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?"

And the next head of the CIA was?

Cannonfire scoffs at the death of Deep Throat.

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.

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.

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...]

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.

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.

"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...

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.

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?

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

Get real

He'd never announce that.



But he'll take care of the herd, at least.

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.

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.

The End of the Beginning

Of so much... exploitation.

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.

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.

"The Great Unraveling"

What to call it? I think Krugman saw it coming a long time ago.

"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.

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?

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.

Charity Work

Really, it's the least we can do.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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]

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!

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.

Fueled by Soylent Green

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.

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?

Controling Interest in Detroit

What Michael Moore says.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.