency that valued cronyism over brains (or even competence) and embraced an anti-intellectualism apotheosized by Sarah Palin, it’s a godsend to have a president who puts a premium on merit. I also wonder if a press corps that underrated Obama’s political prowess for much of the campaign, demeaning him as a professorial wuss next to the brawny Clinton and McCain, is now overcompensating for that mistake. No one wants to miss out a second time on triumphal history in the making.

This, too, is a replay of what happened when Kennedy arrived, beating out the more seasoned Richard Nixon and ending eight years of Eisenhower rule. “Rarely had a new administration received such a sympathetic hearing at a personal level from the more serious and respected journalists of the city,” Halberstam wrote. “The good reporters of that era, those who were well educated and who were enlightened themselves and worked for enlightened organizations, liked the Kennedys and were for the same things the Kennedys were for.” They couldn’t imagine that “men who were said to be the ablest to serve in government in this century” would turn out to be architects of America’s “worst tragedy since the Civil War.”

Post-Iraq, we’re unlikely to rush into a new Vietnam. But we ignore the past’s lessons at our peril. In his 20th-anniversary reflections, Halberstam wrote that his favorite passage in his book was the one where Johnson, after his first Kennedy cabinet meeting, raved to his mentor, the speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, about all the president’s brilliant men. “You may be right, and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say,” Rayburn responded, “but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”

Halberstam loved that story because it underlined the weakness of the Kennedy team: “the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal facility which the team exuded, and true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience.” That difference was clearly delineated in Vietnam, where American soldiers, officials and reporters could see that the war was going badly even as McNamara brusquely wielded charts and crunched numbers to enforce his conviction that victory was assured.
In our current financial quagmire, there have also been those who had the wisdom to sound alarms before Rubin, Summers or Geithner did. Among them were not just economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Nouriel Roubini but also Doris Dungey, a 47-year-old financial blogger known as Tanta, who died of cancer in Upper Marlboro, Md., last Sunday. As the Times obituary observed, “her first post, in December 2006, took issue with an optimistic Citigroup report that maintained that the mortgage industry would ‘rationalize’ in 2007, to the benefit of larger players like, well, Citigroup.” It was months before the others publicly echoed her judgment.

For some of J.F.K.’s best and brightest, Halberstam wrote, wisdom came “after Vietnam.” We have to hope that wisdom is coming to Summers and Geithner as they struggle with our financial Tet. Clearly it has not come to Rubin. Asked by The Times in April if he’d made any mistakes at Citigroup, he sounded as self-deluded as McNamara in retirement.

“I honestly don’t know,” Rubin answered. “In hindsight, there are a lot of things we’d do differently. But in the context of the facts as I knew them and my role, I’m inclined to think probably not.” Since that interview, 52,000 Citigroup employees have been laid off but not Rubin, who remains remorseless, collecting a salary that has totaled in excess of $115 million since 1999. You may be touched to hear that he is voluntarily relinquishing his bonus this Christmas.

Rubin hasn’t been seen in a transition photo op since Nov. 7, and in the end Obama chose Paul Volcker as chairman of his Economic Recovery Advisory Board. This was a presidential decision not only bright but wise.

Wise, but perhaps the wiseguys have simply moved to the back door, the better to avoid the bright lights. Time will tell.  ¶ 6:24 AM 0 comments links to this post

  The facts will set you free

At this season of
the Winter Solstice
may reason prevail.

There are no gods,
no devils, no angels,
no heaven, or hell.

There is only
our natural world.

Religion is but
myth and superstition
that hardens hearts
and enslaves minds.

[tip o'teh tinfoil to vastleft]  ¶ 8:39 PM 2 comments links to this post

  Responsibility in Action

Nothing like an impartial opinion:

...Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, must face up to his country’s involvement — whether official or nearly so...

And if Mr. Zardari knew nothing about some CIA-ISI bankrolled and trained terrorist cells that wanted to destabilize his government because, unlike Musharaff's previous one, it's not Company-owned and controlled, well that certainly is no excuse!  ¶ 8:06 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Scape the right goat



Maddow:

...Rachel Maddow asks whether it is the automotive companies at fault, or if the crisis where buyers can't get credit are at fault for the current crisis the Big-3 is facing. Rachel discusses whether we need a bottom-up rather than top-down solution to the problem with Sen. Sherrod Brown since the banks still are just not lending money even after the huge infusion of cash the taxpayers gave them.

With more than $6 trillion of bad investment derivatives out there, the banks are sitting on every penny Paulson throws at them.



Of course, this makes things worse, because with no investment in the real assets of society, people lose jobs. When people lose jobs, they don't pay their bills. When they don't pay their bills, the future value of the economy grows even worse.

Vicious cycle indeed.

The cycle won't begin to be broken until the government steps in to regulate investment and control how their bailout money is being spent. This will require some degree of micromanagement, and the people that own the government won't allow themselves to be managed openly.

Thus the cycle builds, and anyone who can even count on their fingers and toes can see where the policies are headed.

Let me repeat myself: this is intentional.

The goal of the people who own the money is to create a post-industrial neofeudalism for the greater part of humanity- the servant class- to emerge as the fossil fuel runs out.  ¶ 7:10 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Fueled by Soylent Green

  ¶ 7:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

  The Usual Suspects



The Fourth Branch of Government continues to let the liberals do the heavy lifting the conservatives couldn't do alone:

WASHINGTON — The chief executives of America’s foundering automobile manufacturers returned to Capitol Hill on Thursday and found themselves confronting years of pent-up anger, the harsh politics of a recession and the realization that even their strongest supporters might not be able to muster the votes to save them.

Fiscal hawks are worried that taxpayers will lose billions. Pro-labor lawmakers are furious that union workers are being blamed for causing the automakers’ problems, even as tens of thousands face layoffs. Environmentalists like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are fed up after years of battles over fuel-efficiency rules. And Congress, as a whole, is suffering from acute bailout fatigue...

Yes, environmentalists like Nancy Pelosi.

Here's the scam. Yes, there are $6 trillion dollars of bad derivatives out there. Even with gas a dollar a gallon, most people can't afford to buy a Hummer, much less fuel it. If you haven't already lost your job and/or your house, you realize how close you're shaving it. You'd like to be able to tell someone you're mad as hell, and you're not going to take it anymore, but the big guys tell you the best way to deal with your rape is to relax and enjoy it. Or lose everything.

They're not kidding.

So for refusing to give the big 3 a fraction of what they gave just one of the big banks, one out of ten Americans is about to be thrown out of work.

At Christmas.

This is a raft poised to go over Niagra. Over Angel Falls. The economy is about to go into free fall if this happen.

It doesn't have to happen this way. Like Moore says, the Feds could just say to Detroit: we'll bail you out, but You have to build high mileage, high durability vehicles with high emission standards. Or else. You gotta hire all these people to do this with the money too. Or else.

Something like that happened at the onset of WWII, when Detroit instantly retooled to build all the hardware to win the Great War, overrunning Hitler's Germany in Europe and Hirohito's Japan in Asia in three years.

It could be done. That and a jobs infrastructure program would keep America earning a paycheck until the banks could be regulated. That won't happen.

Obama would be a dead man within days if he tried that. But he won't. Instead, he fills his goverment with Company shills like Robert Gates.

Oh yeah, Mr. Preznit-$elect: if we had wanted a pro-Empire, Republican, ex-Head of the CIA in charge of the D.o'D., we'd have simply given Poppy Bu$h a second term in office.

The results would be pretty much the same as what we about to get anyway.  ¶ 6:41 AM 2 comments links to this post

  The Last Cheer of the Golden Hoard



The Cowboy hears the not-so final hurrah of the Bu$hCo crime syndicate:

"...We are expected to believe that the collapse of the dollar is incidental, co-incidental, unfortunate! The dollar is collapsing as we write because the smart money dumped the dollar and maniupulated the market. Those profits have already been taken --by design..."

The goal of the smart money is to create a post-industrial neofeudalism to emerge as the fossil fuel runs out.

They have to time this carefully, however. If the collapse occurs before alternative energy sources are developed, the Aristocrats have to live in hovels just like the commoners. That would never do.

On the other hand, if alternative energy sources are developed too rapidly, there will be no collapse. Democracy might even take root in America again. With a strong economy, and abundant solar-sourced energy, humanity will reach the stars.

That won't do either. How can you be an aristocrat with no one to Lord it over?  ¶ 8:30 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Controling Interest in Detroit

What Michael Moore says.  ¶ 8:28 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Meet the New Front in the War on Terra

Unlike Iran, with Pakistan, especially since they got rid of our puppet, we can say "Let's you and him fight":

...With each passing day, suspicions of a Pakistani link to the slaughter of 174 people, including six Americans, in Mumbai grow stronger -- and more plausible...

India is probably pissed enough to do it, and not thinking clearly enough right now to consider only one terrorist survived, and taking him apart one toenail at a time is probably not going to tell them anything they don't want to hear.

Even if an Indo-Pak war doesn't leave the subcontinent a smoking radioactive cinder, it is quite likely to plunge India and Pakistan both back into third world economies.

Now we wouldn't know anyone who'd benefit from that, would we?  ¶ 8:55 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Change you can believe in

Remember, the promise was change you could believe in, not change you could actually see.

Matthew Rothschild obviously is having somewhat of a crisis of Faith:

...Let’s remember: Gates was head of the CIA during Bush I. As such, he was involved in the invasion of Panama, the funding of a genocidal regime in Guatemala, the support of Suharto’s brutal government in Indonesia, and the overthrow of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti.

With Bush I, he pushed the first war against Saddam Hussein, even when it seemed that Saddam was preparing to withdraw from Iraq.

And now with Bush II, he’s been running the Iraq War, which Obama vowed to end.

And Gates has come out with modernizing our nuclear weapons arsenal—that means making new nukes—even though Obama talked about nuclear disarmament during the campaign.

Something’s terribly wrong with this picture.

And it’s simply this: Obama doesn’t really want a change in foreign and military policy. He said as much during the campaign when he praised Bush Sr. and said he wanted to return to the bipartisan consensus of the last forty years.

In those forty years, the United States waged war against Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It helped overthrow the Allende government in Chile. It supported Suharto’s invasion of East Timor. It financed and trained death squads in Central America. And on and on.

With the Gates choice, Obama proves he’s not about ending the U.S. empire.

He’s about running the U.S. empire—with less bravado than Bush-Cheney, but perhaps more efficiently.

And he’s perfectly willing to use the old hands like Gates, bloody as they are, to get that job done.

Ending the US empire? Barry O. won't even acknowledge it exists. Barry O. has Faith in Democracy, you know, the Faith-based kind. And you can Believe in that.  ¶ 9:57 PM 0 comments links to this post

  A Thousand Points of Empire



Not the same old Cheneyburton at all.

Handpicked, alrighty, according to Poppy's specifications.

If all the King's horses and all the King's men still fumble the ball, you can bet there's still the Fourth Branch that's not afraid to do what must be done to make that omlet.

...all three of his choices — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as the rival turned secretary of state; Gen. James L. Jones, the former NATO commander, as national security adviser, and Robert M. Gates, the current and future defense secretary — have embraced a sweeping shift of priorities and resources in the national security arena.

The shift would create a greatly expanded corps of diplomats and aid workers that, in the vision of the incoming Obama administration, would be engaged in projects around the world aimed at preventing conflicts and rebuilding failed states...

...Mr. Obama’s best political cover may come from Mr. Gates, the former Central Intelligence Agency director and veteran of the cold war, who just months ago said it was “hard to imagine any circumstance” in which he would stay in his post at the Pentagon. Now he will do exactly that.

A year ago, to studied silence from the Bush White House, Mr. Gates began giving a series of speeches about the limits of military power in wars in which no military victory is possible. He made popular the statistic, quoted by Mr. Obama, that the United States has more members of military marching bands than foreign service officers...

Yes, indeed, aid workers and foreign service officers appointed by an ex-head of the CIA in charge of the D.o'D. Officers who prefer their martinis stirred, not shaken. With the occasional joker in the deck.



Like the commenter said, Joker+No Batman=You're totally fucked

It's part of the script.

So many scripts are getting their chance for the big screen these days. It's a thousand points of Empire. You have to hand it to Poppy's replacement crew for Rumsfeld-Cheneyburton, they aren't at a loss for imagination.

While Barry O. had to shelve his plans for conscription for national service to win the $election, let's face it, the Golden Crescent won't love Big Obrother until there are a lot more boots on the ground. Hence, two interesting reports that have the virtue of indicating where a lot of those black budget warbucks have gone/ are going/ will go:

“My research hypothesis is that intelligent robots can behave more ethically in the battlefield than humans currently can,” said Ronald C. Arkin, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech, who is designing software for battlefield robots under contract with the Army. “That’s the case I make.”

Most certainly! Because the ethics of hunter-killers are part of the program.  ¶ 6:49 AM 1 comments links to this post

  Shadow Candidate



When the Company does to Obama what it did to Carter and Clinton, don't say they didn't warn you.

The next Preznit Bu$h tells you what is happening 'cause he calls for it:

In an interview with the conservative online publication Newsmax, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said the GOP must broaden its appeal to avoid becoming “the old white-guy party,” and recommended that Republicans create a “shadow government” to work on its own agenda. Claiming this is still a “center-right country,” Bush urged Republicans not to move towards a “Democratic-lite” agenda.

Engagement. There's engagement, and then there's those ready for engagement:

The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials.

The long-planned shift in the Defense Department's role in homeland security was recently backed with funding and troop commitments after years of prodding by Congress and outside experts, defense analysts said... the Bush administration and some in Congress have pushed for a heightened homeland military role since the middle of this decade, saying the greatest domestic threat is terrorists exploiting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

The Pentagon's plan calls for three rapid-reaction forces to be ready for emergency response by September 2011. The first 4,700-person unit, built around an active-duty combat brigade based at Fort Stewart, Ga., was available as of Oct. 1, said Gen. Victor E. Renuart Jr., commander of the U.S. Northern Command.

If funding continues, two additional teams will join nearly 80 smaller National Guard and reserve units made up of about 6,000 troops in supporting local and state officials nationwide. All would be trained to respond to a domestic chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or high-yield explosive attack, or CBRNE event, as the military calls it.

Military preparations for a domestic weapon-of-mass-destruction attack have been underway since at least 1996, when the Marine Corps activated a 350-member chemical and biological incident response force and later based it in Indian Head, Md., a Washington suburb. Such efforts accelerated after the Sept. 11 attacks, and at the time Iraq was invaded in 2003, a Pentagon joint task force drew on 3,000 civil support personnel across the United States.

In 2005, a new Pentagon homeland defense strategy emphasized "preparing for multiple, simultaneous mass casualty incidents." National security threats were not limited to adversaries who seek to grind down U.S. combat forces abroad, McHale said, but also include those who "want to inflict such brutality on our society that we give up the fight," such as by detonating a nuclear bomb in a U.S. city.

While we're contemplating this scenario, let's not forget which Crusading shadow government has the access to the nukes.

If a weapon of mass destruction goes off in this country, chances are we made it, right here, in the USA.  ¶ 9:20 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Need to Know Basis

The professionals know that torture doesn't work.

The Pentagon doesn't want you to know that, though:

...After my return from Iraq, I began to write about my experiences because I felt obliged, as a military officer, not only to point out the broken wheel but to try to fix it. When I submitted the manuscript of my book about my Iraq experiences to the Defense Department for a standard review to ensure that it did not contain classified information, I got a nasty shock. Pentagon officials delayed the review past the first printing date and then redacted an extraordinary amount of unclassified material -- including passages copied verbatim from the Army's unclassified Field Manual on interrogations and material vibrantly displayed on the Army's own Web site. I sued, first to get the review completed and later to appeal the redactions. Apparently, some members of the military command are not only unconvinced by the arguments against torture; they don't even want the public to hear them.

My experiences have landed me in the middle of another war -- one even more important than the Iraq conflict. The war after the war is a fight about who we are as Americans. Murderers like Zarqawi can kill us, but they can't force us to change who we are. We can only do that to ourselves. One day, when my grandkids sit on my knee and ask me about the war, I'll say to them, "Which one?"

Americans, including officers like myself, must fight to protect our values not only from al-Qaeda but also from those within our own country who would erode them. Other interrogators are also speaking out, including some former members of the military, the FBI and the CIA who met last summer to condemn torture and have spoken before Congress -- at considerable personal risk.

We're told that our only options are to persist in carrying out torture or to face another terrorist attack. But there truly is a better way to carry out interrogations -- and a way to get out of this false choice between torture and terror...

Why would the Pentagon want to hide this? Why would they want to implememnt a counterproductive and evil policy? Why because it provides job security for the people who like to torture:

...I'm not some ivory-tower type; I served for 14 years in the U.S. Air Force, began my career as a Special Operations pilot flying helicopters, saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, became an Air Force counterintelligence agent, then volunteered to go to Iraq to work as a senior interrogator. What I saw in Iraq still rattles me -- both because it betrays our traditions and because it just doesn't work.

Violence was at its peak during my five-month tour in Iraq. In February 2006, the month before I arrived, Zarqawi's forces (members of Iraq's Sunni minority) blew up the golden-domed Askariya mosque in Samarra, a shrine revered by Iraq's majority Shiites, and unleashed a wave of sectarian bloodshed. Reprisal killings became a daily occurrence, and suicide bombings were as common as car accidents. It felt as if the whole country was being blown to bits.

...Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and I joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators' bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules -- and often break them. I don't have to belabor the point; dozens of newspaper articles and books have been written about the misconduct that resulted. These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.

I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology -- one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they're listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of "ruses and trickery"). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.

Over the course of this renaissance in interrogation tactics, our attitudes changed. We no longer saw our prisoners as the stereotypical al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from Shiite militias and trying to ensure that their fellow Sunnis would still have some access to wealth and power in the new Iraq. Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq as much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to provide them with arms and money. I pointed this out to Gen. George Casey, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, when he visited my prison in the summer of 2006. He did not respond.

Perhaps he should have. It turns out that my team was right to think that many disgruntled Sunnis could be peeled away from Zarqawi. A year later, Gen. David Petraeus helped boost the so-called Anbar Awakening, in which tens of thousands of Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and signed up with U.S. forces, cutting violence in the country dramatically.

Our new interrogation methods led to one of the war's biggest breakthroughs: We convinced one of Zarqawi's associates to give up the al-Qaeda in Iraq leader's location. On June 8, 2006, U.S. warplanes dropped two 500-pound bombs on a house where Zarqawi was meeting with other insurgent leaders...

I know the counter-argument well -- that we need the rough stuff for the truly hard cases, such as battle-hardened core leaders of al-Qaeda, not just run-of-the-mill Iraqi insurgents. But that's not always true: We turned several hard cases, including some foreign fighters, by using our new techniques. A few of them never abandoned the jihadist cause but still gave up critical information. One actually told me, "I thought you would torture me, and when you didn't, I decided that everything I was told about Americans was wrong. That's why I decided to cooperate."

Torture and abuse are against my moral fabric. The cliche still bears repeating: Such outrages are inconsistent with American principles. And then there's the pragmatic side: Torture and abuse cost American lives.

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans...

The Real Amerikans are the people like Dick Cheney who like to play GI Joe with real GIs. They consider the rest of us to be pawns, or property, or terrorists. It's that simple.

It's pretty certain how they now classify Matthew Alexander.

These are the same people who have created record levels of suicide in the armed forces by their fundamentalist approach.

They are not simply incompetent. They know full well what they're doing. An army of Crusading fanatics is the best way to ensure the continued existence of an Islamic Jihad to fight in endless war.  ¶ 6:42 AM 0 comments links to this post