From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Wed Apr 1 03:59:35 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Wed, 01 Apr 2009 18:59:35 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Ishmael by Daniel Quinn Message-ID: <49D33B07.8060706@ashisuto.co.jp> Book Review by Harold W Wood, Jr www.pantheist.net We seek renewed reverence for the biosphere as the ultimate context for human existence ... Pantheists have found a new prophet, and he is a Gorilla. No ordinary Gorilla, Ishmael is uncommonly intelligent, with an ability to not merely understand human speech but to recognize the fundamental flaw of contemporary western culture and, what's more, to point the way toward a solution. Who better than a Gorilla that has been held in captivity for decades to describe the human condition as a form of captivity? Ishmael points out that modern humans, for the most part, are "captives of a civilization system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live". The frustration that Pantheists share with environmentalists - the increasingly rapid loss of the natural world - is one that a few environmental laws, a few scientific studies, and a few people recycling their newspapers seem to do little to allay. One thing that Pantheists recognize - as only a few environmentalists seem to do - as the root of the environmental crisis is the intellectual disease of anthropocentrism. What Daniel Quinn has done in this novel is provide us with not only a thorough analysis of anthropocentrism in a sort of ecological My Dinner with Andre (1981), but to point us in the direction of how we can change from a "Taker" society to a "Leaver" society. Fiction often has served as a motivator for change. Just as Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) helped inspire the effort to free the slaves, so Ishmael will help inspire Pantheists to oppose the arrogant world-view of anthropocentrism and replace it with a view of reverence for the earth. The winner of the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship in 1992, the author of the book, Daniel Quinn, has received enthusiastic letters from readers in every corner of the world: the Near East, the Far East, Africa, Australia, South America, Europe, and Canada. It is being used in an astounding variety of classroom courses, from midschool to graduate school (from animal behavior to zoology and everything in between, including anthropology, ethics, geography, and history). The book is now available in German, Italian, Hungarian, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, and Japanese as well as English. Ishmael eloquently achieves the purpose of the Turner award to encourage authors to write fiction that produces creative and positive solutions to global problems. For a novel, it doesn't have much of a plot, but that's not the point. The exposition of ideas occurs through the medium of a hyper-intelligent Gorilla conversing with a human who seeks nothing less than simply "how to save the world". This turns out to be an excellent device for expressing ideas that many people, as captives of our culture, have difficulty in understanding or accepting. And rather than simply asserting a conclusion - as most writers railing against anthropocentrism have done in the past - Ishmael takes us step-by-step through the fundamental mythology of our culture to explain how things got the way they are, and how they could be different. This entails a re-analysis of the Genesis stories of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel that sets standard theology on its ear, but it is an analysis utterly compelling in its logic and its painstaking accuracy with the discoveries of anthropology. The trick is to get outside the cultural mind-set of Western culture, the Taker culture, which permeates "civilized" societies all over the world, of whatever race, religion, language, or other idiosyncrasies. The Taker culture, as expressed in Ishmael, is based upon the fundamental premise that the world was made for man. If you accept that premise, which our culture most certainly does, than it follows that the Earth "belongs to us and we can do what we damn well please with it". This, of course, is the mythology of our culture, so embedded that we don't even perceive it as a "myth" but perceive rather as an inherent truth that never even needs to be mentioned, much less defended. The dominant myth of anthropocentrism is expressed in the tacit assumption of Western culture that the end of man is to grow "forever" and dominate the Earth with his technological marvels and sheer numbers. "You hear this fifty times a day ... Man is conquering the deserts, man is conquering the oceans, man is conquering the atom, man is conquering the elements, man is conquering outer space", Ishmael tells us. "The mythology of your culture hums in your ears so constantly that no one pays the slightest bit of attention to it". As a result, mankind is trying to live in a way that is plainly not sustainable over the long run. What Ishmael successfully points out is that this viewpoint is not the only possible one to take in human life and culture, and that in fact there are cultures - dubbed by Ishmael as Leaver cultures - which have enacted a different story. The dominant mythology of anthropocentrism isn't necessary to be human, it is only happens to be ingrained in a culture "which casts mankind as the enemy of the world". Ishmael tells us, "The mythology of human superiority justifies their doing whatever they please with the world, just the way Hitler's mythology of Aryan superiority justified his doing whatever he pleased with Europe. But in the end this mythology is not deeply satisfying. The Takers are a profoundly lonely people". Of course, part of the Taker mythology is that the Leavers are just primitive people, and that acting as if the world was made for man and only for man is a necessary part of an advanced civilization. But Ishmael identifies the fallacy of that myth as well, pointing out that it is the idea or myth upon which the culture is based that determines our affect on the world, not merely the level of technology. Ancient "Taker" cultures could destroy the environment with minimal technology; just as any modern culture can do with use of modern technology. But the difference is that the Taker's mythology has adopted a process of destruction of the Earth that has become almost routine, whereas "Leaver" societies have found ways to not only live sustainably with the earth, but to live in a way that provides for the welfare of all the members of the community.. Ishmael argues that it is possible for us today to convert modern culture from a "Taker" culture to a "Leaver" culture, which allows for the survival of other creatures than ourselves, and would also provide for our own physical and psychological needs that are not always provided in "Taker" culture. . The premise of a Leaver culture is the opposite of the Taker Culture. It is simply that Man belongs to the world. This doesn't mean that man is merely an animal; in fact quite the contrary: because man belonged to the world, it was Nature's forces of evolution that made him bright and dexterous. If we would adopt the Leaver premise, , but instead the preservation of creation. To save the world, according to Ishmael, "people need more than to be scolded, more than to be made to feel stupid and guilty. They need more than a vision of doom. They need a vision of the world and of themselves that inspires them." "Stopping pollution is not inspiring. Sorting your trash is not inspiring. Cutting down on fluorocarbons is not inspiring." But thinking of ourselves in a new way is inspiring. Some of these new ways of thinking may relate only to some small questions. Ishmael asks us, "Does being civilized make you incapable of giving the creatures around you a little space in which to live?" In fact, Ishmael explores the biological laws that other creatures live that ensures not only their survival, but the survival of the entire ecological community of which they are a part. There is no reason that modern culture cannot follow these same laws. After all, human life and settlement isn't against the law, it's subject to the law. "And if being civilized means anything at all, it should mean that you're leaders of the club [of the community of life], not its only criminals and destroyers". Ishmael describes eloquently the fundamental importance of changing the way we think about the world and the place of humanity within it. To make the necessary changes, Ishmael asserts, "You can't change these things with laws. You must change people's minds." Importantly, Ishmael further teaches us that "you can't just root out a harmful complex of ideas and leave a void behind; you have to give people something that is as meaningful as what they've lost - something that makes better sense than the hold horror of Man Supreme, wiping out everything on this planet that doesn't serve his needs directly or indirectly". And the solution proposed by Ishmael is not necessarily an easy one, but it is at least an inspiring one. We must "break out" of the prison of western culture, stop fighting over the redistribution of power and wealth within the prison itself, to re-formulate the end of man itself. Ishmael's re-formulation does not deny that man's place is the first of evolution to possess self-awareness, but that man's place is "to be the first, without being the last ... Man's place is to figure out how it's possible to do that - and then to make some room for all the rest who are capable of becoming what he's become". Ishmael never uses the terms biocentrism or pantheism, but these are the concepts that Ishmael points toward for our adoption of a new mythology, for recognizing ourselves as belonging to the world instead of the world belonging to us. I urge you to read this book, and to get your friends to read it too. This book is indeed more than a book. It's ideas are not entirely new, but as a work of fiction it is launching a movement, not a mere political movement, but a revolution of ideas. You will find the gospel according to Ishmael to be not only compelling, but of immense help in transforming the world-views of those who remain prisoners of the Taker culture. Let's take this book and help them break out of prison! Editor's Note: I think that Ishmael is the most important book we've ever reviewed in Pantheist Vision. For more information about Pantheism, or questions about this website please contact Harold Wood at ups at pantheist.net Pantheism \Pan"the*ism\, n. [Pan- + theism.] Any doctrine, philosophy, or religious practice that holds universe [cosmos], taken or conceived of as the totality of forces and/or matter, is synonymous with the theological principle of God. Copyright is held by the indicated organization and/ or author. All rights are reserved. All other material, Copyright (c) 1998, 1999, 2000 Universal Pantheist Society. All rights are reserved. http://www.pantheist.net/society/ishmael_book_review.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From fentona at shaw.ca Wed Apr 1 11:39:21 2009 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2009 10:39:21 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Ward Churchill, George Galloway: Speaking at Concordia University Message-ID: http://openanthropology.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/ward-churchill-george-galloway-speaking-at-concordia-university/ Ward Churchill, George Galloway: Speaking at Concordia University Posted in ADVOCACY, DECOLONIZATION, LIBERATION by Maximilian Forte on April 1st, 2009 Ward Churchill at Concordia I am very happy to announce that Ward Churchill will be speaking at Concordia University, on Wednesday, 15 April 15, at 7:00pm, at the Sir George Williams campus in downtown Montreal, in the Hall Building, room H-110. The admission cost is a voluntary donation. For more information, contact: scott.montreal at sympactico.ca or the Concordia chapter of the Quebec Public Interest Research Group, QPIRG Concordia: 514-848-7585, info at qpirgconcordia.org. Needless to say, I will be attending and reporting on the event shortly thereafter. ??????? ??????? ??????? George Galloway at Concordia Let us hope that this time, with Ward Churchill, that our rather extremist, hard bitten, neo-con government does not do the same as it did to British parliamentarian, George Galloway, who has been banned from entering Canada and speaking to anti-war groups because he is an alleged ?security threat.? The message seems to be that being against war is to be against security, as if we needed another lesson in that ?logic.? In the meantime, a war criminal like George W. Bush was permitted to enter the country and speak at a high-priced private function in Calgary. Nonetheless, George Galloway will still be speaking to an audience at Concordia, via video link: MP GEORGE GALLOWAY PRESENTATION INFO: Date: Wednesday April 1st Time: Doors Open 6:15 P.M. (Starting at: 7:00 P.M.) Location: Concordia University, Hall Building, Room H-110 1455 de Maisonneuve West, (M?tro Guy-Concordia) DESPITE HIS BAN BY THE CONSERVATIVE GOVERNMENT, WE WILL HAVE A LIVE VIDEO FEED For more information on the Canadian tour dates and locations: (Ottawa) http://ottawapeace.blogspot.com/ (Toronto) http://www.nowar.ca/ (Montr?al) http://www.sphr.org Montreal: George Galloway will be speaking in Montreal on ?Resisting war from Gaza to Kandahar? by live video feed. The audience will be able to interact with MP Galloway and ask him questions. Tickets Prices: $20.00 Adults $10.00 Students and Seniors To purchase Montreal tickets, or more information on the George Galloway tour in Canada: www.sphr.org From fentona at shaw.ca Wed Apr 1 11:57:21 2009 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2009 10:57:21 -0700 Subject: [R-G] U.S. Military Funded Mapping Project in Oaxaca References: <3d3b7e590904011051h5004627bq30919adc315b713d@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <05688ECC-AABE-4F19-91BC-36FCB0F9F03D@shaw.ca> U.S. Military Funded Mapping Project in Oaxaca Geographers used to gather intelligence? By Cyril Mychalejko, with Ramor Ryan reporting from Mexico http://www.zcommunications.org/zmag/viewArticle/21044 From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Apr 1 13:40:13 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2009 12:40:13 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Obama Ends Military Aid to Israel Message-ID: <1451376252.3965611238614813843.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> From: US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation [ mailto:uscampaign at mail.democracyinaction.org ] Sent: April 1, 2009 8:02 AM Subject: President Obama Ends Military Aid to Israel! President Obama Ends Military Aid to Israel! April 1, 2009 Happy April Fools' Day!? Although we're not there yet in terms of ending military aid to Israel, it is clear that our collective efforts to hold Israel accountable for its misuse of U.S. weapons are making a difference .? Last month, we asked you to take action to get Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to clarify whether the State Department considered pasta a weapon .? (In response to a reporter's question about Israel's refusal to let pasta into the Gaza Strip, a State Department spokesperson could not say whether or not the United States considers pasta a weapon.) Thousands of you sent her a text or email, which resulted in the United States reportedly pressuring Israel into allowing all food shipments into the besieged Gaza Strip. Also, more evidence of the shifting discourse on Palestine/Israel was apparent during President Obama's first e-town hall meeting held on March 26.? Look below at the screenshot of the top five questions submitted under the keyword "Israel"-all were against U.S. military aid and all received more positive votes than negative ones (including ours which was the second most popular). All this means that our organizing efforts are beginning to pay off , which makes it even more imperative than ever to keep the momentum going.? On that note, Tax Day is in exactly two weeks. ? This is a great opportunity to educate people about how their tax dollars are being misused by Israel to besiege Palestinians and commit human rights abuses against them. Read on to learn how you can offset your contribution to Israeli military occupation and get organizing materials for Tax Day. Be sure to sign up right away to organize for Tax Day in your community so that we can get you an organizing packet in time. Offset Your Tax Contribution to Israeli Military Occupation Above In April , President Obama will send a detailed budget request to Congress which is expected to include $2.775 billion in military aid to Israel for FY2010. That's $17.75 for each of the approximately 156 million individuals who filed a tax return with the IRS in 2008! Israel uses the weapons it gets from U.S. taxpayers to commit human rights abuses against Palestinian civilians living under Israel's illegal military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip, in violation of the U.S. Arms Export Control Act. During the Bush Administration, Israel killed more than 3,000 innocent Palestinian civilians who took no part in hostilities, including nearly 1,200 Palestinian civilians during its December 2008- January 2009 war on the Gaza Strip. Israel often misuses U.S. weapons to kill these Palestinian civilians. Is this how you want your tax-dollars spent? If not, then take action below. TAKE ACTION 1. Offset your tax contribution to Israeli military occupation by making a tax-deductible contribution to support our educational work to challenge military aid to Israel. Donate in multiples of $17.75 to offset your tax contribution to Israeli military occupation, that of your family, friends, co-workers, or even everyone in your zip code! Offset your tax contribution to Israeli military occupation and we'll send you some of these stickers (to the left) to put on your tax return envelope and other places. Offset the tax contribution to Israeli military occupation of just five people (that's $88.75) or more, and we'll send you the stickers and a gift DVD of the award-winning documentary Occupation 101 . To make your tax-deductible contribution today , please click on the icon below: 2. Sign up to organize for Tax Day and get a special expanded Tax Day organizing packet to challenge military aid to Israel. Since February 2008, we've sent more than 1,100 packets to volunteer organizers in 48 states and Washington, DC. (C' mon activists in Nevada and North Dakota , what are you waiting for? Join us!) Check out our Google map below showing the nearly 600 cities and towns across the country where our volunteers are organizing to challenge military aid to Israel. View Larger Map Sign up today to become a volunteer organizer and commit yourself to organizing for Tax Day, and we'll send you an expanded organizing packet which includes: * Tax Day flyers; * Fact sheets; * Petitions to Congress; * Stickers; * Postcards to President Obama; and * A DVD of our recent Capitol Hill Policy Briefing, "Armed and Dangerous: Arms Transfers to Israel during the Bush Administration" To get your expanded Tax Day organizing packet, please click here . Here are some ideas of how you can organize for Tax Day: A. Organize a Tax Day Delegation to Meet with Your Members of Congress. Members of Congress are scheduled to be in their home districts for spring recess from April 6-17. Assemble a delegation of concerned constituents to meet with your Members of Congress to express your opposition to military aid to Israel. To view a model constituent meeting request form, click here . For tips on how to conduct a meeting with your Members of Congress, click here . For a memo to give to your Members of Congress with suggested amendment language to ensure that future U.S. military aid to Israel does not contribute to Israel's human rights abuses of Palestinians, click here . For a Power Point presentation, "Armed and Dangerous: Arms Transfers to Israel during the Bush Administration," which you can show your Members of Congress during your meeting, click here . If you are arranging a delegation of constituents to meet with your Members of Congress during the spring recess, please let us know about it by clicking here . B. Organize a Tax Day Action Outside Your Local Post Office. On April 15, last-minute tax filers line up at local post offices to get their tax returns in before the deadline and local newspapers and TV stations often show up to interview people. This is a great opportunity to organize an action outside of your local post office and educate the people waiting in line how their tax dollars are being used. We've created two different flyers for you to use this Tax Day which you can download by clicking on the following links: Tax Day Flyer #1 Tax Day Flyer #2 You can also download a fact sheet on U.S. weapons used by Israel during its recent war on the Gaza Strip by clicking here . You can also download a fact sheet with background information on U.S. aid to Israel by clicking here . Or, you can also arrange a public educational event for Tax Day and screen our DVD "Armed and Dangerous: Weapons Transfers to Israel during the Bush Administration." If you are arranging a Tax Day action or educational event, please post it to our website by clicking here and selecting "Tax Day Event." You can also send us a press release or other details and photo and video from your events afterwards so that we can post them to the website by clicking here . You can view Tax Day Events on our calendar by clicking here . C. Organize a Tax Day House Party. Invite your friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors over to your house on Tax Day to educate them about U.S. military aid to Israel. Screen our educational DVD "Armed and Dangerous: Weapons Transfers to Israel during the Bush Administration," or give your own presentation on the subject using our Power Point presentation, which can be downloaded by clicking here . At your house party, ask all your attendees to consider making a tax-deductible contribution to the US Campaign of $17.75 or more to offset their tax contribution to Israeli military occupation. In the organizing packets, we'll include educational materials, credit card slips, and envelopes for you to use at your house party. If you'd like to make your Tax Day house party public, please post the details to our on-line calendar by clicking here . Or find a Tax Day event near you on our calendar by clicking here . Don't forget to sign up to organize for Tax Day and get an organizing packet by clicking here . And, don't forget to offset your tax contribution to Israeli military occupation by making a tax-deductible contribution of $17.75 or more by clicking on the icon below: Yes We Can?End Military Aid to Israel! Yes We Can Have a Policy toward Palestine/Israel of Human Rights! US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation DONATE | SUBSCRIBE | UNSUBSCRIBE ? From fentona at shaw.ca Wed Apr 1 14:32:03 2009 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2009 13:32:03 -0700 Subject: [R-G] The secrets of Obama's surge Message-ID: <3745BC46-F939-4420-A66D-0E634ED553C1@shaw.ca> http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KD02Df03.html Apr 2, 2009 THE ROVING EYE The secrets of Obama's surge By Pepe Escobar Is United States President Barack Obama telling it like it is as far as his new strategy for the Afghanistan and Pakistan war theater - AfPak, in Pentagonspeak - is concerned? There are reasons to believe otherwise. Obama's relentless media blitzkrieg stressed the new strategy is refocusing on al-Qaeda. Washington, we got a problem. Why deploy 17,000 troops against "the Taliban" in the poppy-growing province of Helmand, not in the east near the Pakistani tribal areas, where "al- Qaeda" is holed up, plus 4,000 advisers to train the Afghan Army, when Washington actually wants to fight no more than 200 or 300 al-Qaeda jihadis roaming in Afghanistan, plus another 400 maximum in the Pakistani tribal areas? And by the way they are not Afghans - they are overwhelmingly Arabs, with a few Uzbeks, Chechens and Uyghurs thrown in. President Hamid Karzai, the puppet in Kabul which has left Washington beyond exasperated, loved Obama's plan to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat" al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Especially because it involves the improbable "hunt for the good Taliban" (always bribable by loads of US dollars) mixed with Special Ops inside Pakistan, and not Afghanistan. Former Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto's widower, President Asif Ali Zardari, the puppet in Islamabad, loved it too. But as the Pakistani daily Dawn revealed, his Foreign Office diplomats definitely did not. The Afghanistan-Pakistan war has got to be 2009's prime theater of the absurd. It took the New York Times and the usual "American officials" something like 13 years to "discover" that the Pakistani Inter- Services Intelligence (ISI) - a Central Intelligence Agency twin - helps the Taliban. And this while the CIA, alongside their ISI pals, is compiling a mega hit list in the Pashtun tribal areas inside Pakistan. Maybe this is what US Central Command supremo General David "I'm always positioning myself for 2012" Petraeus means by a "trilateral" love affair, as he told CNN's State of the Union. The Pentagon's preferred pal is doubtless Pakistani Army Chief General Ashfaq Kayani, who happens to approve of what's not in Obama's presentation of the surge: the relentless drone war - with inevitable "collateral damage" - over what is for a fact Pashtunistan. As for the Pakistani masses, which have no say in all of this, they see the whole thing as a charade, and al-Qaeda as a threat to the US - not to Pakistan. Obama is selling the surge basically as nation building, based on trust. A hard sell if there ever was one - as Washington cannot trust the ISI or the Pakistani government, while the Pakistani masses don't trust Washington. Insistent rumors in Washington point to a troika - Holbrooke-Petraeus- Clinton - finally being able to convince Obama that the surge should be just the first step towards long-range nation building. Anyone with minimal familiarity with Afghanistan knows this is an impossible strategic target. The Salvador option And then Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special envoy to AfPak, finally let it slip on CNN: the "people we are fighting in Afghanistan" are essentially ... Pashtuns. This was followed by a stark admission: "In the informational side ... we don't have a strong enough counter- informational program to combat the Taliban and al-Qaeda." So this amounts to the State Department admitting that the Pentagon/ Petraeus "humint" (human intelligence) component of counter-insurgency in AfPak, hailed as a gift from the Messiah all across US corporate media, is essentially useless. This also means there's no way of winning local hearts and minds. In the absence of "humint", what prevails is inevitably The Salvador option, performed by a Dick Cheney-supervised-style "executive assassination wing", as investigative icon Seymour Hersh first revealed in a talk at the University of Minnesota on March 10, "going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or to the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving". The "assassination wing" is in fact the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) - a shadowy, ultra-elite unit including Navy Seals and Delta Force commandos immune to Congressional investigations. So if you have such a unit killing "al-Qaeda" jihadis at random from Iraq to Kenya, from Somalia to countries in South and Central America (these are not necessarily "al-Qaeda"; let?s say they are inimical to "US interests"), why not let them loose in Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal areas? Instead of a $5 million bounty on his head, why not send a crack JSOC commando to South Waziristan and take out Pakistani Taliban superstar Baitullah Mehsud, who has just boasted his outfit will "soon launch an attack on Washington that will amaze everyone in the world?" Well, maybe because US "humint" on South Waziristan is negligible - and even JSOC cannot infiltrate. JSOC by now should have been more than fully equipped to find Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Anyway, Vice-President Joseph Biden, to whom the unit would have to answer to, could at least come clean and state the "Salvador option" is not on the cards anymore. Or maybe it still is. The Obama administration is mum about it. A priceless, self-described "hip pocket" manual prepared by the US Army Training and Doctrine Command - TRADOC, one more wonderful, Pentagon acronym to memorize - and available only to "US government personnel, government contractors and additional cleared personnel for national security purposes and homeland defense " spells out what's (visibly) going on. On page 5, one learns this is a US war against, yes, Pashtuns, as Holbrooke said on CNN. The overwhelming majority of the "insurgent syndicate", they are funded by drug smuggling and US allies in the Gulf such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Emirates, and are trained and assisted by, yes, the ISI, with some - in fact marginal - al-Qaeda assistance. Al-Qaeda is a detail here. TRADOC does not seem to understand that al- Qaeda has a pan-Islamic agenda while the various groups bundled as "Taliban" are essentially in a war against foreign occupation and interference, with no dreams of establishing a Caliphate. On page 7, TRADOC estimates the Taliban in Afghanistan to be around 30,000, half of them Pakistani, and supported by the ISI. That's correct. But they overestimate al-Qaeda to be 2,000; these "Arab- Afghans" plus some recently arrived "white moors" (European Arabs) are probably no more than 700. On page 10, TRADOC finally admits that Karzai in Kabul is supported by a myriad of "warlord militias" profiting from crime, narco-trafficking and smuggling. The key element here is not "terrorism" - but regional wars for control over ultra-profitable poppy/heroin manufacturing and smuggling routes. Then there's this stark admission, by former Taliban commander Mullah Abdul Salam, currently governor of a town in poppy-infested Helmand province. He told Reuters that the Taliban are not the real enemy. If Kabul was not so corrupt, and capable of providing security to the rest of the country, most Pashtuns would not even be Taliban. No wonder the Obama administration has stacks of reasons to get rid of Karzai. An opening in The Hague Asia knows this whole thing is upside down. The crucial Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), grouping China, Russia and the Central Asian "stans", all concerned neighbors of Afghanistan, met in Moscow last Friday to discuss it, ahead of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) meeting in The Hague this Tuesday privileged by the US. This is how Asia sees it - and that's an absolutely taboo issue for Obama to touch upon every time he faces American public opinion: Asians simply don't want US military bases in Central Asia. No wonder Iran, which is currently an observer, and soon to become a full member, officially said the SCO is the right forum to solve the Afghan tragedy, not NATO. A minimum of 40% of Afghans are either Shi'ites or they speak Dari, a Persian language. Well, at least Holbrooke admits "the door is open" for Iran to have a say on Afghanistan, but always with conditions attached ("plus our NATO allies"). If Holbrooke is clever, he should immediately buy dinner for legendary mujahid Ishmail Khan, the Lion of Herat, in Western Afghanistan. Khan, a complex mix of feudal warlord and economic developer, told al-Jazeera English "friendship between Iran and America" is essential to solve the Afghan riddle. What Washington has to admit is that Iran has been deeply involved for years in visible, post-Taliban reconstruction in Afghanistan - from roads and railroads to restoration of mosques, financing of libraries and madrassas and the provision of electricity. The Iranian Consulate in Herat, for instance, houses no less than 40 diplomats. Khan - the key Iranian liaison in Herat - was so successful in spite of Kabul that Karzai, under US pressure, stripped him off his enormous powers as local governor and gave him an innocuous ministry in Kabul. At the UN-sponsored, US-backed international conference on Afghanistan this Tuesday in The Hague, Mohammad Mehdi Akhundzadeh - one of Iran's deputy foreign ministers - officially broke the ice, offering to help the rebuilding and stabilization of Afghanistan, something that Iran is already doing anyway. Akhunzadeh was specifically referring to projects fighting drug trafficking - which badly affects Iranian society. But he was also very clear on how Iran views NATO: "The presence of foreign forces has not improved things in the country and it seems that an increase in the number of foreign forces will prove ineffective, too." But, significantly, he tipped his hat to Obama's decision to send those 4,000 trainers for the Afghan Army, when he stressed "Afghanization should lead the government-building process". As for US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, she described corruption in the Kabul government, ie Karzai and his gang, as a "cancer" as threatening to Afghanistan as the Taliban. One more sign from Washington that Karzai?s days may be numbered. Follow the money Did Obama's "strategic reviewers" read this Carnegie Endowment report (http://carnegieendowment.org/files/afghan_war-strategy.pdf)? Apparently not. It states flatly "the mere presence of foreign soldiers fighting a war in Afghanistan is probably the single most important factor in the resurgence of the Taliban". So the question Americans must ask themselves is this: Would you buy a used car - sorry - war from people like Mullen, Petraeus, McKiernan? Well, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who's seen them all since John F Kennedy, wouldn't. For him, "they resemble all too closely the gutless general officers who never looked down at what was really happening in Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the time have been called, not without reason, 'a sewer of deceit'." So what if the AfPak quagmire had nothing to do with "terrorists" but with these facts: 1. A Cold War mentality in action still prevailing at the Pentagon. That explains a Vietnam-style surge - expanding the war to Cambodia then, expanding it to Pakistan now. As University of Michigan's Juan Cole has pointed out, the rationale is the same old fallacious domino theory (communism will take over Southeast Asia, terrorism will take over Central/South Asia). The Taliban are simply not able to take over and control the whole of Afghanistan (they didn't from 1996 to 2001). Al-Qaeda simply can't have bases in Afghanistan: they would be bombed to smithereens by the 80,000-strong Afghan Army plus Bagram-based US air strikes. 2. The US Empire of Bases still in overdrive, and in New Great Game mode - which implies very close surveillance over Russia and China via bases such as Bagram, and the drive to block Russia from establishing a commercial route to the Middle East via Pakistan. 3. The fear of a spectacular NATO failure. NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, absolutely despised by progressives in Brussels and assorted European capitals, is pressuring everyone for more troops to avoid what he calls the "Americanization" of the war. No one is impressed - especially because Scheffer himself was forced to admit troops will have to stay on the ground "for the foreseeable future". 4. Last but not least, the energy wars. And that involves that occult, almost supernatural entity, the $7.6 billion Turkmenistan-Afghanistan- Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline, which would carry gas from eastern Turkmenistan through Afghanistan east of Herat and down Taliban- controlled Nimruz and Helmand provinces, down Balochistan in Pakistan and then to the Pakistani port of Gwadar in the Arabian Sea. No investor in his right mind will invest in a pipeline in a war zone, thus Afghanistan must be "stabilized" at all costs. So is AfPak the Pentagon's AIG - we gotta bail them out, can't let them fail? Is it a Predator drone war disguised as nation building? Will it become Obama?s Vietnam? Whatever it is, it's not about "terrorists". Not really. Follow the money. Follow the energy. Follow the map. Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia at yahoo.com. (Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.) From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Apr 1 14:53:55 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2009 13:53:55 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Stephen Harper announces cancellation of Earth Day In-Reply-To: <8AF58327B430438EB0C66BA8AE80DFCE@twubby.com> Message-ID: <654982904.4004671238619235900.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://rabble.ca:80/news/stephen-harper-announces-cancellation-earth-day Stephen Harper announces cancellation of Earth Day By rabble staff | April 1, 2009 LONDON, UK -- "Canada, among all the advanced countries, is best positioned to prosper and profit from the ecological crisis," announced Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper shortly after arriving for the opening of the G20 summit. "Earth Day is a pessimistic and -- frankly -- socialistic concept, and we would rather focus on the many causes for optimism in the 21st century," explained Harper. "Some people see the Arctic ice cap as half melted, but I prefer to see a new shipping route as half freed up." "The only thing we have to fear about climate change is fear of climate change itself." Canada's Conservative government, said Harper, will be introducing a motion in Parliament to cancel the April 22 celebration of Earth Day, replacing it with Oil Sands Day. "I will have to study this proposal," responded Liberal opposition leader Michael Ignatieff, adding, "On the surface, though, it sounds awesome, much like the oil sands themselves." "And, as you know, I don't take lessons from National Geographic ," added the Liberal leader in reference to his disparaging remarks about a story the magazine did last month on the environmental impact of Alberta's 'tar sands.' Prime Minister Harper, once an ardent denier of anthropogenic climate change, now acknowledges the human affect on climate. From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Apr 1 14:59:48 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2009 13:59:48 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] What it means to talk with Hamas | csmonitor.com In-Reply-To: <1498608930.3657461238540318541.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1865286552.4008011238619588433.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0330/p09s01-coop.html Christian Science Monitor?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? March 30, 2009 edition What it means to talk with Hamas Engaging it is fundamentally about accepting (perhaps uncomfortable) facts. By Ben White Sao Paulo , Brazil - March 2009 may come to be seen as a critical month in the ending of the international community's isolation of Hamas. Finally engaging Hamas would spell the end of hypocritical Western policy and bring the peace process in line with the realities of the Middle East. First, a group of high-level US foreign policy officials, past and present, went public with their recommendation that the Obama administration talk to Hamas. Coincidentally, European politicians who visited Hamas officials in Syria about the same time echoed that view. Typically, meetings between European lawmakers and Hamas leaders are conducted discretely, if not entirely in secret. Now, the trips have begun to be publicized: In March there were trips by a cross-party group of British and Irish members of parliaments, as well as their counterparts from Greece and Italy. There was also an open letter to President Obama, published on March 10, and signed by more than 120 experts and academics. The letter urged a change of US policy in the Middle East. Significantly, the signatories advocated an end to the US "fear of Islamist parties coming to power," and also urged prioritizing human rights over supporting the region's autocrats. Originally, the rationale behind isolating Hamas (a social and political movement condemned by many in the West as a terrorist group) was to weaken the organization and force a change in policy vis-a-vis the armed struggle and Israel, while simultaneously supporting the Ramallah-based leadership of Mahmoud Abbas. The international boycott emerged in parallel with the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip that began post-Palestinian parliamentary elections in early 2006. The aim: Punish the civilian population into rethinking their choice, and make a Hamas government untenable. But the attempt to sideline Hamas has not worked. Hamas is no weaker for the cold-shoulder from diplomats, and, in fact, has been able to use the siege to deflect criticism of its policies in the Gaza Strip. The West Bank "moderates" dominated by Fatah have little to show for their negotiations with Israel; rather, the colonization of the occupied territories continues. Consequently, the anti-Hamas united front is starting to crack. European politicians have been independently visiting Hamas leaders in Syria, and urging a rethink in the position of the so called Quartet of the US, the UN, the EU, and Russia. The appeals to Obama represent this shift in approach, reflective of both how the current policy has failed, and how engaging Hamas will be beneficial. Ending the isolation of Hamas would strike a blow to hypocritical foreign policy ? a small but important step toward changing the way the US and international community relate to Middle East politics. After Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman's success at the polls, Quartet envoy Tony Blair said that "We've got to work with whoever the Israeli people elect"? a courtesy not yet offered to the Palestinians. Israel 's propagandists have tried to use Hamas's increased power in recent years to their benefit by placing the movement at the centre of the debate, presenting the group as an extremist, Iran-sponsored existential threat to the Jewish state. Yet Hamas has only been around for 20 years; Israel conquered the occupied territories in 1967, while Palestinians were originally expelled from their homes more than 60 years ago. Thus to engage Hamas is to acknowledge that the movement is not integral to the conflict, but neither is it peripheral nor ignorable. It has grown into a powerful social and political force, with a tendency toward prioritizing the pragmatism of political power. The oft-cited Charter ? rightly condemned as anti-Semitic, but penned in 1988 by one person ? has become increasingly insignificant; the discourse of ceasefires, truces, and national liberation typically trumps inflexible religious doctrine. But engaging Hamas is fundamentally about accepting (perhaps uncomfortable) facts. Hamas was democratically elected and continues to enjoy considerable support from Gazans. It's important to ask not just why it got such substantial backing in 2006, but why it continues to despite the ongoing Israeli siege and the devastation wreaked in the December war, as well as the cases of human rights abuses by Hamas personnel. The lesson is that the Palestinian people saw through the flaws of the international community's approach to the conflict long before a few voices in foreign capitals started raising questions about the wisdom of isolating Hamas. In the Middle East, the international community's self-defined moderate/extremist division is but a transparent charade. The peace process game, the vacuous endorsements of a two-state solution as Israel absorbs the occupied territories, the lack of will to hold Israel to account ? this is the fuel for Hamas support, and no amount of "isolation" can change the profound unpopularity of current US and Quartet policies among Palestinians. Ending the boycott would not be an endorsement of Hamas, but an end to the obtuse ? and damaging ? refusal to recognize reality. Ben White is a freelance writer, specializing in the Middle East. From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Apr 1 15:04:01 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2009 14:04:01 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Preparing for Civil Unrest in America -- Michel Chossudovsky In-Reply-To: <1369854003.3666431238541429096.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1300012873.4010571238619841223.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Global Research ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????????? March 18, 2009 Preparing for Civil Unrest in America Legislation to Establish Internment Camps on US Military Bases By Michel Chossudovsky The Economic and Social Crisis The financial meltdown has unleashed a latent and emergent social crisis across the United States.? What is at stake is the fraudulent confiscation of lifelong savings and pension funds, the appropriation of tax revenues to finance the trillion dollar "bank bailouts", which ultimately serve to line the pockets of the richest people in America.??? This economic crisis is in large part the result of financial manipulation and outright fraud to the detriment of entire populations, leading to a renewed wave of corporate bankruptcies, mass unemployment and?poverty.? The criminalization of the global financial system, characterized by a "Shadow Banking"?network has resulted in the centralization of bank power and an unprecedented concentration of private wealth.? Obama's "economic stimulus" package and budget proposals contribute to a further process of concentration and centralization of bank power, the cumulative effects of which will eventually resul?in large scale corporate, bankruptcies, a new wave of foreclosures not to mention fiscal collapse and the downfall of State social programs. (For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, America's Fiscal Collapse , Global Research, March 2, 2009).? The cumulative decline of real economic activity backlashes on employment and wages, which in turn leads to a collapse in purchaisng power.?The proposed "solution" under the Obama administration contributes to exacerbating rather than alleviating social inequalities and the process of wealth concentration.? The Protest Movement When people across America, whose lives have been shattered and destroyed, come to realize the true face of the global "free market" system, the legitimacy of? Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and the US administration will be challenged.? A latent protest movement directed against the seat of economic and political power is unfolding.? How this process will occur is hard to predict. All sectors of American society are potentially affected: wage earners, small, medium and even large businesses, farmers, professionals, federal, State and municipal employees, students, teachers, health workers, and unemployed. Protests will initially emerge from these various sectors. There is, however, at this stage, no organized national resistance movement directed against the administration's economic and financial agenda.??? Obama's populist rhetoric conceals the true nature of macro-economic policy. Acting on behalf of Wall Street, the administration's economic package, which includes close to a trillion dollar "aid" package for the financial services industry, coupled with massive austerity measures,? contributes to precipitating America into a bottomless crisis. "Orwellian Solution" to the Great Depression: Curbing Civil Unrest At this particular juncture, there is no economic recovery program in sight. The Washington-Wall Street consensus prevails. There are no policies, no alternatives formulated from within the political and economic system. .? What is the way out? How will the US government face an impending social catastrophe? The solution is to curb social unrest. The chosen avenue, inherited from the outgoing Bush administration is the reinforcement of? the Homeland Security?apparatus and the militarization of civilian State institutions.? The outgoing administration has laid the groundwork. Various pieces of "anti-terrorist" legislation (including the Patriot Acts) and presidential directives have been put in place since 2001, largely using the pretext of the "Global War on Terrorism."? Homeland Security's Internment Camps Directly related to the issue of curbing social unrest, cohesive system of detention camps is also envisaged, under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon.? A bill entitled the National Emergency Centers Establishment Act (HR 645) was introduced in the US Congress in January. It calls for the establishment of six national emergency centers in major regions in the US to be located on existing military installations. http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h111-645 ? The stated purpose of? the "national emergency centers" is to provide "temporary housing, medical, and humanitarian assistance to individuals and families dislocated due to an emergency or major disaster." In actuality, what we are dealing with are FEMA internment camps. HR 645 states that the camps can be used to "meet other appropriate needs, as determined by the Secretary of Homeland Security." There has been virtually no press coverage of HR 645.? These "civilian facilities" on US military bases are to be established in cooperation with the US Military.?Modeled on Guantanamo, what we are dealing with is the militarization of FEMA internment facilities.? Once a person is arrested and interned in a FEMA camp located on a military base, that person would in all likelihood, under a national emergency, fall under the de facto jurisdiction of the Military: civilian justice and law enforcement including habeas corpus would no longer apply.?? HR 645 bears a direct relationship to the economic crisis and the likelihood of mass protests across America. It constitutes a further move to militarize civilian law enforcement, repealing the Posse Comitatus Act.? In the words of? Rep. Ron Paul:? "...the fusion centers, militarized police, surveillance cameras and a domestic military command is not enough... Even though we know that detention facilities are already in place, they now want to legalize the construction of FEMA camps on military installations using the ever popular excuse that the facilities are for the purposes of a national emergency. With the phony debt-based economy getting worse and worse by the day, the possibility of civil unrest is becoming a greater threat to the establishment. One need only look at Iceland, Greece and other nations for what might happen in the United States next." ( Daily Paul , September 2008, emphasis added) The proposed internment camps should be seen in relation to the broader process of militarization of civilian institutions. The construction of internment camps predates the introduction of HR 645 (Establishment of Emergency Centers) in January 2009. There are, according to various (unconfirmed) reports, some 800 FEMA prison camps in different regions of the U.S.?Moreover, since the 1980s, the US military has developed "tactics, techniques and procedures" to suppress civilian dissent, to be used in the eventuality of mass protests (United States Army Field Manual 19-15 under Operation Garden Plot, entitled "Civil Disturbances" was issued in 1985)? In early 2006, tax revenues were allocated to building modern internment camp facilities. In January 2006,? Kellogg Brown and Roots, which at the time was a subsidiary of? Halliburton, received a $385 million contract from the Department of Homeland Security's? Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE):? "The contract, which is effective immediately [January 2006], provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing ICE Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs...? The contract may also provide migrant detention support to other U.S. Government organizations in the event of an immigration emergency, as well as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency , such as a natural disaster. ( KBR, 24 January 2006 , emphasis added) The stated objectives of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are to: "protect national security and uphold public safety by targeting criminal networks and terrorist organizations that seek to exploit vulnerabilities in our immigration system, in our financial networks, along our border, at federal facilities and elsewhere in order to do harm to the United States. The end result is a safer, more secure America" ( ICE homepage) The US media is mum on the issue of the internment camps on US soil. While casually acknowledging the multimillion dollar contract granted to Halliburton's subsidiary, the news reports largely focused their attention on possible "cost overruns" (similar to those which occurred with KBR in Iraq).? What is the political intent and purpose of these camps? The potential use of these internment facilities to detain American citizens under a martial law situation are not an object of media debate or discussion.? Combat Units Assigned to the Homeland In the last months of the Bush administration, prior to the November 2008 presidential elections, the Department of Defense ordered the recall of the 3rd Infantry?s 1st Brigade Combat Team from Iraq. The relocation of a combat unit from the war theater to domestic front is an integral part of the Homeland Security agenda. The BCT was assigned to assist in law enforcement activities within the US.? The BCT combat unit was attached to US Army North, the Army's component of US Northern Command (USNORTHCOM). The 1st BCT and other combat units would be called upon to perform specific military functions in the case of civil unrest:? The 1st BCT?s soldiers also will learn how to use ?the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded,? 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.( (See Gina Cavallaro,? Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1, Army Times, September 8, 2008).? Under the proposed withdrawal of US forces from Iraq under the Obama administration, one expects that other combat units will be brought home from the war theater and reassigned in the United States.? The evolving national security scenario is characterized by a mesh of civilian and military institutions:? -Army combat units working with civilian law enforcement, with the stated mission to curb "social unrest".? - the establishment of new internment camps under civilian jurisdiction located on US military facilities.?? The FEMA internment camps are part of the Continuity of Government (COG), which would be put in place in the case of martial law.? The internment camps are intended to "protect the government" against its citizens, by locking up protesters as well as political activists who might challenge the legitimacy of the Administration's national security, economic or military agenda.?? Spying on Americans: The Big Brother Data Bank Related to the issue of internment and mass protests, how will data on American citizens be collected?? How will individuals across America be categorized?? What are the criteria of the Department of Homeland Security?? In? a 2004 report of the Homeland Security Council entitled Planning Scenarios , pertaining to the defense of the Homeland, the following categories of potential "conspirators" were identified: ? ?"foreign [Islamic] terrorists" , "domestic radical groups", [antiwar and civil rights groups] "state sponsored adversaries" ["rogue states", "unstable nations"] "disgruntled employees" [labor and union activists]. In June of last year, the Bush administration issued a National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD 59- HSPD 24) entitled Biometrics for Identification and Screening to Enhance National Security ?(For Further details see Michel Chossudovsky, "Big Brother" Presidential Directive: "Biometrics for Identification and Screening to Enhance National Security" , Global Research, June 2008) Adopted without public debate or Congressional approval, its relevant ?procedures are far-reaching. They are related to the issue of civil unrest. They are also part of the logic behind the establishment of FEMA internment camps under HR 645. . NSPD 59 (Biometrics for Identification and Screening to Enhance National Security) goes far beyond the narrow issue of biometric identification, it recommends the collection and storage of "associated biographic" information, meaning information on the private lives of US citizens,?in minute detail, all of which will be "accomplished within the law": "The contextual data that accompanies biometric data includes information on date and place of birth, citizenship, current address and address history, current employment and employment history, current phone numbers and phone number history, use of government services and tax filings. Other contextual data may include bank account and credit card histories, plus criminal database records on a local, state and federal level. The database also could include legal judgments or other public records documenting involvement in legal disputes, child custody records and marriage or divorce records."( See Jerome Corsi, June 2008) The directive uses 9/11 and the "Global War on Terrorism" as an all encompassing justification to wage a witch hunt against dissenting citizens, establishing at the same time an atmosphere of fear and intimidation across the land. It also calls for the integration of various data banks as well as inter-agency cooperation in the sharing of information, with a view to eventually centralizing the information on American citizens. In a carefully worded text, NSPD 59 "establishes a framework" to enable the Federal government and its various police and intelligence agencies to: ? " use mutually compatible methods and procedures in the collection, storage, use, analysis, and sharing of biometric and associated biographic and contextual information of individuals in a lawful?and appropriate manner, while respecting their information privacy and other legal rights under United?States law." The NSPD 59 Directive recommends:? "actions and associated timelines for enhancing the existing terrorist-oriented identification and screening processes by expanding the use of biometrics". The procedures under NSPD 59 are consistent with an earlier June 2005 decision which consisted in creating a "domestic spy service", under the auspices of the FBI.? (For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, Bush Administration creates "Secret State Police", June 30, 2005) Working hand in glove with Homeland Security (DHS), the proposed "domestic intelligence department" would combine FBI counterterrorism, intelligence and espionage operations into a single service.? The new department operating under the auspices of the FBI would have the authority to "seize the property of people deemed to be helping the spread of WMD": They would be able to "spy on people in America suspected of terrorism or having critical intelligence information, even if they are not suspected of committing a crime." (NBC Tonight, 29 June 2005).\ ANNEX Text of H.R. 645: National Emergency Centers Establishment Act This version: Introduced in House. This is the original text of the bill as it was written by its sponsor and submitted to the House for consideration. This is the latest version of the bill available on this website. [SOURCE: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h111-645 ] HR 645 IH 111th CONGRESS 1st Session H. R. 645 To direct the Secretary of Homeland Security to establish national emergency centers on military installations. IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES January 22, 2009 Mr. HASTINGS of Florida introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, and in addition to the Committee on Armed Services, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A BILL To direct the Secretary of Homeland Security to establish national emergency centers on military installations. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE. This Act may be cited as the ?National Emergency Centers Establishment Act?. SEC. 2. ESTABLISHMENT OF NATIONAL EMERGENCY CENTERS. (a) In General- In accordance with the requirements of this Act, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall establish not fewer than 6 national emergency centers on military installations. (b) Purpose of National Emergency Centers- The purpose of a national emergency center shall be to use existing infrastructure-- (1) to provide temporary housing, medical, and humanitarian assistance to individuals and families dislocated due to an emergency or major disaster; (2) to provide centralized locations for the purposes of training and ensuring the coordination of Federal, State, and local first responders; (3) to provide centralized locations to improve the coordination of preparedness, response, and recovery efforts of government, private, and not-for-profit entities and faith-based organizations; and (4) to meet other appropriate needs, as determined by the Secretary of Homeland Security. SEC. 3. DESIGNATION OF MILITARY INSTALLATIONS AS NATIONAL EMERGENCY CENTERS. (a) In General- Not later than 60 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary of Defense, shall designate not fewer than 6 military installations as sites for the establishment of national emergency centers. (b) Minimum Requirements- A site designated as a national emergency center shall be-- (1) capable of meeting for an extended period of time the housing, health, transportation, education, public works, humanitarian and other transition needs of a large number of individuals affected by an emergency or major disaster; (2) environmentally safe and shall not pose a health risk to individuals who may use the center; (3) capable of being scaled up or down to accommodate major disaster preparedness and response drills, operations, and procedures; (4) capable of housing existing permanent structures necessary to meet training and first responders coordination requirements during nondisaster periods; (5) capable of hosting the infrastructure necessary to rapidly adjust to temporary housing, medical, and humanitarian assistance needs; (6) required to consist of a complete operations command center, including 2 state-of-the art command and control centers that will comprise a 24/7 operations watch center as follows: (A) one of the command and control centers shall be in full ready mode; and (B) the other shall be used daily for training; and (7) easily accessible at all times and be able to facilitate handicapped and medical facilities, including during an emergency or major disaster. (c) Location of National Emergency Centers- There shall be established not fewer than one national emergency center in each of the following areas: (1) The area consisting of Federal Emergency Management Agency Regions I, II, and III. (2) The area consisting of Federal Emergency Management Agency Region IV. (3) The area consisting of Federal Emergency Management Agency Regions V and VII. (4) The area consisting of Federal Emergency Management Agency Region VI. (5) The area consisting of Federal Emergency Management Agency Regions VIII and X. (6) The area consisting of Federal Emergency Management Agency Region IX. (d) Preference for Designation of Closed Military Installations- Wherever possible, the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary of Defense, shall designate a closed military installation as a site for a national emergency center. If the Secretaries of Homeland Security and Defense jointly determine that there is not a sufficient number of closed military installations that meet the requirements of subsections (b) and (c), the Secretaries shall jointly designate portions of existing military installations other than closed military installations as national emergency centers. (e) Transfer of Control of Closed Military Installations- If a closed military installation is designated as a national emergency center, not later than 180 days after the date of designation, the Secretary of Defense shall transfer to the Secretary of Homeland Security administrative jurisdiction over such closed military installation. (f) Cooperative Agreement for Joint Use of Existing Military Installations- If an existing military installation other than a closed military installation is designated as a national emergency center, not later than 180 days after the date of designation, the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Secretary of Defense shall enter into a cooperative agreement to provide for the establishment of the national emergency center. (g) Reports- (1) PRELIMINARY REPORT- Not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Homeland Security, acting jointly with the Secretary of Defense, shall submit to Congress a report that contains for each designated site-- (A) an outline of the reasons why the site was selected; (B) an outline of the need to construct, repair, or update any existing infrastructure at the site; (C) an outline of the need to conduct any necessary environmental clean-up at the site; (D) an outline of preliminary plans for the transfer of control of the site from the Secretary of Defense to the Secretary of Homeland Security, if necessary under subsection (e); and (E) an outline of preliminary plans for entering into a cooperative agreement for the establishment of a national emergency center at the site, if necessary under subsection (f). (2) UPDATE REPORT- Not later than 120 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Homeland Security, acting jointly with the Secretary of Defense, shall submit to Congress a report that contains for each designated site-- (A) an update on the information contained in the report as required by paragraph (1); (B) an outline of the progress made toward the transfer of control of the site, if necessary under subsection (e); (C) an outline of the progress made toward entering a cooperative agreement for the establishment of a national emergency center at the site, if necessary under subsection (f); and (D) recommendations regarding any authorizations and appropriations that may be necessary to provide for the establishment of a national emergency center at the site. (3) FINAL REPORT- Not later than 1 year after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Homeland Security, acting jointly with the Secretary of Defense, shall submit to Congress a report that contains for each designated site-- (A) finalized information detailing the transfer of control of the site, if necessary under subsection (e); (B) the finalized cooperative agreement for the establishment of a national emergency center at the site, if necessary under subsection (f); and (C) any additional information pertinent to the establishment of a national emergency center at the site. (4) ADDITIONAL REPORTS- The Secretary of Homeland Security, acting jointly with the Secretary of Defense, may submit to Congress additional reports as necessary to provide updates on steps being taken to meet the requirements of this Act. SEC. 4. LIMITATIONS ON STATUTORY CONSTRUCTION. This Act does not affect-- (1) the authority of the Federal Government to provide emergency or major disaster assistance or to implement any disaster mitigation and response program, including any program authorized by the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act (42 U.S.C. 5121 et seq.); or (2) the authority of a State or local government to respond to an emergency. SEC. 5. AUTHORIZATION OF APPROPRIATIONS. There is authorized to be appropriated $180,000,000 for each of fiscal years 2009 and 2010 to carry out this Act. Such funds shall remain available until expended. SEC. 6. DEFINITIONS. In this Act, the following definitions apply: (1) CLOSED MILITARY INSTALLATION- The term ?closed military installation? means a military installation, or portion thereof, approved for closure or realignment under the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Act of 1990 (part A of title XXIX of Public Law 101-510; 10 U.S.C. 2687 note) that meet all, or 2 out of the 3 following requirements: (A) Is located in close proximity to a transportation corridor. (B) Is located in a State with a high level or threat of disaster related activities. (C) Is located near a major metropolitan center. (2) EMERGENCY- The term ?emergency? has the meaning given such term in section 102 of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act (42 U.S.C. 5122). (3) MAJOR DISASTER- The term ?major disaster? has the meaning given such term in section 102 of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act (42 U.S.C. 5122). (4) MILITARY INSTALLATION- The term ?military installation? has the meaning given such term in section 2910 of the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Act of 1990 (part A of title XXIX of Public Law 101-510; 10 U.S.C. 2687 note). From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Apr 1 15:05:06 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2009 14:05:06 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] A Scary Corporate Coup Is Under Way -- We've Got to Stop It In-Reply-To: <930850980.3670131238541889436.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1414678302.4011251238619906637.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.alternet.org/democracy/134217/a_scary_corporate_coup_is_under_way_--_we've_got_to_stop_it/ A Scary Corporate Coup Is Under Way -- We've Got to Stop It If Wall Street gets its way, Washington will pass new "reforms" that consolidate power and ratify a corporate state. Editor's?Note: Click here to join the protest! The Rip Off Must Be Stopped! Big bankers ruined our economy and now they are gaming the political system so they can profit even more off the crisis they caused. They must be stopped. On April 11th, 2009 , the public will come out in cities across the country to express their frustration and disapproval with how our elected officials have handled the economic crisis. No one has been left unscathed; this protest is yours. *** http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090413/greider The Nation ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????? March 28, 2009 Trust Your Guts By William Greider A reassuring new story line is emanating from our leaders. I heard Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., chairman of the House Banking Committee, explain it. Then I read the same line in a Washington Post news story. That tells me people in high places are selling it. Dynamic capitalism, they explain, invents ways to create greater wealth, but sometimes it goes a little too far. Then government has to step in to correct things. This need typically occurs every generation or so, all in a day's work. The Obama administration is proposing "sweeping" new regulatory laws so capitalism can continue its good works. The story makes disturbing current events sound practically normal. But what are the storytellers leaving out? They aren't saying that this financial catastrophe was not merely an inevitable development of history but a manmade disaster. Greedheads on Wall Street did their part, but so did Washington. The reason we need new rules is that a generation of Democrats and Republicans systematically repealed or gutted the old ones -- the regulatory controls enacted 80 years ago to remedy the last breakdown of capitalism (better known as the Great Depression). The White House executed a nifty two-step this week to re-educate the public and deflect anger. On Tuesday , Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner relaunched the massive bailout of banking and finance. Knowing how unpopular this is with the people at large, Geithner followed on Thursday with his "sweeping" plans to re-regulate the bankers and financiers. Whenever official plans are called "sweeping," it indicates that they really, really mean it this time. Most Americans are not financial experts. It's very difficult, nearly impossible, for normal mortals to sort through the dense policy talk and conflicting opinions to figure out if the rhetoric of reform is real. Confusion is widespread in the land. Most Americans want to believe this president is leading us out of the swamp, but how can they know? I say, trust your gut feelings. They are as reliable as the learned experts.' Many Americans want to believe because they think that returning to "normal" means their decimated 401(k) retirement accounts might somehow recover the 30-40 percent that disappeared during the past year. If it takes monster bank bailouts to restore stock-market prices, let's have bailouts. Good luck with that. The Dow has regained 21 percent in two weeks of rallies, but I remind friends that steep, short bursts in the stock market do not foretell the future of the economy. Banks may be relieved of their losses without changing the general economic outlook. After the crash of 1929, there were occasional stock rallies, followed by fierce bears. It took 25 years (until 1954) for the Dow to regain its old peak. Another way to assess the Obama plan for reform is ask: Who likes it? The verdict was swift and sure after Geithner's twin announcements. Wall Street likes it. The blueprint for regulatory reforms was applauded by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association; the American Insurance Association; and the Private Equity Council, the trade group for the major private funds that will get public money and backup insurance to buy the banking system's rotten assets. This could be born-again patriotism. Or it could be the animal appetites of financiers smelling gorgeous opportunity for returns. This may be one of those moments where people can find some guidance from their moral convictions. They do not need to know all the details to ask simple questions. Does the outline of what's happening to rescue major financial institutions seem morally wrong? Or is it justified by the larger necessities of the national predicament? Is the government insufficiently tough in demanding reciprocal commitments from the beneficiaries? Should Washington pursue larger structural changes in the banking system? Trying to imagine alternatives to the bankers-first bailouts is a good place to start. What follows are suggestions I produced at the request of young people organizing demonstrations around the country for April 11. They call themselves A New Way Forward. I hope they light lots of bonfires. This rough outline leaves out lots of particular regulatory issues, but the core goal of reform is to create a banking and financial system that serves the society and the economy, not the other way around. Everything being done to rescue and restore the old order gets in the way of creating something truly new and valuable for the future. Those of us throwing logs in the path of the bailouts are dismissed as naysayers or worse, but the financial titans are trying to foreclose just solutions by stampeding Congress and the president to adopt ill-considered ideas. If Wall Street gets its way, the "reforms" may further consolidate power and ratify a corporate state -- a grotesque hybrid that combines the worst aspects of socialism and capitalism. The reform ideas announced by Geithner would plant the seeds by creating a "systemic risk" regulator, presumably the Federal Reserve, to oversee the largest, most politically adept banks and financial firms that qualify as "too big to fail." Capitalism, with its inherent tendency toward monopoly, would have the means to monopolize democracy (see my recent Washington Post article.) My new book, Come Home, America, asks people to enunciate their versions of "patriotic realism." That is the essence of an alternative vision: de-concentrate power, liberate people and smaller enterprises, workers and middle managers and investors, to help shape the country's future from many different perspectives. This is how democracy was supposed to work. It can again. Some points I recommend people consider: 1. Euthanasia for insolvent banks. Transferring their losses to the public will not restore the trillions in capital the bankers helped destroy. It would merely relieve the banks, their creditors and shareholders of the pain. Government must take control of the system to supervise a just unwinding of the mess -- whether we call it nationalization or something else. Handing out money and leaving bankers in control of how it's spent is nutty and morally wrong. People everywhere understand this. Only Washington seems oblivious to the irrationality of what it is attempting. 2. The Federal Reserve must be democratized and effectively stripped of its peculiar, anti-democratic status as an unaccountable island of power within the government. A new federal agency -- accountable to Congress and the president -- can be refashioned from the working parts of the Fed. Call it a central bank or something else, but its governing power must not rest with heavyweight bankers on the board of directors at the 12 regional banks. (To understand why, consider that the New York Federal Reserve Bank was headed until recently by Geithner.) 3. The reformed Fed would be stripped of its regulatory functions and confined to conducting monetary policy. A different section of the Treasury or a new free-standing regulatory agency can assume responsibility for regulation and be armed with strong antitrust laws and other rules to ensure that "too big to fail" institutions are redefined as "too big to save." 4. The federal law against usury can be restored to halt predatory lending. Persistent violators would not be fined with trivial penalties, as they are now, but stripped of their government protections and subsidies -- that is, doomed. 5. A new banking system -- smaller and more diverse and responsible to the public interest -- can fill the hole left by the demise of major banks like Citigroup. Vast public resources should be devoted to creating this system, not to saving the mastodons. Public banks (like the North Dakota State Bank) and nonprofit savings-and-lending cooperatives can also serve as an important cross-check on private commercial banking -- a competitive model that offers credit on nonusurious terms and keeps the big boys honest. 6. Once the Federal Reserve is domesticated in a democratic fashion, then it can be reformed to assume broad supervision of the nonbank financial firms in the "shadow banking system" -- hedge funds, private equity firms, pension funds, mutual funds, insurance companies. (For more on this, see my recent Nation article, "Fixing the Fed.") 7. Our first political challenge is to disturb business as usual in Washington and prevent Congress from taking hasty action to adopt Wall Street's "reform" agenda. Congress is rattled by the exploding popular anger and listening nervously. The people need to speak louder -- loud enough for the president to hear. About William Greider National affairs correspondent William Greider has been a political journalist for more than thirty-five years. A former Rolling Stone and Washington Post editor, he is the author of the national bestsellers One World, Ready or Not, Secrets of the Temple, Who Will Tell The People, The Soul of Capitalism (Simon & Schuster) and--due out in February from Rodale--Come Home, America. From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Apr 1 15:04:32 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2009 14:04:32 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] In Defense of Washington and Wall Street | The Brecht Forum In-Reply-To: <1824848839.2541181238193739937.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1763570172.4010851238619872010.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://brechtforum.org/defense-washington-and-wall-street In Defense of Washington and Wall Street by Robert Fitch in New Politics, Winter 2009 1. The Crisis of 2007-2008 The very elderly are prone to fall. And unlike infants who also tumble frequently, each time seniors stumble, they risk a disabling or even a fatal injury. On August 9th 2007, after an unparalleled quarter century long expansion, which had been checked in the developed countries only mildly and briefly, capitalism finally tripped and lost its balance with predictable results: banks tottered, while credit and commercial paper markets writhed in paralysis. After about a month, though, notwithstanding the failure of the markets to unfreeze, the crisis was declared over. The palsied patient was deemed well enough to resume normal activity -- a diagnosis apparently confirmed when two months later, on October 9th, the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached 14,164, an all time high. The March 2008 meltdown of two hedge funds belonging to Bear, Stearns suggested otherwise. A pillar of the "shadow banking system" that had emerged over the last two decades, Bear was forced into liquidation, sold to J.P. Morgan for $256 million. Scarcely more than a year earlier it was said to be worth $68.7 billion. Yet this stunning write-down barely moved Wall Street's needle. The market continued to move choppily until September 14th 2008, when Mr. FIRE (as in finance, insurance and real estate) fell again, with even more dire consequences. That Sunday, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. Later in the day, Merrill, Lynch announced its liquidation. Just two days later, AIG, the world's largest insurance company, was taken over by the government. This time, Wall Street had suffered the equivalent of a broken neck. Even in the immediate aftermath of the 1929 Crash, the biggest Wall Street banks didn't fail. They continued to lend. (The wave of failures by thousands of heartland banks came later.) But in 2008, it was precisely the big banks which formed the leading vector of the collapse. Within a period of 200 days , the five biggest U.S. investment banking houses -- the institutions that since the Reagan era had given Wall Street its swagger and identity -- had either gone bankrupt, or forced to find a merger partner or re-organized themselves as bank holding companies. Whenever the spinal cord is severed at the top two vertebrae, i.e., at the neck, the greatest immediate peril is that the victim stops breathing. The September 2008 crisis was marked by increasingly desperate measures to keep big FIRE from asphyxiation. The measures taken included flooding the system with liquidity -- almost unlimited loans and loan guarantees. The Bush Administration came up with a $700 billion plan to deleverage the banks (i.e., raise their dangerously low ratio of equity to debt) by buying their bad mortgage-backed securities. And when that didn't work, passed legislation which amounted to a semi-nationalization of the remaining big banks -- the equivalent of cutting a hole in the patient's trachea. By October 's end FIRE was breathing, albeit with a tube provided by the U.S. guarantee of inter bank loans. But breathing is not walking. A financial system in which banks lend only to other banks refusing to act as intermediaries to the non-financial sector-- is still non-functional. In the midst of the anarchy, the headline "Capitalism in Convulsion" appeared not in The Militant or The People's World, but in the august , salmon colored pages of The Financial Times .1 Unlike the Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) crisis or the dot.com bust which were more or less confined to the G-7 countries, or the Asian, Mexican, Argentinean crises -- which remained localized within the Third World -- the crisis of 2007-8 was truly global. It spread from America to Europe to Latin America to Asia and even to remote Iceland which was all but officially bankrupt and forced to await rescue from the IMF. Nor was the crisis confined to capitalism's financial sub-system. Production was shrinking, consumption was off. Even foreign trade, the main driver of the world economy, was contracting. "There is a real possibility of a real, deep, international depression," said one senior monetary official at a G20 meeting in Dubai who spoke on the condition of anonymity, calling the crisis "the worst in 100 years."2 2. The Meaning of the Meltdown IN 1989, The fall of the Berlin Wall was widely interpreted as a failure of the Communist system. But not by its supporters. They favored minimalist interpretations. Liberal Stalinists saw it as a reaction to certain overzealous GDR officials in the security apparatus; conservatives as the failure of those same officials to contain the illegal exodus. Still others blamed Soviet Premier Gorbachev's blundering efforts to deregulate the Soviet system, which they insisted was still fundamentally sound. Similarly, the present crisis can be interpreted in various ways. Not as the result of inherent, structural, repeated, and irredeemable tendencies within the capitalist system. But as altogether something more surmountable. Democrats have pointed to a failure of capitalism's financial sub-system, i.e., of Wall Street -- where greed ran amok -- and in Washington where officials refused to rein in the Street's wildest propensities. By repealing the depression era Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, the argument runs, Congress demolished the pillar of the old regulatory architecture. And it declared off limits any supervision of the new, escalating trade in opaque forms of over-the-counter derivatives.3 Republicans, while not immune to the widely popular "greedy" banker trope, tended mostly to blame capitalism's regulators -- above all blundering by Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, who allegedly, in the aftermath of the 2001 dot.com collapse, held interest rates "too low, too long." He should have kept his hands off the monetary joystick. The implosion interrupted what might be called "The Big Sleep of the American Left": our failure to exert a detectible influence on working class institutions or on American political life as a whole. The sleepy time coincides roughly with the quarter century long boom which began in 1983 with the recovery from the stagflation crisis of the seventies. Throughout the period, as the global economy continued its unparalleled dizzying ascent, 19th century supply side economics experienced a revival. Not just the napkin version preached by Arthur Laffer, who argued that if you want to increase tax revenues, cut tax rates. But an over-arching argument about the nature of capitalism and its powers of adjustment. The 19th century classic writers -- James Mill, J.B. Say, David Ricardo -- taught that market failures or "gluts" were impossible. Temporary over-supply in this or that market for shoes or hats or handkerchiefs, yes. A generalized over-supply, of shoes, hats and handkerchiefs all at the same time, no.4 So absent meddling by government authorities, depressions were not a possibility. Markets would always self-adjust because market agents -- suppliers of labor and capital -- would behave rationally. Workers, seeing that they had priced themselves out of the market, would work harder and lower their wages. Holders of capital would lower interest rates, which would reduce saving and spur investment. Acceptance of the simple supply side formula, "supply creates its own demand" bred confidence among the believers. The concerns of Keynes, who worried about "effective demand," and the notions of Marx, who argued that the scramble for profits created its own barrier, could be dismissed as groundless. And as America's ruined central cities sprang back to life from the arson and abandonment of the seventies and the stores filled up with cheap Asian goods and American designed microchips powered a global technoboom, with unemployment falling to record lows, a lite version of supply side economics quietly permeated the Left -- in the assumption that "post-industrial" capitalism was more or less impregnable in its First World stronghold. Perhaps understandably, sections of the Left began to lose interest in the struggles going on in the material world around them, re-grouping around the priority of culture wars and even for some science wars. And while economic radicalism didn't disappear, the burden of its critique lay in the idea of an unequal exchange between first and third world countries, which prevented less developed raw material producing nations from industrializing. The idea of class wars within nations gave way to the notion of "proletarian nations."5 Socialism became strictly a Third World option. The Left could try to assist the special victims of First World capitalism -- blacks, women, minorities, immigrants. But not American workers. As Michael Kazin observed, very few American leftists invoked the link between labor and the creation of wealth and capital and the appropriation of that wealth which had been at the core of American radicalism from the 19th century to the 1940s.6 Speculation about transforming first world capitalist institutions became about as respectable as spoon bending. One consequence of the 2007-8 economic tsumani is to wash away the foundations of the intellectual world of the sensible center.7 But much of the Left's outlook rested tacitly on those same foundations. As well as its secret sense that it had no genuine vocation for politics except on the margins of American life. Perhaps the collapse of financial markets hasn't yet produced a mass market for ideas about democratic control of the economy. Yet there appears at least to be a niche. Are markets always wiser than majorities? Would the majority of Americans have voted in a plebiscite for deindustrialization? At a minimum, now that a Republican administration has ordered a semi-nationalization of banks and insurance companies, the supply side era is over, creating the potential for a Left socialist revival. But not without challenging the minimalist interpretations of the great meltdown put forward by the two mainstream political parties. 3. Three Things I Learned About Crises from Marx The depth and scope of the meltodown have made Marx fashionable once again at least in Europe, the BBC reports.8 But acquiring the intellectual resources for the challenge is not simply a matter of mining Marxian texts. If there is a Marxian road to understanding the crisis, it's a cloverleaf highway - with many ways to get on and get off, and each turn-off resulting in a different political direction. There are many Marxist schools. And each explains crises in different ways - as the result of underconsumption; of overproduction; in terms of the falling rate of profit; or as a consequence of the disproportionality between growth rates in consumer and producer good sectors.9 Notwithstanding the impossibility of establishing a true Marxist interpretation of the crisis, his powerful, suggestive, but mostly undeveloped crisis analysis contains three contentious insights which provide a scaffold for grasping the present events. The first might be called the "universal dynamism" thesis. Supply-siders accept it but most modern Marxists don't. Marx portrayed capitalism as an inexorable accumulation machine whose dynamism is fed by the behavior of multiple competitive capitalists all forced to consume productively rather than personally, all relentlessly recycling their profits back into the enterprise. All searching for a way to reduce costs. This feature turned capitalism into a uniquely dynamic and expansive system: one whose dynamism could not be confined to its Western countries of origin. The spread of English commerce, he argued, albeit restricted at first to opium, would "lay the material foundations of Western society in Asia."10 At the same time -- and here's where supply siders get off the bus and neo- Marxists get back on -- Marx recognized capitalist development traced no smooth, upward, untroubled arc. Growth was achieved only through system shattering crises -- "business cycles" -- which proved comprehensively destructive.11 In the abrupt swing from world prosperity to world depression, tens of millions were doomed to unemployment and the dole; economic upheaval would shatter normal trade relations, freeze immigration and promote economic nationalism and political dynamite -- in the form of left/right polarization leading to dictatorship, fascism and war. Finally, there's the least accepted Marxian argument about crises: his claim that they have their origin in the "real" sector of the economy - where commodities were produced -- not in the financial sector where the crisis almost invariably breaks out. "At first glance," Marx writes, "the whole crisis seems to be merely a credit and money crisis." But look again, he advises, and you see that the unsaleable securities represent unsaleable commodities. Or in our own immediate case the oversupply of mortgage backed securities represents the oversupply of houses, and ultimately an oversupply of capital in general. In this way, the crisis expresses in a violent way capitalism's fundamental conflict: Capitalism develops awesomely large productive forces whose limits are checked by the requirement that production be profitable.12 To avoid depressing the profit rate, productive capital saves instead of investing, transferring its saving from the productive sphere, seeking shelter in the financial system where productive capital is turned into credit or financial capital. Indeed, too much. "But credit," Marx wrote, only "accelerates the violent outbreaks of the crisis."13 To accelerate something is not to cause it.14 4. Explaining The Meltdown Thje proximate cause of the 2007-08 crisis was the imploding of what Yale Professor Robert Shiller called the greatest real estate bubble in U.S. history or possibly even world history. Between 1996 and 2005, house prices nationwide increased about 90 percent. In the five years between 2000 to 2005 alone, house prices increased by roughly 60 percent.15 That hadn't happened even in the real estate boom of the 1920s, whose premonitory bust in 1926 gestured wildly but vainly at the still greater collapse to come in 1929. While the inner mechanics of the individual parts that make up the self-destructive bubble apparatus are famously complex -- the SPVs SIVs, the CDOs, CDSs and other "financial dark matter" -- the mechanics of the collapse itself are fairly straightforward. It's not necessary to understand quantum mechanics to grasp why an apple falls to the ground. Newtonian mechanics will suffice. Nor do we need to study the structure of DNA to know why old people fall -- they take slower and shorter steps. Similarly, by concentrating on the intricacies of frenzied finance on Wall Street and faulty regulatory mechanisms in DC, we lose perspective on the ultimate as opposed to the proximate causes of the world crisis. The ultimate cause of the 2007-08 crisis was not the pricking of the real estate bubble in the United States, but the implosion of the greatest and longest global expansion in the history of capitalism going back to the first industrial revolution (1760-1830). The rapid transformation, particularly of the Chinese and Indian economies, produced a super boom that blew away all norms for economic expansion.16 World GDP rates rose to unprecedented levels - peaking at 6 percent in 2007, six times higher than the rate during the first industrial revolution. And what drove the boom? Notwithstanding the core claim of the sensible center that the nature of the period was defined by the rise of post-industrialism and the fall of the blue collar worker who would go the way of the peasant, the boom was shaped by record rates of manufacturing growth and even higher rates of growth in manufacturing trade. The increase in manufacturing itself was fed by a world-reshaping, mass migration of manufacturing capital from the more developed to the less developed countries. Capital was attracted by appalling, but ultimately ravishingly high rates of labor exploitation -- to India, which was emerging as the world's back office, but above all to China, which became the world's workshop, employing 109 million manufacturing workers. (Versus 53 million in the G7 countries.)17 In the United States, median hourly manufacturing wage was $17.85 an hour.18 In China, manufacturing workers in the coastal provinces earned 91 cents an hour at productivity rates increasingly converging with those in the United States19 (inland workers earned 57 cents an hour.)20 The long boom that began in 1983 saw astonishing reversals of economic structure -- particularly in the United States where the FIRE industry displaced manufacturing and all others -- as the leading industry by GDP share. In 1983, at the beginning of the boom, manufacturing was still larger than FIRE. By 2007, the FIRE sector had become 1.8 times the size of the manufacturing sector.21 There were equally bizarre reversals of economic fortune, as the United States once the world's prime creditor nation, became its greatest debtor nation, with poor nations -- most prominently China -- among its largest creditors. Yet despite these startling novelties, the present boom has ended in overproduction and over-consumption just like the classic booms of the past. Consider the world depressions that began in 1837, 1873 and 1929. For these crises, like the implosion of 2007-08, the following seven stage sequence can serve as a model: 1. A fall in the rate of accumulation, or at least a fall in the rate of acceleration; actual profit rates may even rise just before the collapse; but the high rates are sustained by a slowing down of accumulation rates. 2. Formation of surplus capital hoards. Unable to return "home" for productive re-investment, the surplus seeks to preserve itself by moving into financial channels. 3. Capital over-supply forces down interest rates, clearing the way for asset inflation and financial excess. First because low interest rates automatically increase the value of fictitious capital in land and in securities; and second because low interest rates cause risk premiums to fall, promoting riskier behavior as rentiers chase yield. 4. Asset bubbles form as speculators are attracted by the seemingly inexorable rise in asset prices. Prices accelerate further because of rampant bubble psychology. 5. The chain letter snaps. Housing prices burst the bounds of household incomes. Stock prices soar far beyond historic price/earnings ratio. Prices collapse. A local financial crisis breaks out among the most vulnerable borrowers, who can no longer re-finance, leaving the most recent round of developers and mortgage holders unable to pay off their loans, and/or stock speculators can't cover margin calls from their brokers. Asset prices collapse, taking down credit suppliers. 6. A spreading of the financial ripples outward from their point of origin, as asset deflation produces a global panic. And finally -- but not yet of course in 2007-08: 7. Protracted economic stagnation; widespread double-digit unemployment rates; falling wages and commodity prices; growing economic nationalism and a tendency towards "organized capitalism." There are two main differences between this seven step scenario and the mainstream accounts. Regulatory and monetary explanations see the problem as U.S. centered. Obviously the United States can't be ignored -- the meltdown began here. But the emphasis must be on global imbalances. True, the United States is over-consuming. But the rest of the world is over-producing. The second difference is the emphasis on how excesses in the real sector -- the capital glut and the resulting low interest rates -- produce wilding in the FIRE sector. By contrast, mainstream models reverse the causal arrow so that financial and real estate excess bring down an essentially healthy real sector. Except for the wrongheadedness of Greenspan or the antics of a comparative handful of hedge fund operators, mainstreamers then see no reason why the expansion should not go on indefinitely. They don't look at a twenty-five year expansion as being the equivalent of a twenty-five year old dog. The bubble simply erupted. But whence? Either exogenously -- outside the system -- by dodgy regulators who disrupted the economy's natural path towards self-correction -- in the Republican version; or in the Democratic version the bubble is produced endogenously -- in the FIRE sector -- aided by dodgy regulators who look the other way at speculative excess. The Democrats cite a whole host of regulatory failures. There's the problem of fragmented regulation -the Fed regulates banks; the SEC stocks; the states insurance companies. They point to de-regulatory measures like the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Then there's the embarrassment of private regulation -- ceding securities rating to the conflict-of-interest laden private rating agencies. Even more serious perhaps is the absence of new regulation for new institutions -- e.g., failure to bring Over -the-Counter derivative trading under control; ditto the emergence of a shadow banking system, which created "a de facto assembly line for purchasing, packaging, and selling unregistered, high- risk securities."22 The Republicans -- along with their economic mentors in academia -- supply-siders, monetarists, Austrians and Chicagoans -- often talk about too stringent regulation -- like the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1978. The Democratic Administration, they allege, allowed community groups like ACORN to coerce giant banks into making hundreds of billions of dollars in loans to unqualified minority borrowers. But mostly they focus on the interest rate activism of Alan Greenspan. The "too low too long" mantra -- the fed funds rate, they point out, remained below two percent from 2002-2004. One problem with the explanation is that the bubble didn't start in 2002. It was already underway in 1996. As Robert Shiller points out, it lasted three times longer than the period of monetary laxity. Bubble growth continued to accelerate even in 1999 when the Fed was tightening. Moreover, 30 year mortgage rates were mostly unresponsive to Fed moves at the short term end of the interest curve.23 What's more, if the U.S. bubble was simply the result of a Fed policy error -- why did real estate bubbles form all around the world? Bubbles in Spain, Ireland, U.K. and perhaps the mother of all bubbles in Shanghai, where 1 million apartments were built in a single year -- as opposed to 2 million in the peak year for the entire United States. And the average apartment was $300,000 in a city where the median household income is $2,000.24 By comparison, the median household income in Queens is $42,000. If the same income to housing price ratio obtained in Queens, the average housing price would be $6.3 million. Perhaps even more challenging to the Greenspan as the Grinch Who Stole Prosperity model is the comparable behavior of German bank regulators. Roughly speaking between 2002-4, overnight interest rates charged by German banks were only about a percent higher than the federal funds rate. German rates were kept low for longer than in the United States. Yet there was no German real estate bubble. The same could be said for Switzerland and Austria: very low interest rates, no real estate bubble. What German banks, along with their Swiss, Austrian and west European counterparts, do have instead is an emerging market nations bubble: $4.7 trillion in cross-border bank loans to Eastern Europe, Latin America and emerging Asia extended during the global credit boom. It's a sum, according to a Bank for International Settlements reckoning, that "vastly exceeds the scale of both the U. S. sub- prime and Alt-A debacles."25 There are many ways to build a bubble. Different countries have different architectural styles. America, with the most advanced entreprenurial culture, has the most complex: a financial engineering industry -- the United States invented such financial gimmicks as securitization, the Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs), and the Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs). But the central European method, while more traditional, works just as well. Austrian bankers simply lend huge amounts to their favorite clients, the Hungarians. Lending money to Hungarians who can't pay them back is an Austrian tradition that goes back to the early 19th century when the Rothschild Creditanstalt no sooner financed the Hungarian railway system when it abruptly failed. Hungarian loans were a major factor in the collapse of Creditanstalt again in 1931 which took down an estimated 60- 80 percent of Austrian industry triggering the European great depression.26 This time Austrian banks have lent 85 percent of their GDP to Hungarians, who have an external debt worth about 100 percent of their GDP. Ideally, strict, comprehensive, incorruptible regulation could have stopped all this over-lending to under- qualified borrowers dead in its tracks. But in what world do regulatory bureaucrats, barking and snapping like Welsh corgis herding cattle, determine the moves of bankers? Certainly not in ours, where the relevant laws that create the framework for regulation are passed by legislatures influenced not by concerns for macro-economic stability, but by the strength of relevant lobbies. In our world, the FIRE lobby is the largest by far.27 Even if the regulators had more power, and there were a lot more of them, it's not clear how they could be so effective as to prevent another Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) from happening. LTCM showed that one renegade hedge fund, is all it takes to ignite a crisis when the fields of capital are very dry. What regulator would second guess a team of Nobel Prize winners or fathom their formulas for risk or even decipher their complex trades?28 And even if legislators and regulators somehow summoned up the political will and financial sophistication to tame rogue genius lenders, why wouldn't the traders who like to discount risk simply de-camp for some less regulated place? As Chairman Bernanke observed in the immediate aftermath of the Bear Stearns collapse: "The oversight of these firms must recognize the distinctive features of investment banking and take care neither to unduly inhibit efficiency and innovation nor to induce a migration of risk-taking activities to institutions that are less regulated or beyond our borders."29 Historically, the influence of regulators is pro-cyclical, least evident when it's most needed. Regulations are strictest in the aftermath of a collapse, weakest during the manias. Glass Steagall, comprehensive legislation taming the securities behavior of big banks, passed in 1933; it was repealed in 1999 at the height of the dot.com boom. Evidently, what chiefly regulates bankers' behavior is not regulators but conditions in the money market. What the great depressions of 1837, 1873, and 1929 share with the present crisis is a huge inflow of surplus capital into financial centers which drives down interest rates and alters banking standards and norms. That such a surplus formed prior to the 2007-8 crisis there is little doubt. A big policy debate broke out in 2005 involving Bernanke, and critics of U.S. monetary policy over its provenance and meaning.30 Both pointed to the U.S. current account deficit as proof of the surplus. But Fed critics called it a "liquidity glut." The hundreds of billions flowing uphill each year from poor Asian countries to wealthy America were driven by the hydraulics of U.S. monetary policies. Overly stimulative U.S. policies enabled the U..S. to over consume and over borrow. Martin Wolf, editor of the Financial Times, noted that the United States had absorbed 70 per cent of the rest of the world's surplus capital, while its consumption accounted for 91 percent of the increase in gross domestic product in this decade.31 Bernanke, who in 2005 was just a Fed governor, defended U.S. posture and policies. He took note of the bizarre role reversal -- Scrooge borrowing from Tiny Tim -- but argued that the surplus took the form of a "savings glut." And the Chinese were its agents. The United States was just reacting to the Chinese decision to save so great a portion of their income. Well over a trillion was now mostly invested in U.S. Treasuries and government sponsored enterprises. China's savings rate -- managed by the state -- had reached a staggering 50 percent. Even Chinese households on their comparatively tiny incomes saved 30 percent. The U.S. private households, which at the beginning of the superboom were saving nearly 10 percent, now have negative savings. But Americans were making the best of a situation not of their making, acting as Stakhanovite consumers in order to promote the continuation of global expansion. U.S. borrowing was necessary to protect the world from imminent collapse. A striking feature of Bernanke's account -- as well as that of his adversaries who assert the liquidity thesis -- is that neither think trade has anything to do with the trade deficit. Explains Bernanke, "The U.S. trade balance is the tail of the dog; for the most part, it has been passively determined by foreign and domestic incomes, asset prices, interest rates, and exchange rates, which are themselves the products of more fundamental driving forces." For the economists, the financial markets determine the markets for commodities. Any nation could have a giant trade surplus; it's ultimately just a policy choice about savings behavior. The country with the giant surplus just happened to be China. Utterly ignored is the fact that trade surplus/ capital glut could never have formed without staggeringly high rates of labor exploitation in the strict Marxian sense: the ratio of value added by labor divided by wages.32 As far as what drove the boom and what caused the bust, it's the rate of exploitation that's the dog. The savings rate is the tail. Conclusion Marx talks frequently about the capitalist's "wolfish hunger" for profit and his ravenous appetite for capital accumulation. It's no small irony that the most wolfish and ravenous capitalists in history should turn out to be Chinese Communist Party officials trained to revere Marx. But that doesn't detract from the serviceability of Marxian premises about capitalist dynamics. Whose fault is the crisis? Chinese over-exporting or American over-importing? "It should be noted in regard to imports and exports," Marx observes, "that one after another, all countries become involved in a crisis and that it then becomes evident that all of them with few exceptions, have exported and imported too much. So that they all have an unfavorable balance of payments."33 Marx wouldn't have been surprised at the failure of the once highly touted $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. "The entire artificial system of forced expansion of the reproduction process cannot, of course, be remedied by having some bank, like the Bank of England, give to all the swindlers the deficient capital by means of its paper and having it buy up all the depreciated commodities at their old nominal values."34 Making the swindlers whole does nothing to restore profitability in the real sector. The global rupture that's taken place over the last 15 months suggests a pattern of growth -- a global division of labor -- that has grown not just increasingly unwieldy, but probably unsustainable. How can the "imbalances" be fixed unless the United States becomes a producer as well as a consumer of commodities? But how can the United States become a producer on the world market given the vast disparity in rates of exploitation? Only in a post-industrial world which never existed. How can the United States continue to consume Chinese products without Chinese credit -- which is dependent on unsustainable American consumption? No doubt adjustments can be made -- both China and the United States can de-globalize. But such necessarily wrenching transformations take time, more like decades than years. No doubt there is something comforting about the world of the sensible center where greedy bankers, bad regulators or too much regulation brings doom and disaster. At least we remain masters of our fate. At least the virtues still count -- if we can only renew our commitment to them. In the capitalist world as described by Marx -- and this is perhaps the insight most in need of refurbishing -- we think we're actors but we're not. Capitalism is the form of society that must ruthlessly develop the productive forces, but it develops them in a form that turns their agents into passive victims of the process. The reassuring side of Marx's view of capital expansion and collapse is the opportunity it offers for a revival of the spirit of resistance among the working people: "Without the great alternative phases of dullness, prosperity, over-excitement, crisis, and distress, which modern industry traverses in periodically recurring cycles?with the up and down of wages resulting from them ?the working class? would be a heart-broken, a weak- minded worn-out unresisting mass whose self-emancipation would prove as impossible as that of the slaves of ancient Greece and Rome."35 Class struggle is the best stimulus package. Notes 1. John Plender,"Capitalism in Convulsion," Financial Times, September 18, 2008 . 2. Thomas Atkins, "Depression overshadows G20 summit," Reuters, November 10, 2008 . 3. See for example Joseph Stiglitz. 4. See Capital, III, 251-2 for Marx's definition of "absolute overproduction" and its cause. 5. A core notion of Mussolini and various fascist intellectuals like Corradini, re-cycled by Mao and filtering down to the Third Worldist Left in the 70's. 6. The Populist Persuasion, (New York: Basic Books, 1995). 273 7. A self-referential term used by such as The Brookings Institution, the Democratic Leadership Council and Colin Powell. 8. BBC, "Marx popular amid credit crunch," Oct . 20, 2008. 9. Michael Bleaney, Underconsumption Theories (New York: International Publishers, 1976), esp. ch.6. 10. "Future Results of British Rule in India," Portable Marx, 337; see also Capital, III, 333-334. 11. Mainstream economics -- particularly "supply side" economics which flourished during the Long Boom -- was able to grasp #1 but not #2. While acknowledging problem of inequality, they maintained that people were still better off than before; And insisted that true system-shattering crises were impossible. Economists influential on the American Left rejected both #1, and #2. They saw capitalism sunk in protracted stagnation; and argued, just like the Russian 19th century populists that the only way to develop productive forces in third world was some form of de-linkage. 12. Capital, Vol III (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), p.490. 13. Vol. III, Ch.27, p. 441. 14. A point made by an anonymous blogger who insists that Marx is obsolete because he fails to realize that the crisis really is caused by machinations of the financial sector. 15. Ben S. Bernanke, "Remarks on the economic outlook," At the International Monetary Conference, Barcelona, Spain (via satellite), June 3, 2008 . 16. A genuine boom, marked by unprecedented growth in productivity, and not a super-bubble, as George Soros argues. See The New Paradigm for Financial Markets (New York: Public Affairs, 2008) esp. ch.5 "The Super-Bubble Hypothesis" 17. Judith Bannister, "Manufacturing Employment in China," BLS, Monthly Review, July , 2005. 18. BLS, "Earnings." 19. RIETI, "Benchmarking Industrial Competitiveness by International Comparison of Productivity," Dec . 26, 2006. 20. Judith Banister, "Manufacturing Earnings and compensation in China," BLS Monthly Labor Review, November 2005. 21. BEA, Gross Domestic Product by Industry Accounts, 1947-2007. Between 1983 and 2007 financial profits rose from 17 percent to nearly 40 percent of all corporate profits ERP, Table B-91, 2008. 22. Christopher Whalen, "Expanding Fed's Power is Wrong Plan," American Banker, April 4, 2008 . 23. The Subprime Solution, 49. 24. Don Lee, "A Home Boom Busts," Los Angeles Times, Jan . 8, 2006. 25. "Alt -A" stands for Alternative A. It's a euphemism for mortgages slightly less dodgy than sub-prime mortgages. See here . 26. Niall Fergusson, The House of Rothschild 1849-1999. 465. 27. Opensecrets.org credits FIRE with approximately $2.76 in lobbying expenditures between 1996 and 2008. 28. Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed, (New York: Random House, 2000), 187. 29. Ben S. Bernanke, "Financial Regulation and Financial Stability", July 8, 2008 . 30. For savings glut thesis see here . For the liquidity glut view see StanleyRoach . 31. Martin Wolf, "Villains and victims of global capital flows," Financial Times June 12 2007 32. In Marxian terminology, the ratio of surplus value(s) over variable capital (v) or s/v., which is also the ratio of paid to unpaid labor. 33. Vol. III, ch. 30, p. 491. 34. Vol III, ch.30. p. 490. 35. New York Daily Tribune, July 14, 1853 , cited in Lezek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 248 BOB FITCH studied economic history at Berkeley in the 1960s where he also co-founded the Vietnam Day Committee with Jerry Rubin. His latest book is Solidarity For Sale (Public Affairs, 2006). From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Apr 1 15:05:31 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2009 14:05:31 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] It's Obama's War Now by Chris Hedges In-Reply-To: <728649733.3680081238543141819.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1674905644.4011371238619931117.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/03/02 It?s Obama?s War Now ? ? by Chris Hedges This is the text of a talk by Chris Hedges that was read at anti-war gatherings held by The World Can't Wait in New York's Union Square, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Nashville, Louisville, Chicago and Berkeley on March 19 to protest the sixth anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq. Barack Obama has shown that he is as capable of doublespeak as any other politician when he announced an end to the war in Iraq. Combat troops are to be pulled out of Iraq by August 2010, he said, but some 50,000 occupation troops will remain behind. Someone should let the Iraqis know the distinction. I doubt any soldier or Marine in Iraq will notice much difference in 19 months. Many combat units will simply be relabeled as noncombat units. And what about our small army of well-paid contractors and mercenaries? Will Dyncorp , Bechtel, Blackwater (which recently changed its name to Xe), all of whom have made fortunes off the war, pack up and go home? What about the three large super-bases, dozens of smaller military outposts and our imperial city, the Green Zone? Will American corporations give up their lucrative control of Iraqi oil? The occupation of Iraq will not be disrupted. Lies and deception, which launched the war in the first place, are being employed by Democrats to maintain it. This is not a withdrawal. It is occupation lite . And as long as American troops are on Iraqi soil the war will grind on, the death toll on each side will continue to mount and we will remain a lightning rod for hatred and rage in the Middle East. Add to this Obama's decision to increase troop levels in Afghanistan and even his most purblind supporters will have to admit the new president is as intent on maintaining American empire as the old. The occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan has not promoted U.S. security or stability in the Middle East. These occupations have furthered the spread of failed states, increased authoritarianism and unleashed savage violence. They have opened up voids of lawlessness, including in the tribal areas of Pakistan, where our real enemies can operate and plot against us. These occupations have scuttled the art of diplomacy and mocked the rule of law. We have become an outlaw state intent on creating more outlaw states. The occupations have, finally, empowered Iran, as well as Russia and China, which gleefully watch our self-immolation. And, in the end, we cannot win these wars. We will withdraw all our troops in an orderly manner or see these occupations collapse in an orgy of bloodshed. Iraq, because of our invasion and occupation, no longer exists as a unified country. The experiment that was Iraq, the cobbling together of disparate and antagonistic patches of the Ottoman Empire by the victorious powers in the wake of World War I, will never come back. The Kurds have set up a de facto state in the north. The Shiites control most of the south. The center of the country is a battleground. There are at least 2 million Iraqis who have fled their homes and are internally displaced. Another 2 million have left the country, most to Syria and Jordan, which now has the largest number of refugees per capita of any country on Earth. And perhaps as many as 1.2 million Iraqis are dead because of what we have done. The eight-year war in Afghanistan has seen the Taliban re-emerge from the ashes. An additional 30,000 troops will do little to prop up the detested and corrupt regime of Hamid Karzai . Our attempt to buy off Afghan tribal groups with money and even weapons has collapsed, with most slipping back into the arms of the Taliban insurgents. The U.N. estimates that the Taliban is now raking in $300 million a year from the expanded poppy trade to fund the resistance. The Taliban controlled about 75 percent of Afghan territory when we invaded eight years ago. It has recaptured about half of the country since its initial defeat, and its reach has expanded to the outskirts of major cities such as Kabul and Kandahar . Twenty-nine American troops died in Afghanistan the first two months of 2009, a threefold increase compared with the eight who died during the same period last year. And more Afghan civilians are dying in allied operations than at the hands of the Taliban, according to a count by the Associated Press. In the first two months of the year, American, NATO or Afghan forces have killed 100 civilians, while militants have killed 60. Do the cheerleaders for an expanded war in Afghanistan know any history? Have they studied what happened to the Soviets, who lost 15,000 Red Army soldiers between 1979 and 1988, or even the British in the 19th century? Do they remember why we went into Afghanistan? It was, we were told, to hunt down Osama bin Laden, who is now apparently in Pakistan. Has anyone asked what our end goal is in Afghanistan? Is it nation-building? Have we declared war on the Taliban? Or is this simply the forever war on terror? Al- Qaida, which we have also inadvertently resurrected, still finds plenty of recruits. It still runs training facilities. It still carries out attacks in London, Madrid, Iraq and now Afghanistan, which did not experience suicide bombings until December 2005. Al- Qaida has moved on. But we remain stuck, confused and lashing about wildly like a wounded and lumbering beast. Obama, during the campaign, promised that he would pull out one combat brigade per month over a 16-month period from Iraq. But this promise has been scrapped. Instead, troop levels will remain steady for most of this year and into the first few months of 2010. Troops will only start leaving, we are told, in large numbers in the spring and summer of next year, but even the pace of this downsizing will be left to the discretion of commanders. The troops left in Iraq after the "withdrawal" will, the Obama administration says, train Iraqi soldiers, protect U.S. assets and conduct "anti-terror operations." The U.S. agreement with Iraq, known as SOFA, or status of forces agreement, calls for all U.S. forces to be out of Iraq by the end of December 2011. But this seems very unlikely. The Pentagon has, despite the SOFA agreement, built its long-range planning around the assumption that anywhere from 30,000 to 50,000 troops will be based in Iraq long after 2011. The U.S.-Iraq agreement (which was ratified by the Iraqi parliament but never brought to the U.S. Senate for ratification, as mandated by the Constitution) calls for a national referendum to be held in Iraq during the summer of 2009. Iraqis will supposedly be able to approve or reject the agreement. The some 50 U.S. bases in Iraq are, under the agreement, to be turned over to the Iraqis. Will Obama defy the results of a referendum and ram the continued occupation down the throats of Iraqi voters? It certainly looks like it. Of course, all this will be handled, I suspect, by having our client government in Baghdad "request" that we remain, making an even greater farce of our public commitment to democracy. There are huge corporations who are making a lot of money off this war. Obama seems intent on not impeding the profits. So much for our anti-war candidate. We should have known better than to trust the Democrats after they rode to power in Congress in 2006 on an anti-war platform and then continued to fund our wars and approve increased troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan. If the delicate cease-fire we have negotiated with the former Sunni insurgents in Iraq breaks down, how will we respond? Suppose the some 100,000 Sunnis, who have been allowed to ethnically cleanse the areas they control and build militias, turn on the central Shiite-led government. Suppose we can no longer buy off these Sunni "Awakening" militias with the $300-a-month salaries we dispense to these fighters. Suppose the war heats up again. This is what happened in Afghanistan when we tried to bribe tribal groups with money and support. A deterioration of the security situation in Iraq could instantly scuttle even a reduction of forces. And the military, if some troops do leave Iraq, will have to rely more heavily on airstrikes to control territory and keep insurgents at bay. The airstrikes in Afghanistan have, along with the expanded fighting, driven tens of thousands of Afghan refugees into Iran and Pakistan. Even the Karzai government has vigorously protested these airstrikes , which feed scores of recruits to the Taliban. Expect the same ugly backlash in Iraq. I could live with the prolonged injustice of the occupation in Iraq if I thought there would really be peace, that we could then help rebuild the country we destroyed and that we had restored the rule of law by rejecting the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war, something that under post-Nuremberg laws is defined as a criminal "war of aggression." I could live with 19 months more of the war if I knew it would really be the end. But the war in Iraq, like Afghanistan, will go on. Our imperial projects and killing will continue under the Obama presidency. Many more, including some of our own, will die. The only hope now lies in renewed protests against the war and a reinvigorated anti-war movement. This time the movement should hold fast, as stalwarts like Cindy Sheehan, Cynthia McKinney and Ralph Nader have, to the moral imperative of peace and not the false hopes offered by the Democrats. They cannot be trusted. Politics is a game of pressure. Abandon that pressure and you lose. From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Apr 1 15:57:16 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2009 14:57:16 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] American and Iranian diplomats hold brief, cordial meeting; Israel dismayed Message-ID: <777302255.4037841238623036798.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.thestar.com/SpecialSections/article/611562 ? Toronto Star ???????????????????????????????????? ??????????????? ???????????? ??????????????????????????????????????????????? April 1, 2009 ? Iran, U.S. diplomats show signs of cordiality ? Agents of bitter rivals have private, 'unplanned' chat and 'agree to stay in touch' ? Arthur Max, Anne Gearan Associated Press ? The Hague ? Top U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke had a brief but cordial meeting with Iran's deputy foreign minister yesterday at an international conference on Afghanistan, marking another step in unlocking 30 years of tense relations. ? The meeting between Holbrooke, Washington's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Iran's Mehdi Akhundzadeh came on the sidelines of a meeting where Iran pledged to help the reconstruction of its neighbour but criticized U.S. plans to send more troops into Afghanistan. ? Holbrooke's meeting ?did not focus on anything substantive. It was cordial, it was unplanned and they agreed to stay in touch,? U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said as the daylong conference was winding down. ? The Canadian government, meanwhile, used the conference to announce it had brokered a deal to bolster the anarchic Afghanistan-Pakistan border. ? Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said at the conference yesterday that the two countries had agreed to timelines and objectives for bringing order to their lawless frontier. The border has been a source of tension between the two for generations ? most recently with back-and-forth movements by insurgents. ? ?Ultimately what we want is a functional border between two countries,? Cannon said. ? The gathering was being closely watched for signs that the United States and Iran can work together after years of hostility. The two countries co-operated in 2001 and 2002 after U.S.-led forces ousted Afghanistan's Taliban government. ? But relations were frozen during the administration of U.S. president George W. Bush, who referred to Iran as part of the ?axis of evil,? although Bush's former secretaries of state, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, had informal contacts with Iran. Washington broke diplomatic ties with Tehran after the U.S. embassy was overrun and diplomats taken hostage during the 1979 Islamic Revolution. ? Clinton said she also sent Iran a direct letter concerning three U.S. citizens unable to return from Iran: Robert Levinson, Roxana Saberi and Esha Momeni. Their return would be a humanitarian gesture, the letter said. Normally, U.S.-Iran contacts are conducted through Swiss intermediaries. ? The private meeting between American and Iranian officials was the first sign of cordiality. Although they sat at the same horseshoe-shaped table, neither Clinton nor Akhundzadeh made mention of the other in their speeches. ? With files from The Canadian Press From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Apr 1 16:09:07 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2009 15:09:07 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Canada's Parliament Votes to Let War Resisters Stay In-Reply-To: <6FBD66DF66FC473DAAD7B35717B99FD5@twubby.com> Message-ID: <1675833565.4043841238623747088.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> ? From: Gerry Condon < soldiersayno at yahoo.com > Date: March 31, 2009 1:08:00 PM PDT (CA) To: projectsafehaven at hotmail.com Subject: Canada's Parliament Votes to Let War Resisters Stay WAR RESISTERS SUPPORT CAMPAIGN www.resisters.ca ? MEDIA RELEASE For Immediate Release Monday, March 30, 2009 ? PARLIAMENT?VOTES TO LET WAR RESISTERS STAY Canadians call on Immigration Minister Jason Kenney to use his authority to act OTTAWA?On Monday evening the House of Commons voted, for the second time in 10 months, to let Iraq War resisters live in Canada . The vote on a motion from the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration directs the Government of Canada to immediately stop the deportation of U.S. Iraq War resisters and establish a program to facilitate permanent resident status for the resisters and their families. ?It?s time for Immigration Minister Jason Kenney and Prime Minister Harper to follow the will of the majority of Canadians and act as directed by Parliament ,? said Michelle Robidoux, spokesperson for the War Resisters Support Campaign . ?It could be as simple as Jason Kenney using his discretion as minister to grant the resisters? applications to stay in Canada on humanitarian and compassionate grounds.? The vote in Parliament comes less than a week after Members of Parliament from all three opposition parties held a press conference calling on the Harper government to stop the deportation of Kimberly Rivera, the first female Iraq War resister to come to Canada. Kimberly Rivera, a former U.S. soldier, deployed to Iraq in the fall of 2006. While home on leave she decided she could no longer participate in the war. She and her family sought refuge in Canada in January 2007. Kimberly, her husband Mario and their three children ? including a Canadian born daughter ? were ordered to leave Canada by March 26 or face deportation. They won an 11th hour stay from the Federal Court Wednesday evening. Though The Honourable James Russell?s written decision was not immediately released, his verbal ruling explained that war resisters who are deported to the U.S. face disproportionately severe punishment for being public about their objections to the Iraq War. ?This was the fifth time that the court ruled that Iraq war resisters face harsher punishment if they?re sent back to the U.S.,? said Robidoux. ?The courts have spoken, Parliament has spoken and Canadians have made their views clear. These conscientious objectors should not be sent back to the United States to face jail time for opposing the Iraq War.? A public opinion poll conducted by Angus Reid Strategies last June found that 64 per cent of Canadians want the government to allow Iraq War resisters to become permanent residents of Canada. -30- For further information, please contact: Michelle Robidoux, Spokesperson, War Resisters Support Campaign, 416-856-5008 ; or Ken Marciniec, Communications Volunteer, War Resister Support Campaign, 416-803-6066 , kmarciniec at sympatico.ca __________________________________________________ Soldier Say No?/ Project Safe Haven SoldierSayNo at yahoo.com , projectsafehaven at hotmail.com www.SoldierSayNo.blogspot.com From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Apr 1 16:13:59 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2009 15:13:59 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] There's one rule for bankers, quite another for carmakers Message-ID: <1491436257.4046791238624039577.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.vancouversun.com/story_print.html?id=1451017&sponsor = ? Vancouver Sun ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? A pril 1, 2009 ? There's one rule for bankers, quite another for carmakers ? The Obama administration has decided to play hardball with auto firms, a huge contrast to what is being done for U.S. banks, where management has remained entrenched and where Treasury Secretary Geithner and his predecessor have thrown cheap money and other subsidies at doubtful banks in ever more complicated forms ? B y James Saft Reuters ? There is one law, it appears, for failing U.S. automakers, but sadly quite another for similarly failing banks. ? The Obama administration has decided to play hardball with auto firms; rejecting recovery plans from General Motors and Chrysler, and warning they could be thrown into bankruptcy. Chrysler, which is controlled by Cerberus Capital Management, has 30 days to complete an alliance with Italy's Fiat SpA or face losing its government funding. GM chief executive Rick Wagoner is out at government request, as will be most of his board of directors in coming months. ? This is painful and risky but probably for the best; the auto industry has far too much capacity and both firms have blundered repeatedly, avoiding making hard decisions to improve their competitiveness and products. In short, this is what is supposed to happen in capitalism when you fail. ? It is also a huge contrast to what is being done for U.S. banks, where management has generally remained entrenched and where Treasury Secretary Geithner and his predecessor have thrown cheap money and other subsidies at doubtful banks in ever more complicated forms. Most recently, going as far as cutting hedge funds and other investors into the deal under the public private partnership in order to create the illusion of a return to market forces. ? If the U.S. administration thinks the auto tough love will make them look like they are taking a hard line with highly compensated executives, they could not be more wrong. If anything it will increase the perception of the divide between how Main Street and Wall Street are treated when they come begging at the public trough. ? To be fair, the case against the automakers is pretty airtight. Even given a recovery, which is by no means a sure thing, they may not be viable. The best counterargument, that bankruptcy causes rolling failures among suppliers and that consumers will shun automakers which are in bankruptcy. Those possibilities are hard to measure, and even if true, probably not enough to justify keeping the two on life support for what could be an indefinite period. ? n ? So what accounts for the difference in treatment, given that many banks, large and small, are both insolvent and dependent upon government support for their continued existence? ? There are some legitimate reasons but they quickly bleed into special pleading and moral hazard. The entire economy is dependent in substantial part on the health of the financial system which intermediates capital, theoretically allocating it (insert ironic remark here) where it will make the best return. ? That makes it harder for policy makers to simply allow banks to fail and for the industry to find its right size, the damage in the meantime would be too great. That gives large overleveraged banks a strong negotiating position with government, even in their weakness. That's unacceptable and needs to be dealt with now, by treating them on their merits, rather than later through regulation to control the size and leverage of institutions. ? There is a real risk that we get the worst of all worlds; the banks are kept alive and make it through with management in place and are able to use their obvious influence and might to deflect legislation. We then have a system with moral hazard at its heart and another larger crisis heading our way after the next bubble. ? It is striking that the guy leading the inquiry into the viability of the automakers is former media investment banker, financier and private equity investor Steven Rattner rather than an auto person. Quite right too, someone who has lived and breathed this stuff is conflicted and won't have the proper perspective. ? But what a contrast with the number of once and future investment bankers (former Goldman Sachsite's Neel Kashkari being exhibit A) involved in the government side of the banking bailout. After all, who else could understand this stuff? Don't Trouble Your Pretty Little Head about that, as they used to say down south. ? There is an alternative, after all. Rather than constructing a bank bailout which is essentially the Resolution Trust Corporation but missing out all that messy stuff about banks failing and executives getting canned, why not simply impose tough capital limits, fail the banks and executives that fail and come up with a reasonable timetable for selling on what you are left holding? ? It has two great advantages; it has worked, both in the U.S. and around the world, and it is fair and easy to understand as fair. ? Rescuing the economy and the banking system, as opposed to the banks, is going to require more government money. The favourable treatment of banking executives and shareholders may make that money very difficult politically for the administration to get. From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Apr 1 16:28:28 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2009 15:28:28 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] International dismay as Karzai backs law ravaging women's rights Message-ID: <262120494.4055731238624908884.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090401.wafghan01/BNStory/Afghanistan/?page=rss&id=RTGAM.20090401.wafghan01 ? Globe and Mail ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? April 1, 2009 ? International dismay as Karzai backs law ravaging women's rights ? Law would legalize rape within marriage, UN says, putting damper on Afghanistan summit hopes and outraging ministers ? Doug Saunders ? The Hague ? An effort by ministers from the United States, Canada and other members of the 42-nation coalition fighting in Afghanistan to put an optimistic face on the war's progress came close to collapse on Tuesday when Afghan President Hamid Karzai was publicly accused of supporting a law that dramatically limits the rights of women. ? Attended in total by 72 countries and organizations interested in rebuilding the country, The Hague summit was meant to be a ?big tent? show of support for U.S. President Barack Obama's new Afghanistan war plans. But by day's end the participants had been forced to confront the reality of a government riddled with corruption and committed to legislating sexual inequality. ? According to United Nations organizations that have seen it, a law backed by the Karzai government would legalize rape within marriage and would forbid women from going to the doctor or leaving their home without their husband's protection. ? It also reportedly grants custody of children only to fathers or grandfathers. ? U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Afghan President Hamid Karzai meet in The Hague on Tuesday. Reports say Ms. Clinton reproached Mr. Karzai over a law that dramatically limits the rights of women. (PETER DEJONG/AP) ? When the law was brought to the attention of the summit by the Finnish Foreign Minister Tuesday afternoon, forcing U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to back away from her optimistic message, it marked the culmination of a day in which public statements of progress in Afghanistan were contradicted by private expressions of deep concern. ? ?Things are going worse for us than they have during the past four or five years ? the Taliban controls more of our territory than before, and we have made no progress at all on corruption,? a Canadian official said moments before Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon told the summit that he was ?immediately able to see the results and impacts of our efforts? in Afghanistan. ? The rape-law allegations were an especially severe blow to a conference meant to be what Ms. Clinton called a ?blank slate,? in which the 42 countries in the coalition would commit themselves with renewed vigour to the eight-year-old UN-mandated campaign, with support from 4,000 additional U.S. troops and a long-term commitment from Mr. Obama. ? Faced with questions about the law Tuesday afternoon, Ms. Clinton expressed dismay. She is said to have upbraided Mr. Karzai, whose presidency has been backed and promoted by the United States for years, in a private meeting. ? ?This is an area of absolute concern for the United States,? she told reporters. ?My message is very clear. Women's rights are a central part of the foreign policy of the Obama administration.? ? Officials from other countries had even more trouble hiding their disappointment with a government that was meant to signal a turn away from the sexual oppression of the ousted Taliban regime. ? In Ottawa, Trade Minister Stockwell Day, chairman of the cabinet committee on Afghanistan, suggested that if the reports are true, Canada's support for the Afghan government will be affected. ? ?If these prove to be true, this will create serious problems for the government of Canada, for the people of Canada,? Mr. Day said. ?The onus is upon the government of Afghanistan to live up to its human-rights responsibilities, absolutely including the rights of women. If there is any wavering on this point ? this will create serious difficulties, serious problems for the government of Canada.? ? He added: ?We expect this to be addressed. We expect the government of Afghanistan to live up to its responsibilities to protect the rights of people, to respect the rights of women. ? Spousal sexual assault is an offence in most parts of the Western world, and became a crime in Canada in 1983. In its 1993 declaration on the elimination of violence against women, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights established marital rape as a human-rights violation. ? For many officials, the reports of Mr. Karzai's support for the law making rape exclusively an extramarital crime mark the culmination of years of frustration with the corruption, inertia and culture of impunity for which his government is known. One Canadian official said that Mr. Karzai no longer has the support of any country fighting in Afghanistan, but nothing can be said in public because he is likely to win the presidential election scheduled for this summer. ? A British cabinet minister was more explicit. ?We are caught in the Catch-22 that the Afghans obviously have the right to write their own laws,? Lord Malloch Brown, the foreign secretary for Africa and Asia, told the Guardian newspaper Tuesday. ?But there is dismay. The rights of women was one of the reasons the U.K. and many in the West threw ourselves into the struggle in Afghanistan. It matters greatly to us and our public opinion.? ? The outcry over Mr. Karzai's government masked a difficult moment for the Canadians, who have taken on an important and potentially influential role in the NATO coalition on the eve of their departure. ? With 2,800 soldiers fighting in the most dangerous part of Afghanistan, Canada has suffered the highest casualty rate of any coalition member, and has an important leadership role in the country's troubled south. The Canadian approach to counterinsurgency, with civilian teams providing nation-building work in an effort to win over the population, has been studied and in some ways emulated by U.S. forces. ? Mr. Cannon was able to proclaim a Canadian victory in having built a new agreement between Pakistani and Afghan border officials, after talks organized by Canada. But there was a distinct sense that Canada is no longer being treated as a major coalition partner now that both the governing Conservatives and the opposition Liberals have made it clear that they will withdraw all combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2011. ? Canada did not share in the major international development of the day, a public diplomatic contact between the United States and Iran for the first time in 30 years. Signalling a possible rapprochement between Iran and the West, Iran sent a mid-level official to the meeting and held talks in which Tehran agreed to co-operate with drug-eradication schemes in Afghanistan and allow non-military supplies to be sent across its borders ? in both cases solving difficult logistical problems for the coalition. ? Although Canada has better diplomatic relations with Iran than does the United States, which has had no embassy in the country since the Islamic revolution in 1979, there is no sense that Canada is sharing in any possible reconciliation with the Americans. ? Prime Minister Stephen Harper has taken uncompromisingly negative positions toward Iran, Russia and other countries that have troubled relations with NATO. Some officials said that this has denied Canada its traditional role as a middle power conciliator at such summits. ? There were no meetings between the Iranians and the Canadians, Mr. Cannon said. ? With reports from Campbell Clark in Ottawa and Caroline Alphonso. From fentona at shaw.ca Wed Apr 1 16:35:08 2009 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2009 15:35:08 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Petraeus Says Israel Might Choose to Attack Iran Message-ID: <1B29B7A8-6363-4578-8369-844B02AA6F91@shaw.ca> http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a6m8Gjlv2Njs&refer=home Petraeus Says Israel Might Choose to Attack Iran (Update3) By Tony Capaccio April 1 (Bloomberg) -- Israel might choose to attack Iran to prevent it from developing a nuclear bomb, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East said today. Army General David Petraeus told Congress that ?the Israeli government may ultimately see itself so threatened by the prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon that it would take preemptive military action to derail or delay it.? While Iran insists its nuclear program is intended for peaceful power generation, Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, said ?Iranian officials have consistently failed to provide the assurances and transparency necessary for international acceptance and verification.? Iran refuses to suspend uranium enrichment, in defiance of United Nations Security Council resolutions, and won?t give international inspectors full access to its nuclear facilities. Iran?s ?obstinacy and obfuscation have forced Iran?s neighbors and the international community to conclude the worst about the regime?s intention,? Petraeus said in a statement submitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee for a hearing today. Ali Akbar Javanfekr, media adviser to Iran?s President Mahmound Ahmadinejad, responded to the general?s comments. ?Iran?s position as a powerful country that is a proponent of logic and peace, the Zionist regime?s chaotic situation, and the state of the world?s economy are realities that do not make this possible,? Javanfekr said in a telephone interview. Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor declined to comment on Petraeus?s remarks. Netanyahu?s Threat Israel has signaled impatience with the international diplomatic effort to deter Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon. Benjamin Netanyahu, in an interview with the Atlantic magazine given shortly before he became prime minister yesterday, said President Barack Obama must act quickly to stop Iran from getting a nuclear bomb or Israel might be compelled to attack Iranian nuclear facilities. ?You don?t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs,? Netanyahu said of Iran?s leadership, according to an excerpt posted on The Atlantic?s Web site. Petraeus appeared before the Senate as Obama began talks with world leaders in London on the economic crisis and political issues. Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced agreement on a new round of arms control talks aimed at shrinking their nuclear arsenals and curtailing the spread of such weapons to Iran and North Korea. Call to Netanyahu Obama discussed Iran during a congratulatory telephone call today to Netanyahu. Obama affirmed the U.S.?s ?steadfast commitment to Israel and its security,? according to a statement released by the White House. The Israeli government described the conversation as ?friendly and constructive? in an e-mailed statement. Ken Katzman, a Middle East military analyst for the non- partisan Congressional Research Service in Washington, said Petraeus?s assertion on Israel ?was extremely significant, particularly for what he did not say -- that the United States would act to restrain Israel or talk it out of conducting such a strike.? The U.S. has begun a public effort to reach out to the Iranian government and people to find common ground, such as exploring joint efforts to fight the flow of narcotics from opium-producing Afghanistan. Iran borders western Afghanistan. Iran?s ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Aliasghar Soltanieh, said on March 4 that his government is ready for direct talks about its nuclear program with the U.S., Russia, China and leading European nations as long as negotiations also include regional security and economic issues. Iran Policies Petraeus told the Armed Services Committee that Iran pursues policies that ?frustrate U.S. goals? in the region: providing ?material, financial and political support? to the Islamic militant movements Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran has undermined efforts to stabilize Afghanistan by ?providing opportunistic support to the Taliban? insurgency, Petraeus said. ?Setback? in Iraq ?In Iraq, however, the Iranian regime has experienced a recent setback,? he said. ?Iraqi and coalition forces have succeeded in degrading Iranian proxies operating in southern Iraq, and during January?s provincial elections, the Iraqi people voiced a broad rejection of Iranian influence.? Petraeus testified on the first of two days of congressional hearings on the U.S. strategy in the Middle East and Central Asia, with a strong focus on the new U.S. strategy for stabilizing Afghanistan and Pakistan. Petraeus said that U.S. forces would ?aggressively and relentlessly? pursue al-Qaeda and the Taliban. ?We will continue to target, disrupt, and pursue the leadership, bases and support networks of al-Qaeda and other transnational extremist groups operating in the region,? Petraeus said. The border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan has become a base for Taliban and al-Qaeda militants, and both nations face rising terrorist attacks. Civilian deaths last year caused by the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan hit a record level, while suicide bombings and other attacks have left more than 4,000 people dead in Pakistan in the past two years. ?Existential Threat? Petraeus said that Pakistan faces ?a truly existential threat? from al- Qaeda and other Islamic extremist groups. ?Additionally, the possibility, however remote, of serious instability in a nuclear-armed Pakistan would pose a serious danger to the U.S.? and its allies, he said. The general told the senators it was important to turn Pakistan?s attention toward the internal extremist threat and away from its traditional focus on an attack from India. Committee Chairman Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, praised the administration?s new approach as ?the right strategy? while noting ?the road ahead will be long and costly.? Still, Levin questioned whether the administration was correct to suggest that success in Afghanistan is linked so closely to success in Pakistan. Levin said he remained ?skeptical? whether Pakistan ?has either the will or the capability to secure their border.? ?We should not tie Afghanistan?s future totally to the success of efforts in Pakistan or to Pakistan?s governmental decisions,? he said. To contact the reporters on this story: Tony Capaccio in Washington at acapaccio at bloomberg.net Last Updated: April 1, 2009 15:36 EDT From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Wed Apr 1 17:59:26 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Thu, 02 Apr 2009 08:59:26 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] An Attack of the Bellamoids Message-ID: <49D3FFDE.8030806@ashisuto.co.jp> James Lovelock says the government's enthusiasm for wind farms approaches fascism. What is he on about? by George Monbiot The Guardian (March 31 2009) Renewable power is drifting away on the wind like thistledown. The credit has gone; the price of fossil fuels has fallen; it is impossible to work in a country whose people treat wind farms like the Black Death. The investors have blown overseas or put their cash back into coal. So James Lovelock's timing is, to say the least, eccentric. Just as several major companies reveal that they are packing their bags, the venerable father of Gaia theory, possessor of one of the world's greatest minds, announces in Sunday's Observer that "intemperate injunctions about green imperatives could make [environmentalism] as dangerous" as the ideology of the Axis Powers {1}. He told the Guardian that a new planning regime for wind farms is "an erosion of our freedom [that] draws near to what I see as fascism". {2} His grounds? The energy secretary Ed Miliband had mused that it should be "socially unacceptable to be against wind turbines in your area - like not wearing your seatbelt or driving past a zebra crossing". {3} I have great respect for Professor Lovelock. He has done more to advance our understanding of the planet's response to climate change than any other living person. But he appears to be suffering from an acute case of bellamoids*. He is old enough to know what fascism looks like. It embraces a wide and contradictory set of movements, but its common feature is violence in the pursuit of political aims. If Professor Lovelock knows of people who have been killed as a result of their opposition to wind farms, he should tell us. Fascism also has a reputation for being ruthlessly efficient in implementing its chosen schemes - building autobahns, mobilizing panzer divisions, making the trains run on time. This is not a charge that could be laid at the door of Mr Miliband's department. His statement was in fact an expression of utter impotence: a hand-wringing entreaty to the public after all else has failed. The government, as far as I can tell, has not yet formally renounced the target it set in 2000: that ten per cent of our electricity supply should come from renewables by 2010 {4}. So far it has managed 4.9% {5, 6}, and it has nine months in which to make up the difference. Its objective for 2020 is beginning to look almost as unrealistic. Despite the fact that the UK has richer ambient energy resources than any other country in Europe, the government managed to beat its target for renewable power down to fifteen per cent of total energy supply, rather than the twenty per cent adopted across the Union. Even so, this means that by 2020 35% of our electricity must be produced by wind, hydro, wave, tidal, solar or biomass generators {7}. The technology that could be most widely deployed is wind power, but investment is melting away faster than an Andean glacier. Shell has pulled out completely {8}. Centrica, E.On and BT are reviewing their plans. Sun Microsystems has suspended its projects {9}. The Spanish company Iberdrola is cutting its investment in the UK by forty per cent {10}. Scores of smaller firms are going bust. Can you hear the jackboots yet? Such is the state's failure that even Lord Browne, the former chief executive of BP, who worshipped at the alter of the free market as fervently as any, now calls for "a new strategic direction and a new framework of rules, laid down by government". {11} As it happens, the government is prepared to be ruthlessly interventionist in pursuit of other energy aims. To promote its policy of "maximising the UK's existing oil and gas reserves" {12}, it confiscates the licences of any company which fails to make full use of them. In 2007, it seized 32 blocks and parts of forty others {13}. It calls this approach "forcing unworked blocks back into play" {14}. But the state dares not be so dirigiste when dealing with renewables. It allows people of Professor Lovelock's persuasion to trample all over the industry. I understand their concerns. I don't believe that wind farms should be built anywhere and everywhere. (Now that I live among them, however, I like them much more than I used to.) But the battle against wind power has grown out of all proportion to the threat it presents. The Campaign to Protect Rural England and its equivalent in Wales, the CPRW, appear to be obsessed; the CPRW should be renamed the Campaign to Publicly Rubbish Wind. Local authorities are supposed to deal with planning applications within sixteen weeks. They process seventy per cent of other major developments - supermarkets, airport extensions, housing estates and the rest - in this period. They manage to work through just five per cent of windfarms in the same amount of time: such is the public outcry {15}. You might imagine that the objectors are in the majority. They are not. In a survey by the department for business, 64% of respondents agreed that they would be happy to live within five kilometres of a wind development; eighteen per cent disagreed {16}. But a very powerful middle-class constituency drives all before it, often using falsehoods to make its case. Even Professor Lovelock is not above using such tactics. In the Observer he used German figures to make his point about the UK: "the turbines are only seventeen per cent efficient". All the authoritative sources I have seen report a capacity factor for onshore wind in the UK of between 25 and forty per cent, and around 35% for offshore wind {17, 18, 19}. The objectors assert that the new Planning Act will force communities to accept wind farms. It's true that the infrastructure planning commission, rather than local authorities, will decide on projects bigger than fifty megawatts. But just seven per cent of the 7,000 megawatts of onshore applications stuck in the planning process in England and Wales cross this threshold {20}. Councils will have no discretion over new coal-burning power stations, roads and airports, but they will be able to settle the great majority of wind power proposals. There is plenty to object to in the pernicious new act, but it's hard to see why wind farms should be singled out. The windbags have now driven most proposals offshore. But here, though the turbines can be bigger, the costs of establishment are much higher, not least because developers have to pay for their own connections to the national grid, which means laying down a long undersea cable. When you throw in the collapse of the carbon market, the reduction in the price of gas and coal, the shrivelling of credit lines and the devaluation of the pound, it's hardly surprising that investors have found something better to do. As wind was the primary means by which the government was hoping to replace fossil fuels, the great pull-out appears to destroy any remaining likelihood that this country can meet its obligations under either the European directive or the UK's climate change act. This is grim news for all but one of the earth's people. Professor Lovelock might not be around when it happens, but at least he will have the equivocal satisfaction of knowing that his prophecy - the total collapse of human society - is more likely to come true. www.monbiot.com * An unexpected attack of irrationality first noted in David Bellamy. References: 1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/29/lovelock-wind-farms 2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/29/lovelock-wind 3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/24/wind-farms-opposition-ed-miliband 4. This target is still posted on the website of the new energy and climate change department: http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/what_we_do/uk_supply/energy_mix/renewable/renewable.aspx 5. See Table 5.2 here: http://www.berr.gov.uk/energy/statistics/source/electricity/page18527.html 6. and Table 7.4 here: http://www.berr.gov.uk/energy/statistics/source/renewables/page18513.html 7. http://renewableconsultation.berr.gov.uk/consultation/consultation_summary 8. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/mar/17/royaldutchshell-energy 9. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/21/renewable-energy1 10. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article5977714.ece 11. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/25/clean-energy-uk-browne 12. Department of Trade and Industry, 19th December 2006. West of Shetland task force forge ahead into new year. http://www.gnn.gov.uk/environment/fullDetail.asp?ReleaseID=251607&NewsAreaID=2&NavigatedFromDepartment=False 13. BERR, 20th February 2008. Search for oil and gas continues as Hutton announces 25th Offshore Oil and Gas Licensing Round. http://nds.coi.gov.uk/environment/fullDetail.asp?ReleaseID=354046&NewsAreaID=2&NavigatedFromDepartment=True 14. Department of Trade and Industry, 1st February 2007. Oil is well under the North Sea. http://www.gnn.gov.uk/environment/fullDetail.asp?ReleaseID=261127&NewsAreaID=2&NavigatedFromDepartment=False 15. http://www.bwea.com/pdf/2010/0709%20Progress%20to%202010.pdf 16. DBERR, 2008. UK Renewable Energy Consultation. Chapter 3, Figure 3.5. http://renewableconsultation.berr.gov.uk/consultation/chapter-3a/executive-summary/ 17. http://www.planningrenewables.org.uk/cgi-bin/page.cgi?1006 18. Godfrey Boyle {Editor}, 2004. Renewable Energy, page 279. OUP, Oxford. 19. David JC MacKay, 2009. Sustainable Energy - without the hot air, page 267. UIT, Cambridge. 20. The British Wind Energy Association tells me that this applies to 247 megawatts in England and 254 megawatts in Wales. Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/03/31/an-attack-of-the-bellamoids/ TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From critical.montages at gmail.com Wed Apr 1 20:06:48 2009 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2009 22:06:48 -0400 Subject: [R-G] China Invests to Be Leader in Electric Vehicles Message-ID: This is the sort of program that Green Keynesians in the USA think that the USG should pursue, taking over the Big 3 and retooling them from R&D to production. But workers are not in revolt in the USA, so the USG is under no pressure to invest, let alone invest environmentally. Rather, it's busy robbing workers (cf. ) and the rest of the public (cf. ) to re-enrich the capitalist class -- Yoshie April 2, 2009 China Invests to Be Leader in Electric Vehicles By KEITH BRADSHER TIANJIN, China ? Chinese leaders have adopted a plan aimed at turning the country into one of the leading producers of hybrid and all-electric vehicles within three years, and making it the world leader in electric cars and buses after that. The goal, which radiates from the very top of the Chinese government, suggests that Detroit?s Big Three, already struggling to stay alive, will face even stiffer foreign competition on the next field of automotive technology than they do today. ?China is well positioned to lead in this,? said David Tulauskas, director of China government policy at General Motors. To some extent, China is making a virtue of a liability. It is behind the United States, Japan and other countries when it comes to making gas-powered vehicles, but by skipping the current technology, China hopes to get a jump on the next. Japan is the market leader in hybrids today, which run on both electricity and gasoline, with cars like the Toyota Prius and Honda Insight. The United States has been a laggard in alternative vehicles. G.M.?s plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volt is scheduled to go on sale next year, and will use rechargeable batteries imported from LG in South Korea. China?s intention, in addition to creating a world-leading industry that will produce jobs and exports, is to reduce urban pollution and decrease its dependence on oil, which comes from the Mideast and travels over sea routes controlled by the United States Navy. But electric vehicles may do little to clear the country?s smog-darkened sky or curb its rapidly rising emissions of global warming gases. China gets three-fourths of its electricity from coal, which produces more soot and more greenhouse gases than other fuels. A report by McKinsey & Company last autumn estimated that replacing a gasoline-powered car with a similar-size electric car in China would reduce greenhouse emissions by only 19 percent. It would reduce urban pollution, however, by shifting the source of smog from car exhaust pipes to power plants, which are often located outside cities. Beyond manufacturing, subsidies of up to $8,800 are being offered to taxi fleets and local government agencies in 13 Chinese cities for each hybrid or all-electric vehicle they purchase. The state electricity grid has been ordered to set up electric car charging stations in Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin. Government research subsidies for electric car designs are increasing rapidly. And an interagency panel is planning tax credits for consumers who buy alternative energy vehicles. China wants to raise its annual production capacity to 500,000 hybrid or all-electric cars and buses by the end of 2011, from 2,100 last year, government officials and Chinese auto executives said. By comparison, CSM Worldwide, a consulting firm that does forecasts for automakers, predicts that Japan and South Korea together will be producing 1.1 million hybrid or all-electric light vehicles by then and North America will be making 267,000. The United States Department of Energy has its own $25 billion program to develop electric-powered cars and improve battery technology, and will receive another $2 billion for battery development as part of the economic stimulus program enacted by Congress. Premier Wen Jiabao highlighted the importance of electric cars two years ago with his unlikely choice to become minister of science and technology: Wan Gang, a Shanghai-born former Audi auto engineer in Germany who later became the chief scientist for the Chinese government?s research panel on electric vehicles. Mr. Wan is the first minister in at least three decades who is not a member of the Communist Party. And Premier Wen has his own connection to the electric car industry. He was born and grew up here in Tianjin, the longtime capital of China?s battery industry, 70 miles southeast of Beijing. Tianjin has thrived in the six years since Mr. Wen became premier. It now has China?s first bullet train service (to Beijing), a new Airbus factory and an immaculate new airport. Tianjin has also received a surge of research subsidies for enterprises like the Tianjin-Qingyuan Electric Vehicle Company. Electric cars have several practical advantages in China. Intercity driving is rare. Commutes are fairly short and frequently at low speeds because of traffic jams. So the limitations of all-electric cars ? the latest models in China have a top speed of 60 miles an hour and a range of 120 miles between charges ? are less of a problem. First-time car buyers also make up four-fifths of the Chinese market, and these buyers have not yet grown accustomed to the greater power and range of gasoline-powered cars. But the electric car industry faces several obstacles here too. Most urban Chinese live in apartments, and cannot install recharging devices in driveways, so more public charging centers need to be set up. Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries also have a poor reputation in China. Counterfeit lithium-ion batteries in cellphones occasionally explode, causing injuries. And Sony had to recall genuine lithium-ion batteries in laptops in 2006 and 2008 after some overheated and caught fire or exploded. These safety problems have been associated with lithium-ion cobalt batteries, however, not the more chemically stable lithium-ion phosphate batteries now being adapted to automotive use. The tougher challenge is that all lithium-ion batteries are expensive, whether made with cobalt or phosphate. That will be a hurdle for thrifty Chinese consumers, especially if gas prices stay relatively low compared to their highs last summer. China is tackling the challenges with the same tools that helped it speed industrialization and put on the Olympics: immense amounts of energy, money and people. BYD has 5,000 auto engineers and an equal number of battery engineers, most of them living at its headquarters in Shenzhen in a cluster of 15 yellow apartment buildings, each 18 stories high. Young engineers earn less than $600 a month, including benefits. When Tianjin-Qingyuan puts its entirely battery-powered Saibao midsize sedan on sale this autumn, the body will come from a sedan that normally sells for $14,600 when equipped with a gasoline engine. But the engine and gas tank will be replaced with a $14,000 battery pack and electric motor, said Wu Zhixin, the company?s general manager. That means the retail price will nearly double, to almost $30,000. Even if the government awards the maximum subsidy of $8,800 to buyers, that is a hefty premium. Large-scale production could drive down the cost of the battery pack and electric motor by 30 or 40 percent, still leaving electric cars more expensive than gasoline-powered ones, Mr. Wu said. But Mr. Wu has plenty of money to pursue improvements. He interrupted an interview at his company?s headquarters on Thursday to take a call on his cellphone, politely declined an offer from the caller, and hung up. The general manager of a state-controlled bank had called to ask if he needed a loan, he explained. From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Thu Apr 2 07:33:47 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:33:47 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] From Global Finance to the Nationalization of the Banks Message-ID: <49D4BEBB.8020801@ashisuto.co.jp> Eight Theses on the Economic Crisis by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin Socialist Project - E-Bulletin No 189 The B u l l e t (February 25 2009) 1. The current economic crisis has to be understood in terms of the historical dynamics and contradictions of capitalist finance in the second half of the 20th century. Even though the spheres of capitalist finance and production are obviously intertwined (in significant ways today more than ever before), the origins of today's US-based financial crisis are not rooted in a profitability crisis in the sphere of production, as was the case with the crisis of the 1970s, nor in the global trade imbalances that have emerged since. Although the growing significance of finance in the major capitalist economies was already strongly registered by the 1960s, it was the role finance played in resolving the economic crisis of the 1970s that explains the central place it came to occupy in the making of global capitalism. The inflation that was the main symptom of that crisis had a strong negative impact on those holding financial assets and destabilized the international role of the dollar. Under the guidance of the US Federal Reserve, financial markets used very high interest rates to drive up unemployment, defeat trade union militancy and restrict public welfare expenditures in the early 1980s - all of which had come to be seen as the source of the intractable profitability and inflation problems of the previous decade. Yet it was precisely the contradictory ways finance contributed to global capitalism's successes in the closing decades of the 20th century that laid the foundation for the massive capitalist crisis that now closes the first decade of the 21st century. 2. The spatial expansion and social deepening of capitalism in the last quarter century could not have occurred without innovations in finance. The development of securitized financial markets and the internationalization of American finance allowed for the hedging and spreading of the risks associated with the global integration of investment, production and trade. This provided risk insurance in a complex global economy without which capital accumulation would otherwise have been significantly restricted. At the same time, finance penetrated more and more deeply into society, integrating subordinate classes as debtors, savers, and even investors through private pensions, consumer credit and mortgages for private housing. This became especially important in facilitating the maintenance of consumer demand in a period of wage stagnation and growing inequality. In terms of directly fostering capital accumulation, finance was not only an important site of technological innovation in computerization and information systems, but also facilitated innovation more generally in high tech sectors through venture capital, especially in the US. The central role of the US dollar and Treasury bonds in the global economy as the key store of value and the basis for all other calculations of value, alongside the global institutional predominance of US financial institutions, acted as a vortex for drawing the global surplus to American financial markets and instruments. This allowed for the mobilization of cheap global credit for the US economy, and sustained its place as the major import and consumer market in the global economy. The lowering of US interest rates was important to the macroeconomic stability reflected in the fewer and milder recessions within the US in comparison with the post-war era ('The Great Moderation', as economists refer to the 1983 to 2007 period). 3. The competitive volatility of global finance produced a series of financial crises whose containment required repeated state intervention. Global financial competition for higher yields led to institutional and market innovations that allowed greater leveraging and therefore more credit relative to the capital base. This in fact amounted to a vast increase in the effective money supply, but rather than yielding the price inflation that monetarists predicted, the defeat of labour and the increased corporate ability to fund investments with internal funds meant that increased liquidity translated into asset inflation. This asset inflation was uneven across sectors, producing financial bubbles from stock markets to real estate at various times, while the size of these bubbles was expanded by virtue of the material expansions in the real economy related to each of these areas. The bursting of these bubbles became a common feature of capitalism and the state interventions required to contain them reinforced the confidence that supported future bubbles. The alleged withdrawal of states from markets amidst the globalization of capitalism was a neoliberal ideological illusion: states in the developed capitalist countries pumped more liquidity into the banks in the face of financial crises, while they ensuring that crises in the developing countries were generally used to impose financial discipline. The neoliberal American state played the most active role as the imperial guarantor, coordinator and fire-fighter-in-chief for global capitalism. 4. Both finance's central role in the making of global capitalism and the American state's role in sustaining it produced the bubble that emerged inside the US housing sector. Rising demand for home ownership at all income levels, partly reflecting limits on public housing since the crisis of the 1970s, was encouraged by US government support for meeting housing needs through financial markets backed by mortgage tax deductions. And, reflecting the increasingly unequal income distribution that was the consequence of the defeat of labour generally and the restructuring of production and employment, a broad stratum of the working class population also sustained their consumption through taking out second mortgages on the bubble-inflated values of their homes, But all this was really only made possible by the acceleration of financial securitization and the creation of a broader market for mortgage-backed securities in particular. This developed amidst rising house prices that apparently increased the wealth and credit-worthiness of those borrowing, and gave rise to the acceptance of lower standards (including for 'teaser' subprime mortgage rates) by regulatory agencies, largely supported by both parties in Congress. The Federal Reserve's low interest rate policies, especially in the wake of the bursting of the dot-com bubble, reinforced by the high demand for US Treasury securities as the safest store of value in a highly volatile global financial system, intensified competitive pressures on finance everywhere to get higher yields through greater leveraging of assets and innovative securitization to stretch the boundaries of risk. The historical safety of collateralized home loans (with such a large portion having been backed by the US government) reinforced the confidence in perpetually rising home prices and made housing debt the most attractive arena for the systemic exercise of arbitrage between low-interest US Treasury bonds and high-interest mortgage-backed securities. 5. The inevitable bursting of the housing bubble had such a profound impact because of its centrality to sustaining both US consumer demand and global financial markets. The eventual bursting of the housing bubble was inevitable once, as was the case by 2005, housing prices peaked. By this time, not only had the Fed's low interest rate policy come to an end, but teaser rates on many subprimes had run out. The rise in foreclosures and the number of houses offered for resale had immediate effects on housing prices, new home construction and furniture and appliance sales. Moreover, by virtue of the loss in value of the primary asset figuring in workers' perceptions of their personal wealth, this in turn led to an overall decline in US consumer spending and import demand in a way that the bursting of stock market bubbles had not. At the same time, since the spreading of risk in subprime mortgages had been effected through their packaging into derivative securities with more highly-rated tranches of debts, the housing crisis undermined the econometric equations that valued these assets in global financial markets. Mortgage-backed securities became difficult to value and to sell, and this produced a contagion throughout financial and inter-bank markets that spread the collapse internationally. Taken together with the impact of the housing crisis on mass consumption behaviour, and thus on the US economy's ability to function as the key global consumer, illusions that other regions might be able decouple from the US in this crisis were quickly dispelled. 6. The crisis reinforced the centrality of the American state in the global capitalist economy while multiplying the difficulties entailed in managing it. The rise of the US dollar in currency markets and the enormous demand for US Treasury bonds as the crisis unfolded reflected the extent to which the world remained on the dollar standard and the American state continued to be regarded as the ultimate guarantor of value. Treasury bonds are in demand because they remain the most stable store of value in a highly volatile capitalist world: illusions that foreign states were previously doing the US a favour by buying Treasury securities may finally be dispelled by this crisis. The American state's central role in terms of global crisis management - from currency swaps to provide other states with much needed dollars to overseeing policy cooperation among central banks and finance ministries - has also been confirmed in this crisis. Yet despite its very active interventions, the American state has proved unable to contain the effects of this particular crisis. The massive drops of liquidity that it has helicoptered onto the financial system since August 2007 have not restored the banks' capacity or willingness to lend at anything like previous rates - even to each other, let alone to firms or to consumers. The whole system of securitized finance that has grown up over the past few decades - whereby the risk on mortgages, consumer credit and business loans is sliced, diced, repackaged and traded around the world - has imploded. 7. The scale of the crisis today is such that nationalization of the financial system cannot be kept off the political agenda. It is increasingly apparent, that monetary and fiscal stimulation alone are unlikely to succeed in ending the crisis since the banking system's dysfunctionality today undermines the multiplier effect, just as new regulations are supposed to make finance more cautious and prudent in their lending. Indeed, there has been an increasing realization that it may not be possible to keep off the political agenda much longer the issue of bringing large portions of the financial system into public ownership. This is advanced today along the lines of the temporary nationalizations that took place in Sweden and Japan during their financial crises in the 1990s whereby the state took on the banks' bad debts and then passed the banks back to the private sector. It is a measure of the severity of the crisis that nationalization is now being quite generally proposed even within the US although it poses a host of problems as a way of saving global capitalism. It is highly significant that the last time the nationalization of the banks was seriously raised, at least in the advanced capitalist countries, was in response to the 1970s crisis by those elements on the left who recognized that the only way to overcome the contradictions of the Keynesian welfare state in a positive manner was to take the financial system into public control. Now that bank nationalization is back on the political agenda (albeit now coming from very different sources), it is very important to contrast the type of band-aid nationalization now being canvassed with the demand for turning the whole banking system into a public utility, which would allow for the distribution of credit and capital to be undertaken in conformity with democratically established criteria. And it is necessary to point out that this would have to involve not only capital controls in relation to international finance but also controls over domestic investment, since the point of making finance into a public utility is to transform the uses to which it is now put. 8. The call for nationalization of the banks provides an opening for advancing broader strategies that begin to take up the need for systemic alternatives to capitalism. The severity of today's economic crisis once again exposes the old irrationality of the basic logic of capitalist markets. As each firm (and indeed state agency) lays off workers and tries to pay less to those kept on, this has the effect of further undercutting overall demand in the economy. At the same time, the financial crisis exposes new irrationalities, not least those contained in the widespread proposals for trading in carbon credits as a solution to the climate crisis, which involve depending on volatile derivatives markets that are inherently open to the manipulation of accounts and to credit crashes. In the context of such readily visible irrationalities, a strong case can be made that - to save jobs and the communities that depend on them in a way that converts production to ecologically-sustainable priorities during the course of this crisis - we need to break with the logics of capitalist markets rather than use state institutions to reinforce them. We need to put on the public agenda the need to change our economic and political institutions so as to allow for democratic planning to collectively decide how and where we produce what we need to sustain our lives and our relationship to our environment. However deep the crisis, however confused and demoralized are capitalist elites both inside and outside the state, and however widespread the popular outrage against them, making this case will certainly require hard and committed work by a great many activists, many of whom will see the need for building new movements and parties to this end. This is what is really needed if this crisis is not to go to waste. _____ Leo Panitch is Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy at York University. His most recent books are American Empire and the Political Economy of International Finance (2008) and Renewing Socialism: Transforming Democracy, Strategy and Imagination (2007). Sam Gindin, formerly Chief Economist and Assistant to the President of the Canadian Autoworkers Union, holds the Packer Professorship in Social Justice at York University. He is the author of The Canadian Auto Workers: The Birth and Transformation of a Union (1995) and (with Panitch) Global Capitalism and American Empire (2004). http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/bullet189.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From barmy_basket at yahoo.es Thu Apr 2 08:49:14 2009 From: barmy_basket at yahoo.es (peripatetic) Date: Thu, 02 Apr 2009 16:49:14 +0200 Subject: [R-G] A Scary Corporate Coup Is Under Way -- We've Got to Stop It In-Reply-To: <1414678302.4011251238619906637.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> References: <1414678302.4011251238619906637.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <49D4D06A.6020603@yahoo.es> Apropos The Nation: examples of intellectual and political bankruptcy: American liberalism Posted On Thursday, April 2, 2009 at at 3:15 PM by webabuser "For examples of intellectual and political bankruptcy, one could hardly do better than peruse the pages of the /Nation/, the American liberal publication. An excellent starting-point would be the magazine?s ongoing series, ?Reimagining Socialism.? The collection of short essays by a variety of liberal and ?left? commentators in the US, is a response to the breakdown of world capitalism and the discrediting of free market ideology, a phenomenon that even the mass media acknowledges. Popular hatred for the corporate-financial aristocracy is increasingly a fact of American daily life. The /Nation/?s response is a pre-emptive effort to convince its readers that socialist revolution is impossible and the best of all possible worlds would be the emergence of mass reformist pressure on the Obama administration and the Democratic Party. The series prompted a sardonic comment this week in Britain?s /Financial Times/, one of the more astute voices of bourgeois opinion. Columnist Michael Skapinker (?Dangers in a World of Disillusionment,? March 30) notes that ?Oddly, those who should be rejoicing most at capitalism?s humbling are as lost as everyone else.? He observes that the /Nation/ ?has now published an extensive series of essays called ?Reimagining Socialism,? in which one writer after another admits they cannot reimagine socialism.? [...] via The /Nation/ and ?socialism? . http://webabuser.blogspot.com/2009/04/examples-of-intellectual-and-political.html Sid Shniad wrote: > ... > > > http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090413/greider > > > From intnsred at golgotha.net Thu Apr 2 15:06:39 2009 From: intnsred at golgotha.net (Intense Red) Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 17:06:39 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Petraeus Says Israel Might Choose to Attack Iran In-Reply-To: <1B29B7A8-6363-4578-8369-844B02AA6F91@shaw.ca> References: <1B29B7A8-6363-4578-8369-844B02AA6F91@shaw.ca> Message-ID: <200904021706.39403.intnsred@golgotha.net> > April 1 (Bloomberg) -- [...] > Iran refuses to suspend uranium enrichment, in defiance of United > Nations Security Council resolutions, and won?t give international > inspectors full access to its nuclear facilities. As I recall, IAEA inspectors do have full access to Iranian nuclear installations in accordance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty and Iran also agreed to an additional inspection protocol. Can anyone verify/confirm the above or is this an April Fool's joke? -- Bill Gates' wealth equals the combined wealth of the poorest 120 million Americans, or 45 percent of our population. "This is a failure of the political system to defend the people." -- Ralph Nader From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Apr 2 15:02:27 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 14:02:27 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Galloway and Canada's Strange Government In-Reply-To: <9C0E02315C1948079A2B83705D01BDA2@twubby.com> Message-ID: <340005083.4416181238706147374.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-galloway-a-victim-of-canadas-baffling-approach-to-fighting-terror-1658986.html The Independent??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????Wednesday, 1 April 2009 World Focus: Canada Robert Fisk: Galloway a victim of Canada's baffling approach to fighting terror "Come out and debate with me like a man," the old bruiser shouted over the video-link to Toronto. "Let's book the biggest hall in Canada and you and I will debate these issues of war and peace and freedom of speech and censorship... If we don't achieve a political settlement (in the Middle East), we're in for war. If there's no justice, there will be no peace for Palestine." It was, of course, the old scallywag himself, George Galloway, fuming about the Canadian Immigration Minister James Kenney's refusal to allow him to speak in Canada on the grounds that he ? Galloway ? was involved in "terrorism". The Scottish-born MP was talking from an important centre of "world terror" ? New York City. Mr Kenney's spokesman, Alikhan Velshi, last week compared Mr Galloway to Oliver Cromwell and said he would not be allowed to enter Canada. Self-publicist, friend of dictators, reality TV show performer and general silly ass Mr Galloway may be. But he has no more in common with Cromwell than the minister has with Ghengis Khan. But this is no laughing matter. How could the Canadian embassy in London have believed Mr Galloway's food and medicine shipment to Gaza, made with Israel's agreement, and its delivery to the Hamas government was a "terrorist" act, even if Stephen Harper's Canadian government regards Hamas as a "terrorist organisation". Mr Galloway wasn't shipping guns and is touring the US with his anti-war, pro-Palestinian, non-terrorist speeches. "It's just not credible, Mr Kenney," Mr Galloway shouted, "to call a man touring the United States, playing to packed audiences... a terrorist or a security threat." Quite so. After all, the US has lost thousands of soldiers in its "war on terror" in the Middle East. Canada's army in Afghanistan comprises barely 2,000 and has suffered fewer than 120 military casualties. Only a Canadian Jewish organisation agreed with Mr Galloway's exclusion; one paper here suggested this might have prompted the ban. The right-wing National Post came out against the exclusion, though only because a "future left-wing Canadian government" might ban Israeli or US speakers. But there's a bigger issue. Canada helped the US send an innocent Canadian citizen, Mahar Arar, to "rendition" in Syria, where he was savagely tortured. Only a few days ago, another Canadian Muslim told me how he was whipped with steel cables in Damascus as his torturers read out questions from the Canadian embassy. Yet another Canadian Muslim citizen, Abousfian Abdelrazik, has been living in the reception of the US embassy in Khartoum for 10 months after Canadian agents asked the enormously democratic Sudanese government to imprison him for terrorism. Now the government won't let him come home unless he's taken off not a Canadian, but a UN "terrorist" list. Cromwellian isn't the word for it. But the mystery is this: how did so many millions of decent Canadians come to be ruled by such a weird government? From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Apr 2 15:06:17 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 14:06:17 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] British MP George Galloway barred from Canada under the Canada Israel "Public Security" Agreement In-Reply-To: <1340535573.4153781238642212077.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1175933748.4418221238706377238.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> British MP George Galloway barred from Canada under the Canada Israel "Public Security" Agreement By Michel Chossudovsky Global Research , March 26, 2009 ? British MP George Galloway was refused entry to Canada on the pretext that he supported Hamas, which is categorized by the Canadian government as a "terrorist organization." Contrary to what has been reported in the media, this was not a unilateral decision by the government of Canada. The decision was taken in close consultation with Israel under the terms of a farreaching agreement of "public security" signed by Ottawa and Tel Aviv on March 23 2008. The "Declaration of Intent" establishes a framework of? bilateral cooperation in the area of "Public Security". The agreement has not been the object of debate in the Canadian parliament, nor has it received media coverage.?? Under the proposed agreement, the Deputy Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness of Canada is in liason with his Israeli counterpart the Director General of Public Security for the Government of the State of Israel. Together they chair a joint Management Committee. The terms reference of the Canada-Israel "Declaration" are extremely broad. They include issues of immigration and ethnic profiling, the management of borders, intelligence and the exchange of information, emergency preparedness, correctional services, prisons, law enforcement? and counter-terrorism.? The agreement allows for officials from the State of Israel, to play a role in Canadian "public security" including border security and immigration. Were Israeli officials present in Canada? The important question is whether Israeli officials were present in Canada and whether they were assisting their Canadian? counterparts with regard to the decision to bar George Galloway. For further details see article as well text of full agreement in ANNEX, which provides detailed information on the nature of this Canadian-Israeli project. Michel Chossudovsky, March 26, 2009 The Canada-Israel "Public Security" Agreement Ottawa & Tel Aviv collaborate in counter-terrorism & Homeland security by Michel Chossudovsky Global Research , April 2, 2008 Canada and Israel have signed a far-reaching public security cooperation agreement.? The agreement, described as a "Partnership", involves a "Declaration of Intent" by the two governments. The Declaration was signed in Tel Aviv on March 23: " Today , the Honourable Stockwell Day, Minister of Public Safety Canada and Avi Dicter, Minister of Public Security of the Government of the State of Israel, signed a Declaration of Intent to enhance cooperation in the area of public safety. ?The Government of Canada is committed to enhancing the security of Canadians ? both through our actions at home and with our international partners.? said Minister Day. ? Today ?s declaration demonstrates the longstanding cooperation between Canada and Israel on public safety issues, and we welcome this increased cooperation in order to improve our countries? capacity to protect our citizens.? This declaration will allow Canada and Israel to better enhance cooperation in the areas of organized crime, emergency management, crime prevention, and other related public safety concerns. The declaration seeks to establish a more structured framework for the continued cooperation on public safety issues between Canada and Israel. ?The Declaration of Intent is an opportunity for Canada and Israel to strengthen their commitment to safeguarding their citizens and respective national interests from common threats,? said Minister Dicter." ( http://www.ps-sp.gc.ca/app_support/xml/ps_news_e.xml ) Cheney Mission to the Middle East Shrouded in Secrecy Canada's Minister of Public Safety Stockwell Day was in Israel on the same day as Vice Cheney Dick Cheney. Coincidentally, a US mission led by Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff was also in Israel on official business, as guest of Israel's Minister of Public Security, Avi Dicter. There are no reports on Canada-US-Israeli consultations during these official visits. In all likelihood, officials from the respective departments/ministries of US Homeland Security, Israel's Public Security and Canada's Public Safety had meetings behind closed doors.? Terms of Reference of the Partnership Israel's Ministry of Public Security carries out public security, law enforcement activities. It is also in charge of the operation of Israel?s prisons, which are in large part used to detain Palestinians.? Canada's Ministry of Public Safety, established in 2003, is a copy and paste version of US Homeland Security. Public Safety Canada has a close bilateral relationship with US Homeland Security. Public Safety Canada works closely with several government agencies including the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), Correctional Service Canada (CSC) and The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). Officials from these agencies have no doubt been consulted regarding the terms of reference of the Israel-Canada declaration.? The terms reference of the Canada-Israel Declaration are extremely broad. They include issues of immigration and ethnic profiling, the management of borders, intelligence and the exchange of information, emergency preparedness, correctional services, prisons, law enforcement? and counter-terrorism. The Declaration of Intent involves the setting up of a close bilateral cooperation arrangement at the ministerial level. A management committee has been set up under the helm of? the Deputy Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness of Canada, and the Director General of Public Security of the State of Israel. Senior Israeli and Canadian officials respectively from Israel's Ministry of Public Security and from various Canadian federal departments and agencies (including the RCMP, CSIS and CBSA), which are under the jurisdiction of Stockwell Day's ministry? would carry out "an approved program of work". The programme would be implemented by a Senior Coordinator from each country, namely, the Assistant Deputy Minister (Strategic Policy) for Canada's Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness and the Deputy Director General of Israel's Ministry of Public Security of the State of Israel; Nature of the Agreement The agreement requires the two countries to "[b]uild on their shared commitment to facilitate and enhance cooperation to protect their respective countries' population, assets and interests from common threats". What type of border security and control of immigrants is involved? How does this impinge upon Canada's immigration procedures??? The agreement appears to be built upon a much broader agreement between Canada and the US in the area of Homeland Security.? However, it also replicates the pattern of a February 2006 agreement reached between US Homeland Security and Israel's Ministry of Public Security? The Israel-Canada agreement has been in the pipeline since Israel's Public Security Minister Avi Dicter's October 2007 visit to the US and Canada. Avi Dicter met Stockwell Day last October in Toronto "with the intention on establishing cooperation on homeland security" and counter-terrorism. Israel is not part of North America. Canada and Israel do not share a common border. So what is the underlying agenda? Will Canada assist Israel in policing its border with Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian territories? Conversely, will Israeli officials assist Canada in ethnic profiling of people (including biometric applications, which is mentioned in the agreement) who visit Canada from the Middle East? Will Israeli officials have access to confidential files of Canadians? What type of cooperation is envisaged in the areas of prisons and law enforcement? Interrogation techniques? Are Israeli consultants going to help us reorganize our correctional services? The agreement would allow officials from the State of Israel, a country on record for its numerous human rights violations acts directed against the people of Palestine and Lebanon, to play a role in Canadian public security. In this regard, will Israeli officials assist the RCMP and CSIS in the profiling of Canadians citizens who are Muslims. This ethnic profiling is already applied at Canadian airports.? Will Israeli officials assist their Canadian counterparts in dealing with individuals and/or organizations in Canada involved in supporting the rights of Palestinians. Will Israeli officials assist their Canadian counterparts in the domestic "war on terrorism", which in the post 9/11 period has led to numerous arbitrary detentions on trumped-up charges. At the same time,? the Declaration establishes a de facto complicit relationship whereby Canadian officials (RCMP, etc) would contribute to assisting Israel in its domestic police and border activities (e.g. Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and the West Bank), not under the auspices of the United Nations, but directly in cooperation with Israeli police and security officials. In fact, Canada's "contribution" to the policing of Israel's borders with Gaza and the West Bank is already part of a 300 million dollar aid package in support of the "peace process". According to Public Safety Canada,? "a significant component [of the 300 million will be] devoted to security, including policing and public order capacity-building. This five year commitment will go towards the creation of a democratic, accountable, and viable Palestinian state that lives in peace and security alongside Israel." (Marketwire, Ottawa, March 24, 2008 ) Following his meeting with his counterpart Avi Dicter, Stockwell Day had meetings on the 24th of March in the West Bank with President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, where issues pertaining to Canada's peace package, including police training and capacity building were discussed. "I was pleased to meet with Palestinian Authority President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad to discuss public safety issues of mutual interest," said Minister Day. Stockwell Day also visited a West Bank prison as well as a police training center in Jericho. (Ibid) Under the Declaration of Intent, Canada cannot exercise "neutrality" with regard to the Palestinian process. Canada would act as a partner of Israel in all issues of public security in the occupied territories. Moreover, Canadian support channelled to the US-Israeli sponsored Palestinian regime of Mahmoud Abbas will be used to repress Hamas, which is the duly elected government. It will contribute to worsening the situation in the occupied territories. Counter-terrorism and Homeland Security The issue of "counter-terrorism" is not mentioned explicitly in the Declaration of Intent. The terms of reference, however, suggest that the "war on terrorism" is an integral part of the agreement.? In early February 2007, Minister Avi Dicter addressed the public security committee of the Canadian House of Commons:? "Iran is the largest terrorist state in the world" Dichter said. In his discussion with Canadian MPs, Dichter "laid out what he believes to be the guidelines for Canadian-Israeli security cooperation in the future, possibly similar to the agreement that the minister signed a day later in Washington DC." (Jerusalem Post, 7 February 2007 ) "The Canadian MPs echoed their American compatriots in addressing the former Shin Bet head as a world expert in the field of terror rather than as a visiting minister of a foreign government, asking him at one point what specific steps the parliament could take to prevent terror attacks on Canadian soil. In his answer, Dichter reiterated the importance of strengthening border security and use of proper investigative methods with suspects." (ibid) During a followup official visit of Israel's Minister of Public Security Avi Dicter to Canada in late October 2007,? meetings of Israeli and Canadian officials were held behind closed doors to discuss a blueprint for cooperation in the areas of homeland security and counter-terrorism. The meetings chaired by Stockwell Day were held in Toronto on October 29, 2007 .? A so-called "Arrangement Paper" was to be drafted with a view to defining? "the actions of the competent structures at ministerial, central and subordinate/local levels for preventing and fighting home land securities issues": "The parties have agreed to intensify future cooperation by identifying ways of direct communication in order to maximize the exchange of information, technology and operational activity. For the same reason it has been agreed to accelerate negotiations for the signing of an Arrangement Paper between the two Ministries on cooperation in home land security and counter terrorism issues which falls within the responsibility of the respective Ministries. ... Negotiations on the arrangement paper mentioned above will take place as necessary. The signing of the arrangement paper will be held on an occasion and place coordinated in advance between the Ministries. The two Ministers agreed that by early November three work teams will be established in order to promote the cooperation between the two ministries on the following subjects: ? Counterterrorism and Crime ? Emergency preparedness ? Border crossing security, focusing on biometric identification" (Official communique of Israel's Ministry of Public Security, http://www.mops.gov.il/BPEng/MOPS+News/DicterWithCanadianMinister_30_10_07.htm ) The "Arrangement paper" refers to the draft text of The Declaration of Intent, which was signed in Tel Aviv on March 23, 2008 . The two governments chose to sign the agreement during a week of intense diplomatic activity in Tel Aviv, involving the concurrent visits of the Vice President of the US, the US Secretary of the Department Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and other senior officials. The final text of the Declaration of Intent remains vague. "Counter-terroism" and the "Homeland" are not explicitly mentioned in the final text of the Declaration signed on March 23.?? Legal Implications The text of the Declaration of Intent states that ":{it] is not intended to create legally binding obligations, under either domestic or international law. Yet, at the outset, it violates several fundamental principles of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms." The Canada-Israel Public Security agreement has barely been mentioned by the Canadian media. It has not been the object of a debate in parliament. Why has this issue not been brought to the forefront of public debate?? Why has the parliamentary opposition remained mum on the subject? It should be forcefully challenged in Canada's courts. From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Apr 2 15:07:06 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 14:07:06 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] (The Real News) The secrets of Obama's surge In-Reply-To: <308880635.4066101238625934680.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <310969289.4418611238706426452.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=3511&updaterx=2009-04-01+15%3A41%3A54 or http://tinyurl.com/dyybat The Real News??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?? April 1, 2009 The secrets of Obama's surge The President is not exactly telling all that?s going on in AfPak From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Apr 2 15:06:37 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 14:06:37 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Juan Cole: Obama's Domino Theory In-Reply-To: <1862834099.4080591238627410445.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <2049997307.4418401238706397311.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22321.htm Obama's Domino Theory Obama broke with his pledge of straight talk to the public and fell back on Bush-style boogeymen and implausible conspiracy theories. By Juan Cole March 31, 2009 "Salon" -- President Barack Obama may or may not be doing the right thing in Afghanistan, but the rationale he gave for it on Friday is almost certainly wrong. Obama has presented us with a 21st century version of the domino theory. The U.S. is not, contrary to what the president said, mainly fighting "al-Qaida" in Afghanistan. In blaming everything on al-Qaida, Obama broke with his pledge of straight talk to the public and fell back on Bush-style boogeymen and implausible conspiracy theories. Obama realizes that after seven years, Afghanistan war fatigue has begun to set in with the American people. Some 51 percent of Americans now oppose the Afghanistan war, and 64 percent of Democrats do. The president is therefore escalating in the teeth of substantial domestic opposition, especially from his own party, as voters worry about spending billions more dollars abroad while the U.S. economy is in serious trouble. He acknowledged that we deserve a "straightforward answer" as to why the U.S. and NATO are still fighting there. "So let me be clear," he said, "Al-Qaida and its allies -- the terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks -- are in Pakistan and Afghanistan." But his characterization of what is going on now in Afghanistan, almost eight years after 9/11, was simply not true, and was, indeed, positively misleading. "And if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban," he said, "or allows al-Qaida to go unchallenged -- that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can." Obama described the same sort of domino effect that Washington elites used to ascribe to international communism. In the updated, al-Qaida version, the Taliban might take Kunar Province, and then all of Afghanistan, and might again host al-Qaida, and might then threaten the shores of the United States. He even managed to add an analog to Cambodia to the scenario, saying, "The future of Afghanistan is inextricably linked to the future of its neighbor, Pakistan," and warned, "Make no mistake: Al-Qaida and its extremist allies are a cancer that risks killing Pakistan from within." This latter-day domino theory of al-Qaida takeovers in South Asia is just as implausible as its earlier iteration in Southeast Asia (ask Thailand or the Philippines). Most of the allegations are not true or are vastly exaggerated. There are very few al-Qaida fighters based in Afghanistan proper. What is being called the "Taliban" is mostly not Taliban at all (in the sense of seminary graduates loyal to Mullah Omar). The groups being branded "Taliban" only have substantial influence in 8 to 10 percent of Afghanistan, and only 4 percent of Afghans say they support them. Some 58 percent of Afghans say that a return of the Taliban is the biggest threat to their country, but almost no one expects it to happen. Moreover, with regard to Pakistan, there is no danger of militants based in the remote Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) taking over that country or "killing" it. The Kabul government is not on the verge of falling to the Taliban. The Afghan government has 80,000 troops, who benefit from close U.S. air support, and the total number of Taliban fighters in the Pashtun provinces is estimated at 10,000 to 15,000. Kabul is in danger of losing control of some villages in the provinces to dissident Pashtun warlords styled "Taliban," though it is not clear why the new Afghan army could not expel them if they did so. A smaller, poorly equipped Northern Alliance army defeated 60,000 Taliban with U.S. air support in 2001. And there is no prospect of "al-Qaida" reestablishing bases in Afghanistan from which it could attack the United States. If al-Qaida did come back to Afghanistan, it could simply be bombed and would be attacked by the new Afghan army. While the emergence of "Pakistani Taliban" in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas is a blow to Pakistan's security, they have just been defeated in one of the seven major tribal agencies, Bajaur, by a concerted and months-long campaign of the highly professional and well-equipped Pakistani army. United States Secretary of Defense Robert Gates replied last summer to the idea that al-Qaida is regrouping in Pakistan and forms a new and vital threat to the West: "Actually, I don't agree with that assessment, because when al-Qaida was in Afghanistan, they had the partnership of a government. They had ready access to international communications, ready access to travel, and so on. Their circumstances in the FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) and on the Pakistani side of the border are much more primitive. And it's much more difficult for them to move around, much more difficult for them to communicate." As for a threat to Pakistan, the FATA areas are smaller than Connecticut, with a total population of a little over 3 million, while Pakistan itself is bigger than Texas, with a population more than half that of the entire United States. A few thousand Pashtun tribesmen cannot take over Pakistan, nor can they "kill" it. The Pakistani public just forced a military dictator out of office and forced the reinstatement of the Supreme Court, which oversees secular law. Over three-quarters of Pakistanis said in a poll last summer that they had an unfavorable view of the Taliban, and a recent poll found that 90 percent of them worried about terrorism. To be sure, Pakistanis are on the whole highly opposed to the U.S. military presence in the region, and most outside the tribal areas object to U.S. Predator drone strikes on Pakistani territory. The danger is that the U.S. strikes may make the radicals seem victims of Western imperialism and so sympathetic to the Pakistani public. Obama's dark vision of the overthrow of the Afghanistan government by al-Qaida-linked Taliban or the "killing" of Pakistan by small tribal groups differs little from the equally apocalyptic and implausible warnings issued by John McCain and Dick Cheney about an "al-Qaida" victory in Iraq. Ominously, the president's views are contradicted by those of his own secretary of defense. Pashtun tribes in northwestern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan have a long history of dissidence, feuding and rebellion, which is now being branded Talibanism and configured as a dire menace to the Western way of life. Obama has added yet another domino theory to the history of Washington's justifications for massive military interventions in Asia. When a policymaker gets the rationale for action wrong, he is at particular risk of falling into mission creep and stubborn commitment to a doomed and unnecessary enterprise. Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His weblog on the contemporary Middle East is Informed Comment. From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Apr 2 15:21:22 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 14:21:22 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] There's one rule for bankers, quite another for carmakers In-Reply-To: <662252085.4061311238625427656.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <435936809.4426611238707282004.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.vancouversun.com/story_print.html?id=1451017&sponsor = Vancouver Sun ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? A pril 1, 2009 There's one rule for bankers, quite another for carmakers The Obama administration has decided to play hardball with auto firms, a huge contrast to what is being done for U.S. banks, where management has remained entrenched and where Treasury Secretary Geithner and his predecessor have thrown cheap money and other subsidies at doubtful banks in ever more complicated forms B y James Saft Reuters There is one law, it appears, for failing U.S. automakers, but sadly quite another for similarly failing banks. The Obama administration has decided to play hardball with auto firms; rejecting recovery plans from General Motors and Chrysler, and warning they could be thrown into bankruptcy. Chrysler, which is controlled by Cerberus Capital Management, has 30 days to complete an alliance with Italy's Fiat SpA or face losing its government funding. GM chief executive Rick Wagoner is out at government request, as will be most of his board of directors in coming months. This is painful and risky but probably for the best; the auto industry has far too much capacity and both firms have blundered repeatedly, avoiding making hard decisions to improve their competitiveness and products. In short, this is what is supposed to happen in capitalism when you fail. It is also a huge contrast to what is being done for U.S. banks, where management has generally remained entrenched and where Treasury Secretary Geithner and his predecessor have thrown cheap money and other subsidies at doubtful banks in ever more complicated forms. Most recently, going as far as cutting hedge funds and other investors into the deal under the public private partnership in order to create the illusion of a return to market forces. If the U.S. administration thinks the auto tough love will make them look like they are taking a hard line with highly compensated executives, they could not be more wrong. If anything it will increase the perception of the divide between how Main Street and Wall Street are treated when they come begging at the public trough. To be fair, the case against the automakers is pretty airtight. Even given a recovery, which is by no means a sure thing, they may not be viable. The best counterargument, that bankruptcy causes rolling failures among suppliers and that consumers will shun automakers which are in bankruptcy. Those possibilities are hard to measure, and even if true, probably not enough to justify keeping the two on life support for what could be an indefinite period. n So what accounts for the difference in treatment, given that many banks, large and small, are both insolvent and dependent upon government support for their continued existence? There are some legitimate reasons but they quickly bleed into special pleading and moral hazard. The entire economy is dependent in substantial part on the health of the financial system which intermediates capital, theoretically allocating it (insert ironic remark here) where it will make the best return. That makes it harder for policy makers to simply allow banks to fail and for the industry to find its right size, the damage in the meantime would be too great. That gives large overleveraged banks a strong negotiating position with government, even in their weakness. That's unacceptable and needs to be dealt with now, by treating them on their merits, rather than later through regulation to control the size and leverage of institutions. There is a real risk that we get the worst of all worlds; the banks are kept alive and make it through with management in place and are able to use their obvious influence and might to deflect legislation. We then have a system with moral hazard at its heart and another larger crisis heading our way after the next bubble. It is striking that the guy leading the inquiry into the viability of the automakers is former media investment banker, financier and private equity investor Steven Rattner rather than an auto person. Quite right too, someone who has lived and breathed this stuff is conflicted and won't have the proper perspective. But what a contrast with the number of once and future investment bankers (former Goldman Sachsite's Neel Kashkari being exhibit A) involved in the government side of the banking bailout. After all, who else could understand this stuff? Don't Trouble Your Pretty Little Head about that, as they used to say down south. There is an alternative, after all. Rather than constructing a bank bailout which is essentially the Resolution Trust Corporation but missing out all that messy stuff about banks failing and executives getting canned, why not simply impose tough capital limits, fail the banks and executives that fail and come up with a reasonable timetable for selling on what you are left holding? It has two great advantages; it has worked, both in the U.S. and around the world, and it is fair and easy to understand as fair. Rescuing the economy and the banking system, as opposed to the banks, is going to require more government money. The favourable treatment of banking executives and shareholders may make that money very difficult politically for the administration to get. From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Apr 2 15:20:35 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 14:20:35 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Restructure the Big 3, But Not with Bankruptcy] In-Reply-To: <1180502795.4152451238641857485.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1810224631.4426341238707235853.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> mrzine.monthlyreview.org/bgs310309.html MRzine ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?? 31.03.2009 ? Restructure the Big 3, But Not with Bankruptcy Company executives must be coming to understand what other corporations have long known: a trip into Chapter 11 has been the excuse for airlines, steelmakers, and other companies to gut union contracts, impose layoffs, and destroy the jobs that promised a pension, health care, and decent wages in exchange for 30 years of intensely demanding work. by Mark Brenner, Mischa Gaus, and Jane Slaughter MRZine Editor's Introduction The crisis in which we find ourselves is not a crisis of the capitalist class , much less a crisis of the capitalist mode of production.? Nor is it even a crisis of neoliberalism. ? It's a crisis of the working class, plain and simple. ? What's in store for us, especially in the United States ( where the working class has virtually ceased industrial action ), is "a dramatic pro-capital redistribution" of the sort seen in Japan after the collapse of its asset bubbles -- only much more brutal. ?As Rahm Emanuel said, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," and, sure enough, the Barack H. Obama administration is doing all it can to make it easy for the capitalist class to make the best of the opportunities presented by this crisis and to further cut back the wages and benefits of workers in the primary labor market.? Above all, the United States government is leading by example: Mary Williams Walsh and Jonathan Glater, "Contracts Now Seen as Being Rewritable" (New York Times , 30 March 2009).? The attack on autoworkers sets the tone. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Restructure the Big 3, But Not with Bankruptcy by Mark Brenner, Mischa Gaus, and Jane Slaughter Bankruptcy talk for the troubled automakers GM and Chrysler is accelerating, and President Obama -- as well as the companies themselves -- is raising the frightening prospect of mass layoffs and plant closings. If the car companies are too big to fail, too poorly run to put right, it's time to take them over.? But Obama made a point of ruling out a takeover today, saying that the government doesn't want to run the companies.? If they can't present turnaround plans that restore them to profitability, he prefers bankruptcy -- which, without significant alterations, will be a disaster for wide swaths of the Midwest. Obama insists that GM and Chrysler submit to "fundamental restructuring."? He issued a call for the auto industry to remake itself along the lines seen in World War II.? Then, the U.S. desperately needed war material, and Detroit had the factories and the willing workers.? Within weeks the "Arsenal of Democracy" was churning out machines of war instead of four-door sedans, and the government poured money into Michigan to make it happen, spending $56 billion in today's dollars over the war years. The Arsenal of Democracy resulted not from private initiative, not from patiently waiting for the "ingenuity" of executives, but because government demanded it. TOO HALF-HEARTED This moment is crying out for that kind of resolve, not the half-hearted jawboning Obama described on Monday.? GM's problems can't be solved by a symbolic (and well-compensated) firing of the CEO.? What's needed is to transition shuttered auto plants into a new transportation and energy sector that can wean us from oil.? Obama should insist that the dozens of excess auto factories be put to work building clean cars, mass transit, and those 6,000 components of a wind turbine. While he's at it, he should dump the employer-based health care system that, at the Big 3, is about to collapse. That's because our jobs, health care, energy, environment, and transportation problems are all linked, and solving them means connecting the hip bone to the thigh bone: With car sales plummeting 41 percent last month and no bottom in sight, Detroit's automakers could shutter upwards of 30 factories and still meet current demand.? Auto workers face tens of thousands of job losses and billions of dollars in benefit cuts.? A million retirees and their families could lose health care.? The highways and bridges we depend on are falling to pieces.? Those highways feed sprawling suburbs brimming with foreclosed homes. Let's address all those problems at the same time.? In other countries, it's called an "industrial policy," a comprehensive strategy to make sure we're investing wisely.? (It's no accident that Spain and Denmark make the world's wind turbines now, and that France and Japan make its railcars.) WHAT'S THE ALTERNATIVE? The alternative is putting failing auto companies through what industry insiders are calling a "quick rinse": a pre-packaged bankruptcy that would start by tearing up the contractual obligations made to former workers as they labored for decades.? First on the chopping block are "debt obligations," the code name for money promised for retiree health care through the voluntary employee beneficiary association (VEBA). Obama furthered the likelihood of bankruptcy today by guaranteeing that service warranties would be honored if that happened.? GM, too, has softened its tone on bankruptcy recently. Company executives must be coming to understand what other corporations have long known: a trip into Chapter 11 has been the excuse for airlines, steelmakers, and other companies to gut union contracts, impose layoffs, and destroy the jobs that promised a pension, health care, and decent wages in exchange for 30 years of intensely demanding work. HOW'S IT WORK? In bankruptcy, the company proposes a restructuring plan to the bankruptcy judge, which in three months must settle all debts, restructure contracts, and pay off the financers who kept the business running during bankruptcy.? (These financers are known as "debtors-in-possession.") Bankruptcy judges and their "bankruptcy masters," who are appointed by the court to handle the day-to-day negotiations, use the power granted to them in the bankruptcy code to shred contracts and force unions to take concessions. Though their future wages, pensions, and benefits are being decided, workers often have no say in these negotiations, under current rules. Usually the best case for labor is to get a rump-end seat on the least-important committee, the unsecured creditors committee, where labor reps can plead with other committee members and the bankruptcy master to try and get a few scraps thrown their way. The debtor-in-possession financer, meanwhile, jumps to the head of the line in terms of who gets paid first by the bankrupt company. Not only is it paid first, the debtor-in-possession is also the key decision-maker in restructuring.? Workers at auto-parts supplier Delphi discovered this when the private equity firm Appaloosa Partners provided bankruptcy financing and dramatically reshaped the company. ANY LIGHT IN THIS TUNNEL? GM's or Chrysler's bankruptcy would be disastrous for millions of workers and their families.? Entire communities would be emptied of decent jobs and retirees could see pensions and health care coverage gutted.? GM's auditor predicted in early March that bankruptcy could mean 47,000 jobs lost and 14 additional plant closures.? That doesn't even begin to suggest the impact of the failure of up to 100 parts suppliers, a likelihood, according to a UAW researcher's estimates. The time is ripe for bolder action, but if Obama insists on bankruptcy, he should rewrite the script for bankruptcy proceedings to avoid this kind of devastation.? Here's three modest proposals. Have the government function as the "debtor-in-possession" financer.? Running the show would give us the leverage we need to break with car-dependent transportation and put the engineers and the plants to work on the transit of the future. Don't let the car companies shop around for friendly judges.? Bankruptcy courts are often chosen by companies based on their willingness to rule in favor of employers.? That should be out of the question.? And because the government is driving the reorganization, the bankruptcy master should be designated by the White House, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Transportation. Set up a labor committee.? Instead of shunting labor to the side, put it on an equal footing with the creditors' committees.? Give the labor committee input into the governance and planning of the company under bankruptcy, including veto power on the "plan of reorganization." Of course, the bankruptcy czar could just push for concessions, and a labor committee under the control of the current UAW leadership could just stand meekly alongside the same executives that dragged the companies into the ground.? They've chosen to do so, so far. "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said Rahm Emanuel, President Obama's chief of staff. But that's what he and his boss are doing with the auto industry -- throwing billions at a sinkhole and making workers pay for their bosses' mistakes. We could use this moment to craft an industrial policy that marries good blue-collar jobs, pensions, and health care to a green economy.? Bankruptcy, unless we rewrite it, is a one-way ticket to disposable jobs in a hollowed-out Midwest. Mark Brenner is the director of Labor Notes .? Mischa Gaus is the editor of Labor Notes .? Jane Slaughter is the author of Concessions and How To Beat Them and co-author (with Mike Parker) of Choosing Sides: Unions and the Team Concept and Working Smart: A Union Guide to Participation Programs and Reengineering among other books and articles.? This article was first published by Labor Notes ; it is reproduced here with the Labor Notes editor's permission. From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Apr 2 15:25:33 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 14:25:33 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Hypocrisy in action: The Jewish Defence League and the Galloway ban In-Reply-To: <1526091290.4428841238707504413.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <744336481.4429111238707533583.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.rabble.ca/news/whos-terrorist-jdl-and-galloway-ban Hypocrisy in action: The JDL and the Galloway ban Rabble.ca??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? March 30, 2009 A federal Court judge has just upheld the ban on George Galloway entering Canada. Regardless of which way the ruling goes his ideologically driven misuse of power in order to suppress the airing of a political opinion to which he has opposed has caused the questioning by commentators from across the political spectrum of Kenney's judgment and willingness to apply a torutured interpretation of section 34 of the Immigration Act and abuse post-9/11 security concerns for poltiical purposes. In so doing, rather than silence Galloway, Jason Kenney has given the anti-war activist a far larger stage from which to speak. The original fault may lie with cabinet ministers who treat seriously the advice of the extreme, anti-Arab Jewish Defence League in cynical hopes of manipulating Jewish voters. The banning of the British MP from Canada is proving to be a major embarrassment to the Canadian government whose lawyers had great difficulty justifying the action in court this past weekend. When asked to provide evidence that Galloway had engaged in terrorism government lawyer Stephen Gold tried to argue that the government has made no decision to bar Galloway despite the fact that the MP received a letter from the Canadian High Commission which announced that a decision had been made to bar Galloway on the grounds that Ottawa believes he is a member of a terrorist organization, Hamas. When asked to provide proof of Galloway's membership, Gold was forced to admit that there was none. Barbara Jackman, acting for Galloway, pointed out the absurdity of the government describing the humanitarian convoy that he led to Gaza as aiding terrorists when Israeli authorities, which control the entry points to the beseiged strip, thought otherwise as they allowed Galloway and the goods in. Meir Weinstein, leader of the extremist Jewish Defence League of Canada, has gloated that he is responsible for the government's decision to bar the British MP. On March 16, the JDL sent a letter to Immigration Minister Jason Kenney as well as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs (Americas) Peter Kent. The barely articulate open letter called Galloway a "hater," quoted him stating that he didn't think Hamas or Hezbollah are terrorist organizations, maligned the Canadian Peace Alliance which is sponsoring Galloway's tour and accused Galloway of being a neo-nazi because Weinstein recalled that a poster promoting a 2006 Galloway speech used the colours red and black. Normally, the letter would have been largely ignored, evoking only a non-committal letter penned by a junior member of staff, but Kenney and Kent have focussed on pandering to right wing Zionists in the Jewish community in hopes of winning their allegiance to the Conservative Party. While Kenney claims his political staff did not contact the Canada Border Services Agency in order to flag Galloway, Kent -- who was criticised earlier this year for being Weinstein's "Facebook friend" -- has made no such assurances. Nor is it clear that Kenney's non-political staff did not pass on the letter with the suggestion that the minister was interested in the case. Regardless of the exact chain of events, Kenney, in Jackman's words, found himself "mouthing off all over the world about Mr. Galloway's inadmissibility to Canada" and did so four days after receiving the JDL's letter. Kenney's protestations that the decision that Galloway is inadmissable was not political driven is a case of inplausible deniability. One of the ironies of the past week is that Meir Weinstein, the leader of the Jewish Defence League of Canada and former North American spokesperson for the banned Kach movement, called for George Galloway to be banned from Canada as a terrorist apologist. Hence we have a bona fide terrorist apologist, Meir Weinstein, calling someone else a terrorist apologist. Kach has been listed by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization since 1994 and has been banned by Canada since 2005 . How is Weinstein an apologist for terrorists? Well back in 1994 Kach and JDL member Baruch Goldstein shot and killed 30 Palestinians at Hebron's Cave of the Patriarchs. Weinstein, using the pseudonym of Meir Halevi and in his capacity as Kach's North American spokesperson was asked about this by the media. Weinstein told Canadian Press ""[o]ur organization does not condemn the attack. It condemns the Israeli government for not providing adequate protection for settlers." This leads us to our second irony of the week, Liberal aide and one time anti-racist Warren Kinsella spoke over the weekend at a meeting organized by the JDL as a surprise guest. Kinsella hinted at this earlier on his blog, but it seems he was too embarassed to actually name the organization that called the meeting describing it only as a "Zionist group." Now what would possess Kinsella to share a platform with a man who has been an apologist for terrorists and who, until recently, belonged to a Facebook group called ???? ????? (mavet l'aravim) which means "Kill the Arabs" in English? Has he gone completely mad? If he was simply naive and was somehow bamboozled from Weinstein he should say so publicly and apologize. Otherwise, we're left with no other conclusion than that Kinsella has completely lost whatever political judgement he once had. Who in their right mind would associate themselves with a group that has advocated genocidal murder? Apparently Kinsella and or apologists are now trying to tell BCL that the event was not a JDL meeting but a "public meeting at the Zionist Centre." Well that's being too cute with the truth. Yes, it was a public meeting at the Toronto Zionist Centre, but it was organized by the Jewish Defence League, featured Meir Weinstein, head of the JDL, and was billed as a JDL meeting on the JDL website. If that's not bad enough, Weinstein, in a comical appearance on Britain's Channel 4 news, showed his fascist colours by saying that if Galloway's tour organizers attempted to pursue a plan to allow Galloway to speak to planned meetings via webcast or some sort of closed circuit broadcast the JDL "will see to it that the Canadian government will be monitoring every individual and organization that will have anything to do with it" and also called for anyone associated with the Galloway tour to be investigated. Kinsella is supposed to be a liberal. Does he support the police state tactics Weinstein is advocating? Finally, one can't forget that the JDL is a terrorist organization. A succinct and well-sourced summary can be found on Wikipedia. "In its report, Terrorism 2000/2001, the FBI referred to the JDL as a 'violent extremist Jewish organization' and stated that the FBI was responsible for thwarting at least one of its terrorist acts. The National Consortium for the Study of Terror and Responses to Terrorism states that, during the JDL's first two decades of activity, it was an 'active terrorist organization.'" The JDL was specifically referenced by the FBI's Executive Assistant Director Counterterrorism/Counterintelligence, John S. Pistole, in his formal report before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. While the consortium writes that the JDL does not currently engage in terrorist actions, according to the *Washington Post*, both active and former JDL leaders currently serve as primary fundraisers for the outlawed Israeli terrorist group Kahane Chai. *Washington Report on Middle East Affairs* has compiled a long list of mainstream sources it says show a 30-year history of JDL terrorism on U.S. soil, as well as its association with Kahane Chai. While apologists have claimed that Canada's JDL has nothing to do with the U.S. JDL, in fact it is clear that they are a single entity. Really, if someone set up Al Qaeda Canada would anyone take seriously claims that this Al Qaeda has nothing to do with the others? *Andy Lehrer ** is a Toronto based writer and researcher.* From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Apr 2 15:43:21 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 14:43:21 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] BCCLA files complaint against CSIS for using torture-derived information In-Reply-To: <84FAAC4D234B43A395EA201A81C23081@twubby.com> Message-ID: <1465359172.4437921238708601821.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> NEWS RELEASE April 2, 2009 For immediate release BCCLA files complaint against CSIS for using torture-derived information Vancouver, B.C. ? The B.C. Civil Liberties Association has filed a complaint against the Canadian Security Intelligence Service for using information it knows is derived from torture. The complaint was filed with the Security Intelligence Review Committee early this morning. ?Canada?s laws and international commitments say that we will never condone torture, no matter the public emergency,? says Gratl. ?Canada must be unambiguous about opposing torture in all circumstances, or else we risk the greater use of torture by countries who believe Canada is not opposed to this repugnant practice.? The information that CSIS is using torture-derived information came from CSIS lawyer Geoffrey O?Brien. O?Brien, in testimony before the House of Commons Public Safety Committee on March 31, 2009, said that CSIS would use information the organization knows is derived from torture if lives were at stake. The Public Safety Minister contradicted CSIS? lawyer on Thursday, saying that CSIS did not use information derived from torture. ?Either the Public Safety Minister doesn?t know what CSIS is doing or CSIS doesn?t care what the Minister is saying,? said Jason Gratl, Vice-President of the BCCLA. ?Either way we?ve got a serious problem.? Canada is a signatory to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which says that no circumstances whatsoever may be invoked as a justification for torture. Canada?s domestic laws prohibit information derived from torture from being used in Canadian courts. Gratl says that it is clear that policy is not strong enough to prevent use of information derived from torture, and that only legislation can prevent this tacit approval of torture. The BCCLA has drafted a proposed Prevention of Torture Act that would significantly strengthen Canada?s protection against torture by: ? making a criminal offence to use information derived by torture; ? prohibiting Canadian officials from transferring prisoners to face torture; ? creating a watch list of countries known to practice torture to prevent information sharing, extradition and deportation with those countries; ? placing a duty on officials to report knowledge of torture; and, ? establishing diplomatic protocols for the immediate repatriation of any Canadian citizen at risk of torture. Read BCCLA complaint >> MEDIA CONTACTS: Jason Gratl, Vice-President, 604-317-1919 David Eby, Acting Executive Dirctor, 778-865-7997 From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Apr 2 15:55:47 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 14:55:47 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Avigdor Lieberman repudiates key Israel-Palestine accord Message-ID: <2011662048.4444341238709347150.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/5090518/Avigdor-Lieberman-repudiates-key-Israel-Palestine-accord-on-first-day.html ? Daily Telegraph ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? 1 April 2009 ? Avigdor Lieberman repudiates key Israel-Palestine accord ? Israel's new ultranationalist foreign minister repudiated a key accord meant to herald the establishment of a separate Palestinian state, igniting an international row on his first day in the job. ? By Damien McElroy and Bruno Waterfield in Brussels ? Avigdor Lieberman announced that a declaration adopted by the outgoing government in the American city of Annapolis in 2007 would not be upheld by the incoming coalition government. ? "It has no validity," he said. "The Israeli government never ratified Annapolis, nor did parliament." ? Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli premier, committed Israel to efforts to pursue "the goal of two states, Israel and Palestine" within a fixed timetable at the Annapolis conference convened by George W Bush. Its deadline expired at the end of last year, while Israel was fighting Hamas in Gaza. But its apparent legacy was to overcome conditions imposed by earlier agreements that had become obstacles to the drive to Palestinian statehood. ? Tony Blair, the international envoy to the Middle East peace process, warned yesterday that the accord was in "very great jeopardy", given the signals from the new Israeli government. "There is no alternative to a two-state solution, other than a lone-state solution, and if there is a one-state solution there will be a big fight," he said. ? Mr Blair also highlighted the significance and importance to the international community of Egyptian talks with Hamas and Palestinian representatives in Gaza. ? "It is very important to engage with the people of Gaza. It is folly to talk exclusively to the West Bank and leaving Gaza and its people to one side," he said. ? Israel's parliament yesterday affirmed the establishment of the new government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud party leader. The new administration is one of the most unwieldy in Israel's history with a cabinet of 30 members drawn from a host of coalition members. ? An aide close to Mr Netanyahu said the prime minister shared Mr Lieberman's refusal to make an official commitment to a Palestinian state. ? In his acceptance address to the Knesset, Mr Netanyahu referred only to a final accord for Palestinian self-governance. "Under the final accord, the Palestinians will have all the rights to govern themselves except those that can put in danger the security and existence of the state of Israel," he said. ? Diplomats believe he is unwilling to grant Palestinians sovereign rights over their territorial defence or airspace. ? Mr Lieberman stressed that security would be paramount for the new government. "Whoever thinks that through concessions he will bring something, no, he will only invite more pressure and more wars," he said. "If you want peace, prepare for war. We yearn for peace and we want peace, we've proven that more than any other country in the world." ? Yisrael Beiteinu, Mr Lieberman's party, was the big beneficiary of the election winning 15 seats on the back of Israel's expanding community of immigrants from the former Russian bloc. The former nightclub bouncer's radical policies include a loyalty test that would deprive Israel's Arabs of citizens' rights. He has also been condemned for advocating the wholesale transfer of Arab-dominated cities to the West Bank in return for annexing Jewish settlements. ? Palestinians leaders quickly condemned a statement from a man who has become a figure of hate among Arabs, and called on Washington to intervene. "This minister is an obstacle to peace," said Yasser Abed Rabbo, an aide to the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. "He will cause harm to Israel first. Nothing obliges us to deal with a racist person hostile to peace." ? Tzipi Livni, the Israeli opposition leader and former foreign minister, told Mr Lieberman: "In spite of everything that you said, there will be a two-state solution." ? President Shimon Peres, a veteran dove [sic] in Israeli politics, issued a politely veiled warning to Mr Netanyahu that a hardline stance would undermine Israel's international standing as the world backed the Palestinian quest for statehood. From fentona at shaw.ca Thu Apr 2 16:52:14 2009 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 15:52:14 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Petraeus Says Israel Might Choose to Attack Iran In-Reply-To: <200904021706.39403.intnsred@golgotha.net> References: <1B29B7A8-6363-4578-8369-844B02AA6F91@shaw.ca> <200904021706.39403.intnsred@golgotha.net> Message-ID: <5F3E1E2E-12AB-49E8-B67F-908FBAF599D3@shaw.ca> No joke. There's a link to Petraeus' testimony in the original, but the passage you cite comes from Bloomberg.: http://armed-services.senate.gov/statemnt/2009/April/Petraeus%2004-01-09.pdf On 2-Apr-09, at 2:06 PM, Intense Red wrote: >> April 1 (Bloomberg) -- [...] >> Iran refuses to suspend uranium enrichment, in defiance of United >> Nations Security Council resolutions, and won?t give international >> inspectors full access to its nuclear facilities. > > As I recall, IAEA inspectors do have full access to Iranian nuclear > installations in accordance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty and > Iran also > agreed to an additional inspection protocol. > > Can anyone verify/confirm the above or is this an April Fool's joke? > > -- > Bill Gates' wealth equals the combined wealth of the poorest 120 > million > Americans, or 45 percent of our population. "This is a failure of the > political system to defend the people." -- Ralph Nader > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Apr 2 17:04:57 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 18:04:57 -0500 Subject: [R-G] Petraeus Says Israel Might Choose to Attack Iran References: <1B29B7A8-6363-4578-8369-844B02AA6F91@shaw.ca> <200904021706.39403.intnsred@golgotha.net> <5F3E1E2E-12AB-49E8-B67F-908FBAF599D3@shaw.ca> Message-ID: This all reminds me of the run-up to the blitzkrieg on Iraq, with Colin Powell testifying before the UN on the 'absolute certainty' that Saddam Hussein was purchasing yellowcake from Nigeria. It's a prelude to something big, I fear. No doubt more "shock and awe" coming, and from "the only democracy in the Middle East" - YECH! ----- Original Message ----- From: "Anthony Fenton" To: "Richard Menec" Sent: Thursday, April 02, 2009 5:52 PM Subject: Re: [R-G] Petraeus Says Israel Might Choose to Attack Iran No joke. There's a link to Petraeus' testimony in the original, but the passage you cite comes from Bloomberg.: http://armed-services.senate.gov/statemnt/2009/April/Petraeus%2004-01-09.pdf On 2-Apr-09, at 2:06 PM, Intense Red wrote: >> April 1 (Bloomberg) -- [...] >> Iran refuses to suspend uranium enrichment, in defiance of United >> Nations Security Council resolutions, and won?t give international >> inspectors full access to its nuclear facilities. > > As I recall, IAEA inspectors do have full access to Iranian nuclear > installations in accordance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty and > Iran also > agreed to an additional inspection protocol. > > Can anyone verify/confirm the above or is this an April Fool's joke? > > -- > Bill Gates' wealth equals the combined wealth of the poorest 120 > million > Americans, or 45 percent of our population. "This is a failure of the > political system to defend the people." -- Ralph Nader > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Apr 2 17:10:31 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 16:10:31 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Canadian media shocked to discover Afghan women not liberated after all In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1099257160.4486471238713831607.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/rabble-staff/canadian-media-shocked-discover-afghan-women-not-liberated-after-all RABBLE.CA | April 2, 2009 Canadian media shocked to discover Afghan women not liberated after all B y Derrick O'Keefe After more than seven years of giving scant coverage to the ongoing oppression of Afghan women, the Canadian media have finally had to admit that all is not as they have been telling us it is in occupied Afghanistan. The immediate cause is the scandalous and reactionary law that President Hamid Karzai has signed off on that denies Shia women the right to refuse sex with their husbands and the right to leave the house without their husband's permission, among other outrages. The Toronto Star reported that Harper has expressed 'deep concern ' about the law to the Afghan government. Peter Mansbridge led with this story on The National last night on CBC. And this morning, host Bill Good on CKNW -- the most listened to news radio station in B.C. -- led off an hour of open phones with the remark that this latest news will certainly make many Canadians rethink the 'mission.' As it happens, I was fortunate enough to be the first caller to get through. What I said to Mr. Good could apply just as well to Mansbridge and much of our mainstream media, excepting some honest reporters who are too far and few between on the Afghanistan file. Here's a rough summary of what I said to the CKNW host: "This latest news is terrible, but many of us have been saying for years that this war has nothing to do with women's rights, and everything to do with U.S. and NATO geo-political considerations. We have pointed out that the Karzai government is full of warlords and fundamentalists. And while Harper has spoken out on this law, he said nothing when Afghan women's rights advocate Malalai Joya was expelled from the Parliament for her criticism of these fundamentalists. Frankly, the media has been ignoring the voices, like those of RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan), who have been saying for many years that this war has not liberated Afghan women..." I could have added that it is well documented that rape and abduction of women goes on with absolute impunity throughout the country, and that rates of women's self-immolation are higher than ever. In fact, it's well known that there is no justice for women in Afghanistan. So there you go -- a big 'we told you so' from all anti-war voices to the media in this country is very much in order. Let's hope that, with the war going so poorly and the misogynist nature of the government that NATO has been propping up becoming more evident, the media will look more seriously into the regime in Kabul and at the real condition of the women of Afghanistan. From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Thu Apr 2 17:36:41 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Fri, 03 Apr 2009 08:36:41 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Three Ways China May Deal With Growing US Debt Message-ID: <49D54C09.8050604@ashisuto.co.jp> by William Patalon III and Jason Simpkins, Money Morning Editors Although there's a veritable laundry list of obstacles that could blunt the US government's ongoing economic turnaround efforts, its single-biggest challenge may come from its single-biggest creditor - China. When China announced a new array of stimulus measures earlier this month, this very important plan was overshadowed by China Premier Wen Jiabao's concerns about the United States' quickly growing debt load. "We have lent a huge amount of money to the United States", Premier Wen said. "Of course we are concerned about the safety of our assets. To be honest, I am definitely a little bit worried. I request the US to maintain its good credit, to honor its promises and to guarantee the safety of China's assets." China has cause to be concerned: As of December, the most recent figures available, China held $727.4 billion in Treasuries - about 26% more than the $578 billion in US government securities the Asian giant held at the end of 2007. More than half of China's nearly $2 trillion in foreign currency reserves are tied up in US Treasuries and notes issued by other affiliated agencies of the US government - including beleaguered mortgage giants Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE). However, the value of US Treasuries has dropped steadily since the government began selling record amounts of debt to finance its economic stimulus packages. Investors have lost an average of 2.7% in 2009, according to Merrill Lynch & Co Incorporated US Treasury Master Index. China's leaders "are worried about forever-rising deficits, which may devalue Treasuries by pushing interest rates higher", JP Morgan & Co (JPM) analyst Frank Gong told The Associated Press. "Inside China there has been a lot of debate about whether they should continue to buy Treasuries". And as the US debt soars as the government works to halt the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, China's concerns about this country's growing deficits - and its creditworthiness - are escalating in kind. America's Foreign Creditors: See http://www.moneymorning.com/images2/foreigncreditors.GIF Depending upon how it did so, were China to stop buying US debt - or even worse, to start dumping it - the economic fallout could be widespread, and perhaps even catastrophic: * The US dollar would drop fifteen to twenty percent. * US stocks would get hammered. * Inflation would spike and interest rates on Treasuries would jump into the eight percent range. * And the economy would end up flat on its back - where it would stay, with no rebound on the horizon. Detailing the Deficit During the first five months of the 2009 fiscal year, which began October 1, the US budget deficit hit a record $764.5 billion. Last month, President Obama outlined a $3.94 trillion budget plan that would take the deficit to $1.75 trillion by the time the fiscal year ends September 30. The plan then calls for a $1.17 trillion deficit for fiscal 2010. As currently projected, the US budget deficit is forecast to run at about twelve percent of gross domestic product (GDP) - even worse than the perennially anemic Japan, where the deficit is running at eleven percent. And the debt picture is certain to get worse. The Treasury Department has the government's printing presses running overtime just to finance the $787 billion stimulus passed by Congress earlier this year. And in order to pay for all the stimulus, bailout and fix-it plans that are being put in place to arrest the US economic decline, the US government is assuming a murderous amount of debt: Over the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office projects that the White House budget will run $9.3 trillion in deficits. That's $2.3 trillion more than the Obama administration had forecast. But even the CBO projection could prove way too low: It assumes that the US economy - after declining 1.5% this year - will turn around an advance at a racy 4.1% clip in both 2010 and 2011, a forecast that seems far too rosy, given the depths that the US economy appears to have reached. And that brings us to China. Enter the (Red) Dragon During the past several years, government-operated "sovereign-wealth funds" (SWFs) from virtually every major economic powerhouse around the world had been on a global shopping spree, buying up assets and bidding up prices as they did so. China was no exception. So when worldwide financial-asset prices began to slide - and then to nosedive - China abandoned many of its riskier holdings, choosing to boost its stockpile of US Treasury securities. That underscores one marketplace truism: Despite Premier Wen's reservations, the market for US debt is the only market large enough, liquid enough, and stable enough to accommodate China's large-scale investments. That's forced China to engage in a kind of global investor activism - although, so far, most of that activism has been aimed at one country: The United States. About one-fifth of China's currency reserves were tied up in Fannie and Freddie debt last fall when the two mortgage firms were placed under government conservatorship, The Washington Post reported. In fact, as Money Morning detailed back in September as part of its ongoing investigation of the bailout of the US banking system, that US government decision to take control of Fannie and Freddie was driven not by worries about the fading US housing market, but by concerns that foreign central banks in China, Japan, Europe, the Middle East and Russia might stop buying our bonds. China clearly made its risk concerns known at that time, adding to the sense of urgency US officials felt to make a move. Today, as US debt continues to mount at an obscene rate, financial and economic risks also escalate. This could lead to a spike in inflation and interest rates - a double-whammy that could cause any recovery that's under way to sputter and stall. That duo of higher inflation and interest rates could also hammer bond values, including the Treasuries held in such large quantities by China. So it's no wonder the risk concerns China articulated back at the time of the Fannie and Freddie takeovers go double or triple now. Indeed, when Premier Wen unveiled the spending measures earlier this month, he made the point of saying that China should seek to "fend off risks" by further diversifying its reserves. "We have already adopted a guiding management policy of diversifying our foreign exchange reserves, and at present our foreign exchange reserves are safe overall", Wen said. "Our first principle in managing foreign currency is averting risk. We have always adhered to the principles of foreign currency security, liquidity and maintaining value, and implemented a strategy of diversification". When it comes to US government debt, that strategy will take one of three forms, and will have the following potential effects: 1. Quietly threatening to stop purchasing (or even threatening to "dump") US Treasuries, a form of "back-channel" communications that can generate results (just look at how China forced the US government to place Fannie and Freddie in conservatorship). Because this is back channel, it stays out of the marketplace, so long as the US government finds some ways to appease Chinese investors by somehow reducing risk. 2. Quietly slowing or stopping its purchases of US government debt. If China does this effectively and systematically, the fact that it's cutting back on purchases doesn't surface until the plan is executed. If China is able to pull this off - and it faces long odds to do so - the fact that it's cutting back on US debt doesn't roil the markets too badly, especially if it doesn't leak out until after the fact. 3. Publicly dumping US debt. Self-explanatory in nature - and also the most unlikely, if it wants to maintain its "friendly" status with the United States - this is the worst-case scenario, and is the one that ends up with the dollar and the stock market getting stomped. If China chooses this route, it's also essentially cutting off its nose to spite its face. The reason: By publicly dumping US debt, the Treasury market will also take a beating - meaning China's remaining US debt holdings would take a haircut of twenty to thirty percent. The Marketplace Realities International demand for long-term US financial assets actually fell in January, reflecting China's smallest net purchase since May, Bloomberg reported. International investors sold a net $8.4 billion in US corporate debt in January, the report showed. Net foreign purchases of Treasury notes and bonds were a net $10.7 billion in for the month, after purchases of $15 billion a month earlier. Few analysts believe China will abandon its Treasury holdings altogether, as that would hammer the dollar, hurt the value of its debt holdings and ruin its political relationship with the United States. Besides, it's becoming increasingly clear that Beijing wants a voice in Washington. Yu Yongding, a former advisor to the Bank of China said last month that China should seek guarantees from the US government that its holdings won't be diminished by "reckless policies". Premier Wen echoed that request last week when he called on the United States to "honor its promises and guarantee the safety of China's assets". "I think what they're trying to say right now is, 'Don't take any steps that would impair our ability to access your market'," Auggie Tantillo, executive director of the American Manufacturing Trade Action Coalition, told The Post. "The Chinese are starting to flex their muscles, they are becoming more powerful commercially and economically, and they want us to know it". The very possibility that China and other foreign countries would stop buying US bonds already was enough to prompt the US government to take control of foundering mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. http://www.moneymorning.com/2009/03/25/china-us-debt TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From tchilds at resist.ca Thu Apr 2 19:43:00 2009 From: tchilds at resist.ca (tchilds at resist.ca) Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 18:43:00 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Video resource: FRONTLINE: the hugo chavez show: PBS Message-ID: <49194.70.71.176.80.1238722980.squirrel@mail.resist.ca> http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hugochavez/view/ -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: untitled-2 Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20090402/0cc5886b/attachment.txt From fentona at shaw.ca Thu Apr 2 22:56:15 2009 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 21:56:15 -0700 Subject: [R-G] =?windows-1252?q?And_you=92ll_excuse_me_this_moment_of_exce?= =?windows-1252?q?ss?= Message-ID: <3131A572-43BF-4E84-86B5-901AB6A99B93@shaw.ca> http://wardchurchilltrial.wordpress.com/ And you?ll excuse me this moment of excess April 3, 2009 (Cover the kids? ears.) I?ve spent the last four years watching a good man get his name drug through the mud for making the eminently reasonable point that you ought not be killing other peoples? kids. And that if you are in the business of killing other peoples? kids, they have the absolute right to fight back in any way they can. I?ve seen the most vicious smear campaign of my lifetime. A horde of shiteating columnists and radio shockjocks have made it their life?s work to destroy one man. They went after his life, his livelihood, his family, and his reputation. There is no level to which they haven?t stooped to ruin him. I?ve watched Denver?s local media crawl like dogs to eat the shit of their canine superiors in the rightwing national media. There has not been a single article in the Denver media to actually interrogate the trumped-up charges of academic misconduct levelled by the hopelessly biased CU investigative committee. Not one. Like with their coverage of the Iraq war (or for that matter, the preceding sanctions), they have gone to incredible lengths to never actually investigate the shit they were more than willing to eat out of the paws of their presumed betters. Moreover, in that so-called bastion of higher learning at CU, I can count on my fingers and toes those faculty members who were willing to actually stand up and point out the absurdity of the smear campaign launched against Ward Churchill. Almost to a man or woman, they refused to make any kind of stand for the principles they pretended, every day, to represent. Nothing has been more disheartening than the absolute, unmitigated cowardice of the faculty of my alma mater. I?ve met pedophiles and rapists with whom I?d rather share an occupation. But, I?ve also watched Ward Churchill, with his family, put their stake in the ground and refused to back up an inch. That?s what courage is, and I?ve been proud as hell just to witness it. In the last round of McCarthyism, there were very few to fight back. I think of Dashiell Hammett, and I think of Ward Churchill. So this one?s for CU. And for Bill O?Reilly, Caplis and Silverman, Vincent Carroll, and the CU faculty as a whole. Fuck you. johnny-cash-finger From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Fri Apr 3 04:02:17 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Fri, 03 Apr 2009 19:02:17 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] China's empty threat Message-ID: <49D5DEA9.5030805@ashisuto.co.jp> If Wen Jiabao stops buying US debt, China's currency will rise - which is what America has wanted all along by Dean Baker guardian.co.uk (March 30 2009) When China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, expressed concern about the ability of the US government to repay its bonds, his comments prompted headlines everywhere. The newspapers were filled with gloomy warnings that China may no longer be willing to buy up US debt, which supposedly would have dire consequences for us all. Unfortunately, too little thought was given to what these "dire consequences" might be, and who would end up suffering them. Suppose that China stops buying US government debt. That would mean that the dollar would plummet in value against the yuan. Chinese imports would suddenly become much more expensive for consumers in the United States, making domestically produced items far more competitive. The opposite would happen in China. Goods and services made in the United States would suddenly be much cheaper. As a result, we would expect to export much more to China, and see many more Chinese come to the United States as tourists or for business purposes. The reduction in imports from China and the increase in exports would substantially improve our balance of trade. In other words, if Wen was threatening to stop buying dollar-denominated assets and therefore let the yuan rise against the dollar, he was threatening to do exactly what the US government has been demanding that China do. He will stop "manipulating" China's currency - meaning he will stop deliberately intervening in the market to keep the yuan's value from rising. There is an alternative interpretation of Wen's threat. Perhaps he will stop buying long-term government bonds, but continue to buy short-term debt. This will have some impact on raising long-term interest rates in the United States, but it hardly provides a basis for panic. The reason that Wen's threat should not be serious cause for concern is that if we want to keep long-term interest rates low, we already have a mechanism: it's called the Federal Reserve Board. Just last week Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke announced that he was going to buy up more than $1 trillion in long-term government or agency (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) bonds over the next several months. This purchase far exceeds any possible purchases of long bonds by the Chinese. If Wen pulls out of the market, Bernanke can simply increase his purchases to offset the lost demand. Does this policy risk inflation? Actually, the Chinese purchase of Treasury bills and the Fed's buying up the long-term bonds would have the same impact on inflation. It really doesn't matter whether the Chinese government or the Fed is buying bonds to hold down the long-term interest rate - the impact on the inflation rate will be the same. Of course in a period where there are serious concerns about deflation, a modest increase in the inflation rate would be a good thing. There is one other irony about Wen's threat that is worth noting. In 2004, Alan Greenspan began to raise short-term interest rates. He expressed surprise that long-term interest rates stayed constant or even fell slightly. He described this as a "conundrum". There was actually nothing mysterious about the situation at all. As Greenspan was acting to raise short-term interest rates, the Chinese and other foreign central banks were intervening directly in the long-term market, buying up long-term bonds in order to keep long-term interests down. Did Greenspan fail to recognise the impact of the Chinese intervention in the same way that he managed to miss an $8 trillion housing bubble? In short, Wen has nothing with which to threaten the United States. He is proposing to do something that Congress and the Bush and Obama administrations have all urged him to do: stop propping up the value of the dollar against the yuan. This will lead to an adjustment process involving some pain on both sides. In China's case, the reduction in exports to the United States will require increasing the size of its domestic market, or at least finding alternative destinations for its exports. In the case of the United States, we will have to pay more for our imports, which will mean some increase in the rate of inflation and, in the short term, a modest decline in our standard of living. But we always knew that China would not subsidise its exports to the United States forever. It would have been better for us if they had stopped a decade ago, before we developed a huge trade imbalance and developed a housing bubble-led growth path. Still, better late than never. Wen has made a promise, not a threat - and we should encourage him to follow through on it. guardian.co.uk (c) Guardian News and Media Limited 2009 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/mar/30/us-economy-china-debt?commentpage=1 QUESTIONS: Dean Baker's comment's refer only to relations between the United States and China. But as http://www.moneymorning.com/images2/foreigncreditors.GIF shows, various nations hold more three trillion dollars of US Treasury Bonds, denominated in US dollars. Japan holds 626 billion dollars of those bonds. All would lose severely from any significant devaluation of the US dollar vis-a-vis their own currencies. Wouldn't those losses cripple the credibility of the US dollar and the US's ability to make up for its paucity of saving and taxation by borrowing from foreigners? Would those losses spark a worldwide run on the US dollar? Bill Totten TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From fentona at shaw.ca Fri Apr 3 09:55:57 2009 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2009 08:55:57 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Unmanned aircraft to patrol Michigan-Ontario border Message-ID: photo of drone: http://www.richard-seaman.com/Aircraft/AirShows/Nellis2006/Highlights/Predator2006.jpg April 2, 2009 Unmanned aircraft to patrol Michigan-Ontario border By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Military personnel adjust the placement of the US Air Force MQ-1 Predator aircraft at March Air Reserve Base in Riverside County, Calif., June 25, 2008. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS/Damian Dovarganes DETROIT - U.S. authorities plan to use an unmanned aircraft to patrol the border between Michigan and Ontario. U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Juan Munoz-Torres tells the Detroit Free Press that the Predator aircraft likely would be based in the Alpena, Mich., area. A date hasn't been set for patrols to start. Customs and Border Protection has other unmanned aircraft, including one that patrols the northern U.S. border from North Dakota. The Predator has been used along the southern border with Mexico since 2005. Known by many as a drone, the Predator has been used by U.S. forces in military operations overseas. From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Apr 3 11:33:57 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2009 10:33:57 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] In for a Penny, In for $2.98 Trillion In-Reply-To: <630611171.4486711238713864384.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <280340486.4850731238780037570.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090331_in_for_a_penny_in_for_298_trillion/ Truthdig ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ??????????????????????????????????????????????????? April 1,2009 In for a Penny, In for $2.98 Trillion By Robert Scheer The good news on the government's "No Banker Left Behind" program is that according to the special inspector general's report on Tuesday , the total handout to date is still less than 3 trillion dollars. It's only 2.98 trillion to be precise, an amount six times greater than will be spent by federal, state and local governments this year on educating the 50 million American children in elementary and secondary schools. The bad news is that even greater amounts of money are to be thrown down what has to be the world record for rat holes. Where did the money go? Almost all of it went to the bankers and stockbrokers who got us into this mess by insisting that the complex-by-design derivatives they trafficked in should not be regulated by government since they were private transactions between consenting professionals. Sort of like a lap dance: If it doesn't work out, that's the problem of the parties involved and no concern of the government. For the government to intervene would have created "legal uncertainty" in the derivatives market, an argument that a Republican-dominated Congress and President Clinton bought in authorizing the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in December of 2000. That law brought "legal certainty" to the market, a phrase that Lawrence Summers, then Clinton's secretary of the treasury and now Barack Obama's top White House economics adviser, deployed incessantly as a calming mantra as the financial derivatives market swirled out of control. Now Summers and the other finance gurus who move so easily from Wall Street to Pennsylvania Avenue assure us that those professionals who made the toxic swap deals are too big to fail and must be entrusted with 3 trillion of our dollars to save themselves from disaster. And thanks to the laws they wrote, the bankers are likely to be covered for their socially destructive behavior by a get-out-of-jail-free card. Well, maybe not all of them. A shudder must have run through the former Wall Street buddies of Bernie Madoff ? once the highly respected chairman of the Nasdaq stock exchange ? when Inspector General Neil Barofsky warned on Tuesday that "we are looking at the potential exposure of hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money lost to fraud." How naive. The fraud no doubt has occurred and will occur again, but the exposure part is more questionable, if by that is meant bringing the criminals to account. As opposed to welfare cheats who end up imprisoned over scams that involve hundreds of dollars, these guys have brilliant lawyers who tell them how to steal legally when it comes to billions in fraud. But most likely the white-collar criminals, if they are high enough up the food chain, will not even be quizzed about their activities. As the independent Congressional Oversight Panel has reported, there has been no serious accounting of the bailout money. It took major pressure from a Congress reacting to an outraged public to discover that AIG, in addition to handing out hundreds of millions in bonuses to the very hustlers who created the firm's swindles, was a conduit for at least $70 billion in taxpayer money to reimburse the banks and stockbrokers who got us into this crisis with their bad bets. No surprise there, given the incestuous world of finance, where the revolving doors between the Treasury Department, the Fed and executive offices in the industry have been swinging throughout both Republican and Democratic administrations. As a result, those orchestrating the bailout and those grabbing the money are for the most part friends and former colleagues, with enormous respect for each other but not for the American taxpayer and homeowner. Or for the autoworkers who had nothing to do with creating this problem but stand to lose their retiree health benefits and pensions if the Obama administration goes though with its threat to use bankruptcy to discharge GM and Chrysler from their obligations to their workers. Why float a company like AIG to the tune of $170 billion to keep that massive conglomerate from bankruptcy but balk at a much smaller commitment to keep GM solvent? The money involved in the auto bailout is chump change compared with what Wall Street got, and it is far better spent. As opposed to the financial high rollers richly rewarded for crawling in and out of balance sheets, the folks who crawl in and out of cars along an assembly line are left with permanent aching backs and hard-won health care and retirement plans about to disappear through their company's bankruptcy. Where's their bonus package? From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Apr 3 11:34:37 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2009 10:34:37 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] First, 'fix the economy' In-Reply-To: <1910675950.4056091238624942954.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <745228152.4851191238780077707.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090401.wxrsprott01art1931/BNStory/Sports/columnists/ Globe and Mail ??????????? ?????????????????????????????????? Report on Business ??????????????????????????????????????? April 1, 2009 First, 'fix the economy' According to veteran money manager Eric Sprott, the American government?s moves to buy up toxic assets and guarantee debt are not in any rule book. He says that there was a credit bubble that broke and now they?re trying to prevent the logical outcome. By Brian Milner When it comes to a bearish view of the markets, veteran money manager Eric Sprott takes a back seat to no one. So it's not surprising that his firm, Sprott Asset Management, would organize an event, called A Night with the Bears, in Toronto next Tuesday, or that he would be one of the four prominent pessimists who will be addressing the latest market currents. With everything governments are doing to repair the financial system and prop up markets, is this really a good time to be such a committed bear? Here's how I characterize what a bear has to put up with. It's like you're in a Texas Hold 'em, no-limit poker game. You're the one bear at the table, and you've got the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Treasury, the Bank of England, the ECB. And they keep coming up with these moves that are all-in, all trying to prevent what is in fact transpiring ... So far, none has been successful. Are you saying they won't work? It's very difficult when they're fighting what I would call the forces of nature. The forces of nature would have had us in a bear market back in 2000, which was aborted by interest rate policy. ... Now we have, in essence, multilevel quantitative easing. It's everywhere. We'll see how that does. From bogus@does.not.exist.com Thu Apr 2 09:08:15 2009 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:08:15 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: It's the irresponsibility of the monetary authorities. These [moves to buy = up toxic assets and guarantee debt] are not in any rule book you or I have = ever read. It's a little surreal. We're trying to defy the laws of nature. = You had a credit bubble that has broken, and you're trying to prevent the l= ogical outcome.=20 What's your sense of the sentiment out there now?=20 There are two sentiment measures. One is the economy, which has got to be a= bout as bad as it's ever been. And then there are the financial markets, wh= ich in some ways are a bit of a game. It's the game of trying to get financ= ial assets to inflate, which may have nothing to do with the economy. The a= ccepted belief in the U.S. is you cannot get an economic recovery without s= tability in the banking system. That's why all this effort, for the most pa= rt, has been dedicated to the financial system and very little to the econo= my.=20 You disagree?=20 I think you've got to fix the economy. You can keep stock or bond prices mo= ving. But ultimately people have to want to lend. And if the economy gets w= eaker, they're not going to lend. And ultimately, people may not want to bo= rrow. It can cut both ways.=20 Do you see a widening divergence between the markets and the economy?=20 I could see a scenario where they disengage. If you throw enough money at t= he system, the money has to go somewhere. Typically, it seeks out a paper a= sset. You could have stocks going up, because they're hyper-inflating the m= oney supply.=20 How do you think that will play out?=20 It's a tough call to know whether the economic weakness supersedes the quan= titative easing. It's not something that I've ever been through before, and= I truly don't know the answer. But those are the two forces at work. Wheth= er quantitative easing has an impact on financial prices, irrespective of w= hat the economy does, is very difficult to gauge.=20 Do you regard this unpredictability as an opportunity or a handicap, given = your investing approach?=20 I have to be cognizant of what could happen. As a guy who's short the marke= t, you always have to look at all the range of possibilities. One of the po= ssibilities is that people buy stocks.=20 If you're living in Japan today and you're a bear, and the government comes= in and says it's going to buy stocks, what do you do? Maybe you say: If th= ey're going to start buying, I'd better cover my shorts. I may not believe = in it, but that's the way it is.=20 So what does the ordinary investor do in this environment?=20 I can only tell you what I do and what I do on behalf of our clients.=20 There are only two things we do today: precious metals and shorting. There = are only three things in the world that have worked [during the crisis]. Ha= ving cash, which I question, because of the quantitative easing. ... Owning= gold and precious metals or shorting the market.=20 I know you have been deeply bearish on financials. What else are you shorti= ng?=20 I've actually been going a little further into the economic stocks lately. = You know pretty well that anybody who's related to the economy cannot be do= ing well.=20 Any that you care to discuss?=20 To me a classic example is Caterpillar. We've seen many, many instances whe= re the makers of big things get orders cancelled [in bad economic times]. W= hether it's airplanes, ships, front-end loaders, the orders just get cancel= led, because there's enough equipment around already. They've already annou= nced layoffs [at Caterpillar]. And I'd hate to see what the order book look= s like.=20 Do you ever second-guess your bearish approach, knowing that governments ma= y be doing enough to prop up the markets, if not the economy?=20 We always question it. I was asked a question today: Do you see any signs o= f an economic turnaround? No, I do not. But trust me, every day every piece= of information that comes out on anything [is analyzed closely].=20 So to sum up, you've still got a solidly negative outlook, despite the heav= y intervention of governments, or perhaps because of it.=20 I would guess that it's too big to bail. ... They're trying to solve a very= complex problem that I suspect they're not going to be able to solve.=20 bmilner at globeandmail.com=20 ***=20 MEET THE BEARS=20 Eric Sprott is one of four speakers at A Night With The Bears in Toronto ne= xt week. In tomorrow's Globe Investor, Ian Gordon, author of the Long Wave = Analyst newsletter, will explain why he believes "we're only really at the = beginnings of this massive collapse of the debt structure."=20 From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Apr 3 11:35:19 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2009 10:35:19 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] A big bear: Markets 'way too optimistic' Message-ID: <231694147.4851681238780119376.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://business.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090403.wrroubini03/BNStory/Business/home ? Globe and Mail ??????????? Report on Business ??????????? April 3, 2009 ? A big bear: Markets 'way too optimistic' ? People say he is Dr. Doom; he says he is realistic ? Brian Milner ? They don't call economist Nouriel Roubini Dr. Doom for nothing. The New York University professor has ridden the global financial crisis to celebrity status and privileged access to the world's political and business elite, thanks to his early warnings and depressingly accurate forecasts about exploding bubbles and credit freezes, dating back to 2005. In fact, he's such a prominent bear that a market rally after one of his typically gloomy prognostications was dubbed a Roubini bounce. ? Does the current stock market rally make it harder to be so bearish? ? It doesn't change my views, because we have already had about six bear market rallies in the past year. ? The market has been a lousy predictor. People used to say that the stock market predicted 12 out of the last nine recessions. This time, it predicted six out of the last zero economic recoveries. Every time there was a rally, and then the macro[economic] news, the earning news, the financial news was worse, and the market touched a new low. ? 'The market has been a lousy predictor. People used to say that the stock market predicted 12 out of the last nine recessions. This time, it predicted six out of the last zero economic recoveries,' Nouriel Roubini says. (The Associated Press) ? So you don't think we have reached the bottom? ? Of course, as we get lower and lower, we're going to be closer to the bottom. But the way to think about the markets is for us to think about the real economy. And ... I see a real economy which is still in severe recession. ? The consensus calls for U.S. economic growth to resume in the second half at about a 2-per-cent annual clip. Is it safe to assume that you don't agree? ? I expect the recession to continue all the way through the end of this year. The rate of economic contraction is going to slow down from minus 6 [per cent annually] in the first quarter to something close to minus 2 by [the fourth quarter]. ? And next year? ? Growth is going to be so weak next year - 1 per cent or below - and the unemployment rate peaking at 10 per cent, it's going to feel like a recession, even if we're technically out of it. ? So you think it's too early to jump back into equities. ? Given the severe recession and weak recovery, deflationary forces are going to still be strong. That means the pricing power of firms is going to be weak. ? A weak recovery and weak pricing power means ... earnings growth is not going to be very fast, even next year. ? Given that, you have to be cautious about the stock market. Eventually, the economy might bottom out, but it's not going to be in the second half of this year. ? What do you think is the likely time frame then? ? Maybe some time in 2010. But a market rally is going to be sustained only when there is much more robust evidence of strong economic recovery. ? So you don't see the market leading the way here.Usually people say the stock market is forward-looking. And six, nine months before the [economic] bottom, it's going to rally. First of all, the bottom ... is going to be the middle of next year. So even if it was six to nine months, then the [market] recovery would be more like towards the third or fourth quarter, not today. ? Secondly, the last recession [in 2001] was short and shallow. It was only eight months, but the stock market kept on falling and falling and falling for another 16 months. So the argument that it's forward-looking and always sees the light at the end of the tunnel is actually incorrect. ? Do you see this same pattern being repeated? ? This time around, we have a 24-month recession, maybe longer, a global recession with bigger deflationary forces. Corporate defaults might be twice as much as in the last recession, and we have a severe financial crisis and a severe housing crisis. So where are you going to get this robust recovery? Eventually, there'll be a recovery. But I think the markets are getting ahead of the actual macroeconomic, financial and earnings data. ? What's your assessment of government interventions so far, and what impact is it having on your outlook, if any? ? Government policies in the U.S. and abroad are becoming more aggressive and more robust in many dimensions - monetary, fiscal, credit, foreclosures - than they were a few months ago. I always said that if we don't have more aggressive policy action, we risk having an L-shaped near-depression. The policy response is not perfect, but it's more than it was before. Now I believe that the risk of a near-depression is lower. That doesn't mean that we're not going to have a severe recession. I always said, even if we do everything right, policy-wise, we're going to have a severe U-shaped recession lasting through the end of this year. ? People are desperate for good news. Do you have anything positive to tell us? ? The positive news is that there is light at the end of the tunnel, and it's not going to be a coming depression train wreck. But that's the only good news. I think the markets are way too optimistic about the recovery of the economy, of macro news, of earnings and of financial institutions. I think they'll be surprised on the downside in the next few months. ? What's your take on gold in this environment? ? I'm bearish on gold. I think that there will be deflationary - not inflationary - forces in the global economy for the next few years. Gold represents a safe haven not against inflation but against Armageddon, in a world in which ... banks can't even be bailed out and people are going to buy guns, ammunition, gold bars and canned food and rush to their log cabins. But that's a world of great depression. I don't think we're going to end up there. ? On a personal basis, don't you find it getting harder to knock the feeble legs of confidence out from under people? ? I would say people have moved in my direction. I've always been realistic. I've never been overpessimistic. And I got it right on the economy and on the markets. Actually, compared to some people who are talking about Armageddon, I'm giving a qualified statement that there is light at the end of the tunnel. But that light is going to be more towards next year, rather than this year. ? Prof. Roubini is one of the guest speakers at A Night With The Bears in Toronto on Tuesday. ? bmilner at globeandmail.com From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Apr 3 11:34:18 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2009 10:34:18 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] What if the Obama Administration Treated Detroit like Wall Street? In-Reply-To: <1716673216.4060221238625343142.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1553233436.4850971238780058657.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> April 1, 2009 What if the Obama Administration Treated Detroit like Wall Street? Why the tough love for Detroit and kid gloves for Wall Street? Wall Street has bought its gentle treatment through a long-term investment in Washington By Robert Weissman What if the Obama administration treated the auto industry like Wall Street? There'd be no talk of potential bankruptcy, no firing of executives, no demands to shed failing subsidiaries, no demands for honest accounting, no insistence that creditors share some of the companies' pain. And we certainly wouldn't hear about re-writing contracts, heretofore described as sacrosanct. Instead, we'd be hearing about a scheme to get private sector players "now sitting on the sidelines" to invest in absorbing the auto industry's excess capacity. We'd see the Treasury Department announcing a Public-Private Investment Plan to tap hedge funds' pools of capital and expertise to create demand for autos that GM and Chrysler could manufacture but are presently unable to sell at a satisfactory price. These excess cars would be called "legacy assets" (the euphemism for failing mortgage-related securities, more widely called "toxic"). If the plan really paralleled Treasury Secretary's Timothy Geithner's proposal for dealing with Wall Street's toxic assets, it would "incentivize" the hedge funds to buy up hundreds of thousands or millions of cars, and hold them for later sale, when the overall economy improves. The idea would be that the private investors may be willing to pay a price below the list price, but above the price at which GM and Chrysler could actually sell their excess cars right now -- a price high enough to help GM and Chrysler. What would be the incentive for the private investors to take this gamble? The government would offer to contribute $13 for every dollar contributed by the hedge funds. Thus, an investor could spend $1 billion to buy cars -- bought well below sticker price -- while paying only $71 million out of pocket. With that kind of deal, it's possible the private investors would pay enough to help GM and Chrysler. In doing so, they would be taking on enormous risk -- they would be betting that they someday could sell the cars for more than $1 billion -- but if they couldn't ? well, taxpayers would bear all of the losses except for the $71 million. Does this sound crazy? It is. The Treasury plan for the banks' toxic assets is impossibly complex, but its core feature is a massive, disguised taxpayer subsidy to Wall Street (Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University roughly estimates the giveaway component as $276 billion, based on realistic assumptions about the risks embedded in buying the assets). The Geithner plan for the banks contrasts starkly with the very tough and hard-headed approach taken by the Obama administration to the automakers. The administration's response to the automakers is deeply flawed. It should be faulted for continuing to demand still-more givebacks from unionized workers; for focusing too much on short-to-medium term results and not enough on investments in fuel efficiency and transformative technologies; and for threatening the use of bankruptcy, a move which would undermine efforts to direct the companies to major investments in R&D and sustainable technologies. These are very major problems. But the overall approach is right in asserting: If the taxpayers are going to provide tens of billions in supports, then they have the right to make demands on the beneficiaries. They should demand the firing of CEOs who drove firms into insolvency. They should demand specific plans for transformation. They should demand creditors accept some of the cost of insolvency. Why the tough love for Detroit and kid gloves for Wall Street? You can make up whatever story you like about the systemic importance of the financial sector as compared to auto manufacturing, but it is utterly uncompelling -- especially as we move out of the phase of acute crisis and into chronic economic downturn. There's just no escaping that Wall Street has bought its gentle treatment through a long-term investment in Washington, the effect of which goes far beyond any specific policy. At the Treasury Department, they understand the point of view of Wall Street -- there is a unity of culture between top officials at Treasury and Wall Street, not least because the decision makers at Treasury so often come from Wall Street. Treasury Department officials can't imagine themselves in the shoes of auto executives, let alone auto workers. The administration's plan for the auto industry is deeply flawed, but at least it has the right attitude. Quick consideration of what it would like if the government treated Detroit like Wall Street shows how ridiculous the idea is. What everyone should be asking is, What would it look like if the government treated Wall Street like Detroit? And, why isn't that happening? Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor, and director of Essential Action . (c) Robert Weissman This article is posted at: http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/corp-focus/2009/000315.html From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Apr 3 11:35:54 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2009 10:35:54 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] U.S. takes back seat as power balance shifts Message-ID: <82109185.4851971238780154770.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090403.wg20analysis03/BNStory/International/?page=rss&id=RTGAM.20090403.wg20analysis03 ? Globe and Mail ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? April 3, 2009 ? Analysis ? U.S. takes back seat as power balance shifts ? Doug Saunders ? London ? In a conference hall built atop the Blitz-scarred ruins of the east London Docklands, the leaders of the world's largest rich and poor nations huddled for a few hours yesterday and put an end to the postwar era. ? ?The old Washington consensus is over; today we have reached a new consensus,? British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who convened the summit and proposed many of its ideas, declared at its conclusion yesterday. ?I think a new world order is emerging.? ? It was no mere rhetoric. No longer, after yesterday's G20 declaration, is the world governed by the logic and structures that have defined it since the final days of the Second World War, when the similarly momentous 1944 Bretton Woods summit set up global institutions, including the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to rebuild Europe and Asia under U.S. guidance. ? ?Since Bretton Woods, the world has been living on a financial model, the Anglo-Saxon model. ? Clearly, today, a page has been turned,? French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared in a statement broadcast at the same time as Mr. Brown's. ? Significantly, U.S. President Barack Obama didn't challenge those assessments and played a major role in building a 19-nation agreement that comes very close to making them true. ? The Bretton Woods institutions, and the U.S. government's financial arms, have overseen the expanding world economy for six decades and they were at the centre of yesterday's proposals to rescue that economy from its debt-driven collapse. ? But their role, and the shape of the world, is permanently altered. Until 2009, the fundamental goal of the IMF and its sister organizations was to deregulate the world economy, to remove restrictions from finance capital. ? Under yesterday's agreement, those organizations will serve as regulators: As well as keeping the financial system working and rescuing nations from bankruptcy, the IMF and new organizations will aggressively police the worldwide credit, finance and banking systems to prevent a recurrence of the bad-credit spiral that led to the current crisis. ? In exchange, they will become far less U.S.-dominated: In exchange for substantial contributions to the fund, formerly developing countries such as China, India and Brazil will play a larger role controlling them. ? Joseph Stiglitz, the Columbia University economist who has been a leading critic of the ?Washington consensus? of freewheeling finance, described yesterday's agreement as a seismic event in financial history. ? ?It's a historic moment when the world came together and said we were wrong to push deregulation,? he said. ?It is a major step forward.? ? Yet it is not as dramatic a change as some leaders had hoped. This is not the ?new kind of capitalism? proposed by Mr. Sarkozy, a system that would feature more state ownership and protectionism than before. Nor, in the long term, is it a turn away from the successful postwar combination of liberal economics, privatization and open foreign investment. ? Instead, it is a shift from the era of unrestrained globalization into a new era of what might be called ?managed globalization.? ? The London G20 summit has changed the power relations behind globalization, probably permanently. Even if its proposals fail to arrest the deep recession, even if yesterday's proposals prove to be a mere speed bump on the road to ruin, it will be almost impossible to return to the old system. ? It was not the headline figure of $1-trillion in new credit, trade finance and fiscal assistance ? a large part of it coming from China and other non-wealthy countries ? although that news was enough to send stock markets soaring. ? Nor was it the surprisingly large sums to be spent on the world's poorest countries, an amount capable of making a huge difference to hundreds of millions of very poor people. ? The biggest difference lies in the summit itself and in the way it has been approached by the United States and its allies. The rise of the G20 as an instrument for mending the economy, and the new structure of the IMF, paves the way to a world in which the United States is no longer the necessary partner in any major economic dealings. ? The presence of the world's top ?developing? countries ? notably China, India and Brazil ? was not tokenism or ornament, as it has largely been at past summits. Those countries are now contributors, rather than recipients, of finance; without China's $50-billion commitment yesterday, the trade-finance package would not have worked. ? But something important changed yesterday. It is no longer a case of Washington bailing out the world, with the help of a small group of wealthy European nations and sometimes Canada. ? Yesterday, to an important degree, the world bailed out the United States. Mr. Brown compared it to the Marshall Plan, in which the U.S. government injected hundreds of millions into the European and Japanese economies after the war in exchange for Washington holding decisive power in most international bodies. ? Yesterday, 65 years after Bretton Woods, the favour was returned. From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Apr 3 12:40:42 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2009 11:40:42 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Pretty soon psychiatrists will be the only people qualified to report the news In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <784659025.4897271238784042954.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.ottawasun.com/News/Columnists/Harris_Michael/2009/04/03/8985241.html Ottawa Sun???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?April 3, 2009 We're good at saying nothing By Michael Harris Pretty soon psychiatrists will be the only people qualified to report the news. As the planet goes slowly insane, we were treated this week to a sorry vignette from the lunatic villas of our own country. George Galloway was finally and officially refused entry into Canada. The bureaucratic reason was that the British MP is a security threat.-What was he planning to do, kick a Mountie in the shins, sneak into a hockey game without a ticket?- The real reason is that he opposes this country's one-sided policy with respect to Palestine and the war in Afghanistan.- Galloway did have a few supporters though, including Conrad Black, who now covers the Inmate Beat for the National Post. Black wrote that although Galloway was "a magnificent absurdity" he would provide good "entertainment" value if allowed in. Now that Conrad has made such a fine contribution to the Post, readers are wondering: Are theatre reviews from Garth Drabinsky next, perhaps investment tips from Bernie Madoff? Maybe Martha Stewart could do a nice behind-the-bars feature after taking the boys some home-made cookies? While we were denying free speech to a five-times elected British MP, we were extending it to a convicted felon who renounced his Canadian citizenship before being caught with his entire body in the corporate cookie jar.And there is this little item for those who think Galloway really is a security threat. We gave security clearance and a job to a guy at one of our airports who was straight out of the Sopranos. As Auditor General Sheila Fraser pointed out, this choirboy was being investigated for a murder related to drug smuggling at a major airport! But rest easy. We would surely have weeded him out if he had planned on giving a speech. No, George was just too much of an embarrassment to Canada's shameful behaviour toward the Palestinian people. After 1,453 of them were slaughtered in Gaza by the Israeli Defence Forces, including more than 400 women and children, Canada had nothing to say about it. We had nothing to say about it when the United Nations condemned Israel for its super-violent Gaza operation, noting the verified reports of Israeli abuses were "too numerous to list." We had nothing to say when Israeli newspapers published accounts of IDF soldiers who reported that there was a "permissive" attitude toward killing civilians during the assault. As one IDF squad commander put it in the New York Times, "What I felt was, there was a lot of thirst for blood." We had nothing to say about it when the Israeli military was forced to condemn as "unacceptable" shocking images printed on T-shirts ordered by some IDF recruits to commemorate the end of basic training.- As was reported at the time, "One of them bore the image of a pregnant Arab woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, along with the slogan, '1 shot, 2 kills.'" The Israeli army condemned the practice, sort of: "This type of humour is unacceptable. Commanders are instructed to use disciplinary tools against those who produce T-shirts of this type."- Humour? As for Afghanistan, where our soldiers are dying so that certain sectors of that society may legally rape their wives, George might have had a few things to say about the kind of democracy we are spreading so sanctimoniously. I look forward to that great champion of free speech, Jason Kenney, demolishing this troublesome fellow in a public debate. Sorry. April 1 was Wednesday. From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Apr 3 12:44:21 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2009 11:44:21 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Amnesty International on American arms shipment to Israel In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1236351730.4899821238784261382.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Amnesty International USA: TAKE ACTION NOW! The U.S. government just delivered a massive new arms shipment to Israel: Grill State Department officials for answers on why the U.S. would deliver these arms to Israel after the violations in Gaza. New information obtained by Amnesty researchers this week confirmed a massive shipment of U.S. weapons was delivered to Israel on March 22 nd . The administration allowed the delivery, despite clear evidence of Israeli human rights violations, some amounting to war crimes , including the controversial use of U.S. made white phosphorous munitions over densely populated areas. That's the white phosphorous that sticks to flesh and sears it until completely deprived of oxygen. You and I need the State Department to know that they can't just plop tons of weapons into the hands of a known serious human rights violator without getting grilled. Ask State Department officials why the U.S. would deliver these arms to Israel. Last month, our researcher from Gaza came to Washington, DC and met with State Department officials to present our evidence of Israeli war crimes in Gaza. They told us during those meetings that they were concerned and would review our evidence . Refueling Israel with tons of new explosives. Label from missile used in Gaza Label on the remains of a missile that killed three paramedics and a child, Gaza, January 2009. Take Action Now The State Department has a moral and legal obligation to make sure U.S. weapons don't go to foreign forces with a record of committing gross human rights violations. So, what happened? Did they decide against overwhelming evidence that Israel's actions were completely justified and didn't violate numerous international and U.S. laws? Did they put any extra restrictions on the use of these new arms? With this new shipment just landing, we have a unique opportunity to find out exactly what happened to the State Department's review into Israel's misuse of U.S. weapons. There should be little difficulty in simply revealing the outcome of such a review. Yes we want a full embargo. But we need to be smart and push them one step at a time. Ask the State Department officials in charge of U.S. arms exports to come clean on their findings of Israel's use of U.S. weapons in Gaza. There is no way you and I can let tons of weapons land in Israel's hands with no questions asked. We've got enough supporters to actually make something happen here. Send your letter now, and we'll let you know what happens. Sincerely, Edie, Zahir, Colby, Steve and the rest of the team tracking this issue P.S. If you get any replies with information, please send them to us at sdaigneault at aiusa.org with "Arms for Israel" in the subject line. We'll be asking the same questions in person, and we'll let you know once we get some answers. Take Action Donate Blog DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE. Messages sent to this email address are not read. If you have a question or comment, please use our interactive online help system. Subscribe to our RSS feeds . Find Us On Facebook MySpace YouTube Twitter Change.org ? Copyright 2009 | Amnesty International USA | 5 Penn Plaza | New York, NY 10001 | 212.807.8400 Remove yourself from this mailing . From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Apr 3 12:52:41 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2009 11:52:41 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Stiglitz: "It's going to be bad, very bad" In-Reply-To: <507907795.4901291238784440529.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <478497284.4905121238784761577.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/04/03/stiglitz/print.html Joseph Stiglitz: "It's going to be bad, very bad" In an interview, the Nobel Prize-winner and former chief economist at the World Bank talks about the Great Depression, Obama's stimulus package and today's financial crisis. By Spiegel staff Editor's note: This article originally appeared in Der Spiegel. Apr. 03, 2009 Many people are comparing the financial crisis to the Great Depression. Will it really be that bad? It's going to be bad, very bad. We're experiencing the worst downturn since the Great Depression, and we haven't reached the bottom yet. I'm very pessimistic. Governments are indeed reacting better today than during the global economic crisis. They're lowering interest rates and boosting the economy with economic stimulus plans. This is the right direction, but it's not enough. The American government has committed over a trillion dollars to save the banks and $789 billion to boost the economy. Do you think this is too little? I do. More than $700 billion sounds like a lot, but it's not. On the one hand, a large part of the money will first be given out next year, which is too late. On the other, a third of it is drained away by tax cuts. They don't really stimulate consumption, because people will save the majority of that money. I fear that the effect of the American economic stimulus plan won't be even half as big as expected. At least governments worldwide are bracing themselves against the recession, as opposed to the global economic crisis where they accelerated the recession through their savings policy. That's right. That's why I'm confident we'll get off lighter than during the Great Depression. On the other hand, there's a series of developments that make me very anxious. The state of our financial system, for example, is worse than it was 80 years ago. Hundreds of banks collapsed in the U.S. at that time. Today most of them are being saved by the government. What's so bad about that? The banks that survived 80 years ago continued to lend money. Today many banks aren't lending money anymore, above all the large investment banks. This will deepen the crisis. The U.S. government's emergency plan is supposed to prevent this, though. The banks receive money from the state so they can continue to give loans. That's the idea, but it doesn't work. We're just throwing money at them and they pay billions of it out in bonuses and dividends. We taxpayers are being robbed for all intents and purposes in order to reduce the losses that some wealthy people bear. This has to be changed. What do you suggest? We have to reorganize our bailout system for the financial sector. For one thing, any bank that actually lends should get money from the government; more money to small and medium-size banks in smaller towns and less to Wall Street institutions. The government must also accept the consequences when banks become insolvent ... ? and let them go bankrupt? No, they have to be saved, because the consequences to the monetary system would be incalculable. But as a countermeasure, these institutions have to be nationalized, which even Alan Greenspan is now demanding. Then the government can close those business segments that have nothing to do with lending and make sure that the banks no longer organize esoteric stock deals that they themselves do not understand. Today the world is much more intertwined than in the 1920s or 1930s. Does this make the fight against the economic crisis easier? On the contrary, it's going to be more difficult. When a country introduces an economic stimulus plan, a large part of the stimulus goes abroad. For instance, a U.S. company receiving a road construction order from the state buys equipment from Germany, concrete from Mexico and engineering services from Great Britain. The incentive to profit from the economic situation of one's neighbor is correspondingly great, while doing as little as you yourself can do. There is only one solution for this: Economic stabilization policy has to be coordinated internationally in order to diminish the already dangerous global imbalances. What do you mean by that? For years the U.S. was the economic powerhouse of the world. It imported more goods from abroad than it exported, to the joy of manufacturers in Asia or Europe. But this model no longer works. The Americans are completely over-indebted. They can't increase their consumption, instead they have to save. This is why other global growth has to be increased. Washington sees it that way, too. In particular, it wants countries with strong exports to offer further economic stimulus packages. Do you think that's justified? Absolutely. Export surpluses are counterproductive in times of economic crisis. They have to be reduced through economic stimulus programs, for example. Economist John Maynard Keynes was even of the opinion that surplus countries should be taxed during times of economic crisis. Which might not go over so well. That's why we wouldn't go that far. I propose that countries with a positive trade balance should stream part of their surplus to the International Monetary Fund. This can then stimulate the economy in developing countries or prevent the economy from collapsing in Eastern Europe. The global economic crisis following 1929 only really began when governments sealed off their respective countries from international trade. Is there still a danger of this? I think it's unlikely that countries will again enter into open protectionism. What I do fear is indirect insulation measures like financial aid or subsidies. The consequences wouldn't be less serious. There is the threat of secret commercial obstacles that could similarly greatly restrain global exchange, like tariff increases. The leaders of the 20 largest industrial nations are meeting in London this week to discuss the regulation of financial markets. Will the meeting be successful? I'm skeptical. The American government does talk a lot about stricter regulation of financial markets. I doubt that it's serious, though. The Americans have always been masters at changing a supposed regulation measure into further deregulation. Do you expect this of the new Obama administration as well? Obama himself has made clear in many speeches that he wants to prevent prospecting in the American financial industry. But Obama is under pressure from Wall Street. Even within his own administration, there are a lot of officials who are only for cosmetic corrections. The U.S. is against too much regulation in the financial markets, and Germany and Japan would prefer no further economic stimulus packages. Can much come out of the G20 summit? The governments will find the words to put a positive spin on the conference. If they can do anything, they can do that. Everyone will say that more regulation is necessary and that balance is needed between national sovereignty and common action in a globalized world. But how much substance will lie behind their words? I'm skeptical. The economic crisis has severely damaged the economic model of finance-driven turbo-capitalism. Will this lead to a renaissance in the state economy? I don't think so. The fall of the Berlin Wall really was a strong message that communism does not work as an economic system. The collapse of Lehman Brothers on Sept. 15 again showed that unbridled capitalism doesn't work either. Could authoritarian systems like China's be the future? Besides the two extremes of communism and capitalism, there are alternatives, such as Scandinavia or Germany. The Chinese model has succeeded very well for their people, but at the price of democratic rights. The German social model, however, has worked very well. It could also be a model for the U.S. administration. The crisis began in America, spread to other industrialized nations and now threatens the emerging and developing countries. Is the target of the community of states to halve global poverty by 2015 still achievable? Because we don't know how long this crisis will last, it will become more difficult to keep to this promise. I'm also pessimistic, for example, now that the USA is discussing whether we can still afford development aid during the crisis. But there are countries like Japan and Germany that have raised their contributions to the IMF and World Bank to help the Third World. Will Africa be the big loser in the crisis? I'm fearful of that, because even the high growth of 6 percent in Africa in the last few years hasn't been enough to permanently fight poverty. A lot of the countries on the continent which inherited a low standard of education, and no infrastructure from colonialism, have solely focused on increasing commodity prices. That was a risky strategy. The IMF's structural development policies also contributed to deindustrialization. We haven't managed to create a stable foundation for the African economies. World Bank president Robert Zoellick has said that the industrialized nations should direct 0.7 percent of their stimulus packages to the developing countries. That's too little. Take the U.S. example. Each country would receive around $5.5 billion per year from $789 billion. It's a lot more than nothing, but only a drop when compared to what the countries require, namely up to $700 billion in this year alone. Mr. Stiglitz, thank you for this interview. From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Apr 3 13:00:28 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2009 12:00:28 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Obama's Ersatz Capitalism Message-ID: <168856322.4910271238785228684.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/opinion/01stiglitz.html?pagewanted=1&th&emc=th ? New York Times ? ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? March 31, 2009 ? Obama's Ersatz Capitalism ? "What the Obama administration is doing is far worse than nationalization: ? It is ersatz capitalism, the privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. It is a ?partnership? in which one partner robs the other. And such partnerships - with the private sector in control - have perverse incentives, worse even than the ones that got us into the mess." ? By Joseph E. Stiglitz ? The Obama administration's $500 billion or more proposal to deal with America's ailing banks has been described by some in the financial markets as a win-win-win proposal. Actually, it is a win-win-lose proposal: the banks win, investors win - and taxpayers lose. ? Treasury hopes to get us out of the mess by replicating the flawed system that the private sector used to bring the world crashing down, with a proposal marked by overleveraging in the public sector, excessive complexity, poor incentives and a lack of transparency. ? Let's take a moment to remember what caused this mess in the first place. Banks got themselves, and our economy, into trouble by overleveraging - that is, using relatively little capital of their own, they borrowed heavily to buy extremely risky real estate assets. In the process, they used overly complex instruments like collateralized debt obligations. ? The prospect of high compensation gave managers incentives to be shortsighted and undertake excessive risk, rather than lend money prudently. Banks made all these mistakes without anyone knowing, partly because so much of what they were doing was "off balance sheet" financing. ? In theory, the administration's plan is based on letting the market determine the prices of the banks' "toxic assets" - including outstanding house loans and securities based on those loans. The reality, though, is that the market will not be pricing the toxic assets themselves, but options on those assets. ? The two have little to do with each other. The government plan in effect involves insuring almost all losses. Since the private investors are spared most losses, then they primarily "value" their potential gains. This is exactly the same as being given an option. ? Consider an asset that has a 50-50 chance of being worth either zero or $200 in a year's time. The average "value" of the asset is $100. Ignoring interest, this is what the asset would sell for in a competitive market. It is what the asset is "worth." Under the plan by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the government would provide about 92 percent of the money to buy the asset but would stand to receive only 50 percent of any gains, and would absorb almost all of the losses. Some partnership! ? Assume that one of the public-private partnerships the Treasury has promised to create is willing to pay $150 for the asset. That's 50 percent more than its true value, and the bank is more than happy to sell. So the private partner puts up $12, and the government supplies the rest - $12 in "equity" plus $126 in the form of a guaranteed loan. ? If, in a year's time, it turns out that the true value of the asset is zero, the private partner loses the $12, and the government loses $138. If the true value is $200, the government and the private partner split the $74 that's left over after paying back the $126 loan. In that rosy scenario, the private partner more than triples his $12 investment. But the taxpayer, having risked $138, gains a mere $37. ? Even in an imperfect market, one shouldn't confuse the value of an asset with the value of the upside option on that asset. ? But Americans are likely to lose even more than these calculations suggest, because of an effect called adverse selection. The banks get to choose the loans and securities that they want to sell. They will want to sell the worst assets, and especially the assets that they think the market overestimates (and thus is willing to pay too much for). ? But the market is likely to recognize this, which will drive down the price that it is willing to pay. Only the government's picking up enough of the losses overcomes this "adverse selection" effect. With the government absorbing the losses, the market doesn't care if the banks are "cheating" them by selling their lousiest assets, because the government bears the cost. ? The main problem is not a lack of liquidity. If it were, then a far simpler program would work: just provide the funds without loan guarantees. The real issue is that the banks made bad loans in a bubble and were highly leveraged. They have lost their capital, and this capital has to be replaced. ? Paying fair market values for the assets will not work. Only by overpaying for the assets will the banks be adequately recapitalized. But overpaying for the assets simply shifts the losses to the government. In other words, the Geithner plan works only if and when the taxpayer loses big time. ? Some Americans are afraid that the government might temporarily ?"nationalize" the banks, but that option would be preferable to the Geithner plan. After all, the F.D.I.C. has taken control of failing banks before, and done it well. It has even nationalized large institutions like Continental Illinois (taken over in 1984, back in private hands a few years later), and Washington Mutual (seized last September , and immediately resold). ? What the Obama administration is doing is far worse than nationalization: it is ersatz capitalism, the privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. It is a "partnership" in which one partner robs the other. And such partnerships - with the private sector in control - have perverse incentives, worse even than the ones that got us into the mess. ? So what is the appeal of a proposal like this? Perhaps it's the kind of Rube Goldberg device that Wall Street loves - clever, complex and nontransparent, allowing huge transfers of wealth to the financial markets. It has allowed the administration to avoid going back to Congress to ask for the money needed to fix our banks, and it provided a way to avoid nationalization. ? But we are already suffering from a crisis of confidence. When the high costs of the administration's plan become apparent, confidence will be eroded further. At that point the task of recreating a vibrant financial sector, and resuscitating the economy, will be even harder. From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Apr 3 13:11:13 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2009 12:11:13 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Can G20 avert the crisis? Message-ID: <383862827.4916291238785873697.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=3521&updaterx=2009-04-03+10%3A07%3A13 ? The Real News ????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? April 3, 2009 ? Can G20 avert the crisis? ? Leo Panitch: G20 trying to patch up the 'old world order' From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Apr 3 13:13:41 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2009 12:13:41 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Nomination of Goldman Vet Sparks Conflict On Hill Message-ID: <1050581051.4917281238786021851.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=3523&updaterx=2009-04-03+01%3A48%3A22 ? The Real News ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? April 3, 2009 ? Nomination of Goldman Vet Sparks Conflict On Hill ? Obama's plan to name another Goldman Sachs alum to his economic team proving too much for Sen. Sanders ? From fentona at shaw.ca Fri Apr 3 14:50:33 2009 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2009 13:50:33 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Canada-Russia in context Message-ID: New chill in an old war: Canada-Russia in context by Yves Engler www.rabble.ca/news/new-chill-old-war-canada-russia-context At the end of February Stephen Harper referred to Russia as "aggressive." In a throwback to the Cold War, two weeks ago Defense Minister Peter MacKay added that Ottawa will respond to Russian flights in the Arctic by flying Canadian fighter jets near Russian airspace. Recent declarations from the Harper government are the latest installment in a 90-year-old struggle with Russia that should be opposed by most Canadians. Since the end of the Cold War Ottawa has actively pushed against Russian influence in Eastern Europe. Federal government documents uncovered by Canwest in July 2007 explained that Ottawa was trying to be "a visible and effective partner of the United States in Russia, Ukraine and zones of instability in Eastern Europe." During a July 2007 visit to the Ukraine, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay said Canada would help provide a "counterbalance" to Russia. "There are outside pressures [on Ukraine], from Russia most notably. ... We want to make sure they feel the support that is there for them in the international community." As part of Canada's "counterbalance" to Russia MacKay announced $16 million in aid to support democratic reform in the Ukraine. Support for the Ukrainian government follows on the heels of Canada's role in the western-backed, "colour" revolutions in Eastern Europe, which were largely aimed at weakening Russian influence in the region. An in-depth Globe and Mail article headlined "Agent Orange: Our secret role in Ukraine," detailed some of the ways Canada intervened in the 2004-2005 Ukranian elections. "Beginning in January 2004 -- soon after the success of the Rose Revolution in Georgia, he [Canadian ambassador to the Ukraine, Andrew Robinson] began to organize secret monthly meetings of western ambassadors, presiding over what he called 'donor coordination' sessions among 20 countries interested in seeing Mr.[presidential candidate Viktor] Yushchenko succeed. Eventually, he acted as the group's spokesman and became a prominent critic of the Kuchma government's heavy handed media control. Canada also invested in a controversial exit poll, carried out on election day by Ukraine's Razumkov Centre and other groups that contradicted the official results showing Mr. Yanukovich [winning]." The Canadian embassy gave $30,000 US to Pora, a leading civil society group active in the Orange Revolution. In total Ottawa spent half a million dollars promoting "fair elections" in the Ukraine. The ambassador promised the Ukraine's lead electoral commissioner a passport (Canadian citizenship) if he did "the right thing." The embassy also paid for 500 election observers from Canada, the largest official delegation from any country (another 500 Ukranian-Canadians came independently). Many of these election observers were far from impartial, according to the Globe. The first Eastern European "colour" revolution took place in Serbia just over a year after NATO's 78-day bombing campaign. During NATO's illegal bombing of Serbia in 1999, 18 Canadian CF-18 jets dropped 530 bombs in 682 sorties -- approximately 10 per cent of NATO's air operations. "One goal of the war against Yugoslavia," noted Tariq Ali, "was to expand NATO to the very frontiers of the former Soviet Union. And that is what they did. The actual needs of the populations in that region were a secondary matter." -------------- next part -------------- Bombing Serbia, which deepened Kosovo's separation from that country, was the final blow to multiethnic Yugoslavia. The former Yugoslavia's division into ethnic states was attractive to NATO because it diminished Russian influence in the Mediterranean. Through its diplomacy and peacekeeping Canada spurred Yugoslavia's breakup in the 90s. During the Cold War, however, Ottawa took a different tack. At a time when Russia was relatively strong, Canada got close to Yugoslavia as a way to pry it away from the Soviet led Warsaw Pact. Established in 1955 the Warsaw Pact was a response to NATO, which some believe was a Canadian idea. At the U.N. General Assembly in September 1947 External Affairs Minister Louis St. Laurent warned the floor that if the Security Council's veto crisis was not resolved countries would establish a NATO-type organization. Canada, along with Britain and the U.S., was part of initial NATO discussions in March 1948 and at the start of 2007, well-known military analyst J. L. Granatstein wrote that NATO is "the alliance to which Canada had devoted perhaps 90 per cent of its military effort since 1949." Reflected in Ottawa's support for NATO, immediately after World War II Canadian officials spouted Cold War hysteria despite reports from our ambassador in Moscow that the Soviet elite desired peace with Washington and London. Begun during World War II the Canadian Psychological Warfare Committee continued to operate throughout the Cold War. It beamed Canadian propaganda (through the CBC International Service) to the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries. According to former Canadian ambassador to Czechoslovakia and Poland and CBC-IS founder, Jack McCordick, the aim of CBC-IS was "to engage in psychological warfare against the communist regimes." Canada has not only participated in psychological warfare against Russia. Six thousand Canadian troops invaded Russia after the Bolsheviks rose to power in 1917. The war against the Bolsheviks was initially justified as a way to reopen World War I's Eastern Front (the Bolsheviks signed a peace treaty with Germany). Canadian troops, however, stayed after World War One ended. In fact, 2,700 Canadian troops arrived in the eastern city of Vladivostok on January 5, 1919, two months after the war's conclusion. Ninety years ago most working-class Canadian organizations opposed the invasion, arguing that Ottawa acted on behalf of the elite. Unfortunately, the situation has not changed much. Harper's saber rattling does not benefit ordinary Canadians, average Russians or even the real victims of Russian policy in places like Chechnya. Instead, the Harper government's belligerence strengthens the hand of those in Russia and around the world who promote a geo-strategic worldview where the objective is to maximize state power. In this scenario, the interests of common people are set aside in the name of the great game. Yves Engler is the author of the forthcoming The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy. To help organize a talk as part of a book tour in May or June, please e-mail yvesengler[at]hotmail[dot]com. From suzannedk at gmail.com Fri Apr 3 15:01:48 2009 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2009 23:01:48 +0200 Subject: [R-G] U.S. takes back seat as power balance shifts In-Reply-To: <82109185.4851971238780154770.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> References: <82109185.4851971238780154770.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: Maybe not! The assumptions the positive article are based are that that the financial meltdowns world wide are a collective accident. Maybe not. Time will tell, or, has told while, in shock, we were not listening. Suzanne On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 7:35 PM, Sid Shniad wrote: > > > > http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090403.wg20analysis03/BNStory/International/?page=rss&id=RTGAM.20090403.wg20analysis03 > > > > > > > > Globe and Mail > > April 3, 2009 > > > > > > > > Analysis > > > > > > > > U.S. takes back seat as power balance shifts > > > > > > > > Doug Saunders > > > > > > > > London ? In a conference hall built atop the Blitz-scarred ruins of the > east London Docklands, the leaders of the world's largest rich and poor > nations huddled for a few hours yesterday and put an end to the postwar era. > > > > > > > > ?The old Washington consensus is over; today we have reached a new > consensus,? British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who convened the summit and > proposed many of its ideas, declared at its conclusion yesterday. ?I think a > new world order is emerging.? > > > > > > > > It was no mere rhetoric. No longer, after yesterday's G20 declaration, is > the world governed by the logic and structures that have defined it since > the final days of the Second World War, when the similarly momentous 1944 > Bretton Woods summit set up global institutions, including the International > Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to rebuild Europe and Asia under U.S. > guidance. > > > > > > > > ?Since Bretton Woods, the world has been living on a financial model, the > Anglo-Saxon model. ? Clearly, today, a page has been turned,? French > President Nicolas Sarkozy declared in a statement broadcast at the same time > as Mr. Brown's. > > > > > > > > Significantly, U.S. President Barack Obama didn't challenge those > assessments and played a major role in building a 19-nation agreement that > comes very close to making them true. > > > > > > > > The Bretton Woods institutions, and the U.S. government's financial arms, > have overseen the expanding world economy for six decades and they were at > the centre of yesterday's proposals to rescue that economy from its > debt-driven collapse. > > > > > > > > But their role, and the shape of the world, is permanently altered. Until > 2009, the fundamental goal of the IMF and its sister organizations was to > deregulate the world economy, to remove restrictions from finance capital. > > > > > > > > Under yesterday's agreement, those organizations will serve as regulators: > As well as keeping the financial system working and rescuing nations from > bankruptcy, the IMF and new organizations will aggressively police the > worldwide credit, finance and banking systems to prevent a recurrence of the > bad-credit spiral that led to the current crisis. > > > > > > > > In exchange, they will become far less U.S.-dominated: In exchange for > substantial contributions to the fund, formerly developing countries such as > China, India and Brazil will play a larger role controlling them. > > > > > > > > Joseph Stiglitz, the Columbia University economist who has been a leading > critic of the ?Washington consensus? of freewheeling finance, described > yesterday's agreement as a seismic event in financial history. > > > > > > > > ?It's a historic moment when the world came together and said we were wrong > to push deregulation,? he said. ?It is a major step forward.? > > > > > > > > Yet it is not as dramatic a change as some leaders had hoped. This is not > the ?new kind of capitalism? proposed by Mr. Sarkozy, a system that would > feature more state ownership and protectionism than before. Nor, in the long > term, is it a turn away from the successful postwar combination of liberal > economics, privatization and open foreign investment. > > > > > > > > Instead, it is a shift from the era of unrestrained globalization into a > new era of what might be called ?managed globalization.? > > > > > > > > The London G20 summit has changed the power relations behind globalization, > probably permanently. Even if its proposals fail to arrest the deep > recession, even if yesterday's proposals prove to be a mere speed bump on > the road to ruin, it will be almost impossible to return to the old system. > > > > > > > > It was not the headline figure of $1-trillion in new credit, trade finance > and fiscal assistance ? a large part of it coming from China and other > non-wealthy countries ? although that news was enough to send stock markets > soaring. > > > > > > > > Nor was it the surprisingly large sums to be spent on the world's poorest > countries, an amount capable of making a huge difference to hundreds of > millions of very poor people. > > > > > > > > The biggest difference lies in the summit itself and in the way it has been > approached by the United States and its allies. The rise of the G20 as an > instrument for mending the economy, and the new structure of the IMF, paves > the way to a world in which the United States is no longer the necessary > partner in any major economic dealings. > > > > > > > > The presence of the world's top ?developing? countries ? notably China, > India and Brazil ? was not tokenism or ornament, as it has largely been at > past summits. Those countries are now contributors, rather than recipients, > of finance; without China's $50-billion commitment yesterday, the > trade-finance package would not have worked. > > > > > > > > But something important changed yesterday. It is no longer a case of > Washington bailing out the world, with the help of a small group of wealthy > European nations and sometimes Canada. > > > > > > > > Yesterday, to an important degree, the world bailed out the United States. > Mr. Brown compared it to the Marshall Plan, in which the U.S. government > injected hundreds of millions into the European and Japanese economies after > the war in exchange for Washington holding decisive power in most > international bodies. > > > > > > > > Yesterday, 65 years after Bretton Woods, the favour was returned. > > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Fri Apr 3 18:23:26 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Sat, 04 Apr 2009 09:23:26 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] China's Calculated Currency Rhetoric Message-ID: <49D6A87E.9060900@ashisuto.co.jp> by Stratfor (March 25 2009) One of the more popular conventional wisdoms is that the United States is in decline and that it is a simple matter to select options that will edge the United States out of its dominant position in the world. In an editorial published Tuesday, Chinese central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan spoke to one of the more popular financial conspiracy theories in this vein when he wrote that the time had come to establish a new scrip to replace the US dollar as the global reserve currency. The issue is close to Beijing?s heart: The Chinese reserve fund is a significant holder of US debt, with some $750 billion in US Treasury bills. China does not purchase US debt out of choice, but out of a lack of choice. China is a state with serious social stability issues that are mitigated only by state intervention in the economic structure to maintain mass employment. Since there isn?t much internal demand for the goods these employed masses produce - due in part to a high savings rate and low incomes - China must peddle its goods abroad. The US consumer market, with annual sales of approximately $10 trillion, is roughly equivalent in bulk to the next six consumer markets combined. Sales to the United States and other countries hardwired into the American supply chain - which includes the bulk of East Asia - are the only reasonable option. And so the Chinese yuan has a de facto peg to the US dollar. That is hardly the extent to which the Chinese are bound to the dollar, however. Because China lacks the financial and industrial infrastructure needed to metabolize the massive revenues generated by exports, the income must be stored in some sort of non-Chinese asset. Outstanding US Treasury bills currently total $11 trillion, which - with the notable exception of Japanese government debt, which very few foreigners even touch - is greater than the next five government debt issues combined, by a ratio of two to one. US debt outsizes combined euro-denominated government debt by more than three to one. Corporate debt isn?t much of an option either, even though the combined global corporate debt market is sufficiently large to absorb China?s currency reserves. Whenever an investor holds a substantial portion of any company?s debt, market liquidity is constrained and trading dynamics are altered. The solution is a highly diversified - and therefore actively managed - portfolio. But the administrative cost of a trillion-dollar portfolio so diversified that it does not affect the value of any particular asset would be staggering. In contrast, US government debt is a one-stop shop that requires - at most - minimal management. That China?s income is primarily in either dollars or dollar-linked currencies only strengthens the rationale for pouring surplus income into American assets in general, and US government debt in particular. Plainly put, China cannot put its income anywhere else because there is no other option available. There have been some mild attempts to diversify, but a dearth of options means that "mild" is about as dynamic as a diversification program for China can get. As to a world beyond the dollar, the issue is that a reserve currency is not decided upon; it creates itself. Two things are needed to create a reserve currency. First, there must be sufficient liquidity to support a global system. That requires a central bank with an enormous amount of autonomy from a state government, and the US Federal Reserve is unparalleled on this count. Not even the European Central Bank can compete. Second, the economy upon which the currency is based must be large enough to withstand fluctuations caused by other economies buying and selling its assets in massive amounts. Again, the United States is the only economy that potentially could qualify. Part and parcel of any replacement of the US dollar would be a large-scale abandonment of US Treasury bills as the core of Chinese currency reserves, which - as the conventional wisdom holds - would force intractable economic problems upon the United States. But a closer look reveals that this is not the case. First, selling US Treasury bills en masse simply is not possible. Every seller requires a buyer, and the volumes at hand cannot be exchanged quickly. Second, starting down that road would cause the value of the securities in question to plummet, destroying the savings the Chinese have been building up for years. The so-called "nuclear option" really is not an option at all. So why are the Chinese bringing this up in the first place? Beijing clearly has done the math already and knows that this idea - even if it had broad support - is a nonstarter. There are two reasons. First, officials in Beijing know that any direct confrontation - whether military or financial - with the United States would end in disaster for Chinese national interests. Therefore, they wants to foster anything they can that would create an international structure to restrain American power; failing that, something that just gets people thinking in that direction will have to do. Second, China is more severely affected by the ongoing financial crisis than it would like the world to register. The Chinese need sustained international demand to maintain their export industries and, consequently, their high employment levels. Espousing rhetoric that makes it appear that you have more options than you do, while redirecting attention toward a foreign power, always plays well at home. A Stratfor Intelligence Report. http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2009/03/chinas_calculated_currency_rhe.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Sat Apr 4 01:07:31 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Sat, 04 Apr 2009 16:07:31 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Facing Decline, Facing Ourselves Message-ID: <49D70733.50606@ashisuto.co.jp> by John Michael Greer The Archdruid Report (April 01 2009) Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society Of all the fallacies that surround the contemporary crisis of industrial civilization, and have done so much to bring that crisis down on us, the most seductive is the assumption that it's a technical problem that can be solved by technical means. That's an easy assumption to make, for a variety of reasons, but it puts us in the situation of the drunkard in the old joke who looks for his keys under the streetlight half a block from the dark sidewalk where he dropped them, since under the streetlight he can at least see what he's doing. The technical aspects of our predicament, though challenging, are the least of our worries; it's the other aspects that have proven intractable. Consider the project of cutting US per capita energy consumption to a third of its present level. Given that the average European uses a third as much energy each year as the average American, and in many ways gets a better standard of living out of it, this is far from impossible; a great deal of the technology is sitting on the shelf only one continent away, in effect, and simply needs to be put to work. Now of course such a project would require a great deal of investment in railways, mass transit, urban redevelopment, and the like, but what's been spent on recent military adventures in the Middle East would cover much of it - and let's not even talk about what could be done with the funds being wasted right now to prop up Wall Street banks looted by their own executives in the final blowoff of an epoch of corporate kleptocracy. The return on the investment needed to cut our energy use to European levels, in turn, would be immense. Since the US still produces more than a third of the oil it uses, to name only one result, we would no longer be sending billions of dollars a year to line the pockets of Middle Eastern despots; we'd be a net exporter of oil - even, quite conceivably, a member of OPEC. So why isn't so sensible a project being debated right now in the halls of Congress? Why, more broadly, has energy conservation through lifestyle change - arguably the single easiest and most cost effective option we have on hand in dealing with the end of the age of cheap oil - been entirely off the political and cultural radar screens since the end of the 1970s, so much so that most of those who have noticed that we're running out of cheap abundant energy have framed the issue entirely in terms of finding some technical gimmick that will let us keep on living the way we live now? This is where the technical dimension of our predicament gives way to a region where the forces that matter are not the cut-and-dried facts of physics and engineering, but murkier factors - political, cultural, psychological, and (let's whisper the word) spiritual - and what's theoretically possible matters a great deal less than what's culturally and emotionally acceptable. Most writers on peak oil, though not all, have tended to shy away from this unsettled and unsettling territory. This is quite understandable; industrial culture privileges technical knowledge and rewards those who can (or say they can) make the machinery of our daily life purr more smoothly and profitably, and shuts its ears against those who ask questions about the purposes the machines serve and the emotional drives that make those purposes seem to make sense. Still, this leaves us scrabbling around with the drunkard under the streetlight, searching for keys that are lying in the dark half a block away. It's for this reason, among others, that I was pleased to get a copy of Carolyn Baker's new book, Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization's Collapse (2009). Those of my readers who are familiar with Baker's blog and mine will probably be able to imagine, if they don't happen to have followed, some of the lively disagreements we've had, and it will doubtless come as no surprise that some of the arguments made in Sacred Demise seem problematic to me. Still, those issues of detail are less important than what Baker has tried, with quite some success, to accomplish with this book. What Sacred Demise represents is the first really sustained effort to pull the debate over the future of industrial civilization out of the comfortable realm of technical questions, and force it to confront the deeper and fundamentally nonrational factors that have done so much to keep effective solutions out of reach. The title of the book may need some explanation, because Sacred Demise deals at least as much with psychology as with religion. Admittedly the line between these two has become blurred in recent years; as the modern West has redefined religion wholly in terms of personal relationships with the transcendent, and made its collective aspects increasingly hard to sustain, psychology has come to play the role in modern religious movements that theology still plays in their more traditional sisters. While this shift has had its share of dubious results, it has allowed some crucial religious themes - the imminence of death, the quest for meaning in human existence, and the challenge both these level at individuals and societies alike, among others - to remain live issues in a passionately secular age. These themes, in turn, frame Baker's approach. She argues that we are long past the point at which the unraveling of the industrial age can be prevented, and our options at this point are limited to facing the difficult future ahead of us, on the one hand, or pretending it isn't there until it overwhelms us, on the other. She dissects the logic of those who only want to hear about solutions, tracing it back into its deep roots in the fear of death and the attempt to cling to familiar patterns of meaning even when those no longer make sense of our experience, and she tackles the awkward but necessary issues all of us have to confront as decline and fall sets in: the need to mourn, to confront the reality of death, to find new narratives to make sense of a rapidly changing world. . For Baker, then, the core task of our time is not how to prevent collapse; decades of mishandled opportunities have put that hope out of reach. Nor does she embrace the futile strategy of trying to hide out in survivalist enclaves until the rubble stops bouncing. Instead, she calls us to face collapse squarely and personally, as a reality that is already shaping our lives, and will do so ever more forcefully in the years to come. Facing collapse, in turn, requires us to deal with the whole realm of personal baggage we each bring to the experience of decline and fall. That's a crucial issue, for the unstated psychological and religious subtexts of the crisis of industrial civilization have played a huge role in confusing the already complex issues facing the world just now. Thus it's vital to realize, when somebody insists that technological progress will inevitably lead our species to immortality among the stars, or when somebody else insists that contemporary civilization has become the ultimate incarnation of everything evil and will shortly be destroyed so that the righteous remnant can inhabit a perfect world, that what they're saying has very little to do with the facts on the ground. Rather, these are statements of religious belief that coat mythic themes millennia old in a single coat of secular spraypaint. If, dear reader, one or the other of these is your religion, that's fine - you have as much right to your faith as I have to mine - but please, for the love of Darwin, could you at least admit that it's a religious belief, an act of faith in a particular constellation of numinous experience, rather than a self-evident truth that any sane and moral person must automatically accept? This last point, I have to admit, goes a little beyond what Baker has to say, and in fact my central criticism of Sacred Demise is precisely that it doesn't quite manage to apply its sharpest insights to Baker's own point of view. That view is perilously close to the latter of the religious viewpoints mentioned above; for Baker, the diverse and morally complex reality of the industrial world is flattened into a single vast and terrible abstraction labeled by turns Civilization and Empire, the exact equivalent of Babylon and the kingdom of Satan in her historical mythology. Psychologically, this might best be described in Jungian terms as a bad case of projecting the shadow; in religious terms, it represents a drastic confusion between the realms of being, mistakenly mapping one of the great themes of myth and religious vision onto the messy and prosaic realities of everyday existence. For all that, Sacred Demise is a crucially important book. It is not the last word on the subject, nor do I think Baker would want it to be; rather, it's the first word in a conversation that we desperately need to start, as the high notes of economic crisis mingle with the basso-profundo of declining energy reserves, pushing us further and further away from the world of business-as-usual fantasy we have tried to inhabit for the last quarter century. We need to start talking about how we can hold onto our humanity in bitter times; about how we can find reasons for hope and sources of necessary joy as so many of our former certainties crumble to dust; about what stories we can use to bring meaning to the world when so many of our familiar meanings no longer make sense of anything. In order to face the realities of decline, in other words, we have to face ourselves, and Baker's book is a significant contribution to that vital task. _____ ?John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books, including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age" (2008). He lives in Ashland, Oregon. http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/04/facing-decline-facing-ourselves.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From realiteee1 at yahoo.com Sat Apr 4 01:14:57 2009 From: realiteee1 at yahoo.com (james m nordlund) Date: Sat, 4 Apr 2009 00:14:57 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Sentencing Project Acts: Crack Disparity News: Advocacy Mth; etc.. Message-ID: <859344.67459.qm@web111509.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> The Sentencing Project: Fundraising Page?? :) Put your shadow behind you, give the gift that keeps on giving, a hand to a sister and/or brother, Started by james m nordlund?? :) http://www.change.org/the_sentencing_project/projects/fundraising/put_your_shadow_behind_you_give_the_gift_that_keeps_on_giving_a_hand_to_a_sister_andor_brother_4 ? These Actions, on Change.org, the url??? :) Sentencing Project Acts?? :) http://criminaljustice.change.org/actions/view/sentencing_project_acts ? Crack the Disparity Newsletter: Month of Advocacy CRACK THE DISPARITY NEWSLETTER Volume 1, No. 4, Spring 2009, In This Issue Crack the Disparity Month of Advocacy Kicks Off Hearing from the Folks Back Home - April In-District Meeting Crack Cocaine and Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparity Talking Points Cheatsheets for Writing Your Members of Congress and Newspaper Editors Save the Date Media Momentum ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Feature Story: Now That He's Released, Lawrence Garrison's First Priority is Reform By Zerline Hughes Lawrence Garrison is home. After spending more than 10 years of a 15-year crack cocaine sentence, Garrison is rebuilding his life in his hometown of Washington, DC. Despite being released from prison a few years early as a result of the United States Sentencing Commission's retroactive guideline amendment implemented last year, Garrison isn't yet at peace. His twin brother, Lamont, is still incarcerated - and has about nine more years to go. "It didn't hit me until I went to the bus station that I was released - unsupervised," recalled Garrison. "The only thing I could think about was my twin. He was supposed to be with me. We walked in together; we should have walked out together." The brothers - who continue to maintain their innocence - were separately convicted of conspiracy to distribute powder and crack cocaine just a few months after having graduated from Howard University. They were charged with conspiracy as part of a 20-person powder and crack cocaine operation, implicated by a target of the investigation, the owner of a Maryland auto body shop who received a reduced 36-month prison sentence in exchange for information. Although no drugs, paraphernalia or drug money were found in the Garrison's home, or on their person, they were subject to the harsh, mandatory minimum sentence that crack cocaine offenses deliver. For the first time, the Garrison twins were separated in 1998 - by unfair, draconian sentencing. Lawrence served his sentence in Elkton, Ohio, while his brother remains at a prison in Manchester, Kentucky. Lawrence Garrison returned to Washington in January and resides with his mother and great uncle. He clearly remembers his first family meal upon returning: a salad, with broccoli, cheese, ranch dressing, and a slice of cheesecake which he shared with his grandmother and mother, Karen Garrison, who also is an active advocate for sentencing reform and works for Families Against Mandatory Minimums. He's currently living with his mother in the home he and his brother were raised in together, which keeps him motivated to continue to advocate on behalf of his brother and others like him. "We're contemplating a commutation for my brother," said Garrison who celebrates his 36th birthday this month. "I've been on the Hill a couple of times. Everywhere I speak, every organization I speak to, I advocate for my brother. The same way my mom has for the last 10 1/2 years." Garrison is grateful to be able to speak to his twin on the phone - a luxury he was not permitted while incarcerated. He also appreciates what he calls "those little things," like being treated with respect and "not hearing keys jingle and doors being locked behind me." Click here to read more [ http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102536987633&s=12636&e=001p-FLYaOcqmo8uD3Bmx0KpoTf26MXobqZ1XcMfsmv_MX4M8s5HxeYPEbviS0IrQT-bc_iu0n82kjoG78OWP-OEg9VPWGwmA0X1YJu7DESHVlgvjNII6NjevfUzCVtREjZshM0SBtpLhA= ]. [ http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102536987633&s=12636&e=001p-FLYaOcqmo8uD3Bmx0KpoTf26MXobqZ1XcMfsmv_MX4M8s5HxeYPEbviS0IrQT-bc_iu0n82kjoG78OWP-OEg9VPWGwmA0X1YJu7DESHVlgvjNII6NjevfUzCVtREjZshM0SBtpLhA= ] Crack the Disparity Coalition Takes Message to Hill Two defendants appear before a federal judge on drug charges.One is charged with possession of five grams of crack cocaine; theother is charged with trafficking 500 grams of powder cocaine. Neither person has any prior convictions.Who gets the longer sentence, the crack cocaine addict or the powder cocaine trafficker? The most likely answer is that both will get the same mandatory five-year sentence, despite the fact that the cocaine seller had 100 times more cocaine than the crack cocaine user. This question was posed to staffers during a legislative lunch briefing on crack cocaine sentencing in March. Panelists Kara Gotsch of The Sentencing Project, Hilary Shelton of the NAACP, Jasmine Tyler of the Drug Policy Alliance, and Bruce Nicholson of the American Bar Association participated. Moderated by Nkechi Taifa of the Open Society Policy Center, panelists discussed the history and impact of this lopsided law, dispelled unsupported myths, and described current legislative initiatives. www.CrackTheDisparity.com [ http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102536987633&s=12636&e=001p-FLYaOcqmopyhVs4jzu-14qhlVOLVRpsLHlTA0Sd3dFG3stvhkI4v34ZvO0vMJ0PJVuJt32SLVStAWn8eCJowWX_T0L8qDUbFnC99DsrUP4WjL3kv9dQU96HTXNwfAt ] We're on Facebook [ http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102536987633&s=12636&e=001p-FLYaOcqmpBUHZTru7p19lO3zw-9Z6IOLz1KEDGnVlbh9HcHhQ7t0gTgZPm7gcVGPdpcyMdBXdObEa77fkPkwFXYCDm-OsHR5b-hq4a0vZGiv1s_Sy6ajEqIxU9Cj3hGJ2b0brdgmQqzJhubfkBuubAnyEO6It3jQN1E-Uq_GQ= ] and Twitter [ http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102536987633&s=12636&e=001p-FLYaOcqmprv6G3YXBNRq7tA5PenCw4Mc3GmTo8f7DAe4R4XuMknk8VOcLH55aSgQkFwEs1tKtfFKPLBgf4vk4hmiasn9ne06sg3j7j1dQaO647ZrqRNQKkJdXCs43U ], too! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Crack the Disparity Month of Advocacy Kicks Off By Nkechi Taifa "President Obama and Vice President Biden believe the disparity between sentencing crack and powder-based cocaine is wrong and should be completely eliminated." -www.whitehouse.gov What better kickoff can a national month of advocacy have than with the nation's President and Vice President heavily weighing in on the importance of the issue? The disparate sentencing structure between crack and powder cocaine will be the subject of focused attention during the month of April, spearheaded by the Justice Roundtable's Crack the Disparity campaign. This is the second year an entire month has been dedicated to sustained national scrutiny, awareness, and advocacy on the issue of crack cocaine sentencing reform. Last year's Crack the Disparity lobby month activities were enhanced with hearings in both the House and Senate. This year's activities include a Letter-A-Day campaign to the Hill, a National Call-In Day for organizations to mobilize their members and supporters to call their congressional delegation, and in-district meetings. The month will culminate with a National Lobby Day on April 28th, where advocates from across the country will descend on Washington, D.C.'s Capitol Hill to target representatives and senators about the need for reform. Click here to read more. [http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102536987633&s=12636&e=001p-FLYaOcqmpa3fO0AgZ3XEBABYnklttpE8bOM3IKjmKYGdGBrR3oUf8pLrKaN8R1kVGqIR6jj1ampXWDVvRySV4S3MlGOn66Ytcb7jBGn4Q6HgNhOFL7K0-CdWMFUWvK6ct00_LfkuI=] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Hearing from the Folks Back Home - April In-District Meeting By Ian Thompson This year, as part of our Crack the Disparity Advocacy Month, we will be helping our great advocates and grassroots supporters from across the country in organizing in-district meetings with senators and representatives in the locations that matter most - in their home state offices! While people may assume that if you really want to get your voices heard, it's important to make a trip to the halls of Congress, there is nothing as powerful as a group of committed constituents meeting with members on their own turf. After all, at the end of the day, you are the ones who determine if your elected representatives and senators get to return to Congress. Click here to read more. [ http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102536987633&s=12636&e=001p-FLYaOcqmqRJ1PPaoQnoVItb1mzqlXom5ADA93q25tAUFdpiCACRCS5OavbtcKAQZTKht3yrXbdlF5_ga_owI7mK-1RzzWZBrjux-KKBZ7S7PEAK0HJ1N5Gt2V2kBzTqaA-Nrt8XLI= ] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Crack Cocaine and Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparity Talking Points During this Crack the Disparity Month of Advocacy, the Crack the Disparity Coalition wants to equip you with materials that will aid in fruitful visits, calls and letters to your representatives. Use these talking points to persuade your members of Congress to endorse a system of justice where all individuals are treated equally and where laws do not single out groups for different treatment. To reach your members of Congress, call the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at 202.224.3121.Click here to read more. [ http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102536987633&s=12636&e=001p-FLYaOcqmrkIPxYgu0xp7xFHeD13lyX2n28dft8Rc5udqlQNhCLjpkyNrTe0O1FQIzW_sIYI7aI_ahqmyaWKXWXteFBHJpBjNflGdQ4vqw1x0sADfFxFmRWdzGbiOHsGpwSG5bGDfI= ] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Cheatsheets for Writing to Your Members of Congress and News Editors Do your advocacy efforts need a jumpstart when it comes to writing? No problem. Use these resources to give momentum to this month of advocacy and demand reform from your member of Congress and local newspaper editor! Click here to view sample letters to members of Congress [ http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102536987633&s=12636&e=001p-FLYaOcqmr5Eqrky1lOYKgKnTclZu3CKxqsHwvTTS_gYvDqSS4q5wBO07dngbQi5YkZmtT9VMza0IZNcCu1ttMEm-qFHPOCx_72gjb9IVPPOOBANz24Z-wl0gkLl-Z43y4PQpqMjR0= ] Click here to view sample letters to the editor [ http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102536987633&s=12636&e=001p-FLYaOcqmpoOGxi8lwii8EaMChauMdWC6_fmjY0kj2pBO5mfaomBKnYdN0Cw_lhHodrmUiAuoiw1GYa-3AuXpwk1dfedbT_LZ8yNCmqlLvy-vmr2FD6J5eE1U3v6wG6Qwgf2K4OPEI= ] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Save the Date April 4, 2009: What is Justice? Wrongful Convictions Panel Discussion, Fairfield, AL April 7, 2009: The Maryland and Virginia Chapters of the ACLU Host a Free Screening of "American Violet [ http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102536987633&s=12636&e=001p-FLYaOcqmr2R-T9Pen2XwgpQLqNpqmOzcPtc_YoV26vsz4KOBC77q9Zil5yIewwVnJttYeZLQkv2g_TDbSiyMzs4IB5B663uinKMskSBnMOV7850TBWqVqDIZ9CbjkU ]," a Film Inspired by True Events, Washington, DC. RSVP via email to Beverly Miller [mailto:beverly at aclu-nca.org] or call? 202.457.0800. April 16-17, 2009: The? Problem of Punishment [ http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102536987633&s=12636&e=001p-FLYaOcqmqdfLIr2Mam81f1pnTA8R3YVz9L6E6iUoSFK5vCCJyknGp4ZLbtocHGikkQ9SohALCIrkueCfTXYi1S60TL6zPIA1NQXz3aaCtUMTxUPDIefLKwzTGRjli4UtSdOCN2tnofv94peZ2Pwfk6o8_2wBsL-uFYdmxTqks= ] Race Inequality & Justice: A Multidisciplinary? Symposium at the? University of? Virginia, Charlottsville, VA [ http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102536987633&s=12636&e=001p-FLYaOcqmqdfLIr2Mam81f1pnTA8R3YVz9L6E6iUoSFK5vCCJyknGp4ZLbtocHGikkQ9SohALCIrkueCfTXYi1S60TL6zPIA1NQXz3aaCtUMTxUPDIefLKwzTGRjli4UtSdOCN2tnofv94peZ2Pwfk6o8_2wBsL-uFYdmxTqks= ] April 23, 2009: National Call-in Day. Call your member of Congress at 202.224.3121. April 27-28, 2009: Crack the Disparity Coalition Training Kickoff and Lobby Day, Washington, DC ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Media Attention San Francisco Chronicle [ http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102536987633&s=12636&e=001p-FLYaOcqmrmrnKgaUAgHaO2nmNv97kiNJcbozXojgQbkKbQHExmDzDbI5DW1-L9WfM5SYaWuNldi6qZlf7VUlap0c8rS8rWy2IhdjRHzXX6_95xfZyJicJcX7pECPzpD7tldOYTvzuXk6r4lb4ud5rQyzMv1mMQX_fNgvA53xXIUUuiSCICc1nX7NCcm1M_UAVfOdzDOFk= ] Feature on Impact of Sentencing Laws on Individuals Nationally [ http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102536987633&s=12636&e=001p-FLYaOcqmrmrnKgaUAgHaO2nmNv97kiNJcbozXojgQbkKbQHExmDzDbI5DW1-L9WfM5SYaWuNldi6qZlf7VUlap0c8rS8rWy2IhdjRHzXX6_95xfZyJicJcX7pECPzpD7tldOYTvzuXk6r4lb4ud5rQyzMv1mMQX_fNgvA53xXIUUuiSCICc1nX7NCcm1M_UAVfOdzDOFk= ] Boston Globe [ http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102536987633&s=12636&e=001p-FLYaOcqmpaqepQoL8suYgqrt5v8ewVIBB3zyzyla1Ydi4BD2POFwEIZzLI5m-x1hvGOiaOhknzF0itfFioc9eUlcV6Vq6c5nZfDFqkcNLF34e4SqNDkgGzgZGdn3HhrAHo8jvsyBV4MkjUf1zA1zTGIPFouRkNrhn40NA-VXQHl7YZEdLHT6zcrAkp8Tyd2cajWFiCfSN2vg-ylH1swZmi6OkTdWhzzv7YKp0rymWR0F4N4k6B-7vy04v8jSTl ] Column Challenging the Obama Administration to Tackle Prison Problems Including the Disparity rates Caused by Harsh Drug Laws [ http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102536987633&s=12636&e=001p-FLYaOcqmpaqepQoL8suYgqrt5v8ewVIBB3zyzyla1Ydi4BD2POFwEIZzLI5m-x1hvGOiaOhknzF0itfFioc9eUlcV6Vq6c5nZfDFqkcNLF34e4SqNDkgGzgZGdn3HhrAHo8jvsyBV4MkjUf1zA1zTGIPFouRkNrhn40NA-VXQHl7YZEdLHT6zcrAkp8Tyd2cajWFiCfSN2vg-ylH1swZmi6OkTdWhzzv7YKp0rymWR0F4N4k6B-7vy04v8jSTl ] Washington Post [ http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102536987633&s=12636&e=001p-FLYaOcqmrAs8NveWy2Zt0n-6A6f_v190svRn03G0aJmHXTrV2AE4ewJhuO9B9mmhwyKYVhKSMsV3IvdJUydv_B3gcDh-EnsrVW_fstUcofn2E49ZP2iIjLHZGYHf8cBjZf4xi-BL7RjE46wMdModPaXLvxqBhNIORMkonyiC8X2ia6Hotz8irv9mcYIxzYQLPjupex6tXGmtjT0cg_2Q== ] Editorial Urging that President Obama Not Repeat Former President Bush's Track Record on Presidential Pardons [ http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102536987633&s=12636&e=001p-FLYaOcqmrAs8NveWy2Zt0n-6A6f_v190svRn03G0aJmHXTrV2AE4ewJhuO9B9mmhwyKYVhKSMsV3IvdJUydv_B3gcDh-EnsrVW_fstUcofn2E49ZP2iIjLHZGYHf8cBjZf4xi-BL7RjE46wMdModPaXLvxqBhNIORMkonyiC8X2ia6Hotz8irv9mcYIxzYQLPjupex6tXGmtjT0cg_2Q== ] Birmingham News [ http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102536987633&s=12636&e=001p-FLYaOcqmpj-KZIZUUhBktu66y3etokbX-_qqonOviUCyR6KGgmgadh6DbCH54k6EaZthzcuBVP4uOF475ITW7-NiUsrQs6pXdDFo9mW-RornxN7Ot35IM6Q6MtvB0gpQkpyLzuHdL2f_8IGk4OqkNwT9l-mUS2aRuWvN9N2XC4rs2JUoZbqQfM_skdCHApREj8tqMlKxry3pjvbXej9R6bwVJBleYF ] Feature Reporting on Success Rate of Alabama Inmates Who Have Received Sentence Reductions [ http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102536987633&s=12636&e=001p-FLYaOcqmpj-KZIZUUhBktu66y3etokbX-_qqonOviUCyR6KGgmgadh6DbCH54k6EaZthzcuBVP4uOF475ITW7-NiUsrQs6pXdDFo9mW-RornxN7Ot35IM6Q6MtvB0gpQkpyLzuHdL2f_8IGk4OqkNwT9l-mUS2aRuWvN9N2XC4rs2JUoZbqQfM_skdCHApREj8tqMlKxry3pjvbXej9R6bwVJBleYF ] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Crack the Disparity Coalition includes the American Bar Association, American Civil Liberties Union, Break the Chains, Drug Policy Alliance, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Open Society Policy Center, Restoring Dignity, Inc., Students for Sensible Drug Policy, The Sentencing Project, and United Methodist Church, General Board of Church and Society. ? New Report - Drug Courts: A Review of the Evidence Dear Friend, The Sentencing Project is pleased to announce the publication of a new report, Drug Courts: A Review of the Evidence [ http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102536463831&s=12636&e=001PH2kgpPHklewpC_11NaWTuPMSb3qetfoTLlTY-TDgKK2y7y2eflk0_wyqoUZrg2Y7BdWmle1V5I-OQ-vjHBjgaqbSqF7sRIWzAhG560U5QKZn3yQ_ZV1ZfAZZKv7p9sLB0Gw6r3agU_NPk6SXRJek-GWE74pMnXPMG4Y01Zsy1HHsMVfds3aGUKXNGeBGvvFl2NELsJsdgs= ], that assesses the impact of the drug court movement. Since their introduction in 1989, drug courts have received a significant amount of attention by practitioners, policymakers, and the general public. Originally conceived as an alternative to incarceration for persons convicted of low-level drug offenses, there are now more than 1,600 drug courts nationally, covering all 50 states. Many of these programs have broadened their eligibility requirements to grant more individuals access to treatment rather than incarceration. In the two decades since their launch, a substantial body of literature has been established evaluating drug court efficacy in regard to reducing recidivism and criminal justice costs. To mark the 20-year anniversary of the modern drug court, The Sentencing Project surveyed a wide-range of research to outline general findings on the operation and efficacy of drug courts, and to highlight benefits and potential concerns.? Overall, we find that: * Drug courts have generally been demonstrated to have positive benefits in reducing recidivism. * Evaluations of the cost-effectiveness of drug courts have generally found benefits through reduced costs of crime or incarceration. * Concern remains regarding potential "net-widening" effects of drug courts by drawing in defendants who might not otherwise have been subject to arrest and prosecution. We hope you find this report [ http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102536463831&s=12636&e=001PH2kgpPHklewpC_11NaWTuPMSb3qetfoTLlTY-TDgKK2y7y2eflk0_wyqoUZrg2Y7BdWmle1V5I-OQ-vjHBjgaqbSqF7sRIWzAhG560U5QKZn3yQ_ZV1ZfAZZKv7p9sLB0Gw6r3agU_NPk6SXRJek-GWE74pMnXPMG4Y01Zsy1HHsMVfds3aGUKXNGeBGvvFl2NELsJsdgs= ] useful in your work. -The Sentencing Project Privacy Policy: http://ui.constantcontact.com/roving/CCPrivacyPolicy.jsp The Sentencing Project | 514 10th St, NW | Suite 1000 | Washington | DC | 20004 From mstainsby at resist.ca Sat Apr 4 14:24:33 2009 From: mstainsby at resist.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat, 04 Apr 2009 14:24:33 -0600 Subject: [R-G] Over 100 Migrant Workers Arrested; Communities Demand Their Release Message-ID: <49D7C201.7010801@resist.ca> Update: Over 100 Migrant Workers Arrested; Communities Demand Their Release April 4, 2009 - Executing massive and unprecedented US-style raids in East Toronto, Leamington, and Bradford, the Canada Border Services Agency has arrested and detained over 100 migrant workers across Southern Ontario. Hundreds of families and friends are wondering right now why their loved ones have not returned from work. The hundreds of thousands of non-status people across Canada have woken up to a horrible day in Stephen Harper's Canada. On early Thursday morning, enforcement officers stormed into three different businesses in Bradford and Markham where they arrested migrant workers. CBSA even followed workers to their homes throughout the GTA and surrounding area. In total 80 people were arrested. They were placed on GO buses, handcuffed and held immobile for hours. "One of my relatives was arrested in the raid. She called me from jail this morning. She and her co-workers are terrified that they may be deported at any time," said Jonathan Canchela, chair of the Filipino Migrant Workers Movement- and member of Migrante-Ontario. On the same day in Leamington, eight agricultural workers were arrested. The workers were traveling to the farm where they work with a contractor when they were pulled over and arrested. "Canada's immigration policies systemiclly discriminate against the most marginalized members of our community. Instead of reguarlization, the government criminalizes, instead of addressing exploitative working and living conditions, they persecute migrant labourers instead of enhancing workplace protections they engage in these type of raids which send a message to migrant workers that if they exert their rights there will be reprisals" says Chris Ramsaroop of Justicia Migrant Workers. Simultaneously over a dozen agricultural workers were arrested in East Toronto on the Danforth, some from their homes. "The purpose of these raids is to heighten a climate of fear and insecurity in immigrant communities. These raids are part of Canada's revolving door immigration policy where workers are used and disposed of with little or no rights", says Mac Scott of the Law Union of Ontario. "In this economic crisis, companies are hiring us to save money. In my case, I've no work permit. I need to send money for my children to go to school. That is why I have to work. There are so many like me in this country, more than a million. Why not a regularization program so we can pay taxes. Many of us are skilled and qualified and could help the country at the same time as we send the money back home", says Henry, who was arrested on Thursday and is presently in the Detention Centre. Community groups are mobilizing broadly to demand the immediate release of the detainees and status for all people in Canada. For details on how to travel to the Immigration Centre and a document of people's rights if they're arrested at their workplace can be found at: http://toronto.nooneisillegal.org/node/279. Thousands of us, from immigrant communities across Southern Ontario, will be hitting the streets on May 2nd to demand an end to immigration raids, and justice, dignity and respect for all migrant workers. For further information and breaking news, please contact Mac Scott - Law Union of Ontario (416.999.6885) Farrah Miranda - No One Is Illegal - Toronto (416.805.7489) Chris Ramsaroop - Justicia for Migrant Workers (647.834.4932) Marco Luciano - Migrante Ontario (647.205.5908) http://toronto.nooneisillegal.org/node/278 From shniad at sfu.ca Sat Apr 4 20:42:04 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sat, 4 Apr 2009 19:42:04 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Khadr's U.S. defence lawyer fired Message-ID: <584580224.5187351238899324523.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Globe and Mail April 4, 2009 Khadr's U.S. defence lawyer fired Josh Wingrove Lieutenant-Commander William Kuebler, Omar Khadr's U.S. military defence lawyer, was fired Friday after a lengthy feud with his superior over the case. LCdr. Kuebler has repeatedly alleged a conflict of interest on the part of his boss, Pentagon chief defence lawyer Colonel Peter Masciola, in Mr. Khadr's case, saying the colonel supported the continued prosecution of Mr. Khadr while also overseeing his defence. That battle intensified this week, when LCdr. Kuebler lodged a formal complaint. He sought a court order preventing his dismissal until a hearing on his complaint, but was denied. He will be reassigned within the navy, a source said. Messages left for Col. Masciola weren't returned. LCdr. Kuebler said he's been told not to speak with the press. Hours before the axe fell, LCdr. Kuebler sent out a statement saying the formal complaint would lead to his firing. He alleged Col. Masciola ?demonstrated a disturbing pattern of acting to support the agenda of military prosecutors to have Omar tried in the U.S. rather than being repatriated to Canada.? He also said Col. Masciola had ?misgivings? about his handling of the case itself, though it was unclear whether it was LCdr. Kuebler's job performance or the public feud that prompted the decision. Mr. Khadr, facing terrorism charges, still has other American and Canadian lawyers. Mr. Khadr, a Canadian captured after a 2002 Afghanistan firefight, is the last westerner left in the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. U.S. President Barack Obama has ordered the closing of Guantanamo, but the Canadian government has refused to seek Mr. Khadr's repatriation. ?Mr. Khadr's defence will continue,? said Canadian lawyer Dennis Edney. ?I think we'd also like to send a message to President Obama that notwithstanding our Prime Minister showing absolutely no interest in assisting Omar, we as Canadians are interested in bringing him home.? From shniad at sfu.ca Sat Apr 4 20:41:02 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sat, 4 Apr 2009 19:41:02 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Alliance feeling strains over Afghanistan Message-ID: <648830560.5187241238899262845.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Globe and Mail April 4, 2009 NATO SUMMIT Alliance feeling strains over Afghanistan Canadian Foreign Minister calls on Afghan President to explain move to enact laws that would undermine women's rights Brian Laghi and Doug Saunders Strasbourg, France -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai's move to enact new laws that would undermine women's rights darkened the mood of the annual meeting of the NATO military alliance today, exposing deep frustrations with the progress of the Afghanistan war and the leadership of NATO. "If the media reports are true, this is extremely alarming and it's troublesome for a lot of the allies," Canadian Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon said after arriving at the 26-nation summit. "I'm calling for President Karzai in the very first opportunity to be able to come forward and give the explanations [of this] presumed piece of legislation." The prospect of an increasingly fraught military alliance lending its support to an Afghan government whose proposed legislation would legalize rape within marriage underlined deep schisms within the alliance as it marks its 60th birthday this weekend. Those divisions dimmed U.S. President Barack Obama's efforts to build a larger fighting force in Afghanistan and exploded efforts to select a new NATO chief yesterday in meetings in Strasbourg, on the French-German border. Those meetings were attended by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and other heads of state and government, who had been pressured by Mr. Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel to decide on new leadership. But the selection of a new secretary-general, which the United States and Germany had expected to be made by universal, secret vote last night, was held up over yet another dispute between the Islamic world and the West. The government of Turkey, NATO's only Muslim-majority member, objected strongly to the preferred candidate, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, because the Danish government had not censured its newspapers for publishing caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed in 2005, an event that led to riots in Muslim countries. "The Turks were adamant that Anders Fogh could not get the job because of the Mohammed cartoons, and they would not be moved on this," said an official familiar with the working dinner that extended into a lengthy debate over the secretary-general position. This opened the possibility that Canadian Defence Minister Peter MacKay, who had appeared to be campaigning for the secretary-general position earlier this year, may still have some chance as a second-choice candidate, especially if Mr. Obama insists that NATO members resolve the leadership question by the summit's close this afternoon. Mr. Obama is seeking to mend fences with the Muslim world in the wake of the deep divisions over the Iraq war, and officials say he does not want to create an anti-Muslim image in NATO with a protracted defence of Mr. Rasmussen's candidacy. Mr. Obama was also attempting to get European nations to lend more troops to the United Nations-mandated NATO war in Afghanistan, an effort that may also prove to be at least partly in vain. NATO commands 56,000 troops in the country, with the United States set to add 21,000 later this year as part of an "Afghan surge" promised by Mr. Obama. British officials travelling to the summit with Prime Minister Gordon Brown told reporters aboard his plane that Mr. Brown will offer to send more troops to Afghanistan provided others do, too. Officials said the number would likely be in the "mid to high hundreds." As the conference opened, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who is the co-host along with Ms. Merkel, pledged that his nation would send more police trainers and civilian aid. "We totally endorse and support America's new strategy in Afghanistan," Mr. Sarkozy told a joint news conference with Mr. Obama. France is joining the command structure of NATO for the first time since Charles de Gaulle partially withdrew from the alliance in 1966. However, there is no indication whether more French troops would be added to Afghanistan, or whether France would abandon the caveats that prevent most of its troops from fighting in the south, where the Taliban presence is strong. Ms. Merkel also met with Mr. Obama and said Germany wanted to bear its share of the responsibility in Afghanistan, but offered no specifics. This opened the possibility that Mr. Obama could come away nearly empty-handed from an initiative in which he had hoped to attract at least 10,000 extra NATO troops. Mr. Obama also encouraged a skeptical Europe to support his revamped strategy for rooting out terrorism suspects in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and said Europe should not expect America to send combat troops by itself. "This is a joint problem," Mr. Obama said, "and it requires a joint effort." The concerns over Mr. Karzai's backing for the law limiting women's rights became an overwhelming issue of concern at the summit, much to the dismay of leaders who had hoped to send a more upbeat message about the alliance's future. From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Sat Apr 4 21:12:56 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Sun, 05 Apr 2009 12:12:56 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Anti-Empire Report Message-ID: <49D821B8.7000409@ashisuto.co.jp> by William Blum www.killinghope.org (April 04 2009) Some thoughts about socialism "History is littered with post-crisis regulations. If there are undue restrictions on the operations of businesses, they may view it to be their job to get around them, and you sow the seeds of the next crisis." -- Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment analyst, CharlesSchwab & Company, a leading US provider of investment services. {1} And so it goes. Corporations, whether financial or not, strive to maximize profit as inevitably as water seeks its own level. We've been trying to "regulate" them since the 19th century. Or is it the 18th? Nothing helps for long. You close one loophole and the slime oozes out of another hole. Wall Street has not only an army of lawyers and accountants, but a horde of mathematicians with advanced degrees searching for the perfect equations to separate people from their money. After all the stimulus money has come and gone, after all the speeches by our leaders condemning greed and swearing to reforms, after the last congressional hearing deploring the corporate executives to their faces, the boys of Wall Street, shrugging off a few bruises, will resume churning out their assortment of financial entities, documents, and packages that go by names like hedge funds, derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, index funds, credit default swaps, structured investment vehicles, subprime mortgages, and many other pieces of paper with exotic names, for which, it must be kept in mind, there had been no public need or strident demand. Speculation, bonuses, and scotch will flow again, and the boys will be all the wiser, perhaps shaken a bit that they're so reviled, but knowing better now what to flaunt and what to disguise. This is another reminder that communism or socialism have almost always been given just one chance to work, if that much, while capitalism has been given numerous chances to do so following its perennial fiascos. Ralph Nader has observed: "Capitalism will never fail because socialism will always be there to bail it out". In the West, one of the most unfortunate results of the Cold War was that seventy years of anti-communist education and media stamped in people's minds a lasting association between socialism and what the Soviet Union called communism. Socialism meant a dictatorship, it meant Stalinist repression, a suffocating "command economy", no freedom of enterprise, no freedom to change jobs, few avenues for personal expression, and other similar truths and untruths. This is a set of beliefs clung to even amongst many Americans opposed to US foreign policy. No matter how bad the economy is, Americans think, the only alternative available is something called "communism", and they know how awful that is. Adding to the purposeful confusion, the conservatives in England, for thirty years following the end of World War Two, filled the minds of the public with the idea that the Labour Party was socialist, and when recession hit (as it does regularly in capitalist countries) the public was then told, and believed, that "socialism had failed". Yet, ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, polls taken in Russia have shown a nostalgia for the old system. In the latest example, "Russia Now", a Moscow publication that appears as a supplement in the Washington Post, asked Russians: "What socio-economic system do you favor?" The results were: "State planning and distribution": 58% ... "Based on private property and market relations": 28% ... "Hard to say": 14%. {2} In 1994, Mark Brzezinski (son of Zbigniew) was a Fulbright Scholar teaching in Warsaw. He has written: "I asked my students to define democracy. Expecting a discussion on individual liberties and authentically elected institutions, I was surprised to hear my students respond that to them, democracy means a government obligation to maintain a certain standard of living and to provide health care, education and housing for all. In other words, socialism." {3} Many Americans cannot go along with the notion of a planned, centralized society. To some extent it's the terminology that bothers them because they were raised to equate a planned society with the worst excesses of Stalinism. Okay, let's forget the scary labels; let's describe it as people sitting down to discuss a particular serious societal problem, what the available options there are to solve the problem, and what institutions and forces in the society have the best access, experience, and assets to deliver those options. So, the idea is to prepare these institutions and forces to deal with the problem in a highly organized, rational manner without having to worry about which corporation's profits might be adversely affected, without relying on "the magic of the marketplace". Now it happens that all this is usually called "planning" and if the organization and planning stem from a government body it can be called "centralized". There's no reason to assume that this has to result in some kind of very authoritarian regime. All of us over a certain age - individually and collectively - have learned a lot about such things from the past. We know the warning signs; that's why the Bush administration's authoritarianism was so early and so strongly condemned. The overwhelming majority of people in the United States work for a salary. They don't need to be motivated by the quest for profit. It's not in our genes. Virtually everybody, if given the choice, would prefer to work at jobs where the main motivations are to produce goods and services that improve the quality of life of the society, to help others, and to provide themselves with meaningful and satisfying work. It's not natural to be primarily motivated by trying to win or steal "customers" from other people, no holds barred, survival of the fittest or the most ruthless. A major war can be the supreme test of a nation, a time when it's put under the greatest stress. In World War Two, the US government commandeered the auto manufacturers to make tanks and jeeps instead of private cars. When a pressing need for an atom bomb was seen, Washington did not ask for bids from the private sector; it created the Manhattan Project to do it itself, with no concern for balance sheets or profit and loss statements. Women and blacks were given skilled factory jobs they had been traditionally denied. Hollywood was enlisted to make propaganda films. Indeed, much of the nation's activities, including farming, manufacturing, mining, communications, labor, education, and cultural undertakings were in some fashion brought under new and significant government control, with the war effort coming before private profit. In peacetime, we can think of socialism as putting people before profit, with all the basics guaranteed - health care, all education, decent housing, food, jobs. Those who swear by free enterprise argue that the "socialism" of World War Two was instituted only because of the exigencies of the war. That's true, but it doesn't alter the key point that it had been immediately recognized by the government that the wasteful and inefficient capitalist system, always in need of proper financial care and feeding, was no way to run a country trying to win a war. It's also no way to run a society of human beings with human needs. Most Americans agree with this but are not consciously aware that they hold such a belief. In 1987, nearly half of 1,004 Americans surveyed by the Hearst press believed Karl Marx's aphorism: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" was to be found in the US Constitution. {4} Along these lines, I've written an essay entitled: "The United States invades, bombs, and kills for it, but do Americans really believe in free enterprise?" {5} I cannot describe in detail what every nut and bolt of my socialist system would look like. That might appear rather pretentious on my part; most of it would evolve through trial and error anyway; the important thing is that the foundation - the crucial factors in making the important decisions - would rest on people's welfare and the common good coming before profit. Humankind's desperate need to halt environmental degradation regularly runs smack into the profit motive, as does the American health-care system. It's more than a matter of ideology; it's a matter of the quality of life, sustainability, and survival. "Omission is the most powerful form of lie". -- George Orwell I am asked occasionally why I am so critical of the mainstream media when I quote from them repeatedly in my writings. The answer is simple. The American media's gravest shortcoming is much more their errors of omission than their errors of commission. It's what they leave out that distorts the news more than any factual errors or out-and-out lies. So I can make good use of the facts they report, which a large, rich organization can easier provide than the alternative media. In early March, the Washington Post ran an article about Iran which stated that "Iranian leaders ... reiterated that the Holocaust was 'a lie' ". The article then went on to add that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "repeated his assertion that the Holocaust is a 'big lie' ". {6} That's all we're told. What is the poor reader to conclude but that some Iranian leaders must be amongst that much vilified and ridiculed group called "Holocaust deniers"? What the article fails to mention is that these Iranian leaders use the word "lie" to refer to only particular features of the Holocaust. There is no report of any of them simply, clearly, unambiguously, and unequivocally asserting that what we know as the Holocaust never took place. Ahmadinejad, for example, has instead commented about the peculiarity and injustice of a Holocaust which took place in Europe resulting in a state for the Jews in the Middle East instead of in Europe. Why are the Palestinians paying a price for a German crime? he asks. And he wonders about the accuracy of the number of Jews - six million - allegedly killed in the Holocaust, as have many other people of all political stripes and nationalities, including the noted Italian author Primo Levi, a Holocaust survivor. Even Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian National Authority - Israel and Washington's favorite Palestinian because of his opposition to Hamas, their least favored Palestinians - wrote in his doctoral dissertation: "The truth of the matter is that no one can verify this number, or completely deny it. In other words, the number of Jewish victims might be six million and might be much smaller - even less than one million." {7} It is also worth noting that at the end of the Post article we learn that "a senior Israeli official in Washington, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not cleared to discuss such matters publicly" has asserted that "Iran would be unlikely to use its missiles in an attack [against Israel] because of the certainty of retaliation". Really? That's what I and others have been saying for years. It should have been the story's headline, not the very last sentence, literally. Yet, we can be certain that Israeli and American officials and their disciples will continue to warn the world of the danger of Iranian missile attacks. So will the Washington Post, engaging in future omissions of its own news story. What actually has long worried Israeli and US officials about possible Iranian nuclear weapons is not that Iran might attack anyone, but that Israel's beloved security blanket - being the only nuclear power in the Middle East - would at risk, as might be Washington's dominance of the area. Later in March, the Los Angeles Times ran an obituary of Janet Jagan, the former president of Guyana and widow of Cheddi Jagan who had earlier also been president. The obituary says not a word about the fact that for eleven years, 1953-64, two of the oldest democracies in the world, Great Britain and the United States, went to great lengths in their repeated attempts to prevent the democratically elected Cheddi Jagan from occupying his office. {8} I've selected these examples of omission virtually at random. If I wanted to report on each media omission concerning significant US foreign policy matters I could fill this newsletter each month with nothing else. It happens that in late March the Washington Post also provided us with the less common out-and-out lie. In an editorial about the leftist former guerillas in El Salvador, the FMLN, winning the presidential election with their candidate Mauricio Funes, the Post said: "If Mr Funes as well as the election's losers now respect the rule of law, the result could be the consolidation of the political system the United States was aiming for when it intervened in El Salvador's civil war during the 1980s. At the time, the goal of a successful Salvadoran democracy was dismissed as a mission impossible, just as some now say democracy is unattainable in Iraq and Afghanistan." {9} The idea that the US intervention in the Salvadoran civil war stemmed from a desire to bring democracy to the country is so breathtaking in its audacity that it's conceivable the Post editorial writer is suffering from early-stage Alzheimer's; it's wholly comparable to saying that the Apartheid regime of South Africa strove to increase harmony and equality between blacks and whites. In the process of supporting a Salvadoran government of remarkable tyranny, brutality and human-rights violations, the United States provided the country's armed forces with a never-ending supply of funds, weapons and training that brought continual destruction and suffering to the people of El Salvador. The Post's "disclosure" will not send historians scurrying to rewrite their books. Nor can it serve to conceal the fact that the United States is not fighting for "democracy" in Iraq and Afghanistan any more than it did in El Salvador. The ideology of Barack Obama In the past two months: * US Vice President Joe Biden was asked by reporters at a summit in Chile if Washington plans to put an end to the near-fifty-year-old economic embargo against Cuba. He replied "No". {10} * Israeli authorities broke up a series of Palestinian cultural events in Jerusalem, disrupting a children's march and bursting balloons at a schoolyard celebration. {11} There has not been, nor will there be, any embargo of any kind by the United States against Israel. Nor will President Obama make any comment about what he really feels about invading a children's party and bursting their balloons. * The White House and the Pentagon appear to be having a competition over who can announce the most troops being sent to Afghanistan. Is anyone keeping a body count? * US drones continue to drop bombs on people's homes and wedding parties in Pakistan. No one in Washington publicly admits to this or comments in any way about the legality or morality of it all. * Bolivia and Ecuador have expelled American diplomats for what their hosts saw as conspiring to undermine the government. Any number of other examples can be given of how alike the foreign policies of the Bush and Obama administrations are, how little, if any, change has occurred; certainly nothing of any significance. Yet, my saying such a thing is precisely what most often bothers Obama supporters who read or hear my comments. They're in love with the man with the toothpaste-advertisement smile, who's "smart" (whatever that means), who plays basketball, and is not George W Bush, and his wife who puts her arm around the queen of England. Obama's popularity around the world is enhanced, to an important extent, by the fact that he has endeavored to conceal or obscure his real ideology. As an example, in early March, in an interview with the New York Times, he was asked: "Is there a one word name for your philosophy? If you're not a socialist, are you a liberal? Are you progressive? One word?" "No, I'm not going to engage in that", replied the president. {12} The next day he called the Times reporter, telling him: "It was hard for me to believe that you were entirely serious about that socialist question". Obama then gave the reporter several examples of why his policies show that he isn't a socialist. {13} He didn't have to convince me. Obama's centrist bent is clear to anyone who bothers to look. But after the Times incident - which apparently bothered him - he may have felt the need to be more clear about his ideological leanings to avoid any further silly "socialist" episodes. The next day, meeting at the White House with members of the New Democrat Coalition, a group of centrist Democratic members of the House, Obama said at one point: "I am a New Democrat". {14} Most conservatives will probably continue to see him as a dangerous leftist. They should be happy that Obama is the president and not any kind of real progressive or socialist or even a genuine liberal, but the right wing is greedy. Notes 1. Washington Post, March 29 2009 2. "Russia Now", in Washington Post, March 25 2009 3. Los Angeles Times, September 02 1994 4. Frank Bernack, Jr, Hearst Corp. President, address to the American Bar Association, early 1987, reported in In These Times magazine (Chicago), June 24 - July 7 1987 5. William Blum, "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower", chapter 26 6. Washington Post, March 05 2009 7. The Middle East Media Research Institute, "Inquiry and Analysis", No 95, May 30 2002; also see Wikipedia, entry for Mahmoud Abbas, "Doctoral Dissertation" section. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Abbas#Doctoral_dissertation 8. Los Angeles Times, March 29 2009. See William Blum, "Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War Two", chapter 16 for what was left out. 9. Washington Post, March 21 2009 10. Miami Herald, March 28 2009 11. Washington Post, March 22 2009 12. New York Times, March 07 2009 13. New York Times, March 08 2009 14. Politico magazine, online, March 10 2009 http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/19862.html William Blum is the author of:- Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War Two (Common Courage Press, 1995) Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower (Zed Books, 2002) West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir (Soft Skull Press, 2002) Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire (Common Courage Press, 2004) Portions of the books can be read, and copies purchased, at http://www.killinghope.org and previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website. To add yourself to this mailing list simply send an email to bblum6 at aol.com with "add" in the subject line. I'd like your name and city in the message, but that's optional. I ask for your city only in case I'll be speaking in your area. Or put "remove" in the subject line to do the opposite. Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission. I'd appreciate it if the website were mentioned. http://www.killinghope.org/bblum6/aer67.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shniad at sfu.ca Sun Apr 5 10:08:58 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sun, 5 Apr 2009 09:08:58 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Tough reception for Al-Jazeera bid in Canada Message-ID: <1374822596.9531238947738216.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/612936 Toronto Star April 3, 2009 Tough reception for Al-Jazeera bid in Canada Bruce Campion-Smith Ottawa bureau chief OTTAWA?It was once condemned as "propaganda" by former U.S secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld. It's been slammed by Jewish groups for airing anti-Semitic views. And now Al-Jazeera wants to air on a television near you. Tony Burman, the Canadian who is managing director of the Al-Jazeera Network, knows he is fighting history and stereotypes as he seeks regulatory approval to get the broadcaster's English service on Canadian airwaves. But Burman, a CBC veteran, is asking people to judge Al-Jazeera's English network on its merits rather than the sometimes controversial record of its Arabic service. "It's not a channel about the Middle East, solely. It's a channel about Africa, Asia, Latin America and it provides a perspective from the developing world that is unique," Burman said. "I think a lot of Canadians, in this multicultural Canada, a lot of Canadians would discover it really fills a vacuum." That's the message he has been delivering this week as part of Al-Jazeera's quiet lobbying campaign to build support for the network's bid to get regulatory approval to hit the airwaves. On Wednesday night, he met with some MPs behind closed doors to brief them on the network. On Tuesday, he met with leaders of the Canadian Jewish Congress, which had opposed an earlier application by Al-Jazeera's Arabic service to air in Canada. The Qatar-based network has applied to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, using Ethnic Channels Group, a Toronto carrier, as its sponsor. Burman's outreach comes as the CRTC prepares to invite public comment on Al-Jazeera's application to air, perhaps as early as next month. He's quick to rhyme off the numbers behind Al-Jazeera English: viewers in 140 million households in more than 100 countries; 69 news bureaus, plus one promised for Canada if the application succeeds. He says the editorial staff of Al-Jazeera English service, which has been running for two years, is independent from the Arabic service. Still, Burman fears "guilt by association." "We know what the challenges will be. The primary one would be those who feel Al-Jazeera crosses the line and that, are we affected by that," he said. Bernie Farber, the chief executive officer of the Canadian Jewish Congress, says his organization had a "frank and honest discussion" with Burman about their concerns surrounding the network. "Al-Jazeera is Al-Jazeera," Farber said. "There's no walking away from some of the disgusting, anti-Semitic, Jew-hating broadcasts that they have engaged in. "We're still struggling with this one. We recognize the need for free ... speech to be paramount and the right of broadcasters to ensure they can reach audiences. "The jury remains out in our mind." But Al-Jazeera could face a wild card in its application ? a federal government that in recent has taken action against those with controversial views on the Middle East. Ottawa banned British MP George Galloway from entering Canada, charging that he supports Middle East terrorism. And the immigration department cut off funding to the Canadian Arab Federation on grounds that its president regards Hamas and Hezbollah as "legitimate organizations." But Burman is careful to note that his network needs the approval of the CRTC, saying it would be "inappropriate" for the government to intervene. ------------ Examples of controversial comments aired by the Arabic service of Al-Jazeera: ? March 2003: Osama bin Laden refers to Jews as "the murderers of the prophets" and urges Muslims to "kill them." ? Jan. 2002: Jews described as "the most despicable people" and "brothers of apes and pigs" during a discussion program. ? Oct. 2001: Al-Jazeera runs a videotape of bin Laden praising the Sept. 11 hijackers. ? July 2001: A host on a talk show praises Hezbollah and refers to Zionists as "dogs." From shniad at sfu.ca Sun Apr 5 10:25:27 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sun, 5 Apr 2009 09:25:27 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Motorola Sells Israel Bomb Division as National Boycott Campaign Advances Message-ID: <1787281886.10891238948727535.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/israel020409.html Motorola Sells Israel Bomb Division as National Boycott Campaign Advances by the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation Washington, DC (April 2) -- The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and allied organizations participating in a national boycott campaign against Motorola welcomed news that Motorola Israel Ltd. has sold its Government Electronics Department, which made several products that enable Israel's military occupation of and human rights abuses against Palestinians. The reported sale of the Motorola Israel department occurred just two days after a globally-coordinated day of action to promote campaigns of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel and corporations that profit from its human rights abuses of Palestinians. This day of action and the growing global BDS movement were inspired by the 2005 call from Palestinian civil society for BDS campaigns targeting Israel, similar to campaigns targeting South Africa's apartheid regime during the 1970s and 1980s. In Brooklyn, the New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel (NYCBI) launched a city-wide boycott campaign against Motorola, and cell phones stores selling Motorola products were picketed in places such as Cambridge, MA and Santa Clara, CA. The protests called on Motorola and its fully owned subsidiary, Motorola Israel Ltd., to end their sales of bomb fuses, communication devices, and surveillance equipment to the Israeli military. Human rights activists argue that these technologies are used by the Israeli military to violate human rights and international law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Human Rights Watch researchers found shrapnel with Motorola serial numbers on it at the site of bomb blasts after Israel's recent assault on the Gaza Strip, dubbed "Operation Cast Lead." For additional information about the case against Motorola, click here. In February, Hampshire College divested from several companies involved in Israel's military occupation, including Motorola. Hampshire College Students for Justice in Palestine member Bryan Van Slyke had the following response to Motorola's recent actions: "Hampshire Students for Justice in Palestine are proud that, following the historic successful divestment campaign from the Israeli occupation at our college, another milestone has now been achieved by the global BDS movement. This proves that activists around the world can and are truly making an impact in the cause for Palestinian self-determination." According to Katherine Fuchs, National Organizer for the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, "Motorola is a corporation with a history of supplying products to human rights abusing regimes. Consumer pressure forced Motorola to sever its relations with the South African apartheid regime and the military junta in Burma, and we won't stop until they do the same with Israel. The sale of Moto's Government Electronics Department is a positive development and a sign that Motorola is being forced to respond to our boycott campaign. However, we will continue to investigate Motorola's remaining ties with the Israeli military and illegal Israeli settlements; we will continue our campaign until we find that Motorola no longer profits from human rights violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories." The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation is a national coalition of more than 270 organizations working for a U.S. policy toward Israel/Palestine and responsible consumer choices to support human rights, international law, and equality for all in Israel/Palestine. For more information about the US Campaign, please click here. From shniad at sfu.ca Sun Apr 5 10:30:57 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sun, 5 Apr 2009 09:30:57 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] The campaign to isolate apartheid Israel -- lessons from South Africa In-Reply-To: <1690289498.4460881238711037594.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <148207592.11721238949057013.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://links.org.au/node/979 LINKS: International Journal of Socialist Renewal The campaign to isolate apartheid Israel -- lessons from South Africa By Salim Vally * There are moments in modern history when particular struggles galvanise millions around the world to act in solidarity. This occurred during the Spanish Civil War, the struggle of the Vietnamese people against US imperialism and the liberation struggles of Southern Africa. The time has now come for progressive humanity to cut through the obfuscations, canards and calumnies and meaningfully support the resistance of the Palestinian people. For more than 60 years Palestinians have alerted us to one outrage after another, injustices piled upon injustices without the commensurate scale of global solidarity required to make a significant difference to their lives. It is now in our hands to change this unconscionable situation. Not by appealing to the ruling classes of the world and their institutions -- which remain, in the face of abundant evidence, unmoved, callous and hypocritical. Which in fact sustain and provide succour to Israel?s apartheid and terror. It is rather by applying the most potent weapon we have learnt to rely on, forged and steeled through the tried and tested struggles of workers and oppressed people spanning time and space: solidarity. International solidarity in this sense in the words of the late Mozambican revolutionary, Samora Machel is ?not an act of charity but an act of unity between allies fighting on different terrains toward the same objectives?. Acts of defiance and determination against overwhelming odds continue to drive the will of Palestinians. Global solidarity activists need to be inspired and strengthened by this unleashing of creative energies; the fact that obstacles can be surmounted and the debilitating wastefulness of internecine and sectarian conflicts exposed. Israel: a fundamentalist and militarised warrior state The Palestinian struggle does not only exert a visceral tug on many around the world. A reading of imperialism shows that apartheid Israel is needed as a fundamentalist and militarised warrior state not only to quell the undefeated and unbowed Palestinians but also as a rapid response fount of reaction in concert with despotic Arab regimes to do the Empire?s bidding in the Middle East and beyond. Over the years this has included support for the mass terror waged against the people of Central and South America and facilitating the evasion of international sanctions against South Africa. Besides providing a ready supply of mercenaries to terrorise a populace -- whether in Guatemala, Iraq or New Orleans -- Israel also lends its expertise of collective punishment and mass terror. We have to recognise that the foundation of the Israeli economy was founded on the special political and military role which Zionism then and today fulfils for Western imperialism. While playing its role to ensure that the region is safe for oil companies it has also carved out today a niche market producing high-tech security essential for the day-to-day functioning of New Imperialism. The unrestrained hand of US imperialism and its support for barbarism whether in Iraq or Palestine should hasten our actions. In Gaza, 80 per cent of the population live in poverty and close to a million people have no access to fresh water, electricity and other essential services. Close to 70,000 workers have lost their jobs in the siege of Gaza. The killing of Palestinians continues on a ferocious basis -- daily missiles are launched from US-made helicopters and fighter jets. These cowardly war crimes are carried out with impunity -- no longer even meriting a mention in the mainstream press. In the light of these killings and the slow starvation of the inhabitants of Gaza, as well as the frequent ?incursions? into the West Bank, the obsequiousness of the Abbas regime becomes all the more abject. The fanfare and din surrounding the Annapolis ?breakthrough? is one more hoax designed to assuage the conscience and lull the ?international community? to slumber. Karma Nabulsi wrote at the time of this spectacle: The tarnished trickery of those tired catchphrases ?last chance for peace?, ?painful compromises?, ?moderates against extremists? is now worn so thin a child would not be deceived. It is a meeting to legitimise the status quo. There is an intense defeatism pervading the mainstream media and tired politicians without valour everywhere. But there is a hopeful reality: many ordinary citizens all over the world have not given up and the Palestinians have not given up on themselves. Palestinians remain steadfast and courageous. Despite the complexities of the Palestinian resistance and the conflict between Fatah and Hamas, and without discouraging criticism, we outside the Israeli dungeons and the rubble of the Israeli war machine have a responsibility to support the Palestinian struggle. I believe this can be accomplished through the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Campaign (BDS) proposed by a wide array of Palestinian trade unions, and academic, student and political organisations representing the vast majority of the Palestinian people (see http://www.pacbi.org ). Other writings have justified the need for this strategy, so it will suffice here to quote an American currently residing in South Africa, Virginia Tilley, who in the aftermath of the cluster bombing by Israel of Lebanon wrote: It is finally time. After years of internal arguments, confusion, and dithering, the time has come for a full-fledged international boycott of Israel. Good cause for a boycott has, of course, been in place for decades, as a raft of initiatives already attests. But Israel's war crimes are now so shocking, its extremism so clear, the suffering so great, the UN so helpless, and the international community's need to contain Israel's behavior so urgent and compelling, that the time for global action has matured. A coordinated movement of divestment, sanctions, and boycotts against Israel must convene to contain not only Israel's aggressive acts and crimes against humanitarian law but also, as in South Africa, its founding racist logics that inspired and still drive the entire Palestinian problem. Lessons from the campaign to isolate apartheid South Africa It will be helpful to draw activists? attention to some of the egregious lessons from the campaign to isolate apartheid South Africa, bearing in mind Amilcar Cabral?s ?tell no lies, claim no easy victories? advice to revolutionaries. First, it took a few decades of hard work before the boycott campaign made an impact. Despite the impression given by many governments, unions and faith-based groups that they supported the isolation of the apartheid state from the outset this is just not true. Besides the infamous words of Dick Cheney, when as a senator he called for the continued incarceration of Nelson Mandela because he was a ?terrorist? quite late in the day, and the support given by US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Thatcher, together with regimes like dictator Pinochet?s Chile, Israel and others, most powerful institutions, multilateral organisations and unions were hesitant for many years to fully support the campaign. The Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) was formed in 1959 and the first significant breakthrough came in 1963 when Danish dock workers refused to off-load South African goods. The rise of the AAM must be seen in the general effervescence of liberation struggles and social movements in the turbulent 1960s/early 1970s and in the context of, whatever our opinion was of the USSR and its motivations, a counterweight to the US hegemon. This, together with the viciousness of the pro-Israeli lobby, its opportunistic reference to the Holocaust and anti-Semitism and the post-9/11 climate of fear, silencing dissent and Islamophobia, makes the task of isolating apartheid Israel more difficult. Despite these seemingly daunting obstacles the movement for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel is gaining momentum and already some significant gains have been made. Gains which would?ve been difficult to imagine just a few years ago. Second, arguments opposed to the boycott related to the harm it would cause black South African themselves and the need for dialogue and ?constructive engagement? were easily rebuffed by lucid and knowledgeable arguments. The South African regime, like the Israeli regime today, used ``homeland?? leaders and an assortment of collaborators to argue the case for them. Careful research played an important role in exposing the economic, cultural and the armaments trade links with South Africa to make our actions more effective as well as to ?name and shame? those who benefited from the apartheid regime. Third, sectarianism is a danger that we must be vigilant about and principled unity must be our lodestar. Some in the AAM favoured supporting only one liberation movement as the authentic voice of the oppressed in South Africa. They also aspired to work largely with ?respectable? organisations, governments and multilateral organisations and shunned the much harder and patient linking of struggles with grassroots organisations. In the UK for instance as elsewhere this sectarian attitude resulted in debilitating splits. The biggest chapter of the AAM in London, which supported the anti-imperialist struggle in Ireland and was part of the ``Troops Out Movement??, were ostracised by the official AAM. The latter was also keen not to annoy the British government by taking a stronger stance against racism in Britain. The healthy linking of struggles against racism, in support of the indigenous people and workers in North America with the Palestinian struggle that I have witnessed must be lauded. At a huge Palestinian solidarity rally in South Africa recently members of the Palestinian Solidarity Committee were asked by officials from the Palestinian ambassador?s office to pull down the flag of the Western Sahrawi Republic because they feared this would alienate the ambassador of Morocco. We refused this request much to the glee of Polisario Front supporters present. Fourth, the campaign for boycotts, divestment and sanctions must be in concert with supporting grassroots organisations in Palestine as a whole and in the Palestinian diaspora. This can take many forms and shapes including ``twinning?? arrangements, speaking tours, targeted actions in support of specific struggles and concrete support. Initially, the dominant liberation movement and its allies did not support the independent trade union movement in South Africa, which played a pivotal role in bringing down the apartheid regime. Fifteen years after the first democratic election in South Africa the present neoliberal government is privatising municipal services. The poor who cannot pay their rent are being evicted and failure to pay water and electricity bills mean frequent disconnections. The government often calls the inability to pay user fees the ?culture of non-payment and entitlement?. A few years back we were horrified to see officials from the municipality of Cape Town present to a visiting Palestinian delegation, including a proud Saeeb Erekart, prepaid water meters. This is not and should not be the solidarity we are talking about! As a postscript an article in Haaertz written by Amira Hass in February 2008, about a workers? strike in the West Bank, reads: The workers have three main demands: adjusting wages to match the steep increase in the cost of living; a realistic addition to the "travel expenses" component of salaries (which has not risen since 1999, in spite of the doubling and tripling of the cost of travel because of roadblocks and the increase in fuel prices), and overturning a new regulation that demands every resident procure a certificate of honesty based on "confirmation of debt payment."?Government spokesmen, headed by Fayyad, have often spoken against a "culture of non-payment of bills," thus portraying the general Palestinian public as prone to being debt offenders? Familiar language for us in South Africa and resistance to this neoliberalism is growing. For Palestinians it is happening even before ``liberation??. Hass writes: The strike, and all the public and internal discussions accompanying it, is a fascinating lesson of how Palestinians still acknowledge the power of the collective; how they oppose a liberal economic policy under occupation and colonization, and nurture a democratic suspicion as to the motives of the leading class. Finally, the sanctions campaign in South Africa did produce gatekeepers , sectarians and commissars but they were also challenged. Writing in support of the academic boycott a colleague, Shireen Hassim does not gloss over the problems: Some academics who actively opposed apartheid had invitations to international conferences withdrawn; it was not always possible to target the supporters of the apartheid regime; and South African academics? understanding of global issues was certainly weakened. It is in the nature of such weapons that they are double-edged. But, as part of a battery of sanctions, the academic boycott undoubtedly had an impact on both the apartheid state and on white academics and university administrations. The boycott, together with the more successful sports boycott and economic divestment campaigns, helped to strengthen the struggle of black people for justice. The Afrikaner elite, very proud of its European roots and of the legacy of Jan Smuts as a global representative in the post-war system, and convinced that there would be support for its policies abroad, was rudely shaken. University administrations could no longer hide behind an excuse of neutrality but had to issue statements on their opposition to apartheid and introduce programs of redress. Academic associations (some more than others) examined the nature and conditions of research in their disciplines, and faculty unions became part of broader struggles for justice rather than bodies protecting narrow professional interests. Universities became sites of intense debate, and, indeed, intellectuals became critically involved in debates about the nature of current and future South African societies. In the wake of the boycott, there was not a curtailing of academic freedom, then, but a flourishing of intellectual thought that was rich, varied, and exciting. * Salim Vally, a leading member of the Palestine Solidarity Committee in South Africa and a veteran anti-apartheid activist, will be a featured guest at the World at a Crossroads conference, to be held in Sydney, Australia, on April 10-12, 2009, organised by the Democratic Socialist Perspective, Resistance and Green Left Weekly . Visit http://www.worldATACrossroads.org for full agenda and to book your tickets. From fentona at shaw.ca Sun Apr 5 11:21:47 2009 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Sun, 5 Apr 2009 10:21:47 -0700 Subject: [R-G] The Revolution Will Not Be Destabilized Message-ID: April 3, 2009 The Revolution Will Not Be Destabilized Ottawa?s democracy promoters target Venezuela Documents obtained by The Dominion show Canada's involvement in 'democracy' promotion in Venezuela. http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/2557 From ahskar_mm at yahoo.com Sun Apr 5 11:44:30 2009 From: ahskar_mm at yahoo.com (ahskar_mm at yahoo.com) Date: Sun, 5 Apr 2009 17:44:30 +0000 Subject: [R-G] Motorola Sells Israel Bomb Division as National BoycottCampaign Advances In-Reply-To: <1787281886.10891238948727535.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> References: <1787281886.10891238948727535.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1649308519-1238953477-cardhu_decombobulator_blackberry.rim.net-717356438-@bxe1033.bisx.prod.on.blackberry> Q Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile -----Original Message----- From: Sid Shniad Date: Sun, 5 Apr 2009 09:25:27 To: Subject: [R-G] Motorola Sells Israel Bomb Division as National Boycott Campaign Advances http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/israel020409.html Motorola Sells Israel Bomb Division as National Boycott Campaign Advances by the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation Washington, DC (April 2) -- The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and allied organizations participating in a national boycott campaign against Motorola welcomed news that Motorola Israel Ltd. has sold its Government Electronics Department, which made several products that enable Israel's military occupation of and human rights abuses against Palestinians. The reported sale of the Motorola Israel department occurred just two days after a globally-coordinated day of action to promote campaigns of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel and corporations that profit from its human rights abuses of Palestinians. This day of action and the growing global BDS movement were inspired by the 2005 call from Palestinian civil society for BDS campaigns targeting Israel, similar to campaigns targeting South Africa's apartheid regime during the 1970s and 1980s. In Brooklyn, the New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel (NYCBI) launched a city-wide boycott campaign against Motorola, and cell phones stores selling Motorola products were picketed in places such as Cambridge, MA and Santa Clara, CA. The protests called on Motorola and its fully owned subsidiary, Motorola Israel Ltd., to end their sales of bomb fuses, communication devices, and surveillance equipment to the Israeli military. Human rights activists argue that these technologies are used by the Israeli military to violate human rights and international law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Human Rights Watch researchers found shrapnel with Motorola serial numbers on it at the site of bomb blasts after Israel's recent assault on the Gaza Strip, dubbed "Operation Cast Lead." For additional information about the case against Motorola, click here. In February, Hampshire College divested from several companies involved in Israel's military occupation, including Motorola. Hampshire College Students for Justice in Palestine member Bryan Van Slyke had the following response to Motorola's recent actions: "Hampshire Students for Justice in Palestine are proud that, following the historic successful divestment campaign from the Israeli occupation at our college, another milestone has now been achieved by the global BDS movement. This proves that activists around the world can and are truly making an impact in the cause for Palestinian self-determination." According to Katherine Fuchs, National Organizer for the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, "Motorola is a corporation with a history of supplying products to human rights abusing regimes. Consumer pressure forced Motorola to sever its relations with the South African apartheid regime and the military junta in Burma, and we won't stop until they do the same with Israel. The sale of Moto's Government Electronics Department is a positive development and a sign that Motorola is being forced to respond to our boycott campaign. However, we will continue to investigate Motorola's remaining ties with the Israeli military and illegal Israeli settlements; we will continue our campaign until we find that Motorola no longer profits from human rights violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories." The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation is a national coalition of more than 270 organizations working for a U.S. policy toward Israel/Palestine and responsible consumer choices to support human rights, international law, and equality for all in Israel/Palestine. For more information about the US Campaign, please click here. _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From ahskar_mm at yahoo.com Sun Apr 5 11:56:00 2009 From: ahskar_mm at yahoo.com (ahskar_mm at yahoo.com) Date: Sun, 5 Apr 2009 17:56:00 +0000 Subject: [R-G] Motorola Sells Israel Bomb Division as National BoycottCampaign Advances In-Reply-To: <1649308519-1238953477-cardhu_blackberry.rim.net-copy_sent_folder-17352259-@bxe1033.bisx.prod.on.blackberry> References: <1787281886.10891238948727535.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca><1649308519-1238953477-cardhu_blackberry.rim.net-copy_sent_folder-17352259-@bxe1033.bisx.prod.on.blackberry> Message-ID: <1818319704-1238954167-cardhu_decombobulator_blackberry.rim.net-1054887212-@bxe1033.bisx.prod.on.blackberry> Sorry for the prior email. Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile -----Original Message----- From: ahskar_mm at yahoo.com Date: Sun, 5 Apr 2009 17:44:30 To: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. Subject: Re: [R-G] Motorola Sells Israel Bomb Division as National BoycottCampaign Advances Q Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile -----Original Message----- From: Sid Shniad Date: Sun, 5 Apr 2009 09:25:27 To: Subject: [R-G] Motorola Sells Israel Bomb Division as National Boycott Campaign Advances http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/israel020409.html Motorola Sells Israel Bomb Division as National Boycott Campaign Advances by the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation Washington, DC (April 2) -- The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and allied organizations participating in a national boycott campaign against Motorola welcomed news that Motorola Israel Ltd. has sold its Government Electronics Department, which made several products that enable Israel's military occupation of and human rights abuses against Palestinians. The reported sale of the Motorola Israel department occurred just two days after a globally-coordinated day of action to promote campaigns of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel and corporations that profit from its human rights abuses of Palestinians. This day of action and the growing global BDS movement were inspired by the 2005 call from Palestinian civil society for BDS campaigns targeting Israel, similar to campaigns targeting South Africa's apartheid regime during the 1970s and 1980s. In Brooklyn, the New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel (NYCBI) launched a city-wide boycott campaign against Motorola, and cell phones stores selling Motorola products were picketed in places such as Cambridge, MA and Santa Clara, CA. The protests called on Motorola and its fully owned subsidiary, Motorola Israel Ltd., to end their sales of bomb fuses, communication devices, and surveillance equipment to the Israeli military. Human rights activists argue that these technologies are used by the Israeli military to violate human rights and international law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Human Rights Watch researchers found shrapnel with Motorola serial numbers on it at the site of bomb blasts after Israel's recent assault on the Gaza Strip, dubbed "Operation Cast Lead." For additional information about the case against Motorola, click here. In February, Hampshire College divested from several companies involved in Israel's military occupation, including Motorola. Hampshire College Students for Justice in Palestine member Bryan Van Slyke had the following response to Motorola's recent actions: "Hampshire Students for Justice in Palestine are proud that, following the historic successful divestment campaign from the Israeli occupation at our college, another milestone has now been achieved by the global BDS movement. This proves that activists around the world can and are truly making an impact in the cause for Palestinian self-determination." According to Katherine Fuchs, National Organizer for the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, "Motorola is a corporation with a history of supplying products to human rights abusing regimes. Consumer pressure forced Motorola to sever its relations with the South African apartheid regime and the military junta in Burma, and we won't stop until they do the same with Israel. The sale of Moto's Government Electronics Department is a positive development and a sign that Motorola is being forced to respond to our boycott campaign. However, we will continue to investigate Motorola's remaining ties with the Israeli military and illegal Israeli settlements; we will continue our campaign until we find that Motorola no longer profits from human rights violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories." The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation is a national coalition of more than 270 organizations working for a U.S. policy toward Israel/Palestine and responsible consumer choices to support human rights, international law, and equality for all in Israel/Palestine. For more information about the US Campaign, please click here. _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From shniad at sfu.ca Sun Apr 5 11:51:29 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sun, 5 Apr 2009 10:51:29 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Doonesbury on Afghanistan Message-ID: <1576516632.20571238953889024.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Doonesbury on Afghanistan: http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20090405 From suzannedk at gmail.com Sun Apr 5 13:25:52 2009 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Sun, 5 Apr 2009 21:25:52 +0200 Subject: [R-G] Doonesbury on Afghanistan In-Reply-To: <1576516632.20571238953889024.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> References: <1576516632.20571238953889024.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: People who read this wonderful Doonesbury cartoon may not know that during Reagan's disastrous first years. (he rolled back essentials laws and movements for saving the planet and for getting off foreign oil that Carter had carefully crafted into law), Doonesbury was forced to suspend his cartoon as he was daily and weekly skewering the Great Communicator as the Great Fraud pawn of the oil companies. Which the terrible actor he was, was. Schilldom to die for. He was insulted by the Mayor of Detroit (Horse - Face) and promised that the Federal Goverment would never ever after help Detroit! And the Federal Government kept that promise, until Obama, which Obama may pay for politically. Rick Wagoner smiling triumphantly in the photo taken after he is booted by Obama says it all. He is to get twenty million severance pay. The Empire wants the Big Three to lead it, with the other international monopolies. The essential Obama is on a collision course with Corporate America. If he had the self confidence of Roosevelt he could win. Suzanne suzannedk at gmail.com On Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 7:51 PM, Sid Shniad wrote: > Doonesbury on Afghanistan: > > http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20090405 > > > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From tchilds at resist.ca Sun Apr 5 16:24:12 2009 From: tchilds at resist.ca (tchilds at resist.ca) Date: Sun, 5 Apr 2009 15:24:12 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Ice bridge ruptures in Antarctic - BBC Message-ID: <49383.70.71.176.80.1238970252.squirrel@mail.resist.ca> See video resource at the link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7984054.stm Ice bridge ruptures in Antarctic David Vaughan says the break-up is a 'really strong indication' of warming An ice bridge linking a shelf of ice the size of Jamaica to two islands in Antarctica has snapped. Scientists say the collapse could mean the Wilkins Ice Shelf is on the brink of breaking away, and provides further evidence or rapid change in the region. Sited on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula, the Wilkins shelf has been retreating since the 1990s. Researchers regarded the ice bridge as an important barrier, holding the remnant shelf structure in place. Its removal will allow ice to move more freely between Charcot and Latady islands, into the open ocean. The ice bridge has splintered at its thinnest point European Space Agency satellite pictures had indicated last week that cracks were starting to appear in the bridge. Newly created icebergs were seen to be floating in the sea on the western side of the peninsula, which juts up from the continent towards South America's southern tip. Professor David Vaughan is a glaciologist with the British Antarctic Survey who planted a GPS tracker on the ice bridge in January to monitor its movement. He said the breaking of the bridge had been expected for some weeks; and much of the ice shelf behind is likely to follow. "We know that [the Wilkins Ice Shelf] has been completely or very stable since the 1930s and then it started to retreat in the late 1990s; but we suspect that it's been stable for a very much longer period than that," he told BBC News. "The fact that it's retreating and now has lost connection with one of its islands is really a strong indication that the warming on the Antarctic is having an effect on yet another ice shelf." While the break-up will have no direct impact on sea level because the ice is floating, it heightens concerns over the impact of climate change on this part of Antarctica. Over the past 50 years, the peninsula has been one of the fastest warming places on the planet. Many of its ice shelves have retreated in that time and six of them have collapsed completely (Prince Gustav Channel, Larsen Inlet, Larsen A, Larsen B, Wordie, Muller and the Jones Ice Shelf). Separate research shows that when ice shelves are removed, the glaciers and landed ice behind them start to move towards the ocean more rapidly. It is this ice which can raise sea levels, but by how much is a matter of ongoing scientific debate. Such acceleration effects were not included by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) when it made its latest projections on likely future sea level rise. Its 2007 assessment said ice dynamics were poorly understood. From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Sun Apr 5 20:14:52 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Mon, 06 Apr 2009 11:14:52 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Change You Can Parse Message-ID: <49D9659C.1030009@ashisuto.co.jp> Obama Abandons Bush's Talk, Keeps His Walk by Ted Rall rall.com (March 19 2009) You can't blame Dick Cheney for being annoyed at Barack Obama. Obama is closing Guantanamo. He's ordering the CIA to interrogate prisoners according to the rules written in the Army Field Manual, which doesn't allow torture. He's even phasing out such classic Bushian phrases as "enemy combatant" and "war on terror". But the dark prince of neoconservatism should relax. Obama's inaugural address may have promised to "reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals", but - in all the ways that matter - he's keeping all of Bush's outrageous policies in place. Sure, he talks a good game about "moving forward". But nothing has really changed. From reading your e-mails to asserting the right to assassinate American citizens to bailing out companies whose executives pay themselves big bonuses, Obama's changes are nothing but toothless rhetoric. Closing Gitmo, reported The New York Times, was merely "a move that seemed intended to symbolically separate the new administration from Bush detention policies. But in a much anticipated court filing, the Justice Department argued that the president has the authority to detain terrorism suspects there without criminal charges, much as the Bush administration had asserted. It provided a broad definition of those who can be held, which was not significantly different from the one used by the Bush administration." What will happen to the 241 POWs still at Gitmo? They won't be called "enemy combatants" anymore but most won't be going home. "The filing signaled that, as long as Guantanamo remains open, the new Administration will aggressively defend its ability to hold some detainees there", wrote the Times. Where will they go after that? Welcome to Gitmo II - courtesy of Barack Obama. Countless victims have been tortured by US military personnel at Bagram, the US airbase in Afghanistan where Bush imprisoned 600 people without charges. Some were murdered in the camp's notorious "salt pit". "Even children have not been spared", says Amnesty International. Now Bagram is being expanded - nearly doubled in size - in order to accommodate 200-plus detainees from Gitmo, as well as future POWs from Obama's expanded war against Afghanistan. As bad as Guantanamo was, conditions at Bagram are worse. Unless you believe indefinite detention without due process to be torture, Obama says his detainees won't be tortured. Mostly. Probably. Maybe. The Washington Post quotes an Administration insider as saying that the CIA will enjoy "more leeway" than the Army Field Manual allows, in order to "take into account the differences between battlefield interrogations and those aimed at eliciting intelligence about terrorist groups and their plans". Extraordinary renditions, the Times reports in a different article, will continue under Obama. "In little-noticed confirmation testimony recently", says the paper, "Obama nominees endorsed continuing the CIA's program of transferring prisoners to other countries without legal rights, and indefinitely detaining terrorism suspects without trials even if they were arrested far from a war zone". During the 2008 campaign Obama's critics accused him of saying nothing, albeit beautifully. Now that we've gotten to know him a bit, it's time to refine that assessment: He's just a weasel. An eloquent weasel. But a weasel who says the right things while doing the opposite. On March 9th Obama ordered federal agencies to suspend Bush's infamous "signing statements", sneaky documents issued after the signing of a bill that ordered government agencies not to enforce the very same bill he'd just approved in front of the cameras. Signing statements, says the American Bar Association, use one-man dictatorial rule to negate the people's will as expressed by Congress and are thus "contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional separation of powers". "Yet two days later - literally - Obama signed a $410 billion spending bill and appended to it a signing statement claiming that he had the Constitutional authority to ignore several of its oversight provisions", writes Glenn Greenwald of Slate. Greenwald regrets having to quote the vile Rich Lowry of the right-wing National Review magazine. So do I. But even the right is right sometimes: Unlike the word count limit of this column, Obama's perfidy knows no limits. He's already become more dangerous to democracy and basic human rights than George W Bush. Unlike Bush, he has no political opposition. Cheney may nitpick, but most Republicans are happy to see Bush's policies remain in place. Meanwhile, liberals remain loyal, silent, and tacitly pro-torture. Copyright 2009 Ted Rall http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall/?uc_full_date=20090319 TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shniad at sfu.ca Sun Apr 5 20:20:59 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sun, 5 Apr 2009 19:20:59 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] From Thomas Jefferson In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1743070898.88781238984459614.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Quote of the Week 'I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.' Thomas Jefferson 1802 From critical.montages at gmail.com Sun Apr 5 20:39:19 2009 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sun, 5 Apr 2009 22:39:19 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Why Neoliberalism Is Alive and Kicking Message-ID: Neoliberalism is alive and kicking -- kicking the asses of American workers, _hard_. And it's no wonder. Read the kick-me sign slapped on the backs of all US workers: Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers, said there were smarter things to do than demonstrating against layoffs -- for instance, pushing Congress and the states to make sure the stimulus plan creates the maximum number of jobs in the United States. "I actually believe that Americans believe in their political system more than workers do in other parts of the world," Mr. Gerard said. He said large labor demonstrations are often warranted in Canada and European countries to pressure parliamentary leaders. Demonstrations are less needed in the United States, he said, because often all that is needed is some expert lobbying in Washington to line up the support of a half-dozen senators. (Steven Greenhouse, "In America, Labor Has an Unusually Long Fuse," http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/weekinreview/05greenhouse.html New York Times, 5 April 2009) From shniad at sfu.ca Sun Apr 5 21:15:11 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sun, 5 Apr 2009 20:15:11 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] The best way to rob a bank is to own one: America's Institutionalized Con Game (Bill Moyers' Journal) Message-ID: <852255828.98481238987711746.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Bill Moyers? Journal The best way to rob a bank is to own one: America's Institutionalized Con Game http://www.amazon.com/Best-Way-Rob-Bank-Own/dp/0292721390/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1238987351&sr=8-1 ?Bernie Madoff was a piker.? Part 1 of 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-levttuKm4Q Part 2 of 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwzbQXKNG7A Part 3 of 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZVSRF9XPkE From suzannedk at gmail.com Mon Apr 6 02:45:17 2009 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2009 10:45:17 +0200 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Change You Can Parse In-Reply-To: <49D9659C.1030009@ashisuto.co.jp> References: <49D9659C.1030009@ashisuto.co.jp> Message-ID: The statementsof the great Imam of Iran negating all of Obama's newly friendly words to the country says the same as the article by Ted Rall. "We see no difference from the intentions of the former Bush administration" paraphrases the Imam's statement, shortens Rall's opinions, or, visa versa. Obama as a weasel is given too much credit. Suzanne suzannedk at gmail.com On 4/6/09, Bill Totten wrote: > > > Obama Abandons Bush's Talk, Keeps His Walk > > by Ted Rall > > rall.com (March 19 2009) > > > You can't blame Dick Cheney for being annoyed at Barack Obama. Obama is > closing Guantanamo. He's ordering the CIA to interrogate prisoners > according to the rules written in the Army Field Manual, which doesn't > allow torture. He's even phasing out such classic Bushian phrases as > "enemy combatant" and "war on terror". > > But the dark prince of neoconservatism should relax. Obama's inaugural > address may have promised to "reject as false the choice between our > safety and our ideals", but - in all the ways that matter - he's keeping > all of Bush's outrageous policies in place. Sure, he talks a good game > about "moving forward". But nothing has really changed. From reading > your e-mails to asserting the right to assassinate American citizens to > bailing out companies whose executives pay themselves big bonuses, > Obama's changes are nothing but toothless rhetoric. > > Closing Gitmo, reported The New York Times, was merely "a move that > seemed intended to symbolically separate the new administration from > Bush detention policies. But in a much anticipated court filing, the > Justice Department argued that the president has the authority to detain > terrorism suspects there without criminal charges, much as the Bush > administration had asserted. It provided a broad definition of those who > can be held, which was not significantly different from the one used by > the Bush administration." > > What will happen to the 241 POWs still at Gitmo? They won't be called > "enemy combatants" anymore but most won't be going home. "The filing > signaled that, as long as Guantanamo remains open, the new > Administration will aggressively defend its ability to hold some > detainees there", wrote the Times. Where will they go after that? > > Welcome to Gitmo II - courtesy of Barack Obama. > > Countless victims have been tortured by US military personnel at Bagram, > the US airbase in Afghanistan where Bush imprisoned 600 people without > charges. Some were murdered in the camp's notorious "salt pit". "Even > children have not been spared", says Amnesty International. > > Now Bagram is being expanded - nearly doubled in size - in order to > accommodate 200-plus detainees from Gitmo, as well as future POWs from > Obama's expanded war against Afghanistan. As bad as Guantanamo was, > conditions at Bagram are worse. > > Unless you believe indefinite detention without due process to be > torture, Obama says his detainees won't be tortured. Mostly. Probably. > Maybe. The Washington Post quotes an Administration insider as saying > that the CIA will enjoy "more leeway" than the Army Field Manual allows, > in order to "take into account the differences between battlefield > interrogations and those aimed at eliciting intelligence about terrorist > groups and their plans". > > Extraordinary renditions, the Times reports in a different article, will > continue under Obama. "In little-noticed confirmation testimony > recently", says the paper, "Obama nominees endorsed continuing the CIA's > program of transferring prisoners to other countries without legal > rights, and indefinitely detaining terrorism suspects without trials > even if they were arrested far from a war zone". > > During the 2008 campaign Obama's critics accused him of saying nothing, > albeit beautifully. Now that we've gotten to know him a bit, it's time > to refine that assessment: He's just a weasel. An eloquent weasel. But a > weasel who says the right things while doing the opposite. > > On March 9th Obama ordered federal agencies to suspend Bush's infamous > "signing statements", sneaky documents issued after the signing of a > bill that ordered government agencies not to enforce the very same bill > he'd just approved in front of the cameras. Signing statements, says the > American Bar Association, use one-man dictatorial rule to negate the > people's will as expressed by Congress and are thus "contrary to the > rule of law and our constitutional separation of powers". > > "Yet two days later - literally - Obama signed a $410 billion spending > bill and appended to it a signing statement claiming that he had the > Constitutional authority to ignore several of its oversight provisions", > writes Glenn Greenwald of Slate. > > Greenwald regrets having to quote the vile Rich Lowry of the right-wing > National Review magazine. So do I. But even the right is right sometimes: > > Unlike the word count limit of this column, Obama's perfidy knows no > limits. He's already become more dangerous to democracy and basic human > rights than George W Bush. Unlike Bush, he has no political opposition. > Cheney may nitpick, but most Republicans are happy to see Bush's > policies remain in place. Meanwhile, liberals remain loyal, silent, and > tacitly pro-torture. > > Copyright 2009 Ted Rall > > http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall/?uc_full_date=20090319 > > > TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click > on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this > essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ > > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Apr 6 10:42:25 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2009 09:42:25 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Update on quote from Thomas Jefferson In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <600003599.75861239036145822.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> It appears that the quote may have been manufactured: http://tinyurl.com/6rg3ng From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Apr 6 11:30:18 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2009 10:30:18 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Too big to save: the end of financial capitalism | Open Democracy In-Reply-To: <1E8E04A1556641E799A77129CE7C2232@twubby.com> Message-ID: <632410014.103881239039018941.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.opendemocracy.net:80/article/too-big-to-save-the-end-of-financial-capitalism-0 ? Open Democracy ??????????????????????????????????????????? ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????? 1 April 2009 ? Too big to save: the end of financial capitalism ? Saskia Sassen ? The financial logic of neo-liberal capitalism has devoured the world and exhausted itself in the process. A new model beyond "financialisation" is needed, says Saskia Sassen. ? The misnamed "Group of Twenty" ( G20 ) meets in London on 2 April 2009 to discuss how to save the global financial system. It is too late. The evidence is in: we don't have the resources to save this system - even if we wanted to. It has become too big to save: the value of global financial assets is several times the size of global gross national product (GDP). The real challenge is not to save this system but to definancialise our economies, as a prelude to move beyond the current model of capitalism. Why should the value of financial assets stay at almost four times the overall GDP of the European Union, and even more of the United States. What do everyday citizens - or the planet - gain from such excess? ? The question answers itself. To explore further the inner workings of the financial system that has brought the world to this predicament is also to glimpse a future beyond financialisation . The task the G20 should actually address is not to save this financial system but to begin to definancialise the major economies to a significant degree, so that the world can begin to move towards the creation of a "real" economy that delivers security, stability, and sustainability. There is much work to do. ? The logic ? A defining feature of the period that begins in the 1980s is the use of extremely complex instruments to engage in new forms of primitive accumulation , with taxpayers' money the last frontier for extraction. ? ? Global firms that outsource hundreds of thousands of jobs to low-wage countries have had to develop?complex organisational formats, using enormously expensive and talented experts. For what purpose? To extract more labour at the cheapest possible price, including unskilled labour that would be fairly low in the developed countries as well. The insidious element is that millions of saved cents translates into shareholders' gains. ? ? Finance has created some of the most complicated financial instruments in order to extract the meagre savings of modest households: by offering credit for goods they may not need and (even more seriously) promising the possibility of owning a house. The aim has been to secure as many credit-card holders and as many mortgage-holders as possible, so that they can be bundled into investment instruments. Whether people pay the mortgage or the credit-card matters less than securing a certain number of loans that can be bundled up into "investment products". Once thus bundled, the investor is no longer dependent on the individual's capacity to repay the loan or the mortgage. The use of these complex sequences of "products" has allowed investors to reap trillion-dollar profits on the backs of modest-income people. This is the logic of financialisation, which has become so dominant since the neo-liberal era began in the 1980s.? ? Thus in the United States - ground zero for these forms of primitive accumulation - an average of 10,000?homeowners have been losing their home to foreclosures every day . An estimated 10-to-12 million households in the US will?not be able to pay their mortgages over the next four years; under current conditions they would lose their home. This is a brutal form of primitive accumulation: presented with the possibility (which is mostly a fantasy, a lie) of owning a house, many people of modest income will put whatever few savings or future earnings they have into a down-payment. ? ? This type of complexity is aimed at extracting additional value from wherever it can - the small and modest and the big and rich. This too explains why the global financial system is in permanent crisis. Indeed, the term "crisis" is in some respects a misnomer: for what is happening is more nearly business as usual, the way financialised capitalism in the neo-liberal era works. ? The financialising of more and more economic sectors since the 1980s has become both a sign of the power of this financial logic and the sign of its auto-exhaustion. When everything has become financialised, finance can no longer extract value. It needs non-financialised sectors to build on. The last frontier is taxpayers' money - which is real, old-fashioned, not (yet) financialised money.? Krzysztof Rybinski's "zombies" are also parasites. ? The limit ? The difference of the current crisis is precisely that financialised capitalism has reached the limits of its own logic. It has been extremely successful at extracting value from all economic sectors through their financialising. It has penetrated such a large part of each national economy (in the highly developed world especially) that the parts of the economy where it can go to extract non-financial capital for its own rescue have become too small to provide the amount of capital needed to rescue the financial system as a whole. ? By way of illustration: the global value of financial assets (which means: debt) in the whole world by September 2008 - as the crisis was exploding with the collapse of Lehman Brothers - was $160 trillion: three-and-a-half times larger than the value of global GDP. The financial system cannot be rescued by pumping in the money available.? ? ? This in turn explains the abuses of entire economies made possible through extreme forms of financialising. Before the current "crisis" erupted, the value of financial assets in the United States had reached 450% of GDP that is to say 4.5 times total GDP (see " Mapping global capital markets ", McKinsey Report , October 2008).?In the European Union, it stood at 356% of GDP. More generally, the number of countries where financial assets exceed the value of their gross national product more than doubled from thirty-three in 1990 to seventy-two in 2006. ? Moreover, the financial sector in Europe has grown faster than in the United States over the last decade, mostly because it started from a lower level: its compound annual growth rate in 1996-2006 was 4.4%, compared with the US rate of 2.8%.? ? ? ? Even capitalist economies - leaving aside assessments of whether this is the most desirable economic system - do not need an amount of financial assets that is four times the value of GDP. Thus even within a capitalist logic, giving more funds to the financial sector in order to solve the financial "crisis" is not going to work - for it would just deepen the vortex of financialising economies. ? The scale ? Another way to portray the current situation is via the different orders of magnitude involved in (respectively) banking and finance. In September 2008, the value of bank assets amounted to several trillion dollars; but the total value of credit-default swaps ( CDS ) - the straw that broke the system - stood at almost $60 trillion. That is a sum larger than global GDP. The debts fell due, and the money was not there.? ? More generally - and again, to give a sense of the orders of magnitude that the financial system has created since the 1980s - the total value of derivatives (a form of debt, and the most common financial instrument) was over $600 trillion. Such financial assets have grown far more rapidly than has any other economic sector (see Gillian Tett, " Lost through destructive creation ", Financial Times , 9 March 2009). ? The level of debt?in the United States today is higher than in the depression of the early 1930s. In 1929, the debt-to-GDP ratio was about 150%; by 1932, it had grown to 215%. In September 2008, the outstanding debt due on credit-default swaps - a Made-in-America product (and, it should be recalled, only one type of debt - was over 400% of GDP. In global terms, the value of debt in September 2008 was $160 trillion (three times global GDP), while the value of outstanding derivatives is an almost inconceivable $640 trillion (fourteen times the GDP of all countries in the world).? ? ? These numbers illustrate that this is indeed an "extreme" moment - but, again, it is not anomalous nor is it created by exogenous factors (as the notion of "crisis" suggests). Rather, it is the normal mode of operation of this particular type of financial system. Moreover, every time governments (that is, citizens and taxpayers) have bailed out the financial system since the first crisis of this phase - the New York stock-market? crash of 1987 - they have given finance the instruments to continue its leveraging stampede. There have been five bailouts since the 1980s; on each occasion, taxpayers' money was used to pump liquidity into the financial system, and each time, finance used it to leverage.? This time, the end of the cornucopia is near - we have run out of money to meet the enormous needs of the financial system.?? ? The bridge ? The implication of the foregoing is that two major challenges need to be faced: ? ? the need to definancialise the major economies ? ? the need to move out of the current model of capitalism. ? Both will be difficult, but it will help to focus on some very basic facts. The current estimate of official global unemployment is 50 million; the International Labour Organisation ( ILO ) calculates that 50 million more could lose their jobs as the recession deepens. These figures are tragic for those affected. They are also relatively modest (without minimising the human reality in any way) when set against the 2 billion people in the world who are desperately poor. But this raises the question: how many "jobs" would be created if there were a system that aimed at housing and feeding those 2 billion? The world would then need those 50 million currently unemployed to go to work - and another?billion more workers into the bargain.?? ? ? If seen in this light, the financial "crisis" could serve as one of the bridges into a new type of social order. It could help all involved - citizens and activists, NGOs and researchers, local communities and networks, democratic governments - to refocus on the work that needs to be done?to house all people, clean our water, green our buildings and cities, develop sustainable agriculture (including urban agriculture), and provide healthcare for all. This innovative order would employ all those interested in working.?When all the work that needs to be done is listed, the notion of mass unemployment makes little sense. ? ? The technology to underpin this work - in helping to eliminate diseases that affect millions, and to produce enough to feed all - has existed for several decades. Yet millions still die from preventable diseases and even more go hungry . Poverty has become more radical: no longer about having only a plot of land that did not produce more, today it means having only your body.?Inequality too has intensified and taken on new dimensions , including a new global class of super-rich and the impoverishment of the traditional middle classes. ? The history of the last generation confirms that the neo-liberal form of market economy cannot deliver answers to these problems of disease, hunger, poverty and inequality - indeed it reinforces them. Some mixing of clean markets and a strong welfare state has (as in Scandinavia) produced the best outcomes yet; but for most capitalist economies even to come near to this model would entail sweeping internal change (see Amartya Sen, " Capitalism Beyond the Crisis ", New York Review of Books , 26 March 2009). ? In any event, the increase in the?financialising of market economies over the last generation has further sharpened the negative effects of profit-maximisation logics. To move even a little in the direction of addressing the problems financialisation has created means entering an economic space that is radically different from that of high finance. The challenge is there for those attending the G20 summit in London - and for those outside the gates. ? ? Saskia Sassen is professor of sociology and member ? of the Committee on Global Thought,? Columbia University. Her books include Losing Control? Sovereignty in the Age of Globalization (Columbia University Press, 1996); The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton University Press, 2001) ; Territory, Authority, and Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages ( Princeton University Press, 2006); and A Sociology of Globalization (WW Norton, 2007) Also by Saskia Sassen in openDemocracy : " A universal harm: making criminals of migrants " (21 August 2003) " Fear and camouflage: the end of the liberal state?" (22 December 2005) - part of a global end-of-year symposium " Free speech in the frontier-zone " (20 February 2006) " A state of decay " (2 May 2006) " Migration policy: from control to governance " (13 July 2006) " Globalisation, the state and the democratic deficit " (18 July 2007) " Lahore: urban space, niche repression " (21 November 2007) " The world's third spaces " (8 January 2008) " The new new deal " (23 September 2008) " Cities and new wars: after Mumbai" (29 November 2008) ? From suzannedk at gmail.com Mon Apr 6 12:26:43 2009 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2009 20:26:43 +0200 Subject: [R-G] Too big to save: the end of financial capitalism | Open Democracy In-Reply-To: <632410014.103881239039018941.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> References: <1E8E04A1556641E799A77129CE7C2232@twubby.com> <632410014.103881239039018941.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: This was. is, the Bernie Madoff shell game only several trillion percent greater in scope. End of capitalism? It is the beginning of legalized War Empire. The new/old capitalism will be a key player. Democracy has gone the way of the Dodo bird. It only hangs on in the Eurozone, by a thread. Asia and the Middle East never had Democracy. It is not comfortable there. Suzanne suzannedk at gmail.com On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 7:30 PM, Sid Shniad wrote: > > > > http://www.opendemocracy.net:80/article/too-big-to-save-the-end-of-financial-capitalism-0 > > > > > > > > Open Democracy > > 1 April 2009 > > > > > > > > Too big to save: the end of financial capitalism > > > > > > > > Saskia Sassen > > > > > > > > The financial logic of neo-liberal capitalism has devoured the world and > exhausted itself in the process. A new model beyond "financialisation" is > needed, says Saskia Sassen. > > > > > > > > The misnamed "Group of Twenty" ( G20 ) meets in London on 2 April 2009 to > discuss how to save the global financial system. It is too late. The > evidence is in: we don't have the resources to save this system - even if we > wanted to. It has become too big to save: the value of global financial > assets is several times the size of global gross national product (GDP). The > real challenge is not to save this system but to definancialise our > economies, as a prelude to move beyond the current model of capitalism. Why > should the value of financial assets stay at almost four times the overall > GDP of the European Union, and even more of the United States. What do > everyday citizens - or the planet - gain from such excess? > > > > > > > > The question answers itself. To explore further the inner workings of the > financial system that has brought the world to this predicament is also to > glimpse a future beyond financialisation . The task the G20 should actually > address is not to save this financial system but to begin to definancialise > the major economies to a significant degree, so that the world can begin to > move towards the creation of a "real" economy that delivers security, > stability, and sustainability. There is much work to do. > > > > > > > > The logic > > > > > > > > A defining feature of the period that begins in the 1980s is the use of > extremely complex instruments to engage in new forms of primitive > accumulation , with taxpayers' money the last frontier for extraction. > > > > > > > > Global firms that outsource hundreds of thousands of jobs to low-wage > countries have had to develop complex organisational formats, using > enormously expensive and talented experts. For what purpose? To extract more > labour at the cheapest possible price, including unskilled labour that would > be fairly low in the developed countries as well. The insidious element is > that millions of saved cents translates into shareholders' gains. > > > > > > > > Finance has created some of the most complicated financial instruments in > order to extract the meagre savings of modest households: by offering credit > for goods they may not need and (even more seriously) promising the > possibility of owning a house. The aim has been to secure as many > credit-card holders and as many mortgage-holders as possible, so that they > can be bundled into investment instruments. Whether people pay the mortgage > or the credit-card matters less than securing a certain number of loans that > can be bundled up into "investment products". Once thus bundled, the > investor is no longer dependent on the individual's capacity to repay the > loan or the mortgage. The use of these complex sequences of "products" has > allowed investors to reap trillion-dollar profits on the backs of > modest-income people. This is the logic of financialisation, which has > become so dominant since the neo-liberal era began in the 1980s. > > > > > > > > Thus in the United States - ground zero for these forms of primitive > accumulation - an average of 10,000 homeowners have been losing their home > to foreclosures every day . An estimated 10-to-12 million households in the > US will not be able to pay their mortgages over the next four years; under > current conditions they would lose their home. This is a brutal form of > primitive accumulation: presented with the possibility (which is mostly a > fantasy, a lie) of owning a house, many people of modest income will put > whatever few savings or future earnings they have into a down-payment. > > > > > > > > This type of complexity is aimed at extracting additional value from > wherever it can - the small and modest and the big and rich. This too > explains why the global financial system is in permanent crisis. Indeed, the > term "crisis" is in some respects a misnomer: for what is happening is more > nearly business as usual, the way financialised capitalism in the > neo-liberal era works. > > > > > > > > The financialising of more and more economic sectors since the 1980s has > become both a sign of the power of this financial logic and the sign of its > auto-exhaustion. When everything has become financialised, finance can no > longer extract value. It needs non-financialised sectors to build on. The > last frontier is taxpayers' money - which is real, old-fashioned, not (yet) > financialised money. Krzysztof Rybinski's "zombies" are also parasites. > > > > > > > > The limit > > > > > > > > The difference of the current crisis is precisely that financialised > capitalism has reached the limits of its own logic. It has been extremely > successful at extracting value from all economic sectors through their > financialising. It has penetrated such a large part of each national economy > (in the highly developed world especially) that the parts of the economy > where it can go to extract non-financial capital for its own rescue have > become too small to provide the amount of capital needed to rescue the > financial system as a whole. > > > > > > > > By way of illustration: the global value of financial assets (which means: > debt) in the whole world by September 2008 - as the crisis was exploding > with the collapse of Lehman Brothers - was $160 trillion: three-and-a-half > times larger than the value of global GDP. The financial system cannot be > rescued by pumping in the money available. > > > > > > > > This in turn explains the abuses of entire economies made possible through > extreme forms of financialising. Before the current "crisis" erupted, the > value of financial assets in the United States had reached 450% of GDP that > is to say 4.5 times total GDP (see " Mapping global capital markets ", > McKinsey Report , October 2008). In the European Union, it stood at 356% of > GDP. More generally, the number of countries where financial assets exceed > the value of their gross national product more than doubled from > thirty-three in 1990 to seventy-two in 2006. > > > > > > > > Moreover, the financial sector in Europe has grown faster than in the > United States over the last decade, mostly because it started from a lower > level: its compound annual growth rate in 1996-2006 was 4.4%, compared with > the US rate of 2.8%. > > > > > > > > Even capitalist economies - leaving aside assessments of whether this is > the most desirable economic system - do not need an amount of financial > assets that is four times the value of GDP. Thus even within a capitalist > logic, giving more funds to the financial sector in order to solve the > financial "crisis" is not going to work - for it would just deepen the > vortex of financialising economies. > > > > > > > > The scale > > > > > > > > Another way to portray the current situation is via the different orders of > magnitude involved in (respectively) banking and finance. In September 2008, > the value of bank assets amounted to several trillion dollars; but the total > value of credit-default swaps ( CDS ) - the straw that broke the system - > stood at almost $60 trillion. That is a sum larger than global GDP. The > debts fell due, and the money was not there. > > > > > > > > More generally - and again, to give a sense of the orders of magnitude that > the financial system has created since the 1980s - the total value of > derivatives (a form of debt, and the most common financial instrument) was > over $600 trillion. Such financial assets have grown far more rapidly than > has any other economic sector (see Gillian Tett, " Lost through destructive > creation ", Financial Times , 9 March 2009). > > > > > > > > The level of debt in the United States today is higher than in the > depression of the early 1930s. In 1929, the debt-to-GDP ratio was about > 150%; by 1932, it had grown to 215%. In September 2008, the outstanding debt > due on credit-default swaps - a Made-in-America product (and, it should be > recalled, only one type of debt - was over 400% of GDP. In global terms, the > value of debt in September 2008 was $160 trillion (three times global GDP), > while the value of outstanding derivatives is an almost inconceivable $640 > trillion (fourteen times the GDP of all countries in the world). > > > > > > > > These numbers illustrate that this is indeed an "extreme" moment - but, > again, it is not anomalous nor is it created by exogenous factors (as the > notion of "crisis" suggests). Rather, it is the normal mode of operation of > this particular type of financial system. Moreover, every time governments > (that is, citizens and taxpayers) have bailed out the financial system since > the first crisis of this phase - the New York stock-market crash of 1987 - > they have given finance the instruments to continue its leveraging stampede. > There have been five bailouts since the 1980s; on each occasion, taxpayers' > money was used to pump liquidity into the financial system, and each time, > finance used it to leverage. This time, the end of the cornucopia is near - > we have run out of money to meet the enormous needs of the financial > system. > > > > > > > > The bridge > > The implication of the foregoing is that two major challenges need to be > faced: > > > > > > > > ? the need to definancialise the major economies > > > > > > > > ? the need to move out of the current model of capitalism. > > > > > > > > Both will be difficult, but it will help to focus on some very basic facts. > The current estimate of official global unemployment is 50 million; the > International Labour Organisation ( ILO ) calculates that 50 million more > could lose their jobs as the recession deepens. These figures are tragic for > those affected. They are also relatively modest (without minimising the > human reality in any way) when set against the 2 billion people in the world > who are desperately poor. But this raises the question: how many "jobs" > would be created if there were a system that aimed at housing and feeding > those 2 billion? The world would then need those 50 million currently > unemployed to go to work - and another billion more workers into the > bargain. > > > > > > > > If seen in this light, the financial "crisis" could serve as one of the > bridges into a new type of social order. It could help all involved - > citizens and activists, NGOs and researchers, local communities and > networks, democratic governments - to refocus on the work that needs to be > done to house all people, clean our water, green our buildings and cities, > develop sustainable agriculture (including urban agriculture), and provide > healthcare for all. This innovative order would employ all those interested > in working. When all the work that needs to be done is listed, the notion of > mass unemployment makes little sense. > > > > > > > > The technology to underpin this work - in helping to eliminate diseases > that affect millions, and to produce enough to feed all - has existed for > several decades. Yet millions still die from preventable diseases and even > more go hungry . Poverty has become more radical: no longer about having > only a plot of land that did not produce more, today it means having only > your body. Inequality too has intensified and taken on new dimensions , > including a new global class of super-rich and the impoverishment of the > traditional middle classes. > > > > > > > > The history of the last generation confirms that the neo-liberal form of > market economy cannot deliver answers to these problems of disease, hunger, > poverty and inequality - indeed it reinforces them. Some mixing of clean > markets and a strong welfare state has (as in Scandinavia) produced the best > outcomes yet; but for most capitalist economies even to come near to this > model would entail sweeping internal change (see Amartya Sen, " Capitalism > Beyond the Crisis ", New York Review of Books , 26 March 2009). > > > > > > > > In any event, the increase in the financialising of market economies over > the last generation has further sharpened the negative effects of > profit-maximisation logics. To move even a little in the direction of > addressing the problems financialisation has created means entering an > economic space that is radically different from that of high finance. The > challenge is there for those attending the G20 summit in London - and for > those outside the gates. > > > > > > > > > > > > Saskia Sassen is professor of sociology and member of the Committee on > Global Thought, Columbia University. Her books include Losing Control? > Sovereignty in the Age of Globalization (Columbia University Press, 1996); > The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton University Press, 2001) > ; Territory, Authority, and Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages ( > Princeton University Press, 2006); and A Sociology of Globalization (WW > Norton, 2007) > > > > > > Also by Saskia Sassen in openDemocracy : > > > > > " A universal harm: making criminals of migrants " (21 August 2003) > " Fear and camouflage: the end of the liberal state?" (22 December 2005) - > part of a global end-of-year symposium > " Free speech in the frontier-zone " (20 February 2006) > " A state of decay " (2 May 2006) > " Migration policy: from control to governance " (13 July 2006) > " Globalisation, the state and the democratic deficit " (18 July 2007) > " Lahore: urban space, niche repression " (21 November 2007) > " The world's third spaces " (8 January 2008) > " The new new deal " (23 September 2008) > " Cities and new wars: after Mumbai" (29 November 2008) > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Apr 6 13:44:36 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2009 12:44:36 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] The fox who Obama has guarding the financial henhouse Message-ID: <190136275.182841239047076730.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/business/06summers.html?hp=&pagewanted=all ? New York Times ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? April 6, 2009 ? A Rich Education for Summers (After Harvard) ? By Louise Story ? Lawrence H. Summers plays down his stint in the hedge fund business as a mere part-time job ? but the financial and intellectual rewards that he gained there would make even most full-time workers envious. ? Mr. Summers, the former Treasury secretary and Harvard president who is now the chief economic adviser to President Obama , earned nearly $5.2 million in just the last of his two years at one of the world?s largest funds, according to financial records released Friday by the White House. ? Impressive as that might sound, it is all the more considering that Mr. Summers worked there just one day a week. ? Much is known about Mr. Summers?s days in Washington and Cambridge, but little attention has been paid to his two years in New York, from late 2006 to late 2008, advising an elite corps of math wizards and scientists devising investment strategies for D. E. Shaw & Company. ? Mr. Summers said in an interview that his experience at Shaw, however brief, gave him valuable insight into the practical realities of Wall Street, insight he is now putting to use in shaping economic policy in the White House. ? ?I have a better sense of how market participants sort of think and react to things from sort of listening to the conversations and listening to the way the traders at D. E. Shaw thought,? he said. ? Mr. Summers and Shaw executives say his role there was to be a sounding board for Shaw?s traders. But interviews with friends and former colleagues suggest that Mr. Summers?s role at D. E. Shaw was wider and more complex. ? Mr. Summers, these people say, was a marquee hire, a prized spokesman for Shaw. He routinely made himself available for private consultations with Shaw?s clients, an attractive perk for investing with the firm, as one client put it. ? Mr. Summers, who taught economics and public policy at Harvard while advising Shaw, also met with investors in the United States, as well as in the cash-rich Middle East and Asia. He spoke at industry conferences, mixing with officials from public pension funds, endowments and other large institutions with many billions of dollars to invest. ? While at Shaw, Mr. Summers also peered into the inner workings of the $2 trillion hedge fund industry, which the Obama administration is now relying on to buy billions of dollars of worrisome assets from the nation?s beleaguered banks. ? Some of his critics worry that such ties raise questions about whether the government?s ever-changing effort to bolster the financial industry will benefit Wall Street in general, and hedge funds in particular, at the expense of taxpayers. ? ?This is what might be called contamination,? said Andrew Sabl, an associate professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. ?Did Summers spend so much time with the hedge fund, or its investors, sovereign wealth funds and so on, that he started to think like them?? ? Mr. Summers joined the hedge fund world after his tempestuous, five-year term as the president of Harvard came to an unhappy end in February 2006, after a statement he made that women might lack an intrinsic aptitude for math and science. ? It was at that time, to the surprise of some colleagues, that Mr. Summers seriously contemplated his options on Wall Street in part because he believed his chances to return to a prominent position in Washington had dimmed, friends say. ? Although he once compared finance to ketchup sales, Mr. Summers discussed job possibilities with Goldman Sachs , long considered the premier Wall Street bank, and with Citigroup , where Robert E. Rubin , Mr. Summers?s predecessor as Treasury secretary, had become a senior adviser. ? Then a young Harvard graduate named Julius Gaudio, whom Mr. Summers had met at alumni events, raised another possibility: D. E. Shaw, where Mr. Gaudio is a managing director. As part of Shaw?s rigorous screening process ? the firm accepts perhaps one out of every 500 applicants ? Mr. Summers was asked to solve math puzzles. He passed, and the job was his. ? In a rare interview, David E. Shaw, who founded the firm in 1988 above a communist book shop in Greenwich Village, put it simply: Mr. Summers is ?a brilliant, brilliant guy.? That is from a former computer science professor at Columbia who now spends his time researching areas like treatments for cancer, while others run his hedge fund day-to-day. ? D. E. Shaw does not like to talk about what goes on inside its modish headquarters near Times Square. There, esoteric trading strategies are imagined, sketched on whiteboards and modeled on supercomputers by an elite corps of math wizards and scientists, most of them unknown to the outside world. ? It is nothing like a button-down Wall Street brokerage firm. Jeans, sweatshirts and sandals are common. The firm has not one, but two libraries, where textbooks on computer coding are stacked near academic finance journals dating to the 1960s. For a time, the d?cor included light bulbs strung from the ceiling on various lengths of wire, each determined by a computerized random-number generator. ? It is a quicksilver business and wildly lucrative. Mr. Shaw is said to be worth $2.7 billion, and today his firm manages $30 billion. ? At Shaw, Mr. Summers, the professor, was often the student. The arrogant personal style that turned off some Harvard colleagues seemed to evaporate, Shaw traders say. Mr. Summers immersed himself in dynamic hedging, Libor rates and other financial arcana. ? He seemed to fit in among Shaw?s math-loving ?quants,? as devotees of math-heavy quantitative investing are known. Traders joked that Mr. Summers was the first quant Treasury secretary because he had once ordered dollar bills to be printed with the transcendental number pi ? 3.14159... ? as the serial number. ? ?We could call or e-mail him anytime,? a former Shaw trader said. ?He always asked me more questions than I could ask him. He would dig through my entire way of thinking.? ? At Harvard and at Shaw, Mr. Summers cultivated a small circle of financial professionals ? particularly hedge fund managers ? to serve as an informal brain trust. He consults with them on policy matters from his perch in the White House. ? Among these insiders are Kenneth D. Brody and Frank P. Brosens, the founding partners of another hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisors, for whom Mr. Summers did consulting work from 2004 to 2006. ? Mr. Summers reached out to Mr. Brosens in December to discuss the Obama administration?s economic priorities. This year, he campaigned to have him run the federal office overseeing the $700 billion bailout program. Mr. Brosens withdrew his name from consideration last month. ? Others in this inner circle include Nancy Zimmerman, a longtime friend and hedge fund manager in Boston; Laurence D. Fink , the chairman and chief executive of BlackRock, a large money management company that hopes to play a potentially lucrative role in the administration?s bank rescue plan; H. Rodgin Cohen, the chairman of the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, who was briefly considered for a senior Treasury post; and three other top fund managers, Orin S. Kramer, Ralph L. Schlosstein and Eric M. Mindich. ? Friends of Mr. Summers say he has always been meticulous about avoiding conflicts of interest and that he was just as careful at D. E. Shaw. For instance, Mr. Summers went to lengths to pay the Social Security taxes on payments he made to even occasional babysitters from the 1980s, said Jeremy Bulow, an economics professor at Stanford, who has known Mr. Summers since graduate school. ? ?To Larry, it was not about figuring out where the line is and making sure you?re on one side of it,? Mr. Bulow said. ?He would never even get close to it.? ? In addition to his salary at Shaw, Mr. Summers enjoyed growing wealth through investments in the firm?s funds. Unlike most hedge funds, which lost money as the markets plunged in 2008, Shaw posted returns of about 7 percent in its so-called macroeconomic fund. A separate multistrategy fund lost 8 percent, far less than most hedge funds. ? When investors rushed en masse to withdraw their money from hedge funds last year, Shaw asserted its right to block redemptions from its fund. An exception was made for Mr. Summers, however, because the White House job he was taking required him to divest. ? A spokesman for Shaw said Mr. Summers?s main job was not to act as a salesman. But in the fall of 2007, as the financial crisis simmered, Mr. Summers traveled to Dubai for a series of meetings with Shaw?s marketing staff and potential investors. Bankers from across the region flew in for the event. Mr. Summers spoke at several lavish dinners and met with local parties involved in Shaw?s real estate investments in the area, people briefed on his trip said. ? Last September, Mr. Summers explained to Shaw traders what appeared to be an aberration in a key interest rate, the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, thus helping its traders avoid losses. He spoke at the firm?s 20th anniversary gathering for its investors and at a prominent hedge fund investor conference in Boston, weeks before the presidential election. In December, he attended the firm?s annual holiday party, held in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, beneath the giant model of a blue whale. ? Even so, Mr. Summers, who, before the crisis broke out, spoke and wrote about the need for greater financial regulation, has not resisted the efforts to tighten up on hedge funds like Shaw. The administration, for instance, is moving toward closing a tax loophole that these funds have long enjoyed. A White House spokeswoman says his actions supporting hedge fund regulation prove he is not biased. ? Some people in the financial world say they have more confidence in the White House?s plans because of Mr. Summers? time at D. E. Shaw. ? ?He had insights into one of the best hedge funds in the world. That can only add value to the things the government is struggling with right now,? said Robert Borden, chief investment officer of South Carolina?s pension fund, which has invested $350 million with Shaw. Mr. Borden met Mr. Summers to discuss how much money a large institution should allocate to hedge funds. ? ?It was a nice perk to have access to some of his thoughts and insights,? Mr. Borden said. ? Mr. Summers?s experience in hedge funds might leave some wondering if he will return to private investing when his latest White House assignment ends, perhaps even to run his own lucrative fund. ? Asked about that, Mr. Shaw laughed. ?Oh, boy, I have no idea,? he said. ?Thankfully he?s doing what he?s doing. I?m really glad he?s running this. It?s a scary time, and I can?t think of anybody I?d rather see there.? From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Apr 6 13:50:23 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2009 12:50:23 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Is this the change Americans voted for? Message-ID: <53302044.185241239047423069.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090406.wnato06/BNStory/International ? Globe and Mail ??????????????????????????????????????????? ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? April 6, 2009 ? U.S. set to take far greater role in Afghanistan ? As world leaders met in Strasbourg at a high-level NATO summit, it became apparent that the rest of NATO's nations are increasingly wary of getting any more deeply involved in Afghanistan despite Obama?s entreaties. ? Doug Saunders and Brian Laghi ? Strasbourg, France ? The Afghanistan war is set to become a far more U.S.-dominated project, with Canada and major European participants shifting to a lesser role after NATO countries failed this weekend to meet U.S. hopes for substantially more troops. ? While President Barack Obama impressed members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization with his multilateral approach to the war and his willingness to address their concerns, those gestures were not reciprocated with an anticipated boost in troops to match Mr. Obama's "Afghan surge." ? The United States will be sending 21,000 new troops, most of them combat soldiers, to join the U.S. force of about 38,000 soldiers this year, a huge boost to the current 42-nation fighting force of 58,390 troops. ? In January, Mr. Obama and his aides had expressed hope that NATO's 26 member countries would match this gesture by supplying as many as 10,000 combat soldiers to provide a force of sufficient size to liberate most Taliban-held areas in the Afghan south. ? Vice-President Joe Biden had told European leaders in February that he hoped for a "more for more" approach, in which the United States would put an end to practices unpopular with Europeans such as rendition flights, torture policies and the Guantanamo Bay prison, in exchange for a larger European role in the Afghan conflict. ? But as world leaders met on the French-German border this weekend to mark the 60th anniversary NATO's creation with a high-level summit, it became apparent the rest of NATO's nations are increasingly wary of getting any more deeply involved in Afghanistan. ? While Mr. Obama and NATO's leaders were able to boast on Saturday that they had received contributions of 5,000 new troops to Afghanistan, including a number from Britain that could approach 1,000, virtually all of these troops are either trainers for the Afghan National Army or, more often, temporary forces meant to provide security for the national elections in August. ? At least 3,000 of the 5,000 new troops will be temporary election guards; the rest will almost all be trainers. ? In addition to "200 to 900" soldiers from Britain, this includes 600 each from Germany and Spain. Canada added 300 more troops last year to bring its commitment up to 2,800 soldiers, the fourth largest. ? What the United States has failed to gain is the central plank of Mr. Biden's bargain: a matched contribution from NATO to make Europe and the United States nearly equal partners in the war. ? Instead, U.S. forces will be nearly double the size of all other contributions - and this will seem even more asymmetrical because many of the larger European contributors, including Germany and France, are in Afghanistan under "caveats" that prevent them from entering active combat or fighting in the Taliban-plagued south. ? Canadian officials said that Regional Command South, which Canada commands from Kandahar, is likely to become a U.S.-run operation in practice, simply by dint of the sheer number of American troops who will be entering the area, which is among the most violent in Afghanistan. ? While Canadians were quick to point out that the U.S. places Canada in high regard and has learned from the Canadian approach to nation-building and counterinsurgency, the combination of the unmatched U.S. surge and Canada's withdrawal of all combat forces from the war in 2011 have effectively shunted Canada out of the centre of the war - and, some say, away from the centre of NATO. ? Although Mr. Obama had made it clear in February that he did not expect Canada to contribute more forces to Afghanistan, NATO diplomats from several countries said that Canada's role has been marginalized. ? It was clear from his remarks that Mr. Obama did not leave the summit with everything he wanted. After providing an optimistic gloss on the troop commitments, Mr. Obama expressed frustration with the share of the Afghanistan burden being taken by the United States. "This is not an American mission; this is a NATO mission, this is an international mission," he said at a town-hall meeting on Saturday. ? Of the 58,390 NATO troops fighting in Afghanistan under the United Nations-ordered International Stabilization and Assistance Force, 26,215 are from the United States (Mr. Obama's "surge will almost double number with 21,000 extra soldiers), 8,300 from Britain, 3,465 from Germany and 2,830 from Canada. ? The rest consist of small contributions from 42 ISAF member countries, more than half of which are NATO members. ? German Chancellor Angela Merkel suggested that the retraining of the Afghan National Army would be a substitute for adding troops. ? "What we need to do is to understand Afghanistan is a test case for all of us," she said Saturday afternoon. ? "We need to promote Afghanization." ? But she said that Germany would "do its bit," without suggesting the possibility that Germany might consider removing caveats that prevent its soldiers from fighting in combat-ridden areas. ? And while Mr. Obama attempted to put a congenial diplomatic face on the shortfall, other American officials and observers were more outspoken. ? "If the Europeans do not step up to the plate and commit to a more aggressive and effective counterinsurgency strategy, it will make it all the more challenging for President Obama to prevent the war in Afghanistan from becoming the foreign policy crucible for him that Iraq was for president Bush," wrote Nicholas Burns, the undersecretary of defence in the Bush administration and a long-time U.S. NATO figure. From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Apr 6 14:02:43 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2009 13:02:43 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] =?utf-8?q?Ottawa=E2=80=99s_democracy_promoters_target_Venez?= =?utf-8?q?uela?= In-Reply-To: <1980187472.190681239048056767.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <2076176003.191551239048163684.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/2557 T he Dominion ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? April 3, 2009 The Revolution Will Not Be Destabilized Ottawa?s democracy promoters target Venezuela by A nthony Fenton The Dominion - http://www.dominionpaper.ca Documents obtained by The Dominion [ www.dominionpaper.ca/images/2565 ] show Canada's involvement in democracy promotion in Venezuela. Canada's foreign policy, as that country which is closer geographically, economically, and militarily with the US than any other, has long been circumscribed by the whims of the world's lone Superpower. Part of the 'hidden wiring' of the US-Canada relationship is premised on the belief that there is a role for Canada in places where the US carries a lot of counter-productive baggage. New records obtained by The Dominion show just how actively intertwined Canada's foreign policy is with the US-led 'democracy' promotion project in Venezuela. Successive Canadian governments, beginning with Paul Martin's Liberals and increasing under Harper's Tory minorities, have pushed full steam ahead with efforts to expand Canada's democracy promotion efforts globally. Canadian leadership in the regime change and military occupation of Haiti (2004-present) gave rise to a renewed emphasis on the region as an emerging regional power, which carries on under Harper. Democracy promotion is seldom discussed in the Canadian public sphere, even while it has been the subject of a multitude of federal level conferences, reports, and parliamentary hearings over the last five years. Over that same time, Canada has increasingly been integrating its instruments of democracy promotion with those of the US. During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama quietly pledged to increase funding for the controversial National Endowment for Democracy (NED), despite scaling back the rhetoric used to describe continuing US aims to promote global, Western-style democracy. Obama has already fulfilled this pledge. His Omnibus Appropriations Act allocates $115 million for NED's operations, increasing by $35 million the amount requested by Bush for 2009. All told, the requested 2009 budget for US democracy programs is the highest ever at $1.72 billion. By contrast, Canada spent upwards of $650 million on democracy promotion in 2008. The NED was formed in 1983 as a new tool to advance US foreign policy and business interests around the world. Nominally independent, NED receives the majority of its budget from Congress, and each of its grants must be approved by the US State Department. ?One of the NED's first major successes...was helping to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua,? writes journalist Bart Jones in his authoritative biography of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. According to Jones, a couple of decades later ?the NED was rapidly infiltrating [Venezuelan] society in a way reminiscent of the Nicaragua experience.? Channelling money and resources to opposition NGOs has been a prime strategy of the NED in Venezuela. Following a short-lived coup d'etat against Chavez in April 2002, Venezuelan-American attorney Eva Golinger and investigative journalist Jeremy Bigwood obtained a treasure trove of documents through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. These documents, released in conjunction with Golinger's 2004 book, The Chavez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela , exposed NED's active role in the attempted subversion of Venezuela's democracy. One of several Canadian NGOs whose activities are complementary to those of the NED is the Canadian Foundation for the Americas (FOCAL). Established by the Mulroney government in the 1990's, FOCAL is almost entirely dependent on government funding and is accountable to Parliament. A 2004 evaluation of FOCAL conducted by Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada (DFAIT) and Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) wrote: Stakeholders from every sector and from the academic community in particular, indicated that FOCAL is already perceived as 'the right arm of the government,' echoing the perspective and beliefs of its funding bodies, rather than a truly independent, non-governmental organization. "The US has been using Canadian and European foundations more frequently in recent years to filter funding to Venezuelan and other NGOs and political parties that promote their mutual interests," said Golinger, whose most recent book is The Imperial Web: Encyclopedia of Interference and Subversion. "It's a way of covering up US meddling and making the sources of foreign funding for political objectives more difficult to detect. Canada has been a major ally of the US in this respect, particularly in the case of Venezuela." Negative perceptions of the US indicate the necessity of ?shifting responsibility for the [democracy] campaign to more local actors or other Western allies,? wrote Raymond Gastil, one of the theoreticians behind the US shift to democracy promotion, in 1988. Although far from the first such instance, Canada began to take on such ?responsibility? towards Venezuela in January 2005. DFAIT invited the head of a key opposition group in Venezuela, Sumate's Maria Corina Machado, to meet Ottawa lawmakers and officials, as well as to give a briefing on political rights in Venezuela. Machado openly supported the 2002 coup against Chavez. In 2004, she was charged with conspiracy to commit treason for allegedly using NED funds to campaign against Chavez in a recall referendum organized by the opposition. According to records obtained by The Dominion through Access to Information request FOCAL's chairman John Graham joined Machado in Washington, D.C. for a high level meeting in 2005. In attendance were former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Roger Noriega. ?An exchange of ideas as regards the relationships between the civil society and the governments for the strengthening of democracy in the region,? was the stated purpose of the meeting. Shortly after Graham?s meeting with Rice and Machado, the NED approved a $94,516 grant for FOCAL to carry out democracy promotion work in and around Venezuela. Using the NED funds, FOCAL was to commission a series of papers and organize a number of meetings in Ottawa, Venezuela and Ecuador "to discuss how to better collaborate in promoting an informed civil society that can strengthen democracy in the region." But after Stephen Harper's Conservatives took power in early 2006, FOCAL abruptly cancelled the activities that were supposed to take place in Venezuela. "After discussing this project with various people...[we] came to the conclusion that it was not in anybody's interests to organize such an activity while being financially associated with the NED,? reads a heavily-censored memo sent by DFAIT official Flavie Major in July of 2006. "[S]ince the project was originally drafted the internal context in Venezuela has shifted, as has the domestic context in Canada, which could potentially alter the priority and focus of Canada's engagement in Venezuela," indicates a separate document obtained through a US FOIA request. An example of the changing political context in Venezuela is the 2006 draft Law on International Cooperation, which was to have limited the ability of local NGOs to receive funding from foreign governments. Although the law has yet to be enacted, Western-backed NGOs and their donors have launched a campaign to ?push back? against what they describe as a ?backlash? against democracy promoters in the region. By late 2006, the Conservatives proclaimed that democracy promotion was a ?fundamental part? of Canadian foreign policy objectives, and ?an eminently worthy and intrinsically Canadian endeavour.? One indication of the Conservatives? commitment was through the appointment of a former NED board member as a top advisor to Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay. In late 2007, the Canadian government gave the NED $198,168 to produce a major report, titled "Defending Civil Society: A Report of the World Movement for Democracy." The report attacks Venezuela for its efforts to limit Western-funded manipulation of its internal politics: Venezuela?s would-be caudillo Hugo Chavez has a peculiar notion of democracy. His ?Bolivarian revolution? appears to be based on Chavista [sic] monopolizing the country?s political institutions, from an absence of parliamentary opposition to a hand-picked judiciary. In these circumstances...civil society provides the only countervailing power to the Chavista state and to Chavez?s Castroite aspirations. DFAIT seems to have based their own talking points on Venezuela around the NED?s line. "Hugo Chavez has a history of weakening democratic institutions. Minister Kent is committed to furthering the Government's Americas strategy which is dedicated to promoting and enhancing democracy, freedom and the rule of law,? wrote a spokesperson for Canadian Minister of State for Latin America, Peter Kent, in an e-mail statement to The Dominion. "Hugo Chavez has a history of concentrating power in the Executive which has undermined democratic institutions in Venezuela. Since taking office a decade ago, we've seen the politicization of the judiciary and harassment by government officials of the state controlled media and NGOs," wrote Kent?s spokesperson when asked to substantiate her claim about Chavez? anti-democratic tendencies. One of the ways that Canada has tried to avoid drawing attention to its support for the Venezuelan opposition and collaboration with the NED is by carrying out activities outside of Venezuela and coordinating them through embassies. Indeed, such methods have a theoretical basis that Canada helped design. In conjunction with the NED-linked Council for a Community of Democracies and the US State Department, DFAIT contributed $70,000 in financing to the publication of A Diplomat's Handbook for Democracy Development Support, in April 2008. Canada has one of the few foreign services that train its diplomats in democracy promotion. The US Foreign Service Institute has already ordered at least 400 copies of the Handbook, which aims to provide diplomats with ?encouragement, counsel, and a greater capacity to support democrats everywhere.? ?We have over many, many years and will continue to work with the United States in this regard in advancing our common goals, certainly to the benefit of both countries and to the benefit of the world in general,? Canada's Consul-General in New York, Dan Sullivan, said during a launch event for the Handbook in early 2008. One example of the Handbook in action is Canada?s funding of the Venezuelan NGO Justice and Development Consortium (Asociaci?n Civil Consorcio Desarrollo y Justicia). This group, which also receives funding from the NED, has made a name for itself by working to unite reactionary opposition movements throughout Latin America. In November 2007, DFAIT gave the Justice and Development Consortium $94,580 "to consolidate and expand the democracy network in Latin America and the Caribbean" at an assembly held in Panama City in the spring of 2008. This meeting, co-hosted by the Canadian Embassy in Panama and the NED, attracted prominent members of (often NED funded) opposition movements in Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, and Ecuador. It was convened in response to "the usher[ing] in [of] a new era of populism and authoritarianism in Latin America." Flying in the face of the North American read of Venezuelan democracy is the latest report by the non-partisan Chilean Latinobarometro, which shows that 79 per cent of Venezuelans polled are satisfied with their democracy. "Venezuela has a poor image in the rest of the world... but the perception of Venezuelans is positive,? states the report. ?They say they like their democracy as it is now or, at least, much more than the citizens of other countries like their democracies which, by contrast, are not criticized by the outside world for lack of freedom and harassment of institutions.? Colombia, Peru, Mexico, and Chile are considered Canada?s strongest allies in the region, and are also countries where people?s support for their government tends to be lower than it is in Venezuela. The subversion of Venezuelan democracy and the laissez faire attitude towards the regimes of Felipe Cald?ron in Mexico, Alan Garcia in Peru and ?lvaro Uribe in Colombia demonstrates that building popular democracies is not the sought after end result of democracy promotion activities. The governments of Colombia, Peru, Mexico and Chile have already entered into Free-Trade deals with Canada, and each receives high levels of Canadian outward foreign direct investment, particularly in the extractive sector. Canadian trade with Venezuela is second only to trade with Brazil in South and Central America. Venezuela is the tenth-largest provider of Canada's considerable foreign oil needs. In 2008, Canada imported $1.36 billion worth of Venezuelan crude. The North Atlantic Refinery in Newfoundland, home of Premier Danny ?Chavez? Williams, refines the oil. Anthony Fenton is an independent researcher and journalist based in British Columbia, who has traveled to Venezuela several times. Some material in this article is drawn from a forthcoming book on Canadian foreign policy. He can be reached at fentona[at]shaw.ca. From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Apr 6 14:12:24 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2009 13:12:24 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Avneri on Israel's new government In-Reply-To: <372401178.196181239048708947.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1908101842.196381239048744532.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Uri Avnery 4.4.09 Who?s The Boss? ON THE first day of the new Israeli government, the fog cleared: it?s a Lieberman government. The day started with a celebration at the President?s office. All the members of this bloated government ? 30 ministers and 8 deputy ministers ? were dressed up in their best finery and posed for a group photo. Binyamin Netanyahu read an uninspired speech, which included the worn-out cliches that are necessary to set the world at ease: the government is committed to peace, it will negotiate with the Palestinian Authority, bla-bla-bla. Avigdor Lieberman hurried from there to the foreign Office, for the ceremonial change of ministers. He, too, made a speech ? but it was not a routine speech at all. ?Si vis pacem, para bellum ? if you want peace, prepare for war,? declared the new Foreign Minister. When a diplomat quotes this ancient Roman saying, the world pays no attention to the first part, but only to the second. Coming from the mouth of the already infamous Lieberman, it was a clear threat: the new government is entering upon a path of war, not of peace. With this sentence, Lieberman negated Netanyahu?s speech and made headlines around the world. He confirmed the worst apprehensions connected with the creation of this government. Not content with quoting the Romans, he explained specifically why he used this motto. Concessions, he said, do not bring peace, but quite the reverse. The world respected and admired Israel when it won the Six-day war. Two fallacies in one sentence. Returning occupied territory is not a ?concession?. When a thief is compelled to return stolen property, or when a squatter vacates an apartment that does not belong to him, that is not a ?concession?. And the admiration for Israel in 1967 came from a world that saw us as a little, valiant country that had stood up to mighty armies out to destroy us. But today?s Israel looks like a brutal Goliath, while the occupied Palestinians are now viewed as a David with his slingshot, fighting for his life. With this speech, Lieberman succeeded in stirring the world, but even more in humiliating Netanyahu. He exposed the peace declarations of the new Prime Minister as nothing but soap bubbles. However, the world (as I wrote last week) wants to be deceived. A White House spokesman announced that as far as the American administration is concerned, it is Netanyahu?s bla-bla-bla that counts, not Lieberman?s straight talking. And Hillary Clinton was not ashamed to call Lieberman and congratulate him on assuming office. THAT WAS the first test of strength inside the Netanyahu-Lieberman-Barak triangle. Lieberman has demonstrated his contempt for both Netanyahu and Barak. His political base is secure, because he is the only person who can topple the government at any moment. After the Knesset debate on the new government, only 69 members voted for it. If one adds the five Labor members who ?were present but did not participate in the vote? (a voting device that is less negative than abstaining), the government has 74 votes. Meaning: without Lieberman?s 15 members, the government does not command a majority. His speech was intended to underline this political reality. He as much as told Netanyahu: If you intend to shut me up, forget it. In fact, he held a pistol to Netanyahu?s head ? in this case, it could be a German Luger Parabellum, a pistol whose name derives from the Roman saying. The full extent of Lieberman?s Chutzpah came to the fore only an hour later. From the Foreign Office ceremony he hurried to another ritual ministerial handover, this time at the Ministry for Internal Security (formerly called the Ministry of Police). What business did he have there? None. It is highly unusual for a minister to attend such a ceremony in another ministry. True, the new Internal Security minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, belongs to Lieberman?s party, but that is not relevant. After all, he did not attend the similar ceremony at the Immigration Absorption ministry, where another member of his party was installed. ?? The riddle was solved the next day, when the freshly installed Foreign Minister spent seven hours in a police interrogation room, answering questions about suspected bribery, money laundering and such, in connection with huge sums that were transferred from abroad to a company that belongs to his 23 year old daughter. That explains his presence at the police ministry ceremony. He was photographed standing next to the chiefs of the criminal investigation department. It would be hard to see his appearance there as anything other than a crude and shameless threat against those who were to interrogate him on the morrow. His presence at the ceremony declared: I am the man who appointed the minister who is now in charge of each of your careers, for promotion or termination. And the same message went out to the judges: I have appointed the new Justice Minister, and I shall decide upon the promotion of all of you. IT ALL reminds me of a diplomatic reception at the Egyptian embassy exactly 10 years ago. There I met most of the members of the new government which had just been formed by Ehud Barak. All of them were depressed. Barak had done something that bordered on sadism: he had appointed every minister to the post most unsuitable for them. The gentle and polite Professor Shlomo Ben-Ami was appointed Minister of Internal Security (where he failed miserably during the October 2000 disturbances, when he failed to prevent his police from killing a dozen Arab citizens.) Yossi Beilin, a diplomat with a very fertile mind, a natural candidate for the Foreign Office, was appointed Justice Minister. And so on. In private conversations, all of them vented their bitterness against Barak. Now Netanyahu has trumped Barak. The appointment of Lieberman as Foreign Minister borders on the insane. The appointment of Yuval Steinitz, a professor of philosophy and a personal friend of Netanyahu?s wife, Sarah, a man devoid of any economic experience whatsoever, as Minister of the Treasury, at the height of the world financial crises, crosses the border of the absurd. The appointment of the No. 2 Likud leader, Silvan Shalom, to two junior ministries has made him into a deadly enemy. The creation of a long list of new and hollow ministries, just to provide jobs to his cronies, has turned the government into a popular joke (?a Minister for Incoming Mail and a Minister for Outgoing Mail?). BUT A government is no joke. And Lieberman is no joke. Far from it. Already on his first day he made clear that he ? he and not Netanyahu or Barak ? will set the style of the new government, both because of his strong political position and his massive personal presence and provocative character. He will maintain this government as long as it suits him and overthrow it the moment he feels that new elections will give him supreme power. His rude and violent style is both natural and calculated. It is intended to threaten, to appeal to the most primitive types in society, to draw public attention and to assure media coverage. All these are reminiscent of other countries and other regimes. The first one to congratulate him was ? not by chance ? the ex-fascist Foreign Minister of Italy. This week, earlier statements by Lieberman were quoted again and again. He once proposed bombing the huge Aswan dam, an act that would have caused a terrible Tsunami-like deluge and killed many millions of Egyptians. Another time he proposed delivering an ultimatum to the Palestinians: At 8 am we shall bomb your commercial centers, at noon your gas stations, at 2 pm your banks, and so on. He has proposed drowning thousands of Palestinian prisoners, offering to provide the necessary buses to take them to the coast. Another time he proposed deporting 90% of the 1.2 million Arab citizens of Israel. Recently he told the President of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, one of the staunchest allies of the Israeli leadership, to ?go to hell?. In the recent election campaign his official program included the demand to annul the citizenship of any Arab who did not prove his loyalty to Israel. That was also his main slogan. This, too, is reminiscent of the programs of certain parties in history. This is coupled with an open hostility to the Israeli ?elites? and everything connected with the founders of the State of Israel. SOME PEOPLE believe that Lieberman is really not a new phenomenon at all and that he simply brings to the surface traits that were there all the time but were buried beneath a thick layer of sanctimonious hypocrisy. What is his solution to the historic Israeli-Arab conflict? In the past, he spoke about a regime of cantons for the Palestinians. They will live in several enclaves in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which will be disconnected from each other and dominated by Israel. No Palestinian State, of course, no Arab East Jerusalem. He even proposed adding to these cantons some areas of Israel inhabited by a dense Palestinian population, whose Israeli citizenship would be revoked. This is not so far from the ideas of Sharon, nor from those of Netanyahu, who declares that the Palestinians will ?govern themselves? ? of course without a state, without a currency, without control of the border crossings, without harbors and airports. At the Foreign Office ceremony, Lieberman declared that the Annapolis agreement, which was dictated by President Bush, is invalid, and that only the ?Road Map? counts. The Foreign Ministry spokesmen hurried to explain that the ?Road Map? also speaks about ?two states?. They forgot to remind the world that the Israeli government had ?accepted? the Road Map only with 14 provisos that rob it of any content. For example: that Palestinians must ?destroy the terrorist infrastructure? (What is that? Who decides?) before Israel shall make any move, including the freeze of the settlements. (That may remind one of the rich Jew in the Shtetl, who dictated his Last Will and Testament, dividing his wealth between his relatives and friends and adding: ?In case of my death, this Will shall be null and void.?) As far as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is concerned, the controversy between Olmert and Livni on the one side and Netanyahu and Lieberman on the other is about tactics rather than strategy. The strategy of all of them is to prevent the creation of a normal, free and viable Palestinian state. Tzipi Livni was for a tactic of endless negotiations, decorated with pronouncement about peace and ?two nation-states?. Not for nothing did Netanyahu mock her: You had several years to achieve agreement with the Palestinians. So why didn?t you? This debate is not about peace, but about a ?peace process?. But in the meantime Tzipi Livni settles into her new job as the Leader of the Opposition. Her first speeches were vigorous and hard-hitting. We shall soon know if she can fill this job with content. If having to speak about peace will convince her of its value and turn her into a real alternative to the government of Lieberman and Liebermania. From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Apr 6 14:15:50 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2009 13:15:50 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] 10,000 March on Wall Street In-Reply-To: <29DA8552035C419CA84419B60B92BB8F@edxp> Message-ID: <1016094224.198181239048950081.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> From: United For Peace and Justice Sent: Monday , April 06, 2009 11:07 AM Subject: 10,000 March on Wall Street This past Saturday , April 4, in honor of Dr. King and his visionary 'Beyond Vietnam' speech in 1967, 10,000 people marched on Wall Street to protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and to demand a larger investment in the needs of our communities . Labor, veterans, students, immigrant rights groups, military families, faith-based people, women's groups, and community groups joined us for a lively, vibrant march . Joining us, too, was Rev. James Lawson, a leader to us all and co-worker with Dr. King. Speaking before the start of the march , Lawson said to marchers, 'In the spirit of Dr. King and the movement for equality and justice of the fifities and sixties, I say if we want peace to blossom, we must eradicate poverty, racism, sexism, violence, and greed in the U.S. Peace cannot come by crying peace. Peace can only begin to emerge when justice does .' Lawson also bemoaned the fact that 90 million working Americans 'hover in poverty' everyday. He said, 'The greatest impetus for stimulus to the economy is that those 90 million people receive wages that would allow them to sustain themselves and their families. Nothing would be more explosive than that kind of stimulus .' Rev. Lawson led the march -- with IVAW leader Perry O'Brien, Rev. Brad Braxton of Riverside Church, and Youth & Militarism Organizer for Fellowship of Reconciliation, Shauen Pearce -- holding the 'Beyond War, A New Economy Is Possible' banner, UFPJ's ongoing campaign to link war and the economy . The lead banner was followed by veterans and military families, who held a banner, 'End the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan!' The 10,000 demonstrators marched past the Federal Reserve building, surrounded the New York Stock Exchange, and ended in Battery Park for a Peace and Justice Fair. Despite intense wind conditions, along with the cold, marchers spent the next couple hours talking to members of more than 30 groups, who were tabling at the Fair, coordinating ways to continue our work for peace and justice. For images of the fair, please take a look at photos taken by UFPJ Steering Committee member, Mike Hearington. --- Please support our work! We have a lot of work ahead of us, including a petition drive to cut the military budget and a week of actions on Afghanistan. This all takes time and money, and we need your financial support to help us carry out this important work. You can donate here . --- This week is UFPJ's National Days of Local Action for Peace in Afghanistan. Click here for more details on this action . Tomorrow , we will be sending you more details, too, on how you can play a part in pressing for peace, not war, in Afghanistan. *** From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Apr 6 15:12:03 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2009 14:12:03 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] ALERT FROM CUPE: Colombia liquidates Cali unions, help stop the liquidation of unionists In-Reply-To: <9C714B9E-38B8-4641-BF07-D5D02D69AEBF@athabascau.ca> Message-ID: <208536116.229801239052323344.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> ALERT FROM CUPE: Colombia liquidates Cali unions, help stop the liquidation of unionists The government moved on Mar. 26, dissolving EMSIRVA, the city-owned?waste disposal company, using riot police and soliders to evict the workers from their workplace. Meanwhile, at EMCALI, the municipal utilities company, two union??executives and four fired workers have begun a hunger strike to protest a government-appointed trustee's decison to fire still more union members. The unions are asking for email and letters to Colombia's president and cabinet ministers. The government needs to know the world is watching. Sixteen members of Cali's public sector unions have been killed since 2004, including union executive Carlos Alberto Chicaiza Betancourt. S end? a protest email to president Alvaro?Uribe Velez . A copy will go to the workers and their union. http://cupe.ca/global-justice/Cali-unions-liquidated From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Apr 6 15:32:10 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2009 14:32:10 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Holocaust Remembrance Day planned for Geneva during UN Conference Against Racism Message-ID: <1094012774.238071239053529972.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Holocaust Remembrance Day Place des Nations - Geneva Monday , 20 April , 2009 - 6.30 PM ? On Holocaust Remembrance Day, in memory of the six million Jewish victims of the Shoah, the Jewish Communities of Geneva will organize a public commemorative ceremony on Monday , 20 April at 6:30 PM. The event will bring together survivors of the Shoah from across the religious spectrum, and will include public officials, diplomats, and religious leaders. ? The ceremony will take place at the Place des Nations, a symbolic location due to the opening, on the same day and under the auspices of the United Nations, of the Durban Review Conference against Racism. The ceremony in commemoration of the Holocaust will remind all those present of the potential consequences of racism and discrimination. ? The commemoration will highlight the universal lessons of the Shoah while also serving as a testament against Holocaust denial. In this spirit, tribute will be paid to Ren? Cassin and Rapha?l Lemkin, two personalities who, from the ashes of destruction, framed two fundamental texts that strive for the betterment of humanity and the elimination of genocide: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. ? Keynote speakers: ? Irwin Cotler, Canadian Member of Parliament, Former Minister of Justice, and attorney for leading human rights figures including Nelson Mandela and Andrei Sakharov. P?re Patrick Desbois, Director of the National Service for relations with Judaism in France, counsellor to the Vatican on Judaism, and author of "Porteur de m?moires - Sur les traces de la Shoah par balles." Bernard-Henri L?vy, Writer, philosopher, public intellectual. Simone Veil, Former President of the European Parliament, Former French Minister of Health, and Shoah survivor. Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Shoah survivor. ? The ceremony will also include: ? Reading of names of victims of the Shoah. Lighting the flame of memory - In memory of the six million Jews and other minorities that were murdered during the Shoah, the Flame of Memory will be lit by Shoah survivors in the presence of representatives from the Romani community, a Swiss citizen who sheltered those fleeing Nazi persecution, as well as former members of the resistance movement. ? Tributes to Ren? Cassin and Rapha?l Lemkin. ? Musical and choral ensemble ? Contact: ? To reserve a seat in the media section, or to schedule interviews with keynote speakers or members of the organizing committee, either prior to or on the day of the ceremony, please contact Maude Hug at +41 22 308 62 23 or maude.hug at yomhashoah09.org . ? To download a copy of the event press kit, or for more detailed information on the commemoration, please visit www.yomhashoah09.org . From tchilds at resist.ca Mon Apr 6 16:52:16 2009 From: tchilds at resist.ca (tchilds at resist.ca) Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2009 15:52:16 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Vancouver, BC Hydro, sign on to test electric car Message-ID: <49350.70.71.176.80.1239058336.squirrel@mail.resist.ca> Vancouver, trying its darnedest to be seen as green: http://www.vancouversun.com/News/Vancouver+Hydro+sign+test+electric/1469921/story.html From fentona at shaw.ca Mon Apr 6 16:26:54 2009 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2009 15:26:54 -0700 Subject: [R-G] The Audacity of Hopelessness Message-ID: <569E9D89-4090-4E70-8604-711A4B9A4826@shaw.ca> http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/html/20090404T220000-0500_148822_OBS_THE_AUDACITY_OF_HOPELESSNESS_.asp The Audacity of Hopelessness COMMON SENSE JOHN MAXWELL Sunday, April 05, 2009 IT is as idle to define the problems of Haiti as problems of economic development as it is to contemplate the problems of Elisabeth Fritzl as a problem of delinquent parenting. It will never be possible to disentangle Elisabeth Fritzl from the treachery and cruelty of an evil and incestuous father, a man willing to steal the lives and souls of his own child and his children by her, to suck the very breath of freedom, to steal the light and air to which they have title as human beings; to unleash even in those outsiders who have merely heard of these horrors the potential for an infinitely complex self-generating concatenation of Mandelbrot images of sheer terror which, if we had the capacity to pursue, would lead us down endless nights and days into a chaos of unimaginable horror. JOHN MAXWELL It may be possible - with sophisticated help - for the mind of Elisabeth Fritzl to begin to repair itself and perhaps even for her children to obtain some limited version of what we call sanity. It may be possible, but not, I think, in one lifetime. Hold on tight to your screams! Ban Ki Moon, secretary general of the United Nations, an otherwise excellent human being I am sure, is among those, like the burbling boobies of the World Bank and other international financial agencies (IFA), who believe that what ails Haiti is simply a case of distorted economic development and that there is a simple formula to fix things. Free zone development and regular voting will be sure-fire cures. The poorest country in the Western hemisphere got that way, according to an eminent gaggle of politicians and private sector experts, by native mismanagement and the incompetence of the black Haitian population and its leaders. Among these are Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and their advisers including the toxic spawn of Jesse Helms - Roger Noriega and Otto Reich and the International Republican Institute, and before them were Thomas Jefferson who defined blacks as three-fifths human and William Jennings Bryan, three-time Democratic party candidate for the presidency of The USA and who, as Secretary of State, was astonished at the pretensions of the Haitians whom he saw as a bunch of "Niggers speaking French". A child from the Mission of Mercy school looks through a wall in the slum of Cite Soleil, Port-au-Prince, on Thursday, March 26, 2009. Haiti is one of the world's poorest countries. (Photo: AP) There are also some people who believe that women who are raped are at least partially responsible for their own misfortunes and there are, I am sure, people who will tell you with absolute certainty that Elisabeth Fritzl must have in some way contributed to her father's delinquency. Haiti too, conspired in its own catastrophe. It takes two to tango, they will tell you. Hold on tight to your screams! In the New York Times last week Ban Ki Moon noted: "Yes, Haiti remains desperately poor. It has yet to fully recover from last year's devastating hurricanes, not to mention decades of malign dictatorship. Yet we can report what President Ren? Pr?val told us: 'Haiti is at a turning point.' It can slide backwards into darkness and deeper misery, sacrificing all the country's progress and hard work with the United Nations and international community. Or it can break out, into the light toward a brighter and more hopeful future." Last August the secretary general was full of hope: "The time has come to rebuild the institutions that have been destroyed by years of neglect, corruption and violence, to strengthen them so that the State is able to deliver the services that the people need." In his latest visit Ban said: "It is easy to visit Haiti and see only poverty. But when I visited recently with former President Bill Clinton, we saw opportunity. "My special adviser on Haiti, the Oxford University development economist Paul Collier, has worked with the government to devise a strategy. It identifies specific steps and policies to create those jobs with particular emphasis on the country's traditional strengths - the garment industry and agriculture. creating the sort of industrial 'clusters' that have come to dominate global trade. ". dramatically expanding the country's export zones, so that a new generation of textile firms can invest and do business in one place. By creating a market sufficiently large to generate economies of scale, they can drive down production costs and, once a certain threshold is crossed, spark potentially explosive growth constrained only by the size of the labour pool. "That may seem ambitious in a country of nine million people, where 80 per cent of the population lives on less than $2 a day and half of the food is imported." Can anyone really be so ill-informed? Can anyone believe that a country of nine million poverty-stricken people living on less than $2 a day and importing half their food can generate thriving markets for anything but subsistence production? Ban Ki Moon is our new Dr Pangloss: All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. Hold on tight to your screams! "It is easy to visit Haiti and to see only poverty." It probably isn't much harder if you live there and, like a parish priest named Jean Bertrand Aristide, become inflamed with the idea that you and your people are going to change things, to "build utopia on a dung heap". The only problem is that there are people who want Haitians to remain in the misery they have been made to embrace. The facile American journalistic explanations for Haiti have always been lies, launched by no less than Thomas Jefferson and sedulously cultivated by generations of racists intent on keeping Haitians in their proper place. The Haitians were always presumptuous: two hundred years ago they fought above their weight and won, abolishing slavery, destroying France's ambitions in the New World, doubling the size of the USA and above all, being the first nation anywhere to enshrine the rights of man, woman and child, the fundamental universal rights of human beings, in their constitution. The almost contemporaneous American and French revolutions did not do what the Haitians did. Slavery persisted in France and in the US, and 30 years ago the US gave up trying for an Equal Rights Amendment a few years after narrowly forcing through a voting rights act to give all Americans title to their democracy. The Haitians were a serious threat to American slave-based capitalism, promising freedom to any person who set foot in Haiti, naming a main street after John Brown and arming Simon Bolivar to go liberate Latin America. Like the Cubans a century and a half later, the Haitians needed to be contained. The Americans and the French went about solving the Haitian problem in a very businesslike way. The Haitians had sugar to sell, but their only real market was the US. The US agreed with the French that they would buy nothing from the Haitians unless the French recognised Haitian independence. This extortionate double play worked. The Haitians would starve unless they could sell their sugar. Hold on tight to your screams! The solution guaranteed the Haitians would starve anyway, committing themselves to pay a ransom equivalent to US$120 billion to the French, buying their freedom in cash having bought it in blood, pauperising themselves for another century. When they defaulted - as they had to - the Americans and their accomplices intervened, seizing the Haitian Treasury and Customs services, abolishing the Haitian constitution, dive-bombing the Haitian peasants when they rose to assert their rights, stealing Haitian land, cutting down Haitian forests to plant sisal, installing a fascist army to maintain the rule of a minority - light-skinned elite who despised the black Haitians upon whom they battened and fed. They had great plans, the elite and their foreign friends. They were going to revolutionise pig-rearing in Haiti, but first they needed to get rid of the native Haitian pigs. The experts replaced the Haitian pigs with large white hogs, pigs that needed better housing than the Haitian peasants who supposedly owed them. The experts, in the interest of cheap food, then completed the ruin of the Haitian peasantry by importing subsidised American rice, destroying the Haitian market in hill rice. Then, when the Haitians were once again pauperised, the experts and their elite allies introduced the nearest thing to slavery known to this century - free zones, where Haitians laboured for the price of less than one Jamaican patty a day. The women were injected with drugs which stopped their monthly periods so they wouldn't need time off to have babies. They were prohibited from joining unions. Hold on tight to your screams! This is the new dispensation of Mr Ban Ki Moon and of Mr Collier, of Mr Zoellick, of the World Bank and the IDB, of Mr Kofi Annan and Mr Colin Powell, of Mr Patterson and Mr Manning. It will be led by a most unsavoury collection of those George Soros describes as gangster capitalists, who paid for the terror that has murdered thousands, driven thousands more into exile, used rape as an instrument of political enforcement and twice destroyed the Haitians' desperate attempts to recover their rights - the rights they were the first in the world to proclaim, a century before the UN, that every human being is entitled to the same rights and privileges as every other. The security situation is fixed, according to Mr Ban Ki Moon. Gangs of convicted and unconvicted murderers and rapists in concert with so- called UN peacekeepers and child molesters will again control Haiti in the interests of the largely expatriate elite, the market makers whose older brothers have brought the world to the brink of moral and financial disaster, people with the divine right to be rich and to suck the blood of the poor. Haiti's democracy was beheaded in a conspiracy between the US State Department, John McCain's International Republican Institute, and the governments of France and Canada. They shut down the development process, destroyed the nascent medical school, and blocked Haitian access to clean water. In an initiative reminiscent of King Leopold's intervention in the Congo a century ago - a kind of mission of the Red Cross as Leopold described it, they set back development in Haiti by half a century. They didn't kill quite as many people as Leopold. Hold on tight to your screams! And the poor, as Condoleezza Rice points out, can always vote. It won't do them much good but will provide Western journalists with a deep sense of smug self-satisfaction. Meanwhile, to Elisabeth Fritzl and the Haitians we can say: Hold on tight to your screams! One day, somebody may hear them. They may not know what they mean - but they may make a paragraph in the New York Times. Copyright ?2009 John Maxwell jankunnu at gmail.com From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Apr 6 17:35:10 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2009 16:35:10 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Pro-Israel activists set to do battle at Durban II Message-ID: <1199203410.300391239060910732.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://jta.org/news/article/2009/04/06/1004288/pro-israel-activists-set-to-do-battle-at-durban-ii ? Jewish Telegraphic Agency ???????????????? ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? April 6, 2009 ? Pro-Israel activists set to do battle at Durban II ? By Michael J. Jordan ? Bratislava, Slovakia (JTA) -- Eight years ago, at the first U.N. World Conference Against Racism, pro-Israel activists endured a week of hate-filled insults, pamphlets, posters and marches in the streets of Durban, South Africa. ? When they finally marched out of a forum that branded Israel genocidal and racist like Apartheid South Africa, keffiyah-clad antagonists serenaded them with chants of ?Free, free, Palestine!? ? Overwhelmed, activists vowed to prepare better the next time. That chance comes later this month: the Durban Review Conference will be held April 20-24 in the Swiss city of Geneva. ? Palestinian supporters will hold another large street demonstration and brainstorm ways to strengthen their Israel-is-apartheid argument. But this time around Jewish groups are, among other things, sponsoring a pro-Israel rally, co-sponsoring a human-rights event that will feature Martin Luther King III and others, and helping to organize a Holocaust commemoration just outside the gates of the bucolic U.N. compound in Geneva. ? ?Some have told me the reactions now are like post-traumatic stress syndrome, because the community was so traumatized by what happened in 2001,? says Felice Gaer, who attended Durban as director of the American Jewish Committee?s Jacob Blaustein Institute for Human Rights. ?Jewish tradition teaches us to repair the world, not turn our back on the world. So why will Jewish groups be in Geneva? To bear witness, fight back and repair the world." ? Inside the actual forum, with Israel having announced its boycott long ago, each pro- and anti-Israel group will be allotted several minutes daily to address governmental delegations. ? Yet the Israeli-Palestinian conflict won?t be the only provocative subject: the forum may become a flashpoint for newer tensions between Islam and the West. With some European states still threatening a boycott, the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference will likely accuse the West of Islamaphobia and press to restrict criticism of Islam -- and perhaps overwhelm all other grievances. ? ?It?s part of the Islamic group?s strategy: rather than deal with extremist Islam, they take offensive position and say Islam is the victim of Western crimes,? says Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based U.N. Watch. ?What else will they talk about -- genocide in Darfur?? ? The original Durban conference -- particularly the NGO forum that preceded it -- was a seminal U.N. event in Jewish pro-Israel activism, echoing the ?Zionism is Racism? era from 1975-1991. ? Though some had warned the Arab-Muslim bloc -- backed by developing-world allies -- angled to produce an indictment of Israel at Durban, the on-the-ground reality shocked them. ? The NGO document, hammered out in a hostile, intimidating environment, painted the Jewish state as the world?s greatest perpetrator. ? At the time, David Matas of B?nai Brith Canada, said, "This is the first time I?ve ever felt anti-Semitism this personally, at such a level of intensity." ? The text was so extreme, then-U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson rejected it -- a stunning blow for the host agency. Even today , the new commissioner, Navi Pillay, denounces "the virulent anti-Semitic behavior" at Durban, though only blames some groups "on the sidelines." ? What critics overlook is that while conference diplomats also inveighed against Israel, they excised the worst language. Nevertheless, the final text, under the heading "Victims of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance" lamented "the plight of the Palestinian people." ? In the context of an anti-racism proclamation, Israel?s defenders say this implies racism -- a charge they say has nothing to do with what they view as a political conflict. The Durban document identified no other state, so this remains a sticking point eight years later. ? Observers expect Iran, Syria and others to level more charges against Israel in Geneva, but it?s unclear whether Europe will allow them to revise the document. ? Likewise, the 2005 Danish cartoons -- which sparked Muslim protests that turned violent -- have spurred a "defamation of religions" movement that is seen as an effort to stifle criticism of Islam. ? Jewish NGOs will be among those pressing the European Union to focus on topics they deem more legitimate. They?ll also be networking with like-minded NGOs. ? ?While some groups try to bring as much harm and pain as possible to Israel, my job will be to build up a coalition among those who realize their agenda is being hijacked,? says Shimon Samuels, director for international relations for the Simon Wiesenthal Center. ? ? To avert some of the rowdiness of Durban, U.N. diplomats decided to eliminate the NGO forum and hold this session at their secure Geneva campus. ? Instead, activists will joust farther away to win hearts and minds. ? Presumably drawing TV cameras will be a major anti-Israel demonstration -- especially with the ?International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network? a highly visible co-sponsor -- and a ?Warsaw to Gaza? event that links Israelis to Nazis. ? Meanwhile, where Durban I was a milestone that launched a campaign against Israel similar to what aimed to dismantle Apartheid South Africa -- the ongoing ?Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement? -- Durban II will take the campaign one step further. ? One organizer says leading legal minds -- including several from apartheid-era South Africa -- will huddle to figure out how to make the apartheid charge stick against Israel. ? ?Apartheid is already defined as a crime against humanity, but there?s not a lot of experience in taking it to court,? says Ingrid Gassner Jaradat, director of the Bethlehem-based BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights. ?If you strengthen the legal argument, educate and raise awareness, you also strengthen the efforts to prosecute this as a war crime.? ? Jewish activists will fight back. ? On April 20, Swiss Jewish groups will host a Holocaust commemoration that features Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, and others. ? The event will be expressly non-political, with pamphlets and posters barred, says Sabine Simkhovitch-Dreyfus, vice president of the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities. ? However, the organizers also chose a highly symbolic location for the ceremony ? in the large square just outside the main entrance to the U.N. compound. ? "It?s possible that it will be perceived by certain persons as politicizing the Shoah," says Simkhovitch-Dreyfus. "But this is certainly not our intention. To the contrary, we want to draw the attention of all delegates to a universal message. And we think the Shoah is one of the keys, if not 'the' key universal, anti-racism message." ? Moreover, some 40 human-rights groups will sponsor a "Geneva Summit for Human Rights, Tolerance and Democracy" to showcase Burmese, Cuban, Iranian and Egyptian dissidents; Jewish groups will co-host a "Conference Against Racism, Discrimination and Persecution" -- viewed by some as a virtual "alternative" to the actual Durban conference -- and Jewish and Israel groups will put on an "Israel Wants Peace" rally -- with Natan Sharansky, Alan Dershowitz, and Ethiopian and Bedouin Israelis. ? "If the U.N. were really reflecting universal and moral values, these are the types of events they would run," says Gerald Steinberg, executive director of the Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor. "And Israel wouldn't have to go out of its way to show it's not racist." From critical.montages at gmail.com Mon Apr 6 22:25:48 2009 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2009 00:25:48 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Lean Times for the Anti-War Movement Message-ID: A lot of left-of-center US activists and organizations backed Obama explicitly or implicitly. The result is that they have put themselves out of business, empowering their class enemy rather than building up their own bases. -- Yoshie CQ WEEKLY ? VANTAGE POINT March 28, 2009 ? 1:31 p.m. Lean Times for the Anti-War Movement By Shawn Zeller, CQ Staff In the months leading up to the war in Iraq and over the course of the bloody insurgency that followed the 2003 invasion, no anti-war group was bigger than United for Peace and Justice. Although it never boasted a huge staff or budget ? topping out at nine paid employees and $450,000 in annual revenue from foundations and individuals ? United for Peace played a crucial role in coordinating hundreds of demonstrations, including a 2003 global day of protest that featured a rally at U.N. headquarters in New York that the group says drew more than 500,000 participants. But with an anti-war president now in office and the economy in tatters, the organization is tiptoeing on the edge of bankruptcy. This winter, United for Peace sent out desperate appeals informing donors that it was in danger of closing its doors if it could not raise new revenue. The response was good, providing some stability through the spring, says longtime national coordinator Leslie Cagan. Even so, the group issued another appeal this month, saying it is ?not yet out of the difficult financial straits.? Nor is it alone. The anti-war protest movement in general seems to be suffering financially for its political success. The Act Now to Stop War and End Racism Coalition, another umbrella group, has recently faced money problems as well, while struggling to keep its members motivated. This month?s Washington rally by the group, known as Answer, drew only about 3,000 protestors to the steps of the pentagon, according to police. ?You certainly see that the promises the Obama campaign made have had some impact on the anti-war movement,? says Answer?s national staff coordinator, Sarah Sloan. Additionally, the coalition has been distracted lately by a long-running fight with the District of Columbia over whether it put up posters illegally. The city wants Answer to pay more than $60,000 in fines; Sloan says the coalition has abided by local regulations and has no intention of paying. The colorful activist group Code Pink says it has maintained its fundraising of $350,000 per year and has done it, according to national media coordinator Jean Stevens, by shifting its focus away from the Iraq War to the AIG bonus scandal, Afghanistan and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. ?We?re seeing a sense that, ?OK, that?s over,?? she says of grass-roots activists? feelings about Iraq. ?The general sense within the country is it?s an old issue.? In recent strategy sessions, Stevens says, the group?s leaders have thought about ways to fire up grass-roots activists by linking the current financial imbroglio with the war. Stevens says Code Pink is now making the case that, absent the Iraq War, more attention might have been focused on financial regulation and more money spent on pressing domestic issues. But Stevens concedes that some people find that a bit of a leap. ?To motivate people that this is money worth spending, they want to feel they are going to see some immediate return, and that?s tough,? she says. Cagan, meanwhile, says fundraising at United for Peace has fallen by as much as 50 percent. ?It?s been a really dramatic decline,? she says, and it?s because President Obama is in office. ?Some people believe that with the new administration and the changes in Washington, the work of the anti-war movement is not as important as some of the other issues of the day,? Cagan says. One result is that Cagan has had to reduce her staff by two-thirds: Only three people now work in the group?s New York office. And in early April, that number will fall to two when Cagan, 61, steps down after leading the group since its founding. No replacement has been hired. An advertisement for the post on the group?s Web site indicates United for Peace expects to maintain a budget of $250,000 going forward, a 44 percent decline from its peak. All this comes at a time, Cagan says, when anti-war activism is still important. She, like many activists, is not happy with the time frame Obama has laid out for a full withdrawal from Iraq ? he?s pledged to remove all troops by the end of 2011 ? or with Obama?s plan to increase the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. But many of United for Peace?s past donors, stretched by the financial crisis, are not so passionate. ?It?s enough for many of them,? says Cagan, ?that Obama has a plan to end the war and that things are moving in the right direction.? From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Tue Apr 7 00:00:37 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:00:37 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Harvard's masters of the apocalypse Message-ID: <49DAEC05.2040503@ashisuto.co.jp> If his fellow Harvard MBAs are all so clever, how come so many are now in disgrace? by Philip Delves Broughton The Sunday Times (March 01 2009) If Robespierre were to ascend from hell and seek out today's guillotine fodder, he might start with a list of those with three incriminating initials beside their names: MBA. The Masters of Business Administration, that swollen class of jargon-spewing, value-destroying financiers and consultants have done more than any other group of people to create the economic misery we find ourselves in. >From Royal Bank of Scotland to Merrill Lynch, from HBOS to Lehman Brothers, the Masters of Disaster have their fingerprints on every recent financial fiasco. I write as the holder of an MBA from Harvard Business School - once regarded as a golden ticket to riches, but these days more like scarlet letters of shame. We MBAs are haunted by the thought that the tag really stands for Mediocre But Arrogant, Mighty Big Attitude, Me Before Anyone and Management By Accident. For today's purposes, perhaps it should be Masters of the Business Apocalypse. Harvard Business School alumni include Stan O'Neal and John Thain, the last two heads of Merrill Lynch, plus Andy Hornby, former chief executive of HBOS, who graduated top of his class. And then of course, there's George W Bush, Hank Paulson, the former US Treasury secretary, and Christopher Cox, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a remarkable trinity who more than fulfilled the mission of their alma mater: "To educate leaders who make a difference in the world". It just wasn't the difference the school had hoped for. Business schools have shown a remarkable ability to miss the economic catastrophes unfolding before their eyes. In the late 1990s, their faculties rushed to write paeans to Enron, the firm of the future, the new economic paradigm. The admiration was mutual: Enron was stuffed with Harvard Business School alumni, from Jeff Skilling, the chief executive, down. When Enron, rotten to the core, collapsed, the old case studies were thrust in a closet and removed from the syllabus, and new ones were promptly written about the ethical and accounting issues posed by Enron's misadventures. Much the same appears to have happened with Royal Bank of Scotland. When I was a student at Harvard Business School, between 2004 and 2006, I recall a distinguished professor of organisational behaviour, Joel Podolny, telling us proudly of his work with Fred Goodwin at RBS. At the time, RBS looked like a corporate supermodel and Podolny was keen to trumpet his role in its transformation. A Harvard Business School case study of the firm entitled The Royal Bank of Scotland: Masters of Integration, written in 2003, began with a quote from the man we now know as Fred the Shred or the World's Worst Banker: "Hard work, focus, discipline and concentrating on what our customers need. It's quite a simple formula really, but we've just been very, very consistent with it." The authors of the case, two Harvard Business School professors, described the "new architecture" formed by RBS after its acquisition of NatWest, the clusters of customer-facing units, the successful "buy-in" by employees. Goodwin came across as a management master, saying: "A leader's job is to create the conditions that enable people to believe, in their hearts and minds, in the value of what they are doing". Then just last December, Harvard Business School revised and republished another homage to RBS - The Royal Bank of Scotland Group: The Human Capital Strategy. It is tragic to read now of all the effort put in by those under Goodwin, from "pulse surveys" to track employee performance to "the big thank you", a website where managers could recognise individual excellence in customer service. Every trendy business school idea was being implemented, it seemed, while what really mattered - the bank's risk assessment, cash flow and capital structure - was going to hell. To be fair, neither Podolny nor the authors of the case studies were finance professors, but it's still pretty shocking that a school that purports to teach general management should fail to see the gaping problems at a firm they studied in such depth. Is there a pattern here? Go back to the 1980s, and you find that Harvard MBAs played a big enough role in the insider trading scandals that washed through Wall Street for a former chairman of the SEC to consider it a good move to donate millions of dollars for the teaching of ethics at the school. Time after time, and scandal after scandal, it seems that a school that graduates just 900 students a year finds itself in the thick of it. Yet there is remarkably little contrition. Last October, Harvard Business School celebrated its 100th birthday with a global summit in Boston. While Wall Street and Washington descended into an economic inferno, Jay Light, the dean of the school and a board member at the Blackstone private equity group, opened the festivities by shrugging off any responsibility. "We all failed to understand how much [the financial system] had changed in the past fifteen years or so, and how fragile it might be because of increased leverage, decreased transparency and decreased liquidity: three of the crucial things in the world of financial markets", he said. "We all failed to understand how that fragility could evidence itself in a frozen short-term credit system, something that hadn't really happened since 1907. We also probably overestimated the ability of the political process to deal with the realities of what could happen if real trouble developed. "What we have witnessed is a stunning and sobering failure of financial safeguards, of financial markets, of financial institutions and mostly of leadership at many levels. We will leave the talk of fixing the blame to others. That is not very interesting. But we must be involved in fact in fixing the problem." You would think after failing on so many levels, the school that provides more business leaders than any other might feel some remorse. Not in the least. It's onwards and upwards, with the very people who blew apart the world's financial plumbing now demanding to fix the leak. You can draw up a list of the greatest entrepreneurs of recent history, from Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google and Bill Gates of Microsoft, to Michael Dell, Richard Branson, Lakshmi Mittal - and there's not an MBA between them. Yet the MBA industry continues to grow, and business schools provide vital income to academic institutions: 500,000 people around the world now graduate each year with an MBA, 150,000 of those in the United States, creating their own management class within global business. Given the present chaos, shouldn't we be asking if business education is not just a waste of time, but actually damaging to our economic health? If doctors or lawyers wreaked such havoc in their own professions, we would certainly reconsider what is being taught at medical and law schools. During my time at the school, fifty students were chosen to participate in a detailed survey of their development. Scott Snook, the professor who ran it, reported that about a third of students were inclined to define right and wrong simply in terms of what everyone else was doing. "They can't really step back and take a critical view", he said. "They're totally defined by others and by the outcomes of what they're doing". A group of people unable to see their actions in the broader context of the society they inhabit have no business being self-regulating. Yet in the financial services industry this is pretty much what they demanded and to a large extent got - with catastrophic consequences. The happiest in my cohort, which graduated into the rosy economic conditions of 2006, are now certainly those who went off to do the unfashionable jobs: a friend who spurned Wall Street to join a Mid-western industrial firm, and now finds himself running the agricultural division of an Indian conglomerate; one who joined a foundation promoting entrepreneurship; one who went into Boston city government, another who moved to Russia to run a cinema chain. However, these were the rarities: 42% of my class went into financial services and another 21% into consulting, both wretched sectors to be in today and for the foreseeable future. Applications to business schools in America and Europe are broadly up, as people search for a safe haven from the recession. What are they thinking? Many MBA jobs will not be coming back. Students who stump up more than GBP 60,000 for a two-year MBA can expect a long wait to make that back. For those about to graduate from business school, these are grim times. Financial and consulting firms, which used to soak up two-thirds of the MBAs from top schools, have all but vanished from campuses. Suddenly jobs in government and at nonprofit organisations are in hot demand from students who used to consider them laughably underpaid. A dose of modesty among MBAs and business schools is long overdue. But it's not going to come from Harvard. Light, told his audience in October: "The need for leadership in the world today is at least as great as it has ever been. The need for what we do is at least as great as it has ever been." A bold claim to which many might say: please, spare us. _____ Philip Delves Broughton is the author of What They Teach You at Harvard Business School (2005), published by Viking at GBP 12.99. Copies can be ordered for GBP 11.69, including postage, from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0845 271 2135 Copyright 2009 Times Newspapers Ltd. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/education/article5821706.ece TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Tue Apr 7 03:45:13 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Tue, 07 Apr 2009 18:45:13 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Japan proves folly of stimulus plan Message-ID: <49DB20A9.3040603@ashisuto.co.jp> by Professor Richard A Werner Financial Times FT.com (April 03 2009) Sir, In his interview with the FT (April 1), Taro Aso, Japan's prime minister, claims that "because of the experience of the past fifteen years", Japan knows what is necessary to stimulate the economy: "I think there are countries that understand the importance of fiscal mobilisation and there are some other countries that do not - which is why, I believe, Germany has come up with their views". In other words, Mr Aso is asserting that it is out of ignorance of the facts, especially concerning Japan's fiscal experience, that the German leader objects to further fiscal stimulation. A bit rich, I think, coming from the leader of a country where for almost two decades government and central bank have failed to create a sustainable recovery. It is precisely the Japanese experience that has demonstrated, with an unusually high degree of statistical probability, that fiscal stimulation per se will have no positive impact on economic growth but merely leave us with a costly debt burden. I show in an empirical research paper {1}, available on the School of Management's website {2}, that for every yen the Japanese government injected in fiscal stimulation, private demand declined by one yen. This is due to the bond financing of the fiscal spending: effectively, while the government injects money with its right hand, it takes it out of the economy with its left hand via its bond financing. Angela Merkel is right on fiscal policy. This crisis is a monetary phenomenon. Thus monetary policy - credit creation policy to be precise - is required to get out of it speedily and with least cost to society. Richard A Werner, Director, Centre for Banking, Finance and Sustainable Development, School of Management, University of Southampton, UK Links: {1} http://www.management.soton.ac.uk/research/Werner%20Unintended%20Consequence s%20of%20the%20Debt%202008.pdf {2} http://www.management.soton.ac.uk/research/CBFSD.php Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009 "FT" and "Financial Times" are trademarks of the Financial Times. (c) Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2009. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/30d5ab72-1fe6-11de-a1df-00144feabdc0.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From suzannedk at gmail.com Tue Apr 7 14:39:55 2009 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2009 22:39:55 +0200 Subject: [R-G] =?windows-1252?q?Ottawa=92s_democracy_promoters_target_Vene?= =?windows-1252?q?zuela?= In-Reply-To: <2076176003.191551239048163684.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> References: <1980187472.190681239048056767.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> <2076176003.191551239048163684.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: The already beloved queen to be of tiny The Netherlands, the Crown Princess Maxima, is Venezuelan. To Americans and the Canadians who copy their culture, such a fine point means nothing in the vital politics of demonizing socialist movements that criticize the flailing democracy of the world, the elephant center stage, the United States, hosting tent cities for it's newly homeless, breadless and detention centers for all those, enraged, who will demonstrate. They make a miiscalculation, among the many. Suzanne suzannedk at gmail.com On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 10:02 PM, Sid Shniad wrote: > > > > http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/2557 > > > > T he Dominion > > April 3, 2009 > > > > The Revolution Will Not Be Destabilized > > > > Ottawa?s democracy promoters target Venezuela > > > > by A nthony Fenton > > The Dominion - http://www.dominionpaper.ca > > > > > > Documents obtained by The Dominion [ www.dominionpaper.ca/images/2565 ] > show Canada's involvement in democracy promotion in Venezuela. > > > > Canada's foreign policy, as that country which is closer geographically, > economically, and militarily with the US than any other, has long been > circumscribed by the whims of the world's lone Superpower. > > > > Part of the 'hidden wiring' of the US-Canada relationship is premised on > the belief that there is a role for Canada in places where the US carries a > lot of counter-productive baggage. New records obtained by The Dominion show > just how actively intertwined Canada's foreign policy is with the US-led > 'democracy' promotion project in Venezuela. > > > > Successive Canadian governments, beginning with Paul Martin's Liberals and > increasing under Harper's Tory minorities, have pushed full steam ahead with > efforts to expand Canada's democracy promotion efforts globally. Canadian > leadership in the regime change and military occupation of Haiti > (2004-present) gave rise to a renewed emphasis on the region as an emerging > regional power, which carries on under Harper. > > > > Democracy promotion is seldom discussed in the Canadian public sphere, even > while it has been the subject of a multitude of federal level conferences, > reports, and parliamentary hearings over the last five years. Over that same > time, Canada has increasingly been integrating its instruments of democracy > promotion with those of the US. > > > > During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama quietly pledged to increase > funding for the controversial National Endowment for Democracy (NED), > despite scaling back the rhetoric used to describe continuing US aims to > promote global, Western-style democracy. Obama has already fulfilled this > pledge. > > > > His Omnibus Appropriations Act allocates $115 million for NED's operations, > increasing by $35 million the amount requested by Bush for 2009. All told, > the requested 2009 budget for US democracy programs is the highest ever at > $1.72 billion. By contrast, Canada spent upwards of $650 million on > democracy promotion in 2008. > > > > The NED was formed in 1983 as a new tool to advance US foreign policy and > business interests around the world. Nominally independent, NED receives the > majority of its budget from Congress, and each of its grants must be > approved by the US State Department. > > > > ?One of the NED's first major successes...was helping to overthrow the > Sandinista government in Nicaragua,? writes journalist Bart Jones in his > authoritative biography of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. According to > Jones, a couple of decades later ?the NED was rapidly infiltrating > [Venezuelan] society in a way reminiscent of the Nicaragua experience.? > Channelling money and resources to opposition NGOs has been a prime strategy > of the NED in Venezuela. > > > > Following a short-lived coup d'etat against Chavez in April 2002, > Venezuelan-American attorney Eva Golinger and investigative journalist > Jeremy Bigwood obtained a treasure trove of documents through Freedom of > Information Act (FOIA) requests. These documents, released in conjunction > with Golinger's 2004 book, The Chavez Code: Cracking US Intervention in > Venezuela , exposed NED's active role in the attempted subversion of > Venezuela's democracy. > > > > One of several Canadian NGOs whose activities are complementary to those of > the NED is the Canadian Foundation for the Americas (FOCAL). Established by > the Mulroney government in the 1990's, FOCAL is almost entirely dependent on > government funding and is accountable to Parliament. > > > > A 2004 evaluation of FOCAL conducted by Department of Foreign Affairs and > International Trade Canada (DFAIT) and Canadian International Development > Agency (CIDA) wrote: > > > > Stakeholders from every sector and from the academic community in > particular, indicated that FOCAL is already perceived as 'the right arm of > the government,' echoing the perspective and beliefs of its funding bodies, > rather than a truly independent, non-governmental organization. > > > > "The US has been using Canadian and European foundations more frequently in > recent years to filter funding to Venezuelan and other NGOs and political > parties that promote their mutual interests," said Golinger, whose most > recent book is The Imperial Web: Encyclopedia of Interference and > Subversion. "It's a way of covering up US meddling and making the sources of > foreign funding for political objectives more difficult to detect. Canada > has been a major ally of the US in this respect, particularly in the case of > Venezuela." > > > > Negative perceptions of the US indicate the necessity of ?shifting > responsibility for the [democracy] campaign to more local actors or other > Western allies,? wrote Raymond Gastil, one of the theoreticians behind the > US shift to democracy promotion, in 1988. > > > > Although far from the first such instance, Canada began to take on such > ?responsibility? towards Venezuela in January 2005. DFAIT invited the head > of a key opposition group in Venezuela, Sumate's Maria Corina Machado, to > meet Ottawa lawmakers and officials, as well as to give a briefing on > political rights in Venezuela. > > > > Machado openly supported the 2002 coup against Chavez. In 2004, she was > charged with conspiracy to commit treason for allegedly using NED funds to > campaign against Chavez in a recall referendum organized by the opposition. > > > > According to records obtained by The Dominion through Access to Information > request FOCAL's chairman John Graham joined Machado in Washington, D.C. for > a high level meeting in 2005. In attendance were former Secretary of State > Condoleeza Rice and Roger Noriega. ?An exchange of ideas as regards the > relationships between the civil society and the governments for the > strengthening of democracy in the region,? was the stated purpose of the > meeting. > > > > Shortly after Graham?s meeting with Rice and Machado, the NED approved a > $94,516 grant for FOCAL to carry out democracy promotion work in and around > Venezuela. > > > > Using the NED funds, FOCAL was to commission a series of papers and > organize a number of meetings in Ottawa, Venezuela and Ecuador "to discuss > how to better collaborate in promoting an informed civil society that can > strengthen democracy in the region." > > > > But after Stephen Harper's Conservatives took power in early 2006, FOCAL > abruptly cancelled the activities that were supposed to take place in > Venezuela. > > > > "After discussing this project with various people...[we] came to the > conclusion that it was not in anybody's interests to organize such an > activity while being financially associated with the NED,? reads a > heavily-censored memo sent by DFAIT official Flavie Major in July of 2006. > > > > "[S]ince the project was originally drafted the internal context in > Venezuela has shifted, as has the domestic context in Canada, which could > potentially alter the priority and focus of Canada's engagement in > Venezuela," indicates a separate document obtained through a US FOIA > request. > > > > An example of the changing political context in Venezuela is the 2006 draft > Law on International Cooperation, which was to have limited the ability of > local NGOs to receive funding from foreign governments. Although the law has > yet to be enacted, Western-backed NGOs and their donors have launched a > campaign to ?push back? against what they describe as a ?backlash? against > democracy promoters in the region. > > > > By late 2006, the Conservatives proclaimed that democracy promotion was a > ?fundamental part? of Canadian foreign policy objectives, and ?an eminently > worthy and intrinsically Canadian endeavour.? One indication of the > Conservatives? commitment was through the appointment of a former NED board > member as a top advisor to Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay. > > > > In late 2007, the Canadian government gave the NED $198,168 to produce a > major report, titled "Defending Civil Society: A Report of the World > Movement for Democracy." The report attacks Venezuela for its efforts to > limit Western-funded manipulation of its internal politics: > > > > Venezuela?s would-be caudillo Hugo Chavez has a peculiar notion of > democracy. His ?Bolivarian revolution? appears to be based on Chavista [sic] > monopolizing the country?s political institutions, from an absence of > parliamentary opposition to a hand-picked judiciary. In these > circumstances...civil society provides the only countervailing power to the > Chavista state and to Chavez?s Castroite aspirations. > > > > DFAIT seems to have based their own talking points on Venezuela around the > NED?s line. "Hugo Chavez has a history of weakening democratic institutions. > Minister Kent is committed to furthering the Government's Americas strategy > which is dedicated to promoting and enhancing democracy, freedom and the > rule of law,? wrote a spokesperson for Canadian Minister of State for Latin > America, Peter Kent, in an e-mail statement to The Dominion. > > > > "Hugo Chavez has a history of concentrating power in the Executive which > has undermined democratic institutions in Venezuela. Since taking office a > decade ago, we've seen the politicization of the judiciary and harassment by > government officials of the state controlled media and NGOs," wrote Kent?s > spokesperson when asked to substantiate her claim about Chavez? > anti-democratic tendencies. > > > > One of the ways that Canada has tried to avoid drawing attention to its > support for the Venezuelan opposition and collaboration with the NED is by > carrying out activities outside of Venezuela and coordinating them through > embassies. Indeed, such methods have a theoretical basis that Canada helped > design. > > > > In conjunction with the NED-linked Council for a Community of Democracies > and the US State Department, DFAIT contributed $70,000 in financing to the > publication of A Diplomat's Handbook for Democracy Development Support, in > April 2008. > > > > Canada has one of the few foreign services that train its diplomats in > democracy promotion. The US Foreign Service Institute has already ordered at > least 400 copies of the Handbook, which aims to provide diplomats with > ?encouragement, counsel, and a greater capacity to support democrats > everywhere.? > > > > ?We have over many, many years and will continue to work with the United > States in this regard in advancing our common goals, certainly to the > benefit of both countries and to the benefit of the world in general,? > Canada's Consul-General in New York, Dan Sullivan, said during a launch > event for the Handbook in early 2008. > > > > One example of the Handbook in action is Canada?s funding of the Venezuelan > NGO Justice and Development Consortium (Asociaci?n Civil Consorcio > Desarrollo y Justicia). This group, which also receives funding from the > NED, has made a name for itself by working to unite reactionary opposition > movements throughout Latin America. > > > > In November 2007, DFAIT gave the Justice and Development Consortium $94,580 > "to consolidate and expand the democracy network in Latin America and the > Caribbean" at an assembly held in Panama City in the spring of 2008. This > meeting, co-hosted by the Canadian Embassy in Panama and the NED, attracted > prominent members of (often NED funded) opposition movements in Venezuela, > Cuba, Bolivia, and Ecuador. It was convened in response to "the usher[ing] > in [of] a new era of populism and authoritarianism in Latin America." > > > > Flying in the face of the North American read of Venezuelan democracy is > the latest report by the non-partisan Chilean Latinobarometro, which shows > that 79 per cent of Venezuelans polled are satisfied with their democracy. > > > > "Venezuela has a poor image in the rest of the world... but the perception > of Venezuelans is positive,? states the report. ?They say they like their > democracy as it is now or, at least, much more than the citizens of other > countries like their democracies which, by contrast, are not criticized by > the outside world for lack of freedom and harassment of institutions.? > > > > Colombia, Peru, Mexico, and Chile are considered Canada?s strongest allies > in the region, and are also countries where people?s support for their > government tends to be lower than it is in Venezuela. The subversion of > Venezuelan democracy and the laissez faire attitude towards the regimes of > Felipe Cald?ron in Mexico, Alan Garcia in Peru and ?lvaro Uribe in Colombia > demonstrates that building popular democracies is not the sought after end > result of democracy promotion activities. > > > > The governments of Colombia, Peru, Mexico and Chile have already entered > into Free-Trade deals with Canada, and each receives high levels of Canadian > outward foreign direct investment, particularly in the extractive sector. > > > > Canadian trade with Venezuela is second only to trade with Brazil in South > and Central America. Venezuela is the tenth-largest provider of Canada's > considerable foreign oil needs. In 2008, Canada imported $1.36 billion worth > of Venezuelan crude. The North Atlantic Refinery in Newfoundland, home of > Premier Danny ?Chavez? Williams, refines the oil. > > > > Anthony Fenton is an independent researcher and journalist based in British > Columbia, who has traveled to Venezuela several times. Some material in this > article is drawn from a forthcoming book on Canadian foreign policy. He can > be reached at fentona[at]shaw.ca. > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From fentona at shaw.ca Tue Apr 7 15:27:14 2009 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2009 14:27:14 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Fwd: [+Colombia+] 21 Days to Stop the Canada-Colombia FTA References: <20090407181752.84550039@acrosstheamericas.org> Message-ID: Dear friends: The Canada-Colombia "free trade agreement" is now on its way through the Canadian Parliament for ratification. The current ultra- conservative Canadian government launched the process of ratification, but it is supported by Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff; if other Liberals fall in line behind Ignatieff, this damaging agreement will be ratified. Parliament has 21 working days to debate the text of the agreement, which is quite similar to that of the US-Colombia FTA. Without a doubt, ratification of the Canada-Colombia FTA would be used in Washington as a way to pressure the Obama administration and the US Congress with the argument "If Canada is willing to sign an agreement, the United States must do so too." Canadians and Colombians are issuing urgent calls to join their struggle against their countries' FTA. They tell us that support from people in the US is very important and highly appreciated. Thus we are working in direct coordination with social movements in Canada and Colombia, and strategies for supporting this struggle from the United States are quickly being fine-tuned. The effort must take high priority--it's our last chance to oppose this FTA. Remember, if the Canada-Colombia FTA passes, the way will be paved for the US-Colombia FTA and other pending agreements. Please contact us if you want to help. In the coming days we'll be in touch again with actions and letters so that you can speak out. For now, below you will find a March 31, 2009, letter sent from congresspersons in Colombia to their counterparts in Canada, urging a NO vote on ratification. --- Across the Americas P.O. Box 268733 <-- new Chicago, IL 60626-8733 773-938-1036 (phone and fax) http://www.acrosstheamericas.org info at acrosstheamericas.org ## Bogot?, 31 March 2009 INTERNATIONAL TRADE COMMITTEE OF THE CANADIAN PARLIAMENT Ottawa, Canada The undersigned Colombian senators and representatives most cordially invite you to not approve the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) signed by the governments of Canada and Colombia. In brief, there are two main reasons for our request: Almost twenty years of ?free trade? in Colombia show that such policies cause major damage to the urban and rural economies of our country, place the State in the service of powerful monopolies and transnationals, further concentrate wealth, and increase unemployment and poverty. In addition, the current international economic crisis and Canada?s experience spanning several decades show that ?free trade? is also not positive for Canadian workers. The FTA between Colombia and Canada may serve powerful economic interests in the two countries, but not their respective peoples. Secondly, the U.S. Democratic Party is completely right in stating that the Colombian government headed by President Alvaro Uribe would not pass a human rights test, especially with respect to the violence against trade unionists and the impunity that the government enjoys. It is obvious that an FTA between Canada and Colombia will be used in the United States and Europe as a sort of absolution of the Colombian government in this regard. Is the Canadian government certain that it can issue such an absolution? How does that decision serve the Canadian people? Instead of the FTA, parliamentarians from the two countries must seek the best means of establishing relations between our peoples. Sincerely, Signing Senators: Jorge Enrique Robledo Castillo, Gloria In?s Ram?rez, Luis Carlos Avellaneda, Alexander L?pez, Parmenio Cuellar, Jes?s Bernal. Signing Representatives to the Chamber: Germ?n Enrique Reyes Forero, Germ?n Navas Talero, Pedro Obando, River Franflin Legro, Ren? Garz?n, Mar?a Isabel Urrutia, Venus Albeiro Silva G?mez, Wilson Borja D?az. [signatures follow] ## --- You may automatically unsubscribe from this list at any time by visiting the following URL: If the above URL is inoperable, make sure that you have copied the entire address. Some mail readers will wrap a long URL and thus break this automatic unsubscribe mechanism. From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Apr 7 15:32:12 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2009 14:32:12 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Margaret Thatcher's greatest achievement: New Labour In-Reply-To: <2BE58A2166F2466F874A311AC94F1E0C@twubby.com> Message-ID: <696331770.775761239139932024.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Margaret Thatcher's greatest achievement: New Labour http://conservativehome.blogs.com/centreright/2008/04/making-history.html From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Apr 7 17:05:21 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2009 16:05:21 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Six former Bush administration officials may face Spanish justice In-Reply-To: <322931664.820711239145393902.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <444160467.821531239145521422.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/06/EDSG16SH3N.DTL ? San Francisco Chronicle??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???April 6, 2009 ? Spain Investigates What America Should ? by Marjorie Cohn ? A Spanish court has initiated criminal proceedings against six former officials of the Bush administration. John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, William Haynes and Douglas Feith may face charges in Spain for authorizing torture at Guantanamo Bay. ? If arrest warrants are issued, Spain and any of the other 24 countries that are parties to European extradition conventions could arrest these six men when they travel abroad. ? Does Spain have the authority to prosecute Americans for crimes that didn't take place on Spanish soil? ? The answer is yes. It's called "universal jurisdiction." Universal jurisdiction is a well-established theory that countries, including the United States, have used for many years to investigate and prosecute foreign nationals for crimes that shock the conscience of the global community. It provides a critical legal tool to hold accountable those who commit crimes against the law of nations, including war crimes and crimes against humanity. Without universal jurisdiction, many of the most notorious criminals would go free. Countries that have used this as a basis to prosecute the most serious of crimes should be commended for their courage. They help to create a just world in which we all seek to live. ? Israel used universal jurisdiction to prosecute, convict and execute Adolph Eichmann for his crimes during the Holocaust, even they had no direct relationship with Israel. ? A federal court in Miami recently convicted Chuckie Taylor, son of the former Liberian president, of torture that occurred in Liberia. A U.S. court sentenced Taylor to 97 years in prison in January. ? Universal jurisdiction complements, but doesn't supersede, national prosecutions. So if the United States were investigating the Bush officials, other countries would refrain from doing so. ? When the United States ratified the Convention Against Torture, it promised to extradite or prosecute those who commit, or are complicit in, the commission of torture. ? President Obama, when asked whether he favored criminal investigations of Bush officials, replied, "My view is also that nobody's above the law and, if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen." ? "But," he added, "generally speaking, I'm more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backward." Preoccupied with the economy and two wars, Obama reportedly wants to wait before considering prosecutions that would invariably anger the GOP. ? Evidence that Bush officials set a policy that led to the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo continues to emerge. ? According to ABC News, Gonzales met with other officials in the White House and authorized torture, including waterboarding. ? The Office of Professional Responsibility, which reports to the U.S. attorney general, drafted a report that excoriates Yoo and Bybee for writing the infamous torture memos. Haynes, Addington and Feith participated in decisions that led to torture. The release of additional graphic torture memos by the U.S. Department of Justice is imminent. ? It is the responsibility of the United States to investigate allegations of torture. Almost two-thirds of respondents to a USA Today/Gallup Poll favor investigations of the Bush team for torture and warrantless wiretapping. Nearly four in 10 support criminal investigations. ? Former Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora told Congress, "There are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq - as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat - are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo." Providing impunity to those who ordered the torture will be the third recruiting tool. ? If the United States refuses to investigate now, it will be more likely that some future administration will repeat this scenario. The use of torture should be purged from our system, much like we eradicated slavery. ? == ? Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and president of the National Lawyers Guild. She is the author of Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law and co-author of Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent (with Kathleen Gilberd). Her articles are archived at www.marjoriecohn.com. From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Apr 7 17:26:05 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2009 16:26:05 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Why this will not be a normal cyclical recovery In-Reply-To: <701093720.307111239061888040.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1650069619.830981239146765146.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3d89a930-220d-11de-8380-00144feabdc0.html Financial Times?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? April 5 2009 Why this will not be a normal cyclical recovery By Roger Altman The rare nature of this recession precludes a cyclically normal US recovery. Instead, we are consigned to a slow, painful climb-out, as are nations such as Japan and Mexico that depend on US demand. The implications for US policy include a likely second round of stimulus, much more federal capital for the banking system and stunning budget deficits that will slow key initiatives for President Barack Obama, such as healthcare and energy reform. What is unusual is that this is a balance-sheet driven recession, centred on the damaged financial condition of both households and banks. These weaknesses mandate sub-normal levels of consumer spending and overall lending for about three years. In contrast, most postwar recessions had a different sequence ? rising inflationary pressures, a monetary tightening to counter them and, then, a slowdown in response to higher interest rates. This was the pattern of the sharp 1980-81 slowdown. None of that happened here. Instead, we saw a housing and credit market collapse that caused enormous losses among households and banks. The result was a steep drop in discretionary consumer spending and a halt to lending. To see why recovery will be slow, we can look at the balance sheet damage. For households, net worth peaked in mid-2007 at $64,400bn (?47,750, ?43,449bn) but fell to $51,500bn at the end of 2008, a swift 20 per cent fall. With average family income at $50,000, and falling in real terms since 2000, a 20 per cent drop in net worth is big ? especially when household debt reached 130 per cent of income in 2008. This debt derived from Americans spending more than their income, reflecting the positive wealth effect. Households felt wealthier, despite pressure on incomes, because home and financial asset values were rising. Now that wealth effect has reversed with a vengeance. The crisis and unemployment have frightened households into raising savings rates for the first time in years. They had been stagnant at 1-2 per cent of income but have surged to nearly 5 per cent. With reduced incomes, only cutting discretionary spending can produce higher savings. This explains why personal consumption expenditures fell at record rates at the end of 2008. Consumer spending, however, has approximated 70 per cent of US gross domestic product for the past decade and dominates our economy. But household balance sheets will not be rebuilt soon. Home values will keep falling through mid-2010 and there is no precedent for equity markets, still down 45 per cent from their peak, to make those losses up in just two years. It is illogical, therefore, to expect a full snap-back in the consumer sector in 2010 or 2011. This alone mandates a drawn-out, weak recovery. The second key sector is the financial one. According to the International Monetary Fund, western financial institutions, mostly in the US, have realised $1,000bn of losses on US-originated assets since the crisis began. The IMF has estimated that unrealised losses may amount to another $1,000bn. With residential and commercial real estate steadily declining, this is possible. This is why the banking sector cannot make new loans. These losses are eating into banks? capital and shrinking their capacity to add assets. Funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program are only replacing lost capital, not increasing it. When might they end? With key categories of toxic assets still losing value, the answer is: not soon. The scale of lending needed to support a normal cyclical recovery will not materialise. A third constraint on recovery may involve the federal balance sheet. The fiscal and monetary engines are currently on full throttle. But, within two years, concerns over budget deficits and inflation may revive, compelling the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates and Congress to adopt deficit reduction steps. These actions, contractionary by definition, could occur before a full recovery has asserted itself. On that basis, the federal balance sheet would also limit a full recovery. This weak outlook is likely to force a second injection of spending rises and tax cuts in 2010 to prod demand. Despite public opposition, substantially more federal capital will be required for banks. The deficit outlook will worsen, perhaps to $1,000bn annually over 10 years. That will force a slowing of Mr Obama?s investment plans. That is a shame, because those investments are needed, but this balance sheet recession will be too deep. The writer is chairman and CEO of Evercore Partners and former deputy Treasury secretary in the Clinton Administration From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Apr 7 17:26:42 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2009 16:26:42 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Europe's Crisis: The Kraken Wakes In-Reply-To: <1263954457.302011239061074883.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1725184544.831451239146802443.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.portside.org/?q=showpost&i=5774 Portside ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? April 4, 2009 Dispatches From The Edge Europe's Crisis: The Kraken Wakes By Conn Hallinan ? 'Below the thunder of the upper deep; Far far ? ?beneath in the abysmal sea... The Kraken ? ?Sleepeth' ? --Alfred Tennyson In Nordic mythology, the Kraken was a huge beast that lay in wait for ships that braved the restless North Atlantic, rising from the 'abysmal' depths to wrap its great arms around the unwary or the over bold, pulling them down to its lair. As economies from the Baltic to Spain and from Ireland to Austria self-destruct, the Kraken metaphor may be an apt one for a crisis whose first victim was Iceland. The saga of Iceland's fall, from what Reuters called 'One of the richest countries in the world per capita' to flat broke, is a tale that begins in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher dismantled governmental and financial checks and balances, privatized everything that wasn't nailed down, and turned the world's economy into an enormous Ponzi scheme with promises of wealth that would make Las Vegas blush. Tapping into the sea of high risk credit scams that floated the housing bubble, tiny Iceland - whose major export was cod - turned itself into a financial giant whose banks were worth 900 times more than the island nation's gross domestic product. Icelanders bought townhouses in New York, imported expensive cars and lured back ex-patriots to cash in at the casino. Such hubris stirred the Kraken. Last month Icelanders were defaulting on car loans, unemployment was surging, and the country was in hock to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), whose standard formula for accepting its loans is the systematic savaging of education, health care, and social welfare programs. Iceland's richest man, Asgeir Johannesson-who made out like a bandit over the past five years-runs a supermarket chain whose symbol is a cross-eyed pig, which suggests that while the northern gods may be vengeful, they have a sense of humor. Iceland was just the first victim, an hors d'oeuvre for the beast. There are lots of others. The first to fall were smaller countries on the periphery-Latvia, Estonia, and Ireland - but the leviathans too soon felt the Kraken's tentacles. Germany's export industry, the heart of its powerful economy, is off by 21 percent. France's growth rate is projected to be minus 2 percent. Spain's unemployment rate is 14 percent, and 22 percent in the country's hard-hit south. Sweden's industrial output in down 22.9 percent. Ukraine, an industrial giant with 46 million people, will see its economy shrink 6 percent. A $16.5 billion loan from the IMF is temporarily keeping the country solvent, but its foreign debts alone are $105 billion. England-whose Thatcher and Tony Blair share the blame for waking the Kraken in the first place - is a basket case. Its economy is projected to shrink 3 percent, and over two million are out of work. And because the Tories and Labor alike cut social welfare programs over the past 25 years, the jobless only get about $85 a week. As a result, every seven minutes a person in Britain loses his or her home. Virtually no country in Europe remains unscathed, although the worst hit are those like Hungary, Latvia, and Austria that bought into the myth that the economy was a never-ending cornucopia. Austrian banks shoveled loans into Eastern Europe, up to 60 percent of them in foreign currency. When the crisis came, countries like Hungary and Latvia found themselves trying to pay back loans in expensive Euros, Swiss Francs, and dollars, while their own currencies were tanking. Austria now finds itself holding $371 billion in debts, almost equal to the country's annual GDP. Unemployment has jumped 23.7 percent. The newer members of the European Union (EU), including most of the countries that were formerly part of the Soviet bloc, soon found that, when the going got tough, it was every man for himself. When Hungary recently asked its fellow EU members for a bailout, it got heaved overboard. Indeed, the EU's 27-member crew seems less concerned with fighting off the Kraken than with each saving itself, ready to turn on one another at the drop of a currency. Madrid has launched a 'buy Spanish' campaign, London is touting 'British jobs for British workers,' and the French President is urging French carmakers to invest at home, not elsewhere in the EU. When the water reaches the quarterdeck, free markets go a glimmering. The Obama Administration is pushing the Europeans to ante up a lot more cash for a bailout, but EU members are balking. 'We don't think we need to draw up new stimulus packages, and I'm supported on that by German Industry,' German Chancellor Angela Merkel told the Financial Times. The Europeans, on the other hand, are demanding that the Americans accept global regulation of finance, because many in the EU blame the lack of such regulation for the current crisis. So far, however, Washington is resisting. 'The global economic crisis is relentlessly laying bare the EU's flaws and limitations,' says former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer. 'Without common economic and financial policies.the cohesion of [the] European monetary union and the EU - indeed, their very existence - will be in unprecedented danger.' The combination of internal European squabbling-some of it fed by old fashioned panic-and differences with the Americans over regulation, means that besides pumping some money into the IMF, little is likely to come out of the upcoming Group of 20 meetings set for April 2 in London. The G20 is composed of developed and emerging countries. As bad as things are in Europe, at least the region has some safety nets for its people, including mostly free medical care, low cost education, and social services that will blunt the worst aspects of the crisis. The same can't be said for the United States. The worst hit, of course, will be the world's poor, the hundreds of millions of people in places like Africa and South Asia who currently eke out a marginal existence on a dollar or two a day, and who bear none of the blame for bringing on the world-wide economic crisis. The Kraken will make short work of them. According to UNESCO's Kevin Watkins, 'With the slowdown in growth in 2009, we estimate that the average income of the 391 million Africans living on less than $1.25 a day will take a 20 percent hit. When you convert economic growth effect into human cost, the picture looks even grimmer. Best estimates point to an increasing infant mortality of somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 yearly.' Not that the poor or the recently-made-poor are going quietly. A demonstration in Iceland drew 7,000 people, the equivalent of seven million in the U.S. A march and rally in Ireland drew 120,000-a little over three percent of the population-and Waterford Crystal workers took over their plant. Similar demonstrations have taken place in Russia, Latvia, Ukraine, France, and Greece. As the crisis deepens, so has the anger of those who will bear most its weight. In John Wyndham's 1950's science fiction book, 'The Kraken Wakes,' aliens, using the sea as their refuge, paralyze the world. But governments, caught up in the Cold War, are more interested in fighting one another than resisting the invasion. The 'Kraken' is finally destroyed when the poor residents of a fishing village overcome their terror and assault the creatures with crowbars and axes. Their example spreads and the invasion is finally defeated. Demonstrators alone will not overcome the current crisis, but they can demand that governments act in the interests of their people, not those of Goldman Sachs and AIG. Yes, the banks have to be saved, but the most effective way to do that is to nationalize them, and in a way that the people with the crowbars and axes have a say over how their money is spent. According to the Asian Development Bank, the recession has cost the global economy $50 trillion. That is a figure straight out of the darkest nightmare one can imagine. The G20-particularly the Germans and the Chinese-should bite the bullet and beef up the bailouts. They must also reinstate the checks and balances on credit, capital and banking that have been systematically dismantled over the years. And they must insure that the most vulnerable be protected. If greed, selfishness, and timidity triumph, the Kraken waits. From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Apr 7 17:24:59 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2009 16:24:59 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Archbishop Desmond Tutu 'Poor Choice' for Commencement Ceremonies In-Reply-To: <857899606.308761239062140319.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1304738501.830581239146699827.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.adl.org/PresRele/IslME_62/5504_62.htm Anti-Defamation League Press Release ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????? Israel / Middle-East Archbishop Desmond Tutu 'Poor Choice' for Commencement Ceremonies New York, NY, April?6, 2009 ? Citing his long history as a strident critic of Israel and his vocal support for anti-Israel boycotts, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today said that Archbishop Desmond Tutu was a "poor choice" to deliver the commencement addresses at Michigan State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "Desmond Tutu is a poor choice for commencement speaker," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director.? "His statements about Israel have time and again conveyed outright bigotry against the Jewish homeland and the Jewish people, and his deepening involvement in the anti-Israel boycott effort should have raised a red flag.? This is not someone to be held up as a model or awarded an honorary degree, given his history of bombastic rhetoric and unceasing support for the anti-Israel boycott effort. "It is one thing to give him a platform to speak on campus; it is quite another to confer an honorary degree on an individual who actively promotes academic boycotts," Mr. Foxman added. In a letter to Dr. Lou Anna K. Simon, President of Michigan State University, the League called on the university to reconsider the invitation extended to Archbishop Tutu unless he "publicly repudiates" his support for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel.? "Archbishop Tutu has unequivocally endorsed an academic boycott based on ideas that are anti-Semitic and should be anathema to any institution of higher learning truly committed to academic freedom," the League said it its letter to MSU.? ADL sent a similar letter to Dr. Holden Thorp, Chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The League noted that MSU's president and UNC's chancellor were among more than 200 U.S. college and university presidents who issued, in July 2007, an unequivocal statement against university-led boycotts. Archbishop Tutu is a participant in the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI).? The campaign prominently includes Bishop Tutu as a member of its Advisory Board, whose formation was announced on March 30.? The USACBI refers to Israel's "illegal occupation of Palestine and its apartheid system" and calls for the "complete academic and cultural boycott of Israeli academic institutions." The Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913, is the world's leading organization fighting anti-Semitism through programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry. From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Apr 7 17:27:49 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2009 16:27:49 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] From Bubble to Depression? In-Reply-To: <917080903.305441239061645253.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <747568046.831951239146869953.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123897612802791281.html Wall Street Journal???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? April 6, 2009 From bogus@does.not.exist.com Thu Apr 2 09:08:15 2009 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:08:15 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: By STEVEN GJERSTAD and VERNON L. SMITH=20 Bubbles have been frequent in economic history, and they occur in the labor= atories of experimental economics under conditions which -- when first stud= ied in the 1980s -- were considered so transparent that bubbles would not b= e observed.=20 We economists were wrong: Even when traders in an asset market know the val= ue of the asset, bubbles form dependably. Bubbles can arise when some agent= s buy not on fundamental value, but on price trend or momentum. If momentum= traders have more liquidity, they can sustain a bubble longer.=20 But what sparks bubbles? Why does one large asset bubble -- like our dot-co= m bubble -- do no damage to the financial system while another one leads to= its collapse? Key characteristics of housing markets -- momentum trading, = liquidity, price-tier movements, and high-margin purchases -- combine to pr= ovide a fairly complete, simple description of the housing bubble collapse,= and how it engulfed the financial system and then the wider economy.=20 [Review & Outlook] In just the past 40 years there were two other housing bubbles, with peaks = in 1979 and 1989, but the largest one in U.S. history started in 1997, prob= ably sparked by rising household income that began in 1992 combined with th= e elimination in 1997 of taxes on residential capital gains up to $500,000.= Rising values in an asset market draw investor attention; the early stages= of the housing bubble had this usual, self-reinforcing feature.=20 The 2001 recession might have ended the bubble, but the Federal Reserve dec= ided to pursue an unusually expansionary monetary policy in order to counte= ract the downturn. When the Fed increased liquidity, money naturally flowed= to the fastest expanding sector. Both the Clinton and Bush administrations= aggressively pursued the goal of expanding homeownership, so credit standa= rds eroded. Lenders and the investment banks that securitized mortgages use= d rising home prices to justify loans to buyers with limited assets and inc= ome. Rating agencies accepted the hypothesis of ever rising home values, ga= ve large portions of each security issue an investment-grade rating, and in= vestors gobbled them up.=20 But housing expenditures in the U.S. and most of the developed world have h= istorically taken about 30% of household income. If housing prices more tha= n double in a seven-year period without a commensurate increase in income, = eventually something has to give. When subprime lending, the interest-only = adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM), and the negative-equity option ARM were no = longer able to sustain the flow of new buyers, the inevitable crash could n= o longer be delayed.=20 The price decline started in 2006. Then policies designed to promote the Am= erican dream instead produced a nightmare. Trillions of dollars of mortgage= s, written to buyers with slender equity, started a wave of delinquencies a= nd defaults. Borrowers' losses were limited to their small down payments; h= ence, the lion's share of the losses was transmitted into the financial sys= tem and it collapsed.=20 During the 1976-79 and 1986-89 housing price bubbles, the effective federal= -funds interest rate was rising while housing prices rose: The Federal Rese= rve, "leaning against the wind," helped mitigate the bubbles. In January 20= 01, however, after four years with average inflation-adjusted house price i= ncreases of 7.2% per year (about 6% above trend for the past 80 years), the= Fed started to decrease the fed-funds rate. By December 2001, the rate had= been reduced to its lowest level since 1962. In 2002 the average fed-funds= rate was lower than in any year since the 1958 recession. In 2003 and 2004= the average fed-funds rates were lower than in any year since 1955 when th= e rate series began.=20 [Review & Outlook] Monetary policy, mortgage finance, relaxed lending standards, and tax-free = capital gains provided astonishing economic stimulus: Mortgage loan origina= tions increased an average of 56% per year for three years -- from $1.05 tr= illion in 2000 to $3.95 trillion in 2003!=20 By the time the Federal Reserve began to slowly raise the fed-funds rate in= May 2004, the Case-Shiller 20-city composite index had increased 15.4% dur= ing the previous 12 months. Yet the housing portion of the CPI for those sa= me 12 months rose only 2.4%.=20 How could this happen? In 1983, the Bureau of Labor Statistics began to use= rental equivalence for homeowner-occupied units instead of direct home-own= ership costs. Between 1983 and 1996, the price-to-rental ratio increased fr= om 19.0 to 20.2, so the change had little effect on measured inflation: The= CPI underestimated inflation by about 0.1 percentage point per year during= this period. Between 1999 and 2006, the price-to-rent ratio shot up from 2= 0.8 to 32.3.=20 With home price increases out of the CPI and the price-to-rent ratio rapidl= y increasing, an important component of inflation remained outside the inde= x. In 2004 alone, the price-rent ratio increased 12.3%. Inflation for that = year was underestimated by 2.9 percentage points (since "owners' equivalent= rent" is about 23% of the CPI). If home-ownership costs were included in t= he CPI, inflation would have been 6.2% instead of 3.3%.=20 With nominal interest rates around 6% and inflation around 6%, the real int= erest rate was near zero, so household borrowing took off. As measured by t= he Case-Shiller 10 city index, the accumulated inflation in home-ownership = costs between January 1999 and June 2006 was 151%, but the CPI measured a m= ere 23% increase. As the Federal Reserve monitored inflation in the early p= art of this decade, home-price increases were no longer visible in the CPI,= so the lax monetary policy continued. Even after the Fed began to slowly r= aise the fed-funds rate in May 2004, the average rate remained low and the = bubble continued to inflate for two more years.=20 The unraveling of the bubble is in many ways the most fascinating part of t= he story, and the most painful reality we are now experiencing. The median = price of existing homes had fallen from $230,000 in July to $217,300 in Nov= ember 2006. By the beginning of 2007, in 17 of the 20 cities in the Case-Sh= iller index, prices were falling. Serious price declines had not yet begun,= but the warning signs were there for alert observers.=20 Kate Kelly, writing in this newspaper (Dec. 14, 2007), tells the story of h= ow Goldman Sachs avoided the fate of many of the other investment banks tha= t packaged mortgages into securities. Goldman loaded up on the Markit ABX i= ndex of credit default swaps between early December 2006 and late February = 2007, as their price dropped from 97.70 on Dec. 4 to under 64 by Feb. 27. B= ut the market was not yet in free-fall: The insurance on AAA-rated parts of= the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) remained inexpensive. By mid-summer 2= 007, concern spread to the AAA-rated tranches of MBS.=20 At the end of February 2007, the cost of $10 million of insurance on the AA= A-rated portion of a mortgage-backed security was still only $68,000 plus a= $9,000 annual premium. Housing-market conditions deteriorated further in t= he first half of 2007. Case-Shiller tiered price sequences in Los Angeles, = San Francisco, San Diego and Miami all show serious declines by the summer = of 2007. Prices in the low-price tier in San Francisco were down almost 13%= from their peak by July 2007; in San Diego they were off 10% by July 2007.= Startling developments began to unfold that month. Between July 9 and Aug.= 3, 2007, the cost of insuring AAA MBS tranches went from $50,000 upfront p= lus a $9,000 annual premium for $10 million of insurance to over $900,000 u= pfront (plus the annual premium).=20 Once the cost of insuring new mortgage-backed securities skyrocketed, mortg= age financing from MBS rapidly declined. Subprime originations plummeted fr= om $160 billion in the third quarter of 2006 to $28 billion in the third qu= arter of 2007. Mortgage-backed security issuance fell comparably, from $483= billion in all of 2006 to only $30.7 billion in the third quarter of 2007.= Other measures of new loan originations were falling at the same time. The= liquidity that generated the housing market bubble was evaporating.=20 Trouble quickly spread from the cost of insuring mortgage-backed securities= to problems with credit markets generally, as the spread between short-ter= m U.S. Treasury debt and the LIBOR rate increased to 2.40% from 0.44% betwe= en Aug. 8 and Aug. 20, 2007. Since U.S. Treasury debt is generally consider= ed secure, but a bank's loans to another bank carry some risk of default, t= he spread between these rates serves as an indicator of perceived risk in f= inancial markets.=20 In one city after another, prices of homes in the low-price tier appreciate= d the most and then fell the most; prices in the high-priced tier appreciat= ed least and fell the least. The price index graphs for Los Angeles, San Fr= ancisco, San Diego and Miami show that in all of these cities, prices in th= e low-price tier have fallen between 50% and 57%. Moreover, housing prices = have continually declined in every market in the Case-Shiller index. Accord= ing to First American CoreLogic, 10.5 million households had negative or ne= ar negative equity in December 2008. When housing prices turned down, many = borrowers with low income and few assets other than their slender home equi= ty faced foreclosure. The remaining losses had to be absorbed by the financ= ial system. Consequently, the financial system has suffered a blow unlike a= nything since the Great Depression, and the source is the weak financial po= sition of the people holding declining assets.=20 Earlier, during the downturn in the equities market between December 1999 a= nd September 2002, approximately $10 trillion of equity was erased. But a m= easure of financial system performance, the Keefe, Bruyette, & Woods BKX in= dex of financial firms, fell less than 6% during that period. In the curren= t downturn, the value of residential real estate has fallen by approximatel= y $3 trillion, but the BKX index has now fallen 75% from its peak of Januar= y 2007. The financial sector has been devastated in this crisis, whereas it= was almost completely unaffected by the downturn in the equities market ea= rly in this decade.=20 How can one crash that wipes out $10 trillion in assets cause no damage to = the financial system and another that causes $3 trillion in losses devastat= e the financial system?=20 In the equities-market downturn early in this decade, declining assets were= held by institutional and individual investors that either owned the asset= s outright, or held only a small fraction on margin, so losses were absorbe= d by their owners. In the current crisis, declining housing assets were oft= en, in effect, purchased between 90% and 100% on margin. In some of the cit= ies hit hardest, borrowers who purchased in the low-price tier at the peak = of the bubble have seen their home value decline 50% or more. Over the past= 18 months as housing prices have fallen, millions of homes became worth le= ss than the loans on them, huge losses have been transmitted to lending ins= titutions, investment banks, investors in mortgage-backed securities, selle= rs of credit default swaps, and the insurer of last resort, the U.S. Treasu= ry.=20 In an important paper in 1983, Ben Bernanke argued that during the Depressi= on, severe damage to the financial system impeded its ability to perform it= s economic role of lending to households for durable goods consumption and = to firms for production and trade. We are seeing this process playing out n= ow as loan funds for automobile purchases have withered. Auto sales fell 41= % between February 2008 and February 2009. Retail and labor markets too are= now part of the collateral damage from the housing debacle. Housing peaked= in early 2006. Losses from the mortgage market began to infect the financi= al system in 2006; asset prices in that sector began to decline at the end = of 2006. Meanwhile, equities and the broader economy were performing well, = but as the financial sector deteriorated, its problems blindsided the rest = of the economy.=20 The events of the past 10 years have an eerie similarity to the period lead= ing up to the Great Depression. Total mortgage debt outstanding increased f= rom $9.35 billion in 1920 to $29.44 billion in 1929. In 1920, residential m= ortgage debt was 10.2% of household wealth; by 1929, it was 27.2% of househ= old wealth.=20 The Great Depression has been attributed to excessive speculation on Wall S= treet, especially between the spring of 1927 and the fall of 1929. Had the = difficulties of the banking system been caused by losses on brokers' loans = for margin purchases in 1929, the results should have been felt in the bank= s immediately after the stock market crash. But the banking system did not = show serious strains until the fall of 1930.=20 Bank earnings reached a record $729 million in 1929. Yet bank exposures to = real estate were substantial; as the decline in real estate prices accelera= ted, foreclosures wiped out banks by the thousands. Had the mounting diffic= ulties of the banks and the final collapse of the banking system in the "Ba= nk Holiday" in March 1933 been caused by contraction of the money supply, a= s Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz argued, then the massive injections of = liquidity over the past 18 months should have averted the collapse of the f= inancial market during this current crisis.=20 The causes of the Great Depression need more study, but the claims that los= ses on stock-market speculation and a monetary contraction caused the decli= ne of the banking system both seem inadequate. It appears that both the Gre= at Depression and the current crisis had their origins in excessive consume= r debt -- especially mortgage debt -- that was transmitted into the financi= al sector during a sharp downturn.=20 What we've offered in our discussion of this crisis is the back story to Mr= . Bernanke's analysis of the Depression. Why does one crash cause minimal d= amage to the financial system, so that the economy can pick itself up quick= ly, while another crash leaves a devastated financial sector in the wreckag= e? The hypothesis we propose is that a financial crisis that originates in = consumer debt, especially consumer debt concentrated at the low end of the = wealth and income distribution, can be transmitted quickly and forcefully i= nto the financial system. It appears that we're witnessing the second great= consumer debt crash, the end of a massive consumption binge.=20 Mr. Gjerstad is a visiting research associate at Chapman University. Mr. Sm= ith is a professor of economics at Chapman University and the 2002 Nobel La= ureate in Economics.=20 From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Apr 7 17:36:40 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2009 16:36:40 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] 'The war on drugs has been a complete failure' Message-ID: <2107842611.836091239147400181.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Change+wind+decriminalization+marijuana+possession/1472251/story.html ? Vancouver Sun ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? April 7, 2009 ? Change is in the wind for the decriminalization of marijuana possession ? Liberal MP Keith Martin, who introduced a private member's bill this week, rightly maintains that 'the war on drugs has been a complete failure' ? By Barbara Yaffe ? If Vancouver has the equivalent of a public square, it's the fountain outside the old Vancouver Art Gallery downtown, where last week, I smelled an unmistakable aroma coming from the vicinity of two young men rolling white filter papers. ? Pot. Right out there in the open -- in full view of, well, everybody. ? I shouldn't have been taken aback; this same smell can be picked up in any Vancouver park or on a corner any day of the week. It once surprised me when I moved west 20 years ago. These days I'm accustomed to it. ? But isn't possessing and using marijuana a criminal offence? ? It is. But if a law is universally ignored, it becomes tough to enforce. It inevitably grows to be disdained, scoffed at by the community. ? Enter Keith Martin, a free-thinking Liberal MP from Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca, health promotion critic for his party. ? This week he introduced private member's Bill C-359, to decriminalize marijuana possession. It would still be illegal, but those with up to two pot plants would receive modest fines rather than being routed through the justice system at great expense and, if convicted, left with criminal records. ? Ottawa spends about $450 million a year enforcing Canada's drug laws. Half of all offences are for cannabis possession. ? Tens of thousands of Canadians are charged annually with possession, and 1.5 million citizens are carrying criminal records for this offence. Imagine, if Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Stockwell Day or Dalton McGuinty had been convicted for using pot as teens, today they'd have criminal records. ? Martin's rationale is that decriminalization would "sever the connection between organized crime and casual users." ? The MP, a physician who worked in detox and drug rehab centres for 14 years, explains his bill would be "bad news for criminal gangs, which are the only beneficiaries of the status quo because it would eliminate demand for their product." ? Of course, gangsters would still enjoy a thriving market for peddling cocaine, crystal meth and heroin. ? But decriminalization for possession is not about to happen because private member's bills such as Martin's almost always die on the parliamentary order paper. And with a law-and-order Conservative government at the helm, the pot bill is sure to go nowhere. ? Too bad. Martin speaks the truth when he remarks: "The war on drugs has been a complete failure. It has not reduced the crime rate, drug use, nor has it saved money or lives." ? As a taxpayer, I'm prepared to take a lesson from the 1920s: Prohibition does not work. ? I would want to find ways to regulate and tax drug suppliers who currently are running rampant, making personal fortunes, bullet-proofing their fancy cars and killing people all over the place. ? Martin's bill would reflect a modest first step in a much needed paradigm shift on drug enforcement. It's not a new idea either. He has introduced similar, unsuccessful bills in the past. ? Back in 2001, former Progressive Conservative prime minister Joe Clark expressed support for decriminalizing possession of small amounts of pot. The Canadian Medical Association Journal in the past has called on Ottawa to decriminalize possession of small amounts for personal use. ? In 2002, then-Liberal justice minister Martin Cauchon promised the Chretien-led government would introduce legislation to decriminalize marijuana. But it never happened. ? Clearly it's a worthy idea, just waiting to happen. ? byaffe at vancouversun.com From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Apr 7 17:38:54 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2009 16:38:54 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] From heaven to hell: 18 die as drugs war rages on streets of Vancouver Message-ID: <1132475054.836991239147534374.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/from-heaven-to-hell-18-die-as-drugs-war-rages-on-streets-of-vancouver-1663008.html ? The Independent ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? Sunday, 5 April 2009 ? From heaven to hell: 18 die as drugs war rages on streets of Vancouver ? The Canadian city has been named the best place in the world to live. But those halcyon days are over ? By Paul Rodgers ? Once upon a very recent time, Vancouver had a clean, safe image. Nestled between a spectacular bay and snow-capped mountains, this Canadian city, which is twice the size of Birmingham, was described by The Economist as the most liveable in the world. Not any more. As it prepares to host the 2010 Winter Olympics, what it's got now is not cuddly, eco-friendly publicity, but blood-spattered streets littered with shell casings and corpses. ? Vancouver is the battlefield in a war between myriad drug gangs, which include Hell's Angels, Big Circle Boys, United Nations, Red Scorpions, Independent Soldiers and the 14K Triad. Guns ? often machineguns ? are fired almost daily. "We've always been told by media experts to never admit that there is a gang war," the chief of police, Jim Chu, said last month. "Let's get serious. There is a gang war and it's brutal." Vancouver's Mayor, Gregor Robertson, confessed that the police are fighting a losing battle. Since mid-January, the city has recorded 50 gang-related shootings, 18 of them fatal. And the violence is not confined to seedy neighbourhoods. The cross-fire is happening in quiet, residential cul-de-sacs and the car parks of up-scale shopping centres. It's a suburban civil war. ? Nor are hardened criminals the only victims. An attack on one gangster's car killed a 24-year-old man hired to fit it with a new stereo. In February, Nicole Alemy, 23, the wife of another gangster, was gunned down in her white Cadillac ? with her four-year-old son in the back seat. On Friday, police arrested James Bacon ? one of three brothers who left the United Nations gang to join the Red Scorpions, intensifying the rivalry between the two ? for conspiring in the deaths of four gangsters in their flat in Surrey, south-east of Vancouver. Two innocent men were forced from the hallway into the flat and also killed. Police said they intend to make more arrests over the weekend. ? As Vancouver has boomed over the past two decades, attracting wealthy immigrants from across Canada and the Pacific, so too has the illegal drugs trade. It is now the third largest industry in the province, generating between C$7bn (?3.8bn) and C$8bn a year. A young, party-loving population with liberal attitudes to drugs has created strong domestic demand, while the province's mild climate and a ready supply of well-educated horticulturalists has led to supply of a premium brand of cannabis called "BC bud", produced mostly in hydroponic "grow-ops". ? The drug's superior quality ? "one puff and you're anaesthetised," reported one academic ? also found favour with customers in the US, encouraging an imaginative corps of smugglers. Customs agents have found shipments in church vans, hollow logs and even kayaks. One enterprising crew emulated the prisoners of Stalag Luft III, digging a 110m tunnel "under the wire". The bigger problem for Canada, though, was the return trade. The US drug distributors preferred to pay in kind, with cocaine and guns. ? Many commentators think Vancouver's violence is just a skirmish on the fringe of the much larger war in Mexico, where 6,000 were murdered last year as the state tried to reassert control over territories seized by drug lords. The result has been a 50 per cent rise in the price of cocaine in Canada, and correspondingly higher profits to fight over. But not everyone is convinced. Experts at Simon Fraser University argue that the problem is home-grown, and that it's exacerbated by police efforts to bang up mob leaders. "All you do is create vacancies as you put people in jail," said Ehor Boyanowsky, an associate professor of criminology. "Suddenly there's an opportunity." ? In the short term, say the academics, Vancouver's problem is one of unco-ordinated enforcement. By one count, as many as 11 different agencies, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and local police forces, were responsible for suppressing the drugs trade. The courts are almost as confused. Canadian justice is more tolerant than America's. No one has been successfully prosecuted for simple possession of marijuana in years, and Amsterdam-style hash caf?s operate in a grey zone, only occasionally being shut down. Because of judicial leniency, officers prefer to see their targets collared in the US. The "Great Escape" gang were under surveillance on both sides of the border, but were arrested in Washington. ? In the long run, many British Columbians, on both left and right, accept that legalisation and regulation are the answer. Just the sales tax on C$7bn of drugs would pay for several hospitals and schools, policing costs could be reduced, property crime by addicts to pay for their drug habits would be slashed, and the gang wars could be quickly reined in. "But the international politics are unbelievable," said Dr Rob Gordon, director of Simon Fraser's school of criminology. "The DEA [US Drug Enforcement Administration] starts to foam at the mouth at the idea of there being a huge, legal marijuana farm just north of the border. Under George Bush, the concensus was that if Canada ever moved to exercise its economic sovereignty, they would shut the border down by searching every vehicle." ? Until then, the best hope may be that one gang or another comes out on top, allowing it to impose stability, much as the Hell's Angel's bike gang used to do up to 15 or 20 years ago. Professor Boyanowsky said: "Those were the good old days." From suzannedk at gmail.com Tue Apr 7 23:11:58 2009 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2009 07:11:58 +0200 Subject: [R-G] 'The war on drugs has been a complete failure' In-Reply-To: <2107842611.836091239147400181.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> References: <2107842611.836091239147400181.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: It is an idea that has been waiting to happen for over forty years. Criminalizing the soft drug has always about making money on it's use and about increasing it's use. The drug wars are valuable political tools that will, in any US dominated world, always be used. Fear means votes. Suzanne suzannedk at gmail.com On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 1:36 AM, Sid Shniad wrote: > > > > http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Change+wind+decriminalization+marijuana+possession/1472251/story.html > > > > > > > > Vancouver Sun > > April 7, 2009 > > > > > > > > Change is in the wind for the decriminalization of marijuana possession > > > > > > > > Liberal MP Keith Martin, who introduced a private member's bill this week, > rightly maintains that 'the war on drugs has been a complete failure' > > > > > > > > By Barbara Yaffe > > > > > > > > If Vancouver has the equivalent of a public square, it's the fountain > outside the old Vancouver Art Gallery downtown, where last week, I smelled > an unmistakable aroma coming from the vicinity of two young men rolling > white filter papers. > > > > > > > > Pot. Right out there in the open -- in full view of, well, everybody. > > > > > > > > I shouldn't have been taken aback; this same smell can be picked up in any > Vancouver park or on a corner any day of the week. It once surprised me when > I moved west 20 years ago. These days I'm accustomed to it. > > > > > > > > But isn't possessing and using marijuana a criminal offence? > > > > > > > > It is. But if a law is universally ignored, it becomes tough to enforce. It > inevitably grows to be disdained, scoffed at by the community. > > > > > > > > Enter Keith Martin, a free-thinking Liberal MP from Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca, > health promotion critic for his party. > > > > > > > > This week he introduced private member's Bill C-359, to decriminalize > marijuana possession. It would still be illegal, but those with up to two > pot plants would receive modest fines rather than being routed through the > justice system at great expense and, if convicted, left with criminal > records. > > > > > > > > Ottawa spends about $450 million a year enforcing Canada's drug laws. Half > of all offences are for cannabis possession. > > > > > > > > Tens of thousands of Canadians are charged annually with possession, and > 1.5 million citizens are carrying criminal records for this offence. > Imagine, if Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Stockwell Day or Dalton McGuinty > had been convicted for using pot as teens, today they'd have criminal > records. > > > > > > > > Martin's rationale is that decriminalization would "sever the connection > between organized crime and casual users." > > > > > > > > The MP, a physician who worked in detox and drug rehab centres for 14 > years, explains his bill would be "bad news for criminal gangs, which are > the only beneficiaries of the status quo because it would eliminate demand > for their product." > > > > > > > > Of course, gangsters would still enjoy a thriving market for peddling > cocaine, crystal meth and heroin. > > > > > > > > But decriminalization for possession is not about to happen because private > member's bills such as Martin's almost always die on the parliamentary order > paper. And with a law-and-order Conservative government at the helm, the pot > bill is sure to go nowhere. > > > > > > > > Too bad. Martin speaks the truth when he remarks: "The war on drugs has > been a complete failure. It has not reduced the crime rate, drug use, nor > has it saved money or lives." > > > > > > > > As a taxpayer, I'm prepared to take a lesson from the 1920s: Prohibition > does not work. > > > > > > > > I would want to find ways to regulate and tax drug suppliers who currently > are running rampant, making personal fortunes, bullet-proofing their fancy > cars and killing people all over the place. > > > > > > > > Martin's bill would reflect a modest first step in a much needed paradigm > shift on drug enforcement. It's not a new idea either. He has introduced > similar, unsuccessful bills in the past. > > > > > > > > Back in 2001, former Progressive Conservative prime minister Joe Clark > expressed support for decriminalizing possession of small amounts of pot. > The Canadian Medical Association Journal in the past has called on Ottawa to > decriminalize possession of small amounts for personal use. > > > > > > > > In 2002, then-Liberal justice minister Martin Cauchon promised the > Chretien-led government would introduce legislation to decriminalize > marijuana. But it never happened. > > > > > > > > Clearly it's a worthy idea, just waiting to happen. > > > > > > > > byaffe at vancouversun.com > > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From suzannedk at gmail.com Tue Apr 7 23:14:52 2009 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2009 07:14:52 +0200 Subject: [R-G] Archbishop Desmond Tutu 'Poor Choice' for Commencement Ceremonies In-Reply-To: <1304738501.830581239146699827.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> References: <857899606.308761239062140319.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> <1304738501.830581239146699827.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: Just ask the League to explain the Gaza genocide in response to defaming Desmond Tutu! Suzanne On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 1:24 AM, Sid Shniad wrote: > > > > http://www.adl.org/PresRele/IslME_62/5504_62.htm > > > > Anti-Defamation League > > > > Press Release > Israel / Middle-East > > > > Archbishop Desmond Tutu 'Poor Choice' for Commencement Ceremonies > > > > New York, NY, April 6, 2009 ? Citing his long history as a strident critic > of Israel and his vocal support for anti-Israel boycotts, the > Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today said that Archbishop Desmond Tutu was a > "poor choice" to deliver the commencement addresses at Michigan State > University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. > > > > "Desmond Tutu is a poor choice for commencement speaker," said Abraham H. > Foxman, ADL National Director. "His statements about Israel have time and > again conveyed outright bigotry against the Jewish homeland and the Jewish > people, and his deepening involvement in the anti-Israel boycott effort > should have raised a red flag. This is not someone to be held up as a model > or awarded an honorary degree, given his history of bombastic rhetoric and > unceasing support for the anti-Israel boycott effort. > > > > "It is one thing to give him a platform to speak on campus; it is quite > another to confer an honorary degree on an individual who actively promotes > academic boycotts," Mr. Foxman added. > > > > In a letter to Dr. Lou Anna K. Simon, President of Michigan State > University, the League called on the university to reconsider the invitation > extended to Archbishop Tutu unless he "publicly repudiates" his support for > an academic and cultural boycott of Israel. > > > > "Archbishop Tutu has unequivocally endorsed an academic boycott based on > ideas that are anti-Semitic and should be anathema to any institution of > higher learning truly committed to academic freedom," the League said it its > letter to MSU. ADL sent a similar letter to Dr. Holden Thorp, Chancellor of > the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. > > > > The League noted that MSU's president and UNC's chancellor were among more > than 200 U.S. college and university presidents who issued, in July 2007, an > unequivocal statement against university-led boycotts. > > > > Archbishop Tutu is a participant in the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and > Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI). The campaign prominently includes > Bishop Tutu as a member of its Advisory Board, whose formation was announced > on March 30. The USACBI refers to Israel's "illegal occupation of Palestine > and its apartheid system" and calls for the "complete academic and cultural > boycott of Israeli academic institutions." > > > > > > The Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913, is the world's leading > organization fighting anti-Semitism through programs and services that > counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry. > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Wed Apr 8 05:56:23 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Wed, 08 Apr 2009 20:56:23 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Shine, Perishing Republicans Message-ID: <49DC90E7.6090000@ashisuto.co.jp> by Garret Keizer Harper's Magazine Notebook (April 2009) For man it is certainly more grave, or at least much more dangerous, to deny original sin than to deny God. -- Georges Bernanos Perhaps the self-proclaimed party of family values and Judeo-Christian morality might appreciate - in lieu of the more prosaic soul-searching in which it is now engaged - an analysis of its resounding electoral defeat and resultant marginalization rendered in the form of an old-fashioned parable. He that hath an ear, let him hear. The Republican Party is like unto an indulgent father who would not discipline his only son. Though his own father, even Ike, who had begotten him, prophesied against this slackness while the grandson was yet a suckling babe, bestowing upon the child the name of Military-Industrial Complex, the heart of the child's father would not repent. And though the father spake many curses against "permissive society", yet in the rearing up of his son he was the very marrow of permissiveness. When his servants came unto him and said, "This thy son is ruining thine house", he replied, "What is mine house if not a place for my son to play? And is it not written that the spilled wine of a prosperous son doth trickle down to sweeten the tongues of his bondsmen? Be patient then, and the trickled-down wine of my drunkard son may yet be fragrant upon thy beards". It continued in this wise for many years, until the son said to himself, "It is not enough for me that I have my father's heart and my father's servants at my command, that they beat mine enemies and enlarge my purse, and that I am free to enrich myself and hide my treasure across the sea. For I have found me a friend, a youth after mine own heart, who is like my very frat brother, and my love for this W exceedeth my love for womankind. And between us we shall enjoy all that pleaseth our hearts, yea though it breaketh the heart of my dotard father like a potsherd." Saying this, the son and his friend seized the mother of the boy, even Nasdaq the delight of his father's eyes, and stripped her of her raiment and ravished her upon the ground and spoiled the riches of her chamber and greatly shamed her in the eyes of the people. And when he saw this, the father rent his garments and said, "How is it that this crisis has come upon me, and why hast the Lord of hosts visited this calamity upon mine house so that I shall pay the price of it unto my children's children?" But his neighbors and all those in the surrounding countryside said, "How now, but what shall prevent these motherfuckers from doing the same and worse to us, and indeed already we are made like paupers and captives in our own houses". For the son and his friend W had been abroad like a plague on the land. And seizing the father by the hairs of his head, the people of that place cast him out to wander the country like a leper, and with W they did likewise. But the son, the Military-Industrial Complex, they could not seize because of his great strength. And the son continued to oppress them and to commit robbery and abomination wherever he could. And this was about the time when Obama was anointed King. The biblical language comes naturally, not only because of my background - I was raised on the King James Bible by people who were both Calvinist and Republican, not necessarily in that order - but also because the irony of the Republican Party's fall strikes me as essentially theological. That the party seems unable to grasp this may be a measure of just how far it has fallen. Ask someone on the street or in the blogosphere to describe what makes the party's current predicament so ironic, and you might hear something like this: The Republican Party was supposed to stand for small government and fiscal restraint, and instead it has given us big government and the virtual socialization of large segments of our economy. Ask David Brooks of the New York Times and you will hear that such a development was more inevitable than ironic, and not necessarily a bad thing. Ask Ron Paul and he'll say nuts to David Brooks. But all of this is to miss the most basic question, which is why the Republican Party - or, more precisely, its dominant conservative wing - came to stand for smaller government in the first place. This is where it helps to employ a theological language, perhaps while recalling that the rise of the modern conservative movement is sometimes dated to the 1951 publication of William F Buckley's God and Man at Yale. If conservatives have traditionally believed in limited government it is because they also subscribe, contra many liberals and progressives, to an anthropology based on some notion of original sin. That is to say, the politically conserving impulse grows out of a deep-seated pessimism in regard to the ability of human beings to improve their lot merely by wishing to do so. A conservative tells us we had better look at history - hell, we had better examine our own thoughts and deeds since our last coffee break - and that in the light of those all-too-sobering examinations we had better be cautious about jettisoning old institutions and time-tested traditions, which, though flawed as all things human must be flawed, may be our best bulwark against evil itself. That a good law made in our best moments, and in the light of public scrutiny, is our strongest defense against what each of us is capable of doing in his worst moments and under the cover of dark. (I am old enough to remember a time when the battle cry of American conservatism, at least in my neighborhood, was "Law and Order".) The role of a conservative, as I understand it, is to challenge the yes-we-can progressivism of people like me, which is why I have always valued a conservative when I could manage to find one. Cheapskates and chauvinists I've found aplenty, but conservatives are a rarer breed. Take, for example, that "archconservative" Ronald Reagan, who from the perspective of a hundred years will be seen as the last of the California hippies, a man who told us that if we just let the markets run wild and the Magic Bus of juggernaut capitalism go barrel-assing down the road with its freak flag flying all would be groovy and out of sight. What was his "Morning in America" bit but a cover of "Aquarius"; what was his presidency but the last act of Hair? - preferable, I admit, to the helter-skelter criminality of Cheney and Bush. But to call either administration "conservative" in its blithe overconfidence is to hold up a picture of your brain on drugs. Beyond all the prattle about big and small government, this is the mega-irony of the Republican Party: that of all people conservatives ought to have been the first to grasp the dangers of unregulated markets. If big government is susceptible to the abuses of "sinful" human beings, how much more susceptible is a corporate system that is bigger than any government? The right wing of the party ought to have seen this better than the center, and the religious right ought to have seen it best of all. That they failed to see it bespeaks a spiritual bankruptcy beside which the financial plight of an auto industry is as a gnat unto a camel. Given its inability to grasp that irony, we should not be surprised if the Republican Party evinces a similar inability to grasp the primal values of its base. There has been quite some groping about for those values of late, and quite a lot of talk about "the base", but I'm not sure the party would know its base if it fell down drunk and broke its nose on the same, which in a manner of speaking I suppose that it has. This came home to me several years ago when my state representative Cola Hudson (as the story goes, his mother wanted to name him Kohler, but the doctor had had a few nips before he signed the birth certificate) dropped by my house for a visit. Cola was an old-school conservative Republican of the kind that made Vermont notorious for being one of only two states that didn't support Franklin Roosevelt in the election of 1936. (This was several decades before my tribe moved in.) A lifelong bachelor, Cola lived in the farmhouse where he was born and worked as a school janitor between legislative sessions. He died a little over a year ago, and I miss him. Touchingly, Cola arrived at my house with a few clips about his record as an officeholder and with some photocopied pages from what he regarded as the seminal text of his political philosophy: Emerson's essay "Self-Reliance". If the essay was a formative influence for Cola, his reverence for it was something of an epiphany for me. It was also a shot of deja vu. There were none of Emerson's essays in the house where I grew up, or very many other books for that matter, but in addition to the Bible, we had shop manuals and parts lists for every car we ever owned, these being supplemented in later years by a Physicians' Desk Reference. (When my octogenarian father is prescribed some new medicine, he informs the doctor of the side effects.) At bottom, and I mean the demographic as well as the spiritual bottom, the motivating ethos of the Republican Party base is not national defense, or free markets, or "family values". At bottom it is what Cola Hudson knew it was, what Joan Didion, a Goldwater Republican in her youth, partly had in mind when she wrote about "wagon-train morality". In his heart of hearts, the Republican conservative is still a pioneer and a homesteader, someone who takes care of himself, practices thrift, prizes industry, despises waste. I do wonder if the appeal of Sarah Palin had less to do with her opposition to abortion than with her ability to dress a moose. As far as that goes, I wonder if even Republican strategists grasp that hatred of abortion, and the related enthusiasms for guns and school choice, have less to do with opposition to the Democratic Party or to some atavistic "Communist Party" than with opposition to any well-credentialed, all-presuming third party: the physician, the cop, the school superintendent, the politician - alas, the union organizer - who intervenes, imposes, and later sends you the bill. In this connection, I would cite Richard G Mitchell Jr's 2002 study, Dancing at Armageddon, in which he persuasively argues that the driving force behind the survivalist movement is not so much right-wing reaction as the desire to exercise individual creativity and competence on some yet-to-be-subdued acre of "Planet Microsoft". About self-reliance as a creed, several things come immediately to mind. First, the obvious limitations of such a value, the degree to which self-reliance is both precarious and bestial outside of a social contract, the degree to which a patriarchal construction of self-reliance can become a woman's lack of the same. Second, the ease with which self-reliance, laced with a bit of original sin, becomes self-indulgence. Indeed it doesn't take Emerson many paragraphs to go from lauding self-reliance to praising the virtues of "whim", an accolade I would expect to find heavily underlined in Dick Cheney's copy of the text. On the positive side, though, it strikes one how attractive an ethic like self-reliance might prove in a time of environmental catastrophe and economic collapse. In any event, the survival of the Republican Party may depend on its ability to reclaim the values that appear in their most radical form among survivalists. Don't misunderstand me. I want the Republican Party to drop dead. Inasmuch as it differs too little from the competition, I want the Democratic Party to drop dead with it. What interests me is the politics that might emerge from their respective deaths and resurrections, what might happen if each were to glance at the yawning sarcophagus of the other and spot a naked body that it liked. In that contentious stage of boyhood when I first began to shake off the political and religious conservatism of my roots, my worried parents and my much-harried Sunday-school teacher joined in referring me to the Dutch-born minister of the family's Reformed church. Perhaps the learned reverend could calm me down. The trouble of the moment was my discovery of what I took for a glaring contradiction in the writings of Saint Paul. This I could not abide. After hearing me out in his study, and taking a few meditative puffs on his pipe, the minister said that he was inclined to agree with me and that there were actually several other contradictions I might have missed. "For example", he said, "Paul tells the Galatians to bear one another's burdens, and then some verses on, he says that every one shall bear his own burden. Still, I'd say that on the whole it's a pretty good epistle." Then we talked about pipes, as I had recently taken up smoking one myself. The older I get the higher my regard for the old dominie's method of treating with budding skeptics and the lesser my regard for his sense of contradiction. Whatever the apostle's inconsistencies, the dual admonition to bear one another's burdens and to bear one's own burden is not among them. These two imperatives, that of self-reliance and social responsibility, of the Republican heart and the Democratic heart in their purest forms, are the crux of any sustainable community. Neither value makes sense without the other, nor can it be fulfilled without the other. The trick is to get them to kiss. The trick is to create a society in which the privilege of disposable income is not contingent on the existence of disposable people - to say nothing of disposable tigers, ice caps, and arable land. That is the primary task of any mature politics, and it cannot be performed so long as both of our major political parties are held captive by a rumpus-room economic system, with our congressional representatives spending more time talking to CEOs than to philosophers - or even to accountants - and hardly any time talking to the people they supposedly represent. Such a politics must always be puerile. Witness the recent hearings on the bailout; spend an hour lounging with the business-class travelers in an airport bar. (I happen to enjoy that crowd, but then I happen to enjoy the skateboard set as well.) Perhaps the greatest conservative soul who ever lived, Dr Johnson, said, "There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money". He was right insofar as innocence belongs to childhood. Innocents make money; adults make love. Adults hear more possibilities in that last phrase than the reductive eroticism that advertisers use to make money. A grown-up body politic will acknowledge its children, set them strict rules, and let them play with their credit ratings and their hedge funds, their light sabers and their cap pistols, in a well-supervised back yard so that the adults can get down to what adults are meant to get down to: the pleasurable socializing of their resources and the passionate coupling of their best ideas. _____ Garret Keizer is a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine. His essay "Of Mohawks and Mavericks" appeared in the December 2008 issue. TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Apr 8 13:01:19 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2009 12:01:19 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Fujimori given 25 years for killings In-Reply-To: <2036545086.963201239163712636.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <777006293.1132861239217279448.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f5a14a7e-23d3-11de-996a-00144feabdc0.html Financial Times????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????April 8 2009 Fujimori given 25 years for killings By Naomi Mapstone in Lima Alberto Fujimori, the former president of Peru, was given a 25-year prison sentence in Lima yesterday after being found guilty on human rights charges related to killings and kidnappings carried out by a state death squad. A three-judge panel convicted him of ordering a military squad to carry out two massacres that killed 25 people during his 1990-2000 rule, when he was fighting Maoist guerrillas. Mr Fujimori, 70, the first democratically elected president to be tried and convicted in his own country on such charges, kept his head down and studiously took notes as the verdict was read out. The former president is already serving a six-year jail term for abuse of power. The court was packed with observers and the families of people killed by the Colina paramilitary group. Cesar San Martin, the presiding judge, said there was no doubt that Mr Fujimori had authorised the creation of a military death squad that carried out killings and the kidnappings of Samuel Dyer, a businessman, and Gustavo Gorritti, a journalist. In a surprise move, the court deemed the offences "crimes against humanity". Fifteen people were killed in 1991, when the Colina group raided a chicken barbecue in a poor part of Lima. Nine students and a professor were kidnapped, tortured and executed after a raid on La Cantuta university, a stronghold of the Shining Path rebels, in 1992. Mr Fujimori's daughter Keiko, a congresswoman who served as first lady,may run in the 2011 presidential race. She has questioned the court's process and vowed to pardon her father if she wins power. However, Viviana Krsticevic, executive director of the Center for Justice and International Law in Washington, said the "crimes against humanity" classification could make it illegal for anyone to attempt a pardon. Mr Fujimori, who fled Peru in 2000 and faxed over his resignation, found harbour in Japan for some years before moving to Chile, saying he intended to run again for Peru's presidency. "He went to Chile because of the jurisprudence in terms of extradition. I think that he was very surprised when Chilean judges decided he should be extradited," said Eduardo Bertoni, executive director of the Washington-based Due Process of Law centre, one of the trial observers. After 15 months of televised testimony and 90 witnesses, international observers hailed the trial as a model of due process. Maria McFarland, of the group Human Rights Watch, said the court would "go down in history as a model of what we want to see in terms of rule of law and justice and progress in Latin America". An opinion poll before the trial showed that 64 per cent of respondents thought Mr Fujimori was guilty. He continues to enjoy political support from those who credit him with crushing the insurgency and introducing policies that led to years of growth. More than 70,000 deaths have been attributed to the violence of the Shining Path years. Peru's truth and reconciliation commission estimated that 37 per cent of the victims were killed by the armed forces. From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Apr 8 13:01:55 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2009 12:01:55 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Khmer Rouge defendant: US policy benefited regime In-Reply-To: <775498321.962081239163316200.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1988447990.1133281239217315177.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iIuntCU1mCsWYORH7ffwxpYipg1gD97D4MV80 Associated Press ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ? April 6, 2009 Khmer Rouge defendant: US policy benefited regime By GRANT PECK PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) ? The former chief of the Khmer Rouge's most ? notorious prison said his group would not have risen to power in the ? 1970s if it weren't for the policies of former U.S. President Richard ? Nixon and his top diplomat, Henry Kissinger. Kaing Guek Eav (pronounced Gang Geck EE-UU), better known as Duch, ? made the comments Monday before Cambodia's genocide tribunal during ? testimony charting his personal journey to revolution. He also said that he realized early on that the Khmer Rouge would end ? up as a disaster for Cambodia. Duch's remarks on U.S. influence in the region were part of his ? account of the years before the Khmer Rouge's 1975-79 regime. They ? echoed U.S. critics such as Noam Chomsky, who charged that ? Washington's policies ensnared Cambodia in the Vietnam War, ? destabilizing the country to the point that the Khmer Rouge could take ? over. Duch (pronounced Doik) spoke as the U.N.-assisted tribunal began the ? second week of his trial for crimes against humanity and war crimes, ? as well as homicide and torture. Duch, now 66, commanded Phnom Penh's S-21 prison, also known as Tuol ? Sleng. As many as 16,000 men, women and children are believed to have ? been tortured there before being executed. One of the judges, Jean Marc Lavergne of France, questioned Duch about ? everything from personal motives to the conditions at the guerrillas' ? jungle camps. Duch said he believed the Khmer Rouge would have died out by 1970 if ? the United States had not supported Cambodia's military-led government ? following the 1970 coup d'etat that removed Prince Norodom Sihanouk ? from power and installed Gen. Lon Nol. Sihanouk reacted by allying with the Khmer Rouge, his old foes, ? lending them respectability among many Cambodians, which allowed them ? to build up power during their 1970-75 war against the Lon Nol regime, ? Duch said. "I think the Khmer Rouge would already have been demolished" by 1970, ? he said. "But Mr. Kissinger and Richard Nixon were quick (to back coup ? leader Lon Nol), and then the Khmer Rouge noted the golden opportunity." Washington had opposed Sihanouk's neutralist policies because it felt ? they benefited the communists in Vietnam, who used Cambodian territory ? as a rear base. When the coup threatened their sanctuaries in eastern ? Cambodia, the Vietnamese communists responded by increasing military ? aid to the Khmer Rouge. "I believe that it's true that the U.S. bears some responsibility for ? the rise of the Khmer Rouge," said Alex Hinton, a Rutgers University ? historian who attended Monday's hearing. "But we can't say that means ? it was responsible for the genocide." Kissinger has always scoffed at claims that U.S. intervention ? ? including the massive bombing of the Cambodian countryside ? ? contributed to the Khmer Rouge's rise. Speaking in Thailand nine years ago when formation of the tribunal was ? under discussion, Kissinger said that critics blame the U.S. for the ? Khmer Rouge regime even though Washington worked against them for 10 ? years. That criticism suggests that the U.S. is "responsible for the Khmer ? Rouge atrocities because the Khmer Rouge were driven crazy by not ? being permitted to carry out their murder right away ? so they had to ? redouble their efforts once they came into office," he said at the time. Duch testified with enthusiasm, earning a reprimand from the bench by ? sometimes answering questions before they were translated into the ? court's three official languages of Cambodian, French and English. The defendant demonstrated a phenomenal memory, reciting without notes ? people's names and exact dates of activities from four decades ago. Duch testified about how he commanded a jungle prison called M-13 ? during the 1970-75 civil war. Prisoners and documents were sent to ? him, and he saw that Khmer Rouge members were accusing, arresting and ? killing each order. He said he realized the group would be a disaster for the country when ? he heard Khmer Rouge leaders speaking publicly of popular reforms, but ? keeping secret their plans for a radical communist revolution. Duch is the first senior Khmer Rouge figure to face trial, and the ? only one to apologize for his actions. Four more are in custody and to ? be tried sometime over the next year. An estimated 1.7 million Cambodians died from forced labor, ? starvation, medical neglect and executions under the Khmer Rouge. Associated Press writers Susan Postlewaite and Sopheng Cheang in Phnom ? Penh contributed to this story. From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Apr 8 13:02:53 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2009 12:02:53 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Howard Zinn on class in America In-Reply-To: <858122141.956371239161841770.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1222510934.1133871239217373446.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> ? ? New Stories April 7, 2009 More from The Real News Watch more news stories on the economy, US politics and the climate change crisis from around the world view Zinn on class in America Howard Zinn: In the United States we are brought up to think there's only one class view Reality asserts itself Solutions to the economic crisis will be found when we cut through the propaganda and spin view Dear Real News subscriber, We hope you can join us tonight , Tuesday 7 April , for our Real News Cafe series, Digging into the Economic Crisis. We look forward to your company either in person at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto, or online. Streaming of the event will begin at 7pm EST. We have an additional panelist, Catherine Daw for the evening discussion. Catherine Daw has been named to the list of Top 100 Women Entrepreneurs by Profit magazine for the past three years. She is the President and Co-founder of SPM - a successful boutique consulting firm who is a pioneer in an emerging field called Strategic Initiative Management. Catherine holds a BSc and MBA from the Schulich School of Busines and Queen's University. Her work at SPM specializes in the public sector, financial services, energy & utilities. Senior Editor, Paul Jay will be moderating the discussion and we look forward to your questions and comments throughout the night. Full details of the program and other panelists is available on our website at http://therealnews.com Thanks for watching, The Real News Team Make www.therealnews.com your homepage and see the latest stories as soon as they're posted. Help promote The Real News Network on YouTube by making our videos your favourites, rate them and add comments. Promoting our YouTube channel builds our community and helps spread the word about our development. If you use the Miro media player subscribe to the TRNN channel Having trouble viewing this email? View it as a web page instead. You received this message because you or someone using this email address requested it via a form at therealnews.com or via some other communication with The Real News Network. If you do not want to receive further updates from us, unsubscribe here . ? From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Apr 8 12:58:05 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2009 11:58:05 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Notes on Irwin Cotler's Canadian House of Commons statement In-Reply-To: <1501752739.953331239160642970.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <2099763983.1130831239217085818.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/lunatic-cotler-strikes-again/ Notes on Irwin Cotler Canadian House of Commons statement 04.03.2009 | Original By a correspondent Together with a friend, the MP Irwin Cotler rose in parliament yesterday to table a petition denouncing ?the escalating state-backed anti-Semitism in Venezuela?. [1] One wonders if it had anything to do with April Fool?s Day because the only incident they mention specifically was ?the firebombing of a synagogue in Caracas.? Though the incident did spark a chorus of condemnation blaming the Venezuelan government, the rabbi?s bodyguard has since admitted planning the robbery with the help of one of the synagogue?s security guards after the rabbi denied him a loan. [2] When Caracas? biggest mosque was subsequently robbed, the Associated Press failed to suggest the sort of grand conspiracies that get Mr. Cotler?s juices flowing, noting that it was ?located in downtown Caracas, where a scant police presence makes robberies and murders relatively common.? [3] Either Mr. Cotler is ignorant of basic facts or his parliamentary statements were a conscious fraud aimed at stoking the myth of growing anti-Semitism in an effort to deflect attention from Israel?s many crimes. References: ? 1. ^ House of Common Debates , vol. 144, no. 38 ( 1 April 2008 ), p. 2771 ? 2. ^ James Suggett, ?Robbery, not Anti-Semitism, motive for attack on Venezuelan synagogue? , Venezuelanalysis.com , 10 February 2009 . ( Webcite? archive on 4/4/2009 ) ? 3. ^ Associated Press, ?Venezuela?s Biggest Mosque Robbed, Official Says? , CBS News , 24 March 2009 From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Apr 8 13:03:17 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2009 12:03:17 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] The Geithner-Summers Plan Is Even Worse Than We Thought In-Reply-To: <161187381.955611239161496012.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1744339094.1134081239217397334.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-sachs/the-geithner-summers-plan_b_183499.html Huffington Post???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? April 6, 2009 The Geithner-Summers Plan Is Even Worse Than We Thought by Jeffrey Sachs Director of the Earth Institute, Economics Professor, Columbia University Two weeks ago, I posted an article showing how the Geithner-Summers banking plan could potentially and unnecessarily transfer hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth from taxpayers to banks. The same basic arithmetic was later described by Joseph Stiglitz in the New York Times (April 1) and by Peyton Young in the Financial Times (April 1). In fact, the situation is even potentially more disastrous than we wrote. Insiders can easily game the system created by Geithner and Summers to cost up to a trillion dollars or more to the taxpayers. Here's how. Consider a toxic asset held by Citibank with a face value of $1 million, but with zero probability of any payout and therefore with a zero market value. An outside bidder would not pay anything for such an asset. All of the previous articles consider the case of true outside bidders. Suppose, however, that Citibank itself sets up a Citibank Public-Private Investment Fund (CPPIF) under the Geithner-Summers plan. The CPPIF will bid the full face value of $1 million for the worthless asset, because it can borrow $850K from the FDIC, and get $75K from the Treasury, to make the purchase! Citibank will only have to put in $75K of the total. Citibank thereby receives $1 million for the worthless asset, while the CPPIF ends up with an utterly worthless asset against $850K in debt to the FDIC. The CPPIF therefore quietly declares bankruptcy, while Citibank walks away with a cool $1 million. Citibank's net profit on the transaction is $925K (remember that the bank invested $75K in the CPPIF) and the taxpayers lose $925K. Since the total of toxic assets in the banking system exceeds $1 trillion, and perhaps reaches $2-3 trillion, the amount of potential rip-off in the Geithner-Summers plan is unconscionably large. The earlier criticisms of the Geithner-Summers plan showed that even outside bidders generally have the incentive to bid far too much for the toxic assets, since they too get a free ride from the government loans. But once we acknowledge the insider-bidding route, the potential to game the plan at the cost of the taxpayers becomes extraordinary. And the gaming of the system doesn't have to be as crude as Citibank setting up its own CPPIF. There are lots of ways that it can do this indirectly, for example, buying assets of other banks which in turn buy Citi's assets. Or other stakeholders in Citi, such as groups of bondholders and shareholders, could do the same. Several news stories suggest some grounding for these fears. Both Business Week and the Financial Times report that the banks themselves might be invited to bid for the toxic assets, which would seem to set up just the scam outline above. What is incredible is that lack of the most minimal transparency so far about the rules, risks, and procedures of this trillion-dollar plan. Also incredible is the apparent lack of any oversight by Congress, reinforcing the sense that the fix is in or that at best we are all sitting ducks. The sad part of all this is that there are now several much better ideas circulating among experts, but none of these seems to get the time of day from the Treasury. The best ideas are forms of corporate reorganization, in which a bank weighed down with toxic assets is divided into two banks -- a "good bank" and a "bad bank" -- with the bad bank left holding the toxic assets and the long-term debts, while owning the equity of the good bank. If the bad assets pay off better than is now feared, the bondholders get repaid and the current bank shares keep their value. If the bad assets in fact default heavily as is now expected, the bondholders and shareholders lose their investments. The key point of the good bank -- bad bank plans is an orderly process to restore healthy banking functions (in the good bank) while divvying up the losses in a fair way among the banks' existing claimants. The taxpayer is not needed for that, except to cover the insured part of the banks' existing liabilities, specifically the banks' deposits and perhaps other short-term liabilities that are key to financial market liquidity. Cynics believe that the Geithner-Summers Plan is exactly what it seems: a naked grab of taxpayer money for Wall Street interests. Geithner and Summers argue that it's the least bad approach to a messy situation, in which we need to restore banking functions but don't have any perfect ways to do that. If they are serious about their justification, let them come forward to confront their critics and to explain to the American people why the other proposals are not being pursued. Let them explain the hidden and not-so-hidden risks to the American taxpayer of the plan that they have put forward. Let them explain why they are so intent on saving the banks' bondholders, even the long-term unsecured creditors who clearly knew they were taking market risks in buying Citibank bonds. Let them work with their critics to fashion a less risky and less costly plan. So far Geithner and Summers tell us that their plan is the only option, but without a word of further explanation as to why. From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Apr 8 13:03:55 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2009 12:03:55 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Margolis: Those Treacherous Afpakis In-Reply-To: <1908800240.955261239161355019.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <937245912.1134571239217435489.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22329.htm Information Clearing House ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? April 01, 2009 Beware Those Treacherous Afpakis "ISI is not playing a double game, as Washington charges, but simply assuring Pakistan's strategic and political interests in the region. The Obama administration is making an historic mistake by treating Pakistan with imperial arrogance and ignoring the concerns and desires of its people. We seem to have learned nothing from the Iranian revolution." By Eric Margolis President Barack Obama has now taken full ownership of the Afghanistan War. Gone are Washington's pretenses that a western "coalition" was waging this conflict. Gone, too, is the comic book term, "war on terrorism," replaced by the Orwellian sobriquet, "overseas contingency operations." Obama's announcement last week of deeper US involvement in Afghanistan and Pakistan - now officially known in Washington as "Afpak" - was accompanied by a preliminary media bombardment of Pakistan for failing to be sufficiently responsive in advancing US strategic plans. The New York Times in a front-page story last week that was clearly orchestrated by the Obama administration charged that Pakistan's military intelligence agency, Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), has been secretly aiding Taliban and its allies in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 2003, the NY Times severely damaged its once stellar reputation by serving as a primary conduit for fake war propaganda put out by the Bush administration over Iraq. The Times has been beating the war drums for more US military operations against Pakistan. Even so, these latest angry charges being hurled by Washington at Pakistan's spy agency ring true. Having covered ISI for almost 25 years, and been briefed by many of its director generals, I would be very surprised if ISI was not quietly working with Taliban and other Afghan resistance movements. Protecting Pakistan's interests, not those of the United States, is ISI's main job. According to Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Washington threatened war against Pakistan after 9/11 if it did not fully cooperate in the US invasion of Afghanistan. Pakistan's bases and ports were and remain essential for the US occupation of Afghanistan. Pakistan was forced at gunpoint to accept US demands though most of its people supported Taliban as nationalist, anti-Communist freedom fighters and opposed the US invasion. Taliban, mostly composed of Pashtun tribesmen, had been nurtured and armed by Pakistan. Many of Pakistan's generals and senior ISI officers are Pashtun, who make up 15-18% of that nation's population and form its second largest ethnic group after Punjabis. ISI routinely used Taliban and militant Kashmiri groups Lashkar-i-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed. Pakistan was enraged to see its traditional Afghan foes, the Communist-dominated Northern Alliance of Tajiks and Uzbeks, put into power by the Americans. The Northern Alliance was strongly backed by India, Iran, Russia, and the Central Asian post-Communist states. Pakistan has always considered Afghanistan its "strategic hinterland" and natural sphere of influence. The 30-million strong Pashtun people straddle the artificial Pak-Afghan border, known as the Durand Line, drawn by Imperial Britain as part of its divide and rule strategy. Pakistan supports the Afghan Pashtun, who have been excluded from power in US-occupied Afghanistan. But Pakistan also fears secessionist tendencies among its own Pashtun. The specter of an independent Pashtun state - "Pashtunistan" - uniting the Pashtuns of Afghanistan and Pakistanhas long been one of Islamabad's worst nightmares. Pakistanis are outraged by US bombing attacks against their own rebellious Pashtun tribes in the frontier agencies. Most also strongly oppose Washington's "renting" 130,000 Pakistani troops and aircraft to attack pro-Taliban Pashtun tribesmen. A majority believe the increasingly unpopular and isolated government of President Asif Zardari serves the interests of the US rather than Pakistan. Pakistan is bankrupt and now lives on American handouts. Its last two governments have been forced to do Washington's bidding though most Pakistanis are opposed to such policies. The US has ignored intensifying efforts by India, Iran, and Russia to expand their influence in Afghanistan. India, in particular, is arming and supplying Afghan foes of Pakistan. Washington sees Pakistan only as a way of advancing its own interests in Afghanistan, not as a loyal old ally. Obedience, not cooperation, is being demanded of Islamabad. President Barack Obama announced that more US troops and civilian officials will go to Afghanistan, and more billions will be spent sustaining a war against the largely Pashtun national resistance in Afghanistan and Pakistan. None of this will benefit Pakistan. In fact America's deepening involvement in "Afpak" brings the threat of growing instability and violence, even the de facto breakup of Pakistan as the US tried to splinter fragile Pakistan just as it did Iraq. It is ISI's job to deal with these dangers, to keep in close touch with Pashtun on both sides of the border, and to counteract the machinations of other foreign powers in Afghanistan and Pakistan's tribal belt. Many Pakistanis also know that one day the US and its allies will quit Afghanistan, leaving a bloody mess behind them. Pakistan's ISI will have to pick up the pieces and deal with the ensuing chaos. Pakistan's strategic and political interests are quite different from those of Washington. But few in Washington seem to care in the least. ISI is not playing a double game, as Washington charges, but simply assuring Pakistan's strategic and political interests in the region. The Obama administration is making an historic mistake by treating Pakistan with imperial arrogance and ignoring the concerns and desires of its people. We seem to have learned nothing from the Iranian revolution. Eric Margolis , contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media Canada. He is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. See his website From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Apr 8 13:00:49 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2009 12:00:49 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Ahmad Tibi: Time to Boycott Israeli Government In-Reply-To: <1476309610.958431239162481648.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <345277724.1132571239217249960.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/opinion/07iht-edtibi.html?ref=global The New York Times????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????April 6, 2009 A Harsh Reality for Palestinians AHMAD TIBI JERUSALEM ? The right-wing coalition of the new Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, does not bode well for Palestinians in Israel. With the appointment of Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister, the extremists are going after the indigenous population and threatening us with loyalty tests and the possibility of ?transfer? into an area nominally controlled by the Palestinian Authority. Netanyahu?s intransigence vis-?-vis Palestinians in the occupied territories is certainly cause for concern. No less concerning is what the Netanyahu-Lieberman combination may mean to Palestinian citizens of Israel. This government, particularly with Lieberman as foreign minister, should be boycotted by the international community, just as it once boycotted J?rg Haider, the late Austrian far-right politician who won global notoriety for his anti-immigrant views. Lieberman, in one of many outrageous comments, declared in May 2004 that 90 percent of Israel?s Palestinian citizens ?have no place here. They can take their bundles and get lost.? But my family and I were on this land centuries before Lieberman arrived here in 1978 from Moldova. We are among the minority who managed to remain when some 700,000 Palestinians were forced out by Israel in 1948. Today, Lieberman stokes anti-Palestinian sentiment with his threat of ?transfer? ? a euphemism for renewed ethnic cleansing. Henry Kissinger, too, has called for a territorial swap, and Lieberman cites Kissinger to give his noxious idea a more sophisticated sheen. Lieberman and Kissinger envision exchanging a portion of Israel for a portion of the occupied West Bank seized illegally by Jewish settlers. But Israel has no legal right to any of the occupied Palestinian territories. And Lieberman has no right to offer the land my home is on in exchange for incorporating Jewish settlers into newly defined Israeli state borders. We are citizens of the state of Israel and do not want to exchange our second-class citizenship in our homeland ? subject as we are to numerous laws that discriminate against us ? for life in a Palestinian Bantustan. We take our citizenship seriously and struggle daily to improve our lot and overcome discriminatory laws and practices. We face discrimination in all fields of life. Arab citizens are 20 percent of the population, but only 6 percent of the employees in the public sector. Not one Arab employee is working in the central bank of Israel. Imagine if there was not one African-American citizen employed in the central bank of the United States. Israel is simultaneously running three systems of government. The first is full democracy toward its Jewish citizens ? ethnocracy. The second is racial discrimination toward the Palestinian minority ? creeping Jim Crowism. And the third is occupation of the Palestinian territories with one set of laws for Palestinians and another for Jewish settlers ? apartheid. A few weeks ago, Lieberman?s Yisrael Beiteinu Party led the charge in the Israeli Knesset to ban my party ? the Arab Movement for Renewal ? from participating in the elections. Netanyahu?s Likud also supported the action. The Supreme Court overturned the maneuvers of the politicians. But their attempt to ban our participation should expose Israel?s democracy to the world as fraudulent. Lieberman?s inveighing against Palestinian citizens of Israel is not new. Less than three years ago, he called for my death and the death of some of my Palestinian Knesset colleagues for daring to meet with democratically elected Palestinian leaders. Speaking before the Knesset plenum, Lieberman stated: ?World War II ended with the Nuremberg trials. The heads of the Nazi regime, along with their collaborators, were executed. I hope this will be the fate of the collaborators in this house.? Lieberman now has the power to put his vile views into practice. We call for more attention from the Obama administration toward the Palestinian minority in Israel. It is a repressed minority suffering from inadequately shared state resources. The enormous annual American aid package to Israel fails almost entirely to reach our community. Between Netanyahu and Lieberman, the Obama administration will have its hands full. Make no mistake that Netanyahu and Lieberman will press the new administration hard to accept Israeli actions in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem ? as well as discriminatory anti-Palestinian actions in Israel itself. Settlements will grow and discrimination deepen. American backbone will be crucial in the months ahead. Ahmad Tibi is a Palestinian citizen of Israel and a member of the Knesset, Israel?s Parliament. From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Apr 8 14:20:02 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2009 13:20:02 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Canadian Jews support the Durban Review Message-ID: <2108321591.1188661239222002950.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Press Release - For immediate release ?????????????????????????????? ????????????????????????????????????? April 8, 2009 ? Independent Jewish Voice? P.O. Box 23088 Ottawa, Ontario K2B 6H9 ? Canadian Jews support the Durban Review ? As Canadian Jews, we support and will attend the Durban Review of the World Conference Against Racism in Geneva, April 20-24. We do so because we are concerned about all expressions of racism. Unfortunately, there are Zionist and pro-Israeli groups coming to Geneva on April 20, working to derail this crucially important conference in the name of observing the Holocaust . ? For us, the holocaust legacy "Never again" means never again for all peoples. It is a tragic turn of history that the State of Israel, which espouses ideals of democracy and portrays itself as a safe haven for Jews, causes immeasurable suffering and injustice to the Palestinian people. Ironically, the result is less and less security for the people of Israel. ? We are appalled by attempts on the part of prominent Jewish organizations and Canadian politicians to silence protest against the State of Israel. We are alarmed by their escalating use of intimidation and fear tactics. These efforts are designed to deflect attention from Israel?s flagrant violations of international humanitarian law. ? Israel?s stance cannot be characterized as defensive. Israel is the largest recipient of US foreign aid, receiving the equivalent of $3 million per day. Israel has the fourth strongest army in the world. Even before its invasion of Gaza on 27 December 2008, Israel?s siege had already created a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, causing severe impoverishment, malnutrition, and destroyed infrastructure. It is crucial that forums like the Durban Review process be able to hold Israel accountable to the international community for what are widely considered war crimes without being tagged with specious claims of anti-Semitism. ? We recognize that anti-Jewish racism is a reality in Canada and elsewhere. We are committed to resisting any act of hatred against Jews. At the same time, however, we must condemn the laying of false charges of anti-Semitism against people who are exercising their democratic right to freedom of speech and association by criticizing the State of Israel. ? Contrary to what its critics allege, the Durban Review offers a fitting forum in which to honour those who died in the Holocaust. At the Durban Review, nearly all of the nations of the earth will gather to affirm their commitment to implementing the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, with its ambitious and admirable mandate to ?end racism in all its forms.? ? The 2001 Durban Declaration and Programme of Action is more than 60 pages long. The following is a comprehensive list of all of the items from that Declaration relevant to Israel and Palestine. All of them are scrupulously respectful of Jews and Judaism. ? ? ??????????? ?We recall that the Holocaust must never be forgotten.? ? ? ??????????? ?We recognize with deep concern the increase in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in various parts of the world, as well as the emergence of racial and violent movements based on racism and discriminatory ideas against Jewish, Muslim and Arab communities.? ? ? ??????????? ?We are concerned about the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation. We recognize the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to the establishment of an independent State and we recognize the right to security for all States in the region, including Israel, and call upon all States to support the peace process and bring it to an early conclusion.? ? ? ??????????? ?We recognize the right of refugees to return voluntarily to their homes and properties in dignity and safety, and urge all States to facilitate such return.? ? ? ??????????? ?We condemn the persistence and resurgence of neo-Nazism, neo-fascism and violent nationalist ideologies based on racial or national prejudice, and state that these phenomena can never be justified in any instance or under any circumstances.? ? ? ??????????? ?As for the situation in the Middle East, [ we call for] the end of violence and the swift resumption of negotiations, respect for international human rights and humanitarian law, respect for the principle of self-determination and the end of all suffering, thus allowing Israel and the Palestinians to resume the peace process, and to develop and prosper in security and freedom.? ? Independent Jewish Voices (Canada) condemns the Israel Lobby for attempting to derail the World Conference Against Racism and the Durban Review. We strongly object to the attempt by leading apologists for Israel?s war crimes and violations of humanitarian law to discredit the Durban Review Conference and we condemn the Canadian government for colluding with them by refusing to participate in the Durban Review. ? As Canadian Jews, we stand in solidarity with all of the world?s victims of racism. ? -30- ? For further information, please contact ? Diana Ralph, Ottawa, (613) 321-2765 Fabienne Presentey, Montreal (514) 509-6829 Sid Shniad, Vancouver (604) 314-5589 Independent Jewish Voices NGO delegates to the Durban Review of the World Conference Against Racism From tchilds at resist.ca Wed Apr 8 16:25:37 2009 From: tchilds at resist.ca (tchilds at resist.ca) Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2009 15:25:37 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Former oilsands exec named head of climate working group Message-ID: <49749.70.71.176.80.1239229537.squirrel@mail.resist.ca> http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Business/Former+oilsands+exec+named+head+climate+working+group/1474723/story.html Former oilsands exec named head of climate working group BY GLEN MCGREGOR , THE OTTAWA CITIZENAPRIL 7, 2009 OTTAWA ? The Harper government has named a former oil and gas industry executive who led a company active in the Alberta oilsands as a representative on a U.S.-Canada working group on clean energy. Charlie Fischer, who until recently served as president and chief executive officer of Calgary-based Nexen Inc., will head up one of three working groups with American counterparts as part of the Clean Energy Dialogue, Environment Minister Jim Prentice has confirmed. Prime Minister Stephen Harper agreed to set up the working groups after a meeting in Ottawa with U.S. President Barack Obama, promising that the two countries would cooperate on developing new ways to combat climate change. But only last week, in a response to a question in the House of Commons from a Liberal MP, did the government reveal who would serve as Canadian ?envoys? on the groups. The Sierra Club of Canada says the choice of an oil industry executive as a clean energy envoy undermines the credibility of the effort. ?Appointing Charlie Fischer sends a clear signal that this is about promoting the tar sands, period,? said Stephen Hazell, executive director of the environmental group. ?The government of Canada seems to be coming at this whole clean energy dialogue from the perspective of how can they get special exemptions for the tar sands industry so that, when a cap-and-trade system is implemented, the tar sands aren?t affected.? Hazell allowed that Nexen is among the more progressive of oilsands developers and he said that Fischer himself is ?not a Neanderthal . It is a company that recognizes it can?t go on doing what it?s doing.? Fischer, 59, is also listed as a co-chair of Alberta Climate Change Central, a not-for-profit organization that promotes greenhouse gas reduction. Last December, Nexen upped its participation in the Alberta oilsands with a $735-million investment in the Long Lake project. Fischer retired from the top job at the company at the end of last year. As of December, Fischer held over 500,000 common shares in Nexen, then worth about $9.5 million, as well as options on three million more shares, according to insider disclosure records. (Because he is no longer required to report his trades, his holdings may have changed since then.) While the exact mandates of working groups are still being developed, Environment Canada says that none of the participants will be put in a position of a conflict-of-interest. ?Every step will be taken to ensure the integrity of the working groups are maintained,? a department spokesperson said in an e-mail. Fischer will be the co-leader of the working group on clean energy technology, such as carbon capture and sequestration at coal-fire plants, according to the department. Each group will have two co-leaders, with one drawn from senior levels of the bureaucracy and the other from outside government. They will consult with academics, the public and environmental non-governmental organizations. Also named as envoy is Jacques Lamarre, the chief executive of SNC-Lavalin, who will co-lead a group focussed on improving the electricity grid. Lamarre is due to retire from his job at the company in May. Linda Hasenfratz, chief executive officer of Ontario auto parts company Linamar, will also lead a working group, looking at biofuels and clean engines. At a press conference after his meeting with Obama in February, Harper said senior officials from both countries would ?collaborate on the development of clean energy, science and technologies .. (to) reduce greenhouse gases and combat climate change.? All three named envoys have been registered to lobby the federal government in the past. Fischer?s registration, which was terminated in December, lists communications in 2008 between his company and Prentice and Clerk of the Privy Council Kevin Lynch. Lamarre is still on-record as a lobbyist, listing contact between his company and several senior government officials, including Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt. ? Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Apr 8 17:37:54 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2009 16:37:54 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Bring Abousfian Abdelrazik Home! Message-ID: <1572777228.1289131239233874985.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> *please distribute widely* ? Bring Abousfian Abdelrazik Home! Cross-Canada Campaign 7 April to 7 May Update and Call for Action ? On Friday , 3 April , Minister of Foreign Affairs Lawrence Cannon refused to give a passport to Abousfian Abdelrazik. The flight Abousfian was due to board left without him, and he remains in the same situation of forced exile that he has been in for six years - living for almost a year in the Canadian embassy in Khartoum. ? On Tuesday , 7 May , his lawyers will go to the courts to ask for a mandatory order to compel the government to bring Abousfian back by "any safe means at its disposal". This is being argued on the basis of section 6 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which states, "Every citizen of Canada has the right to enter, remain in and leave Canada." ? If they wanted to, government officials could, literally, send a plane today to bring him home tomorrow . But the government's actions have flown in the face of the law and public opinion, and officials have refused to do what is both within their means and within their legal obligation - to bring Abousfian home. Without public pressure, there is no guarantee that they will even respect a court order. ? Project Fly Home is thus calling for a public campaign leading up to 7 May to push the government to act NOW to bring Abousfian home. ? It is imperative that the level of pressure and public scrutiny remain very high. The government has clearly proven its capacity for duplicity and its strong resistance to upholding Abousfian's rights. This is a case which is important not only for Abousfian but for all of us who are concerned about preserving the rights and freedoms - and most importantly, the dignity and equality - of all. ? Abousfian's case has exposed a broad public to a much deeper problem that concerns every single one of us: from the most vulnerable non-citizens (dozens of whom were rounded up in mass factory raids last week and are now facing cruel deportation with no concern for their lives and well-being), to refugee claimants and permanent residents (who, under the draconian secret trial system, can be stripped of the most basic legal rights and forced to live a life of constant state surveillance -- either incarcerated or in their own homes -- under the perpetual threat of deportation), to the more privileged in our society. It is imperative that we act now. ? ACTION ? 1. 28 APRIL : We are calling on all cities to organize creative public information or fundraising events on or around 28 April , to mark the first anniversary of Abousfian's entering the embassy in Khartoum. If you are organizing an event, please email details to projectflyhome at gmail.com . To connect with an event near you, check the list of contacts for various cities on our webpage, www.peoplescommission.org/abdelrazik.php . ? 2. 5 MAY : We are calling on all cities to organize protests on or around 5 May to demand that the government act now to bring him home OR to mobilize people to travel to Ottawa for the protest there. If you are organizing an event or mobilizing to go to Ottawa, please email projectflyhome at gmail.com . You can get in touch with others in your city who could help organize this by checking the webpage www.peoplescommission.org/abdelrazik.php or emailing projectflyhome at gmail.com . ? 3. Please encourage five of your friends, colleagues or neighbours to make calls and write to LAWRENCE CANNON, copying Stephen Harper. Also ask them to write to their own MP. Details as well as a model letter, post card and petition can be found at www.peoplescommission.org/abdelrazik.php . ? 4. Importantly, PLEASE continue to send in notes of solidarity to Abousfian via projectflyhome at gmail.com . These don't have to be long. They have been extremely important to keep up his morale and courage. People are also invited to send letters and gifts directly to the embassy in Khartoum. ? There are other suggestions for action, including obtaining organizational endorsements (still welcome!) and donating to the Abousfian Abdelarazik Solidarity Fund, detailed on the webpage: www.peoplescommission.org/abdelrazik.php . ? BACKGROUND ? On Friday , 3 April , Abousfian Abdelrazik's lawyers received a fax from a government lawyer. In one sentence it stated that Lawrence Cannon, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, had decided to refuse their client an emergency passport. No explanation was provided. At the same time, Cannon, at a NATO summit in France, told reporters that Abousfian was being refused a passport on grounds of "national security". ? The message came just hours before the flight which was supposed to bring Abousfian back to Canada after six years of illegal exile was due to leave Khartoum. The airplane ticket had been bought by people from across Canada who had risked being charged under the "Al Qaeda and Taliban regulations" to contribute money to repatriate Abousfian. They did so in order to fulfill conditions imposed by Passport Canada, which told Abousfian's lawyers in December 2008 that a passport for Abousfian would ? be issued if he presented a payed for ticket. After years of imprisonment without charge, brutality, torture, and frustrated attempts to return home, Abousfian was destitute and in no position to pay for the ticket. The government's position was that anyone who "provided or collected by any means, directly or indirectly, funds with the intention that the funds be used" by the UN-black listed Abousfian could face criminal charges. In a groundswell of public support for the stranded Abousfian, people from across Canada stepped forward to offer their help - their numbers have now grown to over 200. ? The ticket was bought, it was presented; and the passport was refused. Once again the goal posts were moved. ? It is widely known that the RCMP and CSIS have cleared Abousfian, and that the government's standing position is that it wants Abousfian removed from the UN list. In the face of this, Cannon's cry of "national security" sounds even more arbitrary than usual; in fact, it seems downright silly. The government's refusal to issue this Canadian citizen the travel document that he needs in order to come home; that he has been promised, and that he is legally entitled to, is inexplicable. ? A few facts nevertheless stand out as highly relevant. It is clear from documents released under the Privacy Act that Canadian authorities were involved in the arrest of Abousfian in Sudan. It is, by all appearances, a clear-cut case of "extraordinary rendition" - or in less sanitized language, outsourcing torture. For anyone familiar with the stories of Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin, the pattern is disturbingly familiar. Abousfian's story - which started under the Liberal government but continues under the Conservatives - would certainly create embarassment for some powerful people, particularly at a time when Canada and its allies are intent on bringing Sudanese President Bachir before the international court for his many crimes. ? This situation has everything to do with Abousfian's religion and the colour of his skin. It has everything to do with a strong tide of racism and the increasing exercise of arbitrary power on the part of the government that must be seriously and strongly resisted to defend the rights and dignity of all. ? **Why Lawrence Cannon is wrong, 28 March 2009 : www.peoplescommission.org/files/abousfianMedia/ResponseToCannon.pdf **Statement by Abousfian Abdelarazik, 2 April 2009 : http://www.peoplescommission.org/files/abousfianMedia/StatementApril1En.pdf **List of contributors to the Abousfian Abdelrazik Solidarity Fund, 3 April 2009: www.peoplescommission.org/files/abousfianMedia/FinalList.pdf ? More background: www.peoplescommission.org/abdelrazik.php ? ------------------ Project Fly Home projectflyhome at gmail.com www.peoplescommission.org/php ? Project Fly Home is an initiative of the People's Commission Network. From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Apr 8 17:47:14 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2009 16:47:14 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Obama's military budget surpasses that of Bush! In-Reply-To: <"BAA0FC0406F342EE5ED0010D327B5E0DEDC3615173C7E546@667C7A31-4D84-4635-B2FE-00F7FF149628"@response.therealnews.com> Message-ID: <1166336751.1292331239234434936.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> donate to The Real News ? logo News stories April 8, 2009 Obama's military budget While media plays up program cuts, total defense budget surpasses Bush by $20 B view Zinn on class in America Pt.2 Howard Zinn: In the United States we are brought up to think there's only one class view Digging into the economic crisis The Real News Cafe discusses 'too big to fail' so: nationalize & democratize or renew capitalism view Reality asserts itself Solutions to the economic crisis will be found when we cut through the propaganda and spin view Make www.therealnews.com your homepage and see the latest stories as soon as they're posted. Help promote The Real News Network on YouTube by making our videos your favourites, rate them and add comments. Promoting our YouTube channel builds our community and helps spread the word about our development. If you use the Miro media player subscribe to the TRNN channel Having trouble viewing this email? View it as a web page instead. You received this message because you or someone using this email address requested it via a form at therealnews.com or via some other communication with The Real News Network. If you do not want to receive further updates from us, unsubscribe here . ? From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Wed Apr 8 18:07:25 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Thu, 09 Apr 2009 09:07:25 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Zionism is the problem Message-ID: <49DD3C3D.2050405@ashisuto.co.jp> The Zionist ideal of a Jewish state is keeping Israelis and Palestinians from living in peace. by Ben Ehrenreich Los Angeles Times, latimes.com (March 15 2009) It's hard to imagine now, but in 1944, six years after Kristallnacht, Lessing J Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism, felt comfortable equating the Zionist ideal of Jewish statehood with "the concept of a racial state - the Hitlerian concept". For most of the last century, a principled opposition to Zionism was a mainstream stance within American Judaism. Even after the foundation of Israel, anti-Zionism was not a particularly heretical position. Assimilated Reform Jews like Rosenwald believed that Judaism should remain a matter of religious rather than political allegiance; the ultra-Orthodox saw Jewish statehood as an impious attempt to "push the hand of God"; and Marxist Jews - my grandparents among them - tended to see Zionism, and all nationalisms, as a distraction from the more essential struggle between classes. To be Jewish, I was raised to believe, meant understanding oneself as a member of a tribe that over and over had been cast out, mistreated, slaughtered. Millenniums of oppression that preceded it did not entitle us to a homeland or a right to self-defense that superseded anyone else's. If they offered us anything exceptional, it was a perspective on oppression and an obligation born of the prophetic tradition: to act on behalf of the oppressed and to cry out at the oppressor. For the last several decades, though, it has been all but impossible to cry out against the Israeli state without being smeared as an anti-Semite, or worse. To question not just Israel's actions, but the Zionist tenets on which the state is founded, has for too long been regarded an almost unspeakable blasphemy. Yet it is no longer possible to believe with an honest conscience that the deplorable conditions in which Palestinians live and die in Gaza and the West Bank come as the result of specific policies, leaders or parties on either side of the impasse. The problem is fundamental: Founding a modern state on a single ethnic or religious identity in a territory that is ethnically and religiously diverse leads inexorably either to politics of exclusion (think of the 139-square-mile prison camp that Gaza has become) or to wholesale ethnic cleansing. Put simply, the problem is Zionism. It has been argued that Zionism is an anachronism, a leftover ideology from the era of 19th century romantic nationalisms wedged uncomfortably into 21st century geopolitics. But Zionism is not merely outdated. Even before 1948, one of its basic oversights was readily apparent: the presence of Palestinians in Palestine. That led some of the most prominent Jewish thinkers of the last century, many of them Zionists, to balk at the idea of Jewish statehood. The Brit Shalom movement - founded in 1925 and supported at various times by Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem - argued for a secular, binational state in Palestine in which Jews and Arabs would be accorded equal status. Their concerns were both moral and pragmatic. The establishment of a Jewish state, Buber feared, would mean "premeditated national suicide". The fate Buber foresaw is upon us: a nation that has lived in a state of war for decades, a quarter-million Arab citizens with second-class status and more than five million Palestinians deprived of the most basic political and human rights. If two decades ago comparisons to the South African apartheid system felt like hyperbole, they now feel charitable. The white South African regime, for all its crimes, never attacked the Bantustans with anything like the destructive power Israel visited on Gaza in December and January, when nearly 1,300 Palestinians were killed, one-third of them children. Israeli policies have rendered the once apparently inevitable two-state solution less and less feasible. Years of Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have methodically diminished the viability of a Palestinian state. Israel's new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has even refused to endorse the idea of an independent Palestinian state, which suggests an immediate future of more of the same: more settlements, more punitive assaults. All of this has led to a revival of the Brit Shalom idea of a single, secular binational state in which Jews and Arabs have equal political rights. The obstacles are, of course, enormous. They include not just a powerful Israeli attachment to the idea of an exclusively Jewish state, but its Palestinian analogue: Hamas' ideal of Islamic rule. Both sides would have to find assurance that their security was guaranteed. What precise shape such a state would take a strict, vote-by-vote democracy or a more complex federalist system - would involve years of painful negotiation, wiser leaders than now exist and an uncompromising commitment from the rest of the world, particularly from the United States. Meanwhile, the characterization of anti-Zionism as an "epidemic" more dangerous than anti-Semitism reveals only the unsustainability of the position into which Israel's apologists have been forced. Faced with international condemnation, they seek to limit the discourse, to erect walls that delineate what can and can't be said. It's not working. Opposing Zionism is neither anti-Semitic nor particularly radical. It requires only that we take our own values seriously and no longer, as the book of Amos has it, "turn justice into wormwood and hurl righteousness to the ground". Establishing a secular, pluralist, democratic government in Israel and Palestine would of course mean the abandonment of the Zionist dream. It might also mean the only salvation for the Jewish ideals of justice that date back to Jeremiah. _____ Ben Ehrenreich is the author of the novel The Suitors (2006). Copyright 2009 Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-ehrenreich15-2009mar15,0,6684861.story TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Thu Apr 9 03:04:59 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:04:59 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Monetary Proposal Message-ID: <49DDBA3B.5000002@ashisuto.co.jp> Return to the Greenback Dollar by Ellen Brown, JD http://webofdebt (March 06 2008) We no longer have a government "of the people, by the people, for the people". We have a government run by and for Big Business, and Big Business has gotten control because its affiliated banks have monopolized the business of issuing the national money supply, a function the Constitution delegated solely to Congress. What hides behind the banner of "free enterprise" today is a system in which giant corporate monopolies have used their affiliated banking trusts to generate unlimited funds to buy up competitors, the media, and the government itself, forcing truly independent private enterprise out. Big private banks are allowed to create money out of nothing, lend it at interest, foreclose on the collateral, and determine who gets credit and who doesn't. They can advance massive loans to their affiliated corporations and hedge funds, which use the money to raid competitors and manipulate markets. If some players have the power to create money and others don't, the playing field is not "level" but allows some favored players to dominate and coerce others. These giant cartels can be brought to heel only by cutting off their source of power - the power to create money - and returning it to its rightful sovereign owners, the people themselves. Two independent monetary systems have competed for dominance in the United States ever since we were a collection of colonies. In provincial America, paper money was issued by local governments. In England at the same time, paper banknotes were issued and lent privately by banks, headed by the Bank of England, the first private central bank. The major flaw in the private banking system was that the banks created the principal but not the interest necessary to pay back their loans, so more money was always owed back than was put into the money supply, requiring more loans to be taken out to cover the interest, spiraling the people into debt.The most effective and efficient of the American colonial systems was in Pennsylvania, where a publicly-owned bank issued paper money and lent it to farmers. The money returned to the government with interest, preventing inflation; and to keep enough money in the system to prevent the debt spiral of the private banking system, the government issued and spent a sum of money on public works as well. The Pennsylvania system worked so well that it completely funded the provincial government without taxes or inflation. Benjamin Franklin and others maintained that the chief reason for the American Revolution was that Parliament forbade the colonies from issuing their own money. Paper money issued by the Revolutionary government got the colonists through the war, but the British heavily counterfeited the Continental currency as a deliberate war tactic, and by the end of the war it had been inflated so much that it was nearly worthless. Fear of inflation led the Continental Congress to completely omit paper money from the Constitution, which does not say who can issue it or under what circumstances. The private banks filled the breach, and by 1913 the US had the same private central banking system that England had. Ever since the dollar went off the gold standard in 1933, all of our money except coins and a few rare US Notes has been created privately by banks (including the private Federal Reserve) and lent to the government and the people. Two centuries after the Revolution was fought, the pyramid scheme of lending ten dollars and requiring eleven back has reached its mathematical limits. We are "all borrowed up" and the banking system is imploding. It is time we tried the system for which our forefathers fought and died: real, debt-free, publicly-issued US money. This tack would not only not add to inflation but could actually reduce or eliminate it. Inflation results from an increase in "demand" (money) over "supply" (goods and services). Today inflation is caused by borrowing to repay debt: the money created into existence by banks goes to pay interest rather than to produce goods and services. If the government were to issue money and use it to pay for real goods and services (roads and bridges, sustainable energy development, health services, and the like), demand and supply would remain in balance and inflation would not result. The "Federal" Reserve is actually a privately-owned corporation that issues money and lends it to the government. A truly federal central bank would issue funds directly to the Treasury as debt-free US Notes, or as "national credit". This was done successfully in Australia and New Zealand during the 1930s and 1940s. A state-owned central bank funded public projects that put people back to work, at a time when most of the rest of the world was struggling with a depression brought on by a global shortage of bank-created money. Today we are facing the same sort of bank-created credit crisis, and it could be resolved in the same way. Steps Congress might take include: 1. Amending the Federal Reserve Act to make the Federal Reserve a truly federal agency, acting under the auspices of Congress in conjunction with the Treasury. 2. Updating the Constitutional provision that "Congress shall have the exclusive power to coin money [and] regulate the value thereof" to read, "Congress shall have the exclusive power to create the national currency in all its forms, including not only coins and paper dollars but the nation's credit issued as commercial loans; and it shall not delegate this power to any private entity". 3. Authorizing new issues of federal legal tender backed by "the full faith and credit of the United States", to be spent on programs that promoted the general welfare. To prevent inflation, this currency would be advanced only for programs that contributed new goods and services to the economy, keeping supply in balance with demand. Issues of the new currency would also be capped by some ceiling - the unused productive capacity of the national work force, or the difference between the Gross Domestic Product and the nation's purchasing power (wages and spendable income). 4. Advancing credit interest-free to state and local governments, for rebuilding infrastructure and other public projects. The emphasis would be on projects that were self-sustaining, such as the development of cheap, effective alternative sources of energy (wind, solar, ocean wave, et cetera) that could be sold to the public for a fee; or the repurchase of homes in default, to be resold or rented as low-income housing. 5. Establishing a network of national banks to serve as local bank branches of the newly-federalized banking system, either by FDIC takeover of currently insolvent banks or by the purchase of viable banks with newly-issued US currency. Besides serving depository banking functions, these national banks would be authorized to service the credit needs of the public by advancing the national credit as loans. Any interest charged on advances of this credit would be returned to the Treasury, to be used in place of taxes. 6. Authorizing the Treasury to buy back and retire the federal government's outstanding debt as it comes due, using newly-issued US Notes or Federal Reserve Notes. In most cases this could be done online, without physical paper transfers. 7. Regulation and control of the exploding derivatives crisis, either by imposing a modest .25 percent Tobin tax on all derivative trades in order to track and regulate them, or by imposing an outright ban on derivatives trading. If the handful of banks responsible for 97 percent of all derivative trades were found after audit to be insolvent, they could be put into receivership and their derivative trades could be unwound by the FDIC as receiver. 8. Initiating a new round of international agreements modeled on the Bretton Woods Accords, addressing the following monetary issues among others: - The pegging of national currency exchange rates to the value either of an agreed-upon standardized price index or an agreed-upon "basket" of commodities; - International regulation of, or elimination of, speculation in derivatives, short sales, and other forms of trading that are used to manipulate markets; - Interest-free loans of a global currency issued Greenback-style by a truly democratic international congress, on the model of the Special Drawing Rights of the IMF; and - The elimination of burdensome and unfair international debts. This could be done by simply writing the debts off the books of the issuing banks, reversing the sleight of hand by which the loan money was created in the first place. Just as we need publicly-operated police, courts and laws to keep individual and corporate predators at bay, so we need a system of truly national banks, in which the power to create the money and advance the credit of the people is retained by the people. We trust government with sweeping powers to declare and conduct wars, provide for the general welfare, and establish and enforce laws. We should trust it to create the national money supply in all its forms. The federal government need not and should not go into debt. A government with a properly designed and monitored system of publicly-issued money could fund itself without taxes, debt or inflation. http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/monetary-proposal/ TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From realiteee1 at yahoo.com Thu Apr 9 03:27:12 2009 From: realiteee1 at yahoo.com (james m nordlund) Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2009 02:27:12 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Ward Churchill Acts: Today's W.C. Moment- Trial Victory Edition; etc.. Message-ID: <317674.81158.qm@web111516.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> These Actions, on Change.org, the url??? :) Ward Churchill Alerts?? :) http://education.change.org/actions/view/ward_churchill_alerts ? Today's Ward Churchill Moment -- Trial Victory Edition O'SIYO!? WOULD YOU GUYS PLEASE "NOTE" & MAYBE FORWARD THIS?? I APPRECIATE IT! http://www.care2.com/news/member/713135843?sort=submitted ? Controversy Involves Indian Issues in a Professor's Firing Appeal O'SIYO!? WOULD YOU GUYS PLEASE "NOTE" & MAYBE FORWARD THIS?? I APPRECIATE IT! http://www.care2.com/news/member/713135843?sort=submitted Controversy Involves Indian Issues in a Professor's Firing Appeal Society & Culture? (tags: academic freedom, Native America, Native American, Native Americans, 911, ethics, freedoms, lies, corruption, cover-up, americans, dishonesty, government, terrorism, usa, culture, society, politics, interesting, humans, freedoms, ethics, rights ) ? Kat Moasi - http://www.indiancountrytoday.com DENVER - A battle over academic freedom moved from campus to courtroom March 9, when a controversial Indian rights advocate vowed to fight to regain his professorship. Ward Churchill, 61, was fired from the University of Colorado's ethnic studies... From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Apr 9 10:42:15 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2009 09:42:15 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] StopWar statement: End support of violence and oppression in Afghanistan In-Reply-To: <9694D3500FAF40209BE8C3D5A7E0A163@twubby.com> Message-ID: <1042622085.1419841239295335411.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> April 8, 2009 STOPWAR.CA : END SUPPORT OF VIOLENCE AND OPPRESSION IN AFGHANISTAN Stopwar.ca joins much of the rest of the world in condemning the kinds of anti-women policies said to have been approved last month by the Karzai government. We hope that the outcry caused by these abhorrent policies will focus public attention on the ugly nature of the Afghan regime which the U.S., Canada and other NATO forces are fighting a war to uphold. Many leading Afghan women have been warning the world of this reality since the U.S.-installed government took power over seven years ago. StopWar organized a tour of British Columbia in late 2007 by Malalai Joya, a feminist Member of the Afghan Parliament who made exactly this point. With our active participation in the occupation of Afghanistan, Canada is empowering reactionary forces who show no respect for women's rights. Many local strongmen allied to the Afghan government are warlords and druglords, with terrible records of violence and impunity. Their abuses have fed the growth of the Taliban-led insurgency. Some of Afghanistan's Pashtun tribes have joined the insurgency simply because a rival tribe has been favoured by the occupation forces or the central government, while entire villages have joined the insurgency after foreign forces' actions have killed local civilians. The longer we arm and fund one set of armed groups while at the same time bombing and occupying the country, the stronger the insurgency will grow. The impending surge of American forces is widely expected to result in an increase in violence, continuing the cycle of conflict which has tormented Afghanistan for over three decades. It is time to stop supporting the escalation of violence in Afghanistan. We must pull our troops out and support an Afghan-led solution to the conflict. -30- From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Apr 9 12:03:03 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2009 11:03:03 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Just 53% say capitalism better than socialism In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1471308667.1624291239300183351.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/just_53_say_capitalism_better_than_socialism Rasmussen Reports ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ? Thursday, April 09, 2009 Just 53% Say Capitalism Better Than Socialism Only 53% of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 20% disagree and say socialism is better. Twenty-seven percent (27%) are not sure which is better. Adults under 30 are essentially evenly divided: 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided. Thirty-somethings are a bit more supportive of the free-enterprise approach with 49% for capitalism and 26% for socialism. Adults over 40 strongly favor capitalism, and just 13% of those older Americans believe socialism is better. Investors by a 5-to-1 margin choose capitalism. As for those who do not invest, 40% say capitalism is better while 25% prefer socialism. There is a partisan gap as well. Republicans - by an 11-to-1 margin - favor capitalism. Democrats are much more closely divided: Just 39% say capitalism is better while 30% prefer socialism. As for those not affiliated with either major political party, 48% say capitalism is best, and 21% opt for socialism. The question posed by Rasmussen Reports did not define either capitalism or socialism It is interesting to compare the new results to an earlier survey in which 70% of Americans prefer a free-market economy . The fact that a ?free-market economy? attracts substantially more support than ?capitalism? may suggest some skepticism about whether capitalism in the United States today relies on free markets. Other survey data supports that notion. Rather than seeing large corporations as committed to free markets, two-out-of-three Americans believe that big government and big business often work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors . Fifteen percent (15%) of Americans say they prefer a government-managed economy, similar to the 20% support for socialism. Just 14% believe the federal government would do a better job running auto companies , and even fewer believe government would do a better job running financial firms . Most Americans today hold views that can generally be defined as populist while only seven percent (7%) share the elitist views of the Political Class . From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Apr 9 12:33:28 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2009 11:33:28 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] A convoy of hundreds of medical and food trucks heading to Gaza soon In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <58804212.1640841239302008026.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> A convoy of hundreds of medical and food trucks heading to Gaza soon Direct Link: http://www.savegaza.eu/ Direct Link: http://www.paltelegraph.com Facebook Group : The European Campaign to End the Siege of Gaza (ECESG) Arabic version below after English one A convoy of hundreds of medical and food trucks heading to Gaza soon Hope for Gaza Convoy European Campaign to End the Siege of Gaza (ECESG) Hope for Gaza Convoy It?s now three years since Israel imposed this tight and deadly siege on Gaza. The brutal siege is devastating every aspect of life in Gaza. Thousands of families continue to suffer, while many others are dying due to the lack of basic treatment and medical equipment. The basic infrastructure supplying water, power and sanitation is in devastation making life unbearable for the 1.5 million inhabitants, which further compounds the misery of the people. The war totally destroyed what was left from the siege. Thousands were killed and injured and thousands turned disabled. It's the time we move; European Campaign to End the Siege of Gaza, (ECESG) is sending a big convoy of more than 100 trucks. We are going to deliver wheelchairs, medical tools and toys for the people of Gaza. We are going to provide medicines that currently ran out in Gaza. The convoy is to move early in May from many European countries like Britain, France, Ireland, Scotland, Denmark, Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Germany, Italy, Austria and Norway. Yes You Can! Let actions speak louder than words Let us save more lives; let us cure the pain of wounded Gazans IF you have a van, a bus or any vehicle and you want to go to Gaza; there is no better time but this! Cease the opportunity and Join us. The convoy is expected top leave Milan directly after the end of the 7th conference of Palestinians living in Europe. A considerable number of activists, officials from Europe and MPs would take part. Participants wishing to join will drive their vans from their countries to Milan. Vans and trucks to leave Milan on the 3rd of May and sail from Genoa towards Alexandria in Egypt. Drivers will leave for Alexandria directly to drive their vans towards Gaza within 3 days of ships departure. The convoy would leave for Rafah crossing from Alexandria In coordination phase, vans must be checked to make sure they are correctly prepared for movement from Egypt. If you can help Gazans? If you want to grant a smile for traumatized children? Then, don't hesitate to contact our Coordination Team: Contact Info: Rami Abdu European Campaign to End the Siege of Gaza Manchester, United Kingdom Convoy Coordinator Email: ramy at savegaza.eu Mob: 00447728021097 www.savegaza.eu Sameh A. Habeeb European Campaign to End the Siege of Gaza Convoy Spokesman (Arabic and English Language) London , United Kingdom Email: sameh at prc.org.uk Mob: 0044- (0) 7949725139 www.savegaza.eu Amin Abu Rashed Relief and Humanitarian Affairs Coordinator European Campaign to End the Siege of Gaza E-mail: amin at ppmsholland.nl Mob: 0031624628015 www.savegaza.eu ????? ???????: ??????- ??? - ???? "?????? ????????? ???? ?????? ?? ???" ??????????? ?????? ????? ??????? ????? ????? ????? ???? ???? "?????"? ???? ?? ???? ?????? ???????? ?? ??? ??? ?????? ??????? ??? ??????????? ?? ?????? ??? ??? ???? ????? . ????? ???? ????? ??? ?????? ????????? ?????? ??????? ?? ????? ?? ?????? ?? ??????? ??????? ??????? ????????? ???? ?????? ?? ??? ??? ????? ???? ????? ????? ????? ??????????? ?????? ??? ???? ?????? ???? ????? ?????? ???? ?? ????? ?????? ?????????? ??????? ?? ???????? ?????? ???? ??????? ????? ???????? ?????? ?????? ???? ????? ?? ??????? . ????? ??? ?????? ?? ????? "?????" ??? ?? ??????????? ?????????? ??????????? ????? ??? ??? ???? ?? ?????????? ?? ????? ????????? ?? ????? ??????? ?????? ?? ???????? ??????? ??????? ?? ??? ?? ????? ????????? ?????? ????? ?????? ?????????? ??? ?? ????? ?? ???? ?????? ??? ????? ?????? ????? ?????????? ?????? ???? ??? ???? ??? ??? ???? ??? ????? . ????? ??? "?????? ?????????" ??? ?? ??????? ????? ??????? ???? ??????? ???????? ???? ????? ??? ????? ?????? ???? ?????????? ?????? ?? ??????? ???? ????? ?????? ????? ?????? ????????? ???? ??????? ?????????? ??????? ?? ????? ???????? ?????? ?? ????? ?????? ??? ??? ?????? ??????? ????? ??? ?? ??????? ???????????? ???? ????? ?????? ?? ???????? ???????? ???????? ?????? . ???? ???? ???? ?? ?? ??? ????? ??? ??????? ?? ??? ????? ?????? ???? ??? ?????? ????? ???? ??????? ????? ??????? ?? ???? ?????? ???????? ???? ??????? ????? ??? ?? ???????? ??????? ?????????? ?????? ????? ?????? ?? ??? ????? ??????? ?????? ????????? ?? ??????? ??? ????? ?????? ?????? ?? ??????? ???????? ?? ????????? ???????? ????? ????? ?????? ??? ???? ?????? ??????? . From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Apr 9 13:26:30 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2009 12:26:30 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] And the job hits just keep on coming Message-ID: <897004619.1666141239305190303.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.thespec.com/article/537158 ? C anadian Press ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ? March 26, 2009 ? And the job hits just keep on coming ? Canada has lost nearly 300,000 jobs in four months, including 82,600 jobs in February, according to Statistics Canada. A look at some of the specific cuts since Jan. 1: ? JANUARY: ? * Air Canada cuts 345 jobs, mostly flight attendants. ? * Bell Canada plans to reduce its workforce by 1,500 jobs through retirement incentives. ? * Nova Chemicals cuts 400 jobs worldwide, including some at a petrochemicals plant in Sarnia. ? * DBG Metal Manufacturing in Woodstock lays off 35 people. ? * BC Ferries cuts 35 jobs. ? * Navistar cuts 200 jobs from truck plant in Chatham. ? * Steelmaker Evraz cuts 400 jobs across Western Canada. ? FEBRUARY: ? * Hudson's Bay cuts 1,000 jobs. ? * Bombardier Aerospace cuts 1,360 jobs. ? * Nortel Networks lays off 3,200 employees worldwide. ? * Teck Cominco Ltd. to cut 550 Canadian jobs by end of 2009. ? * DDM Plastics of Tillsonburg lays off 160 workers. ? * Torstar's Metroland Media Group cuts 64 full-time-equivalent positions at three papers -- 30 at the Hamilton Spectator, 21 at the Waterloo Region Record and 13 at the Guelph Mercury. ? * Toronto-based Russel Metals Inc. cuts 500 jobs. ? * Montreal-based printer and media company Transcontinental cuts about 600 jobs in Canada, about half of them in Quebec. ? * Canadian Pacific Railway cuts 37 jobs in southwestern Ontario. ? * De Beers Canada cuts 128 full-time workers. ? * Toronto-based CHUM Radio, a division of CTV Ltd., cuts 40 jobs across Canada. ? * Quebec-based Pratt & Whitney Canada to lay off 1,000 globally. ? MARCH: ? * 1,500 jobs lost when Pittsburgh-based United States Steel Corp. shuts down plants in Hamilton and Nanticoke, Ont. ? * Torstar Corp. cuts 60 jobs, primarily in advertising sales at the Toronto Star. ? * Chrysler cuts 1,200 jobs from minivan assembly plant in Windsor. ? * Vale Inco Ltd. cuts 423 white-collar jobs. ? * Steelmaker Evraz lays off 75 workers at operations in Regina. ? * CTV Television Inc. cuts 118 jobs at A Channel TV stations. ? * The Winnipeg Free Press newspaper cuts eight people, joining 13 or 14 people laid off at the newspaper earlier this year. ? * Wal-Mart Stores cuts 1,200 employees in southern Ontario. ? * Sears Canada cuts 300 workers. ? * Japanese heavy equipment maker Komatsu America Corp. cuts 245 jobs, closing Canadian plant in Candiac, Que. ? * CTV Television Inc. lays off more than 28 people from Canada AM morning show and First News in Montreal. ? * Howe Sound Pulp and Paper on B.C.'s Sunshine Coast carves 101 positions from its workforce. ? * United Technologies Corp., which owns Pratt & Whitney, to cut additional 10,600 jobs, including an unspecified number in Canada. ? * ATS Automation Tooling Systems Inc. to cut 80 full-time jobs in Cambridge. ? * Thunder Bay-based Buchanan Forest Products Ltd. lays off 40 people at eight idled sawmills located across northwestern Ontario. ? * Regina-based Advance Engineered Products to lay off 96 employees as of May 15. ? * Finning Canada lays off 69 workers in Red Deer, Alta. ? * Areva Resources Canada puts development of a uranium deposit at McClean Lake in northern Saskatchewan on hold and cuts 100 permanent staff. ? * Red Deer, Alta.-based Trican Well Services lets 37 people go. ? * The New Brunswick government says 700 jobs will be cut from the civil service in the year ahead. ? * The ArvinMeritor plant in Tilbury, Ont., to shut down in June, resulting in 200 layoffs. ? * Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan temporarily lays off 940 workers at three mines in the province. ? * Moosehead Breweries lays off 13 people in Saint John, N.B., Nova Scotia, Ontario and the U.S. ? * CBC to cut up to 800 full-time jobs across Canada. From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Apr 9 13:30:09 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2009 12:30:09 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Sharp Right Turn in Hungary Message-ID: <1710863543.1667871239305409916.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=10743 ? Socialist Review ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ? March 2009 ? Sharp Right Turn in Hungary ? Letter From Hungary ? by G M Tamas ? The economic crisis has led to politicians blaming the poorest for society's problems, and the rise of the far right, writes G M Tamas ? Hungary seems to be haunted both by the demons of its past and the ghosts of the ultra-capitalist present - and the two seem increasingly similar. ? It is not only that the superlatively unpopular "Socialist" minority government, in contrast to at least feebly Keynesian attempts elsewhere, tries to pursue its failed neoconservative policies, aided and abetted by the International Monetary Fund, but the country does not feel able to follow its own fate with anything like sustained attention. The nation is gripped by an unprecedented racist paranoia. ? We are witness to a peculiar rebellion of the impoverished middle class - but not against grand capital or the "neoliberal" global order. This is a rebellion of the relatively strong against the absolutely weak. When society appears to come apart at the seams, it is not solidarity or even sympathy that is invoked, but persecution of the poorest. ? Public opinion turned against the state not because it harbours predators and panders to interests detrimental to the public good but because it is presented (alas, erroneously) as protecting the powerless and distributing wealth among the needy. ? While an increasing number of people are in danger of starving and freezing, the vocal majority is clamouring for an end to social services. Uniformed fascist paramilitary battalions are marching through the poorest districts to keep their voices down and their own bark up. ? How is this possible? It is simple: the oldest of all political recipes. Identify the oppressed with an unpopular race, in our case the Roma or Gypsy. Then the causes of oppression and exclusion are rehabilitated and justified as the gallant defence of the working majority against - let me quote the Hungarian right wing press - "genetic garbage", welfare-dependent, work-shy, crime-prone "sub-humans". ? Last summer a number of village mayors decided not to fulfil their legal obligation to hand social assistance to the officially listed recipients unless the latter were willing to perform (generally non-existent) public works. A wave of enthusiasm swept over the country. Instead of putting a stop to this breach of law, MPs saluted this initiative. Early this year the idea was turned into law. It stipulates all sorts of absurd conditions to be fulfilled by aspirants to social assistance. This leaves local councils to decide who are and who are not the deserving poor. The bill was seconded by the government "Socialists" and voted for by nearly all (except a few liberals). ? Next a farmer had wired his garden fence against thieves and put it under an industrial strength electric current. One thief died and another was paralysed for life. After a short arrest the farmer was freed, celebrated, offered free council housing and declared by a major conservative broadsheet to be a valiant Hungarian. ? In the run down, former industrial town of Miskolc, the local police chief called a press conference. He declared that all robbers in that town were Roma and that "coexistence with our minority fellow citizens proves unfeasible". He was fired by the home secretary, whereupon a demonstration gathered in the main square with the participation of the local mayor who doubles as a "Socialist" MP, all parliamentary "democratic" parties, the extra-parliamentary fascists and the neo- Nazi Hungarian Guard. The government backed down and the police chief was reinstated the same evening. The right wing journals and magazines appeared with banner headlines trumpeting "Truth Has Finally Triumphed", "The Roma Are Criminals: Official". ? In opinion surveys, 82 percent are in favour of some restrictions on Roma rights such as territorial segregation (school segregation is a fact already), forcible adoption of Roma children, etc. The main opposition party, allegedly "centre-right", proposes further penal measures and severe sentences. The fascists are campaigning with death penalty propaganda and organising various vigilante groups. ? In this atmosphere very few venture to protest at the latest austerity measures. And who do you think are those, according to the right, who are timidly venturing to speak out against this war against the poor? You have guessed right. It is "the bloody Jews" again, that's who. ? G M Tam?s is a Marxist philosopher, a dissident before 1989 and a former member of the Hungarian Parliament (1989-94) From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Apr 9 13:35:27 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2009 12:35:27 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Danny Glover on Obama and the Durban Review Conference Message-ID: <789738443.1669411239305727769.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090420/glover?rel=hp_picks ? The Nation ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? April 8, 2009 ? Race and the Obama Administration ? Comment ? By Danny Glover ? In 2001 I traveled to Durban, South Africa, to join the tens of thousands of people who came to participate in the United Nations-sponsored World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. More than 2,000 came from the United States, a rainbow of people crossing all lines--racial, ethnic, national, language, immigration status, religious and much more--joining an equally diverse crowd from across the globe. It was an extraordinary opportunity to meet, discuss, argue and strategize over how to rid the world of these longstanding evils. ? Our participation paralleled that of the official US delegation. And that's where we faced a huge challenge. The Bush administration team, having only grudgingly agreed to participate at all, made clear they had no real commitment to fighting racism or offering leadership on other challenging issues of discrimination. When they didn't like a few small parts of the sixty-one-page text, they packed up and walked out of the conference. It was a sad but hardly surprising moment, exposing once again the history of US failures to take seriously the consequences of its own legacy of racism, a point most recently made by Attorney General Eric Holder. ? The 2001 Declaration expressed powerful truths. It stated: "We acknowledge and profoundly regret the massive human suffering and the tragic plight of millions of men, women and children caused by slavery, the slave trade, the transatlantic slave trade, apartheid, colonialism and genocide, and call upon States concerned to honour the memory of the victims of past tragedies and affirm that, wherever and whenever these occurred, they must be condemned and their recurrence prevented." Another part declared, "We recognize the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to the establishment of an independent State and we recognize the right to security for all States in the region, including Israel, and call upon all States to support the peace process and bring it to an early conclusion." ? Now, eight years later, the United Nations is convening the Durban Review Conference in Geneva April 20 to 24 to review and assess the progress since 2001. Member nations have toiled for two years to craft an outcome document that assesses the current analysis and challenges. This document--which called for particular measures to provide support and reparations to all the victims both of long-ago histories, like the descendants of the European-Atlantic slave trade, and those facing contemporary forms of discrimination and apartheid policies, such as the Roma, the Dalits (India's "untouchables") and the Palestinians--was rejected by the Obama administration. ? This year we thought things would be different. Our country has taken a huge step in our long struggle against racism: we have elected our first African- American president. And perhaps more important, the mobilization of people who made Barack Obama's election possible brought more young people of color into political action, with others of various ethnic and political backgrounds, than perhaps any campaign before. It is a moment not to sit on our laurels; certainly, we have much farther to go. But it is certainly a moment for our nation's political leadership to acknowledge a new marker in the long and painful struggle for justice, and a time to offer global leadership in the United Nations forum organized to combat bigotry and injustice. ? In an effort to address the administration's concerns, the United Nations has released a new "outcome document," stripped of all language deemed offensive or controversial. Yet we face the sad reality that our president, the first African-American to lead this country, who has galvanized hope among victims of injustice around the world and encouraged them to stand up with dignity for their rights, has yet to indicate if he will send an official delegation or continue to abstain from the entire process. ? Our historical struggle against racism can claim great progress as a legacy of the civil rights movement led by the likes of Fanny Lou Hamer and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but this 2009 review of the 2001 Durban conference against racism should still be a moment in which the administration of President Obama returns to the world stage to join deliberations aimed at making even further progress against injustice. ? For twenty years, Congressman John Conyers, dean of the Congressional Black Caucus, has annually introduced a bill urging the United States to form a commission to study whether reparations are an appropriate response to the continuing legacy of slavery in our country. Would not the Durban Review Conference be a perfect venue to the administration to support the remedies recommended by the global community of nations to overcome the impacts of racism, slavery, anti-Semitism, apartheid and other forms of discrimination? ? Would this United Nations conference not be exactly the right place for our new president to show the world that his administration's commitment to "change we can believe in" means rejecting our country's tarnished legacy of violating international law, undermining the United Nations and using American exceptionalism to justify walking away from the leadership responsibility many in the world expect of the United States? To make that change clear, wouldn't this be a great opportunity to remind the world that even if the final document does not call out the name of every perpetrator government, the United States at least believes that every group of victims facing discrimination or worse based on their identity, especially the most vulnerable, and those who are stateless and thus in need of special attention by the international community, should be named and promised assistance? ? This should be a moment for the United States to rejoin the global struggle against racism, the struggle that the Bush administration so arrogantly abandoned. I hope President Obama will agree that the United States must participate with other nations in figuring out the tough issues of how to overcome racism and other forms of discrimination and intolerance, and how to provide repair to victims. Our country certainly has much to learn; and maybe, for the first time in a long time, we have something by way of leadership to share with the rest of the world in continuing our long struggle to overcome. ? ? Glover Danny Glover is an actor/activist and chair of the TransAfrica Forum Board of Directors. From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Apr 9 14:49:21 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2009 13:49:21 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Important background on the Anti-Defamation League Message-ID: <1777759012.1699871239310161485.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.counterpunch.org/adlspying2.html ? CounterPunch ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? February 25, 2002 ? The ADL Spying Case Is Over, But The Struggle Continues ? By Jeffrey Blankfort, Anne Poirier and Steve Zeltzer Plaintiffs in the of ADL Spying Case ? ? In 1993, the District of Attorney of San Francisco Arlo Smith released 700 pages of documents implicating the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that claims to be a defender of civil rights, in a vast spying operation directed against American citizens who were opposed to Israel's policies in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza and to the apartheid policies of the government of South Africa and passing on information to both governments. ? Under great political pressure, Arlo Smith later dropped the charges. One wonders what would have happened had an Arab-American or Muslim organization been caught spying with the names of 10,000 people and 600 organizations in their files. ? Not only were critics of Israel under ADL's surveillance, including thousands of Arab-Americans, but labor organizations such as the San Francisco Labor Council, ILWU Local 10, and the Oakland Educational Association, and civil rights groups such as the NAACP, Irish Northern Aid, International Indian Treaty Council and the Asian Law Caucus were also found in the "pinko" files of ADL's undercover operative, Roy Bullock. ? Moreover, Bullock, who had worked, off the books, for the ADL for more than 25 years, admitted that he had been reporting on the activities of black South African exiles and American anti-apartheid activists for South African intelligence. ? Bullock, pretending to be sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, came to the founding meeting of the Labor Committee of the Middle in 1987 at the home of plaintiff Steve Zeltzer, having met Zeltzer at meetings of the Free Moses Mayekiso Defense Committee, a South African labor solidarity committee in which he also infiltrated under false pretenses. ? Having been responsible for exposing Bullock as an ADL agent to the media, we joined together with other Bay Area activists in filing a suit against the ADL for violation of our privacy rights as provided in California law. ? Almost a decade later the suit has been settled with a significant cash payment by the ADL and, we wish to emphasize, without our signing any agreement for confidentiality which the ADL had previously demanded. Our efforts to expose the organization's work in defending the policies of the Israeli government and stifling its opponents will continue, using new information gained in the pursuance of the suit. ? The ADL spent millions of dollars preventing this case from coming to trial through costly appeals and exploiting the judicial process but, at the end, it had to give up. ? During the course of the suit we learned that: ? Bullock, the ADL's top "fact finder" had sold confidential information to a South African intelligence agent in San Francisco for $15,000. ? Ten days before he was assassinated in South Africa, Chris Hani, the man who would have succeeded Nelson Mandela as the country's president, was trailed by Bullock on a trip through California who reported on it to the South African government. ? ADL agent Roy Bullock was discovered to have a floor plan of murdered Los Angeles Arab American leader Alex Odeh and a key to his office. ? The ADL supplied confidential information to foreign governments that it obtained from police and federal agencies in the US, ? Having infiltrated the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), the ADL's "fact finder" performed a COINTEL-type operation at the convention of the Holocaust-denying Journal of Historical Review when he put ADC's literature on convention tables as a way of smearing the committee for "working with anti- Semites." ? The ADL has organized to silence and eliminate all critical voices of Israel from academia and the media and has targeted professors, particularly those who are African American, and who are critical of Israel. ? That at least 51% of the activities of its San Francisco office were devoted to defending Israel. ? The ADL provided secret files to police agencies when these police agencies were prevented by law from collecting the files themselves. ? Many questions must still be answered about the activities of the ADL and its non-profit status as an "education organization". The settlement offered by the ADL is recognition on its part that it could not afford to go to a trial in front of a jury and face the likelihood that more of its dirty secrets would be revealed. ? We call on all people to make sure that these practices on the part of the ADL are not allowed to continue and that the double standard that presently dominates this country on issues dealing with Israel be eliminated. ? Finally, we wish to thank our attorney, former congressman Pete McCloskey, himself a victim of the ADL and the Israel Lobby, for his years of work on our behalf and his steadfast commitment to the pursuit of justice. ? Jeffrey Blankfort can be reached at: jblankfort at earthlink.net ? For more information on this case read CounterPunch's story, ADL Snoops: Were the Spies "Journalists"? http://www.counterpunch.org/adlspies.html From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Apr 9 15:01:52 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2009 14:01:52 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] =?utf-8?q?Haniyeh_meets_Northern_Ireland=E2=80=99s_Adams_in?= =?utf-8?q?_Gaza?= Message-ID: <1080697986.1704771239310912749.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=36997 ? Maan News ???????????????????????????????????????????? ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? 09 / 04 / 2009?? ? Haniyeh meets Northern Ireland?s Adams in Gaza ? Gaza ? Ma?an ? De facto Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh met with Sinn F?in leader Gerry Adams in Gaza on Wednesday evening. The Hamas leader explained to the northern Irish leader, himself the leader of a formerly-stigmatized party, how his party was boycotted by the international community. ?When we won elections by majority, they refused to deal with our government, and instead they besieged it politically and economically before Israel launched a military offensive against Gaza using all its powers including internationally-banned weapons. Their achievement was only killing innocent men, women, children and police officers,? Haniyeh told Adams. Haniyeh also said that the ongoing Israeli blockade has created an unsustainable situation. He also said Israel?s unreasonable demands were to blame for the collapse of Egyptian-brokered ceasefire talks with Hamas. Adams said that he was happy to visit Gaza and express solidarity with the Palestinian people. He said the overwhelming majority of the Irish people support the Palestinians, and are paying attention to the situation in Palestine. He said the situation in Gaza was similar to ?a big prison.? "I was pleased to speak directly with Mr Hanieyh. I outlined to him Sinn F?in's view that there should be a complete cessation of all hostilities and armed actions by all sides. "The fact is that the people of Palestine and the people of Israel are destined to live side by side. I believe that most people want a peaceful accommodation,? he said. "Following my meeting with Mr Haniya I believe that progress is possible.? "As I have said consistently there needs to be a dialogue between the people of Palestine and their leadership and the people of Israel and their leadership. "That is what worked in Ireland." From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Apr 9 15:37:11 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2009 14:37:11 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Iraqi dead extol success of surge In-Reply-To: <932337161.1642191239302125028.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1816031150.1719781239313031407.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://progreso-weekly.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=888&Itemid=1 Progreso Weekly Iraqi dead join us optimists to extol success of surge By Saul Landau A man at a horse show danced joyfully in a pile of manure. ?Why are you so happy?? another attendee asked. ?There must be a pony in here somewhere!? The U.S. media has attacked the Iraq War story by going straight for the periphery. For example, instead of focusing attention on the devastation caused by an unjust, imperial war that has endured for six plus years, the media changed the debate: ?Has sending more U.S. troops to Iraq in 2007 --?the surge? -- succeeded or failed?? ?It?s no longer a close call,? wrote Peter Beinart. (Washington Post, Jan. 18, 2009) ?President Bush was right about the surge.? By being ?right? Beinart means that the number of Iraqi dead came to only 500 in November 2008, compared with 3,475 in November of 2006. And only 12 Americans died in Iraq in that same period, compared to a higher number in previous years. (Figures from The Iraq War Index, a Brookings Institution report by Michael O'Hanlon and Jason Campbell) The realist might have added: ?That?s 12 more than should have died.? The New York Times Op-Ed page editors seemed undaunted about printing columns on the surge?s success by the very pundits who had only recently assured the public of the biggest lies of the young 21st Century: Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda. Among the surge proselytizers, emerged Kenneth Pollack. In The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (2002), he wrote: ?The only prudent and realistic course of action left to the United States is to mount a full-scale invasion of Iraq to smash the Iraqi armed forces, depose Saddam?s regime, and rid the country of weapons of mass destruction.? He dismissed wusses who ?exaggerated the danger of casualties among American troops.? Pollack even helped persuade Times columnist Bill Keller to support the Iraq war. ?Kenneth Pollack, the Clinton National Security Council expert whose argument for invading Iraq is surely the most influential book of this season,? wrote Keller (February 8, 2003), ?has provided intellectual cover for every liberal who finds himself inclining toward war but uneasy about Mr. Bush.? After expressing absolute certainty about Saddam?s WMD, Pollack threw his enthusiasm behind the surge -- without apologizing for his role in helping to perpetuate destruction and death. Again using the Times as his propaganda organ, Pollack offered new dogma. The surge had provided ?the potential to produce not necessarily ?victory? but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.? (?A War We Just Might Win? with Michael O?Hanlon, June 30, 2007) Like Shakespeare?s Polonius, Pollack the Pompous babbles clich?s. Luckily for him, he didn?t get himself killed hiding in Barbara Bush?s bedroom while spying on W. But he shares with Polonius the characteristics of a pedantic who wields no real power. Shakespeare uses Polonius to mock obfuscators who ladle out ?wisdom? like watery soup -- like Pollack?s and fellow surge zealots? recipe for Iraq. The surgists focused on reducing violence in Baghdad which, if successful, would serve as a model for smaller cities. By late 2007, almost a year after its onset, the Pentagon sold the surge to the usual media suckers as the U.S. ?success story.? The Pentagon claimed it had reduced by 60 percent the war violence and had driven Al Qaida from Baghdad and mostly from Anbar Province as well. The increased number of U.S. soldiers did allow U.S. forces to disarm some Sunnis in Baghdad. Then, the U.S. occupiers invited Shiite militias to invade Sunni neighborhoods and ethnically cleanse them. By mid 2007, Baghdad, once about 65% Sunni, emerged as a predominantly Shiite city. Indeed, leader of the multinational armies in Iraq General David Petraeus, now in charge of Central Command, purposely or inadvertently encouraged Shiites to drive Sunnis from their homes. Many went to Syria. (George Hunsinger, Common Dreams.org, October 23, 2008) One mainstream media exception on surge reporting, Karen de Young, explained how many Iraqis had homes destroyed or, ?the homes they left no longer exist. Houses have been looted, destroyed or occupied. Most Baghdad neighborhoods, where Shiites and Sunnis once lived side by side, have been transformed into religiously homogeneous bastions where members of the other sect dare not tread.? (Washington Post, Dec. 16, 2007) She cited Col. William E. Rapp, a senior aide to Petraeus, who admitted the decline in violence was ?the result, in part, of the city?s segregation. There are now far fewer mixed neighborhoods where religious militias can target members of the other sect.? ?In most of Baghdad,? de Young wrote, ?the population shift has been at the expense of Sunnis, many of whose former neighborhoods are newly populated by poorer Shiite migrants under militia protection and, often, control.? Alongside cleansing, came payola. The U.S. military paid some Sunni groups to stop fighting U.S. occupiers and turn their guns on ?outsiders? -- meaning Al Qaeda. This payoff also reduced the number of attacks against U.S. forces. The White House used the surge with media cooperation to shift debate from the wisdom of starting an unjustified war to how to leave Iraq with a taste of victory. No one defined the ?surge? for what it was, however: the old military tactic of bribing the opponent. From bogus@does.not.exist.com Thu Apr 2 09:08:15 2009 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:08:15 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: ening Council=E2=80=9D Iraqis $300 a month not to fight against U.S. forces= . Al Jazeera=E2=80=99s military analysts estimated that as many as 100,000 = Awakening fighters in Iraq were responsible =E2=80=9Cfor the marked reducti= on in violence in the country.=E2=80=9D=20 By late 2008, thanks to increased oil sales, reported Al Jazeera, =E2=80=9C= The Iraqi government started paying the salaries of about 54,000 Awakening = fighters at 60 locations in Baghdad on Monday.=E2=80=9D=20 In other words, Bush was paying unknown quantities of U.S. taxpayers=E2=80= =99 money to Iraqis in return for them not attacking U.S. forces. So, while= the infusion of more U.S. troops played some role in cutting down violence= , it didn=E2=80=99t compete with the part played by death squads. Bob Woodw= ard in The War Within (Simon & Schuster, 2008) suggests that by creating Ir= aqi =E2=80=9CDeath Squads=E2=80=9D the Pentagon also helped reduce fighting= in Iraq. A =E2=80=9CTop Secret=E2=80=9D memo, according to Woodward, impli= es that U.S. forces targeted certain Sunni groups for systematic assassinat= ion. This operation, like the CIA=E2=80=99s Phoenix Program in Vietnam, cal= led for killing those who refused to =E2=80=9Creconcile=E2=80=9D to U.S. re= ason; they wouldn=E2=80=99t even take bribes.=20 The surge fans, however, ignored such minor details. They focus on the brig= ht side. Iraq now sells 2 million barrels of oil per day! Tie that marketin= g fact to 2 million Iraqis who have fled their homes and remain displaced i= nside the country; or the 3 plus millions who felt forced to leave their un= balanced country. They don=E2=80=99t tie together?=20 Surgites like Pollack and Beinart say, like Bush, that the $610 billion spe= nt on the war has built a =E2=80=9Cdemocracy=E2=80=9D in the region. Indeed= , by knocking off Saddam, the United States opened to the entire Arab world= the road to democratic reform. And pigs will fly!=20 Thus far, thousands of Iraqi professors, scientists, and doctors have been = assassinated. Bush=E2=80=99s rescue of Iraq also cost the lives of some 350= journalists. Tens of thousands of prisoners remain in detention camps and,= according to a UN report, =E2=80=9Cthe detention of children in adult dete= ntion centers violates U.S. obligations under the UN Convention on the Righ= ts of the Child, as well as accepted international human rights norms.=E2= =80=9D (AP, May 19, 2008)=20 In September 2002, I visited Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. Most Iraqis en= joyed electricity, running water and functional sewage -- even though the i= mpact of multilateral sanctions and continuous air strikes throughout the 1= 990s by U.S. and British war planes kept destroying parts of the already ma= ngled post 1991 War infrastructure.=20 After the surge=E2=80=99s success, Iraqis average 3 hours of electricity da= ily; many water and sewage systems remain un-repaired. By 2008, Iraqis suff= ered some 10,000 cases of cholera -- the average over the last five years. = By August 2007, Iraqis still suffered some 25 car bombs per month. (Kevin D= rum, Washington Monthly, August 24, 2007)=20 The surge did succeed in reducing Iraq war coverage by some 60%, according = to the NY Times. (=E2=80=9CWith Success of Surge, NY Times=E2=80=99 Iraq Wa= r Coverage Drops to All-Time Low,=E2=80=9D Oct. 21, 2008) Reduced violence = equals loss of media interest.=20 If not for Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert, and occasional articles by Seymo= ur Hersh in the New Yorker, and an exceptional case like Karen de Young and= a few others, the public would have little access to the facts of war. The= media gives the war mongers lots of space to promote the deadly events in = which few of them ever fight. But they do cheer for the troops -- almost li= ke fans at a ballgame.=20 Saul Landau, an Institute for Policy Studies fellow, author of A BUSH AND B= OTOX WORLD=20 From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Apr 9 15:37:49 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2009 14:37:49 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Why immigrant workers will fill the streets this May Day In-Reply-To: <1466556805.100771238988442133.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <583674364.1720281239313069073.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> WHY IMMIGRANT WORKERS WILL FILL THE STREETS THIS MAY DAY By David Bacon t r u t h o u t | Perspective http://www.truthout.org/032709A ????? OAKLAND, CA (4/4/09) -- In a little less than a month, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of people will fill the streets in city after city, town after town, across the US. This year May Day marches of immigrant workers will make an important demand on the Obama administration: End the draconian enforcement policies of the Bush administration. Establish a new immigration policy based on human rights and recognition of the crucial economic and social contributions of immigrants to US society. ??? This year's marches will continue the recovery in the US of the celebration of May Day, the day that celebrates worldwide the contributions of working people. That recovery started on May 1, 2006, when over a million people filled the streets of Los Angeles, with hundreds of thousands more in Chicago, New York and cities and towns throughout the United States. Again on May Day in 2007 and 2008, immigrants and their supporters demonstrated and marched, from coast to coast. ??? One sign found in almost every march said it all: "We are Workers, not Criminals!" The sign stated an obvious truth. Millions of people have come to the United States to work, not to break its laws. Some have come with visas, and others without them. But they are all contributors to the society they've found here. ???? The protests are a result of years of organizing, the legacy of Bert Corona, immigrant rights pioneer and founder of many national Latino organizations. He trained thousands of immigrant activists, taught the value of political independence, and believed that immigrants themselves must conduct a struggle for their rights. Most of the leaders of the radical wing of today's immigrant rights movement were his students. ???? In part, the May Day protests respond to a wave of draconian measures that have criminalized immigration status and work itself for undocumented people.? In 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act made it a crime, for the first time in US history, to hire people without papers. Defenders argued that if people could not legally work they would leave. Life was not so simple. ??? Undocumented people are part of the communities they live in. They cannot simply go, nor should they. They seek the same goals of equality and opportunity that working people in the US have historically fought for.? In addition, for most immigrants there are no jobs to return to in the countries from which they've come.? After Congress passed The North American Free Trade Agreement, six million displaced Mexicans came to the US as a result of the massive displacement the treaty caused.? Free trade and free market policies have similarly displaced millions more in poor countries around the world. ????? Instead of recognizing this reality, the US government has attempted to make holding a job a criminal act. Some states and local communities, seeing a green light from the Department of Homeland Security, have passed measures that go even further.? Mississippi passed a bill making it a felony for an undocumented worker to hold a job, with jail time of 1-10 years, fines of up to $10,000, and no bail for anyone arrested. Employers get immunity. ? Last summer, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff proposed a rule requiring employers to fire any worker who couldn't correct a mismatch between the Social Security number given to their employer and the SSA database. The regulation assumes those workers have no valid immigration visa, and therefore no valid Social Security number. ?? With 12 million people living in the US without legal immigration status, the regulation would have led to massive firings, bringing many industries and businesses to a halt. Citizens and legal visa holders would have been swept up as well, since the Social Security database is often inaccurate. While the courts enjoined this particular regulation, the idea of using Social Security numbers to identify and fire millions of workers is still very much alive in Washington, DC. ??????? Under Chertoff, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted sweeping workplace raids, arresting and deporting thousands of workers. Many were charged with an additional crime - identity theft - because they used a Social Security number belonging to someone else to get a job. Yet workers using those numbers actually deposit money into Social Security funds, and will never collect benefits their contributions paid for.? The new Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says the big raids need to be reexamined, but she continues to support measures to drive undocumented workers from their jobs, and to keep employers from hiring them. ????? During her term as governor, the Arizona legislature passed a law requiring employers to verify the immigration status of every worker through a federal database called E-Verify, even more full of errors than Social Security. They must fire workers whose names get flagged. This is now becoming the model for Federal enforcement. ?????? Many of these punitive measures surfaced in proposals for "comprehensive immigration reform" that were debated in Congress in 2006 and 2007. The comprehensive bills combined criminalization of work for the undocumented with huge guest worker programs. While those proposals failed in Congress, the Bush administration implemented some of their most draconian provisions by administrative action.? Many fear that new proposals for immigration reform being formulated by Congress and the administration will continue these efforts to criminalize work. ? ? ? In reality, the labor of 12 million undocumented workers is indispensable to the economy, just as is the labor of 26 million people with visas, and the many millions of workers who were born in the U.S.?? The wealth created by undocumented workers is never called illegal.? No one dreams of taking that wealth from the employers who profited from it. Yet the people who produce this wealth are called exactly that - illegal.? ????? All workers need jobs and a way to support their families, not just some.? And in a country with schools behind the rest of the industrialized world, with bridges that fall into rivers and people living in tent cities for lack of housing, there is clearly no shortage of work to be done.? If the trillion dollars showered on banks were used instead to put people to work, there would be plenty of jobs and a better quality of life for everyone. ? ?? Nativo Lopez, president of the Mexican American Political Association and the Hermandad Mexicana Latinoamericana, says, "Washington legislators and lobbyists fear a new civil rights movement in the streets, because it rejects their compromises and makes demands that go beyond what they have defined as 'politically possible.'" ??? The price of trying to push people out of the US who've come here for survival is increased vulnerability for undocumented workers, which ultimately results in cheaper labor and fewer rights for everyone. Under Bush, that was the government's goal -- cheap labor for large employers, enforced by deportations, firings and guest worker programs.? This is what millions of people want to change.? And the Obama administration was elected because it promised "change we can believe in."? ??? In past May Day marches many participants have put forward an alternative set of demands, which includes tying legalization for 12 million undocumented people in the US with jobs programs for communities with high unemployment.? All workers need the right to organize to raise wages and gain workplace rights, including the 12 million people for whom work is a crime.? More green cards, especially visas based on family reunification, would enable people to cross the border legally, instead of dying in the desert.? Ending guest worker programs would help stop the use of our immigration system as a supply of cheap labor for employers.? And on the border, communities want human rights, not more guns, walls, soldiers and prisons for immigrants.?? ?? This May Day, immigrants will again send this powerful message.? Their marches have already rescued from obscurity our own holiday, which began in the struggle for the eight-hour day in Chicago over a century ago.? Today they are giving May Day a new meaning, putting forward ideas that will not only benefit immigrant communities, but all working families. For more articles and images on immigration, see http://dbacon.igc.org/Imgrants/imgrants.htm Just out from Beacon Press: Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002 See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006) http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575 See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border (University of California, 2004) http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html -- __________________________________ David Bacon, Photographs and Stories http://dbacon.igc.org __________________________________ From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Apr 9 15:46:41 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2009 14:46:41 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] =?utf-8?q?Antiwar_activists_split_over_Obama=E2=80=99s_Afgh?= =?utf-8?q?anistan_policy?= Message-ID: <1995465156.1725001239313601175.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0404/p99s07-usgn.html ? Christian Science Monitor ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? April 4, 2009 ? Antiwar activists split over Obama?s Afghanistan policy ? Lawmakers and others who were against the Iraq war generally support the president. But they worry about another 'quagmire.' ? By Gail Russell Chaddock | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor ? Washington - The anti-war movement that helped elect Candidate Obama is in the early throes of a debate over whether to ramp up again ? this time, over President Obama's plans to step up US engagement in Afghanistan. ? For many activists ? on and off Capitol Hill ? it's a tough call. It's early in a new administration, they say. Even opponents of the troop buildup in Afghanistan say that they like and still trust this president. They want to give him time. ? They also like much of what they're hearing from the Obama White House. ? Instead of the go-it-alone, "cowboy diplomacy" of the Bush years, Obama pushes concepts like "shared responsibility" and "civilian effort," they say. ? But Obama's decision to send another 21,000 troops to Afghanistan to help stabilize "the most dangerous place in the world," as he calls it, is shifting some anti-war activists into (reluctant) opposition. It's also forcing some members of Congress to explain to voters why they opposed a troop buildup in Iraq but now support one in Afghanistan. ? "This could be a one-way ticket to a quagmire," says former US Rep. Tom Andrews (D) of Maine, national director of the Win Without War coalition. ? "Sometimes less is more. In the case of Afghanistan and Pakistan, the deployment of US troops can be a source of instability, not stability," he says. "These are very real concerns that we have, and we want to articulate them in a respectful way." ? Since President Obama's announcement of a new strategy in Afghanistan last month, Win Without War and other groups have been trying to revive a dialogue on the war. They're especially urging members of Congress and the news media to get back to the business of vigorous criticism and oversight. ? The anti-war movement shifted into low gear after Obama's election. Funding and staffing for most groups dropped, in some cases precipitously. Code Pink activists ? a highly visible presence at war hearings and protests in the Bush years ? have shifted their target from war to Wall Street. ? Some elements of the anti-Iraq War coalition think that the buildup in Afghanistan is warranted, even essential. ? "Americans have more business in Afghanistan than they ever did in Iraq, Bosnia, Lebanon, Somalia, Panama, or Grenada," says Jon Soltz, chairman and cofounder of VoteVets.org, which rallied veterans against the war in Iraq in the Bush years. ? The reason the US is in Afghanistan is that we were attacked, he adds. "As someone who fought in Iraq, I don't think people are as ready to give up on President Obama as they were on George Bush. I'm biased to think that we give this president a chance." ? On Capitol Hill, the once-robust Out of Iraq Caucus has also been largely silent on the troop buildup in Afghanistan. Members say they're still working to find common ground. ? "We're not there yet," says Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D) of California, a cofounder together with Reps. Barbara Lee (D) and Maxine Waters (D), both of California. ? Meanwhile, the Out of Iraq Caucus will be sponsoring forums to help educate members. "History makes it clear that the Afghan people do not look kindly on foreign armies," Rep. Woolsey said in a floor speech on March 30. ? "I am also concerned about the cost of sending more troops, the cost in both lives and treasure. It will require a 60 percent increase in military spending at a time when our economy right here at home is suffering so badly," she said. "Now is the time to pause to consider whether there are other alternatives to sending our troops to Afghanistan." ? United in opposition to the war in Iraq, liberal Democrats ? many of whom have yet to state publicly their view on the buildup ? are breaking out more nuanced positions on the war in Afghanistan. Some favor it; some oppose it. All want the president to be successful, and they say it's too early for a confrontation on the policy. ? "He's moving away from a military-only protocol that was the hallmark of the Bush years ? to the degree that Bush and Cheney were interested in Afghanistan at all ? in favor of a community-based, civilian-based, civil society-based policy," says Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D) of Hawaii, a member of the Out of Iraq Caucus. ? "Whether or not that succeeds obviously is something that is still open, but it won't be from lack of effort on the president's part," he says. ? Another caucus member, Rep. Jim McDermott (D) of Washington, who opposes the buildup, worries that the president may yet be drawn into a mainly military approach to the conflict. ? "Those of us who lived through Vietnam are very upset with what's going on [in Afghanistan]," he says. "All of us want him to succeed, desperately want him to succeed. But we worry that as John Kennedy got wrapped up by those guys that sent him to the Bay of Pigs, he'll listen to the guys who say: 'Mr. President, you want to look good, don't you? You don't want to look like a quitter or a loser or weak?'" ? But even before they confront the president, Democrats are confronting concerns at home about the new direction of the war in Afghanistan. ? Rep. Paul Hodes (D) of New Hampshire, who campaigned against the war in Iraq, saw the first anti-war protests of the Obama administration last month in his hometown of Concord. Even though the protests are small, he says he needs to explain his stance to voters, and the situation is "difficult and complex." ? "I opposed the war in Iraq because it was not merely a diversion from the effort that we need to make to battle terrorism, not merely because it was sold on false premises, but because it made us less safe and secure as a country and a world," he says. ? "I have long believed that our efforts needed to be directed to Pakistan and Afghanistan in a coherent way with a comprehensive strategy that does not rely on military force alone," he adds. ? New Hampshire peace activists planning vigils in Nashua, Concord, and Durham next week to protest the buildup in Afghanistan say they expect to meet with their congressional delegation on the issue. ? "We're very concerned that the president announced the increase in troops even before having a coherent plan in place," says Anne Miller, executive director of Peace Action of New Hampshire, which claims some 3,000 members statewide. ? "We're still not clear what this plan will accomplish, what benchmarks are, what a win would look like," she adds. "We have colleagues that just got back from Kabul and not one Afghani they spoke to thought that having more troops there would make a difference." ? For the most part, Americans aren't focused on the war in Afghanistan, pollsters say. Wall Street and the economy are much bigger concerns, but that's beginning to shift, too. ? "There's polling data showing a higher percentage of those saying that the war in Afghanistan has not been worth it," says pollster John Zogby of Zogby International. ? "Americans like their wars to be won and short. But President Obama is still getting some slack, as far as the public is concerned," he adds. ? As candidate, Obama clearly signaled his intent as president to withdraw US forces from Iraq to refocus energies on the war in Afghanistan. That clarity helps give credibility to the steps he's taking now, say Congress watchers. ? "You've got a lot of antiwar liberals who said he didn't really mean that ? that he's just talking that way to look tough. What we're learning is that, like many things he's doing on the domestic front, he's doing what he said," says Norman Ornstein a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ? "He's got a year ? and the protests will start before that," he adds. "If it looks like we're bogged down and lot of Americans are dying, we're in a different situation." From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Thu Apr 9 16:02:26 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2009 07:02:26 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Why the World Needs the US to Act Now on Climate Change Message-ID: <49DE7072.4050301@ashisuto.co.jp> by Sophie Ragsdale, The Nation AlterNet (March 17 2009) There are two clocks ticking for the god-fearing climate-conscious among us. The first counts down to Copenhagen, where on December 7 representatives from 192 countries will hammer out a successor to the Kyoto Protocol: a post-2012 global climate deal aimed at curbing greenhouse gases. The second hurtles us toward disaster, a "mankind-threatening juggernaut", the point at which atmospheric carbon dioxide exceeds a concentration of 450 parts per million. To the extent that global warming is contingent on carbon emissions, the tipping point will be determined at the UN Framework Conference for Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Copenhagen, the last stop on the Bali Roadmap toward what UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer has called "the most complex international agreement that history has ever seen". In less than ten months, the Danish capital will host as many as 15,000 ministers and officials whose challenge is to collaborate a shared vision for long-term cooperative climate action. Specifically, they will determine burden-sharing agreements based on "common but differentiated responsibilities", and developed countries must pledge ambitious emissions reduction targets. The alternative business-as-usual approach, which is to do nothing, will shoot carbon dioxide levels up to 900 ppm by 2100, causing worldwide temperatures to increase nearly seven degrees Fahrenheit and sea levels to rise anywhere from three to seven feet, nearly tripling predictions made in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report. In fact, temperatures are accelerating at such a clip that the IPCC's 2007 report, a gathering and distillation of thousands of peer reviews submitted by hundreds of the world's top climate experts, was outdated upon presentation. Since then, scientists have abandoned the language of numbers and data analysis in favor of urgent calls for immediate action. There are, of course, a few odd deniers, such as William Happer, professor of physics at Princeton University, who announced last week at an Environment and Public Works Committee hearing that we are actually in a "carbon dioxide famine" and that increased levels "will be good for mankind". For the most part, however, the consensus is that if temperatures continue to rise as they are, we will not escape hell and high water within the next decade. And where policy is concerned, Obama is considered our last best chance to get it right. "We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world", said James Hansen of the NASA Institute. "America must take the lead". Obama has made it clear that slowing the climate clock is a top priority for his administration. Beginning with his environment and energy cabinet picks, the "Green Dream Team", it's fair to say, as Representative Lloyd Doggett did at a Ways and Means committee hearing, that "this president is committed to changing the White House into a greenhouse". And it's no surprise that after eight years of Bush obstructionism, Obama's willingness to engage on warming and energy matters is being seen as a "sea change" by the international community. But if he really wants to make good on his claim to a new dawn of American leadership, the United States must at least bring the framework of a federal carbon-caps legislation to the Copenhagen table. On the other hand, putting together meaningful legislation will be difficult, especially when the de facto leader of the Republican party, Rush Limbaugh, is encouraging the spread of ideas that climate change is a conspiracy cooked up by the Chinese, the "ChiComs", to destroy the US economy. Remarkably though, Democrats are not backing down. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi emphasized last week that building a new economy around green jobs is the "flagship issue" for the Democratic Congress. "This isn't 'dig a hole, fill a hole'", she said. "It's about doing it in a new, greener way". Also last week, House Energy & Commerce Committee chair Henry Waxman stood by his Memorial Day deadline for climate change legislation and told reporters that his committee has already begun writing a bill, which he expects will set a national standard for renewable energy and a cap-and-trade program. And Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid confirmed that he has been sold on Waxman's far-reaching megabill strategy to combine climate and energy legislation into one package. Finally, the New York Times reports that Senator Barbara Boxer is researching the use of a budget reconciliation process as a way to safeguard the bill from a Republican filibuster. These efforts are reassuring but not enough. The road to Copenhagen must come on two tracks. While Democrats should continue to push hard for a strong domestic climate bill, it's equally important that the United States join forces with its polluting bedfellow, China, to mobilize an effective global response to the unique challenges of the twentieth century. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took a critical first step in this direction by shining a light on the need for bilateral US-China efforts to overhaul our global economy from one that's coal-driven to one that's low-carbon and energy efficient. Clinton's highly publicized trip to Beijing last month meant to signal once and for all that the United States is serious about climate change. But it will take more than signals to keep the ice caps from melting. As the president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, Eileen Claussen, explained, shifting to a climate-friendly economy "is not an issue of just sitting down to work out a position in the global framework. We must consider how the US and China can cooperate, so we can both benefit and really show movement. Because if we show bilateral movement, the rest of the world will follow." In order to guide the process, the Pew Center and the Asia Society Center released a joint project, a "Roadmap for US-China Cooperation on Energy and Climate Change". It is a concrete program for sustained high-level engagement and on-the-ground action focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Because, the truth is, Claussen said, "There's no possibility of addressing the problem if the US and China don't do a lot relatively quickly, which is evident in the numbers alone". Todd Stern eloquently summarized the US position in the lead-up to Copenhagen when he accepted the position of Hillary Clinton's special envoy for climate change: "As the largest historic emitter of greenhouse gases, we can only expect to lead abroad if we are prepared to act decisively at home. Yet we can only meet the climate challenge with a response that is genuinely global." Surely the clocks are ticking louder and faster than ever, but if the United States takes swift and aggressive action on climate change, at home and abroad, we might make it in time. _____ Sophie Ragsdale is a freelance writer. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. (c) 2009 The Nation All rights reserved. http://www.alternet.org/story/131858/ TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Apr 9 17:10:31 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2009 16:10:31 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Israel Cries Wolf Message-ID: <1782309273.1853391239318631739.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/opinion/09iht-edcohen.html?th&emc=th ? New York Times ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?? ? April 9, 2009 ? Op-Ed ? Israel Cries Wolf ? By Roger Cohen ? Istanbul - "Iran is the center of terrorism, fundamentalism and subversion and is in my view more dangerous than Nazism, because Hitler did not possess a nuclear bomb, whereas the Iranians are trying to perfect a nuclear option." ? Benjamin Netanyahu 2009? Try again. These words were in fact uttered by another Israeli prime minister (and now Israeli president), Shimon Peres, in 1996. Four years earlier, in 1992, he'd predicted that Iran would have a nuclear bomb by 1999. ? You can't accuse the Israelis of not crying wolf. Ehud Barak, now defense minister, said in 1996 that Iran would be producing nuclear weapons by 2004. ? Now here comes Netanyahu, in an interview with his faithful stenographer Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, spinning the latest iteration of Israel's attempt to frame Iran as some Nazi-like incarnation of evil: ? "You don't want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs. When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran." ? I must say when I read those words about "the wide-eyed believer" my mind wandered to a recently departed "decider." But I'm not going there. ? The issue today is Iran and, more precisely, what President Barack Obama will make of Netanyahu's prescription that, the economy aside, Obama's great mission is "preventing Iran from gaining nuclear weapons" - an eventuality newly inscribed on Israeli calendars as "months" away. ? I'll return to the ever shifting nuclear doomsday in a moment, but first that Netanyahu interview. ? This "messianic apocalyptic cult" in Tehran is, of course, the very same one with which Israel did business during the 1980's, when its interest was in weakening Saddam Hussein's Iraq. That business - including sales of weapons and technology - was an extension of Israeli policy toward Iran under the shah. ? It's also the same "messianic apocalyptic cult" that has survived 30 years, ushered the country from the penury of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, shrewdly extended its power and influence, cooperated with America on Afghanistan before being consigned to "the axis of evil," and kept its country at peace in the 21st century while bloody mayhem engulfed neighbors to east and west and Israel fought two wars. ? I don't buy the view that, as Netanyahu told Goldberg, Iran is "a fanatic regime that might put its zealotry above its self-interest." Every scrap of evidence suggests that, on the contrary, self-interest and survival drive the mullahs. ? Yet Netanyahu insists (too much) that Iran is "a country that glorifies blood and death, including its own self-immolation." Huh? ? On that ocular theme again, Netanyahu says Iran's "composite leadership" has "elements of wide-eyed fanaticism that do not exist in any other would-be nuclear power in the world." No, they exist in an actual nuclear power, Pakistan. ? Israel's nuclear warheads, whose function is presumably deterrence of precisely powers like Iran, go unmentioned, of course. ? Netanyahu also makes the grotesque claim that the terrible loss of life in the Iran-Iraq war (started by Iraq) "didn't sear a terrible wound into the Iranian consciousness." It did just that, which is why Iran's younger generation seeks reform but not upheaval; and why the country as a whole prizes stability over military adventure. ? Arab states, Netanyahu suggests, "fervently hope" that America will, if necessary, use "military power" to stop Iran going nuclear. My recent conversations, including with senior Saudi officials, suggest that's wrong and the longstanding Israeli attempt to convince Arab states that Iran, not Israel, is their true enemy will fail again. ? What's going on here? Israel, as it has for nearly two decades, is trying to lock in American support and avoid any disadvantageous change in the Middle Eastern balance of power, now overwhelmingly tilted in Jerusalem's favor, by portraying Iran as a monstrous pariah state bent on imminent nuclear war. ? A semblance of power balance is often the precondition for peace. Iran was left out of the Madrid and Oslo processes, with disastrous results. But that's a discussion for another day. ? What's critical right now is that Obama view Netanyahu's fear-mongering with an appropriate skepticism, rein him in, and pursue his regime-recognizing opening toward Tehran, as he did Wednesday by saying America would join nuclear talks for the first time. The president should read Trita Parsi's excellent "Treacherous Alliance" as preparation. ? The core strategic shift of Obama's presidency has been away from the with-us-or-against-us rhetoric of the war on terror toward a rapprochement with the Muslim world as the basis for isolating terrorists. ? That's unsustainable if America or Israel find themselves at war with Muslim Persians as well as Muslim Arabs, and if Netanyahu's intense-eyed attempt to suck America into a perpetuation of war-on-terror thinking prevails. ? The only way to stop Iran going nuclear, and encourage reform of a repressive regime, is to get to the negotiating table. There's time. Those "months" are still a couple of years. What Iran has accumulated is low-enriched uranium. You need highly-enriched uranium for a bomb. That's a leap. ? Israeli hegemony is proving a kind of slavery. Passage to the Promised Land involves rethinking the Middle East, starting in Iran. From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Apr 9 17:29:33 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2009 16:29:33 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Dennis Ross's Iran Plan Message-ID: <1084421667.2109841239319773032.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090427/dreyfuss The Nation April 8, 2009 Dennis Ross's Iran Plan By Robert Dreyfuss When Dennis Ross, a hawkish, pro-Israel adviser to Barack Obama's presidential campaign, was elevated in February to the post of special adviser on "the Gulf and Southwest Asia"--i.e., Iran --Ross's critics hoped that his influence would be marginal. After all, unlike special envoys George Mitchell (Israel-Palestine) and Richard Holbrooke (Afghanistan-Pakistan), whose appointments were announced with fanfare, Ross's appointment was long delayed and then announced quietly, at night, in a press release. But diplomats and Middle East watchers hoping Ross would be sidelined are wrong. He is building an empire at the State Department: hiring staff and, with his legendary flair for bureaucratic wrangling, cementing liaisons with a wide range of US officials. The Iran portfolio is his, says an insider. "Everything we've seen indicates that Ross has completely taken over the issue," says a key Iran specialist. "He's acting as if he's the guy. Wherever you go at State, they tell you, 'You've gotta go through Dennis.'" It's paradoxical that Obama, who made opening a dialogue with Iran into a crucial plank in his campaign, would hand the Iran file to Ross. Since taking office, Obama has taken a number of important steps to open lines to Iran , including a remarkable holiday greeting by video in which the president spoke directly to "the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran," adding, "We seek engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect." He invited Iran to attend an international conference on Afghanistan , where a top Iranian diplomat shook hands with Holbrooke; he's allowing American diplomats to engage their Iranian counterparts; and he's reportedly planning to dispatch a letter directly to Iran 's leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet Ross, like his neoconservative co-thinkers, is explicitly skeptical about the usefulness of diplomacy with Iran . Widely viewed as a cog in the machine of Israel 's Washington lobby, Ross was not likely to be welcomed in Tehran --and he wasn't. Iran 's state radio described his appointment as "an apparent contradiction" with Obama's "announced policy to bring change in United States foreign policy." Kazem Jalali, a hardline member of the Iranian parliament's national security committee, joked that it "would have been so much better to pick Ariel Sharon or Ehud Olmert as special envoy to Iran ." More seriously, a former White House official says that Ross has told colleagues that he believes the United States will ultimately have no choice but to attack Iran in response to its nuclear program. Not quite a neoconservative himself, Ross has palled around with neocons for most of his career. In the 1970s and '80s he worked alongside Paul Wolfowitz at the Defense and State Departments, and with Andrew Marshall, a neoconservative strategist who leads the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessments. In 1985 Ross helped launch the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the Israel lobby's leading think tank. From bogus@does.not.exist.com Thu Apr 2 09:08:15 2009 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:08:15 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: issues for George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, acquiring a reputation as a h= ighly skilled diplomat, albeit one with a pronounced pro-Israel tilt. He le= d the US side at the July 2000 Camp David summit, but he was deeply mistrus= ted by Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, and the feeling was mutual. At a cr= ucial moment in the negotiations, Ross threw a tantrum, hurling a briefing = book into a table full of juice and fruit. Not surprisingly, when Arafat re= jected the Israelis' less-than-generous offer, Ross heaped blame on the Pal= estinians for scuttling the talks, the failure of which led directly to Ari= el Sharon's rise to power and the second intifada. Daniel Kurtzer, an Ortho= dox Jew who served as US ambassador to Israel and Egypt and who was one of = Obama's top Middle East advisers last year, co-wrote a book in which he exp= lained, "The perception always was that Dennis started from the Israeli bot= tom line, that he listened to what Israel wanted and then tried to sell it = to the Arabs."=20 From bogus@does.not.exist.com Thu Apr 2 09:08:15 2009 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:08:15 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: lped to oversee a series of reports designed to ring alarm bells about Iran= 's nuclear research and to support closer US-Israeli ties in response. Las= t summer, while advising Obama, he co-chaired a task force that produced a = paper titled "Strengthening the Partnership: How to Deepen U.S.-Israel Coop= eration on the Iranian Nuclear Challenge." That report opted for an alarmis= t view of Iran 's nuclear program and proposed that the next president set = up a formal US-Israeli mechanism for coordinating policy toward Iran (inclu= ding any future need for "preventive military action"). Along with Holbrook= e, Ross also helped found United Against Nuclear Iran, a group established = to publicize warnings about Iran to the American public and the media. UANI= 's advisory board includes former CIA director James Woolsey and Fouad Ajam= i, perhaps the top Middle East expert for the neoconservative movement.=20 In September, Ross served as a key member of another task force organized b= y the Bipartisan Policy Center . The group assembled a flock of hawks under= the leadership of Michael Makovsky, brother of WINEP's David Makovsky, who= served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the heyday of the Pent= agon neocons from 2002 to 2006. Its report, "Meeting the Challenge: U.S. Po= licy Toward Iranian Nuclear Development"--written by Michael Rubin, a neoco= nservative hardliner at the American Enterprise Institute--read like a decl= aration of war.=20 The core of the Bipartisan Policy Center report predicted that diplomacy wi= th Iran is likely to fail. Anticipating failure, Ross and his colleagues re= commended "prepositioning military assets" by the United States --i.e., a m= ilitary buildup--coupled with a US "show of force" in the Gulf. This would = be followed almost immediately by a blockade of Iranian gasoline imports an= d oil exports, meant to paralyze Iran 's economy, followed by what they cal= l, not so euphemistically, "kinetic action."=20 That "kinetic action"--a US assault on Iran --should, in fact, be massive, = suggested the Ross-Rubin task force. It should hit dozens of sites alleged = to be part of Iran's nuclear research program, along with other targets, in= cluding Iranian air defense sites, Revolutionary Guard facilities, much of = Iran's military-industrial complex, communications systems, munitions stora= ge facilities, airfields and naval facilities. Eventually, the report concl= uded, the United States would also have to attack Iran 's ground forces, el= ectric power plants and electrical grids, bridges and "manufacturing plants= , including steel, autos, buses, etc."=20 Like virtually all of his neoconservative confreres, Ross does not argue th= at negotiations with Iran should not proceed. Surrendering to the inevitabi= lity of a US-Iran dialogue, they insist instead that any such talks proceed= according to a strict time limit, measured in weeks or, at most, a few mon= ths. In November, Iran specialist Patrick Clawson, Ross's colleague at WINE= P, described any US-Iran dialogue that might emerge as mere theater. "What = we've got to do is...show the world that we're doing a heck of a lot to try= and engage the Iranians," he said. "Our principal target with these offers= [to Iran ] is not Iran . Our principal target with these offers is, in fac= t, American public opinion [and] world public opinion." Once that's done, h= e implied, the United States would have to take out its big stick.=20 The reality, however, is that negotiations between Iran and the United Stat= es might take many, many months, perhaps years. Putting US-Iran diplomacy o= n a short fuse, as Ross and his colleagues want to do, guarantees its failu= re, setting the stage for harsher sanctions, embargoes and the "kinetic act= ion" that Ross has suggested might follow.=20 About Robert Dreyfuss=20 Robert Dreyfuss, a Nation contributing editor, is an investigative journali= st in Alexandria , Virginia , specializing in politics and national securit= y. He is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash F= undamentalist Islam and is a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone , The Am= erican Prospect , and Mother Jones .=20 From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Fri Apr 10 03:37:32 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2009 18:37:32 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Bullets from the Drug War Message-ID: <49DF135C.1080906@ashisuto.co.jp> by Dmitry Orlov Club Orlov (March 29 2009) * The US has lost the "War on Drugs" * The losing side is usually not the one to decide when a fight is over or how it ends * Unlike other recent defeats, this lost war is a defeat followed by an invasion * Mexico is the natural staging area for the invasion (inconvenient though it is for the Mexicans) * New franchises are being set up to service the North American drug market (which is the biggest in the world) * The CIA has to eat, and all they know how to do competently is run guns and drugs and control thugs; they get a seat at the table * The narcs have to eat too, and all they are trained to do is deal (with) drugs; they get a seat at the table too * As the federales grow weak in the US and Mexico, the battle lines will advance north of the border, leaving Mexico a quiet and largely intact backwater * This is an inter-US conflict, because Americans are the most avid consumers, sellers, and prosecutors of drugs * Life in the USA gives everyone a pain that is for many people simply not survivable without drugs: either alcohol, pharmaceuticals or illegal drugs * Illegal drugs are far more cost-effective than either pharma or alcohol - government-licensed industries which are either excessively lucrative or taxed heavily * As Americans give up hope, they will need to self-medicate in ever-larger numbers * They will be far more able financially to afford illegal drugs than either pharma or alcohol. * Illegal drugs (and moonshine) are two very large post-collapse enrepreneurial opportunities within the fUSA/???? [Orlov 2005] http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dtxqwqr_20dc52sm * This is no longer a war against drugs; it is now a contest between alternative drug distribution systems * One alternative is a centralized, paramilitary organization run by CIA remnants, former military, and former police * Another alternative is ethnic mafias, which will diversify into many other kinds of trade. * The third, nautrally most cost-effective alternative will be provided by informal, local distribution networks based on barter, which will be all that is left once the dust settles * The downside of all this is that it will be hard to find anyone sober enough to operate a light switch * The upside to that is that the national electrical grid will go away, so there will be little need of that http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/03/bullets-from-drug-war.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Apr 10 14:18:00 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2009 13:18:00 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Obama's speech: good but not enough Message-ID: <801624931.2235781239394680242.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=5&article_id=100763 Daily Star (Beirut) April 8, 2009 Obama's speech: good but not enough By Rami G. Khouri President Barack Obama's speech to the Turkish Parliament Monday was another milestone in what appears to be his continuing attempt to steer the American ship of foreign policy in new directions. He made some important new statements and changes in style, while repeating some silly old bad habits and simplistic insults. If he intended to address the Islamic world and signal a more humble, realistic policy toward majority-Islamic countries, he gets high marks for intent and execution, and medium marks for substance. He reminded us once again of three linked issues: that the United States has serious problems with some Muslims, and with some quarters in the Islamic world; that it is trying to acknowledge and redress those problems with a refreshing combination of courage, humility and honesty; and that it still suffers deep structural flaws in achieving this worthy goal. The most significant thing about Monday's speech in my view was the disparity between how Obama addressed all the tough issues that matter to Turkey - European Union admission, relations with the Kurds, Armenian history, Cyprus, democracy consolidation, and the situation in the South Caucasus - while offering only soft rhetoric and hollow generalities when speaking about American relations with the Islamic world. Specificity reflects seriousness, while generalities reflect hesitation. Obama should be commended for tackling these issues to begin with, but he should be chided for resorting to simplistic nothingness in four areas. The first was his meaningless statement that "the US is not at war with Islam." He might be surprised to learn that neither is Islam at war with America or Americans. He would have been much better advised to stick to the facts by noting that a very small number of criminal Muslims attacked the United States, and that his country was justified in fighting them and trying to bring them to justice. By addressing "Islam" as a protagonist, he recklessly transformed specific quarrels into civilizational, religious and cultural battles. His second mistake was to speak glowingly of respect for the Islamic faith and all that it has contributed to the world, while always framing his words in the context of terrorism and warfare. He should instead have spoken of the rights that individuals and countries expect to enjoy in a world governed by law and mutual commitments to sovereign rights. Muslims don't need an American president or anyone else to tell them that they have a fine cultural heritage; they know that, simply by living their faith and values. They want to hear from the leader of the world's strongest nation that he respects a rule of law applied equally, fairly and consistently to all countries, regardless of their religion. The third mistake he made - a genetic weakness of all American officials, it seems - was that he framed the tensions between some Muslims and some Americans in terms of religious differences, rather than acknowledging that most criticisms of the US in the Arab and Asian heartland of Islam reflected anger with US foreign policies. The problem is not faith; it is foreign policy, specifically American policies supporting Israel or supporting dictators and autocrats throughout the Arab and Asian region. By evading these core problems, he ended up slightly comically and unsuccessfully flailing for substitute issues to address. The fourth weakness in Obama's speech and his general approach was to single out Iran as a potential menace for allegedly wanting to develop nuclear weapons, and chiding Iranian leaders like a school teacher talks to children. This totally negated his remarks about wanting to deal with Iran on the basis of "mutual interests and mutual respect." If that really were his intention, Obama would instead have spoken about working with Iran and others to implement all relevant international laws and regulations to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons, while affirming every country's right to nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. These criticisms of Obama's shortcomings should not detract from his commendable change in tone and direction from the horrors of the George W. Bush years. One intriguing new twist in his remarks was the insistence three times in one passage that Israelis and Palestinians both had to honor their past commitments, change their ways, and make new moves to achieve the goal of two states living side by side in peace and security. This is not new, but it does seem another small shift toward repositioning the US as a credible mediator seeking to work simultaneously for the rights and interests of both Israelis and Palestinians. Rarely has a US president spoken so clearly about both Israelis and Palestinians needing to change their ways to achieve peace. We have here only vague hints couched in nice rhetoric, but they are intriguing hints that should be watched for signs of policy that affirm them. Large ships adjust their course slowly and incrementally. Obama turned the wheel a few degrees in Turkey this week. Rami G. Khouri, editor-at-large, is published twice-weekly by the Daily Star. From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Apr 10 14:16:51 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2009 13:16:51 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Was Gaza Israel's Waterloo? Message-ID: <1172416291.2235641239394611230.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.counterpunch.org/goekler04032009.html CounterPunch Weekend Edition April 3-5, 2009 Is the Power of AIPAC on the Decline? Was Gaza Israel's Waterloo? By John Goekler Jay Forrester, the father of System Dynamics, famously observed that people intuitively recognize leverage points in complex systems ? and they just as intuitively tend to push them the wrong way. Recent actions by Israel and its primary supporter in the US, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) seem a perfect example. Their apparent victories are likely, in the cold light of history, to be seen as a string of self-inflicted injuries that helped tip the world toward a just peace in the Middle East. While not terribly important in itself, the Charles Freeman incident is a recent illustration. Freeman, a solid professional, was selected by Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair to head the National Intelligence Council. As soon as President Obama nominated him, Freeman was attacked by the pro-Israel lobby on grounds he was insufficiently biased in favor of Israel. The usual suspects who savage anyone questioning the AIPAC / Neo-Con party line that America and Israel are Siamese twins conjoined by identical interests delivered the attacks. They were coordinated by former AIPAC official Steve Rosen (currently on trial for allegedly passing top secret US documents to Israel) and featured congressional obeisance by members as senior as senators Joseph Lieberman and Charles Schumer. The counterintuitiveness is stunning. The message that America?s intelligence officers should follow any party line, rather than operate analytically and objectively, is a red flag to thoughtful Americans of all political persuasions. It is particularly foolish mere weeks after the departure of an administration that twisted intelligence to ?slam dunk? the US into Iraq. The subtext is even more important ? AIPAC, Lieberman and Schumer have tacitly acknowledged that America?s strategic and security interests are secondary to Israel?s. For this reason, future historians will likely see the Freeman affair as the apex of a policy arc in which America moved toward Israel, and is now beginning to head away. This irony is especially poignant because AIPAC?s stated mission is, ?to help make Israel more secure by ensuring that American support remains strong?. It takes credit for much of the pro-Israel bias in the US Congress, including: ?Passing more than a dozen bills and resolutions condemning and imposing tough sanctions on Iran during the past 15 years. Securing critical security assistance to Israel each year to ensure that Israel remains capable of facing increased threats. Passing legislation requiring the administration to evaluate all future military sales to Arab states in the context of the need to maintain Israel?s qualitative military edge over potential adversaries. Passing multiple resolutions affirming congressional support for Israel?s right to self-defense in the face of terrorism by the terrorist groups Hamas and Hizballah.? AIPAC was also behind the 390 to 5 vote in favor of a US House resolution supporting Israel?s ?right to defend itself? during its recent invasion of Gaza. The fact that this ?self defense? included using white phosphorous and US-supplied cluster munitions against civilian populations somehow escaped the notice of those 390 supporters, which included the bill?s sponsor, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. What AIPAC failed to notice is that while it has racked up a string of successes in the policy arena, the most important ?initial condition? in the equation ? the mental models of American Jews ? has shifted. The momentum to reassess and revise America?s strategic relationship with Israel is approaching critical mass. The first cracks in the facade appeared when John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published an article titled The Israel Lobby in the London Review of Books in early 2006. Mearsheimer, a professor at the University of Chicago, and Walt, a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, boldly stated that, ?The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ?democracy? throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world.? AIPAC and its allies immediately launched a full-scale assault on the paper and its authors, labeling them conspiracy theorists, anti-Semites, academic incompetents and more. Unfortunately for Israel?s supporters, those attacks gave the article, and the follow on book, ever more publicity. By protesting too much, AIPAC gave the idea legs. Jimmy Carter?s 2007 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, set off a similar paroxysm of vitriol and paranoia within the American pro-Israel community. Again, rather than engaging in a reasoned debate of the issues (or better yet, from a tactical perspective, speaking kindly of the former president while bemoaning his ?naivet??), AIPAC and its allies brutally attacked the former president. This resulted in even more air time and exposure for the book and Carter?s position. Further, the attacks firmly embedded apartheid in the lexicon of Middle East debates. It was the January 2009 Israeli invasion of Gaza, however, that shifted the issue from intellectual to visceral. Whereas previous AIPAC moves had stirred discussion, its blind support of Israeli actions in Gaza spurred disgust. Not only did Israel destroy the meager remnants of its David versus Goliath mystique by using fighter bombers, tanks and helicopter gunships against a minor militia equipped only with small arms, it also surrendered forever what remained of its ?good guy? image by intentionally leveling hospitals, clinics, schools and mosques. The effect of this on American Jews was chilling. In recent decades, American Jews have comprised the core of the American liberal movement. They were a persistent voice of conscience through the civil rights era, Viet Nam, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Iraq 1 and 2, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. They remain among the most passionate advocates for social justice in the world. That they were largely unable to apply that advocacy to Israeli excesses was a bitter, but often unspoken schism that separated the Holocaust generations from their activist children and grandchildren. Now, the denial many American Jews have maintained around Israel?s immoral and illegal behaviors is evaporating. True change, after all, occurs when the inconsistencies between actual and desired realities become too great ? when the resulting tension compels action. The Israeli mugging of Gaza, and AIPAC?s unexamined and unfettered support for it, has clashed with the Jewish ideal of tikkun olam ? ?repairing the world?. In light of this, it is likely that AIPAC?s membership, donors and influence over American foreign policy will steadily decline. As they do, more pragmatic and balanced approaches to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will emerge. These may occur because of American leadership; in the absence of an American veto; or through the discontinuation of the American aid that helps keep the scales tilted in favor of Israel. In a best-case scenario, it might occur because of all three. In our dynamic, nonlinear world, the most successful nations, institutions and individuals are those best able continually to reexamine and narrow the inconsistencies between their beliefs and positions, and objective realities. Institutions built on fundamental inconsistencies ? whether companies such as Enron or countries such as the Soviet Union ? most often prove insufficiently robust in the long term. To frame it another way, they tend to have a relatively short shelf life in the marketplace of history. John Goekler is a trainer and consultant specializing in applying emerging scientific understandings to organizational effectiveness, transformative policy and global security. He is the founder of Change Factors, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Apr 10 14:18:51 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2009 13:18:51 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Herman: "Look Forward, not Back" In-Reply-To: <1174442792.4155661238642745009.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <501204501.2235921239394731618.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Z Magazine, April 2009 ?Look forward, not back,? and other Cliches, Idiocies, and Abused Words Edward S. Herman One of my favorites cliches of today is ?look forward, not back,? also a favorite of President Obama and Vice President Biden. These leaders are under a certain amount of pressure to prosecute, or at least investigate, the Bush-Cheney gang?s war crimes and violations of U.S. and international law. There is also the matter of principle: That is, whether there can be said to be a ?rule of law? when high level but serious violators of law are beyond prosecution. Barry Bonds must be pursued because he allegedly may have lied to a grand jury on his use of steroids, but Bush-Cheney-Rice-Rumsfeld-Powell lied many times on issues involving mass killing and violations of domestic and international law. Of course they haven?t lied before a grand jury, but that is because the establishment won?t let them be put before a grand jury. But what then happens to that famous ?deterrent? that is so important when the establishment deals with and punishes lower-class law violators? This use of the ?look forward? clich? today is in the Pelosi ?impeachment-off-the-table? mold, which is itself in the Democratic Party tradition of bipartisanship and agreement that international law doesn?t apply to this country and its leaders (or to those of a major client state like Israel). Dean Acheson said it way back in 1963 before the American Society of International Law: No ?legal issue? can arise when U.S. ?power, position, and prestige? are at stake. In that same tradition Bill Clinton was pleased to bomb the al-Shifra pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan in 1998 and attack Yugoslavia in 1999, in violation of the UN Charter, and Obama himself has quickly joined this great tradition. Veteran analyst of Afghan civilian casualties Marc Herold credits Obama with 72 Afghan civilian killings during January 21-February 23, with no perceptible slowing down of the kill rate from that of the Bush-Cheney era (Herold, "Seventy-Two Afghan Civilians Killed by U.S/NATO since Obama Took the Reins," Diagonal No. 97, marzo 5-19, 2009, Madrid, forthcoming in Spanish). Of course, sometimes we must look back. Even after the NATO defeat of Yugoslavia and occupations of Bosnia and Kosovo, Milosevic had to be pursued and the Bosnian Serb leaders Mladic and Karadzic captured and brought to trial, because the Bosnian Muslims cannot move forward until they obtain justice. The Serbs must apologize often and humbly and must cough up each Serb participant in the earlier wars demanded by the ICTY, both in the interests of justice and to obtain world forgiveness and reentry into the community of honorable states that only kill in self-defense. The Srebrenica massacre must be remembered each year for the same reasons--of the still-to-be realized justice to the satisfaction of the victims and the need for sincere apologies and proper behavior by the guilty population. So the Serbs also cannot move forward without looking back. Furthermore, how could the United States and NATO justify the followup ?humanitarian interventions? in Afghanistan and Iraq unless it is proven in (kangaroo) court and reiterated that justice had triumphed in Yugoslavia? By the same politicized and power-based double standard, Vietnam war leaders Nixon and Johnson?and the many scores of their killer colleagues like Walt and Eugene Rostow, George and William Bundy, Robert ?Blowtorch? Komer, William Colby, and William Westmoreland?could prosper and die in bed, because the millions of dead Vietnamese victims had no avenues through which they could realize justice; there was no tribunal created by the UN Security Council to pursue the big-time criminals in that case. The lesser but still impressive killers in Western client states, like Suharto and the Shah of Iran, could also prosper and die in bed. Israel has been able to ?move forward? in seizing Palestinian land, with positive assistance from the same powers that have required justice for victims in the former Yugoslavia. In short, in the Age of Kafka the global double standard on the link between justice and ?moving forward? is truly impressive. Projection Clich??The Violent ?Extremists? In his very useful book The Liberal Defense of Murder, Richard Seymour quotes Christopher Hitchens? friend Martin Amis, who says ?The extremists, for now, have the monopoly of violence, intimidation, and self-righteousness.? Bush, Blair, Olmert and their gangs are clearly not the ?extremists? Amis has in mind?Bush and friends are the ?self-defense? folks just striving for a wee bit of security and human rights, and fighting off the invasions of their territory by the Islamo-fascists. The pitiful giant, with 50 percent of the arms budget of the earth, invading or bombing at least three countries right now, is being overwhelmed by the violent folks, ?for now.? Among the other things that make this projection comical, the Pentagon?s National Security statement of 2002 was quite clear on the intent to monopolize the means of violence and to prevent any challenger to this monopoly position from realizing that challenge, implicitly by force. But I guess that was all a bluff by a gang that knew that the Islamo-fascists had them whipped, for now. This kind of idiocy may rest in part on the ultra-self-righteousness of the Western racist-nationalist-imperialist bloc and their pundits and thinkers, who don?t count Western arms and Western aggression and murder as violence any more than they can use the word ?extremists? to refer to their home-grown big-time aggression enthusiasts, managers, and killers. One frequently reads about Western officials demanding that the people who are resisting Western encroachments and rule ?eschew violence.? Only one side has a right to arms, occupation of somebody else?s land, ?self- defense,? and violence?only when ?we? do it it cannot be called violence. This is closely analogous to the treatment of ?terrorism.? Retail terrorism by dissidents, rebels, and resisters to a Western or Western-back state (e.g., the African National Congress in apartheid South Africa), is ?terrorism? (the ANC was listed as a terrorist organization by the Pentagon in 1988, but not Jonas Savimbi and UNITA in Angola, supported by South Africa and the United States). State terrorism, often extremely violent, and commonly using torture, regularly induces resistance (e.g., Israeli versus Palestinian; Guatemalan military versus Mayan victims). But state terrorism is not called terrorism, it is ?retaliation? or ?counter-terrorism.? It is also not ?violence,? an invidious word reserved for the Western-designated bad guys, taking its place alongside ?terrorism.? Nuttiest Argument for the Iraq Invasion-Occupation: Nick Cohen on Getting Rid of the Iraq Sanctions Regime The establishment intellectuals and pundits quickly adjusted the reasons for the Iraq invasion-occupation from protecting our national security from Saddam?s WMD to our desire to bring liberty to the Iraq people. Their ability to do this while Bush-Cheney were busy reducing U.S. liberty, cozying up to Karimov and Mushareff, and struggling as long as they could to prevent free elections in Iraq itself, is really touching on their patriotic ardor and capacity for self-deception. The classic here is Michael Ignatieff?s NYT Magazine piece ?Who Are Americans To Think That Freedom Is Theirs To Spread? (June 26, 2005), where the author feels no obligation to prove the liberation goal beyond the fact that Bush declared it to be so. This swallowing of a completely implausible propaganda line was extremely widespread in the United States, running from George Packer in the New Yorker and Frank Rich in the New York Times to the entire rightwing stable at Fox. It was also widespread in Britain. Seymour quotes British journalist Nick Cohen, a noted member of the UK branch of the cruise missile left, who was enthused at the prospect of a ?multiracial devolved democracy, which stands up for human rights,? which he saw as the outcome of the invasion-occupation. Seymour also notes Cohen?s questioning of ?how Noam Chomsky and John Pilger manage to oppose a war which would end the sanctions they claim have slaughtered hundreds of thousands of children who otherwise would have had happy, healthy lives in a prison state.? Of course, Cohen isn?t admitting those children?s deaths from sanctions, but what an idiotic line of thought!. The sanctions were imposed by the two imperial states at the expense of those children (their deaths were ?worth it,? according to Madeleine Albright), and could have been ended by their simply deciding that more sanctions-deaths of children were no longer worth it. This never seems to occur to Cohen, who is offering implicit apologetics for those sanctions killings. But the further irony is that the invasion-occupation that Cohen is defending in the quoted passage killed hundreds of thousands more Iraqis, and the children of Iraq are not living ?happy, healthy lives? in a wonderful democracy. So Cohen offers crude apologetics for two phases of the imperial mass killing of Iraqis, and he demonstrates a complete incapacity to analyse and forecast the imperial goals and processes of his leaders as they did their dirty work in that victim country. But on the other hand, his service to those imperial leaders and the imperial state is exemplary. ?We? and ?Our? Who is included in ?we? and ?our?? In the political system it is notorious that members of the elite use ?we? and ?our? when they appeal to the underlying population even as they are in the midst of betraying the general citizenry. They are protecting ?our security? in Afghanistan, and advancing ?our? economic interests as they pour taxpayer dollars into Citicorp and AIG. However, they are sometimes honest about a narrower meaning of ?we,? almost always in exchanges within their in-group. This was given public expression when the fired and angry former Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O?Neill, told the story of his exchanges over tax policy with Cheney and Rove to Ron Suskind, whose book The Price of Loyalty is built on O?Neill?s words and documents. In 2004 O?Neill, a conservative and former CEO of the Aluminum Company of America, opposed Cheney and Rove on tax cuts on dividends and further cuts for upper income groups. O?Neill thought the rich had had enough by then at the expense of the middle class. But Cheney?s response to O?Neill was that ?We won the midterms. This is our due.? The ?our? is telling. Bush had once publicly admitted that fat cats were his real constituency? Michael Moore?s Fahrenheit 9/11 includes a video of Bush speaking at a fund-raising dinner, saying "This is an impressive crowd -- the Haves, and the Have-Mores. Some people call you 'The Elite'. I call you my 'Base'. [Laughter]." And Cheney, responding to O?Neill, is obviously talking about those Haves and Have Mores as ?our? people. In this exchange, as reported by Suskind, Bush actually suggested that maybe the middle class should be given a break at this point, but Cheney demured, and Suskind-O?Neill state that Rove chimed in appealing to Bush to ?stick to principle.? The principle is presumably trickle-down theory, or maybe the ?principle? is Cheney?s view that ?we? won the election hence have the right to reward ourselves?a right of conquest. These are principles of class warfare, put into reality in the Bush years, but certainly with the help of the mainstream media and Democrats. We should note that Ignatieff?s view that it is ?Americans? who think that freedom is ?Theirs To Spread,? is in the same deceptive tradition of implying that what the elite support is what the American people want. The editors of the New York Times obviously approved of this refurbished Bush twist of apologetics for invading and occupying Iraq, but they also approved the original invasion based on the threat of WMD, backed by the war-propaganda reporting of Michael Gordon and Judith Miller and their commentary columns by Kenneth Pollack and company. The public was less enthused and had to be lied to by the Bush team and New York Times. ?We? the public didn?t want this war and increasingly disapproved it, but the elite ?we? supported it. From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Apr 10 14:42:01 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2009 13:42:01 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Howard Zinn: Social turmoil is not bad if it leads to something good In-Reply-To: <"BAA0FC0406F342EE0554BC32484FDD8DEDC3615173C7E546@311CC77E-0023-459B-93A0-4BF7A6DBAB42"@response.therealnews.com> Message-ID: <1788030997.2238821239396121262.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> donate to The Real News logo News stories April 10, 2009 More from The Real News Watch more news stories on the economy, US politics and the climate change crisis from around the world view Send a message to Obama Howard Zinn PT3: Social turmoil is not bad if it leads to something good view Credit card industry loses one Credit card lobbyists glum as Senate passes 2 separate bills to protect consumers view Become a member today Receive your copy of The History of the National Security State view Make www.therealnews.com your homepage and see the latest stories as soon as they're posted. Help promote The Real News Network on YouTube by making our videos your favourites, rate them and add comments. Promoting our YouTube channel builds our community and helps spread the word about our development. If you use the Miro media player subscribe to the TRNN channel Having trouble viewing this email? View it as a web page instead. You received this message because you or someone using this email address requested it via a form at therealnews.com or via some other communication with The Real News Network. If you do not want to receive further updates from us, unsubscribe here . From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Apr 10 14:47:50 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2009 13:47:50 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] `Holy Hell' Over Torture Memos In-Reply-To: <20090410004117.C6438200F4@viewsic.mayfirst.org> Message-ID: <1173578715.2239961239396470694.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> `Holy Hell' Over Torture Memos Attorney General Eric Holder wants to release classified Bush-era interrogation memos. But U.S. intel officials are fiercely lobbying the White House to block him from moving forward. By Michael Isikoff Newsweek Web Exclusive April 3, 2009 A fierce internal battle within the White House over the disclosure of internal Justice Department interrogation memos is shaping up as a major test of the Obama administration's commitment to opening up government files about Bush-era counterterrorism policy. As reported by NEWSWEEK, the White House last month had accepted a recommendation from Attorney General Eric Holder to declassify and publicly release three 2005 memos that graphically describe harsh interrogation techniques approved for the CIA to use against Al Qaeda suspects. But after the story, U.S. intelligence officials, led by senior national- security aide John Brennan, mounted an intense campaign to get the decision reversed, according to a senior administration official familiar with the debate. "Holy hell has broken loose over this," said the official, who asked not to be identified because of political sensitivities. Brennan is a former senior CIA official who was once considered by Obama for agency director but withdrew his name late last year after public criticism that he was too close to past officials involved in Bush administration decisions. Brennan, who now oversees intelligence issues at the National Security Council, argued that release of the memos could embarrass foreign intelligence services who cooperated with the CIA, either by participating in overseas "extraordinary renditions" of high-level detainees or housing them in overseas "black site" prisons. Brennan succeeded in persuading CIA Director Leon Panetta to become "engaged" in his efforts to block release, according to the senior official. Their joint arguments stalled plans to declassify the memos even though White House counsel Gregory Craig had already signed off on Holder's recommendation that they should be disclosed, according to an official and another government source familiar with the debate. No final decision has been made, and it is likely Obama will have to resolve the matter, according to the sources who spoke to NEWSWEEK. The continued internal debate explains the Justice Department's decision late Thursday to ask a federal judge for another two-week delay (until April 16) to file a final response in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union seeking the release of the memos. The ACLU agreed to the two- week delay only after Justice officials represented that "high-level Government officials will consider for possible release" the three 2005 memos as well as another Aug. 1, 2002, memo on torture, that has long been sought by congressional committees and members of Congress, according to a motion filed by Justice lawyers with U.S. Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein in New York, who is overseeing the case. The 2002 memo, written by former Justice lawyers Jay Bybee and John Yoo, concluded that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques could be used against Qaeda suspects without violating a federal law that prohibits torture. That memo was publicly withdrawn by the Justice Department in 2004 after its existence became publicly known and sparked a public controversy. But a new set of Justice lawyers-led by Steven Bradbury, the newly installed chief of the department's Office of Legal Counsel-later secretly authored additional memos in the spring of 2005 that essentially approved the same techniques, permitting the agency to barrage terror suspects with a combination of physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping and frigid temperatures, according to a 2007 New York Times account. Those memos concluded that the harsh interrogation techniques used by the CIA would not violate Geneva Conventions restrictions on "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of prisoners. The internal controversy over the memos is viewed as especially significant in light of the larger debate over whether there should be "accountability" for Bush- era tactics in the war on terror, including calls in Congress for a "truth commission" to investigate the matter. Until now, that debate has been cramped by the fact that most of the key material-including those that describe precisely what tactics were used by the CIA in interrogations and what happened to high-level suspects in U.S. custody-has been classified, making it at least theoretically a federal crime for officials with direct knowledge of these issues to publicly discuss them. If the Justice memos were to be declassified, it would free up a host of former officials to talk about precisely what took place during White House and Justice Department meetings over the issue of interrogations. If the White House were to overrule Holder and side with Brennan and Panetta, it could essentially shut the door on attempts to have a full public airing of these issues, according to human- rights activists, lawyers and others who have followed the debate. "It is our goal to release [Office of Legal Counsel] opinions to the maximum extent possible, while still protecting national security information and ensuring robust executive branch decision-making," said Tracy Schmaler, a Justice Department spokeswoman, in a statement. "We continue to review OLC memos for possible release and to consult with the departments and agencies to whom OLC provides legal advice about the appropriate path forward with respect to other memos." Jameel Jaffer, an ACLU lawyer who is overseeing the litigation, said he still remains hopeful that the Justice Department will release the memos later this month. He added, "This is arguably the most important test thus far of the Obama administration's commitment to transparency." From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Fri Apr 10 19:36:14 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Sat, 11 Apr 2009 10:36:14 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Big Takeover Message-ID: <49DFF40E.4060105@ashisuto.co.jp> The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution by Matt Taibbi Rollingstone.com (March 19 2009) It's over - we're officially, royally fucked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline - a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire. _____ The Dirty Dozen: Meet the bankers and brokers responsible for the financial crisis - and the officials who let them get away with it. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26868968/the_dirty_dozen _____ The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history - some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses). So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial - we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck - bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now", he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too". In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down". Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade US and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its "pneumonia" was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market. Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town - and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires. People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'etat. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations. The crisis was the coup de grace: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve - "our partners in the government", as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout. The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron - a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers. I. PATIENT ZERO The best way to understand the financial crisis is to understand the meltdown at AIG. AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of otherwise boring financial bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the mirror. This is a company that built a giant fortune across more than a century by betting on safety-conscious policyholders - people who wear seat belts and build houses on high ground - and then blew it all in a year or two by turning their entire balance sheet over to a guy who acted like making huge bets with other people's money would make his dick bigger. That guy - the Patient Zero of the global economic meltdown - was one Joseph Cassano, the head of a tiny, 400-person unit within the company called AIG Financial Products, or AIGFP. Cassano, a pudgy, balding Brooklyn College grad with beady eyes and way too much forehead, cut his teeth in the Eighties working for Mike Milken, the granddaddy of modern Wall Street debt alchemists. Milken, who pioneered the creative use of junk bonds, relied on messianic genius and a whole array of insider schemes to evade detection while wreaking financial disaster. Cassano, by contrast, was just a greedy little turd with a knack for selective accounting who ran his scam right out in the open, thanks to Washington's deregulation of the Wall Street casino. "It's all about the regulatory environment", says a government source involved with the AIG bailout. "These guys look for holes in the system, for ways they can do trades without government interference. Whatever is unregulated, all the action is going to pile into that." The mess Cassano created had its roots in an investment boom fueled in part by a relatively new type of financial instrument called a collateralized-debt obligation. A CDO is like a box full of diced-up assets. They can be anything: mortgages, corporate loans, aircraft loans, credit-card loans, even other CDOs. So as X mortgage holder pays his bill, and Y corporate debtor pays his bill, and Z credit-card debtor pays his bill, money flows into the box. The key idea behind a CDO is that there will always be at least some money in the box, regardless of how dicey the individual assets inside it are. No matter how you look at a single unemployed ex-con trying to pay the note on a six-bedroom house, he looks like a bad investment. But dump his loan in a box with a smorgasbord of auto loans, credit-card debt, corporate bonds and other crap, and you can be reasonably sure that somebody is going to pay up. Say $100 is supposed to come into the box every month. Even in an apocalypse, when $90 in payments might default, you'll still get $10. What the inventors of the CDO did is divide up the box into groups of investors and put that $10 into its own level, or "tranche". They then convinced ratings agencies like Moody's and S&P to give that top tranche the highest AAA rating - meaning it has close to zero credit risk. Suddenly, thanks to this financial seal of approval, banks had a way to turn their shittiest mortgages and other financial waste into investment-grade paper and sell them to institutional investors like pensions and insurance companies, which were forced by regulators to keep their portfolios as safe as possible. Because CDOs offered higher rates of return than truly safe products like Treasury bills, it was a win-win: Banks made a fortune selling CDOs, and big investors made much more holding them. The problem was, none of this was based on reality. "The banks knew they were selling crap", says a London-based trader from one of the bailed-out companies. To get AAA ratings, the CDOs relied not on their actual underlying assets but on crazy mathematical formulas that the banks cooked up to make the investments look safer than they really were. "They had some back room somewhere where a bunch of Indian guys who'd been doing nothing but math for God knows how many years would come up with some kind of model saying that this or that combination of debtors would only default once every 10,000 years", says one young trader who sold CDOs for a major investment bank. "It was nuts". Now that even the crappiest mortgages could be sold to conservative investors, the CDOs spurred a massive explosion of irresponsible and predatory lending. In fact, there was such a crush to underwrite CDOs that it became hard to find enough subprime mortgages - read: enough unemployed meth dealers willing to buy million-dollar homes for no money down - to fill them all. As banks and investors of all kinds took on more and more in CDOs and similar instruments, they needed some way to hedge their massive bets - some kind of insurance policy, in case the housing bubble burst and all that debt went south at the same time. This was particularly true for investment banks, many of which got stuck holding or "warehousing" CDOs when they wrote more than they could sell. And that's were Joe Cassano came in. Known for his boldness and arrogance, Cassano took over as chief of AIGFP in 2001. He was the favorite of Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, the head of AIG, who admired the younger man's hard-driving ways, even if neither he nor his successors fully understood exactly what it was that Cassano did. According to a source familiar with AIG's internal operations, Cassano basically told senior management, "You know insurance, I know investments, so you do what you do, and I'll do what I do - leave me alone". Given a free hand within the company, Cassano set out from his offices in London to sell a lucrative form of "insurance" to all those investors holding lots of CDOs. His tool of choice was another new financial instrument known as a credit-default swap, or CDS. The CDS was popularized by J P Morgan, in particular by a group of young, creative bankers who would later become known as the "Morgan Mafia", as many of them would go on to assume influential positions in the finance world. In 1994, in between booze and games of tennis at a resort in Boca Raton, Florida, the Morgan gang plotted a way to help boost the bank's returns. One of their goals was to find a way to lend more money, while working around regulations that required them to keep a set amount of cash in reserve to back those loans. What they came up with was an early version of the credit-default swap. In its simplest form, a CDS is just a bet on an outcome. Say Bank A writes a million-dollar mortgage to the Pope for a town house in the West Village. Bank A wants to hedge its mortgage risk in case the Pope can't make his monthly payments, so it buys CDS protection from Bank B, wherein it agrees to pay Bank B a premium of $1,000 a month for five years. In return, Bank B agrees to pay Bank A the full million-dollar value of the Pope's mortgage if he defaults. In theory, Bank A is covered if the Pope goes on a meth binge and loses his job. When Morgan presented their plans for credit swaps to regulators in the late Nineties, they argued that if they bought CDS protection for enough of the investments in their portfolio, they had effectively moved the risk off their books. Therefore, they argued, they should be allowed to lend more, without keeping more cash in reserve. A whole host of regulators - from the Federal Reserve to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency - accepted the argument, and Morgan was allowed to put more money on the street. What Cassano did was to transform the credit swaps that Morgan popularized into the world's largest bet on the housing boom. In theory, at least, there's nothing wrong with buying a CDS to insure your investments. Investors paid a premium to AIGFP, and in return the company promised to pick up the tab if the mortgage-backed CDOs went bust. But as Cassano went on a selling spree, the deals he made differed from traditional insurance in several significant ways. First, the party selling CDS protection didn't have to post any money upfront. When a $100 corporate bond is sold, for example, someone has to show 100 actual dollars. But when you sell a $100 CDS guarantee, you don't have to show a dime. So Cassano could sell investment banks billions in guarantees without having any single asset to back it up. Secondly, Cassano was selling so-called "naked" CDS deals. In a "naked" CDS, neither party actually holds the underlying loan. In other words, Bank B not only sells CDS protection to Bank A for its mortgage on the Pope - it turns around and sells protection to Bank C for the very same mortgage. This could go on ad nauseam: You could have Banks D through Z also betting on Bank A's mortgage. Unlike traditional insurance, Cassano was offering investors an opportunity to bet that someone else's house would burn down, or take out a term life policy on the guy with AIDS down the street. It was no different from gambling, the Wall Street version of a bunch of frat brothers betting on Jay Feely to make a field goal. Cassano was taking book for every bank that bet short on the housing market, but he didn't have the cash to pay off if the kick went wide. In a span of only seven years, Cassano sold some $500 billion worth of CDS protection, with at least $64 billion of that tied to the subprime mortgage market. AIG didn't have even a fraction of that amount of cash on hand to cover its bets, but neither did it expect it would ever need any reserves. So long as defaults on the underlying securities remained a highly unlikely proposition, AIG was essentially collecting huge and steadily climbing premiums by selling insurance for the disaster it thought would never come. Initially, at least, the revenues were enormous: AIGFP's returns went from $737 million in 1999 to $3.2 billion in 2005. Over the past seven years, the subsidiary's 400 employees were paid a total of $3.5 billion; Cassano himself pocketed at least $280 million in compensation. Everyone made their money - and then it all went to shit. II. THE REGULATORS Cassano's outrageous gamble wouldn't have been possible had he not had the good fortune to take over AIGFP just as Senator Phil Gramm - a grinning, laissez-faire ideologue from Texas - had finished engineering the most dramatic deregulation of the financial industry since Emperor Hien Tsung invented paper money in 806 AD. For years, Washington had kept a watchful eye on the nation's banks. Ever since the Great Depression, commercial banks - those that kept money on deposit for individuals and businesses - had not been allowed to double as investment banks, which raise money by issuing and selling securities. The Glass-Steagall Act, passed during the Depression, also prevented banks of any kind from getting into the insurance business. But in the late Nineties, a few years before Cassano took over AIGFP, all that changed. The Democrats, tired of getting slaughtered in the fundraising arena by Republicans, decided to throw off their old reliance on unions and interest groups and become more "business-friendly". Wall Street responded by flooding Washington with money, buying allies in both parties. In the ten-year period beginning in 1998, financial companies spent $1.7 billion on federal campaign contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists. They quickly got what they paid for. In 1999, Gramm co-sponsored a bill that repealed key aspects of the Glass-Steagall Act, smoothing the way for the creation of financial megafirms like Citigroup. The move did away with the built-in protections afforded by smaller banks. In the old days, a local banker knew the people whose loans were on his balance sheet: He wasn't going to give a million-dollar mortgage to a homeless meth addict, since he would have to keep that loan on his books. But a giant merged bank might write that loan and then sell it off to some fool in China, and who cared? The very next year, Gramm compounded the problem by writing a sweeping new law called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that made it impossible to regulate credit swaps as either gambling or securities. Commercial banks - which, thanks to Gramm, were now competing directly with investment banks for customers - were driven to buy credit swaps to loosen capital in search of higher yields. "By ruling that credit-default swaps were not gaming and not a security, the way was cleared for the growth of the market", said Eric Dinallo, head of the New York State Insurance Department. The blanket exemption meant that Joe Cassano could now sell as many CDS contracts as he wanted, building up as huge a position as he wanted, without anyone in government saying a word. "You have to remember, investment banks aren't in the business of making huge directional bets", says the government source involved in the AIG bailout. When investment banks write CDS deals, they hedge them. But insurance companies don't have to hedge. And that's what AIG did. "They just bet massively long on the housing market", says the source. "Billions and billions". In the biggest joke of all, Cassano's wheeling and dealing was regulated by the Office of Thrift Supervision, an agency that would prove to be defiantly uninterested in keeping watch over his operations. How a behemoth like AIG came to be regulated by the little-known and relatively small OTS is yet another triumph of the deregulatory instinct. Under another law passed in 1999, certain kinds of holding companies could choose the OTS as their regulator, provided they owned one or more thrifts (better known as savings-and-loans). Because the OTS was viewed as more compliant than the Fed or the Securities and Exchange Commission, companies rushed to reclassify themselves as thrifts. In 1999, AIG purchased a thrift in Delaware and managed to get approval for OTS regulation of its entire operation. Making matters even more hilarious, AIGFP - a London-based subsidiary of an American insurance company - ought to have been regulated by one of Europe's more stringent regulators, like Britain's Financial Services Authority. But the OTS managed to convince the Europeans that it had the muscle to regulate these giant companies. By 2007, the EU had conferred legitimacy to OTS supervision of three mammoth firms - GE, AIG and Ameriprise. That same year, as the subprime crisis was exploding, the Government Accountability Office criticized the OTS, noting a "disparity between the size of the agency and the diverse firms it oversees". Among other things, the GAO report noted that the entire OTS had only one insurance specialist on staff - and this despite the fact that it was the primary regulator for the world's largest insurer! "There's this notion that the regulators couldn't do anything to stop AIG", says a government official who was present during the bailout. "That's bullshit. What you have to understand is that these regulators have ultimate power. They can send you a letter and say, 'You don't exist anymore', and that's basically that. They don't even really need due process. The OTS could have said, 'We're going to pull your charter; we're going to pull your license; we're going to sue you'. And getting sued by your primary regulator is the kiss of death." When AIG finally blew up, the OTS regulator ostensibly in charge of overseeing the insurance giant - a guy named C K Lee - basically admitted that he had blown it. His mistake, Lee said, was that he believed all those credit swaps in Cassano's portfolio were "fairly benign products". Why? Because the company told him so. "The judgment the company was making was that there was no big credit risk", he explained. (Lee now works as Midwest region director of the OTS; the agency declined to make him available for an interview.) In early March, after the latest bailout of AIG, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner took what seemed to be a thinly veiled shot at the OTS, calling AIG a "huge, complex global insurance company attached to a very complicated investment bank/hedge fund that was allowed to build up without any adult supervision". But even without that "adult supervision", AIG might have been OK had it not been for a complete lack of internal controls. For six months before its meltdown, according to insiders, the company had been searching for a full-time chief financial officer and a chief risk-assessment officer, but never got around to hiring either. That meant that the eighteenth largest company in the world had no one checking to make sure its balance sheet was safe and no one keeping track of how much cash and assets the firm had on hand. The situation was so bad that when outside consultants were called in a few weeks before the bailout, senior executives were unable to answer even the most basic questions about their company - like, for instance, how much exposure the firm had to the residential-mortgage market. III. THE CRASH Ironically, when reality finally caught up to Cassano, it wasn't because the housing market crapped but because of AIG itself. Before 2005, the company's debt was rated triple-A, meaning he didn't need to post much cash to sell CDS protection: The solid creditworthiness of AIG's name was guarantee enough. But the company's crummy accounting practices eventually caused its credit rating to be downgraded, triggering clauses in the CDS contracts that forced Cassano to post substantially more collateral to back his deals. By the fall of 2007, it was evident that AIGFP's portfolio had turned poisonous, but like every good Wall Street huckster, Cassano schemed to keep his insane, Earth-swallowing gamble hidden from public view. That August, balls bulging, he announced to investors on a conference call that "it is hard for us, without being flippant, to even see a scenario within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing $1 in any of those transactions". As he spoke, his CDS portfolio was racking up $352 million in losses. When the growing credit crunch prompted senior AIG executives to re-examine its liabilities, a company accountant named Joseph St Denis became "gravely concerned" about the CDS deals and their potential for mass destruction. Cassano responded by personally forcing the poor sap out of the firm, telling him he was "deliberately excluded" from the financial review for fear that he might "pollute the process". The following February, when AIG posted $11.5 billion in annual losses, it announced the resignation of Cassano as head of AIGFP, saying an auditor had found a "material weakness" in the CDS portfolio. But amazingly, the company not only allowed Cassano to keep $34 million in bonuses, it kept him on as a consultant for $1 million a month. In fact, Cassano remained on the payroll and kept collecting his monthly million through the end of September 2008, even after taxpayers had been forced to hand AIG $85 billion to patch up his fuck-ups. When asked in October why the company still retained Cassano at his $1 million-a-month rate despite his role in the probable downfall of Western civilization, CEO Martin Sullivan told Congress with a straight face that AIG wanted to "retain the twenty-year knowledge that Mr Cassano had". (Cassano, who is apparently hiding out in his lavish town house near Harrods in London, could not be reached for comment.) What sank AIG in the end was another credit downgrade. Cassano had written so many CDS deals that when the company was facing another downgrade to its credit rating last September, from AA to A, it needed to post billions in collateral - not only more cash than it had on its balance sheet but more cash than it could raise even if it sold off every single one of its liquid assets. Even so, management dithered for days, not believing the company was in serious trouble. AIG was a dried-up prune, sapped of any real value, and its top executives didn't even know it. On the weekend of September 13th, AIG's senior leaders were summoned to the offices of the New York Federal Reserve. Regulators from Dinallo's insurance office were there, as was Geithner, then chief of the New York Fed. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who spent most of the weekend preoccupied with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, came in and out. Also present, for reasons that would emerge later, was Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs. The only relevant government office that wasn't represented was the regulator that should have been there all along: the OTS. "We sat down with Paulson, Geithner and Dinallo", says a person present at the negotiations. "I didn't see the OTS even once". On September 14th, according to another person present, Treasury officials presented Blankfein and other bankers in attendance with an absurd proposal: "They basically asked them to spend a day and check to see if they could raise the money privately". The laughably short time span to complete the mammoth task made the answer a foregone conclusion. At the end of the day, the bankers came back and told the government officials, gee, we checked, but we can't raise that much. And the bailout was on. A short time later, it came out that AIG was planning to pay some $90 million in deferred compensation to former executives, and to accelerate the payout of $277 million in bonuses to others - a move the company insisted was necessary to "retain key employees". When Congress balked, AIG canceled the $90 million in payments. Then, in January 2009, the company did it again. After all those years letting Cassano run wild, and after already getting caught paying out insane bonuses while on the public till, AIG decided to pay out another $450 million in bonuses. And to whom? To the 400 or so employees in Cassano's old unit, AIGFP, which is due to go out of business shortly! Yes, that's right, an average of $1.1 million in taxpayer-backed money apiece, to the very people who spent the past decade or so punching a hole in the fabric of the universe! "We, uh, needed to keep these highly expert people in their seats", AIG spokeswoman Christina Pretto says to me in early February. "But didn't these 'highly expert people' basically destroy your company?" I ask. Pretto protests, says this isn't fair. The employees at AIGFP have already taken pay cuts, she says. Not retaining them would dilute the value of the company even further, make it harder to wrap up the unit's operations in an orderly fashion. The bonuses are a nice comic touch highlighting one of the more outrageous tangents of the bailout age, namely the fact that, even with the planet in flames, some members of the Wall Street class can't even get used to the tragedy of having to fly coach. "These people need their trips to Baja, their spa treatments, their hand jobs", says an official involved in the AIG bailout, a serious look on his face, apparently not even half-kidding. "They don't function well without them". IV. THE POWER GRAB So that's the first step in wall street's power grab: making up things like credit-default swaps and collateralized-debt obligations, financial products so complex and inscrutable that ordinary American dumb people - to say nothing of federal regulators and even the CEOs of major corporations like AIG - are too intimidated to even try to understand them. That, combined with wise political investments, enabled the nation's top bankers to effectively scrap any meaningful oversight of the financial industry. In 1997 and 1998, the years leading up to the passage of Phil Gramm's fateful act that gutted Glass-Steagall, the banking, brokerage and insurance industries spent $350 million on political contributions and lobbying. Gramm alone - then the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee - collected $2.6 million in only five years. The law passed 90-8 in the Senate, with the support of 38 Democrats, including some names that might surprise you: Joe Biden, John Kerry, Tom Daschle, Dick Durbin, even John Edwards. The act helped create the too-big-to-fail financial behemoths like Citigroup, AIG and Bank of America - and in turn helped those companies slowly crush their smaller competitors, leaving the major Wall Street firms with even more money and power to lobby for further deregulatory measures. "We're moving to an oligopolistic situation", Kenneth Guenther, a top executive with the Independent Community Bankers of America, lamented after the Gramm measure was passed. The situation worsened in 2004, in an extraordinary move toward deregulation that never even got to a vote. At the time, the European Union was threatening to more strictly regulate the foreign operations of America's big investment banks if the US didn't strengthen its own oversight. So the top five investment banks got together on April 28th of that year and - with the helpful assistance of then-Goldman Sachs chief and future Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson - made a pitch to George Bush's SEC chief at the time, William Donaldson, himself a former investment banker. The banks generously volunteered to submit to new rules restricting them from engaging in excessively risky activity. In exchange, they asked to be released from any lending restrictions. The discussion about the new rules lasted just 55 minutes, and there was not a single representative of a major media outlet there to record the fateful decision. Donaldson OK'd the proposal, and the new rules were enough to get the EU to drop its threat to regulate the five firms. The only catch was, neither Donaldson nor his successor, Christopher Cox, actually did any regulating of the banks. They named a commission of seven people to oversee the five companies, whose combined assets came to total more than $4 trillion. But in the last year and a half of Cox's tenure, the group had no director and did not complete a single inspection. Great deal for the banks, which originally complained about being regulated by both Europe and the SEC, and ended up being regulated by no one. Once the capital requirements were gone, those top five banks went hog-wild, jumping ass-first into the then-raging housing bubble. One of those was Bear Stearns, which used its freedom to drown itself in bad mortgage loans. In the short period between the 2004 change and Bear's collapse, the firm's debt-to-equity ratio soared from 12-1 to an insane 33-1. Another culprit was Goldman Sachs, which also had the good fortune, around then, to see its CEO, a bald-headed Frankensteinian goon named Hank Paulson (who received an estimated $200 million tax deferral by joining the government), ascend to Treasury secretary. Freed from all capital restraints, sitting pretty with its man running the Treasury, Goldman jumped into the housing craze just like everyone else on Wall Street. Although it famously scored an $11 billion coup in 2007 when one of its trading units smartly shorted the housing market, the move didn't tell the whole story. In truth, Goldman still had a huge exposure come that fateful summer of 2008 - to none other than Joe Cassano. Goldman Sachs, it turns out, was Cassano's biggest customer, with $20 billion of exposure in Cassano's CDS book. Which might explain why Goldman chief Lloyd Blankfein was in the room with ex-Goldmanite Hank Paulson that weekend of September 13th, when the federal government was supposedly bailing out AIG. When asked why Blankfein was there, one of the government officials who was in the meeting shrugs. "One might say that it's because Goldman had so much exposure to AIGFP's portfolio", he says. "You'll never prove that, but one might suppose". Market analyst Eric Salzman is more blunt. "If AIG went down", he says, "there was a good chance Goldman would not be able to collect". The AIG bailout, in effect, was Goldman bailing out Goldman. Eventually, Paulson went a step further, elevating another ex-Goldmanite named Edward Liddy to run AIG - a company whose bailout money would be coming, in part, from the newly created TARP program, administered by another Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari. V. REPO MEN There are plenty of people who have noticed, in recent years, that when they lost their homes to foreclosure or were forced into bankruptcy because of crippling credit-card debt, no one in the government was there to rescue them. But when Goldman Sachs - a company whose average employee still made more than $350,000 last year, even in the midst of a depression - was suddenly faced with the possibility of losing money on the unregulated insurance deals it bought for its insane housing bets, the government was there in an instant to patch the hole. That's the essence of the bailout: rich bankers bailing out rich bankers, using the taxpayers' credit card. The people who have spent their lives cloistered in this Wall Street community aren't much for sharing information with the great unwashed. Because all of this shit is complicated, because most of us mortals don't know what the hell LIBOR is or how a REIT works or how to use the word "zero coupon bond" in a sentence without sounding stupid - well, then, the people who do speak this idiotic language cannot under any circumstances be bothered to explain it to us and instead spend a lot of time rolling their eyes and asking us to trust them. That roll of the eyes is a key part of the psychology of Paulsonism. The state is now being asked not just to call off its regulators or give tax breaks or funnel a few contracts to connected companies; it is intervening directly in the economy, for the sole purpose of preserving the influence of the megafirms. In essence, Paulson used the bailout to transform the government into a giant bureaucracy of entitled assholedom, one that would socialize "toxic" risks but keep both the profits and the management of the bailed-out firms in private hands. Moreover, this whole process would be done in secret, away from the prying eyes of NASCAR dads, broke-ass liberals who read translations of French novels, subprime mortgage holders and other such financial losers. Some aspects of the bailout were secretive to the point of absurdity. In fact, if you look closely at just a few lines in the Federal Reserve's weekly public disclosures, you can literally see the moment where a big chunk of your money disappeared for good. The H4 report (called "Factors Affecting Reserve Balances") summarizes the activities of the Fed each week. You can find it online, and it's pretty much the only thing the Fed ever tells the world about what it does. For the week ending February 18th, the number under the heading "Repurchase Agreements" on the table is zero. It's a significant number. Why? In the pre-crisis days, the Fed used to manage the money supply by periodically buying and selling securities on the open market through so-called Repurchase Agreements, or Repos. The Fed would typically dump $25 billion or so in cash onto the market every week, buying up Treasury bills, US securities and even mortgage-backed securities from institutions like Goldman Sachs and J P Morgan, who would then "repurchase" them in a short period of time, usually one to seven days. This was the Fed's primary mechanism for controlling interest rates: Buying up securities gives banks more money to lend, which makes interest rates go down. Selling the securities back to the banks reduces the money available for lending, which makes interest rates go up. If you look at the weekly H4 reports going back to the summer of 2007, you start to notice something alarming. At the start of the credit crunch, around August of that year, you see the Fed buying a few more Repos than usual - $33 billion or so. By November, as private-bank reserves were dwindling to alarmingly low levels, the Fed started injecting even more cash than usual into the economy: $48 billion. By late December, the number was up to $58 billion; by the following March, around the time of the Bear Stearns rescue, the Repo number had jumped to $77 billion. In the week of May 1st, 2008, the number was $115 billion - "out of control now", according to one congressional aide. For the rest of 2008, the numbers remained similarly in the stratosphere, the Fed pumping as much as $125 billion of these short-term loans into the economy - until suddenly, at the start of this year, the number drops to nothing. Zero. The reason the number has dropped to nothing is that the Fed had simply stopped using relatively transparent devices like repurchase agreements to pump its money into the hands of private companies. By early 2009, a whole series of new government operations had been invented to inject cash into the economy, most all of them completely secretive and with names you've never heard of. There is the Term Auction Facility, the Term Securities Lending Facility, the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, the Commercial Paper Funding Facility and a monster called the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (boasting the chat-room horror-show acronym ABCPMMMFLF). For good measure, there's also something called a Money Market Investor Funding Facility, plus three facilities called Maiden Lane I, II and III to aid bailout recipients like Bear Stearns and AIG. While the rest of America, and most of Congress, have been bugging out about the $700 billion bailout program called TARP, all of these newly created organisms in the Federal Reserve zoo have quietly been pumping not billions but trillions of dollars into the hands of private companies (at least $3 trillion so far in loans, with as much as $5.7 trillion more in guarantees of private investments). Although this technically isn't taxpayer money, it still affects taxpayers directly, because the activities of the Fed impact the economy as a whole. And this new, secretive activity by the Fed completely eclipses the TARP program in terms of its influence on the economy. No one knows who's getting that money or exactly how much of it is disappearing through these new holes in the hull of America's credit rating. Moreover, no one can really be sure if these new institutions are even temporary at all - or whether they are being set up as permanent, state-aided crutches to Wall Street, designed to systematically suck bad investments off the ledgers of irresponsible lenders. "They're supposed to be temporary", says Paul-Martin Foss, an aide to Representative Ron Paul. "But we keep getting notices every six months or so that they're being renewed. They just sort of quietly announce it." None other than disgraced senator Ted Stevens was the poor sap who made the unpleasant discovery that if Congress didn't like the Fed handing trillions of dollars to banks without any oversight, Congress could apparently go fuck itself - or so said the law. When Stevens asked the GAO about what authority Congress has to monitor the Fed, he got back a letter citing an obscure statute that nobody had ever heard of before: the Accounting and Auditing Act of 1950. The relevant section, 31 USC 714(b), dictated that congressional audits of the Federal Reserve may not include "deliberations, decisions and actions on monetary policy matters". The exemption, as Foss notes, "basically includes everything". According to the law, in other words, the Fed simply cannot be audited by Congress. Or by anyone else, for that matter. VI. WINNERS AND LOSERS Stevens isn't the only person in Congress to be given the finger by the Fed. In January, when Representative Alan Grayson of Florida asked Federal Reserve vice chairman Donald Kohn where all the money went - only $1.2 trillion had vanished by then - Kohn gave Grayson a classic eye roll, saying he would be "very hesitant" to name names because it might discourage banks from taking the money. "Has that ever happened?" Grayson asked. "Have people ever said, 'We will not take your $100 billion because people will find out about it?'" "Well, we said we would not publish the names of the borrowers, so we have no test of that", Kohn answered, visibly annoyed with Grayson's meddling. Grayson pressed on, demanding to know on what terms the Fed was lending the money. Presumably it was buying assets and making loans, but no one knew how it was pricing those assets - in other words, no one knew what kind of deal it was striking on behalf of taxpayers. So when Grayson asked if the purchased assets were "marked to market" - a methodology that assigns a concrete value to assets, based on the market rate on the day they are traded - Kohn answered, mysteriously, "The ones that have market values are marked to market". The implication was that the Fed was purchasing derivatives like credit swaps or other instruments that were basically impossible to value objectively - paying real money for God knows what. "Well, how much of them don't have market values?" asked Grayson. "How much of them are worthless?" "None are worthless", Kohn snapped. "Then why don't you mark them to market?" Grayson demanded. "Well", Kohn sighed, "we are marking the ones to market that have market values". In essence, the Fed was telling Congress to lay off and let the experts handle things. "It's like buying a car in a used-car lot without opening the hood, and saying, 'I think it's fine'", says Dan Fuss, an analyst with the investment firm Loomis Sayles. "The salesman says, 'Don't worry about it. Trust me.' It'll probably get us out of the lot, but how much farther? None of us knows." When one considers the comparatively extensive system of congressional checks and balances that goes into the spending of every dollar in the budget via the normal appropriations process, what's happening in the Fed amounts to something truly revolutionary - a kind of shadow government with a budget many times the size of the normal federal outlay, administered dictatorially by one man, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. "We spend hours and hours and hours arguing over $10 million amendments on the floor of the Senate, but there has been no discussion about who has been receiving this $3 trillion", says Senator Bernie Sanders. "It is beyond comprehension". Count Sanders among those who don't buy the argument that Wall Street firms shouldn't have to face being outed as recipients of public funds, that making this information public might cause investors to panic and dump their holdings in these firms. "I guess if we made that public, they'd go on strike or something", he muses. And the Fed isn't the only arm of the bailout that has closed ranks. The Treasury, too, has maintained incredible secrecy surrounding its implementation even of the TARP program, which was mandated by Congress. To this date, no one knows exactly what criteria the Treasury Department used to determine which banks received bailout funds and which didn't - particularly the first $350 billion given out under Bush appointee Hank Paulson. The situation with the first TARP payments grew so absurd that when the Congressional Oversight Panel, charged with monitoring the bailout money, sent a query to Paulson asking how he decided whom to give money to, Treasury responded - and this isn't a joke - by directing the panel to a copy of the TARP application form on its website. Elizabeth Warren, the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, was struck nearly speechless by the response. "Do you believe that?" she says incredulously. "That's not what we had in mind". Another member of Congress, who asked not to be named, offers his own theory about the TARP process. "I think basically if you knew Hank Paulson, you got the money", he says. This cozy arrangement created yet another opportunity for big banks to devour market share at the expense of smaller regional lenders. While all the bigwigs at Citi and Goldman and Bank of America who had Paulson on speed-dial got bailed out right away - remember that TARP was originally passed because money had to be lent right now, that day, that minute, to stave off emergency - many small banks are still waiting for help. Five months into the TARP program, some not only haven't received any funds, they haven't even gotten a call back about their applications. "There's definitely a feeling among community bankers that no one up there cares much if they make it or not", says Tanya Wheeless, president of the Arizona Bankers Association. Which, of course, is exactly the opposite of what should be happening, since small, regional banks are far less guilty of the kinds of predatory lending that sank the economy. "They're not giving out subprime loans or easy credit", says Wheeless. "At the community level, it's much more bread-and-butter banking". Nonetheless, the lion's share of the bailout money has gone to the larger, so-called "systemically important" banks. "It's like Treasury is picking winners and losers", says one state banking official who asked not to be identified. This itself is a hugely important political development. In essence, the bailout accelerated the decline of regional community lenders by boosting the political power of their giant national competitors. Which, when you think about it, is insane: What had brought us to the brink of collapse in the first place was this relentless instinct for building ever-larger megacompanies, passing deregulatory measures to gradually feed all the little fish in the sea to an ever-shrinking pool of Bigger Fish. To fix this problem, the government should have slowly liquidated these monster, too-big-to-fail firms and broken them down to smaller, more manageable companies. Instead, federal regulators closed ranks and used an almost completely secret bailout process to double down on the same faulty, merger-happy thinking that got us here in the first place, creating a constellation of megafirms under government control that are even bigger, more unwieldy and more crammed to the gills with systemic risk. In essence, Paulson and his cronies turned the federal government into one gigantic, half-opaque holding company, one whose balance sheet includes the world's most appallingly large and risky hedge fund, a controlling stake in a dying insurance giant, huge investments in a group of teetering megabanks, and shares here and there in various auto-finance companies, student loans, and other failing businesses. Like AIG, this new federal holding company is a firm that has no mechanism for auditing itself and is run by leaders who have very little grasp of the daily operations of its disparate subsidiary operations. In other words, it's AIG's rip-roaringly shitty business model writ almost inconceivably massive - to echo Geithner, a huge, complex global company attached to a very complicated investment bank/hedge fund that's been allowed to build up without adult supervision. How much of what kinds of crap is actually on our balance sheet, and what did we pay for it? When exactly will the rent come due, when will the money run out? Does anyone know what the hell is going on? And on the linear spectrum of capitalism to socialism, where exactly are we now? Is there a dictionary word that even describes what we are now? It would be funny, if it weren't such a nightmare. VII. YOU DON'T GET IT The real question from here is whether the Obama administration is going to move to bring the financial system back to a place where sanity is restored and the general public can have a say in things or whether the new financial bureaucracy will remain obscure, secretive and hopelessly complex. It might not bode well that Geithner, Obama's Treasury secretary, is one of the architects of the Paulson bailouts; as chief of the New York Fed, he helped orchestrate the Goldman-friendly AIG bailout and the secretive Maiden Lane facilities used to funnel funds to the dying company. Neither did it look good when Geithner - himself a protege of notorious Goldman alum John Thain, the Merrill Lynch chief who paid out billions in bonuses after the state spent billions bailing out his firm - picked a former Goldman lobbyist named Mark Patterson to be his top aide. In fact, most of Geithner's early moves reek strongly of Paulsonism. He has continually talked about partnering with private investors to create a so-called "bad bank" that would systemically relieve private lenders of bad assets - the kind of massive, opaque, quasi-private bureaucratic nightmare that Paulson specialized in. Geithner even refloated a Paulson proposal to use TALF, one of the Fed's new facilities, to essentially lend cheap money to hedge funds to invest in troubled banks while practically guaranteeing them enormous profits. God knows exactly what this does for the taxpayer, but hedge-fund managers sure love the idea. "This is exactly what the financial system needs", said Andrew Feldstein, CEO of Blue Mountain Capital and one of the Morgan Mafia. Strangely, there aren't many people who don't run hedge funds who have expressed anything like that kind of enthusiasm for Geithner's ideas. As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system - transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below. The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the ninety-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit forty. "But wait a minute", you say to them. "No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what's left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?" But before you even finish saying that, they're rolling their eyes, because You Don't Get It. These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they're on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests. Good luck with that, America. And enjoy tax season. [From Issue 1075 - April 02 2009] http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/ TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From suzannedk at gmail.com Sat Apr 11 01:08:10 2009 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Sat, 11 Apr 2009 09:08:10 +0200 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Big Takeover In-Reply-To: <49DFF40E.4060105@ashisuto.co.jp> References: <49DFF40E.4060105@ashisuto.co.jp> Message-ID: There is a crimes against humanity element to this reporting that is royally missing. Laughingstock? The reality of the mass rage and starvation world-wide this meltdown has and will cause in response is missing. That mass rage is the reason it was done so thoroughly, not the other way around. The U.S. World War Empire then swings into action, by way of millions of new NATO troops and carefully placed human elements and foreign policy legalized agreements and or secret coups...saving the world from itself. Suzanne suzannedk at gmail.com On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 3:36 AM, Bill Totten wrote: > > The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How > Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution > > by Matt Taibbi > > Rollingstone.com (March 19 2009) > > > It's over - we're officially, royally fucked. No empire can survive > being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a > few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this > country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury > Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again > going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying > insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national > decline - a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of > American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself > chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a > dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of > the British Empire. > > _____ > > The Dirty Dozen: Meet the bankers and brokers responsible for the > financial crisis - and the officials who let them get away with it. > http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26868968/the_dirty_dozen > > _____ > > > The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the > largest quarterly loss in American corporate history - some $61.7 > billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more > than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income > for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a > second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that > America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat > to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport > to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and > explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no > mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held > life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the > national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was > smaller than AIG's 2008 losses). > > So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of > gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst > part about it is that we're still in denial - we still think this is > some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the > group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the > American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the > party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck - > bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. > Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a > cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now", he > said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too". In a pathetic > attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by > the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements > down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down". > > Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and > sick from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He > conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade > systematically scheming to evade US and international regulators, or > that one of the causes of its "pneumonia" was making colossal, > world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic > and completely unregulated derivatives market. > > Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the > Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed > money all over town - and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in > this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high > rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all > casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires. > > People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this > bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the > worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together > a kind of revolution, a coup d'etat. They cemented and formalized a > political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual > takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who > used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken > financial regulations. > > The crisis was the coup de grace: Given virtually free rein over the > economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then > cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean > up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like > AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip > on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve - "our partners in the > government", as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness > after the most recent bailout. > > The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is > thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at > the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street > class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see > is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government > into a kind of giant Enron - a huge, impenetrable black box filled with > self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits > at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, > previously known as taxpayers. > > I. PATIENT ZERO > > The best way to understand the financial crisis is to understand the > meltdown at AIG. AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of > otherwise boring financial bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the > mirror. This is a company that built a giant fortune across more than a > century by betting on safety-conscious policyholders - people who wear > seat belts and build houses on high ground - and then blew it all in a > year or two by turning their entire balance sheet over to a guy who > acted like making huge bets with other people's money would make his > dick bigger. > > That guy - the Patient Zero of the global economic meltdown - was one > Joseph Cassano, the head of a tiny, 400-person unit within the company > called AIG Financial Products, or AIGFP. Cassano, a pudgy, balding > Brooklyn College grad with beady eyes and way too much forehead, cut his > teeth in the Eighties working for Mike Milken, the granddaddy of modern > Wall Street debt alchemists. Milken, who pioneered the creative use of > junk bonds, relied on messianic genius and a whole array of insider > schemes to evade detection while wreaking financial disaster. Cassano, > by contrast, was just a greedy little turd with a knack for selective > accounting who ran his scam right out in the open, thanks to > Washington's deregulation of the Wall Street casino. "It's all about the > regulatory environment", says a government source involved with the AIG > bailout. "These guys look for holes in the system, for ways they can do > trades without government interference. Whatever is unregulated, all the > action is going to pile into that." > > The mess Cassano created had its roots in an investment boom fueled in > part by a relatively new type of financial instrument called a > collateralized-debt obligation. A CDO is like a box full of diced-up > assets. They can be anything: mortgages, corporate loans, aircraft > loans, credit-card loans, even other CDOs. So as X mortgage holder pays > his bill, and Y corporate debtor pays his bill, and Z credit-card debtor > pays his bill, money flows into the box. > > The key idea behind a CDO is that there will always be at least some > money in the box, regardless of how dicey the individual assets inside > it are. No matter how you look at a single unemployed ex-con trying to > pay the note on a six-bedroom house, he looks like a bad investment. But > dump his loan in a box with a smorgasbord of auto loans, credit-card > debt, corporate bonds and other crap, and you can be reasonably sure > that somebody is going to pay up. Say $100 is supposed to come into the > box every month. Even in an apocalypse, when $90 in payments might > default, you'll still get $10. What the inventors of the CDO did is > divide up the box into groups of investors and put that $10 into its own > level, or "tranche". They then convinced ratings agencies like Moody's > and S&P to give that top tranche the highest AAA rating - meaning it has > close to zero credit risk. > > Suddenly, thanks to this financial seal of approval, banks had a way to > turn their shittiest mortgages and other financial waste into > investment-grade paper and sell them to institutional investors like > pensions and insurance companies, which were forced by regulators to > keep their portfolios as safe as possible. Because CDOs offered higher > rates of return than truly safe products like Treasury bills, it was a > win-win: Banks made a fortune selling CDOs, and big investors made much > more holding them. > > The problem was, none of this was based on reality. "The banks knew they > were selling crap", says a London-based trader from one of the > bailed-out companies. To get AAA ratings, the CDOs relied not on their > actual underlying assets but on crazy mathematical formulas that the > banks cooked up to make the investments look safer than they really > were. "They had some back room somewhere where a bunch of Indian guys > who'd been doing nothing but math for God knows how many years would > come up with some kind of model saying that this or that combination of > debtors would only default once every 10,000 years", says one young > trader who sold CDOs for a major investment bank. "It was nuts". > > Now that even the crappiest mortgages could be sold to conservative > investors, the CDOs spurred a massive explosion of irresponsible and > predatory lending. In fact, there was such a crush to underwrite CDOs > that it became hard to find enough subprime mortgages - read: enough > unemployed meth dealers willing to buy million-dollar homes for no money > down - to fill them all. As banks and investors of all kinds took on > more and more in CDOs and similar instruments, they needed some way to > hedge their massive bets - some kind of insurance policy, in case the > housing bubble burst and all that debt went south at the same time. This > was particularly true for investment banks, many of which got stuck > holding or "warehousing" CDOs when they wrote more than they could sell. > And that's were Joe Cassano came in. > > Known for his boldness and arrogance, Cassano took over as chief of > AIGFP in 2001. He was the favorite of Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, the head > of AIG, who admired the younger man's hard-driving ways, even if neither > he nor his successors fully understood exactly what it was that Cassano > did. According to a source familiar with AIG's internal operations, > Cassano basically told senior management, "You know insurance, I know > investments, so you do what you do, and I'll do what I do - leave me > alone". Given a free hand within the company, Cassano set out from his > offices in London to sell a lucrative form of "insurance" to all those > investors holding lots of CDOs. His tool of choice was another new > financial instrument known as a credit-default swap, or CDS. > > The CDS was popularized by J P Morgan, in particular by a group of > young, creative bankers who would later become known as the "Morgan > Mafia", as many of them would go on to assume influential positions in > the finance world. In 1994, in between booze and games of tennis at a > resort in Boca Raton, Florida, the Morgan gang plotted a way to help > boost the bank's returns. One of their goals was to find a way to lend > more money, while working around regulations that required them to keep > a set amount of cash in reserve to back those loans. What they came up > with was an early version of the credit-default swap. > > In its simplest form, a CDS is just a bet on an outcome. Say Bank A > writes a million-dollar mortgage to the Pope for a town house in the > West Village. Bank A wants to hedge its mortgage risk in case the Pope > can't make his monthly payments, so it buys CDS protection from Bank B, > wherein it agrees to pay Bank B a premium of $1,000 a month for five > years. In return, Bank B agrees to pay Bank A the full million-dollar > value of the Pope's mortgage if he defaults. In theory, Bank A is > covered if the Pope goes on a meth binge and loses his job. > > When Morgan presented their plans for credit swaps to regulators in the > late Nineties, they argued that if they bought CDS protection for enough > of the investments in their portfolio, they had effectively moved the > risk off their books. Therefore, they argued, they should be allowed to > lend more, without keeping more cash in reserve. A whole host of > regulators - from the Federal Reserve to the Office of the Comptroller > of the Currency - accepted the argument, and Morgan was allowed to put > more money on the street. > > What Cassano did was to transform the credit swaps that Morgan > popularized into the world's largest bet on the housing boom. In theory, > at least, there's nothing wrong with buying a CDS to insure your > investments. Investors paid a premium to AIGFP, and in return the > company promised to pick up the tab if the mortgage-backed CDOs went > bust. But as Cassano went on a selling spree, the deals he made differed > from traditional insurance in several significant ways. First, the party > selling CDS protection didn't have to post any money upfront. When a > $100 corporate bond is sold, for example, someone has to show 100 actual > dollars. But when you sell a $100 CDS guarantee, you don't have to show > a dime. So Cassano could sell investment banks billions in guarantees > without having any single asset to back it up. > > Secondly, Cassano was selling so-called "naked" CDS deals. In a "naked" > CDS, neither party actually holds the underlying loan. In other words, > Bank B not only sells CDS protection to Bank A for its mortgage on the > Pope - it turns around and sells protection to Bank C for the very same > mortgage. This could go on ad nauseam: You could have Banks D through Z > also betting on Bank A's mortgage. Unlike traditional insurance, Cassano > was offering investors an opportunity to bet that someone else's house > would burn down, or take out a term life policy on the guy with AIDS > down the street. It was no different from gambling, the Wall Street > version of a bunch of frat brothers betting on Jay Feely to make a field > goal. Cassano was taking book for every bank that bet short on the > housing market, but he didn't have the cash to pay off if the kick went > wide. > > In a span of only seven years, Cassano sold some $500 billion worth of > CDS protection, with at least $64 billion of that tied to the subprime > mortgage market. AIG didn't have even a fraction of that amount of cash > on hand to cover its bets, but neither did it expect it would ever need > any reserves. So long as defaults on the underlying securities remained > a highly unlikely proposition, AIG was essentially collecting huge and > steadily climbing premiums by selling insurance for the disaster it > thought would never come. > > Initially, at least, the revenues were enormous: AIGFP's returns went > from $737 million in 1999 to $3.2 billion in 2005. Over the past seven > years, the subsidiary's 400 employees were paid a total of $3.5 billion; > Cassano himself pocketed at least $280 million in compensation. Everyone > made their money - and then it all went to shit. > > II. THE REGULATORS > > Cassano's outrageous gamble wouldn't have been possible had he not had > the good fortune to take over AIGFP just as Senator Phil Gramm - a > grinning, laissez-faire ideologue from Texas - had finished engineering > the most dramatic deregulation of the financial industry since Emperor > Hien Tsung invented paper money in 806 AD. For years, Washington had > kept a watchful eye on the nation's banks. Ever since the Great > Depression, commercial banks - those that kept money on deposit for > individuals and businesses - had not been allowed to double as > investment banks, which raise money by issuing and selling securities. > The Glass-Steagall Act, passed during the Depression, also prevented > banks of any kind from getting into the insurance business. > > But in the late Nineties, a few years before Cassano took over AIGFP, > all that changed. The Democrats, tired of getting slaughtered in the > fundraising arena by Republicans, decided to throw off their old > reliance on unions and interest groups and become more > "business-friendly". Wall Street responded by flooding Washington with > money, buying allies in both parties. In the ten-year period beginning > in 1998, financial companies spent $1.7 billion on federal campaign > contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists. They quickly got > what they paid for. In 1999, Gramm co-sponsored a bill that repealed key > aspects of the Glass-Steagall Act, smoothing the way for the creation of > financial megafirms like Citigroup. The move did away with the built-in > protections afforded by smaller banks. In the old days, a local banker > knew the people whose loans were on his balance sheet: He wasn't going > to give a million-dollar mortgage to a homeless meth addict, since he > would have to keep that loan on his books. But a giant merged bank might > write that loan and then sell it off to some fool in China, and who cared? > > The very next year, Gramm compounded the problem by writing a sweeping > new law called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that made it > impossible to regulate credit swaps as either gambling or securities. > Commercial banks - which, thanks to Gramm, were now competing directly > with investment banks for customers - were driven to buy credit swaps to > loosen capital in search of higher yields. "By ruling that > credit-default swaps were not gaming and not a security, the way was > cleared for the growth of the market", said Eric Dinallo, head of the > New York State Insurance Department. > > The blanket exemption meant that Joe Cassano could now sell as many CDS > contracts as he wanted, building up as huge a position as he wanted, > without anyone in government saying a word. "You have to remember, > investment banks aren't in the business of making huge directional > bets", says the government source involved in the AIG bailout. When > investment banks write CDS deals, they hedge them. But insurance > companies don't have to hedge. And that's what AIG did. "They just bet > massively long on the housing market", says the source. "Billions and > billions". > > In the biggest joke of all, Cassano's wheeling and dealing was regulated > by the Office of Thrift Supervision, an agency that would prove to be > defiantly uninterested in keeping watch over his operations. How a > behemoth like AIG came to be regulated by the little-known and > relatively small OTS is yet another triumph of the deregulatory > instinct. Under another law passed in 1999, certain kinds of holding > companies could choose the OTS as their regulator, provided they owned > one or more thrifts (better known as savings-and-loans). Because the OTS > was viewed as more compliant than the Fed or the Securities and Exchange > Commission, companies rushed to reclassify themselves as thrifts. In > 1999, AIG purchased a thrift in Delaware and managed to get approval for > OTS regulation of its entire operation. > > Making matters even more hilarious, AIGFP - a London-based subsidiary of > an American insurance company - ought to have been regulated by one of > Europe's more stringent regulators, like Britain's Financial Services > Authority. But the OTS managed to convince the Europeans that it had the > muscle to regulate these giant companies. By 2007, the EU had conferred > legitimacy to OTS supervision of three mammoth firms - GE, AIG and > Ameriprise. > > That same year, as the subprime crisis was exploding, the Government > Accountability Office criticized the OTS, noting a "disparity between > the size of the agency and the diverse firms it oversees". Among other > things, the GAO report noted that the entire OTS had only one insurance > specialist on staff - and this despite the fact that it was the primary > regulator for the world's largest insurer! > > "There's this notion that the regulators couldn't do anything to stop > AIG", says a government official who was present during the bailout. > "That's bullshit. What you have to understand is that these regulators > have ultimate power. They can send you a letter and say, 'You don't > exist anymore', and that's basically that. They don't even really need > due process. The OTS could have said, 'We're going to pull your charter; > we're going to pull your license; we're going to sue you'. And getting > sued by your primary regulator is the kiss of death." > > When AIG finally blew up, the OTS regulator ostensibly in charge of > overseeing the insurance giant - a guy named C K Lee - basically > admitted that he had blown it. His mistake, Lee said, was that he > believed all those credit swaps in Cassano's portfolio were "fairly > benign products". Why? Because the company told him so. "The judgment > the company was making was that there was no big credit risk", he > explained. (Lee now works as Midwest region director of the OTS; the > agency declined to make him available for an interview.) > > In early March, after the latest bailout of AIG, Treasury Secretary > Timothy Geithner took what seemed to be a thinly veiled shot at the OTS, > calling AIG a "huge, complex global insurance company attached to a very > complicated investment bank/hedge fund that was allowed to build up > without any adult supervision". But even without that "adult > supervision", AIG might have been OK had it not been for a complete lack > of internal controls. For six months before its meltdown, according to > insiders, the company had been searching for a full-time chief financial > officer and a chief risk-assessment officer, but never got around to > hiring either. That meant that the eighteenth largest company in the > world had no one checking to make sure its balance sheet was safe and no > one keeping track of how much cash and assets the firm had on hand. The > situation was so bad that when outside consultants were called in a few > weeks before the bailout, senior executives were unable to answer even > the most basic questions about their company - like, for instance, how > much exposure the firm had to the residential-mortgage market. > > III. THE CRASH > > Ironically, when reality finally caught up to Cassano, it wasn't because > the housing market crapped but because of AIG itself. Before 2005, the > company's debt was rated triple-A, meaning he didn't need to post much > cash to sell CDS protection: The solid creditworthiness of AIG's name > was guarantee enough. But the company's crummy accounting practices > eventually caused its credit rating to be downgraded, triggering clauses > in the CDS contracts that forced Cassano to post substantially more > collateral to back his deals. > > By the fall of 2007, it was evident that AIGFP's portfolio had turned > poisonous, but like every good Wall Street huckster, Cassano schemed to > keep his insane, Earth-swallowing gamble hidden from public view. That > August, balls bulging, he announced to investors on a conference call > that "it is hard for us, without being flippant, to even see a scenario > within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing $1 in any of > those transactions". As he spoke, his CDS portfolio was racking up $352 > million in losses. When the growing credit crunch prompted senior AIG > executives to re-examine its liabilities, a company accountant named > Joseph St Denis became "gravely concerned" about the CDS deals and their > potential for mass destruction. Cassano responded by personally forcing > the poor sap out of the firm, telling him he was "deliberately excluded" > from the financial review for fear that he might "pollute the process". > > The following February, when AIG posted $11.5 billion in annual losses, > it announced the resignation of Cassano as head of AIGFP, saying an > auditor had found a "material weakness" in the CDS portfolio. But > amazingly, the company not only allowed Cassano to keep $34 million in > bonuses, it kept him on as a consultant for $1 million a month. In fact, > Cassano remained on the payroll and kept collecting his monthly million > through the end of September 2008, even after taxpayers had been forced > to hand AIG $85 billion to patch up his fuck-ups. When asked in October > why the company still retained Cassano at his $1 million-a-month rate > despite his role in the probable downfall of Western civilization, CEO > Martin Sullivan told Congress with a straight face that AIG wanted to > "retain the twenty-year knowledge that Mr Cassano had". (Cassano, who is > apparently hiding out in his lavish town house near Harrods in London, > could not be reached for comment.) > > What sank AIG in the end was another credit downgrade. Cassano had > written so many CDS deals that when the company was facing another > downgrade to its credit rating last September, from AA to A, it needed > to post billions in collateral - not only more cash than it had on its > balance sheet but more cash than it could raise even if it sold off > every single one of its liquid assets. Even so, management dithered for > days, not believing the company was in serious trouble. AIG was a > dried-up prune, sapped of any real value, and its top executives didn't > even know it. > > On the weekend of September 13th, AIG's senior leaders were summoned to > the offices of the New York Federal Reserve. Regulators from Dinallo's > insurance office were there, as was Geithner, then chief of the New York > Fed. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who spent most of the weekend > preoccupied with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, came in and out. Also > present, for reasons that would emerge later, was Lloyd Blankfein, CEO > of Goldman Sachs. The only relevant government office that wasn't > represented was the regulator that should have been there all along: the > OTS. > > "We sat down with Paulson, Geithner and Dinallo", says a person present > at the negotiations. "I didn't see the OTS even once". > > On September 14th, according to another person present, Treasury > officials presented Blankfein and other bankers in attendance with an > absurd proposal: "They basically asked them to spend a day and check to > see if they could raise the money privately". The laughably short time > span to complete the mammoth task made the answer a foregone conclusion. > At the end of the day, the bankers came back and told the government > officials, gee, we checked, but we can't raise that much. And the > bailout was on. > > A short time later, it came out that AIG was planning to pay some $90 > million in deferred compensation to former executives, and to accelerate > the payout of $277 million in bonuses to others - a move the company > insisted was necessary to "retain key employees". When Congress balked, > AIG canceled the $90 million in payments. > > Then, in January 2009, the company did it again. After all those years > letting Cassano run wild, and after already getting caught paying out > insane bonuses while on the public till, AIG decided to pay out another > $450 million in bonuses. And to whom? To the 400 or so employees in > Cassano's old unit, AIGFP, which is due to go out of business shortly! > Yes, that's right, an average of $1.1 million in taxpayer-backed money > apiece, to the very people who spent the past decade or so punching a > hole in the fabric of the universe! > > "We, uh, needed to keep these highly expert people in their seats", AIG > spokeswoman Christina Pretto says to me in early February. > > "But didn't these 'highly expert people' basically destroy your > company?" I ask. > > Pretto protests, says this isn't fair. The employees at AIGFP have > already taken pay cuts, she says. Not retaining them would dilute the > value of the company even further, make it harder to wrap up the unit's > operations in an orderly fashion. > > The bonuses are a nice comic touch highlighting one of the more > outrageous tangents of the bailout age, namely the fact that, even with > the planet in flames, some members of the Wall Street class can't even > get used to the tragedy of having to fly coach. "These people need their > trips to Baja, their spa treatments, their hand jobs", says an official > involved in the AIG bailout, a serious look on his face, apparently not > even half-kidding. "They don't function well without them". > > IV. THE POWER GRAB > > So that's the first step in wall street's power grab: making up things > like credit-default swaps and collateralized-debt obligations, financial > products so complex and inscrutable that ordinary American dumb people - > to say nothing of federal regulators and even the CEOs of major > corporations like AIG - are too intimidated to even try to understand > them. That, combined with wise political investments, enabled the > nation's top bankers to effectively scrap any meaningful oversight of > the financial industry. In 1997 and 1998, the years leading up to the > passage of Phil Gramm's fateful act that gutted Glass-Steagall, the > banking, brokerage and insurance industries spent $350 million on > political contributions and lobbying. Gramm alone - then the chairman of > the Senate Banking Committee - collected $2.6 million in only five > years. The law passed 90-8 in the Senate, with the support of 38 > Democrats, including some names that might surprise you: Joe Biden, John > Kerry, Tom Daschle, Dick Durbin, even John Edwards. > > The act helped create the too-big-to-fail financial behemoths like > Citigroup, AIG and Bank of America - and in turn helped those companies > slowly crush their smaller competitors, leaving the major Wall Street > firms with even more money and power to lobby for further deregulatory > measures. "We're moving to an oligopolistic situation", Kenneth > Guenther, a top executive with the Independent Community Bankers of > America, lamented after the Gramm measure was passed. > > The situation worsened in 2004, in an extraordinary move toward > deregulation that never even got to a vote. At the time, the European > Union was threatening to more strictly regulate the foreign operations > of America's big investment banks if the US didn't strengthen its own > oversight. So the top five investment banks got together on April 28th > of that year and - with the helpful assistance of then-Goldman Sachs > chief and future Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson - made a pitch to > George Bush's SEC chief at the time, William Donaldson, himself a former > investment banker. The banks generously volunteered to submit to new > rules restricting them from engaging in excessively risky activity. In > exchange, they asked to be released from any lending restrictions. The > discussion about the new rules lasted just 55 minutes, and there was not > a single representative of a major media outlet there to record the > fateful decision. > > Donaldson OK'd the proposal, and the new rules were enough to get the EU > to drop its threat to regulate the five firms. The only catch was, > neither Donaldson nor his successor, Christopher Cox, actually did any > regulating of the banks. They named a commission of seven people to > oversee the five companies, whose combined assets came to total more > than $4 trillion. But in the last year and a half of Cox's tenure, the > group had no director and did not complete a single inspection. Great > deal for the banks, which originally complained about being regulated by > both Europe and the SEC, and ended up being regulated by no one. > > Once the capital requirements were gone, those top five banks went > hog-wild, jumping ass-first into the then-raging housing bubble. One of > those was Bear Stearns, which used its freedom to drown itself in bad > mortgage loans. In the short period between the 2004 change and Bear's > collapse, the firm's debt-to-equity ratio soared from 12-1 to an insane > 33-1. Another culprit was Goldman Sachs, which also had the good > fortune, around then, to see its CEO, a bald-headed Frankensteinian goon > named Hank Paulson (who received an estimated $200 million tax deferral > by joining the government), ascend to Treasury secretary. > > Freed from all capital restraints, sitting pretty with its man running > the Treasury, Goldman jumped into the housing craze just like everyone > else on Wall Street. Although it famously scored an $11 billion coup in > 2007 when one of its trading units smartly shorted the housing market, > the move didn't tell the whole story. In truth, Goldman still had a huge > exposure come that fateful summer of 2008 - to none other than Joe Cassano. > > Goldman Sachs, it turns out, was Cassano's biggest customer, with $20 > billion of exposure in Cassano's CDS book. Which might explain why > Goldman chief Lloyd Blankfein was in the room with ex-Goldmanite Hank > Paulson that weekend of September 13th, when the federal government was > supposedly bailing out AIG. > > When asked why Blankfein was there, one of the government officials who > was in the meeting shrugs. "One might say that it's because Goldman had > so much exposure to AIGFP's portfolio", he says. "You'll never prove > that, but one might suppose". > > Market analyst Eric Salzman is more blunt. "If AIG went down", he says, > "there was a good chance Goldman would not be able to collect". The AIG > bailout, in effect, was Goldman bailing out Goldman. > > Eventually, Paulson went a step further, elevating another ex-Goldmanite > named Edward Liddy to run AIG - a company whose bailout money would be > coming, in part, from the newly created TARP program, administered by > another Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari. > > V. REPO MEN > > There are plenty of people who have noticed, in recent years, that when > they lost their homes to foreclosure or were forced into bankruptcy > because of crippling credit-card debt, no one in the government was > there to rescue them. But when Goldman Sachs - a company whose average > employee still made more than $350,000 last year, even in the midst of a > depression - was suddenly faced with the possibility of losing money on > the unregulated insurance deals it bought for its insane housing bets, > the government was there in an instant to patch the hole. That's the > essence of the bailout: rich bankers bailing out rich bankers, using the > taxpayers' credit card. > > The people who have spent their lives cloistered in this Wall Street > community aren't much for sharing information with the great unwashed. > Because all of this shit is complicated, because most of us mortals > don't know what the hell LIBOR is or how a REIT works or how to use the > word "zero coupon bond" in a sentence without sounding stupid - well, > then, the people who do speak this idiotic language cannot under any > circumstances be bothered to explain it to us and instead spend a lot of > time rolling their eyes and asking us to trust them. > > That roll of the eyes is a key part of the psychology of Paulsonism. The > state is now being asked not just to call off its regulators or give tax > breaks or funnel a few contracts to connected companies; it is > intervening directly in the economy, for the sole purpose of preserving > the influence of the megafirms. In essence, Paulson used the bailout to > transform the government into a giant bureaucracy of entitled > assholedom, one that would socialize "toxic" risks but keep both the > profits and the management of the bailed-out firms in private hands. > Moreover, this whole process would be done in secret, away from the > prying eyes of NASCAR dads, broke-ass liberals who read translations of > French novels, subprime mortgage holders and other such financial losers. > > Some aspects of the bailout were secretive to the point of absurdity. In > fact, if you look closely at just a few lines in the Federal Reserve's > weekly public disclosures, you can literally see the moment where a big > chunk of your money disappeared for good. The H4 report (called "Factors > Affecting Reserve Balances") summarizes the activities of the Fed each > week. You can find it online, and it's pretty much the only thing the > Fed ever tells the world about what it does. For the week ending > February 18th, the number under the heading "Repurchase Agreements" on > the table is zero. It's a significant number. > > Why? In the pre-crisis days, the Fed used to manage the money supply by > periodically buying and selling securities on the open market through > so-called Repurchase Agreements, or Repos. The Fed would typically dump > $25 billion or so in cash onto the market every week, buying up Treasury > bills, US securities and even mortgage-backed securities from > institutions like Goldman Sachs and J P Morgan, who would then > "repurchase" them in a short period of time, usually one to seven days. > This was the Fed's primary mechanism for controlling interest rates: > Buying up securities gives banks more money to lend, which makes > interest rates go down. Selling the securities back to the banks reduces > the money available for lending, which makes interest rates go up. > > If you look at the weekly H4 reports going back to the summer of 2007, > you start to notice something alarming. At the start of the credit > crunch, around August of that year, you see the Fed buying a few more > Repos than usual - $33 billion or so. By November, as private-bank > reserves were dwindling to alarmingly low levels, the Fed started > injecting even more cash than usual into the economy: $48 billion. By > late December, the number was up to $58 billion; by the following March, > around the time of the Bear Stearns rescue, the Repo number had jumped > to $77 billion. In the week of May 1st, 2008, the number was $115 > billion - "out of control now", according to one congressional aide. For > the rest of 2008, the numbers remained similarly in the stratosphere, > the Fed pumping as much as $125 billion of these short-term loans into > the economy - until suddenly, at the start of this year, the number > drops to nothing. Zero. > > The reason the number has dropped to nothing is that the Fed had simply > stopped using relatively transparent devices like repurchase agreements > to pump its money into the hands of private companies. By early 2009, a > whole series of new government operations had been invented to inject > cash into the economy, most all of them completely secretive and with > names you've never heard of. There is the Term Auction Facility, the > Term Securities Lending Facility, the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, > the Commercial Paper Funding Facility and a monster called the > Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity > Facility (boasting the chat-room horror-show acronym ABCPMMMFLF). For > good measure, there's also something called a Money Market Investor > Funding Facility, plus three facilities called Maiden Lane I, II and III > to aid bailout recipients like Bear Stearns and AIG. > > While the rest of America, and most of Congress, have been bugging out > about the $700 billion bailout program called TARP, all of these newly > created organisms in the Federal Reserve zoo have quietly been pumping > not billions but trillions of dollars into the hands of private > companies (at least $3 trillion so far in loans, with as much as $5.7 > trillion more in guarantees of private investments). Although this > technically isn't taxpayer money, it still affects taxpayers directly, > because the activities of the Fed impact the economy as a whole. And > this new, secretive activity by the Fed completely eclipses the TARP > program in terms of its influence on the economy. > > No one knows who's getting that money or exactly how much of it is > disappearing through these new holes in the hull of America's credit > rating. Moreover, no one can really be sure if these new institutions > are even temporary at all - or whether they are being set up as > permanent, state-aided crutches to Wall Street, designed to > systematically suck bad investments off the ledgers of irresponsible > lenders. > > "They're supposed to be temporary", says Paul-Martin Foss, an aide to > Representative Ron Paul. "But we keep getting notices every six months > or so that they're being renewed. They just sort of quietly announce it." > > None other than disgraced senator Ted Stevens was the poor sap who made > the unpleasant discovery that if Congress didn't like the Fed handing > trillions of dollars to banks without any oversight, Congress could > apparently go fuck itself - or so said the law. When Stevens asked the > GAO about what authority Congress has to monitor the Fed, he got back a > letter citing an obscure statute that nobody had ever heard of before: > the Accounting and Auditing Act of 1950. The relevant section, 31 USC > 714(b), dictated that congressional audits of the Federal Reserve may > not include "deliberations, decisions and actions on monetary policy > matters". The exemption, as Foss notes, "basically includes everything". > According to the law, in other words, the Fed simply cannot be audited > by Congress. Or by anyone else, for that matter. > > VI. WINNERS AND LOSERS > > Stevens isn't the only person in Congress to be given the finger by the > Fed. In January, when Representative Alan Grayson of Florida asked > Federal Reserve vice chairman Donald Kohn where all the money went - > only $1.2 trillion had vanished by then - Kohn gave Grayson a classic > eye roll, saying he would be "very hesitant" to name names because it > might discourage banks from taking the money. > > "Has that ever happened?" Grayson asked. "Have people ever said, 'We > will not take your $100 billion because people will find out about it?'" > > "Well, we said we would not publish the names of the borrowers, so we > have no test of that", Kohn answered, visibly annoyed with Grayson's > meddling. > > Grayson pressed on, demanding to know on what terms the Fed was lending > the money. Presumably it was buying assets and making loans, but no one > knew how it was pricing those assets - in other words, no one knew what > kind of deal it was striking on behalf of taxpayers. So when Grayson > asked if the purchased assets were "marked to market" - a methodology > that assigns a concrete value to assets, based on the market rate on the > day they are traded - Kohn answered, mysteriously, "The ones that have > market values are marked to market". The implication was that the Fed > was purchasing derivatives like credit swaps or other instruments that > were basically impossible to value objectively - paying real money for > God knows what. > > "Well, how much of them don't have market values?" asked Grayson. "How > much of them are worthless?" > > "None are worthless", Kohn snapped. > > "Then why don't you mark them to market?" Grayson demanded. > > "Well", Kohn sighed, "we are marking the ones to market that have market > values". > > In essence, the Fed was telling Congress to lay off and let the experts > handle things. "It's like buying a car in a used-car lot without opening > the hood, and saying, 'I think it's fine'", says Dan Fuss, an analyst > with the investment firm Loomis Sayles. "The salesman says, 'Don't worry > about it. Trust me.' It'll probably get us out of the lot, but how much > farther? None of us knows." > > When one considers the comparatively extensive system of congressional > checks and balances that goes into the spending of every dollar in the > budget via the normal appropriations process, what's happening in the > Fed amounts to something truly revolutionary - a kind of shadow > government with a budget many times the size of the normal federal > outlay, administered dictatorially by one man, Fed chairman Ben > Bernanke. "We spend hours and hours and hours arguing over $10 million > amendments on the floor of the Senate, but there has been no discussion > about who has been receiving this $3 trillion", says Senator Bernie > Sanders. "It is beyond comprehension". > > Count Sanders among those who don't buy the argument that Wall Street > firms shouldn't have to face being outed as recipients of public funds, > that making this information public might cause investors to panic and > dump their holdings in these firms. "I guess if we made that public, > they'd go on strike or something", he muses. > > And the Fed isn't the only arm of the bailout that has closed ranks. The > Treasury, too, has maintained incredible secrecy surrounding its > implementation even of the TARP program, which was mandated by Congress. > To this date, no one knows exactly what criteria the Treasury Department > used to determine which banks received bailout funds and which didn't - > particularly the first $350 billion given out under Bush appointee Hank > Paulson. > > The situation with the first TARP payments grew so absurd that when the > Congressional Oversight Panel, charged with monitoring the bailout > money, sent a query to Paulson asking how he decided whom to give money > to, Treasury responded - and this isn't a joke - by directing the panel > to a copy of the TARP application form on its website. Elizabeth Warren, > the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, was struck nearly > speechless by the response. > > "Do you believe that?" she says incredulously. "That's not what we had > in mind". > > Another member of Congress, who asked not to be named, offers his own > theory about the TARP process. "I think basically if you knew Hank > Paulson, you got the money", he says. > > This cozy arrangement created yet another opportunity for big banks to > devour market share at the expense of smaller regional lenders. While > all the bigwigs at Citi and Goldman and Bank of America who had Paulson > on speed-dial got bailed out right away - remember that TARP was > originally passed because money had to be lent right now, that day, that > minute, to stave off emergency - many small banks are still waiting for > help. Five months into the TARP program, some not only haven't received > any funds, they haven't even gotten a call back about their applications. > > "There's definitely a feeling among community bankers that no one up > there cares much if they make it or not", says Tanya Wheeless, president > of the Arizona Bankers Association. > > Which, of course, is exactly the opposite of what should be happening, > since small, regional banks are far less guilty of the kinds of > predatory lending that sank the economy. "They're not giving out > subprime loans or easy credit", says Wheeless. "At the community level, > it's much more bread-and-butter banking". > > Nonetheless, the lion's share of the bailout money has gone to the > larger, so-called "systemically important" banks. "It's like Treasury is > picking winners and losers", says one state banking official who asked > not to be identified. > > This itself is a hugely important political development. In essence, the > bailout accelerated the decline of regional community lenders by > boosting the political power of their giant national competitors. > > Which, when you think about it, is insane: What had brought us to the > brink of collapse in the first place was this relentless instinct for > building ever-larger megacompanies, passing deregulatory measures to > gradually feed all the little fish in the sea to an ever-shrinking pool > of Bigger Fish. To fix this problem, the government should have slowly > liquidated these monster, too-big-to-fail firms and broken them down to > smaller, more manageable companies. Instead, federal regulators closed > ranks and used an almost completely secret bailout process to double > down on the same faulty, merger-happy thinking that got us here in the > first place, creating a constellation of megafirms under government > control that are even bigger, more unwieldy and more crammed to the > gills with systemic risk. > > In essence, Paulson and his cronies turned the federal government into > one gigantic, half-opaque holding company, one whose balance sheet > includes the world's most appallingly large and risky hedge fund, a > controlling stake in a dying insurance giant, huge investments in a > group of teetering megabanks, and shares here and there in various > auto-finance companies, student loans, and other failing businesses. > Like AIG, this new federal holding company is a firm that has no > mechanism for auditing itself and is run by leaders who have very little > grasp of the daily operations of its disparate subsidiary operations. > > In other words, it's AIG's rip-roaringly shitty business model writ > almost inconceivably massive - to echo Geithner, a huge, complex global > company attached to a very complicated investment bank/hedge fund that's > been allowed to build up without adult supervision. How much of what > kinds of crap is actually on our balance sheet, and what did we pay for > it? When exactly will the rent come due, when will the money run out? > Does anyone know what the hell is going on? And on the linear spectrum > of capitalism to socialism, where exactly are we now? Is there a > dictionary word that even describes what we are now? It would be funny, > if it weren't such a nightmare. > > VII. YOU DON'T GET IT > > The real question from here is whether the Obama administration is going > to move to bring the financial system back to a place where sanity is > restored and the general public can have a say in things or whether the > new financial bureaucracy will remain obscure, secretive and hopelessly > complex. It might not bode well that Geithner, Obama's Treasury > secretary, is one of the architects of the Paulson bailouts; as chief of > the New York Fed, he helped orchestrate the Goldman-friendly AIG bailout > and the secretive Maiden Lane facilities used to funnel funds to the > dying company. Neither did it look good when Geithner - himself a > protege of notorious Goldman alum John Thain, the Merrill Lynch chief > who paid out billions in bonuses after the state spent billions bailing > out his firm - picked a former Goldman lobbyist named Mark Patterson to > be his top aide. > > In fact, most of Geithner's early moves reek strongly of Paulsonism. He > has continually talked about partnering with private investors to create > a so-called "bad bank" that would systemically relieve private lenders > of bad assets - the kind of massive, opaque, quasi-private bureaucratic > nightmare that Paulson specialized in. Geithner even refloated a Paulson > proposal to use TALF, one of the Fed's new facilities, to essentially > lend cheap money to hedge funds to invest in troubled banks while > practically guaranteeing them enormous profits. > > God knows exactly what this does for the taxpayer, but hedge-fund > managers sure love the idea. "This is exactly what the financial system > needs", said Andrew Feldstein, CEO of Blue Mountain Capital and one of > the Morgan Mafia. Strangely, there aren't many people who don't run > hedge funds who have expressed anything like that kind of enthusiasm for > Geithner's ideas. > > As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. > By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in > a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall > Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into > non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it > used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: > Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are > financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even > more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, > revolutionary change in our political system - transforming a democracy > into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above > and clueless customers below. > > The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall > Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and > lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes > have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how > hard they work, the ninety-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, > the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit forty. > > "But wait a minute", you say to them. "No one ever asked you to stay up > all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what's > left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, > irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell > clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer > money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?" > > But before you even finish saying that, they're rolling their eyes, > because You Don't Get It. These people were never about anything except > turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they're > on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes > to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire > political future now rests. > > Good luck with that, America. And enjoy tax season. > > [From Issue 1075 - April 02 2009] > > http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/ > > > TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click > on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this > essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ > > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From suzannedk at gmail.com Sat Apr 11 01:15:08 2009 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Sat, 11 Apr 2009 09:15:08 +0200 Subject: [R-G] `Holy Hell' Over Torture Memos In-Reply-To: <1173578715.2239961239396470694.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> References: <20090410004117.C6438200F4@viewsic.mayfirst.org> <1173578715.2239961239396470694.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: Doomed. Obama is not commited to transparent government except in his private life. Suzanne suzannedk at gmail.com On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 10:47 PM, Sid Shniad wrote: > `Holy Hell' Over Torture Memos > > Attorney General Eric Holder wants to release > classified Bush-era interrogation memos. But U.S. > intel officials are fiercely lobbying the White > House to block him from moving forward. > > By Michael Isikoff > Newsweek Web Exclusive > > April 3, 2009 > > A fierce internal battle within the White House over the > disclosure of internal Justice Department interrogation memos > is shaping up as a major test of the Obama administration's > commitment to opening up government files about Bush-era > counterterrorism policy. > > As reported by NEWSWEEK, the White House last month had > accepted a recommendation from Attorney General Eric Holder > to declassify and publicly release three 2005 memos that > graphically describe harsh interrogation techniques approved > for the CIA to use against Al Qaeda suspects. But after the > story, U.S. intelligence officials, led by senior national- > security aide John Brennan, mounted an intense campaign to > get the decision reversed, according to a senior > administration official familiar with the debate. "Holy hell > has broken loose over this," said the official, who asked not > to be identified because of political sensitivities. > > Brennan is a former senior CIA official who was once > considered by Obama for agency director but withdrew his name > late last year after public criticism that he was too close > to past officials involved in Bush administration decisions. > Brennan, who now oversees intelligence issues at the National > Security Council, argued that release of the memos could > embarrass foreign intelligence services who cooperated with > the CIA, either by participating in overseas "extraordinary > renditions" of high-level detainees or housing them in > overseas "black site" prisons. > > Brennan succeeded in persuading CIA Director Leon Panetta to > become "engaged" in his efforts to block release, according > to the senior official. Their joint arguments stalled plans > to declassify the memos even though White House counsel > Gregory Craig had already signed off on Holder's > recommendation that they should be disclosed, according to an > official and another government source familiar with the > debate. No final decision has been made, and it is likely > Obama will have to resolve the matter, according to the > sources who spoke to NEWSWEEK. > > The continued internal debate explains the Justice > Department's decision late Thursday to ask a federal judge > for another two-week delay (until April 16) to file a final > response in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the > American Civil Liberties Union seeking the release of the > memos. The ACLU agreed to the two- week delay only after > Justice officials represented that "high-level Government > officials will consider for possible release" the three 2005 > memos as well as another Aug. 1, 2002, memo on torture, that > has long been sought by congressional committees and members > of Congress, according to a motion filed by Justice lawyers > with U.S. Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein in New York, who is > overseeing the case. > > The 2002 memo, written by former Justice lawyers Jay Bybee > and John Yoo, concluded that waterboarding and other harsh > interrogation techniques could be used against Qaeda suspects > without violating a federal law that prohibits torture. That > memo was publicly withdrawn by the Justice Department in 2004 > after its existence became publicly known and sparked a > public controversy. But a new set of Justice lawyers-led by > Steven Bradbury, the newly installed chief of the > department's Office of Legal Counsel-later secretly authored > additional memos in the spring of 2005 that essentially > approved the same techniques, permitting the agency to > barrage terror suspects with a combination of physical and > psychological tactics, including head-slapping and frigid > temperatures, according to a 2007 New York Times account. > Those memos concluded that the harsh interrogation techniques > used by the CIA would not violate Geneva Conventions > restrictions on "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of > prisoners. > > The internal controversy over the memos is viewed as > especially significant in light of the larger debate over > whether there should be "accountability" for Bush- era > tactics in the war on terror, including calls in Congress for > a "truth commission" to investigate the matter. Until now, > that debate has been cramped by the fact that most of the key > material-including those that describe precisely what tactics > were used by the CIA in interrogations and what happened to > high-level suspects in U.S. custody-has been classified, > making it at least theoretically a federal crime for > officials with direct knowledge of these issues to publicly > discuss them. > > If the Justice memos were to be declassified, it would free > up a host of former officials to talk about precisely what > took place during White House and Justice Department meetings > over the issue of interrogations. If the White House were to > overrule Holder and side with Brennan and Panetta, it could > essentially shut the door on attempts to have a full public > airing of these issues, according to human- rights activists, > lawyers and others who have followed the debate. > > "It is our goal to release [Office of Legal Counsel] opinions > to the maximum extent possible, while still protecting > national security information and ensuring robust executive > branch decision-making," said Tracy Schmaler, a Justice > Department spokeswoman, in a statement. "We continue to > review OLC memos for possible release and to consult with the > departments and agencies to whom OLC provides legal advice > about the appropriate path forward with respect to other > memos." > > Jameel Jaffer, an ACLU lawyer who is overseeing the > litigation, said he still remains hopeful that the Justice > Department will release the memos later this month. He added, > "This is arguably the most important test thus far of the > Obama administration's commitment to transparency." > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Sat Apr 11 06:53:28 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Sat, 11 Apr 2009 21:53:28 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Burning our Bridges to the XXI Century Message-ID: <49E092C8.8030806@ashisuto.co.jp> by Dmitry Orlov Club Orlov (April 06 2009) The future does not resemble the past - or does it? When the lights go out, people burn candles and oil lamps, just like they used to before the electric grid came into existence. No longer accustomed to working with open flame, they tend to set things on fire, and for a while, until they regain this experience or until natural selection whittles away the truly incompetent, the neighborhood is a constant blaze. When we find out that the supermarket is out of food and that the cupboard is bare, we hunt, fish, forage, plant kitchen gardens, and start experimenting with raising poultry and rabbits. Those who are incapable of doing so, or who feel that such lowly pursuits are beneath their dignity, become dependent on the charity of those who are more adaptable, or starve. As modernity runs out of resources (those photons sequestered eons ago in fossil form, now released as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere) patterns of life naturally retreat to their pre-modern forms. If there are no more sneakers from China, we sew moccasins or whittle clogs. If we are resource-poor but resourceful, we can still weave basket-like shoes out of birch bark, stuffed with straw for insulation, called lapti. If we are truly destitute and feckless to boot, then we go barefoot. It seems commonsense to accept this reversion to norm as natural, and to strive to have enough of whatever we are going to need, be it tools for working leather, a stock of paraffin, seeds, fishing tackle, and a myriad of other similar items that comprised the pre-industrial survival kit. The last thing we should want to do is to throw these things away at first sign of economic distress and for trivial reasons. And yet that seems to be the prevailing pattern. For instance, if the expectation is that foreigners will no longer want to trade their dwindling crude oil endowment in exchange for worthless US Dollars, and that the US will lose access to two-thirds of its liquid hydrocarbons, it would make sense to make some provisions for raising food and for moving freight. Since a John Deere won't run on hay, that calls for some horses. Furthermore, now is a perfect time for farms to get "horsed up" because so many horse-owners can no longer afford the luxury of keeping a horse, and it is possible to buy a horse very, very cheaply. Many horse-owners would be perfectly happy to donate their horse and take a tax write-off rather than see their beloved pet turned into glue. Instead, horses are trucked to rending facilities across the border in Mexico, to endure incredible suffering while in transit, and then to be incompetently hacked up with machetes. Before the advent of fossil fuels, freight that could not be moved by horse and wagon moved by sail. It would therefore make perfect sense that we keep all the sailboats we currently have, because they will surely be pressed into use once other transportation options are no longer available. Keeping a sailboat afloat is not particularly expensive; there are protected coves where a boat can be kept anchored free of charge, provided it is tended to once in a while. The smaller, trailerable boats are also useful, and can keep for years on the hard, under a tarp in someone's back yard. And yet what is happening now is that sailboat owners, unable to pay the slip fees and the upkeep of their luxury toy, abandon it, simply letting it float away and eventually sink, with its mast protruding out of the water at low tide, or to wash up on a beach, where the surf pounds it into rubble. Even if the boat itself is unsuited for any practical purpose (and, thanks to the combined detrimental effects of sport and luxury on the sailboat market, there are far too many of these) then at the very least they could be stripped of Dacron sailcloth, stainless steel and bronze fittings, lead ballast, marine-grade stranded copper wiring, aluminum spars, and many other items which are both very useful and unlikely to be manufactured in the future in an economy that runs on wind, hay and firewood. The remaining hollow fiberglass husks could make interesting, long-lasting treehouses. Not that, in general, there is a lack of effort to save things. We are making an effort to save financial institutions, which are the ultimate ephemera of industrial civilization, and are absolutely guaranteed to have no reason to continue into a future in which debt, denominated in future earnings that will be meager at best, and money, which will only hold its value for as long as it guarantees access to sources of pure, concentrated energy, all steadily dwindle to nothing. It is as if the doctors decided to only try to save persistent vegetative quadriplegics with terminal cancer, or if the environmentalists decided that the endangered species list only has room for one animal: the vampire bat. It would make much more sense to try to save small businesses, such as family businesses that serve local communities, because there is a good chance that they will find a use in the future, or at least facilitate the transition. Instead, we are squandering the remaining resources on the various dinosaurs of the industrial age. I believe in providing a hopeful vision of the future as much as I believe in providing a sufficiently horrific vision of the present for it to be, in my opinion, a realistic one. However, I am beginning to feel somewhat thwarted in my efforts by this new compulsion sweeping the land to shoot oneself in the foot while simultaneously setting one's hair on fire. The only hope I can offer you today is that this current trend toward suicidal stupidity is temporary, and that it will run its course long before we completely ruin our chances for an orderly regression. http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/04/burning-our-bridges-to-xxi-century.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shniad at sfu.ca Sat Apr 11 17:00:44 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sat, 11 Apr 2009 16:00:44 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Colombia: Fact-Finding Mission "Shocked" In-Reply-To: <003e01c9baf3$f7cd3590$2f01a8c0@DAD> Message-ID: <1162775293.2340511239490844192.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> From: prensaruralenglish at gruposyahoo.com On Behalf Of Agencia Prensa Rural Sent: Saturday, April 11, 2009 2:22 PM Subject: [prensaruralenglish] Colombia: Fact-Finding Mission "Shocked" Colombia: Fact-Finding Mission "Shocked" Constanza Vieira Friday 10 April 2009 A delegation of seven British Labour members of parliament and 10 trade union leaders from the U.S., Canada and Britain said they were in a "state of shock" over what they heard during a week-long fact-finding mission to Colombia. In a strongly worded statement read out in Spanish at a press conference Wednesday in the Colombian Congress, the parliamentary and labour mission accused the government of right-wing President ?lvaro Uribe of being an "accomplice of crimes against humanity." Crimes against humanity are defined by Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), based in this city in the Netherlands, as "any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack: murder; extermination; enslavement; deportation?.; imprisonment?; torture; rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilisation?; persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender (grounds)...; (or) enforced disappearance of persons". The Rome Statute went into effect in Colombia in November 2002 for crimes against humanity, as well as genocide, which is defined in Article 6. But this country availed itself of Article 124, which allows a signatory state to refuse to accept the jurisdiction of the ICC with respect to war crimes "'alleged to have been committed by its nationals or in its territory" for seven years ? a period that ends in November this year. For now, the ICC prosecutors are keeping Colombia under observation. "We have no doubts, given the evidence received, that the Colombian government of ?lvaro Uribe and the security forces are accomplices in human rights abuses," says the communiqu? read out by British Labour MP Sandra Osborne, a member of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. "We are also convinced that the murderous activities of the paramilitaries are approved of and actively supported by the government and the army," the statement says, referring to the far-right militias commanded by drug lords, which partially demobilised after negotiations with the Uribe administration. These crimes are aggravated by the impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators, and the judicial system's failure to prosecute the criminals and those who gave the orders, it adds. Colombia has been in the grip of a civil war since 1964, when the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrillas rose up in arms. The paramilitary groups, in their present form, emerged in the 1980s to combat the leftist insurgents alongside the government forces. An October 2008 report by the London-based rights watchdog Amnesty International states that 1,300 civilians were killed outside of combat in 2006 and 1,400 in 2007, while some 270,000 people fled their homes in the first half of 2008 - a 41 percent increase in forced displacement with respect to the previous year. According to the European Union, only eight out of 100 homicides lead to a conviction in Colombia, and at least 1,200 civilians have been killed since mid-2002 and passed off by the Colombian military as guerrillas or paramilitaries killed in action. In its seven-day visit to Colombia, the mission gathered information on human rights abuses and violations of labour rights, and met with a wide range of actors from Colombian society, covering civic, political, judicial and military interests and including trade unionists, students, teachers, indigenous people, peasant farmers, trade union lawyers, human rights defenders and released FARC hostages, said the statement read by Osborne. Since 2008, the FARC has released eight politicians it had taken hostage with the hopes of negotiating with the government a swap of hostages for imprisoned rebels. Three other political hostages, including former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, escaped or were rescued, along with a number of soldiers and police being held by the guerrillas. The parliamentary and labour delegation travelled to the eastern oil-producing department (province) of Arauca, on the border with Venezuela, where they heard the personal accounts of local people affected by the war, and visited the women's prison and imprisoned local human rights activist Mart?n Sandoval. They also met with Uribe and high-level officials, but their reaction was not published locally. Instead of imprisoning the real criminals, the government has imprisoned trade unionists, members of the political opposition, and human rights defenders like Sandoval, says the statement, which calls for his "immediate release, and the immediate release of other political prisoners and trade unionists." The members of the mission announced that when they return to their countries, "we will be calling for an immediate end to all military and political support for the Colombian government." They also urged that no free trade agreement with Colombia be approved until human and labour rights are respected in an internationally verifiable manner. The free trade deal negotiated with the United States has been held up by Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. Congress over similar concerns about violence against trade unionists in Colombia. But in Canada, the conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper tabled the Canada-Colombia free trade agreement on Mar. 26, which means parliament had 21 days from that date to debate its ratification. And the second round of talks between three Andean countries ? Colombia, Peru and Ecuador ? and the European Union on a free trade deal took place in mid-March in Lima, Peru. The fact-finding mission warned that it would publicly expose the complicity of multinational corporations in violations of human and labour rights in Colombia. The members of the mission said they would work to put an end to the criminalisation of legitimate, democratic opposition, support eventual peace talks and a hostage-prisoner swap between the FARC and the government, and work to bring to a halt the extrajudicial executions of civilians passed off as battlefield casualties by the Colombian army. The delegation included Labour MP Peter Kilfoyle, a former British defence minister who resigned in 2000, unhappy with some of then Prime Minister Tony Blair's policies. The mission was organised by Justice for Colombia, a British NGO created in 2002 ? a year when 184 trade unionists were killed in this country, considered the most dangerous place in the world to be a labour activist. Justice for Colombia is a coalition of 40 British trade unions, along with trade councils, NGOs, academics and MPs, "who support the Colombian people and trade union movement in their struggle for peace with social justice." In September 2007, Justice for Colombia drew the ire of Colombian Defence Minister Juan Manuel Santos when it urged Britain's recently inaugurated Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his foreign secretary to halt military aid to Bogot?. British military aid to Colombia is second only to U.S. aid, of which Colombia is the third biggest recipient, after Israel and Egypt. The 2007 "End British Military Aid to Colombia Petition" was signed by all of the then members of the Labour Party National Executive Committee who did not form part of the government, all of the Labour MPs in the European Parliament, dozens of British Labour MPs, and all of the trade unions affiliated with the Labour Party. "Colombians tend to believe this kind of declaration is extremely important, and that something will start to happen now," like a change in policies of military aid to the government, human rights activist Lilia Solano told IPS by telephone from Bogot?. "But we have to wait and see what results will be achieved; we aren't sure it will be that effective," she added. ----------------- http://prensarural.org/spip/spip.php?mot95 From shniad at sfu.ca Sat Apr 11 17:16:12 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sat, 11 Apr 2009 16:16:12 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Condemn meeting of Jewish institutions in Colombia In-Reply-To: <003f01c9ba4b$8af586f0$2f01a8c0@DAD> Message-ID: <1708915330.2341451239491772421.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> From: Enrique Ferro [mailto:ferro.enrique at gmail.com] Sent: Friday, April 10, 2009 8:13 PM Subject: Condemn meeting of Jewish institutions in Colombia Condemn meeting of Jewish institutions in Colombia The undersigned Latin American Jews CONDEMN the planned meeting of Jewish institutional and community leaders in Colombia in May. According to sources, the Colombian President, ?lvaro Uribe, is not only sponsoring this gathering, but also giving the opening speech. It is doubtful that, only a few months after the brutal attack of Gaza by the Israeli military, these leaders would want to be sponsored by Uribe, a declared ally of the state of Israel and an admirer of genocidal policies and practices employed against Palestinian resistance. The political and military relationship of these two countries dates back many years. In the 80s, for example, mercenaries led by retired Colonel Yair Klein provided training in terrorist tactics to Colombian paramilitaries. Klein?s entry into the country was covered up by a high military commander and his services were paid for by the so called ?Medell?n?s cartel?, in particular Pablo Escobar?s. The Israeli company ISREX, who contacted these mercenaries, has also been selling arms to the Colombian Defense Department since the end of the previous decade. Although the court has ordered his extradition, neither the Colombian nor the Israeli government took any action to capture or extradite him. Their negligence instead rewards these trainers of criminals of humanity. The narco-paramilitary boss Carlos Casta?o publicly acknowledged that he himself had been trained in terrorist tactics under Colombian military orders in Israel. Casta?o, alleged to be dead though many believe that he is living in Israel, is responsible for thousands of horrific crimes against civilians. The city of Monter?a in the northern part of the country was Casta?o?s refuge. The Israeli Ambassador was regularly seen in the mid-90s in this Colombian city. Israeli General, Israel Ziv, who has been denounced by many human rights organizations, currently advises the Colombian government on security issues. Ziv is the ex-commander of the Gaza regiment and ex-commander of operations. Several retired officials of the Israeli army are still under his command. According to some Colombian press, this group is always accompanied by two Colombian colonels and three Argentine translators as none of them speak Spanish. Their consulting contract is ten million dollars and was signed by both the Colombian Defense Department and the co-owner of the newspaper, El Tiempo, Manuel Santos while they were traveling through Jerusalem in February 2008. The UN Working Group has denounced this relationship between the Colombian government and Israeli mercenaries. (The Working Group mandate on the use of mercenaries to violate human rights and hinder the right of People?s self-determination was established by the Human Rights Commission in 2005. The Working Group is made up of five independent experts http://alainet.org/active/13241 ) During this trip, the Colombian Minister met with the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert. At that time, he signed the contract to purchase 24 Kfir combat planes. As is widely known, Colombia is one of the main buyers in the world of Galil rifles. It is also well known, for example, that ?lvaro Uribe?s decision last year to invade and bomb the Ecuadorian territory and assassinate in cold blood several members of the FARC and some students that were camping with them was inspired by typical Israeli tactics in Palestine. Therefore, we declare that the decision to hold this meeting of Latin American Jewish community and institutional leaders in Colombia and to grant the inaugural speech to Uribe is just another example of this ?collaboration? of certain Jewish leaders with fascist regimes and allies of the State of Israel, whose administration controls de facto the geopolitical orientation of these same institutions. This initiative also constitutes a clumsy political maneuver that seeks to: 1) Legitimize discussion of false allegations , such as the ?increase in anti-Semitism in the region,? ?tense relationships between the Jewish community and the Venezuelan government,? or ?influence of the Iranian government in the region?, etc. etc. None of these allegations are based in reality and only meet the propagandist interests of those who gave rise to them; 2) Place once again the Venezuelan Government in check by exploiting the ideological differences that exist between this government and the government of the host country, Colombia. Well, no one can forget that the government of Venezuela has recently been a victim of a defamation campaign by forces closely linked the ruling party of Israel. They condemn President Hugo Chavez for deciding to break diplomatic relations with the state of Israel as a legitimate response to the massacres in Palestine. We also cannot forget the strong ideological rivalry that exists between Uribe and Chavez and the tenuous relations that exist between both governments and certain sectors in Colombia and Venezuela. To discuss the alleged ?tense relationship between the Jewish community and the government of Venezuela? in Colombia, for example, means an obvious tendentious tenor. 3) Provoke feelings of rejection in Jewish communities. We know that the ruling parties in Israel like the Zionist forces in Jewish institutions tend to thrive from these sentiments. They use them to unify their ranks and to silence and discredit legitimate criticisms and repudiations of the murderous policies of the Israeli government against Palestinians and Lebanese. Unfortunately, it is natural that the execution of such a clumsy and malicious maneuver will produce feelings of rejection against those who have orchestrated it. These representatives, who self-proclaim to be leaders and representatives of the Jewish Latin American communities and consolidate ties with one of the bloodiest oligarchies in South America, will present a false image of the entire Jewish community of Latin America that adheres to the doctrines and practices of state terrorism, as of the government of Uribe V?lez. Therefore, we CALL those Latin American Jewish community and institutional leaders to denounce this evil plan and change the location of the meeting to another place in our immense continent. We also suggest that in place of taking up topics that support propagandist interests, they deal with more urgent and relevant questions in the lives of Jewish communities, such as: 1/ How to end the silent complicity of the majority of Jewish community institutions with the government of Israel and its invading and murderous practices against the peoples of Palestine and Lebanon; 2/ The urgent necessity to call to try and punish Israeli war criminals that claim to act in defense of Jewish interest; 3/ How to get the State of Israel, which with its Zionist banner claims to represent the Jewish nation, abolish its racist laws. This measure would demonstrate a progressive will and a rapprochement with the humanist essence of Judaism. In this same vain, it should initiate process to acknowledge its historical crimes in Palestine, abandon these criminal practices, and lastly, carry out a specific plan to compensate the Palestinian victims. IJAN En Nuestro Nombre No Jud?os Antisionistas de Espa?a send your signature to: *_judiosantisionistasenespanya at gmail.com , subject: condemn meeting of Jewish institutions in Colombia _* From shniad at sfu.ca Sat Apr 11 17:34:29 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sat, 11 Apr 2009 16:34:29 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] U.S. indicts Cuban exile Luis Posada, links him to bombings Message-ID: <39544617.2343161239492869028.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.miamiherald.com/news/front-page/v-print/story/991499.html# > Miami Herald April 8, 2009 U.S. indicts Cuban exile Luis Posada, links him to bombings BY ALFONSO CHARDY achardy at MiamiHerald .com A federal grand jury handed up a new indictment against Luis Posada Carriles, for the first time linking the Cuban exile militant in a U.S. legal proceeding to a series of 1997 tourist-site bombings in Cuba that killed an Italian national. The superseding indictment from the grand jury in El Paso does not charge Posada, 81, with planting the bombs or plotting the bombings but with lying in an immigration court about his role in the attacks at hotels, bars and restaurants in the Havana area. The perjury counts were added to the previous indictment that accused Posada of lying in his citizenship application about how he got into the United States. Another new charge is obstruction of a U.S. investigation into ``international terrorism.'' The indictment marks the first time since Posada arrived in the United States seeking asylum in March 2005 that the government has said he was involved in the Cuba bombings. A federal grand jury in New Jersey had been investigating Posada's alleged involvement in raising money for the bombing campaign among Cuban exiles in Union City, but no charges have been handed up there. The new charges almost certainly will dismay Posada's supporters in the Cuban exile community who view the exile militant as a hero in the continuing struggle against the Cuban regime. Posada could not be reached for comment, but his Miami attorney, Arturo V. Hernandez, said his client is innocent. ''This superseding indictment is under analysis, and once we complete that review my client intends to plead not guilty to the additional counts,'' Hernandez said in a telephone interview. The FBI office in Miami had been gathering evidence on the bombing, which killed Italian national Fabio di Celmo at the Copacabana Hotel in Havana. Agents had traveled to the Cuban capital to investigate Posada's connection to the attacks. Agents talked to witnesses to the bombings, reviewed Cuba's forensic evidence and visited the sites where the bombs exploded. Also, the FBI compiled a document alleging a conspiracy involving Posada as mastermind of the bombings. That document claimed Posada hid plastic explosives in shampoo bottles and shoes to be smuggled into Cuba weeks before the Sept. 4, 1997, bombing. The Cuban government has claimed that one of two Salvadoran nationals convicted in Havana of the bombings, Raul Ernesto Cruz Leon, placed the bomb that killed the Italian and that Cruz Leon was a Posada accomplice. Cruz Leon is mentioned in Wednesday's superseding indictment. In count two for perjury, the grand jury said that Posada lied to an immigration judge when asked if he had arranged for Cruz Leon to carry explosives into Cuba in 1997. ''I have never seen nor met Raul Cruz, and I have not done any arrangement to send him to another place,'' Posada replied. The new indictment Wednesday said that Posada's assertion was false because the ``defendant had arranged to send and sent an individual named Raul Cruz Leon to Cuba to transport and carry explosives into Cuba to carry out said bombings in 1997.'' The new indictment also accused Posada of lying when he was asked in immigration court if he had been involved in the attacks. ''Well, were you involved in soliciting other individuals to carry out the bombing in, the bombings in Cuba?'' Posada was asked in court by an immigration trial attorney. ''No,'' he answered. He was then asked how he could reconcile that denial with the interview he gave The New York Times in 1998 in which he was quoted as claiming responsibility for the bombings. Posada testified that The New York Times probably quoted him accurately, but that what he said was wrong because his English was poor. From shniad at sfu.ca Sat Apr 11 17:48:46 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sat, 11 Apr 2009 16:48:46 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Clark University Cancels Talk by Professor Norman Finkelstein In-Reply-To: <140990904.2344381239493670221.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <2036477379.2344441239493726191.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2009/04/10/clark_drops_holocaust_scholar/ Boston Globe April 10, 2009 Clark drops Holocaust scholar Schedule conflict, controversy cited By Matt Byrne, Globe Correspondent Clark University canceled a campus talk scheduled for later this month by controversial Holocaust scholar Norman Finkelstein, saying his presence "would invite controversy and not dialogue or understanding," and would conflict with a similar event scheduled around the same time. The Clark University Students for Palestinian Rights, a student-run group on the Worcester campus, had arranged for Finkelstein to speak on April 21, said Tom MacMillan, the group's president. School administrators, however, contend the topic and the timing conflict with a similar university-sponsored event. In a letter to the university's campus newspaper, Clark's president, John Bassett, wrote: "The university remains committed to inviting a wide range of speakers to encourage diversity of opinions on controversial topics. My decision was predicated on its untimely and unfortunate scheduling." Finkelstein's address would conflict with a similar conference hosted by the university's Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, scheduled for April 23-26, two days after Finkelstein's speech, Bassett said in his letter. That conference could draw Holocaust scholars who MacMillan said may disagree with Finkelstein. Although Bassett wrote that he did not believe that students intended Finkelstein to be an affront to the conference, he said he believed it could be viewed that way. "It is possible that our understanding of the Middle East conflicts would be enriched by conversations with Professor Finkelstein," Bassett said in the letter. "It is my judgement, however, that having Professor Finkelstein speak on the same evening as our planned conference would only invite controversy and not dialogue or understanding." John Foley, assistant secretary at Clark, declined to comment when reached late last night. Jane Salerno, a university spokeswoman, deferred comment to a later date. Finkelstein agreed to the engagement in February, and the student group received funding from a variety of other campus organizations to help pay his speaking fee. The dispute came to the attention of college administrators after Hillel, a Jewish campus group, objected to Finkelstein's scheduled appearance. Bassett met with MacMillan, two other members of the group, and a handful of other campus administrators, including public safety personnel, on Monday to discuss Finkelstein's speech, MacMillan said. At that meeting, the administration suggested that as many as six uniformed or plain-clothes security officers attend Finkelstein's speech, in case the forum became violent, MacMillan said. Finkelstein has been the center of controversy in the past. In June 2007, DePaul University in Chicago denied Finkelstein's bid for tenure after a feud with Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz escalated when Dershowitz publicly opposed Finkelstein's tenure application. Finkelstein asserted in his book "Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History" that Israel uses accusations of anti-Semitism to deflect criticism, a response to Dershowitz's book "The Case for Israel." Clark's decision to deny Finkelstein's speech comes less than a month after Boston College made a similar move, barring William Ayers, a University of Chicago professor and a former member of the Weather Underground, from speaking on campus at the request of a student group there. From shniad at sfu.ca Sat Apr 11 18:20:22 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sat, 11 Apr 2009 17:20:22 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Some telling artoons In-Reply-To: <20090411200749.A7BBF200B9@viewsic.mayfirst.org> Message-ID: <417993467.2347461239495622676.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://tinyurl.com/cq3yep Afghanistan Robert Ariail http://tinyurl.com/c5uo5d Fit to Print Ted Rall http://tinyurl.com/c2d4j7 US Military Budget Signe Wilkinson From tchilds at resist.ca Sat Apr 11 18:30:26 2009 From: tchilds at resist.ca (tchilds at resist.ca) Date: Sat, 11 Apr 2009 17:30:26 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Canada's Prime Minister Installs Tar Sands Exec as "Clean Energy" Envoy to US Message-ID: <49747.70.71.176.80.1239496226.squirrel@mail.resist.ca> http://www.desmogblog.com/harper-installs-tar-sands-executive-clean-energy-envoy-us 8 April 09 Canada's Prime Minister Installs Tar Sands Exec as "Clean Energy" Envoy to US Mitchell Anderson The Harper Government just sent a clear signal of the real agenda for the so-called ?clean energy dialogue? with US government. Under intense questioning from opposition politicians, Ottawa finally fessed up that former tar sands executive Charlie Fisher will represent Canada in these high level negotiations with Obama Administration. Long-time observers of Canada?s already pathetic record on climate change were understandably apoplectic. ?Appointing Charlie Fischer sends a clear signal that this is about promoting the tar sands, period,? said Stephen Hazell, executive director of Sierra Club Canada. ?The government of Canada seems to be coming at this whole clean energy dialogue from the perspective of how can they get special exemptions for the tar sands industry so that, when a cap-and-trade system is implemented, the tar sands aren?t affected.? Until last December, Fisher was the president and chief executive officer of Calgary-based oil giant Nexen, which has a huge stake in the continued expansion in the Alberta tar sands. Just last December they ponyed up an additional $735-million in a property that has about 2 billion barrels of extractable crude locked up in tarry bitumen. The company also owns 7% of tar sands giant Syncrude. If Fisher?s recent leadership of a major oil sands player is not enough to completely compromise his involvement in ?clean energy? negotiations with the US, he also had (and may still have) a hefty personal stake in the tar sands. As of December, Fischer owned over 500,000 common shares in Nexen, then worth about $9.5 million, as well as options on three million more shares. Since he is no longer required to report these trades, the public no longer knows what his personal involvement is. Oh yeah, he was also a registered lobbyist up until January of this year. In one of the better straight lines in modern Canadian political history, the Harper government deadpanned: ?Every step will be taken to ensure the integrity of the working groups are maintained.? The Harper and Alberta governments have been as subtle as a sledgehammer in their efforts to exempt the tar sands from the long-overdue cap and trade and green economy legislation now moving through the US Congress. Desmog readers will recall a tirade on this very subject when President Obama came through Canada?s capital. Just last week, the Alberta government revealed they are blowing $500,000 a year on Washington-based lobbyists to ensure ?the right information gets to the policy-makers and the decision-makers.? The carpet they are trying to sweep the tar sands under is the fiction that carbon capture and storage will make it all ok. Secret documents revealed last year showed that both the Canadian and Alberta governments were advised the significant carbon capture at the tar sands is virtually impossible. The market has also widely rejected the notion. Just last week, almost half of the companies vying for a $2 billion pot of taxpayers money to actually build carbon capture pilot projects in Alberta pulled their bids. The new lobbying money for carbon capture comes in spite of a massive $4.7 billion deficit just posted by the Alberta government ? the largest in the province?s history and more than three times bigger than what was projected even last week. Oil revenues have tanked yet again at the predictable end of the latest boom and bust cycle. The pathological dependence of successive Alberta governments on oil royalties was just slammed in a recent report from the University of Calgary. Apparently both Alberta and the Harper government have a serious learning disability regarding the tar sands. For all their ham-handed attempts to get a pass for the dirtiest oil in the world, the US has clearly signaled that carbon pricing is coming and that the US will be leading the way toward a greener economy. The sooner we get on that train, the better for the battered Canadian economy. From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Sat Apr 11 18:44:13 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Sun, 12 Apr 2009 09:44:13 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Real AIG Conspiracy Message-ID: <49E1395D.8040703@ashisuto.co.jp> by Professor Michael Hudson Global Research (March 18 2009) It may seem odd, but the public outrage against $135 million in AIG bonuses is a godsend to Wall Street, AID scoundrels included. How can the media be so preoccupied with the discovery that there is self-serving greed to be found in the financial sector? Every TV channel and every newspaper in the country, from right to left, have made these bonuses the lead story over the past two days. What is wrong with this picture? Is there not something over-inflated about the outrage led most vociferously by Senator Charles Schumer and Representative Barney Frank, the two leading shills for the bank giveaways over the past year? And does President Obama perhaps find it convenient that finally, at long last, he has been able to criticize something that he believes Wall Street has done wrong? Even the Wall Street Journal has gotten into the act. The government's takeover of AIG, it pointed out, "uses the firm as a conduit to bail out other institutions". So much more greed is involved than just that of AIG employees. The firm owed much more to other players - abroad as well as on Wall Street - than the assets it had. That is what drove it to insolvency. And popular opposition has been rising to how Mr Obama and Mr McCain could have banded together to support the bailout that, in retrospect, amounts to trillions and trillions of dollars thrown "down the drain". Not really down the drain at all, of course - but given to financial speculators on the winning "smart" side of AIG's bad financial gambles. "The Washington crowd wants to focus on bonuses because it aims public anger on private actors", it accused in a March 17 editorial. But instead of explaining that the shift is away from Wall Street grabbers of a thousand times the amount of bonuses being contested, it blames its usual all-purpose bete noire: Congress. Where the right and left differ is just whom the public should be directing its anger at! Here's the problem with all the hoopla over the $135 million in AIG bonuses: This sum is only less than 0.1% - one thousandth - of the $183 BILLION that the US Treasury gave to AIG as a "pass-through" to its counterparties. This sum, over a thousand times the magnitude of the bonuses on which public attention is conveniently being focused by Wall Street promoters, did not stay with AIG. For over six months, the public media and Congressmen have been trying to find out just where this money DID go. Bloomberg brought a lawsuit to find out. Only to be met with a wall of silence. Until finally, on Sunday night, March 15, the government finally released the details. They were indeed highly embarrassing. The largest recipient turned out to be just what earlier financial reporters had said was rumored: Mr Paulson's own firm, Goldman Sachs, headed the list. It was owed $13 billion in counterparty claims. So here's the picture that's emerging. Last September, Treasury Secretary Paulson, from Goldman Sachs, drew up a terse three-page memo outlining his bailout proposal. The plan specified that whatever he and other Treasury officials did (thus including his subordinates, also from Goldman Sachs), could not be challenged legally or undone, much less prosecuted. This condition enraged Congress, which rejected the bailout in its first incarnation. It now looks as if Mr Paulson had good reason to put in a fatal legal clause blocking any clawback of funds given by the Treasury to AIG's counterparties. This is where public outrage should be focused. Instead, the leading Congressional shepherds of the bailout legislation - along with Mr Obama, who came out in his final, Friday night presidential debate with Senator McCain strongly in favor of the bailout in Mr Paulson's awful "short" version - have been posing as conspicuously as possible for the media to cover a deflected target - the AIG executives receiving bonuses, not the company's counterparties. There are two questions that one always must ask when a political operation is being launched. First, cui bono? Who benefits? And second, why now? In my experience, timing almost always is the key to figuring out the dynamics at work. Regarding cui bono, what does Senator Schumer, Representative Frank, President Obama and other Wall Street sponsors gain from this public outcry? For starters, it depicts them as hard taskmasters of the banking and financial sector, not its lobbyists carrying water for one giveaway after another. So the AIG kafuffle has muddied the water about where their political loyalties really lie. It enables them to strike a misleading pose - and hence to pose as "honest brokers" next time they dishonestly give away the next few trillion dollars to their major sponsors and campaign contributors. Regarding the timing, I think I have answered that above. Talking about AIG bonuses has effectively distracted attention from the AIG counterparties who received the $183 billion in Treasury giveaways. The "final" sum to be given to its counterparties has been rumored to be $250 billion, do Senator Schumer, Representative Frank and President Obama still have a lot more work to do for Wall Street in the coming year or so. To succeed in this work - while mitigating the public outrage already rising against the bad bailouts - they need to strike precisely the pose that they're striking now. It is an exercise in deception. The moral should be: The wetter the crocodile tears shed over giving bonuses to AIG individuals (who seem to be largely on the healthy, bona fide insurance side of AIG's business, not its hedge-fund Ponzi-scheme racket), the more they will distract public attention from the $180 billion giveaway, and the better they can position themselves to give away yet more government money (Treasury bonds and Federal Reserve deposits) to their favorite financial charities. _____ Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). 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For media inquiries: crgeditor at yahoo.com (c) Copyright Michael Hudson, Global Research, 2009 (c) Copyright 2005-2007 GlobalResearch.ca www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12784 TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Sun Apr 12 05:50:16 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Sun, 12 Apr 2009 20:50:16 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Obama's Top Economic Adviser is Greedy and Highly Compromised Message-ID: <49E1D578.5040602@ashisuto.co.jp> by Matt Taibbi, True/Slant AlterNet (April 10 2009) "But Summers, a leading architect of the administration's economic policies and response to the global recession, appears to have collected the most income. Financial institutions including JP Morgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch paid Summers for speaking appearances in 2008. Fees ranged from $45,000 for a November 12 Merrill Lynch appearance to $135,000 for an April 16 visit to Goldman Sachs, according to his disclosure form." - Washingtonpost.com So I guess that $45,000 speaking fee from Merrill Lynch wasn't technically a bribe because Summers wasn't named to Obama's economic transition team until November 24 - a full twelve days later. I'm sure Larry Summers had absolutely no inkling whatsoever that he was going to be one of the key advisers to the new administration on November 12. It likewise makes perfect sense that Merrill Lynch, a company just months removed from having to be rescued from bankruptcy by an eleventh-hour, pseudo-state-subsidized buyout by Bank of America, would decide to spend $45,000 on a speaking appearance by Summers because, well, they really valued his economic expertise and his proven ability to rally the troops with his stirring rhetoric. It certainly had nothing to do with the fact that (a) it was eight days after a Democrat was elected to the presidency; (b) Summers had a long history of being one of the key policymakers in Democratic Party politics; and (c) Merrill was absolutely not going to survive more than a few more months unless taxpayers forked over another twenty billion or so to cover the giant hole in Merrill's balance sheet that was, at that time, still being hidden from Bank of America and its shareholders. And how about that $135,000 appearance for Goldman Sachs in April, when Summers was already involved with Democratic Party politics again? That wasn't a surreptitious campaign contribution at all! But you have to give Goldman credit: it sure is thorough. It literally leaves no stone unturned. One has to love the sequence of events here. Back in 2004, Goldman chief Hank Paulson goes to SEC chief William Donaldson and petitions to have lending restrictions relaxed for the top five investment banks. Donaldson rolls over, the restrictions are relaxed, and it's a disaster, as the top five banks immediately overleverage themselves - two of the five, Bear Stearns and Lehman, would actually collapse, at least partially as a result of being insanely overleveraged. In the midst of this disaster, Paulson is named Treasury secretary. He does nothing about the worsening financial crisis until it is far too late, then allows one of Goldman's biggest competitors, Lehman, to fail while at the same time intervening on a huge scale to save AIG, which just happens to owe Goldman a ton of money. When AIG is bailed out, its government regulator is not in the room, but the new chief of Goldman, Lloyd Blankfein, is. In fact, Goldman Sachs ultimately receives about $13 billion of the money paid to AIG by the government in the bailout, reportedly getting paid 100 cents on the dollar for its AIG exposure, despite the fact that the bank claimed it wasn't going to suffer severe losses if AIG collapsed. Later, another former Goldman executive, Ed Liddy, is installed as head of AIG - which just happens to get bailed out twice more, the last time to the tune of $30 billion. The last two bailouts of AIG take place after a former Goldman chief, Robert Rubin (who, incidentally, helped start this mess by ramming through a series of i-banker wet-dream deregulatory moves as Treasury secretary for Clinton in the 1990s), is named to the Obama transition team, joining Summers (who had already taken $135,000 from Goldman that year) and Timothy Geithner (a protege of another Goldman alum, John Thain, former president and chief operating officer and notorious scumbag). When it comes time for new Treasury Secretary Geithner to name a chief of staff, he chooses Mark Patterson, who is less than a year removed from working as a lobbyist for ? Goldman Sachs. Patterson's great contribution to society as a Goldman lobbyist was opposing a 2007 measure introduced in the Senate by presidential candidate Barack Obama to rein in executive compensation. I remember watching Obama the presidential candidate give a speech in Mason City, Iowa, in 2007. Obama had made a big show of not having registered lobbyists working for his campaign, and he promised that lobbyists "won't work in my White House". The line was a hit and became part of Obama's stump speech. I must have heard it two dozen times. A little over a year later, he put a registered lobbyist of a bailed-out investment bank into a job whose primary responsibility is administering bailout money. It gets worse. According to a Glenn Greenwald piece I just read, even Gary Gensler is a former Goldman employee. That absolutely blows my mind. Genlser is Obama's choice to head the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, whose purview is the derivatives market. The CFTC was the battleground where ages ago Rubin, Summers, and then-Rubin aide Gensler teamed up to whack CFTC chief Brooksley Born, who had serious concerns about the burgeoning derivatives market, in particular the credit-default swap market. Rubin overturned Born's recommendations, and derivatives were freed from most regulation. That economic Alamo led almost directly to the AIG disaster. Think about this for a moment. A former Goldman chief, Rubin, presses the CFTC to deregulate a type of derivative contract whose chief benefit to an investment bank like Goldman is that it allows it to lend more - the CDS being most useful as a tool to move investment risk off a bank's balance sheet. Then another Goldman chief, Paulson, pushes for further relaxation of lending limits. Then Goldman jumps head first into the housing bubble, buying tens of billions in CDS protection to hedge its crazy investments. This massive explosion in lending by banks like Goldman, fueled in part by the use of derivatives like CDS and fueled still more by the 2004 change in rules, puts an enormous strain on the economy, leading to giant holes blown in its hull by the end of 2007 and on through 2008. It follows that when Goldman's chief partner in those CDS deals, AIG, collapses as part of this wave of crashes, Paulson - now Treasury secretary - rushes to the rescue, pumping billions in taxpayer money into AIG that is quickly funneled to Goldman. Then a Goldman alum is put in charge of AIG, while another bunch of Goldman alums funnels still more bailout money to AIG, and yet another Goldman alum is put in charge of regulating the derivatives market that is the focus of most of the bailout efforts. In the midst of all of this, something amazing happens. Goldman Sachs, along with Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and a host of other "troubled" banks, reports a profit for its first quarter in 2009! How and why that happened is another fascinating story, for another time. For now, the only thing to remember is that all the ones who got us into this mess - Rubin, Summers, Goldman in general - are now being put in charge of the cleanup by a president who spent most of eighteen months on the campaign trail pledging to end the influence of money in politics. Add this to the obscene giveaway that is the toxic assets program Geithner has just devised (Goldman Sachs "expressed interest in participating in the plan as an investor", according to the Wall Street Journal), and you have an amazing situation. Between the Bush and Obama administrations, you have a bailout program that has now figured three ways to funnel money to Goldman Sachs: via AIG, via TARP and now via this trillion-dollar "public-private investment program", which basically lends huge amounts of money to investors and provides guarantees against heavy losses. It's free