Federal Reserve Orders Stress-Tested Banks to Mislead Investors from Firedoglake

FROM http://oxdown.firedoglake.com/diary/4684

Yesterday the New York Times told us that banks are in better shape than "some" think because all 19 of the stress-tested banks would "pass." That's because no bank will be allowed to fail. Today, we learn that the Federal Reserve has ordered the banks not to reveal any results from their stress tests when they talk to investors about their quarterly results.

From Bloomberg (h/t Calculated Risk):

The U.S. Federal Reserve has told Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Citigroup Inc. and other banks to keep mum on the results of "stress tests" that will gauge their ability to weather the recession ...

The Fed wants to ensure that the report cards don't leak during earnings conference calls scheduled for this month. ...

"If you allow banks to talk about it, people are just going to assume that the ones that don't comment about it failed," said Paul Miller, an analyst at FBR Capital Markets in Arlington, Virginia.

I once naively thought bank executives are under a fiduciary obligation to shareholders, creditors and other investors to disclose information material to the financial condition of their banks whenever they make pronouncements of such financial conditions, as in a quarterly earnings statement. In other words, they're not supposed to lie or mislead people. And there's the minor matter of being honest with American taxpayers who are being asked to bail out these same banks for hundreds of billions of dollars.

But apparently our government thinks that the only way for our banking system to hold together is for the executives of the 19 most important banks in the US to mislead everyone. And this is supposed to reassure us? I don't know what to say.

Proof that Geithner's Bank Plan Is a Massive Giveaway to the Bastards Who Started This Mess

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on April 3, 2009, Printed on April 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/134986/

Recall the Geithner Bank Plan in a nutshell: private investors will partner with the government to buy those "toxic" assets off of struggling "zombie banks." The buyers would put about 7 percent of the purchase price down, and the Treasury Department would match that with another 7 or so percent. Then the FDIC would offer government-backed loans for the remainder.

If the assets were to recover their value and turn a profit down the road, the investors would split the profits with the government. But if they don't -- if their values continue to tank, and it's entirely likely many will -- then you and I and everyone else we know who pays taxes will be on the hook for the lion's share of the losses.

In other words, we're letting bargain-hunters pick up the "troubled assets" that are burdening a number of financial institutions for pennies on the dollar, and limiting their downside risk if it doesn't turn out well. It's a pretty sweet deal for those investors. And, as I wrote when Geithner first announced the plan, it's also pretty much the definition of "moral hazard."

That background is important in order to understand just how incredibly infuriating this report from The Financial Times is:

US banks that have received government aid, including Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, are considering buying toxic assets to be sold by rivals under the Treasury's $1,000bn (£680bn) plan to revive the financial system.

The plans proved controversial, with critics charging that the government's public-private partnership - which provide generous loans to investors - are intended to help banks sell, rather than acquire, troubled securities and loans.

[...]

Participating in the plan as a buyer could be complicated for Citi, which has suffered billions of dollars in writedowns on mortgage-backed assets and is about to cede a 36 per cent stake to the government.

Citi declined to comment. People close to the company said it was considering whether to take part in the plan as a seller, buyer or manager of the assets, but no decision had yet been taken.

[...]

Goldman and Morgan Stanley have large fund management units and have pledged to increase investments in distressed assets.

This week, John Mack, Morgan Stanley's chief executive, told staff the bank was considering how to become "one of the firms that can buy these assets and package them where your clients will have access to them".

Goldman and JPMorgan did not comment, but bankers said they were considering buying toxic assets.

Get it? We first pumped tens of billions of dollars into these institutions via the TARP, set up another program to aid them further by offering investors the opportunity to purchase the "shitpile" on their books with sweet federal subsidies, and they then turn around and now they're essentially going to buy the assets back with taxpayer-backed loans.

FT again:

Critics say that would leave the same amount of toxic assets in the system as before, but with the government now liable for most of the losses through its provision of non-recourse loans.

Administration officials reject the criticism because banking is part of a financial system, in which the owners of bank equity -- such as pension funds -- are the same entities that will be investing in toxic assets anyway. Seen this way, the plan simply helps to rearrange the location of these assets in the system in a way that is more transparent and acceptable to markets.

What mumbo-jumbo -- "banking is part of the financial system." Thanks, but there's a difference between pension funds and the financial institutions who have taken boatloads of public cash because they were deemed "too big to fail."

But the obviousness of Big Finance's rip-off may get in the way of its success. The Financial Times warns, "public opinion may not tolerate the idea of banks selling each other their bad assets ..."

And let's give a Republican who's trying to capitalize on that sentiment some rare credit around here ...

Spencer Bachus, the top Republican on the House financial services committee, vowed after being told of the plans by the FT to introduce legislation to stop financial institutions "gaming the system to reap taxpayer-subsidized windfalls".

Mr Bachus added it would mark "a new level of absurdity" if financial institutions were "colluding to swap assets at inflated prices using taxpayers' dollars."

Shocking but true: Spencer Bachus is 100 percent right.

PS: Make sure to catch this piece in today's WaPo about Giethner's own role in creating the financial meltdown.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.

© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/134986/

Disneyland: The Happiest Place on Earth Fires 1,900

By Lisa Derrick, La Figa
Posted on April 6, 2009, Printed on April 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://lafiga.firedoglake.com//135194/

Disneyland is becoming Dismal-land: 1,900 employees  cast members are losing their jobs at the US theme parks, with the majority of e-tickets to the unemployment line getting passed out at Disney World in Orlando Florida, where about 1,400 jobs will be eliminated.  Disneyland in Anaheim will lose 300 employees cast members and the rest of the layoffs will happen in the company's Burbank, California headquarters.

The Los Angeles Times reports that in January, the company offered buyout packages to 600 executives at its domestic parks division which also includes their cruise lines. It's the recession...

It's going to be weird to go to Bats' Day in the Fun Park this year (aka Goth Day at Disneyland) and see fewer staff cast members scraping gum off the streets, fewer characters in costume. But I'd rather see some litter and lose out on Captain Hook and the Evil Queen than have them cut down on the safety staff running the rides. I got stuck once on the Roger Rabbit ride and had to walk out with a flashlight carrying escort  cast member. It was really freaky.

No word if the staff cast member cut back will include security guards at the Disneyland  jail (which may or may not exist; might, per a friend of a friend have, a mural of Goofy his shaking his finger; or as Gossip Girl actress Blake Lively recalls from her time spent there as a miscreant six year old, is possibly all white).

© 2009 La Figa All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://lafiga.firedoglake.com//135194/

How Cooking the Books on Inflation Helped Destroy the Global Economy

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on April 7, 2009, Printed on April 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/135507/

In the Wall Street Journal, Steven Gjerstad and Vernon Smith explain a key difference between the crash that followed the burst of the 1996-2006 housing bubble, and earlier bubbles that didn't bring the whole enchilada down with them when they deflated [HT: The Bubble Meter].

Monetary policy is a key part of the story -- monetary policy that created the appearance of prosperity, even as American families were growing more financially insecure year after year.

The Fed, under Clinton and Bush, kept interest rates at very low levels even after the recession that followed the crash of the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s. Combined with the elimination of capital gains for houses sold for less than a half-million dollars, the result was a lot of cheap money out there gravitating to one of the few sectors of the economy that was growing.

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, probably sparked by rising household income that began in 1992 combined with the 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.

The 2001 recession might have ended the bubble, but the Federal Reserve decided to pursue an unusually expansionary monetary policy in order to counteract 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 standards eroded. Lenders and the investment banks that securitized mortgages used rising home prices to justify loans to buyers with limited assets and income. Rating agencies accepted the hypothesis of ever rising home values, gave large portions of each security issue an investment-grade rating, and investors gobbled them up.

On that last point, the authors gloss over a key point. As the NY Times reported last year, "Credit rating agencies did not properly manage their conflicts of interests when assigning ratings to structured products such as mortgage-backed securities, a report by the Securities and Exchange Commission said on Tuesday." But that's an aside ...

But housing expenditures in the U.S. and most of the developed world have historically taken about 30% of household income. If housing prices more than 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 no longer be delayed.

How did we get there?

During the 1976-79 and 1986-89 housing price bubbles, the effective federal-funds interest rate was rising while housing prices rose: The Federal Reserve, "leaning against the wind," helped mitigate the bubbles. In January 2001, however, after four years with average inflation-adjusted house price increases 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 the rate series began.

Monetary policy, mortgage finance, relaxed lending standards, and tax-free capital gains provided astonishing economic stimulus: Mortgage loan originations increased an average of 56% per year for three years -- from $1.05 trillion in 2000 to $3.95 trillion in 2003!

Why didn't everyone see it coming a mile away? Some did, of course, but here we have to look at how changes to how we measure inflation played into the "irrational exuberance" of the past decade ...

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% during the previous 12 months. Yet the housing portion of the CPI for those same 12 months rose only 2.4%.

How could this happen? In 1983, the Bureau of Labor Statistics began to use rental equivalence for homeowner-occupied units instead of direct home-ownership costs. Between 1983 and 1996, the price-to-rental ratio increased from 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 20.8 to 32.3.

With home price increases out of the CPI and the price-to-rent ratio rapidly increasing, an important component of inflation remained outside the index. 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 the CPI, inflation would have been 6.2% instead of 3.3%.

This was just one of a number of measures to redefine inflation downwards over the past 20 years. Why? In large part to control Social Security spending and other "entitlement" payments that are hooked to the rate of inflation. I wrote about this at some length back in July, in a piece titled, "In a Perfect Storm of Economic Stagflation, the Yachting Set Says: 'Let Them Eat Pizza'." If you missed it then, check it out.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.

© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/135507/

China Hates Us -- How Much Longer Will They Back Our Debt-Ridden Economy?

By Scott Thill, AlterNet
Posted on April 3, 2009, Printed on April 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/133251/

It started with a joke, but quickly went viral everywhere from the South China Sea to the White House.

"We hate you guys," Luo Ping, director-general at the China Banking Regulatory Commission, wisecracked in New York last month, speaking of the U.S. habit of issuing trillions worth of the Treasury bills that China still considers safe havens. "Once you start issuing $1 trillion, $2 trillion ... we know the dollar is going to depreciate, so we hate you guys, but there is nothing much we can do."

That is, nothing much aside from flexing China's economic and military muscle, the latter of which it recently accomplished in the South China Sea when five Chinese vessels aggressively surrounded the USNS Impeccable, an unarmed surveillance ship spying in the internationally contested Spratly Islands.

The Impeccable turned firehoses on the encroaching ships, whose sailors nevertheless stripped down to their underwear and continued to move in as close as 25 feet from the ship.

Laughably terming the nearly naked Chinese display of territorial strength "provocative," a Pentagon spokesman complained that China, America's largest creditor and owner of the world's largest holding of U.S. Treasuries, and its marine vessels' bold actions "violated the requirement under international law to operate with due regard for the rights and safety of other lawful users of the ocean."

After all, the last thing the United States needs from China, a nation bankrolling not just our economic but also our military gamesmanship, is a bunch of naked nationalists reminding us that our empire is in steep decline.

Flex Those Biceps

"China is beginning to show some muscle," explains journalist and economist Danny Schechter, whose 2006 documentary In Debt We Trust examined the capital flows that led us to our worst downturn since the 1930s. "This is why Hillary Clinton was so easy on China in her recent visit, after once popularly criticizing its human rights record. The U.S. is trying to signal to China that our economy is strong, but at the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding. If there is any pudding left."

Schechter's grim assessment is one shared on both sides of the Pacific. Since the Obama administration came to power just as the global economy sputtered to a halt, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has repeatedly complained that the world's major economies, especially that of the United States, have been witlessly living and spending on borrowed time and money.

"I think the main reason for this global financial crisis is the imbalances of some of the economies themselves," the premier correctly noted in early February. "For a long time, they have had double deficits [trade and budget deficits] and kept up high consumption based on massive borrowing."

In mid-March, Wen was more forcefully direct: "We have lent a huge amount of money to the U.S., [and] we are concerned about the safety of our assets," he said. "To be honest, I am definitely a little worried."

But how far is his country willing to go to safeguard those assets? If Chin purchases fewer of those Treasuries, or, in the worst-case scenario, holds a nightmare sell-off of those assets, it could ruin the United States economy in ways we can only imagine at this stage of the geopolitical game.

At best, it could dump the dollar into the currency basement as the world follows China's suit and diversifies its reserves in other denominations. At worst, it could spell the end of America as a superpower and destroy the global economy as we know it.

Spice It Up

As the AIG controversy came to a head, and member nations prepared for the G20 conference in London on April 2, the governor of the People's Bank of China, Zhou Xiaochuan, proposed replacing the dollar as the world's reserve currency, using instead what he called a "super-sovereign" currency managed by the International Monetary Fund.

Agreed to by Russia, Zhou Xiaochuan's proposal is but the latest salvo in China's campaign to break the dollar's chokehold on global economics, as well as a brilliant PR maneuver to prime the pump for the G20 meet. The issue kicked up enough dust that President Barack Obama had to publicly rebuke it during a televised prime-time press conference.

Whatever its original impetus, the move has paid immediate returns for the Chinese, if only in the form of an increase in mainstream discussion about the dollar's continuing relevance. It's a worthy subject for a country like China, which is appears bent on reshaping the new world monetary order.

It's also a veiled warning to those who do business with the export powerhouse, which includes most of America's allies and enemies. It's a serious geopolitical concern for Washington when many of those countries begin voicing their own concerns about the dollar right before they all meet at a world conference on the econopocalypse.

"Normally we are very polite with each other," Brazil's President Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva explained during a press conference with U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown. "But this meeting in London, it has to be a little bit spicy, [have] a little bit of heat." Lula said this after explaining that we got into this mess because of the "irrational behavior of people that are white, blue-eyed, [who] before the crisis looked like they knew everything about economics" but have since "demonstrated that they don't know anything about economics."

The heavy rhetorical fire is aimed with precision. China, Russia and Brazil -- who hold much of our conventional labor and energy futures in their hands -- know good and well that beggars can't be choosers. They know that if we want their help to fund our gluttonous debt and economic machinations, we are probably now going to have to pay for it, in lost wealth and lost face.

The volley is also a clever invitation to Europe, which has consistently asked China to help fund the IMF, to join in on the dollar dogpile.

But even if Zhou's proposal comes to nothing, there's reason to believe that the economies of America and China have already begun to "decouple."

"The global currency system, being detached from a gold standard, maintained its vital credibility strictly on the faith that a particular nation was capable of producing wealth," explains author and columnist James Kunstler, who predicted the current economic depression in books like The Long Emergency. "If you can't produce wealth, or surplus capital, then you can't service debt. So the system of Chinese production and American consumption has reached its terminal limit.

"A reality-based view of the relationship must admit that China knew what it was doing when it bought our Treasury debt to support our ability to buy their products. And America must have known what it was doing when it mortgaged its future. Either that, or neither nation, or its leadership, knew what the hell it was doing, which is a sobering thought."

Obama certainly sobered up after Wen complained about the safety of his nation's American assets. "Not just the Chinese government, but every investor can have absolute confidence in the soundness of investments in the United States," Obama announced after a White House meeting with Brazil's da Silva, whose country may be the only one left standing after the smoke clears.

How did Lula manage it? Simple: Solid financial regulation and healthy wealth distribution. (Well, that and the kind of oil deposits that elicit a reported invitation to join OPEC.)

Brazil's leadership transitioning to a more regional economic model is catching on throughout the world and could cause massive headaches for the United States, should China decide to implement its own version of it more fully. In fact, it might already be time to break out the ibuprofen.

Here Comes the Headache

Even the comparatively jocular Luo Ping explained that Chinese banks are more interested in regional mergers and acquisitions than "bottom fishing of financial institutions, particularly in the U.S."

For his part, Wen announced billions in local infrastructure, technology and health care spending in a stimulus package that mirrors the Obama administration's recently passed plan.

Just last week, China blocked a $2.4 billion takeover of Huiyuan Juice, the nation's leading juice maker, by Coca-Cola, citing fears of monopoly and damage to smaller domestic companies. 

Indeed, signs of a strengthening China are everywhere, even as its once-explosive growth suffers under the strain of a greater global collapse. But are America's bonds, literal and otherwise, with the Chinese still as strong as they were? More importantly, are they headed for a rupture?

Perhaps not, argue experts like Nouriel Roubini -- the New York University economist who called out our hyper-real finance disaster long before it was cool -- if China sinks us, its own economy could go down with the bloated American ship.

"China may be on its way to a hard landing," Roubini said last year. "Considering the certainty of a recession in advanced economies and the high likelihood of a global recession, there is now a very high probability that Chinese growth could slow down to 7 percent or even lower in 2009."

Roubini nailed the numbers: The World Bank recently cut its forecast for China's growth to about 6.5 percent. But even the World Bank's regional director for China, the ironically named David Dollar, claimed that "there's a lot of strength in China. On balance, you've got decline in real estate and exports, and then you've got growth in areas that the government can directly influence."

That sobering theme was echoed in later comments from China's central bank adviser Fan Gang, who explained that his country's $585 billion stimulus package doesn't "have a financial black hole to fill, so all [its] money will go to the economy and drive demand."

The Comedown

"If the Chinese don't have confidence in our economy," economist Danny Schechter concludes, "there is going to be hell to pay. The situation is extremely unstable; as the U.S. economy contracts, growing doubts about our ability to manage it rightfully arise. As the situation unravels, and it's going to unravel more, deeper nationalism will come into play.

"Right now, we sort of need each other, but the dollar is in trouble. The Federal Reserve is basically just printing money. But the only thing that backs the currency is faith in the U.S., and when that faith evaporates, look out."

For now, China has reiterated its confidence in U.S. Treasuries, but that may change as the "unwinding" of hyper-real investment vehicles gathers momentum and controversy. When all is said and done, China might just have to pick its economic poison.

"In theory, China could just dump its bonds, but that in itself could trigger an outright collapse of the global banking system, which for now is still going through the motions," Kunstler says. "But I believe that the actual process of broader economic decoupling has already occurred. We're not going back to the relationship we had before. China might theoretically shift some of its huge industrial capacity to other markets, but it is increasingly facing grave resource issues, including peak oil, water and food.

"As for America, at this point it appears to be a choice between functional bankruptcy, or renunciation of debt and hyperinflation, both of which would leave China holding a big bag of nothing. Its holdings in U.S. Treasuries is basically a loss under any scenario."

Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm. His writing has appeared on Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, Wired and others.

© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/133251/

Down But Not Out at $464 Million a Year

By Sam Pizzigati, Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality
Posted on April 4, 2009, Printed on April 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/134423/

Not everyone in the international hedge fund industry is making millions. Not everyone in the hedge fund industry right now even has a job. Amid the worst global economic meltdown since the Great Depression, hedge funds are hemorrhaging positions. An estimated 20,000 will be gone by year's end.

But the hedge fund industry still does have something no other industry in the known universe can match: the best-paid top executives who ever lived.

"These are the highest earners," as Manhattan College financial historian Charles Geisst put it last week, "of all time."

That observation came right after Alpha, the hedge fund industry trade journal, reported that the hedge fund industry's top 25 managers added $11.6 billion to their personal fortunes in 2008, an average of $464 million each, the third-highest top 25 total since Alpha started keeping score in 2002.

How did the movers and shakers of hedge fund land work such magic? For the most part, we simply don't know. Hedge funds, as largely unregulated entities, don't have to reveal almost anything about how they go about their business.

The most secretive hedge fund manager of them all, James Simons of Renaissance Technologies, netted $2.5 billion last year. One of the funds Simons manages generated a 160 percent return in 2008, through some financial alchemy that observers, in the absence of any real information, have taken to describing as "computer-driven trading strategies."  

The number two on this year's hedge fund top 25 we know more about. John Paulson of Paulson & Co. has made his big money -- $2 billion in just 2008 alone -- by betting that the incredibly overinflated market for subprime mortgage-backed securities would tank.

Paulson no doubt understands the lucrative irony behind his enormous personal windfall. His colleagues in the hedge fund industry helped inflate the market for subprime securities in the first place.

Fifty years ago, in a more equal America, hedge funds as we now know them didn't exist. They didn't explode onto the financial scene until the 1980s, when the Reagan revolution was rapidly concentrating income and wealth at the top of the U.S. economic ladder.

America's newly flush rich, their pockets bulging, had plenty of cash to invest, and the emerging new hedge funds -- pools of investment capital open only to deep-pocket investors -- promised better returns than those deep pockets could get anywhere else.

Hedge fund managers, needing to deliver on those promises, hungered mightily for high-return investment opportunities that could keep their wealthy clients happy. Traditional Wall Street investments -- corporate stocks and bonds -- couldn't deliver the high returns the hedge funds needed. But the financial world's new-fangled "derivatives" could.  

These increasingly exotic financial instruments, all based on the endless repackaging of ever-shakier mortgage loans and consumer debt, would find an eager hedge fund market. Hedge fund dollars, in effect, kept the U.S. economy blowing bubbles.

The bubbles all burst in 2008, and the hedge fund industry has certainly felt the aftershock. Over 900 hedge funds, about 14 percent of the fund total worldwide, shut their doors last year. The industry ended 2008 with assets down 37 percent, over $700 billion, from the industry peak last June.

But that downturn left an estimated $1.2 trillion still sloshing in hedge fund coffers, more than enough to power top hedge fund execs to another round of windfalls.

These top execs typically charge investors a fixed percentage of the billions in assets they manage, usually 2 percent. The celebrity hedge fund managers charge even more. James Simons, for instance, levies a 5 percent management fee on the billions investors turn over to him — and then takes a 44 percent cut on any profits he makes selling the assets he buys with those investor billions.

In 2008, you didn't have to be a hedge fund celebrity like Simons to score big. Even junior hedge fund analysts did quite wonderfully, given the economic tenor of our times. They averaged $195,520 last year, says the trade journal Alpha.

Industrywide, hedge fund jobs paid an average $794,000 in 2008, down from $940,000 the year before. U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner last week unveiled a plan that will hand hedge funds and other big investors a subsidy worth as much as $1 trillion to start buying up the toxic derivative securities that now have no little or market value.

If Geithner's plan works, hedge funds will take those tax dollars and jumpstart the market for toxic securities, the securities will rise handsomely in value, and hedge fund managers will reap still more jackpots.

But some financial insiders like venture capitalist and commentator Peter Cohan don't believe Geithner's plan will work. A good many hedge fund managers won't play ball with Geithner's new plan, Cohan predicts, "because they fear that there'll be a public outcry over their compensation if the plan makes them even richer."

And if that outcry gets loud enough, the hedgies no doubt worry, lawmakers may feel compelled to shut the loophole that lets hedge fund managers claim much of their income as capital gains. That neat trick lowers the tax rate on a hefty chunk of hedge fund manager earnings from 35 to 15 percent.

The cost to taxpayers? The hedge fund loophole, the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. estimates, is running taxpayers about $2.7 billion a year.

Sam Pizzigati is the editor of the online weekly Too Much, and an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

© 2009 Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/134423/

Stress Tests for Wall Street -- What About the Billions in off-the-Books Toxic Assets?

By Danielle Ivory, American News Project & AlterNet
Posted on April 3, 2009, Printed on April 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/134997/

This report was produced in collaboration with American News Project.

At the center of President Obama's overhaul strategy for Wall Street are the "stress tests" which will be applied to all financial institutions. But how accurate will the test results be? That will depend on whether the treasury takes off-balance-sheet assets into account, experts say. Back in February, in the House Financial Service Committee, when asked a question about the value of Citigroup's assets, CEO Vikram Pandit provided a less-than-clear response: "It's an extraordinarily difficult question."

Click the video below to WATCH the exchange between Rep. Louis Gutierrez (D-IL) and Vikram Pandit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlKYdtw-OSM


Rob Weissman, director of the corporate watchdog group, Essential Action, and author of a new report called Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America, said that, in addition to what Pandit said, there's an additional factor that could fog the test results: off-the-book assets.

"If you don't include the off-balance sheet assets in the stress test, then it's not a legitimate stress test," Weissman said. "It's pretty plain that the off-balance-sheet operations are a central part of the story of why we don't know what the banks own." The Treasury Department declined to comment on whether they would take off-book-assets into account when running the stress tests.

Weissman says that recipients of bailout money, like Citigroup, Bank of America and JP Morgan, have been engaging in "fanciful accounting" of what they owe and what they own by relocating of their less-than-healthy assets off the books, in shadow corporations. Rep. Brad Sherman has described the process as, "apples on one balance sheet and oranges on another."

According to RGE Monitor, off-balance-sheet operations have skyrocketed over the last 15 years. From 1992 to 2007, on-balance-sheet assets grew by 200 percent, while off-balance-sheet assets grew by 1,518 percent. In 2007, it was estimated that there was 15.9 times more money parked in off-balance-sheet operations than in on-the-book operations. Not all off-book assets are toxic. Some financial institutions might park assets off their books if they are planning, for instance, to sell them. However, in rough economic times, off-balance sheet accounting allows banks to veil their losses from investors, regulators, and even insiders.

"This turns out to be a really important benefit [for a bank] if it happens to be insolvent," Weissman added. "And many believe that if you total Citigroup's assets and liabilities, it is insolvent."

As of July, Citigroup appeared to have the most off-book assets -- an estimated $1.1 trillion. But they aren't alone. As of July 2009, JP Morgan Chase & Co. had more than $400 billion off their books. Bank of America had $48.2 billion off the books before it bought Merrill Lynch. "If you start adding up all the potential exposures, it's a huge number," Sam Golden, former ombudsman for the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, told Bloomberg. "The banks will say that it was disclosed. Investors are saying, 'Yeah, but it was cryptic.'"

Disclosure rules for off-balance sheet operations are notably less strict than those for assets on the books. Neri Bukspan, chief accountant for Standard & Poor's told Bloomberg, "A lot of information tends to disappear."

The use of the off-balance-sheet assets was a core part of the Enron scandal, where they were able to wrap debt inside of debt, using obscure corporations, so no one could track what they owed and what they owned. After the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was set in place, there were efforts to address the problems with off-book assets. But after heavy lobbying by two main trade groups, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association and the American Securitization Forum, banks were given special exemptions.

In September of 2008 as the financial crisis was coming into full view, the Senate Baking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee held a hearing, discussing off-balance sheet operations. Senator Jack Reed recalled Enron: "This phenomenon of moving assets off the balance sheets is eerily familiar. We recall back in the days of Enron that its schemes to manufacture false profits included special purpose entities that conducted transactions off-balance sheet. The goal was to avoid financial reporting. While no one is necessarily suggesting scandals of the Enron kind, we cannot fail to admit the irony. We are dealing with a similar problem yet again, only six years later."

George P. Miller, Executive Director of the American Securitization Forum, said that moving assets off-book back on to the books would cause dangerous swelling of balance sheets. He added, "There are many other steps that the industry can and should undertake to promote broader and better transparency about risk exposures in these vehicles, whether they are on or off-balance sheet."

But Donald Young, former member of the Financial Accounting Standards Board countered, "We just had an investment bank [Lehman Brothers] go bankrupt with a fair value balance sheet that showed it had plenty of assets and liabilities. And it almost seems like financial reporting is out of control and not trusted and not believed in. And I think what we do here has got to establish transparency. If the transparency is such that we're going to bring out some bad news that wasn't there before, that's a risk. But I think the benefits of reestablishing confidence in the markets will overwhelm that."

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) are revising the rules so some off-book assets will have to be reported on the books. However, the changes won't be effective until January 2010 at the earliest. In March at a House Financial Services Subcommittee hearing, Rep. Sherman complained about this lag. He told the chairman of the FASB, Bob Herz, "If you guys can't act quickly and logically, perhaps the regulatory accountants need to act and depart from what is a somewhat illogical and certainly slow process that you've got."

In the meantime, in a recent letter to his employees, Pandit has said Citigroup is having its best quarter since 2007 and the bank had conducted its own internal stress tests with positive results. But Weissman says something doesn't add up. "Either they've done a lot of due diligence in a short amount of time that they hadn't done before, or the stories are incompatible."

Danielle Ivory is an associate producer for American News Project. Her videos and writing have appeared on Democracy Now, The Nation, Alternet, Truthout, and The Huffington Post.  She currently co-writes a weekly media column with Eric Alterman at the Center for American Progress.  You can follow her on twitter.

© 2009 American News Project & AlterNet All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/134997/

Moyers Journal: Madoff Was A Piker -- America's Big Banks Are a Far Larger Fraudulent Ponzi Scheme

By Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal
Posted on April 6, 2009, Printed on April 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/135161/

Bill Moyers: For months now, revelations of the wholesale greed and blatant transgressions of Wall Street have reminded us that "The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One." In fact, the man you're about to meet wrote a book with just that title. It was based upon his experience as a tough regulator during one of the darkest chapters in our financial history: the savings and loan scandal in the late 1980s.

Bill Black was in New York for a conference at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice where scholars and journalists gathered to ask the question, "How do they get away with it?" Well, no one has asked that question more often than Bill Black. The former Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention now teaches Economics and Law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. During the savings and loan crisis, it was Black who accused then-house speaker Jim Wright and five US Senators, including John Glenn and John McCain, of doing favors for the S&L's in exchange for contributions and other perks. The senators got off with a slap on the wrist, but so enraged was one of those bankers, Charles Keating -- after whom the senate's so-called "Keating Five" were named -- he sent a memo that read, in part, "get Black -- kill him dead." Metaphorically, of course. Of course. Now Black is focused on an even greater scandal, and he spares no one -- not even the President he worked hard to elect, Barack Obama. But his main targets are the Wall Street barons, heirs of an earlier generation whose scandalous rip-offs of wealth back in the 1930s earned them comparison to Al Capone and the mob, and the nickname "banksters." Bill Black, welcome to the Journal.

William K. Black: Thank you.

Bill Moyers: I was taken with your candor at the conference here in New York to hear you say that this crisis we're going through, this economic and financial meltdown is driven by fraud. What's your definition of fraud?

Black: Fraud is deceit. And the essence of fraud is, "I create trust in you, and then I betray that trust, and get you to give me something of value." And as a result, there's no more effective acid against trust than fraud, especially fraud by top elites, and that's what we have.

Moyers: In your book, you make it clear that calculated dishonesty by people in charge is at the heart of most large corporate failures and scandals, including, of course, the S&L, but is that true? Is that what you're saying here, that it was in the boardrooms and the CEO offices where this fraud began?

Black: Absolutely.

Moyers: How did they do it? What do you mean?

Black: Well, the way that you do it is to make really bad loans, because they pay better. Then you grow extremely rapidly, in other words, you're a Ponzi-like scheme. And the third thing you do is we call it leverage. That just means borrowing a lot of money, and the combination creates a situation where you have guaranteed record profits in the early years. That makes you rich, through the bonuses that modern executive compensation has produced. It also makes it inevitable that there's going to be a disaster down the road.

Moyers: So you're suggesting, saying that CEOs of some of these banks and mortgage firms in order to increase their own personal income, deliberately set out to make bad loans?

Black: Yes.

Moyers: How do they get away with it? I mean, what about their own checks and balances in the company? What about their accounting divisions?

Black: All of those checks and balances report to the CEO, so if the CEO goes bad, all of the checks and balances are easily overcome. And the art form is not simply to defeat those internal controls, but to suborn them, to turn them into your greatest allies. And the bonus programs are exactly how you do that.

Moyers: If I wanted to go looking for the parties to this, with a good bird dog, where would you send me?

Black: Well, that's exactly what hasn't happened. We haven't looked, all right? The Bush Administration essentially got rid of regulation, so if nobody was looking, you were able to do this with impunity and that's exactly what happened. Where would you look? You'd look at the specialty lenders. The lenders that did almost all of their work in the sub-prime and what's called Alt-A, liars' loans.

Moyers: Yeah. Liars' loans--

Black: Liars' loans.

Moyers: Why did they call them liars' loans?

Black: Because they were liars' loans.

Moyers: And they knew it?

Black: They knew it. They knew that they were frauds.

Black: Liars' loans mean that we don't check. You tell us what your income is. You tell us what your job is. You tell us what your assets are, and we agree to believe you. We won't check on any of those things. And by the way, you get a better deal if you inflate your income and your job history and your assets.

Moyers: You think they really said that to borrowers?

Black: We know that they said that to borrowers. In fact, they were also called, in the trade, ninja loans.

Moyers: Ninja?

Black: Yeah, because no income verification, no job verification, no asset verification.

Moyers: You're talking about significant American companies.

Black: Huge! One company produced as many losses as the entire Savings and Loan debacle.

Moyers: Which company?

Black: IndyMac specialized in making liars' loans. In 2006 alone, it sold $80 billion dollars of liars' loans to other companies. $80 billion.

Moyers: And was this happening exclusively in this sub-prime mortgage business?

Black: No, and that's a big part of the story as well. Even prime loans began to have non-verification. Even Ronald Reagan, you know, said, "Trust, but verify." They just gutted the verification process. We know that will produce enormous fraud, under economic theory, criminology theory, and two thousand years of life experience.

Moyers: Is it possible that these complex instruments were deliberately created so swindlers could exploit them?

Black: Oh, absolutely. This stuff, the exotic stuff that you're talking about was created out of things like liars' loans, that were known to be extraordinarily bad. And now it was getting triple-A ratings. Now a triple-A rating is supposed to mean there is zero credit risk. So you take something that not only has significant, it has crushing risk. That's why it's toxic. And you create this fiction that it has zero risk. That itself, of course, is a fraudulent exercise. And again, there was nobody looking, during the Bush years. So finally, only a year ago, we started to have a Congressional investigation of some of these rating agencies, and it's scandalous what came out. What we know now is that the rating agencies never looked at a single loan file. When they finally did look, after the markets had completely collapsed, they found, and I'm quoting Fitch, the smallest of the rating agencies, "the results were disconcerting, in that there was the appearance of fraud in nearly every file we examined."

Moyers: So if your assumption is correct, your evidence is sound, the bank, the lending company, created a fraud. And the ratings agency that is supposed to test the value of these assets knowingly entered into the fraud. Both parties are committing fraud by intention.

Black: Right, and the investment banker that -- we call it pooling -- puts together these bad mortgages, these liars' loans, and creates the toxic waste of these derivatives. All of them do that. And then they sell it to the world and the world just thinks because it has a triple-A rating it must actually be safe. Well, instead, there are 60 and 80 percent losses on these things, because of course they, in reality, are toxic waste.

Moyers: You're describing what Bernie Madoff did to a limited number of people. But you're saying it's systemic, a systemic Ponzi scheme.

Black: Oh, Bernie was a piker. He doesn't even get into the front ranks of a Ponzi scheme…

Moyers: But you're saying our system became a Ponzi scheme.

Black: Our system…

Moyers: Our financial system…

Black: Became a Ponzi scheme. Everybody was buying a pig in the poke. But they were buying a pig in the poke with a pretty pink ribbon, and the pink ribbon said, "Triple-A."

Moyers: Is there a law against liars' loans?

Black: Not directly, but there, of course, many laws against fraud, and liars' loans are fraudulent.

Moyers: Because…

Black: Because they're not going to be repaid and because they had false representations. They involve deceit, which is the essence of fraud.

Moyers: Why is it so hard to prosecute? Why hasn't anyone been brought to justice over this?

Black: Because they didn't even begin to investigate the major lenders until the market had actually collapsed, which is completely contrary to what we did successfully in the Savings and Loan crisis, right? Even while the institutions were reporting they were the most profitable savings and loan in America, we knew they were frauds. And we were moving to close them down. Here, the Justice Department, even though it very appropriately warned, in 2004, that there was an epidemic…

Moyers: Who did?

Black: The FBI publicly warned, in September 2004 that there was an epidemic of mortgage fraud, that if it was allowed to continue it would produce a crisis at least as large as the Savings and Loan debacle. And that they were going to make sure that they didn't let that happen. So what goes wrong? After 9/11, the attacks, the Justice Department transfers 500 white-collar specialists in the FBI to national terrorism. Well, we can all understand that. But then, the Bush administration refused to replace the missing 500 agents. So even today, again, as you say, this crisis is 1000 times worse, perhaps, certainly 100 times worse, than the Savings and Loan crisis. There are one-fifth as many FBI agents as worked the Savings and Loan crisis.

Moyers: You talk about the Bush administration. Of course, there's that famous photograph of some of the regulators in 2003, who come to a press conference with a chainsaw suggesting that they're going to slash, cut business loose from regulation, right?

Black: Well, they succeeded. And in that picture, by the way, the other -- three of the other guys with pruning shears are the…

Moyers: That's right.

Black: They're the trade representatives. They're the lobbyists for the bankers. And everybody's grinning. The government's working together with the industry to destroy regulation. Well, we now know what happens when you destroy regulation. You get the biggest financial calamity of anybody under the age of 80.

Moyers: But I can point you to statements by Larry Summers, who was then Bill Clinton's Secretary of the Treasury, or the other Clinton Secretary of the Treasury, Rubin. I can point you to suspects in both parties, right?

Black: There were two really big things, under the Clinton administration. One, they got rid of the law that came out of the real-world disasters of the Great Depression. We learned a lot of things in the Great Depression. And one is we had to separate what's called commercial banking from investment banking. That's the Glass-Steagall law. But we thought we were much smarter, supposedly. So we got rid of that law, and that was bipartisan. And the other thing is we passed a law, because there was a very good regulator, Brooksley Born, that everybody should know about and probably doesn't. She tried to do the right thing to regulate one of these exotic derivatives that you're talking about. We call them C.D.F.S. And Summers, Rubin, and Phil Gramm came together to say not only will we block this particular regulation. We will pass a law that says you can't regulate. And it's this type of derivative that is most involved in the AIG scandal. AIG all by itself, cost the same as the entire Savings and Loan debacle.

Moyers: What did AIG contribute? What did they do wrong?

Black: They made bad loans. Their type of loan was to sell a guarantee, right? And they charged a lot of fees up front. So, they booked a lot of income. Paid enormous bonuses. The bonuses we're thinking about now, they're much smaller than these bonuses that were also the product of accounting fraud. And they got very, very rich. But, of course, then they had guaranteed this toxic waste. These liars' loans. Well, we've just gone through why those toxic waste, those liars' loans, are going to have enormous losses. And so, you have to pay the guarantee on those enormous losses. And you go bankrupt. Except that you don't in the modern world, because you've come to the United States, and the taxpayers play the fool. Under Secretary Geithner and under Secretary Paulson before him… we took $5 billion dollars, for example, in U.S. taxpayer money. And sent it to a huge Swiss Bank called UBS. At the same time that that bank was defrauding the taxpayers of America. And we were bringing a criminal case against them. We eventually get them to pay a $780 million fine, but wait, we gave them $5 billion. So, the taxpayers of America paid the fine of a Swiss Bank. And why are we bailing out somebody who that is defrauding us?

Moyers: And why…

Black: How mad is this?

Moyers: What is your explanation for why the bankers who created this mess are still calling the shots?

Black: Well, that, especially after what's just happened at G.M., that's… it's scandalous.

Moyers: Why are they firing the president of G.M. and not firing the head of all these banks that are involved?

Black: There are two reasons. One, they're much closer to the bankers. These are people from the banking industry. And they have a lot more sympathy. In fact, they're outright hostile to autoworkers, as you can see. They want to bash all of their contracts. But when they get to banking, they say, contracts, sacred.' But the other element of your question is we don't want to change the bankers, because if we do, if we put honest people in, who didn't cause the problem, their first job would be to find the scope of the problem. And that would destroy the cover up.

Moyers: The cover up?

Black: Sure. The cover up.

Moyers: That's a serious charge.

Black: Of course.

Moyers: Who's covering up?

Black: Geithner is charging, is covering up. Just like Paulson did before him. Geithner is publicly saying that it's going to take $2 trillion -- a trillion is a thousand billion -- $2 trillion taxpayer dollars to deal with this problem. But they're allowing all the banks to report that they're not only solvent, but fully capitalized. Both statements can't be true. It can't be that they need $2 trillion, because they have masses losses, and that they're fine. These are all people who have failed. Paulson failed, Geithner failed. They were all promoted because they failed, not because…

Moyers: What do you mean?

Black: Well, Geithner has, was one of our nation's top regulators, during the entire subprime scandal, that I just described. He took absolutely no effective action. He gave no warning. He did nothing in response to the FBI warning that there was an epidemic of fraud. All this pig in the poke stuff happened under him. So, in his phrase about legacy assets. Well he's a failed legacy regulator.

Moyers: But he denies that he was a regulator. Let me show you some of his testimony before Congress. Take a look at this. TIMOTHY GEITHNER:I've never been a regulator, for better or worse. And I think you're right to say that we have to be very skeptical that regulation can solve all of these problems. We have parts of our system that are overwhelmed by regulation. Overwhelmed by regulation! It wasn't the absence of regulation that was the problem, it was despite the presence of regulation you've got huge risks that build up.

Black: Well, he may be right that he never regulated, but his job was to regulate. That was his mission statement.

Moyers: As?

Black: As president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which is responsible for regulating most of the largest bank holding companies in America. And he's completely wrong that we had too much regulation in some of these areas. I mean, he gives no details, obviously. But that's just plain wrong.

Moyers: How is this happening? I mean why is it happening?

Black: Until you get the facts, it's harder to blow all this up. And, of course, the entire strategy is to keep people from getting the facts.

Moyers: What facts?

Black: The facts about how bad the condition of the banks is. So, as long as I keep the old CEO who caused the problems, is he going to go vigorously around finding the problems? Finding the frauds?

Moyers: You--

Black: Taking away people's bonuses?

Moyers: To hear you say this is unusual because you supported Barack Obama, during the campaign. But you're seeming disillusioned now.

Black: Well, certainly in the financial sphere, I am. I think, first, the policies are substantively bad. Second, I think they completely lack integrity. Third, they violate the rule of law. This is being done just like Secretary Paulson did it. In violation of the law. We adopted a law after the Savings and Loan crisis, called the Prompt Corrective Action Law. And it requires them to close these institutions. And they're refusing to obey the law.

Moyers: In other words, they could have closed these banks without nationalizing them?

Black: Well, you do a receivership. No one -- Ronald Reagan did receiverships. Nobody called it nationalization.

Moyers: And that's a law?

Black: That's the law.

Moyers: So, Paulson could have done this? Geithner could do this?

Black: Not could. Was mandated--

Moyers: By the law.

Black: By the law.

Moyers: This law, you're talking about.

Black: Yes.

Moyers: What the reason they give for not doing it?

Black: They ignore it. And nobody calls them on it.

Moyers: Well, where's Congress? Where's the press? Where--

Black: Well, where's the Pecora investigation?

Moyers: The what?

Black: The Pecora investigation. The Great Depression, we said, "Hey, we have to learn the facts. What caused this disaster, so that we can take steps, like pass the Glass-Steagall law, that will prevent future disasters?" Where's our investigation? What would happen if after a plane crashes, we said, "Oh, we don't want to look in the past. We want to be forward looking. Many people might have been, you know, we don't want to pass blame. No. We have a nonpartisan, skilled inquiry. We spend lots of money on, get really bright people. And we find out, to the best of our ability, what caused every single major plane crash in America. And because of that, aviation has an extraordinarily good safety record. We ought to follow the same policies in the financial sphere. We have to find out what caused the disasters, or we will keep reliving them. And here, we've got a double tragedy. It isn't just that we are failing to learn from the mistakes of the past. We're failing to learn from the successes of the past.

Moyers: What do you mean?

Black: In the Savings and Loan debacle, we developed excellent ways for dealing with the frauds, and for dealing with the failed institutions. And for 15 years after the Savings and Loan crisis, didn't matter which party was in power, the U.S. Treasury Secretary would fly over to Tokyo and tell the Japanese, "You ought to do things the way we did in the Savings and Loan crisis, because it worked really well. Instead you're covering up the bank losses, because you know, you say you need confidence. And so, we have to lie to the people to create confidence. And it doesn't work. You will cause your recession to continue and continue." And the Japanese call it the lost decade. That was the result. So, now we get in trouble, and what do we do? We adopt the Japanese approach of lying about the assets. And you know what? It's working just as well as it did in Japan.

Moyers: Yeah. Are you saying that Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, and others in the administration, with the banks, are engaged in a cover up to keep us from knowing what went wrong?

Black: Absolutely.

Moyers: You are.

Black: Absolutely, because they are scared to death. All right? They're scared to death of a collapse. They're afraid that if they admit the truth, that many of the large banks are insolvent. They think Americans are a bunch of cowards, and that we'll run screaming to the exits. And we won't rely on deposit insurance. And, by the way, you can rely on deposit insurance. And it's foolishness. All right? Now, it may be worse than that. You can impute more cynical motives. But I think they are sincerely just panicked about, "We just can't let the big banks fail." That's wrong.

Moyers: But what might happen, at this point, if in fact they keep from us the true health of the banks?

Black: Well, then the banks will, as they did in Japan, either stay enormously weak, or Treasury will be forced to increasingly absurd giveaways of taxpayer money. We've seen how horrific AIG -- and remember, they kept secrets from everyone.

Moyers: A.I.G. did?

Black: What we're doing with -- no, Treasury and both administrations. The Bush administration and now the Obama administration kept secret from us what was being done with AIG. AIG was being used secretly to bail out favored banks like UBS and like Goldman Sachs. Secretary Paulson's firm, that he had come from being CEO. It got the largest amount of money. $12.9 billion. And they didn't want us to know that. And it was only Congressional pressure, and not Congressional pressure, by the way, on Geithner, but Congressional pressure on AIG. Where Congress said, "We will not give you a single penny more unless we know who received the money." And, you know, when he was Treasury Secretary, Paulson created a recommendation group to tell Treasury what they ought to do with AIG. And he put Goldman Sachs on it.

Moyers: Even though Goldman Sachs had a big vested stake.

Black: Massive stake. And even though he had just been CEO of Goldman Sachs before becoming Treasury Secretary. Now, in most stages in American history, that would be a scandal of such proportions that he wouldn't be allowed in civilized society.

Moyers: Yeah, like a conflict of interest, it seems.

Black: Massive conflict of interests.

Moyers: So, how did he get away with it?

Black: I don't know whether we've lost our capability of outrage. Or whether the cover up has been so successful that people just don't have the facts to react to it.

Moyers: Who's going to get the facts?

Black: We need some chairmen or chairwomen--

Moyers: In Congress.

Black: --in Congress, to hold the necessary hearings. And we can blast this out. But if you leave the failed CEOs in place, it isn't just that they're terrible business people, though they are. It isn't just that they lack integrity, though they do. Because they were engaged in these frauds. But they're not going to disclose the truth about the assets.

Moyers: And we have to know that, in order to know what?

Black: To know everything. To know who committed the frauds. Whose bonuses we should recover. How much the assets are worth. How much they should be sold for. Is the bank insolvent, such that we should resolve it in this way? It's the predicate, right? You need to know the facts to make intelligent decisions. And they're deliberately leaving in place the people that caused the problem, because they don't want the facts. And this is not new. The Reagan Administration's central priority, at all times, during the Savings and Loan crisis, was covering up the losses.

Moyers: So, you're saying that people in power, political power, and financial power, act in concert when their own behinds are in the ringer, right?

Black: That's right. And it's particularly a crisis that brings this out, because then the class of the banker says, "You've got to keep the information away from the public or everything will collapse. If they understand how bad it is, they'll run for the exits."

Moyers: Yeah, and this week in New York, at this conference, you described this as more than a financial crisis. You called it a moral crisis.

Black: Yes.

Moyers: Why?

Black: Because it is a fundamental lack of integrity. But also because, if you look back at crises, an economist who is also a presidential appointee, as a regulator in the Savings and Loan industry, right here in New York, Larry White, wrote a book about the Savings and Loan crisis. And he said, you know, one of the most interesting questions is why so few people engaged in fraud? Because objectively, you could have gotten away with it. But only about ten percent of the CEOs, engaged in fraud. So, 90 percent of them were restrained by ethics and integrity. So, far more than law or by F.B.I. agents, it's our integrity that often prevents the greatest abuses. And what we had in this crisis, instead of the Savings and Loan, is the most elite institutions in America engaging or facilitating fraud.

Moyers: This wound that you say has been inflicted on American life. The loss of worker's income. And security and pensions and future happened, because of the misconduct of a relatively few, very well-heeled people, in very well-decorated corporate suites, right?

Black: Right.

Moyers: It was relatively a handful of people.

Black: And their ideologies, which swept away regulation. So, in the example, regulation means that cheaters don't prosper. So, instead of being bad for capitalism, it's what saves capitalism. "Honest purveyors prosper" is what we want. And you need regulation and law enforcement to be able to do this. The tragedy of this crisis is it didn't need to happen at all.

Moyers: When you wake in the middle of the night, thinking about your work, what do you make of that? What do you tell yourself?

Black: There's a saying that we took great comfort in. It's actually by the Dutch, who were fighting this impossible war for independence against what was then the most powerful nation in the world, Spain. And their motto was, "It is not necessary to hope in order to persevere." Now, going forward, get rid of the people that have caused the problems. That's a pretty straightforward thing, as well. Why would we keep CEOs and CFOs and other senior officers, that caused the problems? That's facially nuts. That's our current system. So stop that current system. We're hiding the losses, instead of trying to find out the real losses. Stop that, because you need good information to make good decisions, right? Follow what works instead of what's failed. Start appointing people who have records of success, instead of records of failure. That would be another nice place to start. There are lots of things we can do. Even today, as late as it is. Even though they've had a terrible start to the administration. They could change, and they could change within weeks. And by the way, the folks who are the better regulators, they paid their taxes. So, you can get them through the vetting process a lot quicker.

Bill Moyers is president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy.

© 2009 Bill Moyers Journal All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/135161/

Shocking Scenarios: Rapid Economic Contraction May Lead to New Wars and Radicalized Politics

By Arun Gupta, Indypendent
Posted on April 6, 2009, Printed on April 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/135288/

As the global economy heads for its first annual decline since WWII and the biggest decline in trade in 80 years, more and more commentators are using the term depression to describe the vertiginous economic collapse.

The rate of the decline is astonishing. Nouriel Roubini, a.k.a. "Dr. Doom," writes, "The scale and speed of synchronized global economic contraction is really unprecedented (at least since the Great Depression), with a free fall of GDP, income, consumption, industrial production, employment, exports, imports, residential investment and, more ominously, capital expenditures around the world."

During the Great Depression the global economy fragmented, leading to the rise of competing power blocs. Eventually, fascist Germany and imperial Japan launched wars of conquest for new markets and lands because they lacked the territorial and trade outlets possessed by the United States, England and the Soviet Union.

This crisis is at an early stage, but the process of global fragmentation has already begun, which means a greater likelihood of interstate military conflict. With the fading of the "war on terror" as the central U.S. battleground, China will probably return as the pre-eminent peril in the minds of the U.S. economic and political elite.

Recently, a sea-going confrontation and China's lecturing the United States over debt indicates how the powers are skirmishing over military and economic interests.

CHINA RISING

China is using the economic crisis as an opportunity by dipping into its gargantuan cash reserves to stoke demand with a two year stimulus plan of $586 billion, which amounts to 14 percent of its annual gross domestic product, versus the Obama plan, which at $797 billion is less than 6 percent of U.S. GDP.

China is focusing on improving its industrial competitiveness, but has yet to address its minimal social welfare spending, which provides greater stimulus than infrastructure spending and spurs demand by allowing the Chinese to lower their high savings rate.

The bigger problem is the Asian economic model may be finished, with exports declining 33 percent in South Korea, where exports account for 60 percent of GDP, and 46 percent in Japan. Industrial output has dropped 43 percent in Taiwan. With consumer demand and business investment collapsing worldwide, countries can no longer export their way to recovery (a policy known as export-oriented industrialization).

These export drops are showing up in China, where imports have declined significantly. It plays a critical intermediary role in the global economy. Walden Bello describes China's economy as the "overwhelming driver of export growth in Taiwan and the Philippines and the majority buyer of products from Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and Australia."

Even if China can spur domestic demand,  it's not a long-term solution. Production can't survive on internal demand alone, and prioritizing domestic manufacturing over foreign trade inevitably devolves into "beggar-thy-neighbor" economic warfare.

EUROPE'S SWAN SONG?

This is precisely what's happening in the 27-member European Union, where "peripheral states such as Latvia, Bulgaria and even Ireland have been brutally whipsawed from an era of heady growth to shockingly fast decline," according to the Wall Street Journal.

The crisis threatens to unravel the post-Cold War economic order in which the West administered "shock therapy" to former Soviet Bloc countries by restructuring them along neoliberal lines. Twenty years ago, Soviet Bloc populations largely accepted the shock therapy with passivity, disoriented by the rapid collapse of Communism.

Peter Gowan, author of The Global Gamble, argues that the Western-imposed shock therapy in the early 1990s bankrupted and privatized East Europe's industrial enterprises and dismantled the region's integrated economy, known as Comecon. This paved the way for unsustainable bubbles in housing and construction, foreign credit and capital flows, low-wage manufacturing and remittances.

Central and East European (CEE) countries are dependent on exporting to meet Eurozone demand, which has collapsed. Net private capital inflows are expected to drop in the region by almost 90 percent this year to just $30 billion. Remittances, which account for 2.5 percent of Poland's GDP and 8 percent of Ukraine's GDP, are evaporating as migrant workers head back home jobless.

Germany and France are telling Eastern countries to look to the International Monetary Fund for help. While European institutions are giving East Europe the cold shoulder, offering only $30 billion in financing assistance for banks in Eastern Europe, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is planning to double its $250 billion fund "to fight the financial crisis in emerging markets," according to the Financial Times.

THE IMF RETURNS

Neoliberalism has led to a historic crisis and been discredited as a political ideology and economic program, but international institutions like the IMF that enforce neoliberal policies are implementing a new phase of structural adjustment programs that will make weaker economies pay for the excesses of Western capital.

The IMF is disbursing loans while instituting new regimes of shock therapy to countries that include Hungary, Iceland, Latvia, Serbia and Ukraine.

Analyst Adam Hanieh writes: "The conditions that come with this latest round of IMF lending have been particularly opaque. … Hungary has agreed to cuts in welfare spending, a freeze in salaries and canceling bonuses for public sector workers yet the final details have not been made public. Iceland was required to raise interest rates to 18 percent with the economy predicted to contract by 10 percent and inflation reaching 20 percent."

West Europe, meanwhile, is turning inward. In England protests are increasing against foreign investment and the 2.4 million foreign workers in the country. Xenophobia and economic nationalism will likely rise as unemployment does across the continent. More joblessness and bankruptcies will increase pressure by labor and capital for protectionist measures ranging from supporting domestic industries and more national stimulus plans to forcing out foreign workers and passing "buy national" provisions.

The effect could lead to greater pressure on Europe's weaker economies, the growth of radical political movements on the left and right and perhaps the eventual disintegration of the Europe's common market and currency. Already, large-scale protests or riots having occurred in Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Iceland, Ukraine and Greece.

RUSSIA LOOKS EAST

Russia would like to benefit from the turmoil both as a response to 20 years of U.S. policy to encircle it militarily and economically and out of rising nationalism. But its economy has been bloodied over the last year. The ruble, Russian stock market and oil and natural gas prices have all tanked, draining away $200 billion in the government's hard currency reserves. Nonetheless, Russia will probably gain leverage over littoral states like the Ukraine and the Baltic region and Ukraine because of their lack of options.

Russia is trying to promote greater regionalization, and has cast its eyes east as part of this strategy. President Dmitry Medvedev predicted last November that "the high human and technological potential" of Asian-Pacific countries "will become the locomotive of sustainable world economic development in the future." Recently, China inked a $25 billion deal to aid Russia's state-controlled energy industry in exchange for about 100 million barrels of oil a year for 20 years. But this pact points to the limited role Russia plays in China's economy, as a supplier of commodities and military hardware, while China exports more valuable consumer and industrial goods to Russia.

THE LATIN AMERICAN MODEL

As for Latin America, its 2.2 percent GDP growth from 2002 to 2006, the highest level since the 1960s, was fueled by exports, mainly commodities, and remittances, which accounted for $59 billion or 2 percent of the continent's GDP by 2006. With the contracting U.S. economy and plunging commodity prices, remittances and exports are falling quickly.

The difference in Latin America is the ascension of leftist governments in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador that are forging new economic relations by "nationalizing natural resources and redistributing the subsequent wealth to social programs to benefit the countries' poor majorities," writes Benjamin Dangl, founder of the website upsidedownworld.org.

Venezuela is promoting the "Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas" (in opposition to the neoliberal Free Trade Area of the Americas) as a regional economic pact based on "cooperation and solidarity," and which encompasses related agreements on energy, finance and media. It's mostly been limited to technical cooperation, subsidized oil supplies and barter agreements, particularly in healthcare, which have proven effective and popular, but are a long way from creating a regional economy.

EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

Washington may look to Latin America as an outlet for capital expansion, such as with the Plan Puebla Panama, which has been in the works for a decade. Public funds and money from international institutions would be used to create an export-oriented industrial zone from southern Mexico through all of Central America.

These types of projects provide a "spatial fix" for capitalism by reorganizing new spaces that serve as sites where surplus capital (and labor) can be deployed as a way to alleviate crises of overproduction.

More ominously, Washington may seek to renew its imperial project in Latin America. Greg Grandin writes in Empire's Workshop that the United States used Latin America historically as a "staging ground" for the "early push towards empire," then as a school to study how to "execute imperial violence through proxies," and most recently as a site for a resurgent "nationalist militarism" that began with the Central America wars of the Reagan presidency and culminated in the post-Sept. 11 wars.

Thus, given a declining economy and the need for domestic capital to find new markets, the United States may be tempted to use the Pentagon to launch adventurist wars in Latin America as a solution to its economic woes.

While many people fondly talk of a return to New Deal economics, it was World War II that pulled the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression. The solution to the global crisis requires restructuring economies to stimulate widespread demand while not feeding production and speculative bubbles, which means a redistribution of resources. Absent such measures, authoritarianism and militarism will have growing appeal. Just like the 1930s.

Arun Gupta is a founding editor of The Indypendent newspaper. He is writing a book on the decline of American Empire for Haymarket Books.

© 2009 Indypendent All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/135288/

Fast-Rising Protest Group Challenges the Outrageous Power of the Bankers

By Kristina Rizga, WireTap
Posted on April 7, 2009, Printed on April 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/135390/

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.

Sign AlterNet's pledge that you aren't going to let this rip-off happen and join New Way Forward's national protest on April 11.

***

Tiffiniy Cheng, 29, never imagined she'd spark a populist movement influenced by a former IMF banker. Three weeks ago Cheng and her co-founding partners launched A New Way Forward, a volunteer-run website that advocates for a new approach to bank bailouts and is organizing a nationwide protest on April 11. Cheng and her friends are not new to online organizing. In 2006, some of them launched OpenCongress.org, a nonpartisan website that lets people track the legislation in Congress, and Downhill Battle, a music activism website, but they never had a burning desire to study and reform the financial system. Then, as 350 billion of taxpayer money went to the same CEOs who helped bring the global economic system down, Cheng and her friends, as many in America, became angry. Why reward the same people who broke the system, they asked.

On February 19, the co-founders of A New Way Forward heard Simon Johnson, the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF),  interviewed on PBS's Bill Moyers Journal argue for an alternative bailout plan. Until recently, Johnson spent 20 years at the IMF working on international bank bailouts, among other things. Dissatisfied with the current bailout process, he decided to show his ex-colleagues at the IMF the balance sheets of some of America's leading banks receiving bailouts (concealing their names). Every one of his former colleagues gave a similar prescription: Recovery will fail unless Americans break up the financial oligarchy. In the short term, that means the failing banks would have to be temporarily taken over by the government, cleaned up, broken up and sold off in the private markets. The board members and CEOs of those banks would have to be fired and replaced. This contradicts the administration's current plan.

In an appearance on NPR's Fresh Air, host Terry Gross asked Johnson why the government hadn't fired the current CEOs. He argued that the American government allowed banks become too big and powerful through lax regulation. When banks grow too big and become major financial supporters of politicians, it becomes much harder to fire them Johnson explained.

Three weeks later, Cheng and her five activist partners launched A New Way Forward as both a platform to advocate for the bailout plan offered by Johnson and other independent economists and an online organizing tool to protest the current plan. In the first three weeks, 8,000 people of all ages signed up to participate in protests planned in over 55 cities. WireTap talked to Tiffiniy Cheng to find out why A New Way Forward thinks a different bailout plan is urgent and why these online organizers decided to protest on the streets this time.

WireTap: Let's start with the basics. Why did you and your partners decide to launch a New Way Forward initiative?

Tiffiniy Cheng: The [bank] bailouts were just on everybody's minds and on my own. Watching all of the bailouts go to the banks and bankers has been so frustrating, because they are a part of the reason why this system has been broken. Once I saw Simon Johnson on Bill Moyers Journal and heard a clear strategy that had the public interest in mind, we wanted to do something. It seemed that Obama and Congress didn't have enough political independence from the financial industry to actually push forward policies that were in the public interest. It seemed to us that there is a sound policy we can all rally around that had our interest in mind.

Is your agenda mostly informed by Simon Johnson?

Yes, a lot of our thinking comes from what Simon Johnson, but also what James Kwak, George Akerlof, and Robert Shiller have written about. I think Paul Krugman is also pretty influential. And we started working on this campaign when both [Paul] Bernanke and [Nouriel] Roubini came out and said that we might need to take a different course. That nationalization [of the banks] would probably be a good thing in their view. We are drawing ideas from expert opinion for sure. We are looking at all of the people who are talking about a way we can get out of this economic crisis in a way that will allow us to build a healthier economy, and a healthier free market where the bottom is allowed to prosper. We are looking at any economist or any leader in Congress who is talking about the policies that will affect the working class people as well.

What is your agenda?

First, nationalize the banks. That means temporary FDIC [Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that guarantees the safety of deposits in the U.S. banks] intervention. FDIC can help to clear the balance sheets of any bank that is failing and has needed the bail out money.

To clarify, right now, it's still the bank board members and the CEOs who are deciding how the money is going to be spent, right?

They are not only deciding, the current plan allows them to privatize the cost of the bail out, and socialize the cost. We are saying the government should be getting something back.

To clarify, another way to describe this is if the banks fail, taxpayers pay for it. If the banks succeed, they take the profits, correct?

Exactly. We are giving them the money with no strings attached.

The second point on your agenda calls to reorganize the current banking system--what do you mean by that?

We think that the government and any future regulatory agency needs political independence from the current powerful financial industry. We are saying that if the government cleans up their balance sheets, other banks should be able to come in and build a new banking system with new rules in place.

And the final point of your agenda is decentralize--what does that mean?

Regulation. We don't want to see any bank that is allowed to grow so big, again, that they can take down the entire economy ["too big to fail"]. The people in power for the past 20 years have eroded most anti trust laws that would make it so that financial industry aren't allowed to make complex financial instruments that create a web of influence that can take down the country. We don't want to see monopolistic behaviors. We don't think that financial industry should be able to play around with consumers' money in such a frivolous way. We need a healthy free market and the best way to do that is to allow for a new, smaller banking industry grow to a healthy level without creating this web of connections.

One of the key points that Simon Johnson made on the Fresh Air program, I think, was that when a similar banking crisis happened in Sweden, at some point, the government had to "face down the big bankers" and tell them that they screwed up and will be replaced by other CEOs and board members. And he was implying that the American Banks are so big and powerful and contribute so much money to politicians that the elected officials are not standing up to them right now. So, does that relate to your point about why we don't want to let any banks get this big and powerful?

Right. It's what missing from the conversation. There is this also this human factor that is involved. When your friend gives you a $100 as a political contribution to your campaign, you still want to take care of them. And that's what's happening at the highest levels of government right now. We have an ex-lobbyist for Goldman Sachs [Mark Patterson] as chief of staff for Timothy Geithner, and that's actually breaking a restriction that Obama was going to have. He wasn't going to have any lobbyists serve in his cabinet, but they made an exception for the chief of staff of Geithner. The "reorganize part" [of our agenda] is essential to seeing policies that don't favor the banks over the public.

What do you say to some young people, who maybe skeptical about street protesting? Why not just use online organizing instead?

I think there are lots of online organizing tools that are yet to be made, but this is a moment to come out and show that the public can be organized around serious ideas, and show Obama that there is political viability to publicly entrusted policies.... I think that showing up at a protest is one of the strongest forms of our political expression. We are glad that the technology allows us to organize something like that. I'm really sick of just signing a lot of petitions online. I do think that showing up at a protest or anything else is still the most potent way to express our political power.

Do you hope that something will happen immediately after these protests?

I think that because we are so well organized and we are seeing so much public support for serious reform ideas that the government can't do anything but listen to everyone. We are saying, 'We don't get to have private meetings with you Pres. Obama and Congress, but you have to listen to us because we are strong in numbers. We are asking for something concrete--for real structural change that we can believe in.'

 What are some experiences in your life that impacted your work and politicized you?

I see a huge difference between people who are engaged and not engaged. Not just in politics, but in life in general--about their job, or some event, or idea.... And I think the thing that makes a difference is how open the system is and shows an individual that their efforts are effective and create change....

Seeing my family being less engaged. I was able to enjoy school.... They never had the opportunities that I had. They always had to think about surviving. We were immigrants to this county.... Learning about my own family history and learning about the different political movements that were here before I was even born showed the power of politics. Being political is one of the most powerful ways to live, I think. My parents have always been very poor, but were always impacted by politics.

My grandparents were the victims of the largest famine in the world, which happened in China. And my father was an orphan. And my mother was very poor too, and her parents just died from overwork. We were also affected by the Vietnam war, and I was born in Macau [China] in a refugee camp. And we were then sponsored to come to this country. So, all of that makes me value being political. Seeing a system like ours that can alleviate some poverty makes me want to do something. But when you have excessive growth at the corporate level, you really see a distortion of our political system, and our economy.

How so?

Then the corporations just have so much money and so many connections to the political system. Then they are allowed to influence some of the most important decisions. There are some people who have a bunch of political power because of the money they are allowed to make. And then there is the public that can never gain that much political power individually.

What is one thing that you are hoping that could happen right away? What does success look like?

Independent regulatory body that enforces antitrust laws. I think we could help create a bill in Congress that revisits some of our strongest regulatory policies that we had in the country twenty years ago and that could prevent the financial industry from going out of control again. Some of these things are sort of happening, but there isn't enough energy around it. Some people are talking about and making a few gestures, but no one is putting enough energy to really push it through. I hope we can push our representatives to make those kinds of policies happen.

*******

To learn more about A New Way Forward, visit their site.

Click here to watch Simon Johnson speak on PBS's Bill Moyers Journal.

To learn more about the bailout recepients click here.

Kristina Rizga is the executive editor of

WireTap, a political youth magazine, project director of Future5000.com and a member of the editorial board of The Nation.

© 2009 WireTap All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/135390/

Unemployment Is Hitting Men Particularly Hard -- and Both Sexes Are Losing Out

By Betsy Reed, The Nation
Posted on April 8, 2009, Printed on April 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/135521/

The Los Angeles Times is calling it the "he-cession." The stark facts show that the economic crisis is hitting men particularly hard: The official male unemployment rate just spiked to 8.8 percent, while the figure for women is on a slower rise, now at 7 percent. So we can add to the old-fashioned gender gap in wages (favoring men, who make one dollar to a woman's 80 cents for the same job), a new gender gap in unemployment, favoring women.

With women working more, there has been a role reversal of sorts, but it's hardly the kind feminists envisioned. As men lose their jobs, households are depending increasingly on the relatively meager wages of women to stay afloat. And the newly unemployed men aren't spending their freed-up time packing lunches and schlepping the kids to soccer games. According to a recent analysis of time use data by economists Alan B. Krueger and Andreas Mueller, they're devoting those hours to looking for new jobs -- and sleeping more, and watching more TV.

The picture of domestic life that emerges is not the gendered suburban dystopia of Revolutionary Road. But vestiges of that old order persist, mixing in new and potentially combustible ways with the legacy of feminism (the increased participation of women in the labor force), its unfinished business (their lower wages, and the lack of social supports for working motherhood), and the vagaries of this particular downturn, which has been especially merciless in male-dominated sectors like construction and manufacturing.

To put it another way, the "second shift" that sociologist Arlie Hochschild described in her classic book of that name is alive and well -- even as it's increasingly women alone who are working the first shift.

These complex dynamics were the subject of lively discussion at the symposium "Achieving Equity for Women" last week in Washington, organized by the Institute for Women's Policy Research. A few months ago, feminists were writing skeptical op-eds about President Obama's "macho stimulus package," which emphasized "shovel-ready" projects that would boost employment in traditionally male occupations over investment in childcare, education and health, where women are more likely to be employed.

Now that we know men have lost four out of every five jobs in this recession, the conversation among feminists is focusing on how the jobs women have hung onto weren't so great in the first place. For example, while childcare workers in many states make just minimum wage ($7.21 in Florida), construction workers, when they can get work, routinely earn upwards of $30 an hour. And childcare, meanwhile, continues to be woefully underfunded, with the stimulus package alotting just $2 billion to support care for low-income kids. To build a truly decent universal system -- making life sane for all working parents -- the price tag would be more like $100-$200 billion.

With women poised to eclipse men the labor force -- they're at 49.1 percent and counting -- it's nice to have proof that the much-celebrated "Opt-Out Revolution" was the smoke and mirrors working mothers always knew it was. But there's no reason to cheer this milestone if it mainly reflects the obliteration of jobs for men. Likewise, the narrowing of the gender gap in wages (which has been cut in half in the past 25 years) has been in part an illusory victory, since it has reflected not just the advancement of upper-income women, but the fact that the real wages of low-skilled men were eroding.

In other words, if men take two steps back, and women one, we all wind up behind.

© 2009 The Nation All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/135521/

Without Cops on the Beat, the Great Worker Rip-Off Continues

By Catherine Ruckelshaus and Christine Owens, AlterNet
Posted on April 9, 2009, Printed on April 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/135780/

For the third time in less than a year, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) is reporting that protections guaranteed by the wage and hour laws are non-existent for many low-wage workers in this country, due in large part to failings of the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) in recent years. In recent testimony to the House Education and Labor Committee, the GAO announced the results of its undercover investigation into the DOL's enforcement of wage and hour protections for these workers, and the news is disturbing.

The labor-intensive jobs in our increasingly dominant service sectors have long been fertile terrain for employers bent on cheating workers of their wages, but now the nose-diving economy is impelling even more firms into desperate cost-cutting modes. Some employers simply don't pay their workers. Others use schemes that obstruct enforcement, like calling employees "independent contractors," inserting fly-by-night subcontractors, and using payrolling or leasing companies in an attempt to shield themselves from liability and confuse the workers. Some employers seek out and hire undocumented workers, knowing they will not complain of underpayments. Competing firms feel pressured to adopt similar practices to stay in the game. As the GAO undercover investigation revealed, there's very little risk that these employers will get caught.

This is bad for workers and their families -- and for the economy. Without a solid wage floor and strong wage protections, our janitorial, hospitality, retail, home health care, restaurant and construction jobs will not boost the economy in any way.

Last summer, GAO issued two reports lambasting DOL's Wage & Hour Division for its abject failure to enforce basic minimum wage, overtime, and child labor rules. One of these reports was a devastating set of case studies on DOL enforcement, highlighting the agency's failure to pursue worker complaints and its utter disregard for deadlines and employer evasions. Now we learn that with its report to be released in May, GAO will document that those most vulnerable to underpayment of wages -- low wage workers -- found little solace at the Department of Labor.

Thankfully, though, the tide is turning, with the new Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, declaring at her swearing-in ceremony, "there's a new sheriff in town!" Secretary Solis has emphatically stressed that enforcing our wage and hour laws is a top priority, and President Obama's 2010 budget proposes the first real increase in Wage and Hour Division funding in nearly a decade.

Meanwhile, during a period of relative inaction at the federal level, several state labor departments and related agencies picked up the mantle and enacted innovative enforcement strategies aimed at the most persistent sweatshops. Community workers centers and unions often joined these efforts, providing the "eyes and ears" for the agencies, and in some cases bringing lawsuits against scofflaw employers. In janitorial and construction jobs, creative labor-management partnerships resulted in employer-funded efforts to ensure wage compliance by all firms, by leveraging enforcement by state agencies and private actors.

This kind of redundancy in enforcement brings needed reinforcement to law-abiding firms in industries that have operated with impunity for too long. And these public and private initiatives provide solid models for reinvigorated federal enforcement.

But there is much to do. The newly re-energized DOL should use the full array of tools and penalties at its disposal to crack down on problem industries, repeat violators, and companies that brazenly perpetrate "independent contractor" scams costing the government billions each year in tax theft. Congress can aid this effort by fully funding the Administration's budget request for DOL and enacting common-sense improvements to the Fair Labor Standards Act that will better enable workers to pursue their legal remedies.

At times like these, when workers are at their most vulnerable and economic pressures create incentives to cut corners among even the best of employers, it is critical that the Department aggressively embrace and advance its mission of promoting the interests of and opportunities for America's workers. That means making sure that law-breaking employers fear the DOL as much as an IRS audit. When that happens, the wage floor will mean something to low-wage workers, their families, and our economy.

The authors are the Legal Co-Director and Executive Director, respectively, of the National Employment Law Project.

© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/135780/

Congress Pushing Covert Bailout to Save Big Finance and Screw Homeowners

By Zach Carter, AlterNet
Posted on April 9, 2009, Printed on April 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/135542/

U.S. policymakers just dealt struggling homeowners another devastating financial blow by helping Wall Street banks cook the books on their mortgages.

The real outrage, however, is that federal policymakers know the strategy they're adopting screws borrowers: they did the same thing in the 1980s to save banks from overwhelming losses on loans they'd made to developing nations, with horrific consequences for the global economy.

Under intense pressure from Congress and the banking lobby, regulators have approved a new accounting rule that allows banks leeway to value troubled mortgages and debt-backed securities at inflated prices. Banks typically have to value these assets at market prices: the amount investors might pay for them.

But with the U.S. economy fighting for life under a mountain of foreclosures, investors have figured out that these loans -- and the byzantine securities into which they were "sliced and diced" -- are not actually worth very much. As a result, nobody is buying them; their "market" has disappeared. 

So the banks now insist that hundreds of billions of dollars in debt-backed securities are not really worthless predatory garbage but merely assets being unfairly scorned by the trading markets. Their bargain-basement prices are artificially low.

So Big Finance has persuaded Congress and regulators to allow them to use secret proprietary "models" the banks own to assign values to these "toxic assets" without having to justify those numbers with concrete market information.

"The market would demonstrate that the value of these assets is much, much lower than what they've already got on the books," says Duke University Economics Professor William Darity. But once the new rules take effect, big losses on absurd mortgages will magically disappear with the stroke of a pen.

If that sounds like a back-door bailout, rest assured: it is. Even worse, it will actually hurt homeowners facing foreclosure. Allowing banks to use magical valuation models eliminates the incentives for them to modify loans that can't be repaid -- loan modifications that might enable families hit hard by this recession to stay in their homes.

Instead of encouraging banks to cut their losses by reducing the amount borrowers owe on their mortgages, regulators are giving them every reason to refuse to negotiate with their customers. 

This is exactly what happened in the foreign debt crisis of the 1980s.

"The commercial banks at the time essentially pushed loans on the developing countries," Darity says. "They tried to make it as attractive as possible for these governments to take on external debt, not necessarily with an expectation that the debt obligations would be paid." 

When it became clear that those countries simply could not afford to pay off the mountains of debt they had accumulated, the banks found themselves facing total financial ruin.

According to FDIC data, as early as 1982, at least eight of the largest U.S. banks -- including Citibank, Bank of America and JPMorgan -- would have been wiped out by the losses from those loans to foreign governments, yet all stayed in business thanks to accommodating regulators.  So it is with those "toxic assets" today, with bank balance sheets stretched beyond the breaking point thanks to defaults on expensive mortgages that will never be repaid. 

"You had a number of the largest money center banks that had losses so large that they would be insolvent," according to William Black, a senior banking regulator during the 1980s who now teaches law and economics at the University of Missouri. (A money center bank is one that lends to other banks, big corporations and governments rather than consumers. They're the ones often described as "too big to fail.")

"Insolvency is a somewhat kind word," Darity says, referring to both the foreign debt crisis of the '80s and the current financial mess. "Really, the banks are bankrupt." 

In August 1982, Mexico's minister of finance told U.S. Treasury officials and the International Monetary Fund that his country would not be able to make an interest payment on an $80 billion debt. Several other countries, including Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Venezuela soon announced that they too would not be paying interest on loans from Wall Street. It was obvious that the national economies of these highly indebted countries could not generate the funds necessary to pay off the U.S. banks. 

The government has a non-bailout solution for this problem, but it simply refused to use it with big banks during the Latin American debt crisis and in today's mortgage implosion. When banks destroy themselves with predatory loans, the government is supposed to take them over and work out their troubled loans with borrowers.

Shareholders who made bad bets on a busted bank get wiped out, and the management team responsible for the problem is shown the door. Eventually, the rehabilitated loans that borrowers can now afford get sold to a new set of investors and borrowers get relief. 

In the '80s, instead of requiring Citibank, Bank of America and JPMorgan to write off loans that were obviously never going to be paid back in full, regulators adopted a policy of simply looking the other way. Regulators knowingly allowed banks to pretend that their loans to foreign governments were perfectly healthy, ignoring the fact that the banks had not only suffered losses, but were essentially kaput.

It would be nearly five years after the debt crisis began before banks started accounting for losses on their loans to Latin American governments, according to the FDIC, with Citibank becoming the first to do so in May 1987. 

This proved extraordinarily destructive to the economies of developing nations, particularly in Latin America. Accounting giveaways made it unnecessary for banks to acknowledge reality, so instead of reducing the overall size of the loans, they only haggled over individual interest payments. 

"That was a major economic and political disaster," says Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira, who served as finance minister of Brazil during the debt crisis. Bresser-Pereira was at the heart of Brazil's debt negotiations with the U.S. Treasury Department, major U.S. banks, the IMF and the World Bank. 

Enormous portions of the national economy in countries like Brazil became completely devoted to meeting one-off interest payments.  Once each payment was made, a new round of negotiations would begin for the next payment.

Long-term solutions that allowed the economies of countries like Brazil to recover were off the table. Actually reducing how much Brazil owed would have required the banks to take losses, but regulators would allow banks to value the original bad loans at full price. In several cases, banks even issued more debt to countries to help them pay the interest on old loans, building up an even bigger mountain of debt and putting even more pressure on their economies. 

"This meant that they didn't work out the loans for years and years and years, and so the interest carry got bigger and bigger," Black says. "When they were paying high interest, people are actually suffering malnutrition. It's a big deal in that context." 

When Bresser-Pereira initially began discussions with big U.S. commercial banks and the IMF, his country had imposed a "moratorium" on its debt -- it was refusing to make interest payments until banks agreed to a long-term solution that would allow Brazil to get moving again. But banks were focused exclusively on short-term fixes. 

"They asked me to suspend the moratorium, and I said, 'Look, I will not suspend the moratorium if I do not have a good solution to the debt crisis. If we just suspend the moratorium and are not able to pay the debts, this makes no sense at all.' " 

Banks did not begin to seriously negotiate with developing nations on the full scope of their debt burden until they had actually started accounting for big losses on those loans.

In 1987, when the U.S. banks were first starting to see some red ink from their loans to foreign governments, Bresser-Pereira pitched a plan to the Treasury Department that would reduce Brazil's total debt burden. As banks wrote down the value of their loans, they became more willing to reduce that debt burden. 

"It would have been much better for them to have agreed earlier, for sure," Bresser-Pereiera says. "In 1987, they already knew that some of the money was lost, and they had already written it off in their balance sheets. So what they wanted was to continue to make business."

It is important to note that serious negotiations only began in 1987 -- Brazil would not actually reach formal agreements with its U.S. creditors until the early 1990s. 

"This also relates to the accounting practices that are involved in the current crisis," Darity says. "The foreign loans could be kept on the books as performing for far longer than domestic loans when the borrowers went into arrears. There are some similar kinds of accounting high jinks ... in the current crisis." 

The order here is crucial. Banks do not worry about borrowers' problems until their balance sheets make it financially acceptable to do so. By making it even easier for banks to hide losses on their balance sheets, regulators are approaching the issue precisely in reverse.

They should be forcing banks to take losses from bad lending, so that they have strong economic reasons to cut their losses and help borrowers stay in their homes. If banks do not have the funds to withstand the losses, the government should take them over and take care of their borrowers.

Instead, the government is protecting the banks, which are in trouble for engaging in predatory subprime lending, while the borrowers targeted by those lending schemes receive no relief.  

The Latin American debt crisis experience makes it pretty easy to predict the effects of today's accounting trickery: banks will do everything in their power to keep borrowers under their current loan contracts so they don't have to take massive losses on their balance sheets. This will involve short-sighted solutions that hurt homeowners and the broader economy.

We are already seeing some of this behavior from banks. According to Valparaiso University Law Professor Alan White, most borrowers who renegotiated the terms of their loan with their bank in the fall of 2008 actually ended up owing the bank more than they had previously. 

Unlike the Latin American debt crisis, however, banks will not be shipping the economic calamity overseas this time -- they'll be detonating it in neighborhoods around the United States. But, as with the crisis of the 1980s, the culpable loan pushers will be saved, while the troubled borrower will be screwed.

Zach Carter writes a weekly blog on the economy for the Media Consortium. His work has appeared in the American Prospect, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and on CNBC.

© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/135542/

The Geithner-Summers Plan: Even Worse Than We Thought

By Jeffrey Sachs, Huffington Post
Posted on April 8, 2009, Printed on April 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/135532/

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.

© 2009 Huffington Post All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/135532/

ASU Stiffs Obama, Claims Too Inexperienced For Honorary Degree

TEMPE, ARIZONA - Universities typically confer an honorary degree on commencement speakers, particularly those who have reached the pinnacle of their career or achieved the top of their field. Arizona State University (ASU), though, says it will not confer an honorary degree on this year's commencement speaker, President Barack Obama, because "his body of work is yet to come."

ASU Media Relations Director Sharon Keeler says, unlike other universities, the processes for selecting commencement speakers and honorary degree recipients are independent. She says that honorary degrees are given "for an achievement of eminence" and that Obama was not considered for an honorary degree because his body of achievements, at this time, does not fit within that criteria.

Writing two best-sellers? Not outstanding. Developing one of the largest grassroots organizations in the world? Nothing special. Becoming the first African American President of the United States? Good, but nothing to write home about.

A local paper published an editorial within hours of the news, exhorting ASU to give the honorary degree to Obama:

REST AT http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dawn-teo/asu-stiffs-obama-claim-to_b_185296.html

Jews Angry at Not Being Invited to Barack's Power Seder [Passed Over] from Gawker by John Cook

FROM http://gawker.com/5205862/jews-angry-at-not-being-invited-to-baracks-power-seder

Barack Obama is having a seder in the White House tonight. Boy, are the Jews pissed. Because of course they all wanted to come and then complained about not being invited.

A "seder" is an ancient Jewish endurance contest where people gather around a table; drink awful, terrible wine; sing songs; eat foods inspired, in the most literal sense imaginable, by construction materials; and celebrate the liberation of Joe Lieberman's ancestors from Barack Obama's ancestors.

Obama will be the first president to host one tonight, and owing to an e-mail snafu from his press shop, which sent the presidential schedule out to reporters with internal annotations from White House staff, we now know that some Jews were upset:

From: [REDACTED]
Sent: Wednesday, April 08, 2009 6:55 PM
To: [REDACTED]
Subject: RE: DRAFT: DAILY GUIDANCE AND PRESS SCHEDULE FOR WEDNESDAY, APRIL 9, 2009

Apparently Jewish here and in neighboring states are now calling wondering why they have not been invited.

You can't win with these people, Barack! So who was invited? A whole lot of goyim, including adviser Valerie Jarrett and personal assistant Reggie Love. His two highest profile Jewish staffers, Rahm Emmanuel and David Axelrod, aren't going to be there, according to the Huffington Post's guest list.

If every Jew in the tri-state area had been invited, we have it on good authority that they would have complained about how crowded it was.

Santorum: Obama has ‘deep-seated antipathy toward American values.’ from Think Progress

from http://thinkprogress.org/2009/04/09/santorum-obama-antipathy/

In a column for the Philadelphia Inquirer titled "The Elephant in the Room: Obama vs. The United States," former right-wing senator Rick Santorum declares that the President of the United States has a "deep-seated antipathy toward American values," made obvious by his nomination of a highly-qualified, brilliant legal scholar for a post at the State Department:

Watching President Obama apologize last week for America's arrogance - before a French audience that owes its freedom to the sacrifices of Americans — helped convince me that he has a deep-seated antipathy toward American values and traditions. His nomination of former Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh to be the State Department's top lawyer constitutes further evidence of his disdain for American values.

Santorum is just the latest right-winger to insist that, since Obama policies are not conservative, they are thus by definition anti-American. During the campaign, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) stated flatly, "Barack Obama's views are against America." Last week, Sean Hannity declared that Obama "harbors deep resentment that he just hides" and accused him of pandering to "the worst instincts of those who hate this country."

Hackers Reportedly Have Embedded Code in Power Grid from AfterDowningStreet.org

from http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/41556

Computer hackers have embedded software in the United States' electricity grid and other infrastructure that could potentially disrupt service or damage equipment, two former federal officials told CNN.

The code in the power grid was discovered in 2006 or 2007, according to one of the officials, who called it "the 21st century version of Cold War spying."

Department of Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano would not confirm such a breach, but said Wednesday that there has been no known damage caused by one.

"There have been, to my knowledge, no disruptions of power on any grid caused by a deliberate cyberattack on our infrastructure -- on the grid," Napolitano said. "Nonetheless, we remain in constant protection, prevention, education, resiliency mode and we work with the utility sector particularly on that."

The U.S. power grid isn't the only system at risk. The former officials said malicious code has been found in the computer systems of oil and gas distributors, telecommunications companies and financial services industries.

Napolitano said the vulnerability of the nation's power grid to cyberattacks "has been something that the Department of Homeland Security and the energy sector have known about for years," and that the department has programs in place to fight such attacks.

Security experts say such computer hacking could be the work of a foreign government -- possibly Russia or China -- seeking to compromise U.S. security in the event of a future military conflict.

Former CIA operative Robert Baer said he is not aware of a specific breach like the one the former officials describe. But he said people in the intelligence community assume that such attacks from countries like China go on all the time.

"Their foreign intelligence service has been probing our computers, our defense computers, our defense contractors, our power grids, our telephone system. ... I just came from a speech at the national defense university and they were hit by the Chinese trying to get into their systems," Baer said.

"They are testing and have gotten in portals. It's a serious threat."

Baer said if the software was embedded by a foreign government, he doubts it would be used to launch a surprise attack. Instead, he said, that government likely would keep the bugs in place in case of a future conflict with the United States.

"It's deterrence in the event of war," he said. "They will have another weapon at their disposal, which will be to turn off our power."

When the coding is found, it can be destroyed. But experts said that's easier said than done.

"If you have somebody who knows what they're doing writing that code and embedding it in a clever way, you can look right at it and not recognize it," said Scott Borg, director and chief economist at the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, an independent research institute.

And even when it's found, Borg said, confirming the source of a cyberattack can be next to impossible.

"Anonymity is a fact of life in the cyberworld," he said. "It's very easy to run an attack through somebody else's computer. It's very easy to embed code in Russian or Chinese when you're not Russian or Chinese.

"So it's very difficult to be confident on where anything like this comes from."

Critics of the utilities industry have accused it of not doing enough in the past to defend against cyberassaults. But Ed Legge, spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, which represents shareholder-owned electric companies, said the industry takes the threat seriously and has made progress in closing some of the loopholes that would allow such attacks.

President Obama has started a 60-day review of all the nation's efforts at cybersecurity that is expected to be completed by April 17, Napolitano said.

While utility grids are owned by industries, not the government, Napolitano said her department will continue working with power companies and other industries to help prevent an attack that could cripple power or other vital services.

"Can we continue to work to enhance efforts within critical infrastructure like the utility grid? Yes," she said. "Are we continuously looking for ways to enhance and educate for the prevention and protection of the cyberworld? Absolutely.

"Is this a priority of the president's and of all of us that are involved with safety and security? You bet."

"Why Can't You Just Change Your Name So I Don't Sound So Stupid?": TX Lawmaker Suggest Asians Simplify Names from Crooks and Liars

from http://crooksandliars.com/nicole-belle/why-cant-you-just-change-your-name-so

Houston Chronicle:

A North Texas legislator during House testimony on voter identification legislation said Asian-descent voters should adopt names that are "easier for Americans to deal with."

The comments caused the Texas Democratic Party on Wednesday to demand an apology from state Rep. Betty Brown, R-Terrell. But a spokesman for Brown said her comments were only an attempt to overcome problems with identifying Asian names for voting purposes.

The exchange occurred late Tuesday as the House Elections Committee heard testimony from Ramey Ko, a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans.

Ko told the committee that people of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent often have problems voting and other forms of identification because they may have a legal transliterated name and then a common English name that is used on their driver's license on school registrations.

Brown suggested that Asian-Americans should find a way to make their names more accessible.

"Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it's a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?" Brown said.

Brown later told Ko: "Can't you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that's easier for Americans to deal with?"

Oy. I guess Rep. Brown should be grateful she was not facing Zbigniew Brzezinski. That might have made her look stupid.

Rove Attacks Obama For Praising Turkey’s ‘Secular Movement,’ Even Though Bush Made Similar Statements from Think Progress

from http://thinkprogress.org/2009/04/09/rove-obama-turkey/

President Obama recently said in Turkey that a strength of the U.S. is that "we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values."

The right wing is up in arms over Obama's remarks, in which he also noted that "modern Turkey was founded with a similar set of principles." Yesterday, Fox News's Sean Hannity and Karl Rove lampooned Obama for saying the U.S. is a secular country. Rove accused Obama of identifying himself with the "Turkish secular movement" and denying the role of "faith in the public square":

ROVE: And to somehow go to Turkey and in order to sort of identify yourself with this Turkish secular movement that began in the early part of the previous century and try and somehow make Turkey and America equivalent is to deny each nation's reality.

And Turkey is a country that adopted a certain attitude toward the role of religion in the public arena, and America has a different attitude, and we have historically had, you know, a robust presence of faith in our public square and to deny that that's a reality is, you know, very strange, I think.

"Look, America is a nation built on faith. I mean we can be Christian, we can be Jew," Rove added. Watch it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn3SoEN-V8o

Turkey is a officially a secular democracy, dating back to the 1920s when the ruler Ataturk broke off ties with the Islamic caliphate. Indeed, like Obama, Rove's former boss, President Bush, also saw Turkey as a role model for the entire world.

Turkey "provides Muslims around the world a hopeful model of a modern and secular democracy," Bush said in 2002. "I appreciate so very much the example your country has set on how to be a Muslim country and at the same time, a country which embraces democracy and rule of law and freedom," he said in 2004.

The attack on Obama's remarks are part of a growing right-wing narrative. Yesterday on Fox News, Newt Gingrich claimed that Obama was "fundamentally misleading about the nature of America" in Turkey. Gingrich then made an astounding remark: "We are not a secular country."

Of course, Obama is absolutely correct to note that the U.S. and Turkey are both secular. Indeed, the U.S. Constitution says that Congress can pass "no law respecting an establishment of religion." Nor is Obama denying the "presence of faith in our public square," as Rove alleged. In fact, Obama brought a diverse array of religious leaders to the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives this week.

Fox's Pirate-Killing Jet Swindle [Conflicts Of Interest] from Gawker

from http://gawker.com/5204575/foxs-pirate+killing-jet-swindle

Fox News analyst Thomas McInerney bizarrely twisted today's pirate attack to cheerlead for a pricey fighter the Obama administration plans to cancel. Is that because he's been paid by a contractor on the plane?

McInerney is no stranger to shilling. Last year, the New York Times busted the retired lieutenant general for acting as an on-air puppet to George W. Bush's Department of Defense, helping promote war in Iraq. "Good work — we will use it," the general wrote the Pentagon after swallowing a fresh batch of talking points.

McInerney "sits on the boards of several military contractors," the Times wrote. Those are typically well-paid positions.

The talking head has worked as a consultant to Northrop Grumman. Northrop is a major contractor on the F-22 Raptor, a fighter slashed from the Pentagon's new budget proposal. Contractors are already organizing a fight in Congress.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that McInerney turned up on Fox today to say the Raptor, a fighter designed to cruise a supersonic speeds and shoot down other airplanes, is ideal for escorting U.S. ships and fighting off the hot military enemy of the moment, bands of pirates — especially if you pair it with Northrop's spy drone (scandalously over budget) and an in-flight refueling tanker (like the Northrop model McInerney consulted on).

See the clip above, found by Mike Byhoff in our video department (and mentioned in a previous post).

It doesn't take an Air Force general to see how bizarre McInerney's military reasoning is. The analyst told Fox the F-22, at $146 million each, would be great against pirates due to its fast "reaction time" and 20 milimeter cannon.

He neglected to mention virtually every U.S. fighter made in the last 30 years carries such a cannon (usually the six-barrel M-61 Vulcan), including the F/A-18 Hornet already in use by the U.S. Navy (pictured left). He also fails to mention that, no matter how fast the F-22 might be, it can't be based off an aircraft carrier. So its reaction time could never be as good (from a land base on, say, the Arabian Peninsula) as a Hornet or other existing Navy jet floating in the waters nearest the pirates.

Finally, McInerney fails to mention that, though capable of ground attack, the F-22 is optimized for air-to-air operations, i.e., shooting down other fighters.

The idea of going after hostage-taking pirates with an advanced fighter jet and a high-altitude drone is absurd on its face. Prior to intercepting its prey, a pirate ship could be taken with anything from a cheap, Hellfire-missile-equipped Predator (for small ships) to an inexpensive helicopter to almost any existing fighter plane. Once hostages are involved, there's very a little any attack aircraft could do, short of dropping in some commandos.

But military realism need not matter to either Fox or its shill general. McInerney's fantasy not only helps his benefactors — we need the Raptor to keep away evil pirates, you see — it also no doubt holds a certain sexy Top Gun appeal to many Fox News viewers. It's a win-win, at least until more people start calling Fox on its weapons-lobby footsie.

(First thumbnail picture, of F-22, by Rob Shenk)

Chia Obama Head Offends from PerezHilton.com by Perez Hilton

from http://perezhilton.com/2009-04-08-chia-obama-head-offends

Chicago and Tampa-areas Walgreens have pulled the limited edition Chia Obama head from their shelves after finding the item "objectionable."

Chia Pets founder, Joseph Pedott, has no plans to hault production of the green-haired prez by any means, though!

"Since when is an Afro racist?" questioned Pedott. "Owners can trim Chia Obama's 'hair' to any length they want," the Chia mogul matter-of-factly explained.

Pedott is currently in negotiations with New York based drugstores to send shipments of the controversial Chia Heads to the Empire State ASAP! "As quickly as they can take them, we will send them," he reveals.

The Obama Chia comes in two editions: "Happy" and "Determined," with the campaign slogan "Yes We Can," and the words "liberty," "opportunity," "prosperity" and "hope" adorned on the front, both available for the low low price of $19.99 on Chia's website!

Hospital to pay $1.6m in homeless dumping from Raw Story Breaking News

from http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-homeless-dumping9-2009apr09,0,5952498.story

L.A. city attorney's office says 150 mentally ill patients on skid row streets.

Doctors at College Hospital diagnosed Steven Davis as suffering from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and schizoaffective disorder. Doctors at the Costa Mesa mental institution prescribed him numerous drugs to deal with paranoid delusions that had led to an earlier suicide attempt.

But that didn't stop the hospital from hauling Davis into a van and driving him more than 40 miles north to downtown L.A., where they dropped him off outside the Union Rescue Mission. When mission officials complained to the hospital, the van returned and drove Davis a few miles south to another shelter. Davis wandered away without ever entering.

Davis turned out to be the key to uncovering what Los Angeles prosecutors described as the largest case of homeless dumping they've investigated to date.

In a settlement announced Wednesday, the L.A. city attorney's office said that College Hospital had dumped more than 150 mentally ill patients on skid row -- long a magnet for the region's most vulnerable citizens -- in 2007 and 2008.

As part of the settlement, the hospital will pay $1.6 million in penalties and charitable contributions to a host of psychiatric and social-service agencies. The hospital also agreed to a first-of-its-kind injunction that prohibits it from transporting any homeless psychiatric patient discharged from their facilities to the streets or any shelter within an established "Patient Safety Zone," a swath of downtown and South Los Angeles where most of the region's homeless shelters and missions are concentrated.

Until now, the city attorney's office had developed cases involving specific patients. But with College Hospital, prosecutors say they uncovered a much larger pattern of sending patients from its facilities in Cerritos and Costa Mesa to downtown L.A.

"In the city of Los Angeles, we will not stand idly by while society's most vulnerable are dumped in the gutter of skid row," said City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo.

An attorney for College Hospital said the hospital did nothing wrong and that its actions didn't amount to "homeless dumping." While the hospital agreed to the civil court settlement, attorney Glenn Solomon maintains that it broke no laws and that the settlement sets up a protocol for dealing with homeless patients that the hospital can work with.

"It is the policy of the hospital . . . to discharge each and every patient appropriately," Solomon said.

Details of the new protocols are still being finalized. But they probably will include specific regulations on how patients are released from the hospitals, a system for having them evaluated after their release, and a process for getting those who need additional care placed in medical or social service programs.

Union Rescue Mission Chief Executive Andy Bales praised the settlement as another victory in a long fight against homeless dumping. "This is another step toward living up to our name, the City of Angels," he said.

Over the last four years, authorities -- along with many service providers in the skid row area -- have cracked down on the practice of dumping people onto the streets of skid row by hospitals and some law enforcement agencies. The Union Rescue Mission installed "dumping cams" outside its shelter, and the Los Angeles Police Department vowed to arrest anyone who dumps patients on skid row, using a law against false imprisonment.

The city attorney's office has mounted a campaign targeting specific hospitals believed to be engaging in the practice, using a state law concerning unfair business practices that allows a corporation to be sued for unscrupulous behavior.

Two years ago, Kaiser Permanente agreed to a settlement requiring the HMO to establish new discharge rules and provide more training for employees, both of which were aimed at preventing further patient dumping. A retired U.S. District Court judge was assigned to oversee how the hospital chain complied with the rules.

But prosecutors said the scope of the College Hospital case was much larger.

Jeffrey Isaacs, who is in charge of the city attorney's criminal division, said the hospitals would send vans up to Los Angeles once a week, dumping one or two patients at a time in the downtown area. Van drivers were told to drop the patients off near the shelters but not go inside with them, Isaacs said.

"They would average more than a dumping a week," he said.

The practice may never have been discovered had it not been for Davis.

The mental health patient who was left near a South L.A. shelter was being sought by authorities for several days in the spring of 2008. They finally caught up with him at California Hospital Medical Center downtown, where he was being treated for his psychiatric ailments.

After authorities interviewed Davis, they began investigating College Hospital. Over the next year, they interviewed shelter workers, van drivers, patients and others, Isaacs said.

Davis reached an undisclosed financial settlement with College Hospital.

Homeless psychiatric patients "are the ones that are taxing the resources, in a very sort of fractured way, and are the ones who really need to be focused on to get the bridges connected . . . so that a continuum of care exists," said David Daniels, the directing attorney of Public Counsel's Homeless Prevention Law Project and one of Davis' lawyers.

Delgadillo said his office is continuing to investigate other medical facilities accused of discharging and transporting homeless patients to skid row or other neighborhoods without the patients' consent. Despite the lawsuits and settlements, Delgadillo says his office continues to get reports regularly of dumping of patients.

Ex-Rep. Gilchrest: Pressure Groups "Have a Hold on Congress!" from AfterDowningStreet.org - Impeach Bush and Cheney Now! by Chip

Ex-Rep. Gilchrest: Pressure Groups "Have a Hold on Congress!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzbh4_FBImw

read more

They Survived Katrina, But Not The Master Plan to Push Them From New Orleans from Crooks and Liars

from http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/they-survived-katrina-not-master-plan

For four years, Katrina survivors have been living in these toxic boxes. But there's more to this story than mere indifference or even incompetence - there was a concerted effort to push poor people out of the area after Katrina:

JACKSON, Miss. - Thanh Nguyen will soon give up the cramped travel trailer that's been her home for more than four years, pack her belongings into an old Toyota Corolla and rely on the kindness of others for a place to live.

She has no choice: The government is taking back the trailer.

"I'm going to pack everything I have in a car and go to my friends' houses and move on and on until I find something I can afford," the Vietnamese immigrant said through a translator. "It's for however long they allow me to stay."

Nguyen is one of nearly 6,000 residents in Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama who face a May 1 deadline to leave the government trailers and cottages where they have lived since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita raked the Gulf Coast.

[...] The main barrier is affordability. Following Katrina, rent more than doubled along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Much of the affordable housing stock was destroyed and insurance rates increased. Hundreds of housing units have been replaced within the last year, but "developers can't put it on line at pre-Katrina rates," Carr said.

The state also plans to transform 1,800 so-called Katrina Cottages — billed as a sturdier alternative to trailers — into permanent structures.

Nguyen, 69, lives on a $646 Social Security check, said Danny Le, who works for Boat People SOS, an organization that helps Asian immigrants.

Le said the minimum cost for a one-bedroom apartment in Biloxi is $500. He said Nguyen has applied for public housing, but hasn't received a response.

Perhaps things like this have something to do with it:

Peter Werwath [Enterprise Foundation] laid out a "Marshall Plan" to estimate how a relatively small amount of FEMA's budget could temporarily fix 150,000 roofs, install 50,000 trailers, and repair 100,000 homes. He noted the night and day difference between the progress being made in cleaning up Mississippi and the lack of activity in New Orleans, as well as the fact that FEMA had tarped tens of thousands of home roofs in Gulfport and Biloxi, while they had done very little in New Orleans.

From a volunteer with WorldChanging, a similar perspective:

When I first arrived, Biloxi didn't look too bad. A lot of it is pretty intact, houses still livable or newly-rebuilt, even fences in yards. But then I saw the beach highway, and everything was broken. Casino barges the size of hotels were not only washed up on the beach, but washed across the highway and smashed into buildings; now slowly being eaten by heavy machinery for conversion into bales of scrap metal and landfill. Many buildings were nothing but foundation slabs with the names of what they used to be spray-painted on them. Other places were mere roofs, or were ragged doll-house cutaways, or high-rise hotels with the first two stories ripped out and ocean gaping through.

New Orleans was the same but more so. Uptown areas are mostly fine; the French Quarter is in business, sort of--if only there were still people there to do business with, it would be done.

But the Ninth Ward is wholesale destruction. The entire neighborhood, the entire suburb, is destroyed. For blocks and blocks and blocks in all directions, there is nothing but wreckage. Houses picked up and dropped on cars, or washed into the neighbor's house; trucks smashed sideways through porches and each other; piles of debris so random and jumbled as to make the constituent parts unidentifiable. Your material life in a blender. It's amazing how much stuff a house holds.

At least in Biloxi, the trashed properties have mostly been gutted or demolished, but in the Ninth Ward everything was just left to rot. Cracked dried mud laying an inch deep in car interiors, air conditioner parts hanging from telephone wires, power lines dangling by a knocked-over fire hydrant. (both shut off, of course.) And no one there anymore. At first I felt guilty about being a tourist in the ghost town, just wandering the desolation and taking photos as screen doors creaked in the wind, but then I noticed that the only people there were also doing the same thing. Which was that much weirder. Although my friend said she talked to one woman who was looking for her house. ...She'd found the lot where her house used to be, so the house itself was probably no more than a block or so away.

You don't suppose there was, oh, I don't know, an actual reason why it was taking so much longer to rebuild New Orleans than Biloxi?

The Biloxi-Gulfport, Miss., MSA was on the east side of the eye of Katrina and, as a result, bore the brunt of some of the storm's most serious winds and water surges. More than 98,000 homes were impacted by the storm, and nearly 61,000 were rendered uninhabitable. One difference between this MSA and the New Orleans MSA is that while water surges destroyed thousands of homes along the Biloxi-Gulfport beachfront, floodwaters did not remain as they did in New Orleans. While Biloxi- Gulfport MSA employment remains more than 23 percent below its peak in 2005, all schools and hospitals have reopened and most economic indicators are showing solid recovery trends.

Now, let me point out here that the Republicans were motivated - nay, eager - to delay the Gulf Coast rebuilding, even in Biloxi - East Biloxi, their equivalent of New Orleans' Ninth Ward. Because just like New Orleans, they were trying to push all the poor people out and let all the developers in:

Biloxi has been one of the earlier test cases of the post-Katrina racial dynamic. Before the hurricane, the city had been a booming casino and vacation territory, crammed along the coastline with glitzy gaming palaces, hotels and restaurants, while remaining geographically segregated in the interior -- mostly white on the west side, mostly black and Vietnamese on the east side. Home to the state's first legal casinos after the passage of the 1990 Mississippi Gaming Control Act, Biloxi had become something of a showcase city for a new Republican ethos of vice-funded political power in an era of vanishing manufacturing revenues, as symbolized by the rise of biped swine like Jack Abramoff. This was the new America: tourism, shopping, fast food and poker, fueled by transient traffic. The old communities parked behind the casinos were the anachronism.

What's happening now is that legal processes have been instituted that are all but guaranteed to cause a rapid outflow of those poor blacks from the eastern interior, while at the same time a new wave of commercial developers will float in on a cloud of government largess. The mechanism here is an uneven application of new safety guidelines for residential homeowners, passed quietly alongside a colossal tax break for commercial investors. It's a high-stakes hand of real-estate poker, and the casinos, the condo developers and contractors like Halliburton are the ones drawing extra cards.

The scam in East Biloxi centers around flood maps, and it mirrors what is likely to be a similar fiasco in New Orleans. New guidelines called Advisory Base Flood Elevations, or ABFEs, issued quietly and unilaterally by FEMA late last year, place the average suggested elevation above sea level for house construction in most of peninsular East Biloxi at eighteen feet. In order to qualify for any federal assistance in rebuilding your home, you must rebuild according to these guidelines.

Currently, most houses in the neighborhood are at about nine feet or less. [...]

Around the time that FEMA was issuing its ABFEs for East Biloxi, Congress was passing the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act of 2005, colloquially known as the GoZone Act. When President Bush signed the law on December 21st, he made it sound like a relief program for the little guy. "It's a step forward to fulfill this country's commitment to help rebuild," he said. "It's going to help small businesses, is what it's going to do."

Well, not exactly. GoZone does an important thing. It provides a first-year bonus depreciation of fifty percent for commercial real-estate investors within the designated areas, which include East Biloxi and most of the lower parts of Mississippi, Louisiana and western Alabama. What this means, essentially, is that investors who bought into large projects after August 28th, 2005, will pay a fraction of the usual taxes in the first year of the investment.

The GoZone law is just another hand job for the rich, of the sort that has become a staple of the Bush administration's post-Katrina strategy. If the strategy for keeping public money from reaching the poor is to force people to first stand upside down and sing "Come On Eileen" backward and blindfolded, the strategy for giving money to the rich is a little more subtle. First, you give them tax breaks for indulging in the same activity you told the poor was dangerous, then you issue aid packages that only find their way down to needy recipients long after the value has been torn from the package's spine by a string of rapacious subcontractors, each taking their cut, who of course never had to enter into a competitive bid for their trouble. Carrying charges, my boy, carrying charges!

Lincoln’s $250 billion estate tax plan would cut taxes for only 60 ’small businesses.’ from Think Progress

from http://thinkprogress.org/2009/04/08/lincoln-estate/

Last week, 10 Democrats in the Senate joined all 41 Republicans in voting for a $250 billion proposal to cut estate taxes, designed by Sens. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ). More than 99 percent of this cost would go to the inheritors of estates worth over $7 million. Touting the tax cut in a press release, Lincoln claimed that it was "aimed at farms and small businesses." However, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, Lincoln's $250 billion proposal would save just 60 small businesses or farms from the estate tax:

An always charged issue is how the estate tax affects small farms and family-owned businesses. We estimate that under the Obama proposal, 100 family farms and businesses would owe tax…The Lincoln-Kyl proposal would cut the number to 40.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, "almost all such estates are able to pay the tax bill without having to sell business assets."

Reforming the Tax Treatment of S-Corporations and Limited Liability Companies Can Help States Finance Public Services

By Michael Mazerov

Businesses organized as subchapter S Corporations or Limited Liability Companies generate roughly one-fourth of all business receipts.  Yet 19 states impose only nominal taxes on these entities even though they benefit from state services just as businesses that are subject to state corporate income taxes do. 

These…states should consider imposing meaningful levies on S-Corps and LLCs as a source of additional revenue to help close the major budget gaps many of them are facing.  States that impose significant taxes and fees on S-Corps and LLCs should determine whether reforms are warranted [to ensure they do] not treat LLCs more favorably than S-Corps.

The full report is posted to:
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=2771
http://www.cbpp.org/files/4-8-09sfp.pdf  10pp.

Congressional Panel: Fire Managers, Liquidate Banks from The Big Picture by Barry Ritholtz

Tee hee:

A congressional panel overseeing the U.S. financial rescue suggested that getting rid of top executives and liquidating problem banks may be a better way to solve the economic crisis.

The Congressional Oversight Panel, in a report released yesterday, also said the Treasury may be relying on too rosy an economic scenario to guide its $700 billion bailout, and declared that the success of the program after six months is "mixed." Three of the group's members disagreed with at least some of the findings.

"All successful efforts to address bank crises have involved the combination of moving aside failed management and getting control of the process of valuing bank balance sheets," the panel, headed by Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Warren, said in its report.

Here's the actual report language:

rest at http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/04/congressional-panel-fire-managers-liquidate-banks/

Iran Warms to Obama Overtures from Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines

from http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/20090408_iran_warms_to_obama_overtures/

"The Iranian people would welcome a hand extended to it if the hand is truly based on honesty," said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Wednesday. The "hand" has so far come in the form of a New Year's message from President Obama, surprise direct diplomatic contact and a commitment from the U.S. to reengage in multilateral talks.

Vice President Joe Biden, meanwhile, warned Israel's hawkish new prime minister not to attack Iran.

New York Times:

Mr. Obama said in a message late last month that he wanted better ties with Iran and offered a new start in relations. Iran and the United States severed diplomatic ties in 1979 after students attacked the American Embassy in Tehran and took its diplomats hostage.

"The Iranian people would welcome a hand extended to it if the hand is truly based on honesty," said Mr. Ahmadinejad in a speech in Isfahan on Wednesday, the Fars news agency reported.

"Yet, if it has an honest appearance but is dishonest by nature, the Iranian people would give the same response that it gave to George Bush. Therefore the change should be in action, not in words."

Read more

READ THE WHOLE ITEM

Die Hard 5: Real Life from Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines

from http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/20090408_die_hard_5_real_life/

Hollywood has given us many a laptop-wielding hacker who causes explosions, blackouts and mayhem with a few malicious keystrokes, but such scenarios may not be the stuff of preposterous action flicks anymore. The Wall Street Journal reports that cyberspies from China and Russia have infiltrated the U.S. electrical grid, mapped it and left a little something behind.

Wall Street Journal:

Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials.

The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven't sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.

Read more

Republican Members Of Congress Embrace Radical Anti-Obama Tea Party Protests from Think Progress

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/04/08/gopestablishment-joins-teaparties/

Next week on Tax Day (April 15), right wing activists will converge in cities across the country to protest President Obama. The primary figures organizing the protests, the lobbyist-run think tank Freedom Works and bloggers such as Michelle Malkin, say they are reacting to taxes that are "too high." However, previous tea party protests have attracted protesters who called for impeaching Obama while slurring the President's name as "Obama Bin Lyin."

Congressional Republicans have enthusiastically embraced the movement, with Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) sponsoring a bill to honor the protests. So far, at least 12 Republican lawmakers and Governors have signed on to speak at local events:

– Rep. David Davis (R-TN) and representatives from Sen. Bob Corker's (R-TN) office will be speaking at the Kingsport protest.

– Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) and Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT) will be speaking at the Salt Lake City protest.

– Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-KS) and a representative from Rep. Sam Graves' (R-MO) office will be speaking at the Overland Park protest.

– Rep. John Fleming (R-LA) will be speaking at the Shreveport protest.

– Rep. Ander Crenshaw (R-FL) will be speaking at the Jacksonville protest.

– Rep. Bob Latta (R-OH) will be speaking at the Wauseon protest.

– Rep. John Shadegg (R-AZ) and former Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-AZ) will be speaking at the Phoenix protest.

– Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC) will be speaking at the Charlotte protest.

– Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) will be speaking at the Brevard protest.

– Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) will be speaking at the Longview protest.

– Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC) will be speaking at the protest in Columbia.

In addition, Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT), Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA), and Rep. Tom Rooney (R-FL) have been urging their constituents to attend tea party protests.

The events are also being embraced by a smorgasbord of far-right causes. Gun rights militias, secessionists, and neo-Nazi groups are currently working to contribute to the organizing effort.

Obama Lawyers Invoke "State Secrets" to Block Warrantless Spying Lawsuit

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet
Posted on April 6, 2009, Printed on April 8, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/135267/

Oops, they did it again: lawyers for Barack Obama's Department of Justice have invoked the "state secrets" privilege to block a lawsuit seeking to reverse one of the most scandalous policies of the Bush administration.

In a motion filed in a San Francisco court on Friday, attorneys for the Obama administration moved to dismiss a challenge to the National Security Agency's notorious warrantless wiretapping program. "The information implicated by this case, which concerns how the United States seeks to detect and prevent terrorist attacks, would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security," DOJ lawyers argued in the 36-page brief, echoing an argument made ad nauseum by the Bush administration.

The case, Jewel v. NSA, was filed in September of 2008 on behalf of five AT&T customers "to stop the illegal, unconstitutional, and ongoing dragnet surveillance of their communications and communications records," according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the civil liberties organization that brought forth the suit. "Evidence in the case includes undisputed documents provided by former AT&T telecommunications technician Mark Klein showing AT&T has routed copies of Internet traffic to a secret room in San Francisco controlled by the NSA."

Klein, the whistleblower who blew the lid off AT&T's participation in the NSA spying program, was an employee at AT&T for 22 years but showed no qualms about exposing the company. "If they've done something massively illegal and unconstitutional -- well, they should suffer the consequences," Klein told the Washington Post in 2007. Teaming up with EFF, Klein has played a critical role in furnishing the evidence for multiple lawsuits brought against the NSA's spying program, including Hepting v. AT&T, a class-action lawsuit against AT&T itself. (That case was brought forth in 2006, before Congress passed legislation granting immunity to telecoms that participated in the government's warrantless wiretapping program.)

Although Jewel v. NSA is not a lawsuit against AT&T, the DOJ's court motion displays its full support for the company. "All of plaintiffs' claims require the disclosure of whether or not AT&T assisted the Government in alleged intelligence activities, and the (Director of National Intelligence) again has demonstrated that disclosure of whether the NSA has an intelligence relationship with a particular private company would also cause exceptional harm to national security"

It may have been fantasy to imagine that the Obama DOJ would allow AT&T -- whose corporate logo graced the official goody bags at the Democratic National Convention this summer -- to be at all vulnerable to litigation for its role in the warrantless wiretapping scheme, particularly after Obama himself cast a vote for telecom immunity. But its invoking of the state secrets privilege is a disturbing move -- particularly because it is not the first time it has done so.

On Monday EFF sent out a press release condemning the Obama administration's use of state secrets privilege to conceal the government's criminal activity. "President Obama promised the American people a new era of transparency, accountability, and respect for civil liberties," Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston said in a written statement. "But with the Obama Justice Department continuing the Bush administration's cover-up of the National Security Agency's dragnet surveillance of millions of Americans, and insisting that the much-publicized warrantless wiretapping program is still a 'secret' that cannot be reviewed by the courts, it feels like deja vu all over again."

Why is the Obama Administration Protecting Bush Officials?

Over e-mail, Cindy Cohn, legal director of EFF, called the legal filing by Obama's DOJ "very significant." "Obama is attempting to block the courts from considering serious constitutional issues raised in this case entirely," she said. "This is the sort of disdain for the rule of law and the role of the courts that he campaigned against."

Cohn added, "It's also a continuation of the outrageous secrecy claims that Bush was criticized for -- after all, the warrantless wiretapping is hardly a secret. We presented a box of Congressional testimony, Congressional admissions, news stories, and even a few books to the court describing it. The argument that this is still a secret really strains belief."

Jewel v. NSA is not just a lawsuit against the NSA. It is also a lawsuit against the individuals who created the government's spying program, including George W. Bush and his senior staff.

As Raw Story's John Byrne points out, "in attempting to block a San Fransisco court from reviewing documents relating to the NSA program, the Obama Administration is also protecting other individuals named as defendants in the suit: Vice President Dick Cheney, former Cheney chief of staff David Addington and former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales." These, of course, are the same individuals many Americans would like to see prosecuted for their role in implementing the government's "harsh interrogation" policies. But on the question of torture, the Obama administration has shown no inclination to bring former Bush officials to account.

Quite the opposite. In February Obama lawyers used the same "state secrets" tactic to block a lawsuit brought by the ACLU on behalf of five victims of extraordinary rendition -- the CIA's famed kidnap and torture program. "This case cannot be litigated," Department of Justice lawyer Douglas Letter declared on February 9th, arguing that the case, Mohamed et al. v. Jeppesen Dataplan, should be thrown out. "The judges shouldn't play with fire in this national security situation."

ACLU director Anthony Romero decried the move. "Eric Holder's Justice Department stood up in court today and said that it would continue the Bush policy of invoking state secrets to hide the reprehensible history of torture, rendition and the most grievous human rights violations committed by the American government."

Now, warrantless spying can be added to the list.

"In our case we have no reason to believe that the warrantless wiretapping has ended," said Cohn, "so at some point we have to call it Obama's warrantless wiretapping."

Liliana Segura is a staff writer and editor of AlterNet's Rights and Liberties and War on Iraq Special Coverage.

© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/135267/

Why the London Protesters Are on the Right Side of History

By Johann Hari, Huffington Post
Posted on April 6, 2009, Printed on April 8, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/135201/

When this hinge-point in human history is remembered, there will be far more sympathy for the people who took to the streets and rioted than for the people who stayed silently in their homes. Two global crises have collided, and we have a chance here, now, to solve them both with one mighty heave -- but our leaders are letting this opportunity for greatness leach away. The protesters here in London were trying to sound an alarm now, at five minutes to ecological midnight.

Many commentators seemed bemused that the protesters focused on the climate crunch as much as the credit crunch. What's it got to do with a G20 meeting on reviving the global economy? Why wave banners saying "Nature Doesn't Do Bail-Outs" today? Because both crises have their roots in the same ideology -- and both have the same solution.

We are facing a collapsed economy and a rapidly warming world because an extreme ideology has dominated world affairs for decades. It is the belief that markets aren't just a useful tool in certain circumstances; they are an infallible mechanism for running human affairs. If the economy ebbs, the market will put itself right by punishing wrong-doers. If the climate begins to unravel, business will rectify its own behavior voluntarily. Now we know how well this market fundamentalism works.

The climate is currently going the same way as the banks. Last month, the world's climate scientists gathered in Copenhagen to explain we are facing "devastating consequences" -- not in some distant future, but in my lifetime and yours. Unless we swerve fast, we are soon going to hit global temperatures that no human being has ever lived through. We don't have much time. By 2015, we will have belched so much carbon into the atmosphere that we will cross the Point of No Return: the climate will start to unravel as all its natural cooling processes breaking down one by one, guaranteeing we become hotter and hotter. Once we hit an increase of 4 degrees, much of the world will become uninhabitable, and there will be vast wars for what remains.

This isn't the warning of apocalyptic wackos: it's the judgment of the climate scientists who have consistently been proven right up to now. Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize winning scientist who has been appointed Energy Secretary by Barack Obama, says: "I don't think the American public has gripped in its gut what will happen. We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California. I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going either." Goodbye Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego. And that, he stresses, is only the start.

The distinguished environmental scientist James Lovelock warns that climate changes tend not to happen gradually, inch-by-inch. They suddenly flip -- in our case from a cool world to a very hot one. He believes the hotter new world we are bringing into being could support, at best, a billion people. That would require 84 percent of the world's population to die off.

That's why the protesters were talking about the climate. It should be the number one issue at every global meeting. And the way out of the climate crunch and the credit crunch is the same -- a Green New Deal.

Our leaders are divided about whether we need a fiscal stimulus at all. Obama, Gordon Brown, and the Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso are leading the charge for a burst of big government spending to jump-start the global economy, while Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, David Cameron and the U.S. Republicans are arguing this will simply be a debt-funded splurge to nothing.

It's a strange debate to have now, because the opponents of any stimulus seem to be mired in a row that was resolved back in the 1930s. John Maynard Keynes transformed the way that we think about recessions. Before him, everybody believed the Merkel-Cameron-McCain line that recessions are like bad weather: you just need to wrap up and sit it out, even though it hurts. But Keynes transformed all that.

He showed that recessions are actually caused by a failure of consumer demand. When people sense that they might lose their job, they -- perfectly sensibly -- cut back on their spending. They buy fewer DVDs or restaurant meals or holidays. But this causes a fall in demand for services -- and more people lose their jobs, causing demand to fall further in turn, and on and on, in a spiral. He called it "the paradox of thrift": what is rational for an individual consumer is irrational for the society as a whole.

But he also showed there is a way out: the government needs to spend large sums of money, financed by borrowing, to get all the workers waiting idle back into action. This government spending brings consumer demand back - and reverses the downward trend. Then, once you've recovered, you pay off the debt.

Keynes stressed you can spend this money on anything: at one point he proposed burying wads of cash and paying people to dig them up. But today, we face an incredible coincidence. At the same moment, we need to spend lots of money on something, anything -- and we need an immediate transition to a low-carbon economy.

And it gets better: it turns out a green stimulus is best for the economy. A major study by the University of Massachusetts compared the effects of an old-style stimulus that simply gives people more cash to a green stimulus. They found that a green stimulus creates four times more jobs, and three times more "good jobs," defined as those that pay more than $16 per hour. Why? Because a green stimulus is labor-intensive: you spend more money on people and less on machines. And the money you spend stays at home, making it easier to sell: you can only insulate a loft in Hull in Hull; you can only build a wind farms in the Mid-West in the Mid-West.

But it's not happening. A study by HSBC has found that only 6 percent of Britain's stimulus so far has gone to green projects. In the U.S., it is just 16 percent. It's nonsense to claim there aren't enough green projects "shovel-ready": during World War Two, the industrial capacities of our countries was transformed from making consumer goods to making tanks and weaponry in less than sixty days. We could do the same.

But this alacrity shouldn't surprise us. The weight of conventional wisdoms and the sway of powerful corporations with vested interests in the old sickening world holds back even the better leaders. The first New Deal wasn't handed down by Franklin Roosevelt as a benevolent gesture. On the contrary: he came to power as a budget-balancing centrist, and only became a great President because he was confronted by massive riots and civil disobedience across the United States. The American people pushed him in a more radical direction, often with behavior that made this week's riot in London look like a Buckingham Palace reception.

On Wednesday, one of the young protesters sat in a tent at the edge of the City of London, looked out towards the glistening towers of the financial district, and said to me: "The dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid. Suddenly, we are realizing that we are our own asteroid." She shook her head. "How can so many people just sit at home and watch it happen?"

© 2009 Huffington Post All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/135201/

Obama Administration Quietly Expands Bush's Legal Defense of Warrantless Wiretapping

By John Byrne, Raw Story
Posted on April 8, 2009, Printed on April 8, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/135605/

In a stunning defense of President George W. Bush's warrantless wiretapping program, President Barack Obama has broadened the government's legal argument for immunizing his Administration and government agencies from lawsuits surrounding the National Security Agency's eavesdropping efforts.

In fact, a close read of a government filing last Friday reveals that the Obama Administration has gone beyond any previous legal claims put forth by former President Bush.

Responding to a lawsuit filed by a civil liberties group, the Justice Department argued that the government was protected by "sovereign immunity" from lawsuits because of a little-noticed clause in the Patriot Act. The government's legal filing can be read here (PDF).

For the first time, the Obama Administration's brief contends that government agencies cannot be sued for wiretapping American citizens even if there was intentional violation of U.S. law. They maintain that the government can only be sued if the wiretaps involve "willful disclosure" -- a higher legal bar.

"A 'willful violation' in Section 223(c(1) refers to the 'willful disclosure' of intelligence information by government agents, as described in Section 223(a)(3) and (b)(3), and such disclosures by the Government are the only actions that create liability against the United States," Obama Assistant Attorney General Michael Hertz wrote (page 5).

Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is suing the government over the warrantless wiretapping program, notes that the government has previously argued that changes to the Patriot Act protected the government from lawsuits surrounding eavesdropping. But he says that this is the first time that they've made the case that the Patriot Act protects the government from all surveillance statutes.

"They are arguing this based on changes to the law made by the USA PATRIOT Act, Section 223," Bankston said in an email to Raw Story. "We've never been fans of 223 -- it made it much harder to sue the U.S. for illegal spying, see an old write-up of mine at: http://w2.eff.org/patriot/sunset/223.php --but no one's ever suggested before that it wholly immunized the U.S. government against suits under all the surveillance statutes."

Salon columnist and constitutional scholar Glenn Greenwald -- who is generally supportive of progressive interpretations of the law -- says the Obama Administration has "invented a brand new claim" of immunity from spying litigation.

"In other words, beyond even the outrageously broad 'state secrets' privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and -- even if what they're doing is blatantly illegal and they know it's illegal -- you are barred from suing them unless they 'willfully disclose' to the public what they have learned," Greenwald wrote Monday.

He also argues that the Justice Department's response is exclusively a product of the new Administration, noting that three months have elapsed since President Bush left office.

"This brief and this case are exclusively the Obama DOJ's, and the ample time that elapsed -- almost three full months -- makes clear that it was fully considered by Obama officials," Greenwald wrote. "Yet they responded exactly as the Bush DOJ would have. This demonstrates that the Obama DOJ plans to invoke the exact radical doctrines of executive secrecy which Bush used -- not only when the Obama DOJ is taking over a case from the Bush DOJ, but even when they are deciding what response should be made in the first instance."

"Everything for which Bush critics excoriated the Bush DOJ -- using an absurdly broad rendition of 'state secrets' to block entire lawsuits from proceeding even where they allege radical lawbreaking by the President and inventing new claims of absolute legal immunity -- are now things the Obama DOJ has left no doubt it intends to embrace itself," he adds.

Both the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union say the "sovereign immunity" claim in the context of the case goes farther than any previous Bush Administration claims of wiretap immunity.

Writing about the changes to the Patriot Act last year, the EFF asserted that revisions to the Act involved troubling new developments for U.S. law.

"Unlike with any other defendant, if you want to sue the federal government for illegal wiretapping you have to first go through an administrative procedure with the agency that did the wiretapping," the Foundation wrote. "That means, essentially, that you have to politely complain to the illegal wiretappers and tip them off to your legal strategy, and then wait for a while as they decide whether to do anything about it before you can sue them in court."

Moreover, they said, "Before PATRIOT, in addition to being able to sue for money damages, you could sue for declaratory relief from a judge. For example, an Internet service provider could ask the court to declare that a particular type of wiretapping that the government wants to do on its network is illegal. One could also sue for an injunction from the court, ordering that any illegal wiretapping stop. PATRIOT section 223 significantly reduced a judge's ability to remedy unlawful surveillance, making it so you can only sue the government for money damages. This means, for example, that no one could sue the government to stop an ongoing illegal wiretap. At best, one could sue for the government to pay damages while the illegal tap continued!"

The Obama Administration has not publicly commented on stories that revealed their filing on Monday.

John Byrne is editor of Raw Story.

© 2009 Raw Story All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/135605/

Lenny Dykstra Needs Your Help!

from http://dealbreaker.com/2009/04/lenny-dykstra-needs-your-help.php

Not sure how we missed this but Nails is in trouble, BIG TIME. Many of you will recall that last June, LD put his Thousand Oaks, California house on the market, hoping to see a 33 percent return after having purchased it ten months earlier for $18.5 million. Now we find out that exactly no one went for the $24,950,000 asking price, despite Dykstra's genius idea to throw in some extras to clinch the deal, the coup de grace of the package being LD's "Discarded Dips Of Distinction," a collection of chewing tobacco from the great moments in his illustrious career, tastefully encased in a white gold-flecked display case. And the hits don't stop there. Private equity firm Index Investors, which granted Dykstra a $850,000 bridge loan in November, secured by the 8-bedroom manse, filed foreclosure papers on Dykstra's pad last month, as has Washington Mutual, on account of Nails defaulting on his $12 million mortgage. Also, his Gulfstream II was impounded on February 12. Basically, the guy needs cash ASAP. How fortuitous then, that Dykstra's best bud, Jim Cramer, who's publicly described LD as the one of the greatest in the biz, will be ringing in the 1000th episode of his television show tonight. As the thing will probably prove highly watched, should JC turn it into a Save Nails telethon? We say yes.

This Is Just A Preview: Roubini's Full Set Can Be Heard Tonight At The Friars Club's Official Jim Cramer Roast

from http://dealbreaker.com/2009/04/this-is-just-a-preview-roubini.php

Mad Money is "celebrating" its 1000th episode tonight at 6PM ("35,892 sound effects, 16,114 miles on the road, 672 CEO interviews, 987 lightening rounds, more than 1,500 booyahs, 1 rant heard round the world AND....1,000 EPISODES" the press release reads, though we're pretty sure they're missing a few things from that list you should feel free to fill in now). How is frequent CNBC guest Nouriel Roubini paying honor to the big boy on his special day?

"Cramer is a buffoon," said Roubini at a Toronto event titled "A Night with the Bears." "He was one of those who called six times in a row for this bear market rally to be a bull market rally and he got it wrong. And after all this mess and Jon Stewart he should just shut up because he has no shame...He's not a credible analyst. Every time it was a bear market rally he said it was the beginning of a bull and he got it wrong."

Of course, the horse's ass comments may have been provoked by JC saying recently that Roubs is "intoxicated" with his own "prescience and vision," but who's counting?

We don't much care who started it, we just want to know what it's gonna take to these two fame whores to realize they're not so different, bury the hatch and throw back a few in the company of some plaster vaginas.

Fainting in This Country Can Carry a $10,000 Price Tag

By Kirk Nielsen, Miller-McCune.com
Posted on April 1, 2009, Printed on April 8, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/134353/

There's really no good time or place for a blackout, though some are significantly worse than others. Mine, one subzero evening in downtown St. Paul, Minn., last December, fell solidly on the inauspicious side of the spectrum.

The Level 2 lobby of the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts was teeming with people waiting for the second half of a fine production of Irving Berlin's White Christmas to begin. I was standing with my mom, sister and her three young-adult kids. Through the windows of a dazzling curtain-wall that spans the front of the trapezoidal building, I was admiring the golden lights on the canopy of trees in the park across the street. On the warm side of the glass, a professional trio of carolers had just finished a short intermission set. I was in a good mood; a fantastic woman in Duluth was expecting my call after the show to finalize plans for our first date the next night.  

Suddenly, I felt weirdly lightheaded, so I turned to hasten to my seat. I took three steps, got the spins and took a nosedive, just missing the edge of a wine and coffee bar. Upon impact, I regained some consciousness and sat half-sprawled with my elbows on the carpet. A short-haired middle-age woman was crouching next to me, asking me if I knew my name, what day of the week it was, where I was. I did, which eliminated the possibility of stroke. "You blacked out ... I'm not a doctor ... That happens to me ... You should lay down," I recall her saying.   

Assuming the dead man's pose in the Ordway lobby sounded fairly embarrassing, so I resolved to head for one of the lobby's posh benches several paces away. With someone's help, I got to my feet, and within two steps, a heavy wave of dizziness nearly sent me back down. I made it to the bench and sat, feeling exhausted and nauseated, and exchanging glances with the horrified faces of my mom and sister. I hoped my nieces and nephew were inside watching the rest of White Christmas, not their uncle's freak show.    

There was talk of an usher who was also a paramedic. He -- a polite young man in a dark suit -- appeared and took my blood pressure, which was very low as was my pulse. He said calmly that one option was to call an ambulance. I was afraid, I thought I might be dying, I was thinking about my deductible. The number "$2,500" flashed through my mind.  Or was that my maximum "out of pocket"?

I knew for sure that I was enrolled in a $129-per-month emergency and hospitalization plan with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida. Like everyone, I'd heard that a trip to an emergency room could cost several grand.

"I can't afford that," I muttered.

"Now isn't the time to worry about money," my sister responded, slightly scolding.

Then my eyes rolled upward into my skull as I blacked out again, my chin dropping to the top of my chest and the rest of me still just sitting there.

Moments later, I awoke from a frenzied dream, intensely disoriented, then realized I was still on the bench. The usher was looking at me. "You did it again," he said. Not certain I wasn't in the early stages of some kind of gradual heart failure -- I had felt some weirdness in my chest before my sprawl on the carpet — I consented to the ambulance ride.

Within a few minutes I was rolling feet-first on a stretcher, into the elevator, out into the subzero air and aboard the rescue truck. As I recall they affixed an intravenous tube into my arm and asked me to open my mouth so one of them could toss in some tiny nitroglycerine pellets, which dilate the blood vessels. "I bet you don't wear those shoes in Miami," one of the paramedics joshed, referring to a pair of (my dad's) old brown rubber jobbies that clashed badly with my black wool suit pants. Then they put an oxygen mask over my mouth.

Soon I was in an emergency room bed at United Hospital in downtown St. Paul, still connected to an IV while nurses further hooked me up to an EKG and drew blood from my arm to start testing for heart attack enzymes.

Within an hour came the impression from my emergency-room doctor, a serious, trim, capable-looking man. I had suffered syncope, a manly term for fainting. The question now, the doctor continued, is why. There were many possible causes of syncope. "When your heart rate drops to 40 all of a sudden and you pass out, it's a good idea to find out what's going on," he said tersely. Thus, I would be spending the night in the hospital, having my heart monitored and my blood analyzed.

The doctor had me recap my day. I live in Miami Beach. Flew to Minneapolis a few days ago. Didn't eat much today. Went for a three-mile run this afternoon (in 7-degree weather). Felt great afterward. Had a glass of wine at dinner a few blocks from the theater. Saw first half of White Christmas. Etcetera. The doctor mentioned something about blood sometimes "pooling" in people's legs when they sit or stand for extended periods of time. Then he left. Eventually, I was rolled upstairs to a room in the cardiac wing.

The nocturnal heart monitoring, followed by a midday echocardiogram, turned up nothing but a very healthy heart. Diagnosis: a case of dehydration-induced syncope. Dehydration (apparently caused by the cumulative effects of my Miami to Minneapolis plane ride, a long hot sauna at my parents' house, too much alcohol and coffee, not enough glasses of water and the desiccating air of a very cold, extraordinarily dry Minnesota winter) had reduced my blood volume. It pooled in my legs as I mingled in the Ordway lobby. There wasn't enough left to make it to my head. My low heart rate was from conditioning, the doctors said, because I tend to run for an hour about several times a week (in Florida). 

I was discharged, my sister picked me up, and off we went to enjoy a white Christmas. I put the ordeal behind me and managed to forget about my deductible -- until late January, when the bills started arriving at my Miami Beach apartment.

I received six of them from the hospital -- for "Emergency Department Visit," for "Initial Hospital Care," for "Facility Service," for "Hospital Discharge Day," and more -- and one from the ambulance company. They all added up to thousands of dollars. I'm still not sure how much I really owe.

To their credit, the folks at Blue Cross Blue Shield send their customers concise statements that summarize medical services rendered and billed. According to the one I recently received, the total cost of my fainting emergency: $10,260.

But lucky me. I owe only $2,267. "Your savings: $7,992.87," the summary states. Good thing I paid BCBS $1,500 in premiums over the past year to cover me for emergencies, one of which is now costing me an additional two thousand. 

Of course, I was relieved, if not grateful, to learn that I'm not liable for the whole $10,260, and thus not like guys who faint and don't have emergency coverage. But upon further inspection of my statement I noticed a curious and disturbing thing. BCBS had to pay only $2,582 -- about one-fourth -- of that $10,260. So who paid the balance of my $7,992 in "savings"? I wondered.

No one.

The $7,992 was all discounted because hospitals let BCBS and other big insurance companies pay lower rates than ordinary, underinsured Americans.

Similarly, the statement indicates that BCBS would have gotten a huge discount on, and had to pay only one-fourth of, the $1,409 ambulance bill that St. Paul Fire & Safety Service is now pressuring me to pay in full. I'm responsible for all but $17.65 of it, BCBS says, because the ambulance service was "out of network." BCBS has been kind enough to cover less than half of the $48 worth of oxygen I inhaled during my ambulance ride. Hence the check for $17.65 that BCBS mailed me. Some of the oxygen was "in network," I guess.

A few years ago, in order to control price gouging, Congress ordered up a national fee schedule for Medicare payments to ambulance services. According to that legally binding schedule, Medicare, like BCBS, would have to pay St. Paul Fire & Safety Service only about one-fourth of the $1,409 the company says I owe.

My date in Duluth gave me a break. When are America's health care givers going to give all of us one?

© 2009 Miller-McCune.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/134353/

New Public Database Reveals First-Hand Accounts of How Toxic Burn Pits Are Making U.S. Troops Sick

By Nora Eisenberg, AlterNet
Posted on April 3, 2009, Printed on April 8, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/134913/

Cancer, pulmonary disease, multiple sclerosis, sleep apnea, heart disease: Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans have suffered all these and more from toxic fumes spewing from burn pits on American bases. The Disabled American Veterans now has information on 182 sick veterans in a database developed by Assistant National Legislative director, Kerry Baker. Forty-eight have developed lymphoma, leukemia or other cancers; and 16 veterans in the database have died. And on March 30th, a group of seven lawmakers asked Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to attend to these findings as well the findings from an independent scientific consultant, which found a serious danger that veterans may become ill  from burn pit fumes.

As early as 2006, the DoD had been informed by Air Force Bioenvironmental Engineering Flight Commander Darrin Curtis that the pit was an acute health hazard. Though the Department of Defense has admitted that samples at the large burn pit at Balad contain Acetaldehyde, Acrolien, Arsenic, Benzene, Carbon Monoxide, Ethylbenzene,  Formaldehyde, Hydrogen Cyanide, Hydrogen Fluoride, Phosgene, Sulfur Dioxide, Sulfuric Acid, Toluene, Trichloroethane, Xylene, and other chemicals, to date, it  has insisted the pit presents no known dangers. The letter to Gates -- signed by Senators Russ Feingold, D-Wis.; Evan Bayh, D-Ind; and Ron Wyden, D-Ore.; and Representatives Tim Bishop, D-N.Y.; Steve Cohen, D-Tenn.; John Hall, D-N.Y.; Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y.; and Carol Shea-Porter, D-N.H. -- urged vigilance, citing the protracted and painful lessons from Agent Orange.

Rep. Bishop's office has developed a website in which veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan can tell their stories. In just a few days, many stories of negligence and suffering have emerged, adding to a tragic saga.

Dave

Dave was stationed at Balad, less than half a mile downwind from a double burn pit.

"They burned plastic, chemicals, tires, metal and who knows what else in that pit. Two months in everyone was coughing up black stuff. Three months in my black stuff started to include blood. I went to the clinic and the front desk turned me away. They said that I didn't need to see a doctor because it was just the burn pit crud. They said, 'A doctor cannot help you if you are not ill from a disease.' Later in the deployment, the smoke was so bad that we all were puking from it. Found out later that it was probably arsenic in the smoke. An air force memo outlined Dioxin, the chemical that made everyone sick from agent orange, comes from burning the same materials that were in the burn pit. The DoD tries to say that the dioxin was of no threat to human life. … I might not be the smartest guy in the world but dioxin is dioxin and it's harmful to humans no matter what the source. Be it agent orange or standing in the plume of the burn pit … But whatever, I came back home and was still coughing and having breathing problems. The doc gave me Sudafed."

Dave's Physical Training run time went from 10:12 to 13:59 in 6 months. His squad leader told him it was his fault. He should run even more, to run faster.

"So I took his advice … and then boom. Emergency room. Couldn't breathe. Had to be put on a machine … And the salt in the wound: The DoD says that burning tires, plastics, chemicals, medical waste, metal, oil, etc. isn't harmful. Which makes you wonder why it's illegal to burn that stuff back at home. "

Terry

Terry, deployed with the 101st Division, was stationed in Balad.

"Two weeks after arriving in country on my most recent deployment to Balad, I started developing symptoms that were eventually diagnosed as Still's Disease (Adult Onset Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis). The experts say that the disease is triggered by something to which you're exposed."

Terry is an Army Reserve Major and civilian airline pilot, and the illness has put both his military and civilian careers in jeopardy.

Kathy

Kathy was a staff sergeant with the National Guard in Balad.

She became sick while there, and once home was diagnosed with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease -- hearing loss and tinnitus.

"My health began to slowly decline. Widespread muscle aches and pains w/stiffness gradually settled in, as did neuralgia and sleep apnea."

She now sleeps with a breathing machine. Kathy has done extensive research and has found dozens of studies that have linked high concentration of particulate matter to cardiovascular problems, as well as to premature death.

Michael

Michael was stationed in Balad Iraq from Oct 2005 until June 2006.

"During this time I would always complain about the smoke. We were told it was safe. Well I started choking in my sleep waking up not breathing. At the time I was also being treated for PTSD so that's what I was told it was from. I got medavaced from Balad in June. I seen another doctor; he told me that it did not sound like PTSD. I did a sleep study and I found out that I had sleep apnea really bad. since then I have had three surgeries on my face and now I have chronic pain in my face because the first surgery did not go well. I have breathing problems during the day, a problem with the lower part of my lungs so now I'm on inhalers. I never had any of these problems until I got to Balad. It has pretty much ruined my army career. It's time someone is held responsible for negligence to me and my fellow soldiers going through the same thing."

Robert

Robert was deployed to Balad, Iraq from February to June 2006.

"Virtually every night my tent was hazy and full of smoke and at times you could even see bits of ash floating in the air. The smell was so acrid that even holding your head on the sheet/blankets would not help you get that "clean" breathe of fresh air. I never got a good nights sleep there."

Things he saw in the burn pit included 55-gallon drums of unknown fluids, tent parts, cabinets … anything from paper to the kitchen sink. He now has problems doing "normal tasks like moving boxes, putting on my boots, playing with my children … It feels like someone is grabbing me in the center of my chest and squeezing to prevent me getting a good breath … I find myself gasping for air and hyperventilating to catch my breath. For Robert, a 42-year-old father of six, "The most troubling of this isn't my health as it is is the health and welfare of the thousands of other service men and women who have come and gone through Balad. My oldest two children also joined the Air Force … and ironically enough my oldest daughter is heading to Balad this summer on her third deployment to the same base. My son is also heading to Balad this summer on his first deployment. What is in their future … one can only hope …"

Derrol

Derrol was stationed at Bagram, Afghanistan and later Balad, Iraq as an Air Force reservist on active orders for over six years.

From the steady burning pits, he suffered both coughing and diarrhea. "An x-ray for a back problem showed that one half of my right lung was missing … they found 2 large nodules/masses in my lower right lung. A CT scan "showed a total of 7 nodules/masses in my right lung and scarring in my left. A Line of Duty was initiated and pushed through rather quickly to confirm the injury as active duty, deploy related. I contacted the VA and started a claim in November of 2007. I again deployed to Qatar for 4.5 months last summer and the claim was held until I was released from active duty in Sept 2008. It is now March 24, 2009 and I still have not heard from VA as to my medical board rating for compensation and disability. I also have problems with my stomach now and shortness of breath, I am still waiting on VA."

John and Wallace both worked for KBR at Balad. They both now have colon cancer.

***

More first-hand reports from veterans can be found on the online Military Times.

Veterans who are suffering health problems they believe are connected to burn pit fumes should report their condition to Kerry Baker at 202-314-5229, to add to the database.

Nora Eisenberg is the director of the City University of New York's Faculty Fellowship Publication Program. Her short stories, essays and reviews have appeared in such places as the Partisan Review, the Village Voice, the Los Angeles Times, Tikkun, and the Guardian UK. Her third novel, When You Come Home, which explores the 1991 Gulf War and Gulf War illness, was recently published by Curbstone Press.

© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/134913/

People Died Because of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Accident, Why Won't Corporate Media Admit It?

By Harvey Wasserman, AlterNet
Posted on April 6, 2009, Printed on April 8, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/135278/

Chernobyl exploded and Three Mile Island missed by a whisker. They both killed people. 

But thirty years after the Pennsylvania melt-down, a Soviet-style Iron Curtain has formed between the corporate media and the alternatives, with nuclear power at its center. 

The Soviets denied for days that the Chernobyl accident had happened at all. America's parallel corporate media says "no one died at TMI." 

Take National Public Radio's Scott Simon. On March 28, Simon smirked on air that "no one was killed or injured" at Three Mile Island, "not so much as a sprained ankle." 

Except when people are fleeing them, as they did 30 years ago, radiation releases have never been linked directly to joint sprains. 

But cancer, leukemia, birth defects, stillbirths, malformations, spontaneous abortions, skin lesions, hair loss, respiratory problems, sterility, nausea, cataracts, a metallic taste, premature aging, general loss of bodily function and more can be caused by radioactive emissions of the type that poured out of TMI. And all such ailments have been documented there outside the corporate media. 

Simon and everyone else inside the corporate media missed the well-organized, well-executed press event in the statehouse at Harrisburg on March 26. Despite solid publicity from Eric Epstein and the long-standing Three Mile Island Alert, not a single corporate reporter covered presentations by nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen and University of North Carolina epidemiologist Dr. Stephen Wing. 

Once a top industry executive, Gundersen has shown that the containment at Three Mile Island Unit 2 did not completely hold, and that far more radiation was released than previously believed. 

Dr. Wing reports that levels of radiation-related disease significantly rose in the downwind area. Wing and three co-authors looked at statistics used in a major study by Columbia University and other sources. They concluded that -- despite official denials -- the numbers clearly indicate serious potential health effects. 

Gundersen and Wing were neither hiding nor alone. University of Pittsburgh radiology Professor Emeritus Dr. Ernest Sternglass and health researchers Joe Mangano and Jay Gould have long since documented that public health catastrophe. House-to-house surveys from local residents Jane Lee and Mary Osborne confirm the damage. Massive anecdotal evidence collected in a book and radio show by Robbie Leppzer appears at www.turningtide.com. Published in 1982 by DellDelta, Killing Our Own correlated the death toll at TMI with that from other mis-uses of radiation. Other books have followed with similar conclusions. 

This tidal wave of proof about the TMI death toll spread through the "alternative" media prior to the accident's anniversary. Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales talked with me about it on March 27. Announced by the Institute for Public Accuracy, the story appeared on the Pacifica and Counterspin/Fair radio networks , and with Peter B. Collins on the Thomm Hartmann Show. It was also heard on stations such as WORT (Madison), KBOO (Oregon), KDKA (Pittsburgh), radioornot.com, and more. Websites like Huffington Post, CommonDreams, AlterNet, FreePress.org, NukeFree, CounterPunch, BuzzFlash, Smirking Chimp, Daily Kos, and dozens more got the story out, as did environmental groups like Greenpeace, NIRS and Beyond Nuclear. (If your website, radio show or organization also carried it, please contact me). 

But the word never crossed the conceptual chasm between the "mainstream" media and the "alternative." Despite a federal class action lawsuit filed by 2400 Pennsylvania families claiming damages from the accident, despite at least $15 million quietly paid to parents of birth-defected children, despite three decades of official admissions that nobody knows how much radiation escaped from TMI, where it went or who it affected, not a mention of the fact that people might have been killed there made its way into a corporate report. 

Nuclear opponents commemorated the day throughout the United States -- most visibly at the gates of the plant itself -- while Simon and others piously intoned that the opposition was dead and gone. 

Simon concluded his 11-minute smarm by interviewing Dan Reicher from Google, whose "green" vision somehow includes new reactors. Not a peep was allowed from an epic grassroots No Nukes movement that has sustained itself nonstop (and nonviolently) since long before TMI melted, and is as strong as ever. 

From the Associated Press and other corporate outlets, the parroted mantra that "nobody was killed" rang out as if a melt-down was no big deal, and turning a $900 million asset into a multi-billion-dollar liability was a "success story." 

Few assertions more clearly divide our parallel media universes than this one. Stolen elections and WMDs, corporate thievery and hemp/marijuana prohibition are all part of the Great Divide. But people (and animals) dying unreported in our most infamous industrial accident cut to the heart of our dis-informational dilemma. 

Newspapers and TV networks are dying because they cannot attract advertisers because they are losing audience. 

In some ways, we will miss them. But their self-interested omissions and deceptions have disemboweled their usefulness. Even the legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite bought into the line that there was no danger of an explosion at TMI that week. 

But in fact there was. Was the omission due to haste in a murky nightmare? A fear of causing panic? A fear of retribution from major sponsors? Or merely an unhealthy willingness to take the authorities at their word? 

Whatever the case, the bad news is that the dominant media cannot handle this story and too many others like it. Millions of Americans are thus dangerously misinformed. 

The good news is, there is new media -- including wherever you're now reading this -- that will report it. And that's growing stronger because it reports the truth to power. 

Izvestia and Pravda are still being televised. But people did die at Three Mile Island. And it's the "alternative" media that now brings reality to the mainstream. 

Harvey Wasserman edits NukeFree.org and is senior editor of http://FreePress.org, where this article originally appeared. His books, including SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, are available at http://harveywasserman.com.

© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/135278/

China Looking at Major Health Reforms

By * Staff, AlterNet
Posted on April 6, 2009, Printed on April 8, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/135309/

The Associated Press reports:

China announced Monday the outlines of a thorough reform of the health care system that pledges to provide improved services to all citizens by 2020, tackling a critical issue that has become a major source of public dissatisfaction.

While many details of the plan remain unclear, the announcement underscored the communist government's need to at least appear to be making progress on the issue. Public health care has been underfunded for years, and the high cost and poor availability of services are among the biggest complaints of the Chinese public.

A serious illness can wipe out a family's life savings and the need to set aside earnings for potential medial costs is considered a major drag on the domestic consumption that the government so badly needs to boost to raise the flagging economy.

Credited with making huge inroads against infectious diseases and providing basic free care to most citizens, China's soviet-style centralized public health system was largely dismantled in the 1980s amid economic reforms and a growing taste for privatization. Seeing a doctor became far more expensive and the gap between rural and urban health care began to grow, undercutting attempts to boost rural incomes.

Health care spending by both the private and public sector in China amounts to just 5 percent of GDP, significantly less than the 17 percent spent in the United States.

According to a text of the roadmap for reform released Monday by the official Xinhua News Agency, the first stage of the plan calls for extending some form of basic health insurance to 90 percent of the population by the end of 2011.

Read the entire article here.

© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/135309/

Study: One in Three Americans Under Age 65 Lacked Health Coverage in 2007-2008

By , AlterNet
Posted on April 7, 2009, Printed on April 8, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/135503/

Editor's note: the following is from a report released in March by Families USA. You can download the full report (PDF) here.

As the recession worsens, America's businesses and families are feeling the squeeze of these tough economic times. Unemployment is at its highest rate in decades, and economic forecasts suggest that troubles are likely to continue for many months to come. At the same time, the cost of health coverage continues to rise, and millions of Americans remain uninsured, with more workers losing their jobs and the health insurance that they rely on with each passing week.

For too long, the story has been the same: Health reform is the topic of much political and policy discussion, but meaningful action to cover the uninsured fails to occur. And thus the crisis continues, leaving millions of Americans at risk—unless policy makers act to ensure that all Americans have health coverage.

To find out how many people are affected by being uninsured, Families USA commissioned The Lewin Group to analyze data from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (CPS) and its Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), as well as from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), which is conducted by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. This analysis found that 86.7 million people—one out of every three Americans under the age of 65—was uninsured for some period of time during 2007 and 2008. These Americans have had to pay for medical care out of their own pockets, or they have had to delay needed care altogether.

Who are these uninsured Americans? No one is protected from the risk of uninsurance. People in all age groups, of every race and ethnicity, and across all income ranges are affected. While most of us have health insurance through our jobs, four out of five uninsured Americans are from working families. Many of these working families are at great risk today as more and more workers get laid off and lose their ability to retain health coverage.

This report offers a closer look at the number of uninsured Americans, who they are, and how long they are uninsured. We also discuss the major underlying reasons for the growth in the number of uninsured.

© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/135503/

The Black Smoke of Ayahuasca: A Cancer Patient Finds a Cure and Love in Ecuador

By Adam Elenbaas, Reality Sandwich
Posted on April 8, 2009, Printed on April 8, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/135585/

A battle with cancer led Margaret De Wys to Ecuador for traditional Ayahuasca ceremonies. After miraculous healings Margaret started an apprenticeship and began a life-altering romantic relationship with the shaman who healed her.

I interviewed author Margaret De Wys about her memoir, Black Smoke.

What led you to Ecuador to work with Ayahuasca medicine healing?

Ayahusaca brought me to South America. Pulled me down there. If I'd had a real choice, I might never have made it to Ecuador. I had no knowledge of ayahuasca in the beginning. I didn't choose it. Ayahuasca chose me. The pretext was cancer, and I believed I was dying. Carlos a Shuar uwishin (healer) came into my life in Guatemala. He'd seen the cancer inside me and said he could cure me. I followed him into the jungles of the High Upper Amazon. I had some crazy faith that what I was doing was right. Fear threw me out of the nest. It was like a big fireball, this big explosion yelled at me. Move.

Describe your first experience with Ayahusaca.

At the time I didn't know where the journey was going to take me. I was going into the unknown, into the jungle, into the soul, into the center of the earth, and my journey became much more than just about me getting healed. Healing included arduous, intense purifications, difficult initiations, and drinking plant medicines. Carlos told me I was choosing my path, my destiny to live.

The first ceremony took place in the jungle outside Puyo, Ecuador. Deep in the forest I sat quietly among the Shuar and the Quechua waiting for the affects of the medicine. It felt funereal. The only light came from the fire burning in the center of the room. The floor was pounded dirt, the overhead palm thatch, the sides of the longhouse open to the elements. Some of the locals began vomiting, others passing out. I hoped the medicine wouldn't have an affect on me. When it hit, a cold tingling rose from my feet through my core, and the floodgates in my brain opened wide flushing out images and sounds. Time expanded and receded as my pupils dilated in order to see more. The cells in my ears could hear a twig crack hundreds of yards away. My nasal cavity vibrated and I began to shake violently.

During healing Carlos drew black smoke from my flesh, where the cancer was. I looked inside. My cells were alive, pulsing, beating the rhythm of the cosmos. Some were spontaneously regenerating, sending live signals to others beside them. The dark spots in my breast were black holes sucking energy into another sphere, one in which living things were doomed. Carlos pressed hard swirling his fingertips deep into fleshy parts of me where the black smoke lay. I cried in pain as I watched his hand magnetized the black smoke. It spread like army ants in file and followed his motion away from my body.

 

Did you know after your first ceremony that it was possible to heal yourself with Ayahuasca?

During the ceremony I could feel the sickness being sucked out and something seemed to shift on a cellular level. The ayahuasca brought spirit doctors, and I could see inside my body. I could see the cancer moving out. I knew I would continue drinking the medicine. It or Carlos or both were curing me.

 

The book is about healing and also about love. When did you and Carlos start to fall in love?

I don't know. For me it just sort of naturally came into being. But later in our relationship Carlos told me Nunqui (Mother Earth) formed a pact with us, marrying us in Guatemala. He said he thought it strange because we didn't know each other. "But I knew we should be together. Now I understand why. The sickness of the earth, the sickness of the tribes, and the sickness in our bodies is linked. Nunqui wants you to help me in my work. She wants you to heal the people and the land with me," he said.

 

What are some of the challenges of falling in love with a shaman?

After living in the jungle for some time I suddenly realized I felt extremely alive, like I hadn't felt before. Maybe that had a great deal to do with my healing. Carlos was loving, demanding, creative, at times manipulative and stubborn. The romance, the love was compelling, so present, so real, so exciting. The experience, tactile; what took place in the jungle was riveting -- in horror, in sensuality and beauty, in the moment. Rituals, prayers, selecting medicines, placement of a person -- everything was carefully orchestrated. Carlos was/is a brilliant healer. When he heals a patient it is with great love. The spirit that flows into him is love from the heavens, from the Great Spirit.

As a lover and apprentice I was "up in there," learning during healing rituals. And that was great. I spoke with another person recently who'd apprenticed under a healer. He said there should be a support group for shaman's apprentices!

 

Throughout eleven trips you went back and forth to Ecuador to the United States and Canada. Was healing slowed by having to come home, or were these integration periods necessary?

No, the healing wasn't slowed. After my first trip I'd found out from doctors in New York that the cancer had disappeared. But I had a lot of integration to do. I was making judgments in my dreams and rearranging my feelings while I slept. I'd dropped my composing career, and my marriage fell apart. I lost my home. Everything flipped. And ayahuasca came to me in the States. First I'd smell it as it swirled down -- the revoltingly sweet, rotten smell. I'd have just enough time to grab on to something before I was in the spirit world. I'd be taken for as long as eight hours. Ayahuasca -- we're married now. And I don't every want to get divorced from la medicina.

Aside from writing a thoughtful book, how do you explain your experiences? What's the right way to talk about the Ayahuasca healing cosmology here at home?

I had no thought of writing this memoir. I am a composer who couldn't put two sentences together before this whole thing began. I didn't think of writing a book until three or four years after things had settled down. Then, I was forced into it. The medicine wanted me to write from a personal point of view, naturally, and in the form of a healing story.

The right way to talk about ayahuasca is with reverence. I know plant spirits and energy heal the body. I know there is a vast, inexplicable universe and there's inherent power in that knowledge. I want people to know that ayahuasca embodies the holy sacred, natural living, respect, and love for Mother Earth. The medicine reveals to a person that they know what life is. To know how to live. To know its great value. As an apprentice, to know one has helped people heal is the happiest feeling. Carlos showed me remarkable treatments that were both death-defying and life-affirming. Black Smoke reveals the process of deep risk, trust, and the female voice establishing psychic and physical authority.

 

The book chronicles your journey through the jungle, but it also takes you back to the Hudson Valley and puts Carlos in your world. Did the relationship change and how did he deal with your culture?

People were crowding us to be healed. I was talking to cancer patients daily. Carlos's work was very effective here. But Black Smoke is a cautionary tale. Crossing cultures can be dangerous, and in the book the reader will see how dangerous it was for Carlos, and for me.

 

What is the role of the vision quest today? Can it still serve a purpose in western, post-modern culture?

Absolutely. Vision quests strip away the false, the pretentious, the negative, and open one to a world of life, possibility. Both are gateways beyond fear. The roots of disease (spiritual, emotional, physical) are fear, repression, the calcification of love and the life force within a person. Ayahusaca and vision quests unleash artificial trappings and burdens. This kind of healing is the holiest work in the world.

 

Any new projects in the works? What are you up to these days? What do you want to learn more about yet?

I've recently returned from Nigeria where I live very simply in an Igbo village. No electricity, running water, bathrooms, refrigeration. But Ah! The people and the land. Palm wine. Kola nuts. Hot peppers. Pounded yam. Music. Holy Spirit. Spirit Masks. Tradition. Ancient ways of curing. Herbal medicine people. Traveling has allowed me to work with healers in Brazil, Egypt, Sub Sahara Africa and Indonesia. There seems to be another book coming about spirit possession, I think.

A recovered Christian fundamentalist, Elenbaas lives in New York and is currently working towards the publication of his book, Fishers of Men, a memoir based upon his recent years of recovery work with Ayahuasca shamanism in the Peruvian Amazon. Adam is a Contributing Editor for RealitySandwich.

© 2009 Reality Sandwich All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/135585/

Crisis = Opportunity for Single-Payer

By Roger Bybee, Dollars and Sense
Posted on April 8, 2009, Printed on April 8, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/135595/

President Obama seems ready to proceed full-throttle toward a health care reform plan, but one that will keep private insurers at the center of the system. The plan, termed "guaranteed affordable choice," would allow workers to "keep the insurance they like," find a rival private insurer, or opt into a Medicare-style public plan.

To date, Obama has sensibly insisted that quick action on health care is imperative. "It's not something that we can put off because of the [financial] emergency," Obama declared in December. "This is part of the emergency." Questioned about the wisdom of launching a $100 billion health care program at a time of mounting government deficits, "I ask a different question," Obama countered. "How can we afford not to?"

He's right: economic meltdown is making health care reform more urgent by the day. Hospitals are hurting; while "the number of paying patients and profitable elective procedures is down . . . ," the LA Times reported recently, "the number of uninsured patients whom hospitals treat is rising." At the same time, escalating health care costs are squeezing private employers and governments alike. "The new Congressional Budget Office report shows that rising health care costs are the largest driver of the nation's long-term budget problems," budget watchdog Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities told Congress last fall.

But Obama's hybrid, public-private plan is likely to hit a fiscal wall as federal spending balloons, and along with it the deficit. In the end, both popular sentiment and fiscal barriers may force him to follow a different course.

The administration's plan subsidizes lower-income Americans to enable them to buy private health insurance. Contrary to Obama's statements during the campaign, his plan will "need to require" all individuals to have health insurance, concludes the respected Commonwealth Fund. Such a mandate would be crucial to securing industry concessions necessary to move toward universal coverage, particularly a ban on excluding people with pre-existing conditions from coverage.

If so, the plan would eventually deliver tens of millions of new enrollees -- the number of uninsured is about 47 million -- to the insurance companies. Some 31% of their premiums, in many cases government-subsidized, will go into overhead and insurance company profits -- an estimated $400 billion annual burden weighing down the health care system.

But this plan is on a collision course with the fiscal realities. On top of the budget wreckage left by the Bush years, the federal government's fiscal demands are exploding. Health care reform faces daunting competition from a $787 billion stimulus package; the president's $72 billion decision to delay repealing the Bush tax cuts for high earners; a Wall Street, bank, and insurance company bailout at $700 billion to date and likely to grow; and the ongoing Iraq and Afghanistan wars, together costing $170 billion in "extra" defense spending in FY2009.

Still, a leading advocate of the Obama plan, political scientist Jacob Hacker, argues that it can be billed as an important economic stimulus and thus escape the fierce budgetary competition. In December, Hacker cheerfully declared in The New Republic that the Obama plan offers nothing less than a "magic bullet" that will yield "short-term spending and long-term saving" -- a perfect combination as the economy moves deeper into recession.

However, it is likely that Hacker seriously overstates the long-term savings while underestimating the clash of government priorities that lies just ahead. First, Obama-style individual mandate plans have run aground in at least six states that have tried them. With no mechanism to control the premiums charged by private insurers, the ever-higher cost of subsidizing low-income residents' premiums soon exhausts available funds. Nor will sufficient savings be derived from Obama's plan for electronic recordkeeping and more treatment of chronic illness, recent studies by the Congressional Budget Office and others suggest.

To many, a single-payer plan is the obvious way to ensure universal health coverage while containing costs. In addition to the dramatic reduction in administrative costs, single-payer plans offer other opportunities for controlling costs. For instance, they allow government -- the "single payer" -- to negotiate for lower costs with providers like doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies.

Unfortunately, Obama's statements and key appointments suggest he has already disqualified single-payer as a serious option.

Tom Daschle, tapped for Health and Human Services secretary and "point man" on the health care reform effort until tax problems forced him to withdraw his name in February, appeared unwilling to let the private insurance industry go. His basic policy direction emerged in an interview last May. In a remark that seems staggering in hindsight, Daschle said, "And I would ask the question, if you think our banking system today is reasonably regulated, why not try the same model for our health-care system?"

Obama's initial pick for surgeon general was TV health expert Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Gupta was trounced by Michael Moore in a televised debate over Moore's documentary "Sicko," and was then forced to retract some of the factually inaccurate criticisms of single-payer he had offered.

Another key player is Senate Finance Chair Max Baucus, author of a plan similar to Obama's. Baucus recently dismissed the single-payer option on this basis: "We are Americans; we're different from Canada, we're different from the United Kingdom." Baucus was probably not referring to the United States' poorer health outcomes at vastly higher costs when he spoke of the American "difference."

Promoted by this kind of team, Obama's health-care plan could prove to be the most vulnerable component of his domestic program. The Republicans feel confident about their ability to brand Obama's plan as overly complex and a threat to consumer choice in medical care, as they did so successfully with the Clinton plan in the 1990s.

The Obama plan's "pay or play" component, giving employers a choice between insuring their employees or paying a tax to help finance the government plan, will no doubt open it up to conservative criticism as a coercive, big-government program. This line may also strike a chord among moderate-income citizens who earn too much to qualify for a subsidy and consequently lose enthusiasm for reform once they start to pay mandatory health premiums.

The single-payer approach, on the other hand, would disarm many of the most explosive Republican arguments. It is far less costly to both employers and individuals -- nearly 50% lower per person in Canada than the United States, for instance -- and there is no billing of patients or other complexity. Every citizen enjoys the right to health care and a free choice of doctors and hospitals. Start-up costs would be minimal, especially if Medicare were simply expanded to cover the entire public.

Back in 2003, Barack Obama told the Illinois AFL-CIO: "I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14% of its Gross National Product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody . . . a single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that's what I'd like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House."

Now that Obama himself occupies the White House and health care costs consume nearly 17% of GNP, the new president may rediscover that single-payer is the truly pragmatic course on health care reform. Hemmed in on all sides by the enormous costs facing the federal government, Obama may find -- despite his misgivings -- that pursuing a single-payer reform plan is the sole means of creating a low-cost and appealing alternative to the health-care status quo.

 

© 2009 Dollars and Sense All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/135595/

The Stunning Consequences of Not Getting Enough Sleep

By Allison Ford, Divine Caroline
Posted on April 1, 2009, Printed on April 8, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/134516/

Nothing feels worse than hearing your alarm clock ring in the morning when your body is screaming for a few extra hours of rest. Given the opportunity, who wouldn't get more sleep? If I had a choice between a year of unlimited Easter candy and a year of unlimited sleep, I'd say "Bye-bye Cadbury" and "Hello, bed!"

Many people don't get as much sleep as they should. Since the invention of the light bulb, people sleep about 500 hours per year less than they used to. Whether we're kept awake by our partner's snoring or we stay up too late watching TV, we wake up tired, groggy, and cranky. No wonder the coffee industry does so well. Unfortunately, sleep deprivation has some side effects and they can't all be remedied with a little extra caffeine.

This Is Your Brain on Sleep

While the mechanism of sleep isn't fully understood yet, doctors and scientists do know that it's one of our body's most important processes. Studies show that sleep is important for cellular renewal, helping to replace muscle tissue and dead cells throughout the body. Studies have also shown that sleep is a key time for the brain to process and archive information, including memories. Deep, restorative REM sleep, the kind associated with dreaming, seems to stimulate regions of the brain used in learning.  

Every night without adequate rest is like adding to a sleep debt—eventually it will have to be repaid. Even after one sleepless night, we can feel the first effects of sleep deprivation—irritability, memory loss, and drowsiness. Continued sleep deprivation can result in trouble concentrating, blurry vision, impaired judgment, and even more severe mental effects. After just a few days without any sleep, people can begin to experience hallucinations, mania, and nausea. Luckily, if you repay your sleep debt right away, those effects vanish immediately.

Short-Term Side Effects

Sleep deprivation doesn't just cause mental deficits; our physical abilities are diminished too. Studies have demonstrated that not sleeping can reduce glucose metabolism by as much as 40 percent. We use stored glucose for energy and sleep deprivation can interfere with how the body stores and processes it. Sleep-deprived athletes also experience high levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, as well as lower levels of human growth hormone, which is important for muscle repair. The immune system is also thought to be maintained while asleep; people who don't get enough sleep tend to be more susceptible to infections and have slower healing times.

Sleep deprivation also has an effect on how the brain stores information. A study at the University of Pennsylvania showed that mice who were taught a task and allowed to sleep afterward remembered what they had learned better than mice that didn't sleep. Among school-aged children, those who get even one less hour of sleep than their peers have shown to perform more poorly on tests of memory and attention.

Some of the effects of short-term sleep deprivation can be very similar to the effects of being drunk. In 2000, researchers in New Zealand and Australia found that people who drive after being awake for seventeen to nineteen hours performed worse on tests than people with a blood alcohol level of 0.05 percent, almost the legal limit for drunk driving. In fact, the U.S. Department of Transportation reports that as many as 100,000 sleep-related auto accidents occur every year.

One study found that sleep-deprived medical interns working on the night shift were twice as likely to misinterpret patients' test results. There is even evidence that sleep deprivation may have played a part in some major disasters, including the Exxon Valdez oil spill. 

Long-Term Consequences

It's easy to erase the short-term effects of sleep deprivation—get more sleep. However, when people don't sleep well for weeks, months, or even years, it can have cumulative effects on their health. Sleep has shown to be important in regulating blood sugar levels and people who don't sleep can become increasingly resistant to insulin. Long-term insulin resistance puts extra burdens on the pancreas to produce more, and eventually can result in type 2 diabetes.

Recent studies have also linked chronic sleep deprivation to obesity. Sleep has an important effect on the hormones ghrelin and leptin, which control hunger and appetite. When we don't sleep, these hormones can go out of balance, causing us to eat more than we need. Heart disease, high blood pressure, and depression are other diseases that can result from long-term sleep deprivation.  

Get Forty Winks … At Least

It's common to feel a bit tired in the morning, but how do you know if you're truly sleep-deprived? Sleep experts say that if you feel groggy or tired during the day, feel the urge to nap, or if you fall asleep within five minutes of lying down, you could possibly be sleep-deprived. Another symptom of severe sleep debt is the occurrence of "microsleeps," short bursts of sleep that can happen without a person even realizing it.

Although most people think they need to sleep for eight hours a night, the amount actually varies from person to person; some are fine with five, others would do better with ten. If you feel like you need more sleep, simple lifestyle changes can help you get more. Missing a few hours of sleep on occasion isn't the end of the world, because it's easy to make up the sleep with no lasting side effects. Many people are psychologically adjusted to constantly feeling tired, and in the short-term, their bodies may be able to adjust too. But the long-term consequences of sleep deprivation should be enough to convince anyone to hit the sack.

Allison Ford is a staff writer with Divine Caroline.

© 2009 Divine Caroline All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/134516/

Jesse Jackson Jr Under Investigation [Blagosphere] from Gawker

from http://gawker.com/5203858/jesse-jackson-jr-under-investigation

Surprise: the Office of Congressional Ethics is investigating Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. for that whole "Rod Blagojevich's Senate Candidate 5" thing.

Jackson is not actually in any legal trouble, because he didn't actually do anything, but according to taped conversations, corrupt former Illinois governor Blago seemed to think he might end up with a pretty decent payday if he appointed Jackson to the Senate to replace Barack Obama.

Blago told his brother to get in touch with Raghuveer Nayak, a friend of and fundraiser for Jackson, and try to sell Nayak on giving Blago "tangible political support" in exchange for the Jackson appointment. Now Blago didn't actually seem to want to appoint Jackson, 'cause Jackson had not really been his best political ally, but it still seemed worth a shot to approach Jackson's rich friends. And then there was this fundraiser Jackson and his brother and Nayak went to, a couple weeks before Blago's arrest, but honestly who knows what was actually going on out there, in Chicago, with the favor-trading.

Now the "Office of Congressional Ethics" is a toothless citizens' board sort of thing that was just formed last year, and all they can really do is ask politely for interviews and documents and then recommend that the for-real Ethics Committee look into something, but still: you don't really want to be the only member of the Illinois congressional delegation not named "Roland Burris" to be under investigation by any group with "ethics" in the name.

“US Watchdog Calls for Bank Executives to Be Sacked” from Firedoglake

from http://firedoglake.com/2009/04/08/us-watchdog-calls-for-bank-executives-to-be-sacked/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bRerUGAOAw

Such was the headline in Sunday's London Observer.

The Observer's correspondent went on to note that a call would be made this week by the U.S. watchdog "for the removal of top executives from Citigroup, AIG and other institutions that have received government funds in a damning report that will question the administration's approach to saving the financial system from collapse."

You might suppose that the U.S. watchdog in question was Timothy Geithner, Obama's Secretary of the Treasury. Geithner did, after all, make noises on Face the Nation Sunday about how the administration "would consider" removing top management and boards at troubled banks that are "beyond repair," in the words of the Wall Street Journal.

But, no, what Geithner was doing was little more than an end-run in advance of yesterday's report from the real U.S. watchdog.

Meet Elizabeth Warren.

The Harvard Law professor—she's an expert on consumer lending laws (which is to say she's the bane of the credit card industry)—is the chair of the five-member Congressional oversight committee monitoring the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

The committee's 151-page "April Oversight Report," issued Tuesday, comes on the heels of the six-month anniversary of the passage of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008," and gives plenty to pause over, beginning with the simple, obvious question: "What is Treasury's strategy?"

The report lays out—as best it can given Treasury's deliberate, dogged opacity—what that strategy is. As Paul Krugman has long pointed out, the current bank-subsidization plan is little more than the Japanese "Zombie Bank" strategy, repackaged. But the report also makes the case for alternative plans—like liquidization and conservatorship.

No wonder the two right-wing members of the Oversight Committee—the know-nothing former New Hampshire Senator John Sununu and the egregious East Texas yahoo Congressman Jeb Hensarling—voted against the April report.

But what did anyone ever expect of politicians such as Sununu and, especially, Hensarling?

Since the oversight report makes it abundantly clear that almost nothing that Treasury has done has been in the least bit transparent and since the true "total value of all direct spending, loans and guarantees provided to date in conjunction with the government's financial stability efforts" amounts to more than $4 trillion, you might think that the administration, Congress and, especially, the establishment media would be listening to what the People's watchdog has to say.

So far, apparently not.

Well, if the establishment media won't give it to you, we will.

Read the entire report, if you can. Read the short (3-page) executive summary, if you can't. But, in any case, listen to what Liz Warren has to say in this extraordinarily honest, fair-minded, and straightforward eight-minute video introduction. The oversight report itself repeatedly calls for clarity. Here it is (PDF).

Goodbye, Bill of Rights from AfterDowningStreet.org

from http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/41518

Goodbye, Bill of Rights
by Philip Giraldi | AntiWar.com

Those who hoped that the change promised by candidate Barack Obama would include repeal of the various acts that have stripped Americans of their constitutional rights should be disappointed. Benjamin Franklin supposedly wrote, "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." The citation is likely apocryphal, at least in terms of its attribution to Franklin, but it is useful shorthand for the unfortunate abandonment of many of the liberties guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution as a consequence of 9/11. The trauma of 9/11 created an opportunity for those seeking to centralize executive power, an objective of recent presidents from both political parties. Many Americans initially accepted that there had to be some abridgment of fundamental liberties while fighting a multi-faceted and unconventional war against terrorism, but few realize just how much the constitutional rights that all citizens take for granted have been eroded. History also teaches us that once a right is suspended, in all likelihood it is gone forever.

The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 might well be described as one of history's more spectacular euphemisms employed to gut a constitution, somewhat akin to Hitler's "emergency act" in the wake of the Reichstag fire of 1933. It is better known as PATRIOT Act I. PATRIOT Act I became law six weeks after the fall of the Twin Towers and was followed by PATRIOT Act II in 2006. The two laws together diminish constitutional guarantees of free speech, freedom of association, freedom from illegal search, the right to habeas corpus, prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, and prohibition of the illegal seizure of private property. The First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments in the Bill of Rights have all been discarded or abridged in the rush to make it easier to investigate, torture, and jail both foreigners and American citizens. The PATRIOT Act also incorporates the Financial Anti-Terrorism Act of Oct. 17, 2001, which permits the freezing of assets and investigation of individuals suspected of being financial supporters of terrorism. "Suspected" is the key word, as there is no oversight or appeal in the process.

The Military Commission Act of 2006 (MCA) followed the PATRIOT Acts, creating military tribunals for the trying of "unlawful enemy combatants," including American citizens. Unlike a civil or criminal court, the accused needs only a two-thirds vote by the commission members present to be convicted. The act permits the indefinite jailing of suspects in a military prison without being charged with a crime or given access to a lawyer. The government is not required to produce any normally admissible evidence at a commission hearing and can rely on hearsay or even information obtained overseas during torture to make its case. Detainees do not have access to any classified information used against them and cannot cross-examine or even know the identity of witnesses. The MCA suspends habeas corpus for anyone charged and forbids the application of the Geneva Conventions to mitigate conditions of confinement or to challenge the judicial process or verdict. The Geneva Conventions also cannot be invoked if the accused subsequently claims he was tortured or otherwise abused, protecting overly zealous interrogators from later charges of "war crimes." The act was also designed to cover all cases that were pending, meaning that it was retroactive.

An executive order issued on July 17, 2007, which is still in effect, authorized the president to seize the property of anyone who "threatens stabilization efforts in Iraq." As the administration's own Justice Department decides what constitutes "threatening stabilization efforts," the order can be used to go after any critic of the government. Most disturbing, the order does not permit a challenge to the information the seizure is based on, and it also permits the confiscation of the property of anyone who comes to the assistance of the suspected de-stabilizer.

The threat to civil liberties is real. Under the authority of the PATRIOT Act, the FBI requested more than 30,000 national security letters in 2007, and the number was surely higher in 2008. The letters enable the FBI to look at anyone's personal information without any judicial oversight or showing of cause. Anyone who is presented with a letter and compelled to cooperate to provide information on a suspect cannot reveal that the letter has been received. Are there 30,000 terrorists roaming the United States? If there were, the country would surely be a bombed-out ruin by now. The government is instead using the security letters and the other tools provided by the PATRIOT Act legislation to look at people who are completely innocent of any wrongdoing, because it is convenient to be able to do so without the bother of having to go to a judge for a search warrant.

Sen. Barack Obama opposed the MCA and voted against it. He was not in the Senate when the first PATRIOT Act was passed, but he criticized the second version for its abuse of civil liberties before voting for an amended version. Candidate Obama ran on his record of opposition to the various pieces of legislation, noting consistently that they had authorized the abuse of authority by law enforcement and had abridged the rights of every American. Unfortunately, President Obama appears to have forgotten the principled positions he took as a senator and presidential candidate. After his inauguration, he moved quickly to publicly ban the CIA's use of torture, a meaningless gesture in that the Agency had already abandoned the practice, but it now appears that he will do nothing to revoke Bush-era legislation like the MCA that he once strongly criticized. There is every indication that he will also endorse renewal of the PATRIOT Act when it expires at the end of the year, afraid that if he does not do so and there is a terrorist attack he will pay a significant political price. The Obama administration has also been silent about the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretaps and has invoked the "state-secrets privilege" in connection with a lawsuit by the Islamic charity al-Haramain in an apparent bid to prevent disclosure of the warrantless wiretap procedure.

President Obama is not just contradicting his progressive campaign promises and betraying many of the people who voted for him. As a lawyer, he surely understands that protecting the government's questionably legal "rights" to monitor citizens completely subverts the rule of law, because it guarantees that there will be no accountability. Currently, judges who rule on the state-secrets issue are not themselves allowed to see the alleged classified information, meaning that there is absolutely no transparency to the process in which the government is asserting an extralegal privilege that is surely unconstitutional.

If the Obama administration is beginning to sound like the Bush White House, it should. To be sure, the new president is relying on the advice of many Bush administration holdovers like FBI Director Robert Mueller. Mueller asserts, without providing any evidence, that the tools provided by the PATRIOT Act have been effective in preventing terrorism, just as Bush-era intelligence chiefs claimed that torture and extraordinary rendition were essential to meet the terrorist threat. All such claims should be viewed with extreme skepticism, particularly as they are rarely backed up by any evidence. The government also often lies when it wants to make a case for some illegal action. Claims made in 2008 that the waterboarding of Abu Zubaida produced a flood of information that frustrated terrorist plots are now revealed to have been false. Zubaida confused his interrogators and sent them off on wild goose chases with information that was either deliberately deceptive or flat-out wrong. In reality, the government cannot cite a single instance where the use of draconian new legislation or illegal procedures like torture has either prevented a terrorist incident or led to the arrest of anyone who was ready, willing, and able to carry out a violent act.

Obama would have been wiser to ignore the experts and sit back and consider the broader picture. Does the creation of a monstrous Department of Homeland Security supported by a bloated defense and intelligence establishment really make sense in light of the threat that the U.S. actually faces? How did we arrive at a 400,000-name no-fly list and an NSA that has conducted hundreds of millions of interceptions of telephone calls without any oversight? That a small group of terrorists holed up in an isolated and backward part of the world got lucky against an unsuspecting America on 9/11 is clear, but the odds of them repeating that spectacular success are minimal. More than seven years later, the actual vulnerability of international terrorism should be completely clear and the government should be telling the people the good news, that al-Qaeda is on its last legs and that the other Salafist terrorist groups that have a similar philosophy have been hounded and contained all around the world. There has been no successful terrorist action within the United States, and the appeal of jihadist terrorism is on the wane everywhere else. Its moment has passed.

In spite of the reduced threat, under Obama the business of fighting terrorism goes on with a change in the rhetoric but not in the policy, buttressed by an enlarged military budget to spread the cheer to Afghanistan and increased spending on intelligence. And there is no sign that the liberties that Americans have bartered away are about to be returned. Having an amorphous foreign threat hanging around is always good politics, as it can be used to divert attention from more serious problems at home. Having the mechanisms at hand to investigate an American citizen can also be useful when the critics become too loud. Those who feared that George W. Bush would give his successors unconstitutional tools that they would be reluctant to relinquish have apparently been vindicated.

Boren (D) accuses Obama of being weak on defense from Daily Kos

from http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/4/8/717871/-Boren-(D)-accuses-Obama-of-being-weak-on-defense

Expect to see shit like this from elected officials from states that live off the military-industrial complex, like Oklahoma.

Something to watch for for: Dems in Congress who, worried about cuts to defense programs in their states in the proposed restructuring of the Pentagon budget, cross over into questioning Obama's commitment to national security.

We now have our first candidate: Blue Dog Dem Dan Boren of Oklahoma.

Oklahoma is home to a major defense contract that the restructuring puts on the chopping block. GOP Senator James Inhofe made a big splash yesterday by saying Obama is endangering our troops and "disarming America."

Now Boren has added his voice to Inhofe's chorus. "The administration's announcement today of sweeping changes to key defense programs is a significant concern," Boren said in a statement posted, tellingly, on Inhofe's Web site. "Even in tough economic times, providing a strong national defense for the American people should remain a top priority of the federal government."

The Oklahoma officials are less concerned with national security, than in protecting a defense cash-cow -- the Future Combat Systems, a network of aerial- and ground-based systems that allow hitting enemy armor without having line-of-sight. So our forces can hit enemy forces without exposing themselves.

While in true defense contractor fashion, the program is being developed in 41 different states (the better to protect funding in Congress), the Oklahoma portion is worth $500 million over three years. That makes sense, the FCS has a heavy artillery component, and the US Army's artillery operation is headquartered at Ft. Sill in Lawton, OK. I spent nearly a year of my life in that post learning to be a fire direction control specialist for MLRS missile systems.

Problem is, today's battlefield is less about massive Soviet tank armies, and more about counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency. And existing weapon systems are still technically far superior to anything the Russians or Chinese would be able to field. It makes sense to shift funding from obsolete battleground systems to bolstering the capabilities we most need at this time. Last time anyone checked, Al Qaida or the Taliban aren't running around with T-57s or fielding any artillery heavier than mobile mortars.

And worse than that, an obsession with speed and agility means the vehicles are lightly armored, allowing them to move quicker and, with higher fuel efficiency, to move faster before needing resupply. (My job in the Army was mostly logistical, and getting fuel to deployed vehicles, especially in forward positions, is one of the toughest challenges facing any army). Yet if we've learned anything the last six years of war is that lightly-armed vehicles are insurgent magnets and one of the biggest causes of fatalities in both Iraq and Afghanistan. There's a reason that our troops had to learn to build hillbilly armor to protect themselves from ambush and IEDs.

Finally, as SoD Gates noted in his budget announcement, the FCS contract is too heavily tilted toward the contractors at the taxpayer's expense (and given that it's $87 billion on the hook, that's significant), and that the vehicle plan ignores the Army's move toward the MRAP armored vehicle, far more effective for the kind of combat we're currently waging.

But assholes like Boren and Inhoffe, unable to defend the Future Combat Systems on its merits, have to resort to claiming that Obama is weakening national security, even as he bolsters the already bloated defense budget beyond 2008 figures.

Rest assured, they care far less about America's security than their defense contractor buddies back home. Otherwise, they'd be fighting for a force configured to fight today's wars, and fighting to protect the investment American taxpayers make in their national security.

Unplug electrical grid from Net, ex-terror czar Clarke warns from Raw Story Breaking News

Unplug electrical grid from Net, ex-terror czar Clarke warns

The Wall Street Journal reported that spies from Russia and China have penetrated the United States power grid. "The intruders haven't sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war," the report said.

Former White House cyber security adviser Richard Clarke told ABC's Diane Sawyer that the U.S. should consider disconnecting the power grid from the internet to decrease the likelihood of attack.

Clarke, now an ABC consultant, called the "offensive cyber war units" being employed by foreign countries such as Russia "very serious."

The onetime Counter Terrorism Czar, who famously criticized the Bush Administration for doing little to combat al Qaeda early in his first term before 9/11, chided the Obama Administration for not moving fast enough to decide upon the best defense strategy to counter cyber attacks on key infrastructure.

"One thing you can do is disconnect the power grid control system from the internet," Clarke said. "There's no reason for it to be connected."

Clark adds, "It would cost a lot of money to do that but it would also cost a lot of money if one day we woke up and we didn't have electrical power."

This video is from ABC's Good Morning America, broadcast Apr. 8, 2009.

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Richard_Clarke_Disconnect_electrical_grid_from_0408.html

Save American Jobs: Boycott Chase from Emptywheel

FROM http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/04/08/save-american-jobs-boycott-chase/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdZNSngUDbc

JP Morgan Chase wants to push Chrysler into bankruptcy so it can jump the line ahead of retirees and US taxpayers to get paid back.

If JP Morgan Chase does that, 300,000 people will lose their jobs.

That's sorry thanks we get from a company that has gotten $25 billion in TARP funds from American taxpayers--plus billions more in other benefits from the Wall Street bailout.

My husband and I decided the only way to pressure JP Morgan Chase to negotiate in good faith with Chrysler was to close our Chase accounts. We want our money to go to a bank that is investing in rebuilding Michigan--not bankrupting it.

Now, FDL and Progress Michigan are calling on others to join our Chase boycott.

Sign the petition

Join the FaceBook group

Find your Michigan Chase branch and close your account

Explain why you're closing your account

Update: Progressive radio host Nancy Skinner--who drives a Chrysler and lives in MI--is joining the boycott.

She'll have Jane on her show today at 3PM to talk about the boycott. Listen in. 

THE CASE AGAINST SHELL

The multinational corporation Shell financed, armed, and otherwise colluded with the Nigerian military forces that used deadly force and conducted massive, brutal raids against the Ogoni people of the Niger Delta. Shell was also involved in a strategy that resulted in the executions of nine Ogoni leaders who were working for environmental justice and human rights, including internationally-acclaimed writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. The Center for Constitutional Rights, EarthRights International and other human rights attorneys sued Shell for their role in the repression of the Ogoni and the executions of the "Ogoni Nine". The case will go to trial on April 27, 2009 in New York City. Please watch the video and visit www.wiwavshell.org for more information.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-g7WqFn1Tv8

Will New Food Safety Bills Really Outlaw Backyard Gardening and End Farmers' Markets? By Ari LeVaux, AlterNet

Posted on April 6, 2009, Printed on April 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/135002/

My inbox has been pummeled in recent weeks by a barrage of emails warning me of the evils of HR 875, a bill currently working its way through Congress. Sponsored by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn), the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 was one of several bills introduced in the wake of the peanut butter-borne salmonella outbreak. Each of these bills ostensibly seeks to improve food safety with increased regulation.

Critics, paranoid and level-headed alike, point to the disproportionate burden that increased regulation places on small farmers, and many wonder if the banner of food safety is being used as a Trojan horse to create a more favorable business climate for corporate agriculture.

 "If [HR 875] passes, say goodbye to organic produce, your Local Farmer's market and very possibly, the GARDEN IN YOUR OWN BACKYARD!!!!!" announced one email."

Another warned that HR 875 would result in "...criminalization of seed banking, prison terms and confiscatory fines for farmers."

And of course, no serious foodie conspiracy theory would be complete without Monsanto as the architect: "DeLauro's husband Stanley Greenburg works for Monsanto!" claim nearly all of these emails.  

Stanley Greenberg is indeed the CEO of a polling firm that did, indeed, contract with Monsanto. But it's no more true to say he works for Monsanto than it is to say he works for Nelson Mandela - who was also a former client of his firm, according to factcheck.org, which did a detailed dissection of one of the viral emails.

These emails seem to have been propagated largely by well-intentioned foodies, after having originated from a cadre of conspiracy theorists and Ron Paul supporters with too much time on their hands.  

"There is a perfectly legitimate conversation to be had about how we can have food safety regulation without jeopardizing small farms and local food systems," says Patty Lovera, Assistant director of Food and Water Watch. "But it's hard to have a rational conversation via forwarded emails. It's not happening in a way that's going to change the policy."

Lovera says HR 875 won't regulate seed-saving, backyard gardens, or farmers markets. It would, however, split the Food and Drug Administration into separate bodies, one for food and one for drugs. This is a move that Food and Water Watch would support. But unfortunately, she says, it's likely to kill the bill, because splitting the FDA might be too daunting a task for lawmakers to take on right now.

Another bill that's more likely to make it to a vote, Lovera says, is HR 759. While this bill, "the Food And Drug Administration Globalization Act," has drawn relatively little attention, she thinks it would be more likely to cause big problems for small farmers.

HR 759 would extend traceability recordkeeping requirements that currently apply only to food processors to farms and restaurants - and require that recordkeeping be done electronically, placing a disproportionate burden, in terms of time and money, on small farmers. The bill would also establish production standards for fruits and vegetables, which are called "Good Agricultural Practices."

Agriculture practices designed to improve food safety and address environmental, economic, and social sustainability, might sound like a good idea, Lovera says. But as written, the Good Agriculture Practices are mostly relevant to large, corporate farms - which are the source of most farm-related economic, social, environmental, and safety problems to begin with.

All of these bills, ostensibly, are efforts to make factory-farmed food safer so we can avoid E.coli in spinach, downer cattle in school lunches, feathers in chicken patties, and other food-borne horror stories we've grown all-too used to hearing about. But if these regulations are extended to the small, family farms where the problems aren't coming from, it's more than just a legislative overextension. It's a tilting of the playing field grossly in favor of corporate agriculture. And on this point, we all should be paranoid.

"What people don't realize is that if any of these bills pass, we lose. All we will have left is industrial food," says Deborah Stockton, executive director of the National Independent Consumers and Farmers Association, which is dedicated to promoting and preserving unregulated direct farmer-to-consumer trade, and fostering the availability of locally grown or home-produced food products.

One of Stockton's top priorities is stopping the controversial National Animal Identification System (NAIS). Implemented by USDA in 2003 without congressional approval, NAIS is a federal registry program for livestock and for the premises where animals live or visit. The stated purpose of the system is to aid state and federal government response to outbreaks of animal disease.

"NAIS is a safety net for the corporate livestock industry," Stockton told me. "They're the ones with the practices that are creating problems for human and animal health, and they're the ones who need NAIS to cover their backs when something goes wrong. The main threats to food safety are centralized production, processing and long distance transportation."

Food and Water Watch shares Stockton's distaste for NAIS. According ot its web page: "The current plan to create a federal animal identification system ignores existing state animal health programs, puts too much emphasis on privatizing the data collection (forcing small farmers to submit data about their operations to trade associations they don't support), and essentially forces small farmers and ranchers to pay for a safety net for agribusiness."

But, says Lovera, the bills currently under consideration are aimed at the FDA, and NAIS is a USDA program. While she sees a lot of problems with many of the current bills, strengthening NAIS isn't one of them.

Stockton doesn't buy it. If any of them pass, she says, it would ratify NAIS, and strengthen USDA's ability to make it mandatory for all livestock, including your flock of backyard chickens.

So lawmakers, if you're listening, and you want these protestors, ballistic and level-headed alike, to chill out, here is how to get them off your backs: exempt local food systems from the current bills. Include specific language in the bills that will guarantee that small family farms, backyard gardens, personal livestock, farmers markets, and all forms of food self-sufficiency and farmer-direct purchasing are protected. Because the right to buy milk from your neighbor or grow your own food is as inalienable as the right to bear arms. And if you threaten to take away this right, you're going to face a backlash that will make the NRA seem like a bunch of flower-waving Hare Krishnas.

Ari LeVaux writes a syndicated weekly food column.

© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/135002/

Why Sarah Palin and Chevron May Be Responsible for the Next Massive Oil Spill in Alaska By Shannyn Moore, Huffington Post

Posted on March 31, 2009, Printed on April 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/134341/

Mount Redoubt is awake. Our governor is not. I'm beyond annoyed.

Currently, 6 million gallons of Alaska crude oil wait at the base of a volcano that has puked, spewed and gone half mad 19 times in the last 8 days. The years of colonization have made flaccid the response of many Alaskans. For good reason; collective PTSD from the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill and subsequent 20 year wait only to have the Supreme Court deliver Exxon a reach-around while Alaskans grabbed their ankles fuels collective disillusionment. It's ironic we need petroleum products to deal with an oil company. Sadly, our governor couldn't remember "Exxon v. Baker" when asked by Katie Couric about Supreme Court decisions she disagreed with. The 20th solemn observance of the catastrophic spill last week would have been an appropriate time for a statement, but she was loudly silent. It is a very real possibility that history could be repeated.

The Drift River marine terminal started operating in 1967. Brilliant. I know, let's put an oil storage facility at the base of a volcano. You would think it was the secret lair of the Evil Dr. Cheney; or some hilariously funny and misguided plotline from an Austin Powers film. Pipelined in from another facility, it merely holds the crude until it's ready to ride to the refinery across the inlet.

One of the reasons given for leaving 6 million gallons of crude in the storage tanks is stability; the tanks are much more stable when they have something in them. Chevron referenced Katrina and the need to keep the tanks heavy enough so they don't float away in a flood. The environmental coupon clippers decided to risk Cook Inlet in order to save empty storage tanks. DID I MENTION THEY ARE AT THE BASE OF AN ACTIVE AND EXPLODING VOLCANO? Drift River is also permitted by the EPA to treat ballast water from tankers. Were the storage tanks emptied of oil, they could be filled to safe and stable weight levels with sea water-called BALLAST when it's in a boat.

The volcanic eruption of 1989 was severe, but Cook Inlet was not at risk - the storage tanks had been emptied. 20 years later, industry initially wouldn't release the amount of oil left in the tanks citing a threat to "homeland security". So, by that logic, the terrorists would attack if they knew the crude supply in a storage facility was running a little low? REALLY? The Palin Administration, the Coast Guard, and the EPA rolled with that and regurgitated the corporate line of drivel without question. Why don't the terrorists attack the Port of Valdez? They release their crude number every day. Finally, due to relentless pressure from Cook Inlet Keepers, Chevron finally owned the fact they decided to store 6 million gallons of crude oil at the base of Mt Redoubt.

After months of seismic activity, rumblings, belches...well, all the volcanic foreplay you would expect before an eruption...why are 6 million gallons of oil still there? That's over half the size of the reported Exxon Valdez oil spill. The Coast Guard, Chevron and the State have collectively admitted that there is a lack of response equipment if the Drift River oil tanks rupture or collapse.

According to state statutes for lease conditions;

"Mitigative, Preventive, and Abatement Activities Required (a) The LESSEE will, at its own expense ....The LESSEE shall prevent or, if the procedure, activity, event or condition already exists or has occurred, shall abate, as completely as practicable, using the BEST PRACTICABLE TECHNOLOGY AVAILABLE...immediate, serious, or irreparable harm or damage to the environment (including but not limited to soil, sediments, water and air quality, areas of vegetation, fish or other wildlife populations or their habitats, or any other natural resource)."

HOLY CRAP! It's the Pottery Barn Rule! You break it...you buy it. That's hilarious! Exxon just disproved it, and the Supreme Court set precedent for multinational corporations to have an "accident" and get a pass-just the cost of doing business. It's time to demand the State of Alaska enforce the laws we already have. It doesn't take an economist to realize a "Free-Market" capitalist society is very expensive. Chevron, like Exxon, privatize their profits and socialize their risk and loss with the livelihoods and lifestyles of the people and environment of Cook Inlet.

The Cook Inletkeepers have a call to action. This is Vitamin Democracy.

Write to the Captain of the Port - Mark Hamiltion - mark.h.hamilton@uscg.mil - and ask him to:

1) draw down the oil in the tanks at the Drift River Terminal until the volcano subsides and

2) position spill response equipment so we're ready in case things turn south.

Join Cook Inletkeepers. You can tell them I sent you. Join Renewable Resources Coalition to keep an eye on the Bristol Bay watershed and Pebble Mine updates.

I could bang my head and tell you the controlling forces in Alaska have better things to focus on...like denying vaginal rights, bringing back the death penalty (Jesus would have loved that...oh wait, maybe not), and the "I-did-a-dog" bestiality bill. Palin's pandering appointments of W.A.R. (extremist Wayne Anthony Ross) for Attorney General and the newly converted and recent Republican Tim Grussendorf to replace Democrat Kim Elton's vacated Alaska State Senate seat are just short of a "F*@# YOU, Alaska!" press release.

But I won't rant on that just now, WE DON'T HAVE TIME!

© 2009 Huffington Post All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/134341/

How a Green Economy Is an Antidote to Casino Capitalism By Robert Pollin, New Labor Forum

from http://www.alternet.org/environment/134434/how_a_green_economy_is_an_antidote_to_casino_capitalism/

Posted on April 2, 2009, Printed on April 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/134434/

The convergence of a profound economic crisis and the inauguration of Barack Obama as President has created both tremendous challenges and opportunities for progressives in the United States. Two of the overarching economic issues around which progressives will need to struggle are: first, how to build a clean energy economy, creating millions of good jobs in the process; and second, how to create a financial system focused on channeling money toward productive investment as opposed to destabilizing speculation.

In fact, the link between these matters becomes clear once we pose the simple question: how can we pay for the transition to a clean energy economy? Realistically, there is no way to construct a clean energy economy -- driven by solar, wind, and geothermal power and biomass fuels, and operating at dramatically higher levels of energy efficiency -- unless trillions of dollars are channeled into this project over the next 20 years.

Considered on an annual basis, it is reasonable to assume that a green investment program should be in the range of $150 billion per year. This is roughly equal to 1 percent of the United States gross domestic product (GDP) or equal to the current level of our spending on the Iraq war. A green investment program of this size would create about 2.5 million new jobs within the U.S. economy. But as long as Wall Street continues to squander trillions chasing speculative profits and generating financial bubbles -- i.e. variations on the housing market, stock market, and emerging economy bubbles that we experienced just over the past decade alone -- there will not be enough money available to adequately finance a clean energy transformation.

There are only two possible ways to finance a clean energy transition -- public funding, with money coming from either the U.S. or individual states' treasuries; or private funding, with money coming from private businesses and households. We often think about large-scale economic policy initiatives as necessarily being funded by the federal government. In fact, both public and private sources of funds will be needed to build a clean energy economy. But the key will be to ensure that private funds are channeled into green investments and away from fossil fuels.

rest at http://www.alternet.org/environment/134434/how_a_green_economy_is_an_antidote_to_casino_capitalism/

The Startling Effects of Going Vegetarian for Just One Day By Kathy Freston, Huffington Post

from http://www.alternet.org/water/134650/the_startling_effects_of_going_vegetarian_for_just_one_day/

Posted on April 2, 2009, Printed on April 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/134650/

I've written extensively on the consequences of eating meat -- on our health, our sense of "right living", and on the environment. It is one of those daily practices that has such a broad and deep effect that I think it merits looking at over and over again, from all the different perspectives. Sometimes, solutions to the world's biggest problems are right in front of us. The following statistics are eye-opening, to say the least.

If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would save:

● 100 billion gallons of water, enough to supply all the homes in New England for almost 4 months;

● 1.5 billion pounds of crops otherwise fed to livestock, enough to feed the state of New Mexico for more than a year;

● 70 million gallons of gas -- enough to fuel all the cars of Canada and Mexico combined with plenty to spare;

● 3 million acres of land, an area more than twice the size of Delaware;

● 33 tons of antibiotics.

If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would prevent:

● Greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 1.2 million tons of CO2, as much as produced by all of France;

● 3 million tons of soil erosion and $70 million in resulting economic damages;

● 4.5 million tons of animal excrement;

● Almost 7 tons of ammonia emissions, a major air pollutant.

My favorite statistic is this: According to Environmental Defense, if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads. See how easy it is to make an impact?

Other points:

Globally, we feed 756 million tons of grain to farmed animals. As Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer notes in his new book, if we fed that grain to the 1.4 billion people who are living in abject poverty, each of them would be provided more than half a ton of grain, or about 3 pounds of grain/day -- that's twice the grain they would need to survive. And that doesn't even include the 225 million tons of soy that are produced every year, almost all of which is fed to farmed animals. He writes, "The world is not running out of food. The problem is that we -- the relatively affluent -- have found a way to consume four or five times as much food as would be possible, if we were to eat the crops we grow directly."

A recent United Nations report titled Livestock's Long Shadow concluded that the meat industry causes almost 40% more greenhouse gas emissions than all the world's transportation systems -- that's all the cars, trucks, SUVs, planes and ships in the world combined. The report also concluded that factory farming is one of the biggest contributors to the most serious environmental problems at every level -- local and global.

Researchers at the University of Chicago concluded that switching from standard American diet to a vegan diet is more effective in the fight against global warming than switching from a standard American car to a hybrid.

In its report, the U.N. found that the meat industry causes local and global environmental problems even beyond global warming. It said that the meat industry should be a main focus in every discussion of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortages and pollution, and loss of biodiversity.

Unattributed statistics were calculated from scientific reports by Noam Mohr, a physicist with the New York University Polytechnic Institute.

© 2009 Huffington Post All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/134650/

Startling Revelations about Three Mile Island Disaster Raise Doubts Over Nuke Safety

A growing body of personal and scientific evidence contradicts the official story that the accident posed no threat to the public.

This story originally appeared on Facing South, online magazine of the Institute for Southern Studies.

It was April Fool's Day, 1979 -- 30 years ago this week -- when Randall Thompson first set foot inside the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Middletown, Pa. Just four days earlier, in the early morning hours of March 28, a relatively minor problem in the plant's Unit 2 reactor sparked a series of mishaps that led to the meltdown of almost half the uranium fuel and uncontrolled releases of radiation into the air and surrounding Susquehanna River.

It was the single worst disaster ever to befall the U.S. nuclear power industry, and Thompson was hired as a health physics technician to go inside the plant and find out how dangerous the situation was. He spent 28 days monitoring radiation releases.

Today, his story about what he witnessed at Three Mile Island is being brought to the public in detail for the first time -- and his version of what happened during that time, supported by a growing body of other scientific evidence, contradicts the official U.S. government story that the Three Mile Island accident posed no threat to the public.

"What happened at TMI was a whole lot worse than what has been reported," Randall Thompson told Facing South. "Hundreds of times worse."

Thompson and his wife, Joy, a nuclear health physicist who also worked at TMI in the disaster's aftermath, claim that what they witnessed there was a public health tragedy. The Thompsons also warn that the government's failure to acknowledge the full scope of the disaster is leading officials to underestimate the risks posed by a new generation of nuclear power plants.

While new reactor construction ground to a halt after the 1979 incident, state leaders and energy executives today are pushing for a nuclear energy revival that's centered in the South, where 12 of the 17 facilities seeking new reactors are located.

Fundamental to the industry's case for expansion is the claim that history proves nuclear power is clean and safe -- a claim on which the Thompsons and others, bolstered by startling new evidence, are casting doubt.

rest at http://www.alternet.org/environment/134977/startling_revelations_about_three_mile_island_disaster_raise_doubts_over_nuke_safety/

Michele Bachmann Says Volunteer Bill Creates Re-Education Camps, Yet Supports Christian Indoctrination in Schools

from http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/alerts/641

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT
 by Meg White

Just when we thought she was running out of crazy juice, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has done it again.  Pretty much everyone on the liberal blogosphere has mentioned Bachmann's new obsession: liberal re-education camps. This myth stems from the widely-repeated lie that President Obama is trying to start a fascist army by requiring American children to enroll in Americorps and forbidding them from going to church.

(You can listen to -- or read the transcripts of -- the radio interview where Bachmann warns of the camps here.)

Yup. Sounds just crazy enough to be repeated by Bachmann.

But what seems to have gone unreported here is that Bachmann herself condones indoctrination, especially as part of an educational regime. She's just against that politically-correct "Democrat" kind.

Here are a few examples of Bachmann's fascist streak:

• Her husband is a Christian therapist who reportedly engages in "curing" homosexuality.
• Bachmann attended Oral Roberts School of Law, where students are required to sign a pledge promising not to drink, smoke, lie, gamble and engage in certain sexual acts, especially homosexual ones. 
• She believes children should be taught creationism and be exposed to the Ten Commandments in school. 
• Probably because she didn't get her way on that whole education tirade, she home schools her five biological children, and has been a foster mom to 23 other children.
• She's also closely tied with the conservative religious think tank EdWatch, an organization which includes this belief in their mission statement: "Good education accurately teaches the political heritage of western civilization, including the Judeo-Christian worldview, as America's historical foundation."

Whew. Just make sure you don't accidentally send your kids off to Camp Bachmann this summer.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT

Hungry for more? Check out our extensive round up Watch Out: The Mad Woman From Minnesota, Michele Bachmann, is Back from November 2008.

DOJ Urges Dismissal of Warrantless Wiretapping Case Brought on Behalf of AT&T Customers

from http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/alerts/644

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT

The Obama-Holder Department of Justice (DOJ) Friday filed a brief seeking dismissal of a warrantless wiretapping case -- Jewel v. NSA -- in a U.S. District Court in California. The DOJ argues lack of jurisdiction and seeks to "uphold the government's privilege assertions" based on the "state secrets" privilege and asserting "sovereign immunity." According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), who brought the case:

In Jewel v. NSA, EFF is suing the National Security Agency (NSA) and other government agencies on behalf of AT&T customers to stop the illegal, unconstitutional, and ongoing dragnet surveillance of their communications and communications records.

Jewel v. NSA is aimed at ending the NSA's dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans and holding accountable the government officials who illegally authorized it. Evidence in the case includes undisputed documents provided by former AT&T telecommunications technician Mark Klein showing AT&T has routed copies of Internet traffic to a secret room in San Francisco controlled by the NSA.

In a response Monday to the goverment filing for dismissal, EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston accused the Obama Justice Department of "continuing the Bush administration's cover-up of the National Security Agency's dragnet surveillance of millions of Americans ... "

For in-depth analysis, see:

New and worse secrecy and immunity claims from the Obama DOJ (Glenn Greenwald, salon.com)

Shut Up: It's Still A Secret (Marc Ambinder, theatlantic.com)

Following Bush lead, Obama moves to block challenge to wiretapping program (John Byrne, rawstory.com)

Obama Lawyers Invoke "State Secrets" to Block Warrantless Spying Lawsuit (Liliana Segura, alternet.org)

The DOJ filing is here.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT

Which will come first -- universal health care or the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series?

from http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/alerts/643

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT
by Chad Rubel 

This is the year. Finally.

This is a theme that carries on inside the heads of baseball fans as the season opened up this week. Regardless of how well your team did in the off-season in getting new players, or how much the other teams in your division spent on players, there is optimism.

Well, E.J. Dionne Jr. has renewal and spring on his mind in a different realm. The first sentence from his column yesterday in The Washington Post:

"Yes, this is the year Congress will finally give every American access to health insurance."

For years, this is the equivalent of Chicago Cubs fans saying "This year, the Cubs will win the World Series." For the record, if the Cubs don't win it all this year, this will be the 101st season in a row where it hasn't come true. But this year might be the year. The Cubs have been to the postseason two years in a row, first time that has happened in 100 years. Of course, the Cubs have lost 9 straight postseason games.

As Dionne said about health care: "Getting there won't be pretty." Cubs fans can relate.

But maybe Dionne is right. The Boston Red Sox snapped an 86-year championship-less stretch in 2004. The Chicago White Sox, the Cubs' hated rival on the South Side, ended an 88-year string in 2005 with only two trips to the Series in between, one of which they were accused of intentionally losing.

After all, if those two famous streaks could be snapped, what about health care?

Opening Day in baseball comes at a time of spring and renewal, even if most baseball fans root for a team that has no chance of coming close to the playoffs. It's the one time of year to have optimism.

But it's difficult to have optimism over health care. We already have the experience of seeing other countries be our guinea pigs -- we know that it works, yet "socialized medicine" and other bogeyman terms get in the way.

Dionne invites us to "feel free to be skeptical." But he does point out why this time is different:

But this conclusion misses almost everything that has been happening. It's not just that the public (including business) is frustrated with the status quo. And it has little to do with the details that policy wonks are necessarily hashing over.

What matters is that members of Congress have quietly been preparing the ground for reform since the Democrats took over two years ago. And the competing interest groups seem more inclined to get what they can out of reform than to stop the enterprise altogether.

Should we be optimistic about health care? Is this the year? Are we going to get universal health care before the Cubs win the World Series? Can we get both in the same year?

The Cubs did win their opening game last night 4-2 over Houston. And the team is predicted to make the postseason for the third year in a row. Can we pray for two miracles -- universal health care and the Cubs? Might happen: after all, many thought we couldn't elect a black man as president.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT

Private Health Insurance Companies Increase Healthcare Costs and Reduce Care: End Them

from http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/analysis/700

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

In the coming months, we will see the development of a new healthcare system in Washington. Concessions will be made on all sides and everyone is nervous about what those concessions might be.

While many of us hope for single-payer, universal healthcare, the fact is that the political will might not exist for it. However, no matter what the Obama Administration decides to call the final product, private health insurance companies need to disappear from the equation.

It seems the Obama Administration, and most congressional Democrats, are afraid of single-payer's association with socialized medicine. But doctors don't have to work for the government for this healthcare reform initiative to be successful. According to Washington Post correspondent T.R. Reid, private health insurance companies -- not private doctors -- need to go.

Reid's book, The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care, will be published this summer. Reid has been traveling the world learning about other countries' healthcare systems, while keeping in mind the idiosyncrasies of American patients and doctors, to try and figure out what will work best here.

Reid found that, while advances in healthcare are driving up costs all over the world, the astronomically high prices in this country originate with insurance companies.

Not only do insurance companies allow the pharmaceutical industry to charge Americans many times the prices others pay for the same medicine, but also internal costs take a big chunk of change as well. Administrative costs for public insurance systems hover around 3 percent, while private insurance companies spent 25-31 percent on such costs. Overhead among private insurers in the U.S. is nine times that of Canada's single-payer system.

U.S. health insurance companies have also institutionalized a reduction in quality of care. A lot of those extra administrative costs are spent on hiring people to try and deny coverage and claims.

But even these relatively moderate views on healthcare reform are being pushed aside by the health insurance industry and the media. Reid, who has done one documentary for PBS' "Frontline" accompanying his international reporting on five foreign healthcare regimes called Sick Around the World, was again commissioned by PBS to do a similar documentary called Sick Around America. But Frontline so skewed Reid's reporting that he refused to appear in the final product and says he won't work with Frontline in the future.

The Sick Around America producers invited the president of the leading health insurance lobbyist group onto the program and essentially agreed with her statements on the need to keep the insurance companies in charge and force every American to sign up with them as a reform measure. (An interesting look at how this proposal works for and is being pushed by the health insurance lobby, check out this recent L.A. Times business column.)

Reid spoke with Corporate Crime Reporter about the disagreement:

"I said to them -- mandating for-profit insurance is not the lesson from other countries in the world," Reid said. "I said I'm not going to be in a film that contradicts my previous film and my book. They said I had to be in the film because I was under contract. I insisted that I couldn't be. And we parted ways."

"Doctors, hospitals, nurses, labs can all be for-profit," Reid said. "But the payment system has to be non-profit. All the other countries have agreed on that. We are the only one that allows health insurance companies to make a profit. You can't allow a profit to be made on the basic package of health insurance."

As insurance companies do everything they can to stay top dog in the healthcare profit pile, you'll hear plenty from their surrogates in Congress. Republicans have already begun trotting out the same fear tactics that worked to defeat healthcare reform back in the 90s: the loss of patient choice and privacy.

Hopefully the American people will be able to see this red herring. The only thing they need consider is whether they actually have that supposed "choice" being trumpeted as the American way. Does Blue Cross Blue Shield allow you to see any doctor in the country, such as patients can do in, say, France?

The problem is that single-payer is inextricably tied to socialism in the minds of Americans. If the administration is going to give up the single-payer idea anyway, perhaps we should throw it to the wolves: Tell Republicans screaming about socialized medicine that our doctors and clinics will stay private. Then the GOP might have to actually admit that it's the health insurance companies they want to protect, not doctors and patients. 

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

LucasFilm Tells Darth Vader that Return of the Jedi Hasn’t Made a Profit!? from /Film

this is really fucked up http://www.slashfilm.com/2009/04/05/lucasfilm-tells-darth-vader-that-return-of-the-jedi-hasnt-made-a-profit/

During an interview with Equity Magazine, David Prowse, the actor who played (but didn't voice) Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy, claims that LucasFilm has yet to pay him any residual payments on Return of the Jedi because the the film has yet to make a profit.

"I get these occasional letters from Lucasfilm saying that we regret to inform you that as Return of the Jedi has never gone into profit, we've got nothing to send you. Now here we're talking about one of the biggest releases of all time," said Prowse. "I don't want to look like I'm bitching about it," he said, "but on the other hand, if there's a pot of gold somewhere that I ought to be having a share of, I would like to see it."

Of course, Return of the Jedi has grossed over $572 million worldwide, which includes an estimated $88 million when the film was re-released in 1997. So how is it possible that the film has yet to make a profit? Prowse really can't be serious, can he?

TimesOnline contacted LucasFilm about the story but the company declined to comment as a matter of policy. In the interview, Prowse warns young actors to know exactly what kind of contracts they are signing:

"There is a big difference between having a share of the gross profit and having a share of the net profit. It is a huge difference in just one word. Sometimes, with net profit, with all the expenses and so on, it seems like you end up paying them."

Hollywood contracts are notoriously one-sided, but I'm pretty sure Prowse must be mistaken about that letter and what might be owed to him for Return of the Jedi, right?

/Film reader Seth posted the following in the comments:

Gross profit is what you get if you are a big enough actor or producer to demand this. You get a percentage of profit based on the gross of the film - how much it makes before any costs. Therefore, you are guaranteed to get paid since the studio can't hide anything.  Very few people can demand gross points. But if you have them and your film hits big, you make millions. In fact, this can be so profitable you will sometimes see big stars forgo any salary at all except union minimum just to get these points.

Unfortunately, Mr. Prowse relates what is almost universally the case with a net profit clause. Studios almost never pay on this clause, as they claim nearly any and every expense possible to keep the film from showing any actual profit. Very few films have ever shown a net profit on the books.

How do they do this? Well first, imagine that George Lucas decided to go to New York tomorrow to talk about showing Return of the Jedi in 3D. And he stayed at the Ritz Carlton, ordered sushi at 3 a.m. from room service and used the hotel phone to call Bahrain to make prank calls.

Well, 26 years after the release of the film, the accountants at Lucasfilm are going to charge $86,000 to the costs of Return of the Jedi. I am NOT joking. This is what they do. If George Lucas utters the words Star Wars and he's spending money, they're putting it on the red line for one of those films.

On the flipside, Mr. Prowse would be wise to use the FORCE, aka a lawyer, to get Lucasfilm to cough up. You see, as you can tell by the above, the accounting is utter bullshit. And on a film like Return of the Jedi, Lucasfilm would be extremely reluctant to open its books in open court. Extremely reluctant because of how incredibly embarrassed studios have been in the past when they have made the mistake of doing this. Plus, the ensuing publicity would be embarrassing to Lucasfilm. Can you imagine the hedlines if Darth Vader sued George Lucas?

In short, if you have net participation on a film that has grossed hundreds of millions, you may get some dough, but you'll have to sue to get it.

Related Stories

The Perfect Balance of Capitalism [Recessionomics] from Gawker

from http://gawker.com/5200518/the-perfect-balance-of-capitalism

Stocks are down this morning, on concerns about the health of the financial sector. But the foreclosure business is booming, on optimism of more and more and more foreclosures!

The agents who handle foreclosures for banks are doing great. They're lounging around a fancy conference in Palm Desert in beach gear, which makes for fabulous color for the New York Times reporter there.

This, you see, proves that capitalism works. The profits flowing into the foreclosure industry will offset, for example, the profits flowing out of the auto industry. Who needs a car when they can't even pay their mortgage, anyhow? Efficiency. Economics is all about re-allocating capital to where it can be used most effectively. So while towns in Michigan are facing such bleak times that even the mayor is saying "There isn't any light at the end of the tunnel right now," other places in our interconnected global economy are doing just fine: North Korean missile repair depots! Baghdad car bomb manufacturers! Extortionate health insurance providers! And, of course, Somali pirates!

This is what the liberal media always 'forgets' to print: capitalism is a perfect system. When one thing dies, another comes into glorious being. The buggy industry crumbled; automobiles rose. Railroads crumbled; Airlines rose. Newspapers are crumbling; somebody else is probably making money on journalism somewhere, somehow, instead (Romenesko?). So all you Marxist Chomskies out there, save your cries about how greedy bankers have gone and destroyed America's institutions with wild overleveraging and irresponsible risk management. Consider the balance factor, will you? Out: jobs. In: gun nuttery, everywhere.
[Pic via]

Who Likes Larry Summers? [Money Honeys] from Gawker

from http://gawker.com/5200704/who-likes-larry-summers

Well, Barack Obama does. And Tim Geithner. But no one else. Not one other person on god's green earth likes Lawrence H. Summers. Which is why all the Summers income documents were dumped on Friday.

Summers is Obama's chief economic advisor, a position that, conveniently, doesn't require Senate confirmation. If it had required Senate confirmation, Summers probably woulda been Daschle'd. Not necessarily because he doesn't pay his taxes (though he probably doesn't, who knows) but because he is totally beholden to everyone in finance.

So. Summers earned $5.2 million for a part-time gig at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw.

And hey, what a shock this is to learn:

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.

And suddenly the Geithner plan makes a little more sense! Well, except that they still can't convince the HEDGE FUNDS THAT WILL SAVE THE ECONOMY to sign on, even when the government is basically promising to insulate them from risk.

More fun facts about Larry: after he stepped down as President of Harvard because he said gurls are stoopid, he still made $528,996 as "Charles W. Eliot University professor" this last year, making him Harvard's highest-paid professor! This while he was working at the hedge fund and all the other shit he gets paid millions to make appearances at.

Naturally Harvard forbids devoting more than "20 per cent of one's total professional effort" to "outside work," which it could be argued that Mr. Summers has been doing since he stepped down as President to remain a highly paid pretend professor back in '06.

Anyway. Larry Summers. We keep hearing about how he is THE MOST BRILLIANT ECONOMIST OF HIS GENERATION but maybe that only applies if his economic theories made you rich in the 90s and are keeping you rich now.

Plot To Assassinate President Obama Revealed! from PerezHilton.com by Perez Hilton

from http://perezhilton.com/2009-04-07-plot-to-assassinate-president-obama-revealed

Officials have revealed that a plot to assassinate President Barack Obama has been foiled and is being investigated "very seriously."

A Syrian man believed to be involved was arrested late last week in Turkey. Cautioning that it's not unusual for the President to be the target of threats - especially since Obama is the first African-American Prez - officials reassured that the alleged plotter didn't even get close to executing his plans while Obama was on his first overseas travel, nor did the incident alter Obama's schedule.

A Suadi-Arabian paper was the first to report the plot, stating that the suspect was caught carrying an Al-Jazeera TV press credential in the name of "M.G." and that he and three accomplices had planned to stab the President during the Alliance of Civilizations Summit in Istanbul on Monday.

Officials don't want to say more, fearing that the media may have been infiltrated, although since the arrest, journalists covering the trip were more thoroughly searched.

We're glad they were able to stop the plot in time!

[Image via WENN.]

How Badly Do BAC Shareholders Want Ken Lewis Out? from Dealbreaker

from http://dealbreaker.com/2009/04/how-badly-do-bac-shareholders.php

So badly they've set up a website and bought commercial blocks on CNBC!

Our Lady of the Angels firefighter dies from Chicago Breaking News

from http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2009/04/our-lady-of-the-angels-firefighter-dies.html

Retired Chicago firefighter Richard Scheidt, a subject of one of the grimmest and most iconic newspaper photographs in Chicago history, has died. He was 81.

On Dec. 1, 1958, a helmeted Scheidt, his face drawn in sorrow, carried the wet, lifeless body of 10-year-old John Jajkowski Jr. from Our Lady of the Angels grade school on the West Side. The fire, one of the worst tragedies in Chicago annals, killed 92 children and three nuns.

Scheidt died Monday at his home in southwest suburban Oak Lawn, a day after he was brought home from the hospital following a minor stroke a month ago, according to relatives.

Scheidt, a member of Rescue Squad 1, carried the bodies of 20 children from the school. Jajkowski was the first.

Scheidt was forever haunted by the memory. In an interview with the Tribune in 1995, in the wake of the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in which another image of a firefighter cradling a dying child went around the world, Scheidt described the horror of the Our Lady of the Angels School conflagration.

"It just broke my heart all over again for those poor people, having to pick up those babies," Scheidt said at the time. "There's nothing that prepares you for that. Thirty-some years later, I'm not over it yet."

Scheidt had been a Chicago firefighter for eight years when all 13 of the city's rescue squads were dispatched to the school.  The fire, he recalled, "was just roaring through the building."

Firefighters eventually broke a hole through a second-floor wall to find a smoky classroom full of unconscious pupils. Scheidt said he and his colleagues immediately tried to rescue as many as they could. He grabbed a boy and rushed out of the building.

But Scheidt said, with tears in his eyes, "He was dead. He didn't make it, like so many of the rest of them."

He then went back and brought out 19 more children, all dead.

Meanwhile, Chicago American photographer Steve Lasker, arrived at the scene and saw one firefighter -- Scheidt -- heading down an interior staircase with a child. Lasker aimed his camera and waited for the rescuer to emerge.

Scheidt said he never noticed the cameraman.

"It was just an accident that they took that photograph," Jack Gallapo, 82, an old friend of Scheidt's and fellow firefighter, said this morning. "He just came out and they took it."

The photograph not only appeared on the front page of the Chicago American, but in newspapers around the world. But in his home, the fire and the picture were rarely spoken of.

"He and all the men that he worked with -- that was their job, and they were brothers in that," his daughter, Nancy Coughlin of Tinley Park, recalled this morning. "He never thought he was any more of a hero than any of the men he worked with."

Scheidt, three of whose older brothers also were firefighters, said he almost quit the fire department after the school fire. "But I went on," he said.

"You just live with it," Scheidt said in the 1995 interview. "It happened. You were part of it. You might not have liked it, but you did your job. You might have liked to have done more, but you did as good as you could."

Frances, his wife of 32 years, said her husband was always gracious when people broached the subject of the fire with him, but it was not something he spoke freely about.

"He really didn't want to talk about it," she said. "It always broke his heart. It was a terrible thing."

Friends and relatives said that though the Our Lady of Angels fire was the one that made Scheidt well known, it was just one of many instances that showed the sort of "first in, last out" firefighter Scheidt was.

"He never asked anyone to do something he wouldn't do himself," said son Andy Scheidt. "His biggest thing was making sure all his guys got home to their families."

As a young firefighter working with Scheidt 35 years ago, Fire Department First Deputy Commissioner Bob Hoff remembered him as a "tough, tough man. I mean physically tough."

On one call in the early 1970s to a grocery store with a fire in the basement, Scheidt ordered his men not to go in because it was too treacherous. But he didn't listen to his own advice. He and one other firefighter went in with a hose and struck out the fire themselves.

"There was heavy smoke and this was before the use of masks [with breathing apparatus]," Hoff said. "He didn't want to get anyone hurt, but he had to put that fire out."

In his own quiet, hard-working way, he was a mentor, Hoff said.

"He affected a lot of lives. You'd get a thousand stories about him, all good. I'm only one," Hoff said. "It was an honor and a privilege to work for a guy like that."

Scheidt retired from the fire department in 1986 as a captain. He is survived by his wife, nine children, 28 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. Funeral services are pending.

-- Staff report

Big Publisher's Clearing House Scam Drop Hits Mailboxes [Publisher's Clearing House] from Consumerist

from http://consumerist.com/5201927/big-publishers-clearing-house-scam-drop-hits-mailboxes

Call your grandma: the BBB reports a big mailing of Publisher's Clearing house scam letters went out on March 6th and March 20th, promising people big bucks in exchange for a hefty up-front fee. The fraudulent letters use the name Publisher's Clearing House and Reader's Digest but are sent by flim-flammers, not these organizations.The prize never materializes and the scammers dematerialize after you stop forking over bogus processing fees. One grandma, thinking she won $1 million, got taken for over $4,000. The fraudsters sent her a "downpayment" check of $6,000 and told to deposit it and send $3,700 of it elsewhere to claim her million-dollar-prize. Inside, what the scam letter and check look like so you know what to call your grandma and tell her to watch out for.

Grandmother loses $4K in lottery scam [ConnectMidMissouri] (Photo: whatatravisty)

Obama's New Claims to Protect Illegal Spying Go Beyond Anything Bush-Cheney Tried from AfterDowningStreet.org

from http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/41472

Commentary from Glenn Greenwald here.

After Massive Fundraiser, Sen. Lincoln Turns Back on Working Families from Political Affairs Magazine

from http://politicalaffairs.net/article/view/8365/

After reportedly raising $800,000 from Democratic sources in March, including with the aid of Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) announced her opposition to a bill that would help working families boost their standards of living by joining unions.

Lincoln admitted in a statement this week that she had been less than forthcoming about her position on the bill, the Employee Free Choice Act, prior to the fundraising efforts. Just three months before raking in $800,000, Lincoln sent mixed signals about her position on the bill. Biden and the Obama administration strongly support passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.

"I cannot support that bill. I cannot support it in its current form," Lincoln was quoted by the Associated Press as saying this week. "I may not have said that as clearly before, but I'm saying it now." Lincoln accused the labor movement of promoting divisiveness on the issue and declared the issue to be a "distraction."

During the presidential campaign, candidate Obama described passage of the Employee Free Choice Act as a top priority for his administration. Since taking office, President Obama reiterated his support, sending Vice President Biden to meet with top labor movement leaders on the issue in March.

Other media reports revealed the Arkansas Senator's strong ties to Wal-Mart, the multinational retailer headquartered in her state. Last summer, the company earned strong criticisms for illegally pressing employees to vote for John McCain because of his opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act. A former staffer of hers now works as a lobbyist against the bill for Wal-Mart .

Notably, on a separate matter, Lincoln last week co-sponsored an amendment to the Senate version of the federal budget that would cut the top bracket of the estate tax. This move on the estate tax, which would benefit only the less than one percent of Americans who are millionaires and billionaires, also has a Wal-Mart connection. The wealthy family that owns most of Wal-Mart joined with 18 other millionaire and billionaire families to push for a cut to the estate tax.

The Employee Free Choice Act would remove barriers to unionization by giving workers the choice on how to certify a union in their workplace and by eliminating red tape exploited by employers to delay or stop union organizing efforts. The declining rate of unionization has been linked to stagnant wages for working families over the past decade and to the severity of the current recession.

Arkansas workers currently are members of unions at a rate far below the national average. In terms of average weekly earnings, Arkansas workers are ranked 44th in the country.

With friends like Sen. Blanch Lincoln, do working families need enemies? Instead of being the Senator from Arkansas, Lincoln my be more aptly titled the Senator from Wal-Mart. A primary challenge to Lincoln for the 2010 race may be needed to make real progress for working families and restore of measure of honesty from American politicians.

Arctic Ice Shrinking Faster Than Scientists Expected from The Washington Independent

from http://washingtonindependent.com/37556/arctic-ice-shrinking-faster-than-scientists-expected

Satellite measurements released yesterday reveal that Arctic sea ice is shrinking more rapidly than expected, and an older, thicker type of ice is now at its lowest level since scientists began recording these data 30 years ago, according to The Washington Post.

Because Arctic sea ice floats partially submerged in the ocean, its decline does not immediately lead to rising sea levels. However, scientists say that the shrinking ice can lead to warmer ocean temperatures, which in turn can melt ice in Greenland and elsewhere that will contribute to higher waters. Some scientists now think that Arctic ice could vanish altogether by 2015.

Just as the North Korean missile launch on Sunday lent urgency to President Obama's Prague speech on nuclear disarmament, this revelation adds weight to a meeting of international leaders in Washington to address polar warming issues. According to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the United States may ask the states of the Arctic Council — which includes the United States, Canada, Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Iceland — to take steps to reduce short-lived pollutants that contribute to polar warming, including methane and soot (black carbon).

As The Post's Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan point out, yesterday's measurements are the latest evidence against columnist George Will's Feb. 15 assertion in the newspaper that sea ice is actually growing:

As global levels of sea ice declined last year, many experts said this was evidence of man-made global warming. Since September, however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began. According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.

Looks like Will might have to get The Post's ombudsman to defend him again.

Update: Reuters has a good video simulation of the shrinking Arctic ice (starting about a minute in), along with similarly bleak news coming out of Antarctica, where a major ice shelf is on the brink of breaking off.

What's HIPAA All About? [HIPAA] from Consumerist

from http://consumerist.com/5201993/whats-hipaa-all-about

If someone says "HIPAA" and you think they might be talking about a herd of hippos, you got some reading to do. The "Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act" protects the health insurance workers and their families when they lose their jobs, and also protects the confidentiality of patients' records. Like all big laws, it's a bit of a thicket to navigate, so the World Privacy Forum just published a "Patient's Guide to HIPAA" to help chop your way through it. Check it out and bone up on your rights.

Patient's Guide to HIPAA: How to Use the Law to Guard your Health Privacy [World Privacy Forum] (Photo: yosoyjulito)

Do This: A Culinary Tour of Pilsen from Chicagoist

from http://chicagoist.com/2009/04/07/do_this_a_culinary_tour_of_pilsen.php

It's been said before around here: if you can't find anything good to eat in Pilsen, you aren't looking hard enough. On April 18, Adobo Grill Executive Chef Freddy Sanchez will lead a tour of some of the neighborhood's best and most popular places to nosh.

The American Institute of Food and Wine is sponsoring a culinary tour of Pilsen. Scheduled stops along the tour include Carnitas Don Pedro, El Nopal Bakery and Mundial. Chef Sanchez will provide historic background on the culinary history, ingredients and culture of Chicago's Mexican American community. The tour starts at 10:30 a.m. from El Nopal and runs until 3 p.m. the cost of the tour is $55 ($40 for AIFW members); RSVP to 847.910.5946.

Henry Paulson's Son Finds Dad's Money Won't Buy Soccer Bliss [Bloomberg]

Being Merritt Paulson (Part Deux)

from http://dealbreaker.com/2009/04/being-merritt-paulson-part-deu.php

Remember when we reported that Hank Paulson's son, Merritt (no, we didn't make that up) had managed, with a little help from Dad, to talk his way into a major league soccer team in Portland? Yeah, well maybe not so much.

The bad news was that Paulson could get a third vote on the council only after commissioners agreed to strip out a plan to create a new urban renewal area around the existing stadium and sell $15 million of bonds backed by taxes generated within the new district.

That left a $15 million hole that Paulson says must be filled by Sept. 1, or the stadium won't be done in time for the 2011 MLS season. He says he can't commit any more family money. He and his father are paying $35 million for the franchise and $12.5 million for the stadiums. They're also guaranteeing rent and ticket taxes for 25 years and will pick up construction overruns beyond $2.5 million.

Stop worrying. Nothing is fucked. This is a brief delay. Nothing more.

Henry Paulson's Son Finds Dad's Money Won't Buy Soccer Bliss [Bloomberg]

Lincoln Hearts Wal-Mart (Again) from The Washington Independent

from http://washingtonindependent.com/37565/lincoln-hearts-wal-mart-again

Just days after Sen. Blanche Lincoln made headlines for amending the Democrats' budget plan to include a $10 million estate tax exemption, the moderate Arkansas Democrat is back in the news for becoming the first Senate Democrat to officially oppose the Employee Free Choice Act — the union-friendly card check bill. From her statement released yesterday:

I consider both the labor and the business communities to be my friends. However, now that we need all hands on deck, including business and labor, to get our economy moving again, this issue is dividing us. While I may not have been clear about my position in the past, I am stating today that I cannot support Employee Free Choice Act in its current form and I can't support efforts to bring it to Senate consideration in its current form.

It must be a coincidence that Arkansas-based Wal-Mart — which has donated $38,500 to Lincoln over her career, according to the Center for Responsive Politics — is among the loudest opponents of both the estate tax and card check, right?

A Walmart cashier from Shreveport, LA was ... ['Id] from Consumerist

from http://consumerist.com/5202114/

A Walmart cashier from Shreveport, LA was caught cop