Officially the First to Do and the Last to Know

Lisa Pease gets this about right. The righteous indignation of Congress is part of the political show.

The Agency has a long history of manipulating Congress and others to support its programs. That this was posed as an actual question reveals the media’s historical illiteracy in this matter.

In fact, when a House select committee investigated the CIA in the 1970s, the CIA convinced the House to suppress its own report, begging the question of who was overseeing whom. Nevertheless, a copy of the House report was leaked, via Daniel Schorr, to the Village Voice. The report opened with this disturbing sentence:

“If this Committee’s recent experience is any test, intelligence agencies that are to be controlled by Congressional lawmaking are, today, beyond the lawmakers’ scrutiny.”

In the wake of revelations that CIA Director Leon Panetta just recently learned of an eight-year CIA operation that had never been revealed to, much less approved by, Congress, Reps. Anna Eshoo, D-California, and Rush Holt, D-New Jersey, echoed similar sentiments.

On Andrea Mitchell’s show on MSNBC Thursday, Eshoo and Holt stated that Panetta’s revelation challenged his earlier statement that the CIA did not mislead Congress.

Eshoo made clear that, contrary to accusations from some Republicans, the charge has nothing to do with protecting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who earlier claimed the CIA lied to and misled Congress regarding its use of waterboarding and other brutal interrogation methods.

“This isn’t anything personal,” Eshoo said emphatically. “This is strictly about business, and this is deadly serious business, if I might characterize it that way.

“The issue here is the national security of our nation. There are very few members of Congress that [sic] are chosen to serve on the House Intelligence Committee. And in that role, we are reliant upon the intelligence community to inform us – in fact, they are obligated, under the National Security Act of 1947 – to fully and completely inform the Congress.

“So this is about accountability. If in fact we do not get the proper information, how can we conduct our oversight which we are responsible for in the oath that we take, as well as shaping policy based on that information?”

Rep. Rush Holt focused the key issue for Andrea Mitchell:

“A moment ago, [you] said the relationship between Speaker Pelosi and Director Panetta and who told what [to] whom when is the bigger issue. No, that’s the smaller issue. The bigger issue is, how well-examined are the activities of the CIA? Is the CIA doing things that are not in the best national interest? Who knows, if you don’t have the oversight and the examination? So that’s what this is about.”

As the only full-scale House investigation focused on the CIA – the one led by Rep. Otis Pike in the mid-1970s determined – overseeing the CIA is a challenging task, at best, and one at which government had repeatedly failed...

If we study history, we’ll find rather quickly that the CIA has repeatedly, systematically, misled Congress.

Miles Copeland, one of the founding fathers of the CIA, talked of the use of “Byzantine intrigues” designed to keep Congress off its back.

Tom Braden noted that CIA Director Allen Dulles and CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton used to discuss each morning, in the guise of fishing talk, the “take” from the night before, i.e., intelligence gathered on prominent denizens of Capitol Hill from CIA taps sprinkled throughout the community.

(Braden, who died recently, is famously cited for writing an article titled “Why I’m Glad the CIA is Immoral.” Few commentators note that, in a later article, penned in the wake of disclosures about the Agency’s wrongdoings, Braden advocated the abolition of the CIA.)

Angleton said at one point that if the CIA couldn’t find out its own future from tapping the Hill, it had no business being in intelligence.

It should go without saying that “gossip” could easily become blackmail material, especially where illicit sexual liaisons were involved.

E. Howard Hunt, the notorious figure who at the time of Watergate was on his ostensible third retirement from the CIA, described how, during the 1960s, he penned a series of spy novels to aid the CIA, but “quit” the agency when his pen name became linked to his real name.

After he “quit,” he was instantly rehired as a contract agent, answerable solely to the CIA director’s deputy Thomas Karamessines. In his own words, Hunt explained he did this as a “cautionary” move “in the event some Congressman might raise a question.” In other words, he “quit” to hide a CIA media operation from congressional scrutiny...

And nowhere is the CIA’s deception and independent action more evident than in the Castro assassination plots.

When Congress first got a whiff of these plots thanks to a couple of articles by Jack Anderson and others, what did the CIA tell Congress?

“[W]ith the exception of one case which is under review by the Committee staff, there is no substance to the charges that CIA directed agents to assassinate Castro.” (Letter from Walter Elder to the Staff Director of the Church Committee, dated Aug. 21, 1975.)

As both Elder and the Church Committee later learned, the CIA of course had directed numerous agents to assassinate Castro in a variety of ways. But, the CIA suggested publicly, they were acting under presidential authority.

Privately, however, according to the CIA’s own Inspector General Report, the CIA never informed President John F. Kennedy of the Phase I Castro plots until they had ended, and never informed Kennedy of the ongoing Phase II plots at all.

In its own report, the CIA asks itself, can we claim executive approval for these plots, and answers its own question, “No.” (This report was not declassified until the late 1990s, and should be considered the final word on the subject.)

The legacy of the investigations of the CIA in the 1970s was the perception, though not the reality, that effective CIA oversight had been implemented.

We’re now seeing that, in reality, almost nothing changed. The troubling insights of the committees that investigated the CIA were all but forgotten. No one went to jail for breaking laws or committing perjury.

(In 1977, former CIA Director Richard Helms was convicted of misleading Congress about the Nixon administration’s covert action to oust Chile’s socialist President Salvador Allende, who died in a 1973 coup. Helms received a two-year suspended sentence and a $2,000 fine, which was paid by friends at the CIA. Until his death in 2002, Helms wore the conviction as a badge of honor, and President Ronald Reagan awarded him the National Security Medal in 1983.)

(In the 1980s, CIA Director William J. Casey delighted in mumbling through his congressional testimony making it nearly impossible for the Intelligence Committee members to understand what he was saying or grasp its import. When the deceptions of the Iran-Contra Affair were exposed in 1986, Casey was accused of misleading Congress but died in May 1987 before any legal action could be taken. Three other implicated CIA officers were pardoned by President George H.W. Bush on Christmas Eve 1992.)

While both the Senate and House have intelligence oversight committees, the CIA is always in control of what Congress knows about its operations, as we were reminded again on Thursday. How can that be changed? Who has the political will to demand true openness?

It appears that President Obama has no desire to demand any change in the current system of intelligence community oversight. That’s unfortunate, and dangerous to our Democracy.

How can there be consent of the governed, as our Constitution demands, if the governed, or at least, their representatives, have no knowledge of what they are consenting to?

Should we then demand a new investigation of the intelligence communities? Of course we should, and regularly. But we should also do so with a genuine desire for change.

We shouldn’t spend the time and money unless there’s a determination to get to the truth and follow through on lessons learned. We shouldn’t start unless we have the stomach to face our past with a view towards protecting our future.

We elect our leaders. We have chosen whom we want to entrust with our secrets. How dare the CIA decide our representatives are unworthy of our trust and keep secrets from them? Is this a government of the people, by the people, and for the people? Or do we live under a government run by covert operators for purposes undisclosed?

We can’t know if we don’t ask the hard questions and perform a serious investigation into all that has been kept from us to date.

The supposed complacency of the American people to the depredations of the Company is a carefully maintained media illusion. As is the indignation of Congress about the lies they've been officially getting. Nobody's fooling anybody, but the liars use the kabuki to advance themselves in the game of the Village.

An amusing facet of the act is that the secret eavesdropping program is now Officially ended.

Trust us now, the Company says, because we're honest about the fact we are liars.

We'd never monitor your every move and statement for a National $ecurity only we are qualified to judge and execute with extreme sanction.

Meanwhile,

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on Sunday that the Bush administration may have broken the law if the Central Intelligence Agency concealed a covert spy program from Congress...

Well, yeah, but the question is whether this is an act leading to a Barry O. squelch before really taking off. A speech from Sy Hersch last spring:

...After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.

"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...

"Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

"Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

"It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.

"In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.

"I’ve had people say to me -- five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee?’

"But they’re not gonna get before a committee.”

Now that's not likely to get rehashed in Congress- despite being public information. CIA operated assasination rings? If there are, count on Ms. Feinstein to profess totally ignorance of this kind of thing ever occuring, and Mr. Panetta's assurances we'd never do this kind of thing.

Where anybody could see it or survive to report on it anyway.

Congress Knew Nothing About Bu$hCo's Illegal Surveillance

It's all Cheney's fault, you see...

The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday...

There's no doubt the old Sith Lord himself is one heeluva a villian.

There is also no doubt the entire left wing blogsphere knew all about this virtually from its inception.

We tried warning people. The main$tream totally ignored and dismissed the reports of this, not only from the blogosphere but the admissions of Bu$hCo-Cheneyburton about what the NSA was doing. It's not like they hid it from anyone. And the main$tream reaction? We were accused of being moonbats. We were accused of being unpatriotic. We were accused of being unAmerican.

Well, maybe we are unAmerikan. With the Imperial "k".

A lot of us would like to see Cheney prosecuted for his war crimes. Which, in fact, these aren't. Despite its protestations to the contrary Congress knew all about this.

Compared to everything else Dick Cheney is done, this is minor. This will publically humiliate him for awhile. He will be cleared of all wrongdoing- he's the Vice in a time of war, right? And he will emerge virtually impossible to indict for anything else.

Do Not Attempt this at home

...but let's face it, the Man has you out gunned. So what are you gonna do when Big Brother has 21st century Star Wars weapons and all you have is your lousy Glock?

Why, you use your own pocket laser...



link here

The Perfect DINOcrat

"Management", McNamara declared in 1967 "is the gate through which social and economic and political change, indeed change in every direction, is diffused through society."

It'll work like Vista

Or better yet, Explorer:

...Billionaire Bill Gates has patented the idea to halt hurricanes by decreasing the surface temperature of the ocean.

The patent calls for a large fleet of specially equipped ships which would mix warm water from the ocean surface with colder water down below, according to five new patents that include Microsoft's chairman as a co-inventor. That could then reduce or perhaps eliminate the heat-driven condensation which hurricanes feed upon, thus significantly reducing their intensity...

[tip o'teh tinfoil to Cryptogon]

Will somebody explain to these morons what actually happens in a hurricane? The surface heat has to go somewhere. You just pump the warm relatively fresh surface water into the cold briney deep- and play Hell with the deep sea conveyor currents, not to mention the surface and benthic ecosystems.



Ham-handed and bone-headed myopic hubris.

When one can walk across Lake Washington to reach Mercer Island, one hopes Mister Gates realizes what a colossal disaster his ego has been for the world he lives in.

On second thought: this may not be a bug, but a Feature of his system.

Free Enter Prize and the Honor Among Thieves

Non competition clauses? Why, who's competing?

BOSTON (Reuters) - Citadel Investment Group, one of the world's most powerful hedge fund firms, sued a former top executive in its highly successful quantitative trading unit and two others for setting up their own firm.

Chicago-based Citadel, founded by 41-year-old billionaire Kenneth Griffin, said in a lawsuit filed on Thursday that Mikhail Malyshev and two other former employees had violated their noncompete clauses by starting their own firm, Teza Technologies LLC.

Teza Technologies made headlines this week when it was identified as the firm that had hired a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) computer programer whom federal prosecutors had accused of stealing trade secrets from the Wall Street investment bank.

Malyshev, a Russian emigre with a doctorate in astrophysics from Princeton, left Citadel's quantitative trading unit in February after the funds he helped run returned about 40 percent last year. Their performance stood out at a time most hedge funds lost money and Citadel's flagship portfolios tumbled 50 percent.

Like all employees who leave the $11 billion hedge fund firm, Malyshev faced a nine-month noncompete clause. A source at Citadel said the hedge fund had found out about Malyshev's new firm this week.

Former Citadel employees Jace Kohlmeier and Matthew Hinerfeld are also listed on the civil complaint.

A spokesman for Teza called the suit "frivolous" and said it "appears to be timed to harass Teza executives."

Well, yeah... except the tactics these pirates engage in tend to raise their ships by sinking everyone else's- just like Citadel's. Just like Goldman-Sachs.

Which may be why a lot of these young geniuses seem to be walking off of skyscraper rooftops these days one supposes. Call it "retirement with extreme sanction", no paperwork, litigation, 401ks, small airplanes, or AK47s required.

“The stimulus is on track,”

And Lawrence H. Summers is a hack.

The best thing for Barry O. to do would be fire Larry Summers, the point man in the Cabinet backing a bankster focused bailout.

And quite possibly hire a special prosecutor- but if he won't do that to go after Bu$hCo, he certainly won't go after his own.

But he'd better do something, because the banksters are up to their old tricks again using the bailout as collateral.

No, really?

The Company lies when it suits them.

... In a June 26 letter to Mr. Panetta discussing his testimony, Democrats said that the agency had “misled members” of Congress for eight years about the classified matters, which the letter did not disclose. “This is similar to other deceptions of which we are aware from other recent periods,” said the letter, made public late Wednesday by Representative Rush D. Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, one of the signers.

In an interview, Mr. Holt declined to reveal the nature of the C.I.A.’s alleged deceptions,. But he said, “We wouldn’t be doing this over a trivial matter.”

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Silvestre Reyes, Democrat of Texas, referred to Mr. Panetta’s disclosure in a letter to the committee’s ranking Republican, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, Congressional Quarterly reported on Wednesday. Mr. Reyes wrote that the committee “has been misled, has not been provided full and complete notifications, and (in at least one occasion) was affirmatively lied to.”

In a related development, President Obama threatened to veto the pending Intelligence Authorization Bill if it included a provision that would allow information about covert actions to be given to the entire House and Senate Intelligence Committees, rather than the so-called Gang of Eight — the Democratic and Republican leaders of both houses of Congress and the two Intelligence Committees.

A White House statement released on Wednesday said the proposed expansion of briefings would undermine “a long tradition spanning decades of comity between the branches regarding intelligence matters.” Democrats have complained that under President George W. Bush, entire programs were hidden from most committee members for years.

The question of the C.I.A.’s candor with the Congressional oversight committees has been hotly disputed since Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the agency of failing to disclose in a 2002 briefing that it had used waterboarding against a terrorism suspect. Ms. Pelosi said the agency routinely misled Congress, though she later said she intended to fault the Bush administration rather than career intelligence officials.

Since then, Republicans have called Ms. Pelosi’s complaint an unwarranted attack on the integrity of counterterrorism officers and have demanded an investigation. Democrats have rebuffed the demand.

In a statement Wednesday night, a C.I.A. spokesman, George Little, noted that the agency “took the initiative to notify the oversight committees” about the past failures. He said the agency and Mr. Panetta “believe it is vital to keep the Congress fully and currently informed.”

So what makes the DINOcrats think they're doing any different now?

How do you make a sitting duck secure in the 21st century?

I mean really, battleships? In the age of missiles and fighters?

Why, laser cannon of course.



They're too big (so far) to mount on airplanes. But on battleships? Computer and secondary laser guided, with 50 mile line of sight ranges? You betcha.

Don't give me any of this "Top Secret" biz about experimental weapons. That's so Cold War. Now they save that label for the CIA's opium runners from Afghanistan. This laser ordnance stuff has been in the mil geek mags since Rummy zombified Star Wars.

The Company will just love selling all the shiny pricey hardware to the highest bidders.

But it is okay when we do it

It is said that when Gorbachev met Reagan for the first time he was severely shocked to realize that this was not the man running things.

People learn, however.



Thus, the One conferred first extensively with Putin's sockpuppet on his trip to Moscow before given a chance to meet informally with the real deal.



Even his supporters there refused the Oborg Assimilation and classified him as a relatively friendly "politician".

So it's not surprising who the Russian Brotherhood target, and what the results of the theft mean:

...because of the way this software interfaces with the various markets and exchanges, the bank has warned it could be used to "manipulate markets in unfair ways."

Obviously, Goldman-$acks Amerika is the only one that can be trusted with such super powers.

[tip o'teh tinfoil to Cryptogon again]

To Hell with him

...and his boss, too.



Bob Herbert:

...Lessons learned from Vietnam? None.

As The Times’s Tim Weiner pointed out in McNamara’s obituary, Congress authorized the war after President Johnson contended that American warships had been attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964. The attack never happened. As Mr. Weiner wrote, “The American ships had been firing at their own sonar shadows on a dark night.”

But McNamara, relying on intelligence reports, told Johnson that evidence of the attack was ironclad. Does this remind anyone of the “slam dunk” evidence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction?

More than 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam and some 2 million to 3 million Vietnamese. More than 4,000 Americans have died in Iraq, and no one knows how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Even as I was writing this, reports were coming in of seven more American G.I.’s killed in Afghanistan — a war that made sense in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, but makes very little sense now.

None of these wars had clearly articulated goals or endgames. None were pursued with the kind of intensity and sense of common purpose and shared sacrifice that marked World War II. Wars are now mostly background noise, distant events overshadowed by celebrity deaths and the antics of Sarah Palin, Mark Sanford and the like.

The obscenity of war is lost on most Americans, and that drains the death of Robert McNamara of any real significance.

Notice that Herbert can go right up to the line here in the New York Pravda but can't cross it. He can admit the historical fact that the Gulf of Tonkin never happened- but he can't get published saying that it was a manufactured incident. Similarly, his newspaper will say that Cheney and Rumsfeld and Tenet and Dubya were mistaken about Iraq without ever admitting they lied.



Gravitas and all that, you know.

Who is this "we" you speak of, White man?

Joe Biden is eating his shoe again:

..."The truth is, we and everyone else misread the economy," Biden told me during our exclusive "This Week" interview in Iraq.

Biden acknowledged administration officials were too optimistic earlier this year when they predicted the unemployment rate would peak at 8 percent as part of their effort to sell the stimulus package. The national unemployment rate has ballooned to 9.5 percent in June -- the worst in 26 years.

"The truth is, there was a misreading of just how bad an economy we inherited," said Biden, who is leading the administration's effort to implement it's $787 billion economic stimulus plan. ..

Everybody except Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini, and most of the people who voted for you and Barry O. over the Republicans you're continuing to imitate, you asshat.

Try listening to the Democratic wing of the Democratic party instead of Goldman-$achs and the Yale boys sometime.

What is this "undisputed head" they speak of?

We learn new things every day:

MOSCOW — The summit meeting here this week revolves around two men with some notable affinities. Presidents Obama and Dmitri A. Medvedev are relatively young leaders who represent a new generation of post-cold-war leadership, who once taught law and embrace the Internet. (Mr. Medvedev even has a video blog.)

One difference stands out, though: Mr. Obama is the undisputed head of his nation. Mr. Medvedev? Well, that is a bit more complicated, and is a significant problem for the Obama administration as it prepares for discussions on Monday.

Mr. Medvedev holds the highest office in Russia, so protocol dictates that Mr. Obama meet and negotiate nuclear arms control and other matters with him. Yet questions about Mr. Medvedev’s authority hang over the summit meeting like an awkward familial arrangement that everyone acknowledges but no one knows how to handle.

Mr. Obama himself waded into the issue on Thursday when he made a pointed remark about Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, who is Mr. Medvedev’s mentor and is widely assumed to be Russia’s real ruler...

Pootie might ask the One: Who's your Daddy, Barry?

But certainly not where the kids can hear.

Dillinger was small fry

Rich on Tiabbi:

...To beat out the implementation of new regulations, banks are rapidly jacking up checking-account charges and credit card fees, even for those who have paid their bills on time. As Eric Dash of The Times reported on Thursday, the institutions that received the most bailout loot are often the biggest offenders.

That would include the too-big-to-fail Citigroup, which has so far received $45 billion in taxpayers’ money, along with guarantees on $300 billion in toxic assets, to mitigate its reckless risk-taking during the reign of such obscenely rewarded (and now departed) executives as Charles Prince and Robert Rubin. While taxpayers will soon own some 34 percent of Citi, it is not only increasing our credit card interest rates (to nearly 30 percent in some cases) but raising its own base salaries (by 50 percent) to work around Washington’s new restrictions on bonuses. New rules may come and go, but loopholes remain eternal.

We also have learned, from The Wall Street Journal on Thursday, that Goldman Sachs, another bailout recipient, is on track to pay its employees an average of $700,000 each in 2009, which, incredibly, is a bit higher than its compensation average in the pre-crash year of 2007. In a scathing and controversial new article in Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi accuses Goldman of having earned such rewards by engineering “every major market manipulation since the Great Depression.”

What’s uncontroversial and indisputable is that Goldman alumni have played key roles in both the Bush and Obama administrations’ responses to the current crisis — even though Goldman has a big stake in the outcome. The dense revolving-door conflicts of interest are appalling. Goldman is howling about Taibbi’s article, but the bottom line was articulated last week by the economic blogger Felix Salmon of Reuters. He wrote that he couldn’t “think of a single government regulation over the past couple of decades which has remotely harmed Goldman Sachs” as opposed to the many that “have done it a world of good.”

Goldman also rules at the New York Fed, a supposed monitor of Wall Street. Until May the Fed’s chairman was serving simultaneously on the Goldman board; he resigned only after The Wall Street Journal reported that he was also still buying Goldman stock during his Fed tenure. At least that other failed watchdog, the Securities and Exchange Commission, has now cleaned house. But Politico reported last week that its new chairwoman, Mary Schapiro, had been the star draw at a lavish June banquet for the S.E.C. Historical Society, an independent organization that sold tables for up to $7,500 to “law and lobbying firms that do business with the S.E.C.” Among the buyers: Standard & Poor’s, a credit ratings agency that enabled the subprime bubble by giving its approval to wildly speculative derivatives.

It’s against this grand backdrop of business-as-usual at the top of the pyramid that we learned at week’s end that the speed of job losses is accelerating again. The government also reported that Americans who still do have jobs now have an average 33-hour workweek, the lowest since tracking began in 1964...

Goldman-$achs is only the latest Company brand name you can recognize, Mister Rich.

It's more than a $ystemic inability to recognize the foxes running the henhouse. The foxes are the $ystem. They've been so for most of human history.

Michael Parenti's addressed what is unthinkable for most of the main$tream- and its motivation:

Often the term "conspiracy" is applied dismissively whenever one suggests that people who occupy positions of political and economic power are consciously dedicated to advancing their elite interests. Even when they openly profess their designs, there are those who deny that intent is involved. In 1994, the officers of the Federal Reserve announced they would pursue monetary policies designed to maintain a high level of unemployment in order to safeguard against "overheating" the economy. Like any creditor class, they preferred a deflationary course. When an acquaintance of mine mentioned this to friends, he was greeted skeptically, "Do you think the Fed bankers are deliberately trying to keep people unemployed?" In fact, not only did he think it, it was announced on the financial pages of the press. Still, his friends assumed he was imagining a conspiracy because he ascribed self-interested collusion to powerful people...

...Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: "Do you actually think there's a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?" For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together - on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot - though they call it "planning" and "strategizing" - and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.

Yet there are individuals who ask with patronizing, incredulous smiles, do you really think that the people at the top have secret agendas, are aware of their larger interests, and talk to each other about them? To which I respond, why would they not? This is not to say that every corporate and political elite is actively dedicated to working for the higher circles of power and property. Nor are they infallible or always correct in their assessments and tactics or always immediately aware of how their interests are being affected by new situations. But they are more attuned and more capable of advancing their vast interests than most other social groups.

The alternative is to believe that the powerful and the privileged are somnambulists, who move about oblivious to questions of power and privilege; that they always tell us the truth and have nothing to hide even when they hide so much; that although most of us ordinary people might consciously try to pursue our own interests, wealthy elites do not; that when those at the top employ force and violence around the world it is only for the laudable reasons they profess; that when they arm, train, and finance covert actions in numerous countries, and then fail to acknowledge their role in such deeds, it is because of oversight or forgetfulness or perhaps modesty; and that it is merely a coincidence how the policies of the national security state so consistently serve the interests of the transnational corporations and the capital-accumulation system throughout the world...

...conspiracy and structure are not mutually exclusive dynamics. A structural analysis that a priori rules out conspiracy runs the risk of not looking at the whole picture. Conspiracies are a component of the national security political system, not deviations from it. Ruling elites use both conspiratorial covert actions and overtly legitimating procedures at home and abroad. They finance everything from electoral campaigns and publishing houses to mobsters and death squads. They utilize every conceivable stratagem, including killing one of their own if they perceive him to be a barrier to their larger agenda of making the world safe for those who own it.

The conspiracy findings in regard to the JFK assassination, which the movie JFK brought before a mass audience, made many people realize what kind of a gangster state we have in this country and what it does around the world. In investigating the JFK conspiracy, researchers are not looking for an "escape" from something "unpleasant and difficult," as Chomsky would have it, rather they are raising grave questions about the nature of state power in what is supposed to be a democracy.

A structuralist position should not discount the role of human agency in history. Institutions are not self-generating reified forces. The "great continuities of corporate and class interest" (Cockburn's phrase) are not disembodied things that just happen of their own accord. Neither empires nor national security institutions come into existence in a fit of absent-mindedness. They are actualized not only by broad conditional causes but by the conscious efforts of live people. Evidence for this can be found in the very existence of a national security state whose conscious function is to recreate the conditions of politico-economic hegemony...

Teh Latest

[via]

Fireworks for your 4th

Rolling Stone finally publishes Matt Tiabi's piece on Goldman-$achs.

Jon Schwarz:

...The funniest part is, you could legitimately argue that Goldman Sachs has killed more people than Saddam.

[tip o'teh tinfoil to Avedon again]

It's important to not lose sight that Goldman-$achs is simply another head of the hydra. Maybe one of the Ringwraiths, but not the Lord of the Rings. Nowhere close. The Company's like that: a band of contentious robber barons, they spend at least as much energy trying to screw each other as they spend trying to take over the world.

The buck stops in their pocket

...which is why we continue to blame them.

The Dark Wraith seeks to place blame where it belongs:

...The Federal Reserve failed to control the money supply aggregate M3, and when its failure began to pulse like a flashing red beacon, the Federal Reserve had the unbelievable gall to simply stop publishing the information about the out-of-control aggregate. By not maintaining control of M3, a highly illiquid form of money, it gave banks and other financial institutions all the incentive in the world to construct derivative instruments by which that illiquid form of money could be used to generate more liquid capital.

It's like owning a house when you're cash-strapped. The house is "money," but you can't use it to buy groceries; but what you can do is use that house as collateral to borrow cash-money so you can make bets and engage in other risky behaviors that do generate cash.

It was, is, and always will be the Federal Reserve's principal duty to maintain a stable growth of the money supply, and part of the reason for this is so that distorted incentives do not arise in the financial system where market power is sufficient to both seek and discover prices for financial instruments.

To some extent, the Federal Reserve's custodial role is very similar to the job of parents in ensuring that distorted incentives do not overwhelm decision-making processes of their children. The world has all kinds of bad things to offer, and it has all kinds of ways by which those bad things can infect the thinking of rational entities who want what's best for themselves without regard to larger, longer-term consequences for either themselves or the bigger world that will have to pay the price for their errors.

Yes, of course Goldman-Sachs is a greedy entity. That's what motivates business enterprise, and no amount of shaming, "ethics" training, or preaching from the Bible is going to change either the nature of the firm or the nature of the people who comprise an enterprise. It is our public institutions (in a secular society) that have the responsibility to circumscribe our worst and to foster an environment in which our worst does not become our best choice.

The Federal Reserve failed, and it failed massively, both during the tenure of Ben Bernanke and before him during the last years of Alan Greenspan, who became a spiteful manipulator of monetary policy against Bill Clinton and then a shill for lies about the need for massive tax cuts under George W. Bush.

And now, let me go on the attack against President Barack Obama.

I have written time and time again against this man. He is, at best, a center-right authoritarian, and his judgment regarding appointments to high offices is nothing short of outrageous. He is not choosing the best; he is, instead, choosing institutional hacks and people of otherwise less-than-stellar minds and strengths. I could name his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, as one of his worst-of-the-worst choices were it not for others who rank in the same league of outlandish incompetence, mendacity, and sheer inadequacy of qualifications and prior performance; but I shall for the purposes of this brief article focus upon Timothy Geithner, whom Obama appointed — under no pressure whatsoever to do so — as the Secretary of the Treasury.

This is the Timothy Geithner who was the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the so-called "Empire Bank," which has a permanent voting seat on the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee, which decides upon and then directs the execution of monetary policy, with the principal means of carrying out that monetary policy being via what are called "open market operations" carried out by the Domestic Trading Desk at the Federal Reserve District Bank in New York.

Beyond Geithner's intimate involvement in the utterly irresponsible monetary policy regime that allowed M3 to grow out of control, because the Reserve Banks are in charge of supervising all member banks of the Federal Reserve system in their respective districts, the Empire Bank was the regulatory point where control of the banks in New York was supposed to take place, and yet New York was the virtual epicenter of the "financial meltdown." This happened when Geithner was the President of the Reserve Bank that was supposed to have had an iron fist of regulatory control over those very banks. And the claim that the Reserve Banks do not have regulatory authority over some of the financial institutions that got in trouble is sheer nonsense: after Glass-Steagall was all but thrown in the trash a decade ago, the financial sector dispensed with all pretense that there was a wall separating banking from all manner of other financial services, yet the Fed could do nothing to regulate this integrated financial services industry? Sure. Right.

Did Geithner get fired?

Did Geithner go to prison?

Did Geithner get publicly humiliated and driven into the wilderness?

No, President Barack Obama appointed him Secretary of the Treasury of the United States of America.

And finally, a brief mention of Ben Bernanke.

For allowing M3 to roar out of control, thereby allowing the creation of the vast overhang of illiquid monetary assets that were used to back ridiculously risky bets by banks, did Ben Bernanke get charged with crimes of any kind?

Was Ben Bernanke fired from his job for staggering malfeasance that will ultimately cost the American economy and its taxpayers more than $60 trillion? (You read that right: $60 trillion. Do a search using the keyword term "notional value.")

Has Ben Bernanke even been called before a grand jury?

Has President Barack Obama made any signal whatsoever that he will not tolerate this kind of stunning malfeasance in the government of which he is now the undisputed chief executive officer?

The answer to every single one of the above questions is a resounding, "No."

I am not interested in hearing about Goldman-Sachs or Bank of America or Lehman Brothers or Merrill Lynch or any other bad, greedy firm, not until someone tells me why it is that the greed of private enterprise is to be condemned when the incompetence of duly authorized public enforcers of proper behavior was so profound that greed in its destructive form could go as far as it did, for as long as it did, to the extraordinary detriment of the macroeconomy as it did.

Do not talk to me about how bad the kids are when no one wants to give me anything but blank looks about the trailer trash parents who were singularly, unambiguously responsible for seeing to it that their little snots didn't tear up the town...

It's very true that most of our political culture needs to be exposed and face the consequences of their crimes.

However, these sockpuppets wouldn't dance in the halls of power if their stage wasn't bought by those very bastions of the free market that profit from their show.

So, I will continue to blame the Company- with the knowledge that they've bought both the Law and the rights to enforce it as well.

Imperial Palaces

The Oborg have okayed Baghhdad v.2 for Company use. Chalmers Johnson:

The U.S. Empire of Bases -- at $102 billion a year already the world's costliest military enterprise -- just got a good deal more expensive. As a start, on May 27th, we learned that the State Department will build a new "embassy" in Islamabad, Pakistan, which at $736 million will be the second priciest ever constructed, only $4 million less, if cost overruns don't occur, than the Vatican-City-sized one the Bush administration put up in Baghdad. The State Department was also reportedly planning to buy the five-star Pearl Continental Hotel (complete with pool) in Peshawar, near the border with Afghanistan, to use as a consulate and living quarters for its staff there.

Unfortunately for such plans, on June 9th Pakistani militants rammed a truck filled with explosives into the hotel, killing 18 occupants, wounding at least 55, and collapsing one entire wing of the structure. There has been no news since about whether the State Department is still going ahead with the purchase...

...what is being done about those military bases anyway -- now close to 800 of them dotted across the globe in other people's countries? Even as Congress and the Obama administration wrangle over the cost of bank bailouts, a new health plan, pollution controls, and other much needed domestic expenditures, no one suggests that closing some of these unpopular, expensive imperial enclaves might be a good way to save some money.

Instead, they are evidently about to become even more expensive. On June 23rd, we learned that Kyrgyzstan, the former Central Asian Soviet Republic which, back in February 2009, announced that it was going to kick the U.S. military out of Manas Air Base (used since 2001 as a staging area for the Afghan War), has been persuaded to let us stay. But here's the catch: In return for doing us that favor, the annual rent Washington pays for use of the base will more than triple from $17.4 million to $60 million, with millions more to go into promised improvements in airport facilities and other financial sweeteners. All this because the Obama administration, having committed itself to a widening war in the region, is convinced it needs this base to store and trans-ship supplies to Afghanistan.

As Barry O. contemplates his own 1937, he wishes to avoid his own 1963, and if he thwarted this aspect of economic stimulus, the Company would ensure a short ride for him in an unprotected limousine.

Count on it.

A 1937 moment is walking to your door

Dr. Krugman speaks. You listen:

O.K., Thursday’s jobs report settles it. We’re going to need a bigger stimulus. But does the president know that?

Let’s do the math.

Since the recession began, the U.S. economy has lost 6 ½ million jobs — and as that grim employment report confirmed, it’s continuing to lose jobs at a rapid pace. Once you take into account the 100,000-plus new jobs that we need each month just to keep up with a growing population, we’re about 8 ½ million jobs in the hole.

And the deeper the hole gets, the harder it will be to dig ourselves out. The job figures weren’t the only bad news in Thursday’s report, which also showed wages stalling and possibly on the verge of outright decline. That’s a recipe for a descent into Japanese-style deflation, which is very difficult to reverse. Lost decade, anyone?

Wait — there’s more bad news: the fiscal crisis of the states. Unlike the federal government, states are required to run balanced budgets. And faced with a sharp drop in revenue, most states are preparing savage budget cuts, many of them at the expense of the most vulnerable. Aside from directly creating a great deal of misery, these cuts will depress the economy even further.

So what do we have to counter this scary prospect? We have the Obama stimulus plan, which aims to create 3 ½ million jobs by late next year. That’s much better than nothing, but it’s not remotely enough. And there doesn’t seem to be much else going on. Do you remember the administration’s plan to sharply reduce the rate of foreclosures, or its plan to get the banks lending again by taking toxic assets off their balance sheets? Neither do I.

All of this is depressingly familiar to anyone who has studied economic policy in the 1930s. Once again a Democratic president has pushed through job-creation policies that will mitigate the slump but aren’t aggressive enough to produce a full recovery. Once again much of the stimulus at the federal level is being undone by budget retrenchment at the state and local level.

So have we failed to learn from history, and are we, therefore, doomed to repeat it? Not necessarily — but it’s up to the president and his economic team to ensure that things are different this time. President Obama and his officials need to ramp up their efforts, starting with a plan to make the stimulus bigger.

Just to be clear, I’m well aware of how difficult it will be to get such a plan enacted.

There won’t be any cooperation from Republican leaders, who have settled on a strategy of total opposition, unconstrained by facts or logic. Indeed, these leaders responded to the latest job numbers by proclaiming the failure of the Obama economic plan. That’s ludicrous, of course. The administration warned from the beginning that it would be several quarters before the plan had any major positive effects. But that didn’t stop the chairman of the Republican Study Committee from issuing a statement demanding: “Where are the jobs?”

It’s also not clear whether the administration will get much help from Senate “centrists,” who partially eviscerated the original stimulus plan by demanding cuts in aid to state and local governments — aid that, as we’re now seeing, was desperately needed. I’d like to think that some of these centrists are feeling remorse, but if they are, I haven’t seen any evidence to that effect.

And as an economist, I’d add that many members of my profession are playing a distinctly unhelpful role.

It has been a rude shock to see so many economists with good reputations recycling old fallacies — like the claim that any rise in government spending automatically displaces an equal amount of private spending, even when there is mass unemployment — and lending their names to grossly exaggerated claims about the evils of short-run budget deficits. (Right now the risks associated with additional debt are much less than the risks associated with failing to give the economy adequate support.)

Also, as in the 1930s, the opponents of action are peddling scare stories about inflation even as deflation looms.

So getting another round of stimulus will be difficult. But it’s essential.

Obama administration economists understand the stakes. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, published an article on the “lessons of 1937” — the year that F.D.R. gave in to the deficit and inflation hawks, with disastrous consequences both for the economy and for his political agenda.

What I don’t know is whether the administration has faced up to the inadequacy of what it has done so far.

So here’s my message to the president: You need to get both your economic team and your political people working on additional stimulus, now. Because if you don’t, you’ll soon be facing your own personal 1937.

The key is jobs. Without jobs people can't pay bills. They can't buy cars, or gasoline for the cars, or even a good meal.

Of course, the people who have Barry's ear say the key is banks. Since they footed the bill for his presidency, they're the ones he's inclined to listen to. And they're the ones that are making the Oborg years Poppy Bush's 6th term in office and prepping the way for Jebbie in 2012.

Green Shoots

But its weeds.

The American economy lost 467,000 more jobs in June, and the unemployment rate edged up to 9.5 percent in a sobering indication that the longest recession since the 1930s had yet to release its hold...

The Labor Department’s monthly snapshot of employment, released Thursday, challenged visions of a recovery already taking root...

Some economists are now calling for another dose of government spending to stimulate the economy, though the White House maintains that enough money is in the pipeline already...

Not to the banksters, you Village morons. Create jobs. Fix roads. Clean streets. Plant trees, already.

Hearts and Bottoms

Not another conspiracy theory

Call it a fact of the way the banksters do biz:

n yet another move to make a mockery of so-called market transparency, and again with mad props to Zerohedge, we have this:

...The Exchange has filed with the SEC to implement the decommissioning of the DPTRrequirement following the July 10, 2009 trade date. Accordingly, the last required submission of the DPTR will be on July 14, 2009, which is the second business day after the last trade date for which the DPTR is required.

Go read the entire Zerohedge article; what this means, in short, is that the ability of people (like you and I) to see the fact that a handful of banks, most specifically Goldman Sachs, constitute the majority of NYSE trading volume - and they're trading for their own book, not for customers, will no longer be disclosed.

This "back and forth trade" between a handful of institutions is nothing more than the old "pump and dump" game that has been played in the OTC market forever - and almost always screws the individual investor.

This is no different than you and I selling a house back and forth between us repeatedly, each time at a higher price. We both appear to be geniuses as we're both making a "profit", right?

Well, no. One of us is destined to take a horrifying loss if we do not find a sucker to make the final transaction with.

The embedded scam is that real gains require real parties at interest and not a closed system of a couple of guys passing an asset back and forth in a transparent attempt to "bait" someone else into becoming the sucker to offload that asset to...

A Sudden Downward Tic

Someone should tell the robber barons their plundering has more consequences than they anticipate in a world with over 5 billion omnivores.

...The new analysis shows 869 species became extinct or extinct in the wild since the year 1500 while 290 more species are considered critically endangered and possibly extinct.

At least 16,928 species are threatened with extinction, including nearly one-third of amphibians, more than one in eight birds and nearly a quarter of mammals.

By comparison, the 2004 Red List showed 784 extinctions since 1500...

The report said this is not a comprehensive list with only 2.7 percent of the 1.8 million described species analyzed.

The number of extinctions is "a gross underestimate but it does provide a useful snapshot of what is happening to all forms of life on Earth," the study authors wrote.

"It's much more severe than the economic crisis or the bank crisis," Vie said. "You can lose a core industry but you can rebuild one. In nature, if you lose it, you lose it, and you're losing a lot of capital that cannot be replaced."

He said the notion that biodiversity is secondary to economic health is largely a view held by countries in North America, Europe and elsewhere, where the connection to natural products is less direct.

In less developed areas, there is a direct line between human prosperity and biodiversity.

In much of the world, Vie said, "The main problem every day is not to find a job, it's to find food ... and in most places this comes from biodiversity, from nature, from fish and plants..."

Consider the desert:

Exactly how credulous can we be?

As credulous as we can get...

Excuse me for double posting but the Warren Commission?

Hell, even they disagreed after the fact. And they were hand picked.

And invoking the sanctity of the Authorities on the same thread that points out what Martin Luther King thought about Democratic Leadership.

Anyone remember his refusal to be co-opted by LBj. And what happened soon after?

Go read Shystee. Please.

It damn well ought to be taken as a property of psychohistory. Dr. Seldon, are you listening? Or is it only the NSA? Or am I worrying about conspiracies again?

You. Can. Not. Believe. the. Authorities.

The only One who really knows is the Perpetrator(s). Whether it's one Comedian or a host of Jokers in the deck.

It just amazes me that anyone who has witnessed even only the events since 2000 is willing to accept anything a government source tries to sell you. Any government source.

Be it Hillary. Or Barry O. Or Goldman-Sachs.

Woops- they're aren't the government now, are they?

DINOcrat angst

Why the gall of 72% of the American public, dissing their Betters:

In the high-stakes battle over health care, a growing cadre of liberal activists is aiming its sharpest firepower against Democratic senators who they accuse of being insufficiently committed to the cause.

The attacks -- ranging from tart news releases to full-fledged advertising campaigns -- have elicited rebuttals from lawmakers and sparked a debate inside the party over the best strategy for achieving President Obama's top priority of a comprehensive health-system overhaul.

The rising tensions between Democratic legislators and constituencies that would typically be their natural allies underscore the high hurdles for Obama as he tries to hold together a diverse, fragile coalition. Activists say they are simply pressing for quick delivery of "true health reform," but the intraparty rift runs the risk of alienating centrist Democrats who will be needed to pass a bill...

Among the Democratic senators targeted by such liberal groups as MoveOn.org are, from left, Ben Nelson (Neb.), Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), Mary Landrieu (La.), Ron Wyden (Ore.) and Arlen Specter (Pa.)...

You know. The Democrats In Name Only.

Please. Arlen Spector? Dianne Feinstein? Spare me.

More and better Demoncrats, not DINOcrats, in 2010 and 2012. Please.

Some scoff

...at the term "the Company".

Not Just Doublespeak, Doubletalk

Greenwald:

...I thought Democrats (and Obama himself) believe that information obtained via "harsh interrogation" is unreliable. Isn't that supposed to be a core Democratic belief? If so, why would we want to imprison someone as "dangerous" based on unreliable information obtained using those methods? If the accusations against someone were drowned or beaten out of another person, shouldn't we consider those coerced accusations too unreliable to justify keeping the accused in a cage for years with no trial? And if they're willing to repeat the accusations in court now that they're not being tortured -- and if we have independent, non-coerced evidence to prove the accusations -- why would past abuse bar the use of their testimony (as Marcy Wheeler suggests, the real reason why we'd want to prevent witnesses who were tortured from testifying in a court seems to be "because we're covering up our own torture")?

More important, look at the mentality being expressed -- and about to be implemented -- here: there may be instances where we cannot get convictions because of witness unavailability or other logistical problems, so we'll just imprison them anyway. Does it really require any effort to demonstrate how dangerous that mentality is -- that the President will have the power to order people imprisoned wherever there are some logistical barriers to obtaining convictions? If there's one principle that can be described as fundamental to the American founding, it's that the state -- and certainly the President -- do not have the power to order people imprisoned without charges. Thomas Jefferson said that trials by jury is "the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution." Why is this painfully obvious proposition still necessary to defend after the November election?

Digby:

...The irony, of course, is that the man who ran on transparency is actually turning out to be less transparent than the president he excoriated on the campaign trail for his secrecy. Bush and Cheney were pretty upfront about the fact that they believed they had the constitutional right to act in any way they saw fit, regardless of the accepted understanding of the constitution or congressional and judicial prerogatives. Bush declared "I'm the decider" and he meant it. This administration obviously believes it has that right as well --- it just pretends otherwise.

I suspect they understand that keeping the folks from losing that freedom loving, patriotic illusion of American exceptionalism is an important part of exercising American political power. And they're probably right. Bush and Cheney's biggest mistakes were in being honest about something nobody wants to know.

In the final analysis, this was why they- and the Republican cronies- were removed from power. Not because the Company didn't like the Endless War, not because the Company didn't like their economic polices- Obama even kept the Reptilican honchos that Bu$hCo had in charge of these. Gates and Bernanke. Goldman-Sachs and the Yale boys are still running the show. Hell, they've even figured out how to make money off of the environmental behemoth that just passed the House.

No, Darth Cheneyburton, like Darth Rumsfeld before him, was excommunicated from office for the high crime of being just too bloody transparent. Real Dark Lords like moves that most people can't see. It's part of their schtik.

There's a less polite word for it

Bob Herbert does not want to offend you, however.

How do you put together a consumer economy that works when the consumers are out of work?

One of the great stories you’ll be hearing over the next couple of years will be about the large number of Americans who were forced out of work in this recession and remained unable to find gainful employment after the recession ended. We’re basically in denial about this.

There are now more than five unemployed workers for every job opening in the United States. The ranks of the poor are growing, welfare rolls are rising and young American men on a broad front are falling into an abyss of joblessness.

Some months ago, the Obama administration and various mainstream economists forecast a peak unemployment rate of roughly 8 percent this year. It has already reached 9.4 percent, and most analysts now expect it to hit 10 percent or higher. Economists are currently spreading the word that the recession may end sometime this year, but the unemployment rate will continue to climb. That’s not a recovery. That’s mumbo jumbo.

The less polite term is, of course, Bullshit. But Bob Herbert seems to get that.

Why this rampant joblessness is not viewed as a crisis and approached with the sense of urgency and commitment that a crisis warrants, is beyond me. The Obama administration has committed a great deal of money to keep the economy from collapsing entirely, but that is not enough to cope with the scope of the jobless crisis.

There were roughly seven million people officially counted as unemployed in November 2007, a month before the recession began. Now there are about 14 million. If you add to these unemployed individuals those who are working part time but would like to work full time, and those who want jobs but have become discouraged and stopped looking, you get an underutilization rate that is truly alarming.

“By May 2009,” according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston, “the total number of underutilized workers had increased dramatically from 15.63 million to 29.37 million — a rise of 13.7 million, or 88 percent. Nearly 30 million working-age individuals were underutilized in May 2009, the largest number in our nation’s history. The overall labor underutilization rate in May 2009 had risen to 18.2 percent, its highest value in 26 years.”

If it were true that the recession is approaching its end and that these startlingly high numbers were about to begin a steady and substantial decline, there would be much less reason for alarm. But while there is evidence the recession is easing, hardly anyone believes a big-time employment turnaround is in the offing.

Three-quarters of the workers let go over the past year were permanently displaced, as opposed to temporarily laid off. They won’t be going back to their jobs when economic conditions improve. And many of those who were permanently displaced were in fields like construction and manufacturing in which the odds of finding work, even after a recovery takes hold, are not good.

Another startling aspect of this economic downturn is the toll it has taken on men, especially young men. Men accounted for nearly 80 percent of the loss in employment in this recession. As the labor market center reported, “The unemployment rate for males in April 2009 was 10 percent, versus only 7.2 percent for women, the largest absolute and relative gender gap in unemployment rates in the post-World War II period.”

Workers under 30 have sustained nearly half the net job losses since November 2007.

This is not a recipe for a strong economic recovery once the recession officially ends, or for a healthy society. Young males, especially, are being clobbered at an age when, typically, they would be thinking about getting married, setting up new households and starting families. Moreover, work habits and experience developed in one’s 20s often establish the foundation for decades of employment and earnings.

We’ve seen what happens when you rely on debt and inflated assets to keep the economy afloat. The economy can’t be re-established on a sound basis without aggressive efforts to put people back to work in jobs with decent wages.

We also need to consider the suffering that is being endured by these high levels of joblessness, including the profound negative effect on the families of the unemployed. Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, warned about the consequences for children. “What does it mean,” he asked, “when kids are under stress because there is no money in the household, or people have to move more, or are combining households, or lose their health insurance? I believe this is going to leave a permanent scar on a generation of kids.”

The first step in dealing with a crisis is to recognize that it exists. This is not a problem that will evaporate when the gross domestic product finally begins to creep into positive territory.

It's worth noting that the "Bu$h Boom" years saw a supposed recovery without a return to normal levels of unemployment. That another bubble, fueled by assets gleaned from the United States Treasury is being blown to fuel the current "recovery", is accompanied by a worsening of unemployment should come as no surprise.

After all, the same banksters still own the Fed, and Washington.

Managing Wildlife by Killing It

Washington, DC — One-third of National Wildlife Refuges in the Southeast U.S. are growing genetically modified crops with approval from the official tapped by the Obama White House to head the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, according to agency records obtained today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Planting GM crops on a wildlife refuge is illegal without full prior environmental and public review under a federal court ruling won by PEER and allied groups last year, but none of the Southeastern refuges have undertaken the required reviews.

National wildlife refuges have allowed farming for decades in order to help prepare seed beds for native habitat such as grasslands and provide food for migratory birds and other wildlife. In recent years, refuge farming programs are being converted to GM crops because that is the seed that farmers can obtain or, in some case, prefer. Today, almost all the crops being grown on refuges are genetically modified.

By law and policy, these refuges are supposed to be administered to benefit wildlife, not local farmers. In fact, Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) policy explicitly forbids “genetically modified agricultural crops in refuge management unless we determine their use is essential to accomplishing refuge purpose(s)”. By contrast to this policy, in the Southeast Region, headed by Sam Hamilton, named by the Obama administration as its intended nominee to lead the entire FWS, records show –

* One in three (41 of 128 total refuges) are growing GM crops;
* No refuge has been denied permission for GM crops; and
* The basis for Hamilton’s Regional Office approval typically cites farmers’ profitability or their preference for GM crops.

“What is supposed to be a last resort exception has become common practice,” stated PEER Executive Direct Jeff Ruch, who obtained copies of all GM crop approvals from the FWS under the Freedom of Information Act. “Sam Hamilton seems to embrace genetically engineered refuge management with open arms.”

Allowing agribusiness to plow and plant wildlife refuges is another Bu$hism the Obrog seem perfectly willing to continue on with, GM crops aside. Once again, genetic manipulation of crops would not be a bad idea if the genetic manipulation actually just enhanced nutrient value. Instead, there are two major manipulations that are typically done: first, to introduce a bacterially derived insecticide into the plant genome. Second, to introduce herbicide resistance into the crop, which are then sprayed with RoundUp to get rid of the "weeds".

Thereby knocking off the base of the foodchain for any wildlife varmints that might actually live in the wildlife reserve.

But that's what the Free Market does best, right? Starve those it pretends to serve.

Not Meddling

Not fueling the Green revolution in Iran, either, one supposes.

Tehran’s demonstrators rose up by themselves. But the technology that helped them organize — and helped them connect with the rest of the planet — was funded in part by the U.S. government.

Early in the pro-democracy protests, everyone made a big deal out of the State Department’s call to Twitter, asking the short-messaging firm to reschedule maintenance so the Iranian opposition movement could keep communicating. In retrospect, that might have been one of least meaningful moves an American agency made on the activists’ behalf. More important, it now appears, are the millions of dollars invested over the years in technologies that could pry open the Iranian firewall — and avoid the Supreme Leader’s web censors.

“Our goal was to promote freedom of speech for Iranians to communicate with each other and the outside world. We funded and supported innovative technologies to allow them to do this via the Internet, cell phones and other media,” former State Department Iran democracy program coordinator David Denehy tells Eli Lake of the Washington Times.

Forget the driven-by-DC mock-populism and the all-too-clever schemes; this is how America should be promoting democracy abroad. Give activists the tools — and then let them decide how and when to use ‘em.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which oversees the Voice of America and the Farsi-language Radio Farda, has a three-person anti-censorship team that focuses on China and Iran. “Iran has a growing audience of young activist Internet users and we have repurposed our tools to work in Farsi and make it available to Iranians,” BBG’s Ken Berman says. “We open up the channels so the Iranian blogosphere is more accessible to Iranians in Iran.”

One of those projects: design the Firefox Web browser to embed the TOR network. That’s the “onion router” anonymous surfing service, which throws off the Supreme Leader’s online goons by “distributing your transactions over several places on the Internet, so no single point can link you to your destination,” the project’s site explains. “The idea is similar to using a twisty, hard-to-follow route in order to throw off somebody who is tailing you — and then periodically erasing your footprints. Instead of taking a direct route from source to destination, data packets on the Tor network take a random pathway through several relays that cover your tracks so no observer at any single point can tell where the data came from or where it’s going.”

“There are plenty of programs political dissidents can use to route their Internet traffic through third parties and escape censorship and avoid monitoring,” one know-it-all blogger tells Lake. “But TOR is different because it is an encrypted network of node after node, each one unlocking encryption to the next node. And because of this, it is all but impossible for governments to track Web sites a TOR user is visiting. TOR is a great way to give Ahmadinejad’s Web censors headaches.”

That onion routing approach was originally developed by the Naval Research Lab and by Darpa, the Pentagon’s leading science and technology arm...

Yes, one must remember not to laugh in the face of the next cyberchild who tells me how secure TOR is from the NSA when it was developed by the Pentagon.

It is amusing how Noah Shachtman prefaces the piece with "Tehran’s demonstrators rose up by themselves..."

Sure, they did.

As the Dark Wraith has some interesting things to say about this too.

"If you've done nothing wrong, what's the worry?"

If there was any doubt the Company wants to know who you are, let them be laid to rest:

Senate Democrats outlined plans yesterday to overhaul the nation's immigration laws, including a requirement that all U.S. workers verify their identity through fingerprints or an eye scan.

Speaking on the eve of a White House summit with congressional leaders on immigration, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) said a national system to verify work documents is necessary because Congress has failed to crack down on unscrupulous employers and illegal immigrants with fake documents...

You heard that right campers. Everyone in Amerika will be fingerprinted if Chuckles has his way. Doubtless this will allow right thinking people to collate it with everything else they know about you, too.

The real question

Someone tell Bob Herbert that we know who we are- as he knows who he is:

Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House...

Read it all, he's figured it out.

So has Bill Maher:

...Each time President Obama tries to take on a progressive cause, Maher charged that there was "a major political party standing in his way: the Democrats.

But the solution is not a third political party, according to the self-described libertarian pundit: "We don't need a third party. We have a center right party, and a crazy party. Democrats have moved to the right, and the right has moved into a mental hospital."

Maher scoffs at the notion that Obama is a socialist: "He's not even a liberal."

Hammering in his point, Maher asks, "Shouldn't there be one party that unambiguously supports cutting military spending? Straight up in favor of gun control, gay marriage, higher taxes on the rich, universal healthcare, legalizing pot, and steep, direct taxing of polluters?"

"These aren't radical ideas," Maher stresses, "The majority of Americans are either already for them, or would be if they were properly argued and defended; and what we need is an actual progressive party to represent the millions of Americans who aren't being served by the Democrats."

"Because bottom line," he concludes "Democrats are the new Republicans."

[-via Avedon]

Now that's funny

Life is much simpler when you're not meddling, one supposes.
[tip o'teh tinfoil to b]

Short memories get short Changed

You encounter a lot of anguished fantasy in cyberspace, and none is more inane than the endless hand-wringing about how great it all would have been if Hillary Clinton had won the nomination.

This is sheer dementia. From Summers to Emmanuel, the worst NeoLiberals of the Oborg are Clintonista.

I'll let Robert Scheer handle this:

... It’s not working. The Bush-Obama strategy of throwing trillions at the banks to solve the mortgage crisis is a huge bust. The financial moguls, while tickled pink to have $1.25 trillion in toxic assets covered by the feds, along with hundreds of billions in direct handouts, are not using that money to turn around the free fall in housing foreclosures.

As The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, “The Mortgage Bankers Association cut its forecast of home-mortgage lending this year by 27% amid deflating hopes for a boom in refinancing.” The same association said that the total refinancing under the administration’s much ballyhooed Home Affordable Refinance Program is “very low.”

Aside from a tight mortgage market, the problem in preventing foreclosures has to do with homeowners losing their jobs. Here again the administration, continuing the Bush strategy, is working the wrong end of the problem. Although President Obama was wise enough to at least launch a job stimulus program, a far greater amount of federal funding benefits Wall Street as opposed to Main Street.

... Citigroup, the prime mover for ending the sensible restraints of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, is now a pathetic ward of the state. But back in the day President Clinton would tour the country with Citigroup founder Sandy Weill touting the wonderful work that Weill and other moguls were doing to invest in economically depressed communities. It wasn’t really happening then, and now millions of folks in those communities have seen their houses snatched from them as if they were just pieces in a game of Monopoly that Clinton and his fat-cat buddy were playing.

Once Weill got the radical deregulation law he wanted, he issued a statement giving credit: “In particular, we congratulate President Clinton, Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, NEC [National Economic Council] Chairman Gene Sperling, Under Secretary of the Treasury Gary Gensler, Assistant Treasury Secretaries Linda Robertson and Greg Baer.”

Summers is now Obama’s top economic adviser, Sperling has been appointed legal counselor at Treasury, and Gensler, a former partner in Goldman Sachs, is head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which he once attempted to prevent from regulating derivatives when it was run by Brooksley Born. Robertson worked for Summers in pushing through the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which freed the derivatives market from adult supervision and contained the “Enron Loophole,” permitting that company to go wild. Robertson then became the top Washington lobbyist for Enron and was recently appointed senior adviser to Fed Chair Ben S. Bernanke. Baer went to work as a corporate counsel for Bank of America, which announced his appointment with a press release crediting him with having “coordinated Treasury policy” during the Clinton years in getting Glass-Steagall repealed. As a result of deregulation, B of A too spiraled out of control and ended up as a beneficiary of the Treasury’s welfare program.

Why was I so naive as to have expected this Democratic president to not do the bidding of the banks when the last president from that party joined the Republicans in giving the moguls everything they wanted?

I dunno, because maybe you believed what he said until he brought the Clintonista and the banksters on board anyway.

Even a child could do it

...if they want to:

It's not your average science fair when the 16-year-old winner manages to solve a global waste crisis. But such was the case at last month's May's Canadian Science Fair in Waterloo, Ontario, where Daniel Burd, a high school student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, presented his research on microorganisms that can rapidly biodegrade plastic.

NOTE: there are TWO high school students who discovered plastic-consuming microorganisms. The first was Daniel Burd (last year). The second was Tseng I-Ching (last month), a high school student in Taiwan.

Daniel had a thought it seems even the most esteemed PhDs hadn't considered. Plastic, one of the most indestructible of manufactured materials, does in fact eventually decompose. It takes 1,000 years but decompose it does, which means there must be microorganisms out there to do the decomposing.

Could those microorganisms be bred to do the job faster?

That was Daniel's question which he put to the test by a very simple and clever process of immersing ground plastic in a yeast solution that encourages microbial growth, and then isolating the most productive organisms.

The preliminary results were encouraging, so he kept at it, selecting out the most effective strains and interbreeding them. After several weeks of tweaking and optimizing temperatures Burd was achieved a 43 % degradation of plastic in six weeks, an almost inconceivable accomplishment.

With 500 billion plastic bags manufactured each year and a Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch that grows more expansive by the day, a low cost and nontoxic method for degrading plastic is the stuff of environmentalists' dreams and, I would hazard a guess, a pretty good start-up company as well...

[tip o'teh tinfoil to Cryptogon]

You would think. But if they can't engineer suicide genes into it and patent the process, biotech isn't interested. The best thing the kid could do it to grow it up and release it in his favorite neighborhood garbage dump.

Serially. Everyplace he goes. Of course, he might just have Homeland Security following him around- because chance are a bug that can oxidize polypropylene will be eating away at all those cameras keeping the Homeland Secure, too.

Now that's what I call Terra'ism.

Closing it down- or simply Classifying it?

One wonders if the satellites will simply shut their cybernetic eyes and go to sleep now.

The truth is this has been going on at the Fed level awhile- the 2007 Bu$hCo order simply established funding to an overt office in Homeland Security to co-ordinate it with domestic police.

The National Applications Office

... When most Americans were too busy enjoying the beach to notice, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell announced that the powers of the Protect America Act, which had just been passed into law by Congress, would be used to redirect military spy satellites put into space to watch over the Soviet Union. Now, the satellites would be watching Americans, and sharing information about the activities of Americans with state and local law enforcement, to be used in investigations and prosecutions. The kicker: The spying would all take place without any search warrant to establish probable cause for suspicion.

In 2008, the FISA Amendments Act was passed, extending and expanding the unconstitutional powers of unreasonable search and seizure created under the Protect America Act. As a United States Senator, Barack Obama voted for the law, enabling satellite spying against Americans to continue. Now, with Obama as President, George W. Bush’s plans for the National Applications Office are going ahead at full pace. Obama seems rather fond of having a Big Brother eye in the sky, watching you. There are indications that satellite spying, through the National Applications Office and beyond, include massive warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ private emails and telephone calls.

Members of Congress who have been briefed on the activities of the National Applications Office have expressed grave concerns that it will be abused, and have voiced protests in the past, but Congress has provided enough funding to get the National Applications Office up and running anyway.

Thursday evening, that posture changed. Representative Jane Harman introduced H.R. 2703 and H.R. 2704, which would completely defund and stop the operations of the National Applications Office. Representative Harman is a particularly interesting person to sponsor this legislation, given that she has herself been the target of, and yet a defender of, warrantless surveillance by the Executive’s intelligence agencies.

There seems to be a lot more going on with this issue, and the personalities involved, than what we can see at first glance. I’ll be keeping an eye on both of Harman’s bills, and Harman herself, looking for the next move in this two-year struggle over satellite spying.

This was also spotted by Cryptogon.

I like this comment:

“It’s being shut down,” said a homeland security official.

Translation: The program is “going dark” so all the f**king questions and bureaucratic resistance will finally stop.

No matter the color

No Matter Who Is President of Iran, They Would Stone Me

by Lila Ghobady


Indeed. Me too, sweetie, for different reasons...

It's also nice to know not everyone's drinking the green Kool-Aid.

It's Not Fascism When We Do It

Greenwald hits again on a theme that may be the Achilles heel of the war machine:

...We don't really consider torture and mass pointless slaughter -- when we do it -- to be all that bad. Those who advocated, defended and ordered it are still highly respectable -- "honorable." Those who were so humiliatingly wrong that it cannot be adequately expressed in words still prance around, and are still treated as, wise experts, while those were right are naive and unSerious. The U.S stands for freedom, democracy and human rights -- even when we don't. People who advocate unprovoked wars of aggression, torture and mass violence are irredeemable monsters -- except when they're American or our allies...

Well, sure

Is our president learning?

As the commenters say, he's getting there:

What? Reaganesque ?

You mean secretly fund killers in Latin America ?

Sell arms to Iran to fund the effort ?

Backdoor negotiations to free hostages ?

Lie to the American people ?

Lead all Presidents with 32 convictions of his administration ?

Double the national debt ?

Check. The Middle East, too.
Not yet
Not yet
Check.
Getting there.
Easily.

It all depends on what the definition of "fail" is

This is what is known in the legal vernacular as a leading question. It's a rhetorical point used to drive home the Faith among the Faithful.

...how big is too big to fail? And how would you measure it anyway? In the case of banks and giants like A.I.G. and Fannie Mae, policy makers argue that the interconnectedness of modern finance, as much as the size of the players, is the real issue. The collapse of one big financial company could cascade through the industry. In the case of General Motors and Chrysler, a failure could mean that thousands of jobs — not only at those companies, but at their suppliers as well — could evaporate.

The too-big-to-fail doctrine, sometimes called T.B.T.F., goes back at least as far as Brandeis’ time, when, in 1914, the Treasury stepped in to provide financial aid to New York City. In the 1980s, when the government rescued Continental Illinois Bank, Stewart B. McKinney, a Connecticut Congressman, declared that the government had created a new class of banks, those too big to fail. The phrase returned and stuck.

Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, often uses a wonkish euphemism. He refers to Brobdingnagian banks as “systemically critical” institutions. The Obama administration rolled out another description last week: “Tier 1 Financial Holding Companies.”

What is remarkable is that, even now, the T.B.T.F. club and some of its members are actually growing, not shrinking. A decade-long run of mergers in the banking industry has concentrated power in fewer hands. Last autumn, when the financial crisis was at its height, policy makers pushed some banks to buy weaker ones to head off failures. (See Merrill Lynch, acquisition of, among others.)

Frederic S. Mishkin, a former Federal Reserve governor from 2006 to 2008, for one, said there could be no turning back on too big to fail. “You can’t put that genie in the bottle again,” he said. “We are going to have to deal with it.”

Especially when it's such a useful djinni. It enriches so many of the people with the right stuff. Every now and then it makes some embarrassing move like funding Adolf or Osama bin Laden, but all in all it certainly complements the tasteful among us. It is a pity it lives on human souls, but really, the ones with the beautiful minds never even notice, lacking much in this department anyway.

These djinn don't live in bottles, but on a Mobius strip:

Staff at Goldman Sachs staff can look forward to the biggest bonus payouts in the firm's 140-year history after a spectacular first half of the year, sparking concern that the big investment banks which survived the credit crunch will derail financial regulation reforms.

A lack of competition and a surge in revenues from trading foreign currency, bonds and fixed-income products has sent profits at Goldman Sachs soaring, according to insiders at the firm.

Staff in London were briefed last week on the banking and securities company's prospects and told they could look forward to bumper bonuses if, as predicted, it completed its most profitable year ever. Figures next month detailing the firm's second-quarter earnings are expected to show a further jump in profits. Warren Buffett, who bought $5bn of the company's shares in January, has already made a $1bn gain on his investment.

Goldman is expected to be the biggest winner in the race for revenues that, in 2006, reached £186bn across the entire industry. While this figure is expected to fall to £160bn in 2009, it will be split among a smaller number of firms.

Barclays Capital, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank are among the European firms expected to register bumper profits, along with US banks JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley following the near collapse and government rescue of major trading houses including Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, UBS and Royal Bank of Scotland.

In April, Goldman said it would set aside half of its £1.2bn first-quarter profit to reward staff, much of it in bonuses. It is believed to have paid 973 bankers $1m or more last year, while this year's payouts are on track to be the highest for most of the bank's 28,000 staff, including about 5,400 in London.

Critics of the bonus culture in the City said the dominance of a few risk-taking investment banks is undermining the efforts of regulators to stabilise the financial system.

Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat treasury spokesman, said: "The investment banks more than any other institutions created the culture of excessive leverage, excessive risk and excessive bonuses that led to the downfall of the financial system. Now they are cashing in and the same bonus culture has returned. The result must be that we are being pushed to the edge of another crash."

Goldman Sachs said it reviewed its bonus scheme last year and switched from a system of guaranteed rewards that were paid over three years to variable payments that tied staff to the firm. It told employees last year that profit-related bonuses would be delayed by 12 months.

Until the release of its first quarter profits in April, it seemed inconceivable that a firm owing the US government $10bn would be looking to break all-time records in 2009.

David Williams, an investment banking analyst at Fox Pitt Kelton, said: "This year is shaping up to be the best year ever for investment banks, or at least those that have emerged relatively unscathed from the credit crisis.

"These banks are intermediaries in the bond markets where governments and companies are raising billions of pounds of new money. There is also a lack of competition that means they can charge huge sums for doing business."

Last week, the firm predicted that President Barack Obama's government could issue $3.25tn of debt before September, almost four times last year's sum. Goldman, a prime broker of US government bonds, is expected to make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from selling and dealing in the bonds.

You read that last sentence right. Goldman-$acks Amerika is having a windfall year selling the U.S. government bonds financing the bailout of Goldman-$acks Amerika.
[tip o'teh tinfoil to Lambert]



Goldman-Sachs and friends fund the campaigns of Lyndon Baines Obama, the DINOcrats, and the Rethuglicans. They provide a friendly business environment, not only bailing out the Company, but ensuring its business selling the bonds that finance the cash flow for its bailout. The Company, in its gratitude, ensures the people with the Right $tuff get $elected again.