Y'all should venture into the world of Black intellectuals - specifically The Black Commentator http://www.blackcommentator.com/login.php
One of that brilliant weekly e-zines weekly contributors wrote a piece entitled "Barack Obama is no black man"
Another of its weekly contributors posed this question to me: "What 27-year old man shows up in the City of Chicago, gets a million plus dollar job in a law firm, gets to teach at the U of C, marries into one of Chicago's more prominent black families (the most prominent one with a marriage-aged daughter readily available), gets picked to run for the Illinois State Senate, gets to deliver the key note address at the 2004 Democratic National convention?"
Who ever heard of this guy before? Where did he come from? HE WAS THE ANNOITED ONE, THE CHOSEN ONE, AND THE CHOOSING WAS DONE LONG, LONG, TIME AGO.
Hiding in plain sight, really, until you think about it.
Interesting parentage: Harvard-educated Kenyan father,
Lily-white mother
Is it even barely possible
that at some time in the not so distant past
one of the Harvard-educated (an oxymoron, to be sure)
CIA operatives hit upon a plan
A plan for a "post-racial" America
Led by the face of a person of colour
Although, SPECIFICALLY AND ESSENTIALLY, not TOO dark!
And while that face would be a thing of beauty
And his brain could be trained to mouth all the right platitudes
With the conviction of a black Baptist Minister
Awash with the Holy Spirit
Who could have hatched such a plan?
All random, the events as they transpired, so you say
So you think
But I say
"Henry Kissinger"
He, the "good Kraut" (the war criminal who dares not set foot
on the soil of many nations of this earth, for he would risk
immediate arrest and deportation to the Hague, where he would
be tried as a war criminal, and could look forward to a guilty
convinction, and the spending of the measure of his days
in solitary confinement
Yes, Henry Kissinger could have conceived just such a plan
James Baker III, who effectively operated at POTUS from the
moment Ronald Reagan was shot ... Baker would have seen
immediately just how much America loves an actor - although
for the Gipper, it might merely have been that they loved
his avuncular ways (having forgotten, or perhaps never known
that he was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party --
Only in America
YES - SAINT RONALD REAGAN
Who showed unto "the powers that be"
The corporate and wealth elites of this nations
and their lap dogs, permitted to sit and eat from the same table -
the media elites (who tend not to make anywhere near the money
(and the academic elites - who assuredly do not make anywhere near the money
But, in fact are absolutely essential cogs in the machine
The machine the grinds up and spits out human beings
But keeps the $$$GRAVY TRAIN$$$ rollin' in green
Although limits the stops that train makes
To destinations only of certain zip codes
and even within those certain zip codes
only to MUCH smaller neighborhoods
To have a pleasing face
On a President of the United States
Who could read his lines
And hit his marks
THAT - is corporate America's wet dream
And THAT is precisely what they's got
AND precisely what they'll get again and again and again and again
UNLESS - as I do surely believe
The system is so god-damned broke that it is beyond all repair
While the world waits
To watch and see
If America (the American Material Way of Life)
Ends not with a bang (it is to be feared that we WILL go down, gunz a blazin'
but with a whimper (we will go down, gunz a blazin' all the while askin'
WHY DO THEY HATE US SO?
WHY DO THEY HATE OUR FREEDOMS?
Ask the wrong question
And you will get the wrong answer
Time after time after time after time after time after time after time after time ...
Friday, November 4, 2011
Ramsey Clark, writing in the 1990's
There have never been people at any time in history who so clearly and abundantly possessed the potential to meet all of their problems and provide for all of their needs as do Americans today. We do not release half the energies of our people. Through technology we can build new cities – clean, ample and beautiful. We can educate, employ and fulfill all of our people. Tragically neglected processes of criminal justice can enlarge both security for society and liberty for the individual. We can find justice. The question is one of will.
It is the crimes of poor and powerless people that most enrage and frighten the affluent, comfortable and advantaged majority. Riots, muggings, robbery and rape are loathsome not only because they are inherently irrational and inhuman, but because they and their causes are so foreign to the experience of people with power that they are incomprehensible. It is the inhumane and irrational condition of the poor that finally causes some among them to commit crimes.
Society cannot hope to control violent and irrational antisocial conduct while cunning predatory crime by people in power continues unabated. Any nation that wishes to prevent crime must be conscious of the whole range of criminal activity.
White collar crime is the most corrosive of all crimes. The trusted prove untrustworthy; the advantaged, dishonest. It shows the capability of people with better opportunities for creating a decent life for themselves to take property belonging to others. As no other crime, it questions our moral fiber.
When police crime occurs, it too brutalizes. Where police protection is purchased, it corrupts. Anyone who experiences such things or believes that they happen will have little confidence in the law or its enforcement. Where can he turn? If he lives in a world of brutality he will be brutal. If he lives in a world of corruption, he will be corrupt. Police, however professional, can never hold the respect of the people when they must endeavor to enforce laws the public will not obey.
Of the many faces of crime, the most tragic is never recognized by many. Millions fall victim to the cruelest of all crimes which takes its toll in miserable, empty and wasted lives. It is the crime of power over impotence – the crime of a society that does not insure equal protection under the laws. It is a crime against people who have no rights – the crime of a society which seeks to maintain order without law. From it grows most crime of violence and much property crime.
If the law is to be enforced – and rights fulfilled for the poor – we must end poverty. Until we do, there will be no protection under the law. To permit conditions that breed antisocial conduct to continue is our greatest crime. We pay dearly for it.
It is the crimes of poor and powerless people that most enrage and frighten the affluent, comfortable and advantaged majority. Riots, muggings, robbery and rape are loathsome not only because they are inherently irrational and inhuman, but because they and their causes are so foreign to the experience of people with power that they are incomprehensible. It is the inhumane and irrational condition of the poor that finally causes some among them to commit crimes.
Society cannot hope to control violent and irrational antisocial conduct while cunning predatory crime by people in power continues unabated. Any nation that wishes to prevent crime must be conscious of the whole range of criminal activity.
White collar crime is the most corrosive of all crimes. The trusted prove untrustworthy; the advantaged, dishonest. It shows the capability of people with better opportunities for creating a decent life for themselves to take property belonging to others. As no other crime, it questions our moral fiber.
When police crime occurs, it too brutalizes. Where police protection is purchased, it corrupts. Anyone who experiences such things or believes that they happen will have little confidence in the law or its enforcement. Where can he turn? If he lives in a world of brutality he will be brutal. If he lives in a world of corruption, he will be corrupt. Police, however professional, can never hold the respect of the people when they must endeavor to enforce laws the public will not obey.
Of the many faces of crime, the most tragic is never recognized by many. Millions fall victim to the cruelest of all crimes which takes its toll in miserable, empty and wasted lives. It is the crime of power over impotence – the crime of a society that does not insure equal protection under the laws. It is a crime against people who have no rights – the crime of a society which seeks to maintain order without law. From it grows most crime of violence and much property crime.
If the law is to be enforced – and rights fulfilled for the poor – we must end poverty. Until we do, there will be no protection under the law. To permit conditions that breed antisocial conduct to continue is our greatest crime. We pay dearly for it.
Question for y'all:
Is there any relevance today in what Clark wrote then?
Is America still a land with an abundance of physical / mineral resources?
Are we nation of forgivers?
Of people who lift up those who need uplifting - the hungry? the poor? the homeless? the widow? the orphan? the pregnant teen-aged mother? the single working mother of three or more children? do we visit the prisoner? do we provide our prisoners with something to do upon release that might give them the hope of fitting into and becoming a productive member of society? do we educate ALL of our children, and not just the sons and the daughters of the incurably well off and wealthy and the comfortably well off living for the most part in those lily white (with a scattering of Asian, East Indian, and Middle-Eastern families who have risked everything coming to America to make money - because for some - and ESPECIALLY THE WELL-EDUCATED, this is a land where money can be made; where if your business fails, you can reinvent yourself, file for bankruptcy and start another one, where the law enforcement agents are paid sufficiently well that they need not resort to petty bribery to feed their families (trust me, my Muslim brothers ALL love being in this country and not having to deal with such petty corruptions - they call it the greatest country on earty - I am not so optimistic.
When, as in Iceland, a critical mass of people STOP PAYING TAXES - THEN this takes off
Published on Thursday, November 3, 2011 by The Guardian/UK
Ordinary Greeks Are Taking Matters Into Their Own Hands
Grassroots refusal to put up with austerity is quickly gaining momentum, as people give up on mainstream politics
by Hara Kouki and Antonis Vradis
In early October, a peculiar news item barely made its way into the back pages of Greek national press: in the northern city of Veria, a small group of people had started reconnecting the electricity supply of households disconnected from the national grid due to bill non-payment. This kind of solidarity action seemed rather abnormal.
Then again, it is difficult to define what constitutes normality in the country nowadays – the upper echelon of political power is in an unprecedented turmoil, and Tuesday's referendum announcement by prime minister George Papandreou, followed by him reportedly preparing to step down, has thrown his political allies and foes into a tailspin. Parliamentary opposition parties are calling for a "national unity" government, snap elections, or a succession of the two; the entire mainstream political spectrum in the country seems to have entered a delirious state of panic. In a stunningly surreal scene, eurozone leaders and global markets are nervously waiting for people in Greece to cast a vote.
And yet, at this precise moment, Greek people are realising they are left with what they had at the outset – that is, absolutely nothing to hope for from the mainstream political scene.
Take Yannis, a 43 year-old man working in a bank in Athens, who doesn't want to return home because it is going to be cold again. The heating will be off, as nobody in the block can afford the heating prices. His 16-year old daughter, Sophia, does not want to go to school, as she finds little meaning in preparing for her exams: why would she want to enter university knowing full well she will never find a job in Greece, anyway? Or take Eleftheria's father, a 72-year old pensioner leaving in the village of Kymi, who called her today while she was returning home and hesitantly asked her for money to buy his medicine that the state fund no longer covers for. His pension was recently cut by 50%. "But, please," he pleaded, "do not tell your mother." Back in the city, Eleftheria's streets are lined with garbage which has been lying there for more than three weeks.
Thousands of workers are to be put on reduced pay schemes across the country and hundreds are being fired on a daily basis. The government has raised already existing taxes and introduced a variety of new ones across the board, while slashing salaries and pensions in both the public and private sector. Official unemployment rose by more than 35% year-to-year and now stands at just under 20%; homelessness is on an enormous increase across the country, while tax on food consumption has shot up from 13 to 23%. At the same time, public transport is being dismantled and hospitals across the country barely function. For the first time, there were no books to be distributed in public schools and universities are in utter disarray. The "bloated" public sector has been portrayed as responsible for all the misery the country has to endure. At the same time, social services have been intentionally abandoned, making it easier for enraged citizens to accept the privatisation of the public sector in return.
People here feel the country is gradually sinking, carrying them down a path dug in arbitrariness and injustice. Yet at this very moment – when it is not only the rules of the game that are challenged but the game itself – they seem to feel empowered to act in ways that would not have appeared feasible in the past: they physically attack politicians, mock and cancel military-inspired national public parades and humiliate army officials attending them, participate in neighbourhood assemblies and mass demonstrations (irrespective of the amount of tear gas thrown against them by the police), create grassroots trade unions to demand their labour rights, occupy workplaces, disrupt public services and protest in violent, impulsive, unpredictable ways.
In these peculiar times, when there is nothing to lose for so many, everything becomes possible. In the northern Athens suburb of Nea Ionia, the municipality is now actively calling for locals to shun the new tax, offering instructions to avoid its payment on its official website and promising legal support and even volunteers to reconnect potentially disconnected supplies. Grassroots refusal to put up with austerity is quickly gaining momentum, regardless of everyday politics of fear and emergency, or never-ending market crashes. In return, the realisation is sinking in that a possibility for tangible change only lies in people changing their understandings, their habits, the ways in which they do politics: while asked to cast a vote, Greek society sees a major role recast.
Ordinary Greeks Are Taking Matters Into Their Own Hands
Grassroots refusal to put up with austerity is quickly gaining momentum, as people give up on mainstream politics
by Hara Kouki and Antonis Vradis
In early October, a peculiar news item barely made its way into the back pages of Greek national press: in the northern city of Veria, a small group of people had started reconnecting the electricity supply of households disconnected from the national grid due to bill non-payment. This kind of solidarity action seemed rather abnormal.
Then again, it is difficult to define what constitutes normality in the country nowadays – the upper echelon of political power is in an unprecedented turmoil, and Tuesday's referendum announcement by prime minister George Papandreou, followed by him reportedly preparing to step down, has thrown his political allies and foes into a tailspin. Parliamentary opposition parties are calling for a "national unity" government, snap elections, or a succession of the two; the entire mainstream political spectrum in the country seems to have entered a delirious state of panic. In a stunningly surreal scene, eurozone leaders and global markets are nervously waiting for people in Greece to cast a vote.
And yet, at this precise moment, Greek people are realising they are left with what they had at the outset – that is, absolutely nothing to hope for from the mainstream political scene.
Take Yannis, a 43 year-old man working in a bank in Athens, who doesn't want to return home because it is going to be cold again. The heating will be off, as nobody in the block can afford the heating prices. His 16-year old daughter, Sophia, does not want to go to school, as she finds little meaning in preparing for her exams: why would she want to enter university knowing full well she will never find a job in Greece, anyway? Or take Eleftheria's father, a 72-year old pensioner leaving in the village of Kymi, who called her today while she was returning home and hesitantly asked her for money to buy his medicine that the state fund no longer covers for. His pension was recently cut by 50%. "But, please," he pleaded, "do not tell your mother." Back in the city, Eleftheria's streets are lined with garbage which has been lying there for more than three weeks.
Thousands of workers are to be put on reduced pay schemes across the country and hundreds are being fired on a daily basis. The government has raised already existing taxes and introduced a variety of new ones across the board, while slashing salaries and pensions in both the public and private sector. Official unemployment rose by more than 35% year-to-year and now stands at just under 20%; homelessness is on an enormous increase across the country, while tax on food consumption has shot up from 13 to 23%. At the same time, public transport is being dismantled and hospitals across the country barely function. For the first time, there were no books to be distributed in public schools and universities are in utter disarray. The "bloated" public sector has been portrayed as responsible for all the misery the country has to endure. At the same time, social services have been intentionally abandoned, making it easier for enraged citizens to accept the privatisation of the public sector in return.
People here feel the country is gradually sinking, carrying them down a path dug in arbitrariness and injustice. Yet at this very moment – when it is not only the rules of the game that are challenged but the game itself – they seem to feel empowered to act in ways that would not have appeared feasible in the past: they physically attack politicians, mock and cancel military-inspired national public parades and humiliate army officials attending them, participate in neighbourhood assemblies and mass demonstrations (irrespective of the amount of tear gas thrown against them by the police), create grassroots trade unions to demand their labour rights, occupy workplaces, disrupt public services and protest in violent, impulsive, unpredictable ways.
In these peculiar times, when there is nothing to lose for so many, everything becomes possible. In the northern Athens suburb of Nea Ionia, the municipality is now actively calling for locals to shun the new tax, offering instructions to avoid its payment on its official website and promising legal support and even volunteers to reconnect potentially disconnected supplies. Grassroots refusal to put up with austerity is quickly gaining momentum, regardless of everyday politics of fear and emergency, or never-ending market crashes. In return, the realisation is sinking in that a possibility for tangible change only lies in people changing their understandings, their habits, the ways in which they do politics: while asked to cast a vote, Greek society sees a major role recast.
© 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited
I don't trust Bill Gates as far as I can throw him - born into privelige and he would dismantle the public education system - for charters!
Published on Thursday, November 3, 2011 by Institute for Policy Studies Blog
Bill Gates (the .001%) Joins the 99% for Robin Hood Tax
One of the world's richest and many of the poorest agree on something, but the Obama administration is holding out.
by Sarah Anderson
The world's second-richest man and a group of American nurses on the frontlines of the Occupy Wall Street protests came to the G20 summit in Cannes, France this week to advocate for the same thing.
Bill Gates came because French President Nicolas Sarkozy asked him to give G20 leaders recommendations on how to raise funds to meet the needs of the world's poorest. Among Gates' proposals: a small tax on trades of stocks, derivatives, and other financial instruments, also known as a financial transactions tax (FTT), Wall Street speculation tax, or the Robin Hood tax.
According to an advance copy of Gates's report, "FTTs already exist in many countries, where they generate significant revenue, so they are clearly technically feasible. According to the IMF, 15 G20 countries have some form of securities transaction tax. In the seven countries where the IMF estimates revenue, these taxes raise an estimated $15 billion per year."
"It is very plausible that certain kinds of FTTs could work," Gates told the Guardian. "I am lending some credibility to that. This money could be well spent and make a difference."
Gates has a net worth of $59 billion. So forget the 1 percent, he'd be in what, the top 0.001 percent? Meanwhile, representatives of the 99 percent were outside the summit security zone, plugging the same idea.
National Nurses United, the largest union representing U.S. nurses, came to France from the Occupy Wall Street protests across the United States where they have been providing first aid for the encampments. In Cannes, they dressed in their scrubs and joined nurses from Australia, France, Ireland, and Korea. This global group then administered an FTT saline drip to an ailing world economy — represented by a man painted in full body art as the Earth.
"The economic decline is literally making our patients sick," said one of the U.S. nurses. "We see more and more children with conditions related to poor nutrition and stress." The solution, according to the nurses, is a Wall Street tax that could generate the revenues needed to address human needs.
Bill Nighy, an actor famous for his roles in "Love, Actually" and other British films, jumped right into the world economy's hospital bed and posed for photos. "People around the world are dying of illnesses that should have been eliminated hundreds of years ago," Nighy said, noting that a new Wall Street tax could help raise the money required to stop those scourges.
One of his contributions to the campaign for such a tax in the UK was a video that went viral, in which he plays a banker trying to argue against the idea. Ultimately, his character can't find a good reason why not to raise huge amounts of money for the things people need through a tiny tax on financial transactions.
Back inside the summit venue, there's a frenzy of last-minute lobbying going on to try to line up a group of G20 governments to launch a “coalition of the willing on FTT.” The Obama administration isn't expected to be on the list.
But RoseAnn DeMoro, National Nurses United's executive director, said, “Nurses don’t give up on people and they won’t give up on this.” The union also spearheaded a rally in Washington, DC today, with more than a thousand nurses and their allies targeting opponents of the Wall Street tax in the Treasury Department and Congress.
Bill Gates (the .001%) Joins the 99% for Robin Hood Tax
One of the world's richest and many of the poorest agree on something, but the Obama administration is holding out.
by Sarah Anderson
The world's second-richest man and a group of American nurses on the frontlines of the Occupy Wall Street protests came to the G20 summit in Cannes, France this week to advocate for the same thing.
Bill Gates came because French President Nicolas Sarkozy asked him to give G20 leaders recommendations on how to raise funds to meet the needs of the world's poorest. Among Gates' proposals: a small tax on trades of stocks, derivatives, and other financial instruments, also known as a financial transactions tax (FTT), Wall Street speculation tax, or the Robin Hood tax.
According to an advance copy of Gates's report, "FTTs already exist in many countries, where they generate significant revenue, so they are clearly technically feasible. According to the IMF, 15 G20 countries have some form of securities transaction tax. In the seven countries where the IMF estimates revenue, these taxes raise an estimated $15 billion per year."
"It is very plausible that certain kinds of FTTs could work," Gates told the Guardian. "I am lending some credibility to that. This money could be well spent and make a difference."
Gates has a net worth of $59 billion. So forget the 1 percent, he'd be in what, the top 0.001 percent? Meanwhile, representatives of the 99 percent were outside the summit security zone, plugging the same idea.
National Nurses United, the largest union representing U.S. nurses, came to France from the Occupy Wall Street protests across the United States where they have been providing first aid for the encampments. In Cannes, they dressed in their scrubs and joined nurses from Australia, France, Ireland, and Korea. This global group then administered an FTT saline drip to an ailing world economy — represented by a man painted in full body art as the Earth.
"The economic decline is literally making our patients sick," said one of the U.S. nurses. "We see more and more children with conditions related to poor nutrition and stress." The solution, according to the nurses, is a Wall Street tax that could generate the revenues needed to address human needs.
Bill Nighy, an actor famous for his roles in "Love, Actually" and other British films, jumped right into the world economy's hospital bed and posed for photos. "People around the world are dying of illnesses that should have been eliminated hundreds of years ago," Nighy said, noting that a new Wall Street tax could help raise the money required to stop those scourges.
One of his contributions to the campaign for such a tax in the UK was a video that went viral, in which he plays a banker trying to argue against the idea. Ultimately, his character can't find a good reason why not to raise huge amounts of money for the things people need through a tiny tax on financial transactions.
Back inside the summit venue, there's a frenzy of last-minute lobbying going on to try to line up a group of G20 governments to launch a “coalition of the willing on FTT.” The Obama administration isn't expected to be on the list.
But RoseAnn DeMoro, National Nurses United's executive director, said, “Nurses don’t give up on people and they won’t give up on this.” The union also spearheaded a rally in Washington, DC today, with more than a thousand nurses and their allies targeting opponents of the Wall Street tax in the Treasury Department and Congress.
© 2011 Institute for Policy Studies
Let's get RADICAL, RADICAL - amazing how many people don't get it!: FAILED SYSTEMS!
Occupy Demands: Let's Radicalise Our Analysis
The crisis we face is caused by failed systems - replacing leaders while keeping the old system intact will not help.
by Robert Jensen
There's one question that pundits and politicians keep posing to the Occupy gatherings around the country: What are your demands?
I have a suggestion for a response: We demand that you stop demanding a list of demands.
The demand for demands is an attempt to shoehorn the Occupy gatherings into conventional politics, to force the energy of these gatherings into a form that people in power recognise, so that they can roll out strategies to divert, co-opt, buy off, or - if those tactics fail - squash any challenge to business as usual.
Rather than listing demands, we critics of concentrated wealth and power in the US can dig in and deepen our analysis of the systems that produce that unjust distribution of wealth and power. This is a time for action, but there also is a need for analysis.
Rallying around a common concern about economic injustice is a beginning; understanding the structures and institutions of illegitimate authority is the next step.
We need to recognise that the crises we face are not simply the result of greedy corporate executives or corrupt politicians, but rather of failed systems. The problem is not the specific people who control most of the wealth of the country, or those in government who serve them, but the systems that create those roles.
Most chart the beginning of the external US empire-building phase with the 1898 Spanish-American War and the conquest of the Philippines that continued for some years after. That project went forward in the early 20th century, most notably in Central America, where regular US military incursions made countries safe for investment. If we could get rid of the current gang of thieves and thugs but left the systems in place, we will find that the new boss is going to be the same as the old boss.
My contribution to this process of sharpening analysis comes in lists of three, with lots of alliteration. Whether or not you find my analysis of the key questions compelling, at least it will be easy to remember: Empire, economics, ecology.
Empire: Immoral, illegal, ineffective
The United States is the current (though fading) imperial power in the world, and empires are bad things. We have to let go of self-indulgent notions of American exceptionalism - the idea that the US is a unique engine of freedom and democracy in the world and therefore is a responsible and benevolent empire. Empires throughout history have used coercion and violence to acquire a disproportionate share of the world's resources, and the US empire is no different.
Although the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are particularly grotesque examples of US imperial destruction, none of this is new; the US was founded by men with imperial visions who conquered the continent and then turned to the world.
The empire emerged in full force after World War II, as the United States assumed the role of the dominant power in the world and intensified the project of subordinating the developing world to the US system. Those efforts went forward under the banner of "anti-communism" until the early 1990s, but continued after the demise of the Soviet Union under various other guises, most notably the so-called "war on terrorism".
Whether it was Latin America, southern Africa, the Middle East, or Southeast Asia, the central goal of US foreign policy has been consistent: to make sure that an independent course of development did not succeed anywhere. The "virus" of independent development could not be allowed to take root in any country out of a fear that it might infect the rest of the developing world.
The victims of this policy - the vast majority of them non-white - can be counted in the millions. In the Western Hemisphere, US policy was carried out mostly through proxy armies, such as the Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s, or support for dictatorships and military regimes that brutally repressed their own people, such as El Salvador. The result throughout the region was hundreds of thousands of dead - millions across Latin America over the course of the 20th century - and whole countries ruined.
Direct US military intervention was another tool of US policymakers, with the most grotesque example being the attack on Southeast Asia.
After supporting the failed French effort to recolonise Vietnam after World War II, the US invaded South Vietnam and also intervened in Laos and Cambodia, at a cost of three to four million Southeast Asians dead and a region destabilised.
To prevent the spread of the "virus" there, we dropped 6.5 million tonnes of bombs and 400,000 tonnes of napalm on the people of Southeast Asia. Saturation bombing of civilian areas, counterterrorism programs and political assassination, routine killings of civilians, and 11.2 million gallons of Agent Orange to destroy crops and ground cover - all were part of the US terror war.
On 9/11, the vague terrorism justification became tangible for everyone. With the US economy no longer the source of dominance, policymakers used the terrorist attacks to justify an expansion of military operations in Central Asia and the Middle East. Though non-military approaches to terrorism were more viable, the rationale for ever-larger defence spending was set.
A decade later, the failures of this imperial policy are clearer than ever. US foreign and military policy has always been immoral, based not on principle but on power. That policy has routinely been illegal, violating the basic tenets of international law and the constitutional system. Now, more than ever, we can see that this approach to world affairs is ineffective, no matter what criteria for effectiveness we use. An immoral and criminal policy has lost even its craven justification: It will not guarantee American dominance.
That failure is the light at the end of the tunnel. As the elite bipartisan commitment to US dominance fails, we the people have a chance to demand that the US shift to policies designed not to allow us to run the world but to help us become part of the world.
Anti-democratic economics
The economic system underlying empire-building today has a name: capitalism. Or, more precisely, a predatory corporate capitalism that is inconsistent with basic human values. This description sounds odd in the US, where so many assume that capitalism is not simply the best among competing economic systems but the only sane and rational way to organise an economy in the contemporary world.
Although the financial crisis that began in 2008 has scared many people, it has not always led to questioning the nature of the system.
That means that the first task is to define capitalism. It is an economic system in which:
Property, including capital assets, is owned and controlled by private persons;
Most people must rent their labour power for money wages to survive; and
The prices of most goods and services are allocated by markets.
"Industrial capitalism", made possible by sweeping technological changes and imperial concentrations of capital, was marked by the development of the factory system and greater labour specialisation. The term "finance capitalism" is often used to mark a shift to a system in which the accumulation of profits in a financial system becomes dominant over the production processes.
Today in the United States, most people understand capitalism in the context of mass consumption - access to unprecedented levels of goods and services. In such a world, everything and everyone is a commodity in the market.
In the dominant ideology of market fundamentalism, it's assumed that the most extensive use of markets possible, along with privatisation of many publicly owned assets and the shrinking of public services, will unleash maximal competition and result in the greatest good - and all this is inherently just, no matter what the results.
If such a system creates a world in which most people live in poverty, that is taken not as evidence of a problem with market fundamentalism but evidence that fundamentalist principles have not been imposed with sufficient vigour; it is an article of faith that the "invisible hand" of the market always provides the preferred result, no matter how awful the consequences may be for real people.
How to critique capitalism in such a society? We can start by pointing out that capitalism is fundamentally inhuman, anti-democratic and unsustainable:
Inhuman: The theory behind contemporary capitalism explains that because we are greedy, self-interested animals, a viable economic system must reward greedy, self-interested behaviour.
That's certainly part of human nature, but we are also just as obviously capable of compassion and selflessness. We can act competitively and aggressively, but we also have the capacity to act out of solidarity and cooperation. In short, human nature is wide-ranging. In situations where compassion and solidarity are the norm, we tend to act that way. In situations where competitiveness and aggression are rewarded, most people tend towards such behaviour.
Why is it that we must accept an economic system that undermines the most decent aspects of our nature and strengthens the cruelest?
Because, we're told, that's just the way people are. What evidence is there of that? Look around, we're told, at how people behave. Everywhere we look, we see greed and the pursuit of self-interest.
So the proof that these greedy, self-interested aspects of our nature are dominant is that, when forced into a system that rewards greed and self-interested behaviour, people often act that way.
Doesn't that seem just a bit circular? A bit perverse?
Anti-democratic: In the real world - not in the textbooks or fantasies of economics professors - capitalism has always been, and will always be, a wealth-concentrating system. If you concentrate wealth in a society, you concentrate power. I know of no historical example to the contrary.
For all the trappings of formal democracy in the contemporary US, everyone understands that for the most part, the wealthy dictate the basic outlines of the public policies that are put into practice by elected officials. This is cogently explained by political scientist Thomas Ferguson's "investment theory of political parties", which identifies powerful investors rather than unorganised voters as the dominant force in campaigns and elections.
Ferguson describes political parties in the US as "blocs of major investors who coalesce to advance candidates representing their interests" and that "political parties dominated by large investors try to assemble the votes they need by making very limited appeals to particular segments of the potential electorate".
There can be competition between these blocs, but "on all issues affecting the vital interests that major investors have in common, no party competition will take place". Whatever we might call such a system, it's not democracy in any meaningful sense of the term.
People can and do resist the system's attempt to sideline them, and an occasional politician joins the fight, but such resistance takes extraordinary effort. Those who resist sometimes win victories, some of them inspiring, but to date concentrated wealth continues to dominate. If we define democracy as a system that gives ordinary people a meaningful way to participate in the formation of public policy, rather than just a role in ratifying decisions made by the powerful, then it's clear that capitalism and democracy are mutually exclusive.
Unsustainable: Capitalism is a system based on an assumption of continuing, unlimited growth - on a finite planet. There are only two ways out of this problem. We can hold out hope that we might hop to a new planet soon, or we can embrace technological fundamentalism and believe that ever-more-complex technologies will allow us to transcend those physical limits here.
Both those positions are equally delusional. Delusions may bring temporary comfort, but they don't solve problems; in fact, they tend to cause more problems, and in this world those problems keep piling up.
Critics now compare capitalism to cancer. The inhuman and antidemocratic features of capitalism mean that, like a cancer, the death system will eventually destroy the living host.
Both the human communities and non-human living world that play host to capitalism eventually will be destroyed by capitalism. Capitalism is not, of course, the only unsustainable system that humans have devised, but it is the most obviously unsustainable system, and it's the one in which we are stuck. It's the one that we are told is inevitable and natural, like the air we breathe. But the air that we are breathing is choking the most vulnerable in the world, choking us, choking the planet.
Ecology: Out of gas, derailed, over the waterfall
In addition to inequality within the human family, we face even greater threats in the human assault on the living world that come with industrial society. High-energy/high-technology societies pose a serious threat to the ability of the ecosphere to sustain human life as we know it. Grasping that reality is a challenge, and coping with the implications is an even greater challenge. We likely have a chance to stave off the most catastrophic consequences if we act dramatically and quickly. If we continue to drag our feet, it's "game over".
While public awareness of the depth of the ecological crisis is growing, our knowledge of the basics of the problem is hardly new.
"World Scientists' Warning to Humanity" - issued by 1,700 of the planet's leading scientists:
"Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring ."
That statement was issued in 1992, and since then we have fallen further behind in the struggle for sustainability. Look at any crucial measure of the health of the ecosphere in which we live - groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, increased toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of "dead zones" in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species and reduction of bio-diversity - and the news is bad.
Remember also that we live in an oil-based world that is fast running out of easily accessible oil, which means we face a huge reconfiguration of the infrastructure that undergirds our lives. And, of course, there is the undeniable trajectory of climate disruption.
Add all that up, and ask a simple question: Where we are heading? Pick a metaphor. Are we a car running out of gas? A train about to derail? A raft going over the waterfall? Whatever the choice, it's not a pretty picture. It's crucial we realise that there are no technological fixes that will rescue us. We have to acknowledge that human attempts to dominate the non-human world have failed. We are destroying the planet and in the process destroying ourselves.
Hope amid a harsh future
The people who run this world are eager to contain the Occupy energy not because they believe that the critics of concentrated wealth and power are wrong, but because somewhere deep down in their souls (or what is left of a soul), the powerful know we are right.
People in power are insulated by wealth and privilege, but they can see the systems falling apart. US military power can no longer guarantee world domination. Financial corporations can no longer pretend to provide order in the economy.
The industrial system is incompatible with life.
We face new threats today, but we are not the first humans to live in dangerous times. In 1957 the Nobel writer Albert Camus described the world in ways that resonate:
"Tomorrow the world may burst into fragments. In that threat hanging over our heads there is a lesson of truth. As we face such a future, hierarchies, titles, honors are reduced to what they are in reality: a passing puff of smoke. And the only certainty left to us is that of naked suffering, common to all, intermingling its roots with those of a stubborn hope."
A stubborn hope is more necessary than ever. As political, economic, and ecological systems spiral down, it's likely we will see levels of human suffering that dwarf even the horrors of the 20th century. Even more challenging is the harsh realisation that we don't have at hand simple solutions - and maybe no solutions at all - to some of the most vexing problems. We may be past the point of no return in ecological damage, and the question is not how to prevent crises but how to mitigate the worst effects. No one can predict the rate of collapse if we stay on this trajectory, and we don't know if we can change the trajectory in time.
There is much we don't know, but everything I see suggests that the world in which we will pursue political goals will change dramatically in the next decade or two, almost certainly for the worse. Organising has to adapt not only to changes in societies but to these fundamental changes in the ecosphere.
In short: We are organising in a period of contraction, not expansion. We have to acknowledge that human attempts to dominate the non-human world have failed. We are destroying the planet and in the process destroying ourselves. Here, just as in human relationships, we either abandon the dominance/subordination dynamic or we don't survive.
In 1948, Camus urged people to "give up empty quarrels" and "pay attention to what unites rather than to what separates us" in the struggle to recover from the horrors of Europe's barbarism. I take from Camus a sense of how to live the tension between facing honestly the horror and yet remaining engaged. In that same talk, he spoke of "the forces of terror" (forces which exist on "our" side as much as on "theirs") and the "forces of dialogue" (which also exist everywhere in the world). Where do we place our hopes?
"Between the forces of terror and the forces of dialogue, a great unequal battle has begun," he wrote. "I have nothing but reasonable illusions as to the outcome of that battle. But I believe it must be fought."
The Occupy gatherings do not yet constitute a coherent movement with demands, but they are wellsprings of reasonable illusions. Rejecting the political babble around us in election campaigns and on mass media, these gatherings are an experiment in a different kind of public dialogue about our common life, one that can reject the forces of terror deployed by concentrated wealth and power.
With that understanding, the central task is to keep the experiment going, to remember the latent power in people who do not accept the legitimacy of a system. Singer/songwriter John Gorka, writing about what appears to be impossible, offers the perfect reminder:
"They think they can tame you, name you and frame you,
aim you where you don't belong.
They know where you've been but not where you're going,
that is the source of the songs."
The crisis we face is caused by failed systems - replacing leaders while keeping the old system intact will not help.
by Robert Jensen
There's one question that pundits and politicians keep posing to the Occupy gatherings around the country: What are your demands?
I have a suggestion for a response: We demand that you stop demanding a list of demands.
The demand for demands is an attempt to shoehorn the Occupy gatherings into conventional politics, to force the energy of these gatherings into a form that people in power recognise, so that they can roll out strategies to divert, co-opt, buy off, or - if those tactics fail - squash any challenge to business as usual.
Thank you Robert Jensen - I have been claiming this all the long - and yet, one of my most stalwart liberal fiends, who, sadly, gets his opinions molded by the NYT - specially the drunken Lesbo MoDo and the pompous Israel-lover Thomas Friedman - who hath bought totally into "the system"
Rather than listing demands, we critics of concentrated wealth and power in the US can dig in and deepen our analysis of the systems that produce that unjust distribution of wealth and power. This is a time for action, but there also is a need for analysis.
Rallying around a common concern about economic injustice is a beginning; understanding the structures and institutions of illegitimate authority is the next step.
Also, keeping the response of the OCCUPY movement people - i.e., OCCUPATION ongoing through it all, is, a BRILLIANT STRATEGY
We need to recognise that the crises we face are not simply the result of greedy corporate executives or corrupt politicians, but rather of failed systems. The problem is not the specific people who control most of the wealth of the country, or those in government who serve them, but the systems that create those roles.
Most chart the beginning of the external US empire-building phase with the 1898 Spanish-American War and the conquest of the Philippines that continued for some years after. That project went forward in the early 20th century, most notably in Central America, where regular US military incursions made countries safe for investment. If we could get rid of the current gang of thieves and thugs but left the systems in place, we will find that the new boss is going to be the same as the old boss.
My contribution to this process of sharpening analysis comes in lists of three, with lots of alliteration. Whether or not you find my analysis of the key questions compelling, at least it will be easy to remember: Empire, economics, ecology.
Empire: Immoral, illegal, ineffective
The United States is the current (though fading) imperial power in the world, and empires are bad things. We have to let go of self-indulgent notions of American exceptionalism - the idea that the US is a unique engine of freedom and democracy in the world and therefore is a responsible and benevolent empire. Empires throughout history have used coercion and violence to acquire a disproportionate share of the world's resources, and the US empire is no different.
Although the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are particularly grotesque examples of US imperial destruction, none of this is new; the US was founded by men with imperial visions who conquered the continent and then turned to the world.
The empire emerged in full force after World War II, as the United States assumed the role of the dominant power in the world and intensified the project of subordinating the developing world to the US system. Those efforts went forward under the banner of "anti-communism" until the early 1990s, but continued after the demise of the Soviet Union under various other guises, most notably the so-called "war on terrorism".
Whether it was Latin America, southern Africa, the Middle East, or Southeast Asia, the central goal of US foreign policy has been consistent: to make sure that an independent course of development did not succeed anywhere. The "virus" of independent development could not be allowed to take root in any country out of a fear that it might infect the rest of the developing world.
The victims of this policy - the vast majority of them non-white - can be counted in the millions. In the Western Hemisphere, US policy was carried out mostly through proxy armies, such as the Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s, or support for dictatorships and military regimes that brutally repressed their own people, such as El Salvador. The result throughout the region was hundreds of thousands of dead - millions across Latin America over the course of the 20th century - and whole countries ruined.
Direct US military intervention was another tool of US policymakers, with the most grotesque example being the attack on Southeast Asia.
After supporting the failed French effort to recolonise Vietnam after World War II, the US invaded South Vietnam and also intervened in Laos and Cambodia, at a cost of three to four million Southeast Asians dead and a region destabilised.
To prevent the spread of the "virus" there, we dropped 6.5 million tonnes of bombs and 400,000 tonnes of napalm on the people of Southeast Asia. Saturation bombing of civilian areas, counterterrorism programs and political assassination, routine killings of civilians, and 11.2 million gallons of Agent Orange to destroy crops and ground cover - all were part of the US terror war.
On 9/11, the vague terrorism justification became tangible for everyone. With the US economy no longer the source of dominance, policymakers used the terrorist attacks to justify an expansion of military operations in Central Asia and the Middle East. Though non-military approaches to terrorism were more viable, the rationale for ever-larger defence spending was set.
A decade later, the failures of this imperial policy are clearer than ever. US foreign and military policy has always been immoral, based not on principle but on power. That policy has routinely been illegal, violating the basic tenets of international law and the constitutional system. Now, more than ever, we can see that this approach to world affairs is ineffective, no matter what criteria for effectiveness we use. An immoral and criminal policy has lost even its craven justification: It will not guarantee American dominance.
That failure is the light at the end of the tunnel. As the elite bipartisan commitment to US dominance fails, we the people have a chance to demand that the US shift to policies designed not to allow us to run the world but to help us become part of the world.
Anti-democratic economics
The economic system underlying empire-building today has a name: capitalism. Or, more precisely, a predatory corporate capitalism that is inconsistent with basic human values. This description sounds odd in the US, where so many assume that capitalism is not simply the best among competing economic systems but the only sane and rational way to organise an economy in the contemporary world.
Although the financial crisis that began in 2008 has scared many people, it has not always led to questioning the nature of the system.
That means that the first task is to define capitalism. It is an economic system in which:
Property, including capital assets, is owned and controlled by private persons;
Most people must rent their labour power for money wages to survive; and
The prices of most goods and services are allocated by markets.
"Industrial capitalism", made possible by sweeping technological changes and imperial concentrations of capital, was marked by the development of the factory system and greater labour specialisation. The term "finance capitalism" is often used to mark a shift to a system in which the accumulation of profits in a financial system becomes dominant over the production processes.
Today in the United States, most people understand capitalism in the context of mass consumption - access to unprecedented levels of goods and services. In such a world, everything and everyone is a commodity in the market.
In the dominant ideology of market fundamentalism, it's assumed that the most extensive use of markets possible, along with privatisation of many publicly owned assets and the shrinking of public services, will unleash maximal competition and result in the greatest good - and all this is inherently just, no matter what the results.
If such a system creates a world in which most people live in poverty, that is taken not as evidence of a problem with market fundamentalism but evidence that fundamentalist principles have not been imposed with sufficient vigour; it is an article of faith that the "invisible hand" of the market always provides the preferred result, no matter how awful the consequences may be for real people.
How to critique capitalism in such a society? We can start by pointing out that capitalism is fundamentally inhuman, anti-democratic and unsustainable:
Inhuman: The theory behind contemporary capitalism explains that because we are greedy, self-interested animals, a viable economic system must reward greedy, self-interested behaviour.
That's certainly part of human nature, but we are also just as obviously capable of compassion and selflessness. We can act competitively and aggressively, but we also have the capacity to act out of solidarity and cooperation. In short, human nature is wide-ranging. In situations where compassion and solidarity are the norm, we tend to act that way. In situations where competitiveness and aggression are rewarded, most people tend towards such behaviour.
Why is it that we must accept an economic system that undermines the most decent aspects of our nature and strengthens the cruelest?
Because, we're told, that's just the way people are. What evidence is there of that? Look around, we're told, at how people behave. Everywhere we look, we see greed and the pursuit of self-interest.
So the proof that these greedy, self-interested aspects of our nature are dominant is that, when forced into a system that rewards greed and self-interested behaviour, people often act that way.
Doesn't that seem just a bit circular? A bit perverse?
Anti-democratic: In the real world - not in the textbooks or fantasies of economics professors - capitalism has always been, and will always be, a wealth-concentrating system. If you concentrate wealth in a society, you concentrate power. I know of no historical example to the contrary.
For all the trappings of formal democracy in the contemporary US, everyone understands that for the most part, the wealthy dictate the basic outlines of the public policies that are put into practice by elected officials. This is cogently explained by political scientist Thomas Ferguson's "investment theory of political parties", which identifies powerful investors rather than unorganised voters as the dominant force in campaigns and elections.
Ferguson describes political parties in the US as "blocs of major investors who coalesce to advance candidates representing their interests" and that "political parties dominated by large investors try to assemble the votes they need by making very limited appeals to particular segments of the potential electorate".
There can be competition between these blocs, but "on all issues affecting the vital interests that major investors have in common, no party competition will take place". Whatever we might call such a system, it's not democracy in any meaningful sense of the term.
People can and do resist the system's attempt to sideline them, and an occasional politician joins the fight, but such resistance takes extraordinary effort. Those who resist sometimes win victories, some of them inspiring, but to date concentrated wealth continues to dominate. If we define democracy as a system that gives ordinary people a meaningful way to participate in the formation of public policy, rather than just a role in ratifying decisions made by the powerful, then it's clear that capitalism and democracy are mutually exclusive.
Unsustainable: Capitalism is a system based on an assumption of continuing, unlimited growth - on a finite planet. There are only two ways out of this problem. We can hold out hope that we might hop to a new planet soon, or we can embrace technological fundamentalism and believe that ever-more-complex technologies will allow us to transcend those physical limits here.
Both those positions are equally delusional. Delusions may bring temporary comfort, but they don't solve problems; in fact, they tend to cause more problems, and in this world those problems keep piling up.
Critics now compare capitalism to cancer. The inhuman and antidemocratic features of capitalism mean that, like a cancer, the death system will eventually destroy the living host.
Both the human communities and non-human living world that play host to capitalism eventually will be destroyed by capitalism. Capitalism is not, of course, the only unsustainable system that humans have devised, but it is the most obviously unsustainable system, and it's the one in which we are stuck. It's the one that we are told is inevitable and natural, like the air we breathe. But the air that we are breathing is choking the most vulnerable in the world, choking us, choking the planet.
Ecology: Out of gas, derailed, over the waterfall
In addition to inequality within the human family, we face even greater threats in the human assault on the living world that come with industrial society. High-energy/high-technology societies pose a serious threat to the ability of the ecosphere to sustain human life as we know it. Grasping that reality is a challenge, and coping with the implications is an even greater challenge. We likely have a chance to stave off the most catastrophic consequences if we act dramatically and quickly. If we continue to drag our feet, it's "game over".
While public awareness of the depth of the ecological crisis is growing, our knowledge of the basics of the problem is hardly new.
"World Scientists' Warning to Humanity" - issued by 1,700 of the planet's leading scientists:
"Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring ."
That statement was issued in 1992, and since then we have fallen further behind in the struggle for sustainability. Look at any crucial measure of the health of the ecosphere in which we live - groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, increased toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of "dead zones" in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species and reduction of bio-diversity - and the news is bad.
Remember also that we live in an oil-based world that is fast running out of easily accessible oil, which means we face a huge reconfiguration of the infrastructure that undergirds our lives. And, of course, there is the undeniable trajectory of climate disruption.
Add all that up, and ask a simple question: Where we are heading? Pick a metaphor. Are we a car running out of gas? A train about to derail? A raft going over the waterfall? Whatever the choice, it's not a pretty picture. It's crucial we realise that there are no technological fixes that will rescue us. We have to acknowledge that human attempts to dominate the non-human world have failed. We are destroying the planet and in the process destroying ourselves.
Hope amid a harsh future
The people who run this world are eager to contain the Occupy energy not because they believe that the critics of concentrated wealth and power are wrong, but because somewhere deep down in their souls (or what is left of a soul), the powerful know we are right.
People in power are insulated by wealth and privilege, but they can see the systems falling apart. US military power can no longer guarantee world domination. Financial corporations can no longer pretend to provide order in the economy.
The industrial system is incompatible with life.
We face new threats today, but we are not the first humans to live in dangerous times. In 1957 the Nobel writer Albert Camus described the world in ways that resonate:
"Tomorrow the world may burst into fragments. In that threat hanging over our heads there is a lesson of truth. As we face such a future, hierarchies, titles, honors are reduced to what they are in reality: a passing puff of smoke. And the only certainty left to us is that of naked suffering, common to all, intermingling its roots with those of a stubborn hope."
A stubborn hope is more necessary than ever. As political, economic, and ecological systems spiral down, it's likely we will see levels of human suffering that dwarf even the horrors of the 20th century. Even more challenging is the harsh realisation that we don't have at hand simple solutions - and maybe no solutions at all - to some of the most vexing problems. We may be past the point of no return in ecological damage, and the question is not how to prevent crises but how to mitigate the worst effects. No one can predict the rate of collapse if we stay on this trajectory, and we don't know if we can change the trajectory in time.
There is much we don't know, but everything I see suggests that the world in which we will pursue political goals will change dramatically in the next decade or two, almost certainly for the worse. Organising has to adapt not only to changes in societies but to these fundamental changes in the ecosphere.
In short: We are organising in a period of contraction, not expansion. We have to acknowledge that human attempts to dominate the non-human world have failed. We are destroying the planet and in the process destroying ourselves. Here, just as in human relationships, we either abandon the dominance/subordination dynamic or we don't survive.
In 1948, Camus urged people to "give up empty quarrels" and "pay attention to what unites rather than to what separates us" in the struggle to recover from the horrors of Europe's barbarism. I take from Camus a sense of how to live the tension between facing honestly the horror and yet remaining engaged. In that same talk, he spoke of "the forces of terror" (forces which exist on "our" side as much as on "theirs") and the "forces of dialogue" (which also exist everywhere in the world). Where do we place our hopes?
"Between the forces of terror and the forces of dialogue, a great unequal battle has begun," he wrote. "I have nothing but reasonable illusions as to the outcome of that battle. But I believe it must be fought."
The Occupy gatherings do not yet constitute a coherent movement with demands, but they are wellsprings of reasonable illusions. Rejecting the political babble around us in election campaigns and on mass media, these gatherings are an experiment in a different kind of public dialogue about our common life, one that can reject the forces of terror deployed by concentrated wealth and power.
With that understanding, the central task is to keep the experiment going, to remember the latent power in people who do not accept the legitimacy of a system. Singer/songwriter John Gorka, writing about what appears to be impossible, offers the perfect reminder:
"They think they can tame you, name you and frame you,
aim you where you don't belong.
They know where you've been but not where you're going,
that is the source of the songs."
© 2011 Al-Jazeera-English
Published on Thursday, November 3, 2011 by TomDispatch.com
One US Citizen’s Misadventure in Securityland
Me and OFAC and Ahmed the Egyptian
by Ann Jones
The big war news on the front page of the New York Times last weekend was headlined: “U.S. Is Planning Buildup in Gulf After Iraq Exit.” Its first sentence: “The Obama administration plans to bolster the American military presence in the Persian Gulf after it withdraws the remaining troops from Iraq this year, according to officials and diplomats.” Of course, for those reading TomDispatch.com, this news was undoubtedly less than startling, given that Nick Turse nailed down the same long-term buildup almost two years ago in a post presciently entitled “Out of Iraq, Into the Gulf.”
Nonetheless, that Times piece has a little gem buried in it, one that should get Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the Onion Orwellian-geopolitical-statement-of-the-week award. The newspaper of record quotes her as saying, “We will have a robust continuing presence throughout the region, which is proof of our ongoing commitment to Iraq and to the future of that region, which holds such promise and should be freed from outside interference to continue on a pathway to democracy.” Yes, it’s a fact: the United States is, on principle, against outside interference everywhere on Earth, and if you don’t believe us, we’re happy to garrison your country to prove it.
It’s evidently not, by the way, the season to write for TomDispatch.com. State Department official Peter Van Buren, whose firsthand book about the debacle of “nation-building” in Iraq, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, has gotten so much attention lately, and who wrote at this site about his (mis)treatment by his employer, has now been stripped of his security clearance and suspended from his job. He’s at home facing future punishment for being an honest man -- and so, evidently, not up to diplomatic snuff -- in his continuing blunt comments on the State Department’s path to madness in Iraq. Here’s how the official departmental letter put the matter: “[Y]ou have shown an unwillingness to comply with Department rules and regulations regarding writing and speaking on matters of official concern, including by publishing articles and blog posts on such matters without submitting them to the Department for review, and that your judgment in the handling of protected information is questionable.” Mind you, this is in an American world of security overkill in which, according to Dana Priest and William M. Arkin of the Washington Post, 854,000 people hold top security clearances, while "some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States."
In the meantime, Ann Jones, who has regularly reported for this site from grim global battle zones, finally left them for -- one bloody massacre aside -- a land so peaceable you can practically hear a pin drop. I’m talking about Norway. But as with Van Buren, no matter how far you go, the U.S. government still gets its man (... er, woman). What that’s meant for her is that, even in peaceable Norway, Jones found herself embroiled in some small corner of post-9/11 American national security madness. We’ve all heard about what happens when you find yourself trapped on a no-fly list, but how about a no-pay list (and worse yet, it’s your own money)? Tom
Me and OFAC and Ahmed the Egyptian
One Citizen’s Misadventure in Securityland
By Ann Jones
Where did I go wrong? Was it playing percussion with an Occupy Wall Street band in Times Square when I was in New York recently? Or was it when I returned to my peaceful new home in Oslo and deleted an email invitation to hear Newt Gingrich lecture Norwegians on the American election? (Yes, even here.)
I don’t know how it happened. Or even, really, what happened. Or what it means. So I’ve got no point -- only a lot of anxiety. I usually write about the problems of the world, but now I’ve got one of my own. They evidently think I’m a terrorist.
That is, someone in the U.S. government who specializes in finding terrorists seems to have found me and laid a heavy hand on my bank account. I think this is wrong, of course, but try to tell that to a faceless, acronymic government agency.
It all started with a series of messages from my bank: Citibank. Yeah, I know, I should have moved my money long ago, but in the distant past before Citibank became Citigroup, it was my friendly little neighborhood bank, and I guess I’m in a rut. Besides, I learned when I made plans to move to Norway that if your money is in a small bank, it has to be sent to a big bank like Citibank or Chase to wire it to you when you need it, which meant I was trapped anyway.
So the first thing I noticed was that one of those wires with money I needed never arrived. When I politely inquired, Citibank told me that the transaction hadn’t gone through. Why not? All my fault, they insisted, for not having provided complete information. Long story short: we went round and round for a couple of weeks, as I coughed up ever more morsels of previously unsolicited personal information. Only then did a bit of truth emerge.
The bank wasn’t actually holding up the delivery of the money. The funds had, in fact, left my account weeks before, along with a wire transfer fee. The responsible party was OFAC.
Oh what? I wondered. OFAC. It rhymes with Oh-Tack, but you’ve got to watch how you pronounce it. Speak carelessly and the name sounds like just what you might say upon learning that you’ve been sucked into the ultimate top-secret bureaucratic sinkhole. It turns out, the bank informs me, that OFAC is a division of the U.S. Treasury Department that “reviews” transactions.
“Why me?” I ask. As a long-time reporter I find it a strange question, as strange as finding myself working on a story about me.
By way of an answer, the bank refers me to an Internet link that calls up a 521-page report so densely typed it looks like wallpaper. Entitled “Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons,” it turns out to be a list of what seems to be every Muslim business and social organization on the planet. That’s when I Google OFAC, go to its site, and find out that the acronym stands for the Office of Foreign Assets Control.
Its mission description reads chillingly. It “administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions based on U.S. foreign policy and national security goals against targeted foreign countries and regimes, terrorists, international narcotics traffickers, those engaged in activities related to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and other threats to the national security, foreign policy or economy of the United States.” And it turns out to be a subsidiary of something much bigger that goes by the unnerving name of “Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.”
Off With Her Head
Whoa! Perhaps it doesn’t help, at this moment, that I’ve just been reading Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State, the scary new book by Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William M. Arkin about our multiple, overfed, overzealous, highly-classified intelligence agencies, staffed in significant part not by civil servants but by profit-making private contractors. Suddenly, I feel myself in the grip of the national post-9/11 paranoia that hatched all that new “security.” (And you, too, could find yourself in my shoes fast.)
I check OFAC’s list more carefully. It’s in a kind of alphabetical order, but with significant incomprehensible diversions -- and if my name is there, I sure can’t find it. Since I’ve spent most of the last decade working with international aid organizations as well as reporting from some of the more strife-ridden lands on the planet, including Afghanistan, the only thing I can imagine is that maybe all those odd visas in my fat passport raised a red flag somewhere in Washington.
Next, I search for the name of my Norwegian landlady. Did I say that the wired funds that never arrived were meant to pay her my rent? She’s in India, a volunteer health-care worker with Tibetan refugees, currently helping refurbish an orphanage for 144 kids. (What could be more suspicious than that?) I can’t find her name either. No Anns or Heidis at all, in fact, among the raft of Mohammads and Abduls.
Heidi is a Buddhist. I’m an atheist. Almost everybody on the list seems to be Muslim, including really dangerous-sounding guys like “Ahmed the Egyptian.” But I guess that to a truly committed and well-paid terrorist hunter, we must all look alike.
I’m desperate to get the rent to Heidi so she can cover her own expenses as a volunteer; an international organization pays for the children’s needs, but Heidi does the work. So I call the American Embassy in Oslo and speak to a nice young woman in the section devoted to “American Citizen Services.” I tell her about me and OFAC and Ahmed the Egyptian. She says, “I’ve never heard of such a thing. But there are so many of these intelligence offices now, I guess I’ll be hearing these stories more often.” (Maybe she’s been reading Top Secret America, too.)
She takes it up with her superiors and calls me back. The Embassy can’t help me, citizen or not, she says, because they don’t handle money matters and have nothing to do with the Treasury Department.
“What? The State Department doesn’t deal with the Treasury?”
“No,” she says, “I guess not.”
Perhaps since I last paid attention the Treasury stopped being considered part of the government. Maybe it now belongs to Lockheed Martin.
At least the State Department has some compassion left in it. If I’m really destitute, she assures me, the Embassy might be able to give me a loan to pay for a plane ticket that would get my two cats and me back to the States. I guess it doesn’t occur to her that under the circumstances I might feel more secure in Norway.
Down the Rabbit Hole
Still, all I want to do is clear up this mess, so I put my head in the lion’s mouth and send an email directly to OFAC. I tell them that I’m in Norway for the year on a Fulbright grant as a researcher -- that is, as part of an international exchange program founded by a U.S. Senator and sponsored by the U.S. Government, or at least one part of the State Department part of it. Among my informal responsibilities, I add, is to be a goodwill ambassador for the United States, but I’m finding it really hard to explain to Norwegians that I can’t pay my rent because a bunch of terrorist-trackers in the pay of my government have made off with the money and left nothing behind but a list of Muslim names.
Remarkably quickly OFAC itself writes back, giving me the creepy feeling that it was lurking behind the door the whole time. It is sorry that I am “frustrated.” It will help me, but only if I supply a whole long list of information, mostly the same stuff I have already provided three times to the bank, the same information the bank later said wasn’t the issue after all. (Still later, the bank would say that I had given not too little information, but too much.) I send the requested tidbits back to “Dear OFAC Functionary or Machine as the case may be.”
Two days later comes another message from OFAC, this time signed by “Michael Z.” Like Afghans, or spies, he evidently has only one name, but my hopes that he might be an actual person inexplicably rise anyway -- only to sink again when he claims OFAC needs yet more information. All this so that Michael Z., presumed person, may help me “more effectively.” (More than what, I wonder?) He is, he insists, trying to locate my money with the help of my bank, which by the way is now blocking me from seeing information about my own account online.
It seems odd to me that this top-secret office of Financial Intelligence somehow can’t manage to lay hands on the money it snatched from me, but what do I know? I’m just a citizen.
Then -- are you ready for this? -- comes what should be a happy ending. A message from the bank tells me that the money has slipped through after all, and sure enough there it is at last in a Norwegian bank, only a month late. I won’t be evicted after all, and Heidi will make sure those Tibetan kids get some fresh fruit and brand new bright green curtains.
Still, this is not a cheery story. So I have to send my apologies to the long-dead Senator J. William Fulbright: I’m sorry indeed that certain changes in the spirit and operations of the United States have occurred since that day in 1948 when you launched your farsighted program of grants to encourage open international educational and cultural exchange. And I apologize that some of those changes may have temporarily cramped my style as a goodwill ambassador; I’ll try to get back on the job if I can just figure out what hit me.
Was this all simply a mistake? A technical glitch? An error at the bank? I’d like to think so, but what about that list of “Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons”? Why was I directed to that? And what about Michael Z., who presumably is some kind of intelligence analyst at OFAC and who, when last heard from, was still seeking information and trying to find the money?
Frankly, this month-long struggle has left me mighty tired and uneasy. Right now, Senator Fulbright, I’m lying low, down here at the bottom of the rabbit hole, trying to make sense of things. (I took a last look at the “Blocked Persons” list, and just this week it’s grown by another page.) So I want to tell you the truth, Senator, and I think that with your great interest in peaceable international relations, you just may understand. Strange as it may seem, since I’ve been hunkered down here in the rabbit hole, I’ve worked up some sympathy for Ahmed the Egyptian who, I have a sneaking feeling, could be down here, too. It’s hard to tell when you’re kept in the dark, but maybe he’s just another poor sap like me, snarled in the super-secret security machine.
Ann Jones is in Norway under the auspices of the Fulbright Scholar Program, researching the Norwegian economic, social, and cultural arrangements that cause it to be named consistently by the United Nations as the best place to live on earth.
One US Citizen’s Misadventure in Securityland
Me and OFAC and Ahmed the Egyptian
by Ann Jones
The big war news on the front page of the New York Times last weekend was headlined: “U.S. Is Planning Buildup in Gulf After Iraq Exit.” Its first sentence: “The Obama administration plans to bolster the American military presence in the Persian Gulf after it withdraws the remaining troops from Iraq this year, according to officials and diplomats.” Of course, for those reading TomDispatch.com, this news was undoubtedly less than startling, given that Nick Turse nailed down the same long-term buildup almost two years ago in a post presciently entitled “Out of Iraq, Into the Gulf.”
Nonetheless, that Times piece has a little gem buried in it, one that should get Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the Onion Orwellian-geopolitical-statement-of-the-week award. The newspaper of record quotes her as saying, “We will have a robust continuing presence throughout the region, which is proof of our ongoing commitment to Iraq and to the future of that region, which holds such promise and should be freed from outside interference to continue on a pathway to democracy.” Yes, it’s a fact: the United States is, on principle, against outside interference everywhere on Earth, and if you don’t believe us, we’re happy to garrison your country to prove it.
It’s evidently not, by the way, the season to write for TomDispatch.com. State Department official Peter Van Buren, whose firsthand book about the debacle of “nation-building” in Iraq, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, has gotten so much attention lately, and who wrote at this site about his (mis)treatment by his employer, has now been stripped of his security clearance and suspended from his job. He’s at home facing future punishment for being an honest man -- and so, evidently, not up to diplomatic snuff -- in his continuing blunt comments on the State Department’s path to madness in Iraq. Here’s how the official departmental letter put the matter: “[Y]ou have shown an unwillingness to comply with Department rules and regulations regarding writing and speaking on matters of official concern, including by publishing articles and blog posts on such matters without submitting them to the Department for review, and that your judgment in the handling of protected information is questionable.” Mind you, this is in an American world of security overkill in which, according to Dana Priest and William M. Arkin of the Washington Post, 854,000 people hold top security clearances, while "some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States."
In the meantime, Ann Jones, who has regularly reported for this site from grim global battle zones, finally left them for -- one bloody massacre aside -- a land so peaceable you can practically hear a pin drop. I’m talking about Norway. But as with Van Buren, no matter how far you go, the U.S. government still gets its man (... er, woman). What that’s meant for her is that, even in peaceable Norway, Jones found herself embroiled in some small corner of post-9/11 American national security madness. We’ve all heard about what happens when you find yourself trapped on a no-fly list, but how about a no-pay list (and worse yet, it’s your own money)? Tom
Me and OFAC and Ahmed the Egyptian
One Citizen’s Misadventure in Securityland
By Ann Jones
Where did I go wrong? Was it playing percussion with an Occupy Wall Street band in Times Square when I was in New York recently? Or was it when I returned to my peaceful new home in Oslo and deleted an email invitation to hear Newt Gingrich lecture Norwegians on the American election? (Yes, even here.)
I don’t know how it happened. Or even, really, what happened. Or what it means. So I’ve got no point -- only a lot of anxiety. I usually write about the problems of the world, but now I’ve got one of my own. They evidently think I’m a terrorist.
That is, someone in the U.S. government who specializes in finding terrorists seems to have found me and laid a heavy hand on my bank account. I think this is wrong, of course, but try to tell that to a faceless, acronymic government agency.
It all started with a series of messages from my bank: Citibank. Yeah, I know, I should have moved my money long ago, but in the distant past before Citibank became Citigroup, it was my friendly little neighborhood bank, and I guess I’m in a rut. Besides, I learned when I made plans to move to Norway that if your money is in a small bank, it has to be sent to a big bank like Citibank or Chase to wire it to you when you need it, which meant I was trapped anyway.
So the first thing I noticed was that one of those wires with money I needed never arrived. When I politely inquired, Citibank told me that the transaction hadn’t gone through. Why not? All my fault, they insisted, for not having provided complete information. Long story short: we went round and round for a couple of weeks, as I coughed up ever more morsels of previously unsolicited personal information. Only then did a bit of truth emerge.
The bank wasn’t actually holding up the delivery of the money. The funds had, in fact, left my account weeks before, along with a wire transfer fee. The responsible party was OFAC.
Oh what? I wondered. OFAC. It rhymes with Oh-Tack, but you’ve got to watch how you pronounce it. Speak carelessly and the name sounds like just what you might say upon learning that you’ve been sucked into the ultimate top-secret bureaucratic sinkhole. It turns out, the bank informs me, that OFAC is a division of the U.S. Treasury Department that “reviews” transactions.
“Why me?” I ask. As a long-time reporter I find it a strange question, as strange as finding myself working on a story about me.
By way of an answer, the bank refers me to an Internet link that calls up a 521-page report so densely typed it looks like wallpaper. Entitled “Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons,” it turns out to be a list of what seems to be every Muslim business and social organization on the planet. That’s when I Google OFAC, go to its site, and find out that the acronym stands for the Office of Foreign Assets Control.
Its mission description reads chillingly. It “administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions based on U.S. foreign policy and national security goals against targeted foreign countries and regimes, terrorists, international narcotics traffickers, those engaged in activities related to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and other threats to the national security, foreign policy or economy of the United States.” And it turns out to be a subsidiary of something much bigger that goes by the unnerving name of “Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.”
Off With Her Head
Whoa! Perhaps it doesn’t help, at this moment, that I’ve just been reading Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State, the scary new book by Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William M. Arkin about our multiple, overfed, overzealous, highly-classified intelligence agencies, staffed in significant part not by civil servants but by profit-making private contractors. Suddenly, I feel myself in the grip of the national post-9/11 paranoia that hatched all that new “security.” (And you, too, could find yourself in my shoes fast.)
I check OFAC’s list more carefully. It’s in a kind of alphabetical order, but with significant incomprehensible diversions -- and if my name is there, I sure can’t find it. Since I’ve spent most of the last decade working with international aid organizations as well as reporting from some of the more strife-ridden lands on the planet, including Afghanistan, the only thing I can imagine is that maybe all those odd visas in my fat passport raised a red flag somewhere in Washington.
Next, I search for the name of my Norwegian landlady. Did I say that the wired funds that never arrived were meant to pay her my rent? She’s in India, a volunteer health-care worker with Tibetan refugees, currently helping refurbish an orphanage for 144 kids. (What could be more suspicious than that?) I can’t find her name either. No Anns or Heidis at all, in fact, among the raft of Mohammads and Abduls.
Heidi is a Buddhist. I’m an atheist. Almost everybody on the list seems to be Muslim, including really dangerous-sounding guys like “Ahmed the Egyptian.” But I guess that to a truly committed and well-paid terrorist hunter, we must all look alike.
I’m desperate to get the rent to Heidi so she can cover her own expenses as a volunteer; an international organization pays for the children’s needs, but Heidi does the work. So I call the American Embassy in Oslo and speak to a nice young woman in the section devoted to “American Citizen Services.” I tell her about me and OFAC and Ahmed the Egyptian. She says, “I’ve never heard of such a thing. But there are so many of these intelligence offices now, I guess I’ll be hearing these stories more often.” (Maybe she’s been reading Top Secret America, too.)
She takes it up with her superiors and calls me back. The Embassy can’t help me, citizen or not, she says, because they don’t handle money matters and have nothing to do with the Treasury Department.
“What? The State Department doesn’t deal with the Treasury?”
“No,” she says, “I guess not.”
Perhaps since I last paid attention the Treasury stopped being considered part of the government. Maybe it now belongs to Lockheed Martin.
At least the State Department has some compassion left in it. If I’m really destitute, she assures me, the Embassy might be able to give me a loan to pay for a plane ticket that would get my two cats and me back to the States. I guess it doesn’t occur to her that under the circumstances I might feel more secure in Norway.
Down the Rabbit Hole
Still, all I want to do is clear up this mess, so I put my head in the lion’s mouth and send an email directly to OFAC. I tell them that I’m in Norway for the year on a Fulbright grant as a researcher -- that is, as part of an international exchange program founded by a U.S. Senator and sponsored by the U.S. Government, or at least one part of the State Department part of it. Among my informal responsibilities, I add, is to be a goodwill ambassador for the United States, but I’m finding it really hard to explain to Norwegians that I can’t pay my rent because a bunch of terrorist-trackers in the pay of my government have made off with the money and left nothing behind but a list of Muslim names.
Remarkably quickly OFAC itself writes back, giving me the creepy feeling that it was lurking behind the door the whole time. It is sorry that I am “frustrated.” It will help me, but only if I supply a whole long list of information, mostly the same stuff I have already provided three times to the bank, the same information the bank later said wasn’t the issue after all. (Still later, the bank would say that I had given not too little information, but too much.) I send the requested tidbits back to “Dear OFAC Functionary or Machine as the case may be.”
Two days later comes another message from OFAC, this time signed by “Michael Z.” Like Afghans, or spies, he evidently has only one name, but my hopes that he might be an actual person inexplicably rise anyway -- only to sink again when he claims OFAC needs yet more information. All this so that Michael Z., presumed person, may help me “more effectively.” (More than what, I wonder?) He is, he insists, trying to locate my money with the help of my bank, which by the way is now blocking me from seeing information about my own account online.
It seems odd to me that this top-secret office of Financial Intelligence somehow can’t manage to lay hands on the money it snatched from me, but what do I know? I’m just a citizen.
Then -- are you ready for this? -- comes what should be a happy ending. A message from the bank tells me that the money has slipped through after all, and sure enough there it is at last in a Norwegian bank, only a month late. I won’t be evicted after all, and Heidi will make sure those Tibetan kids get some fresh fruit and brand new bright green curtains.
Still, this is not a cheery story. So I have to send my apologies to the long-dead Senator J. William Fulbright: I’m sorry indeed that certain changes in the spirit and operations of the United States have occurred since that day in 1948 when you launched your farsighted program of grants to encourage open international educational and cultural exchange. And I apologize that some of those changes may have temporarily cramped my style as a goodwill ambassador; I’ll try to get back on the job if I can just figure out what hit me.
Was this all simply a mistake? A technical glitch? An error at the bank? I’d like to think so, but what about that list of “Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons”? Why was I directed to that? And what about Michael Z., who presumably is some kind of intelligence analyst at OFAC and who, when last heard from, was still seeking information and trying to find the money?
Frankly, this month-long struggle has left me mighty tired and uneasy. Right now, Senator Fulbright, I’m lying low, down here at the bottom of the rabbit hole, trying to make sense of things. (I took a last look at the “Blocked Persons” list, and just this week it’s grown by another page.) So I want to tell you the truth, Senator, and I think that with your great interest in peaceable international relations, you just may understand. Strange as it may seem, since I’ve been hunkered down here in the rabbit hole, I’ve worked up some sympathy for Ahmed the Egyptian who, I have a sneaking feeling, could be down here, too. It’s hard to tell when you’re kept in the dark, but maybe he’s just another poor sap like me, snarled in the super-secret security machine.
Ann Jones is in Norway under the auspices of the Fulbright Scholar Program, researching the Norwegian economic, social, and cultural arrangements that cause it to be named consistently by the United Nations as the best place to live on earth.
© 2011 Ann Jones
Ann Jones wrote at length about the failure of American aid in Kabul in Winter (Metropolitan Books), a book about American meddling in Afghanistan as well as her experience as a humanitarian aid worker there from 2002 to 2006. For more information, visit her website. For a concise report on many of the defects in international aid mentioned here, check out Real Aid (pdf file), a report issued in 2005 by the South African NGO Action Aid.
Plannin' on Ridin' the Storms Out (when the gales of November come early)
The Legend Lives ON!
Maybe the coppers won't beat the crap out of the law-abidin' OCCUPY folks when the weather just turns frightfully frigid! We can only pray:
Heavenly Father,
May your frigid Northeasterly winds blow hard and strong upon the American lands, so that they who on conviction and of principle have chosen to massively demonstrate in the Occupy Movement might be saved from the fiery billy clubs and lethal tasers that the banksters will implore the police to use to susbide the throngs - whose numbers are legion and growing every day.
We ask this, Holy Father, because you know, as do we, that the American Way of Life is unsustainable, is the antithesis of Christianity, is the antithesis of all your myriad prophets have taught and handed down through the ages - that we are compelled by you to be good stewards of our mother earth; that we are compelled to feed the hungry; to clothe those whose own clothes cannot keep them warm; to shelter the homeless; to care for the widows and the orphans; to visit the prisoner - that this American Way of Life, this mindless pursuit of money, which we are warned of, in Your Holy Bible - the love of money (for money's sake) is the root of all evil - that his love of money, and with it the things that money can buy - meaningless, useless, objects - that will be tossed away upon our deaths, if not before - and the power that money has accorded to it - this has led to the so-called "Gospel of Prosperity" which we know to be anathema in Your eyes. Forgive us, heavenly Father, that we have been led astray, led by the evil one, led by Lucifer to seek ever more money, for its own sake, for the sake of our most unsatisfying creature comforts, we ask Heavnely Father, that you send your fiercest winds, your deepest snows, your coldest days to shelter those who would do your work - who prophesy, rightly, that we have gone astray, we have been led to worship the Golden Calf - for the gold; BAAL worship, which is most wrtetched in despised by you, and all of your angels and archangels.
Let us learn, heavenly father, from the examples of these young people, these middle aged people, these old people, who have taken peacefully to the streets of every large city in America, and in the smaller cities too, they have gone there, asking nothing, demanding nothing, but to draw attention to how far we have strayed from Your Holy words, and from the Way of Your Beloved Son, Jesus of Nazareth. We ask this now, in His Name, heavenly Father, if it be Thy will, AMEN.
Maybe the coppers won't beat the crap out of the law-abidin' OCCUPY folks when the weather just turns frightfully frigid! We can only pray:
Heavenly Father,
May your frigid Northeasterly winds blow hard and strong upon the American lands, so that they who on conviction and of principle have chosen to massively demonstrate in the Occupy Movement might be saved from the fiery billy clubs and lethal tasers that the banksters will implore the police to use to susbide the throngs - whose numbers are legion and growing every day.
We ask this, Holy Father, because you know, as do we, that the American Way of Life is unsustainable, is the antithesis of Christianity, is the antithesis of all your myriad prophets have taught and handed down through the ages - that we are compelled by you to be good stewards of our mother earth; that we are compelled to feed the hungry; to clothe those whose own clothes cannot keep them warm; to shelter the homeless; to care for the widows and the orphans; to visit the prisoner - that this American Way of Life, this mindless pursuit of money, which we are warned of, in Your Holy Bible - the love of money (for money's sake) is the root of all evil - that his love of money, and with it the things that money can buy - meaningless, useless, objects - that will be tossed away upon our deaths, if not before - and the power that money has accorded to it - this has led to the so-called "Gospel of Prosperity" which we know to be anathema in Your eyes. Forgive us, heavenly Father, that we have been led astray, led by the evil one, led by Lucifer to seek ever more money, for its own sake, for the sake of our most unsatisfying creature comforts, we ask Heavnely Father, that you send your fiercest winds, your deepest snows, your coldest days to shelter those who would do your work - who prophesy, rightly, that we have gone astray, we have been led to worship the Golden Calf - for the gold; BAAL worship, which is most wrtetched in despised by you, and all of your angels and archangels.
Let us learn, heavenly father, from the examples of these young people, these middle aged people, these old people, who have taken peacefully to the streets of every large city in America, and in the smaller cities too, they have gone there, asking nothing, demanding nothing, but to draw attention to how far we have strayed from Your Holy words, and from the Way of Your Beloved Son, Jesus of Nazareth. We ask this now, in His Name, heavenly Father, if it be Thy will, AMEN.
Published on Thursday, November 3, 2011 by FireDogLake
#OccupySupply Launches First Shipment of Cold Weather Gear
by Jane Hamsher
Today we started sending out the first shipment of #OccupySupply goods — 500 pairs of UFCW union-made socks made to withstand -40 degree weather.
But that’s just the beginning. There’s a lot more on the way.
On October 21, the FDL Membership Program started the Occupy Supply fund. At the same time that other organizations saw Occupy Wall Street as a vehicle to reinvigorate their tarnished images and enhance their own coffers, FDL members just wanted to help. And what we saw was trouble on the horizon: the powers that be were clearly executing plans to shut down occupations across the country in the warm weather areas, and hoped to freeze out those in the cold. One day #OWS discussed moving to Atlanta for the winter, and the next day #OccupyAtlanta was raided. It’s no coincidence that Bloomberg seized the #OWS generators the first day it snowed.
We raised over $50,000 in one day for occupations across the country, with 100% of all funds received committed to buying supplies they need. Kevin Gosztola stayed with FDL member Mark S. in Ft. Wayne, Indiana and together they used money from OccupySupply to buy tents, sleeping bags, blankets and sheets. In Bloomington, FDL Member John S. played host to Kevin, and they bought heavy-duty cold weather sleeping bags for 10-30 degree weather. Kevin was the guest of FDL Member Fred O. in Memphis, where they purchased more tents and warm clothing. FDL member Patty M. and Kevin buy tents, sleeping bags and pizza in Louisville. In Des Moines, FDL member Angela G helped Kevin buy four generators. In St. Louis, a group of FDL members including Ray, Bill, Harold and Beverly helped Kevin buy tents and sleeping bags. More supplies have been purchased for occupations in Columbus, Cleveland, Madison, Los Angeles and DC.
But it became clear that in order to adequately supply occupations across the country with appropriate cold weather gear through the winter, there was going to have to be an organized supply chain. And we also realized that there was an opportunity to give the business to American made, union manufacturers. So over the course of the past 2 weeks, with the help of unions from the UFCW to Unite-HERE to Worker’s United, the IAM and SEIU, we’ve basically been building a product line of superb cold-weather gear that can continuously supply occupations throughout the winter.
Of the $51,000 we have raised to date, we’ve already spent $42,000, most of it on heavy-duty cold weather gear: thinsulate-lined masks and beanies, wool watch caps, polar fleece scarves and blankets, double base-layer self-wicking long underwear, quilted jackets and vests, fleece pullovers, as well as the aforementioned -40 degree socks will all be going out to FDL members who will deliver them to occupations across the country. We hope to announce that gloves, boots and other supplies will be added to the list soon.
But it was not an easy task to source all of these union suppliers, and it was extraordinarily depressing. The garment manufacturing industry in the United States has been decimated by NAFTA. Link after link to once thriving union shops were dead, even in the past few years. They went out of business. They were gobbled up and gutted, or the jobs went overseas. Or both.
Which leads right back to Occupy Wall Street. As American manufacturing goes, so goes the American middle class — which was built on manufacturing jobs. ”Decline” is too delicate of a word to describe what happened. American manufacturing and the middle class economic stability that went with it were sabotaged by cooperation between leaders of both political parties. The 18% unemployment that young people now face, the crippling student loans and credit card debt that puts them into indentured servitude to the banks before they’re even out of school, the bleak future as a Starbucks barista living on their parents’ couch, the constant redistribution of wealth out of their pockets and into those of the one percent — in short the very factors that have driven #OWS residents into these modern Hoovervilles — were all prophesied in the WTO protests of 1999.
It was tragic to see what we had lost — not only the vast majority of American textile manufacturers in the United States, the jobs they provided and the communities they sustained, but also the craft and skill in the products they made. Go over to Ebay and search for “union made.” You’ll see amazing clothes that span the decades, from industrial attire to high fashion. Virtually every one of those companies is gone now, or no longer manufactures in the US. It’s stunning.
So when we were creating the OccupySupply line of cold weather clothing for the steady stream of people who show up at the occupations, we committed ourselves to using union made goods. To insure that the money would go to support people with sustainable incomes, and won’t just cyclically reinforce the problem.
I’m proud to say that all of the clothing in the #OccupySupply line is 100% union made in the USA.
The fabulous logo, by our designer Caz, signifies the commitment to economic justice that these garments represent.
It took the cooperation of a great many people to pull this off in such a short period of time, with union Presidents past and present reaching out to shop stewards and manufacturers to bump us to the head of the production line so we could deliver the goods to Occupy Wall Street protesters as quickly as possible. Special thanks go out to Joe Hansen, Leilah Mooney and Teresa Hansen of the UFCW; Noel Beasley, Edgar Romney, Jo-Ellen Schlademan, Lynn Fox and Nancy Campos-Siete of Workers United; Tom Buffenbarger, Matt McKinnon and Bruce Olsson of the Machinists Union; Art Pottash and Joel Coen of Artex Mills; Rod Eitland of American Unions; and SEIU alumni Stephen Lerner and Andy Stern. It would have been impossible to pull this off in such a short period of time without them.
Thanks also go out to the remarkable FDL members who have become the #OccupySupply liaisons to the encampments in their communities. The time that they have taken to ask questions, sit and listen to the needs of the occupiers, take part in General Assemblies and try to offer help in the most constructive and cooperative way possible has been invaluable and inspirational. Our members are the backbone of the #OccupySupply program.
If you know of an #Occupy encampment that needs winterization supplies, you can let us know here. If you’d like to become an FDL member and help with outreach to occupations in your community, you can join here. And if you’d like to donate to the #OccupySupply fund to help us send more gear through the pipeline as soon as possible, you can do it here.
As always, 100% of the money we raise through the #OccupySupply fund will be used to get much-needed supplies for Occupy encampments throughout the winter. And we we are committed to doing it in an economically just, cost-effective way that respects and values the workers and companies who manufacture them.© 2011 FireDogLake.com
No - this is not a health CARE solution - it is a health INSURANCE solution - two entirely different matters!
Published on Thursday, November 3, 2011 by The Capital Times (Wisconsin)
Health Care Solution is Simple: Single-Payer
by Dave Zweifel
The answer to the nation’s health care crisis is staring everyone in the face, yet as a country we continue to refuse to come to grips with it.
Late last month, the Wisconsin secretary of health services, Dennis Smith, held hearings to let people sound off about planned cuts to Wisconsin’s BadgerCare and Family Care programs. The state says it needs to reduce health care spending by some $554 million over the next two years, which is likely to leave tens of thousands of Wisconsin low-income citizens without health care coverage once again.
At around the same time Smith was holding his hearings, former Wisconsin governor and U.S. health secretary Tommy Thompson was telling a WisPolitics.com luncheon audience that American companies often find themselves at a competitive disadvantage because their health insurance costs are so much higher than those of companies in other countries.
But neither Smith nor Thompson, nor most of our state and national leaders, can bring themselves to a simple obvious solution to this continuing quandary that has faced Americans for the past several decades.
It is far from rocket science. What this country simply needs is a single-payer national health insurance program that covers all American citizens from the day they’re born to the day they die — just as other advanced countries have done for decades.
Bill Kraus, who was a confidant of the late Wisconsin Republican Gov. Lee Dreyfus, in a column on FightingBob.com last week traced the sad history of America’s health system. He went back to the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt, pointing out that Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins first proposed a national health care plan as part of the president’s vast New Deal program aimed at ending the Great Depression.
Before Congress was able to seriously debate the plan, World War II intervened, but it was revived again by President Harry Truman, only to run into stiff opposition from a Congress that was sympathetic to the American Medical Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
“The AMA exploited the power of the Chamber of Commerce to expand the fledgling health insurance industry by convincing its insurance company members to go into that business despite the dim prospects that (they) could make a profit,” Kraus wrote. “Over time the insurance industry solved the profit problem and private health insurance became a member of the status quo which is committed to protecting the status quo against change.”
The insurance lobby and others who benefit from the current system — decrying what they call “socialized medicine” — beat Richard Nixon when he tried to reform health care, destroyed Bill Clinton’s plan in the 1990s and now continue to fight tooth and nail against Barack Obama’s plan, which promises to at least provide health care coverage to most Americans but hasn’t been able to stem the rising costs.
“These oversights brought the shortsighted Chamber of Commerce into the battle against ‘socialized medicine’ again despite the woes many of their members were experiencing as they tried to price the products they were trying to sell abroad competitively,” Kraus noted.
So what we have today is a system that costs Americans nearly double the cost of single-payer national health insurance — in short, Medicare for all — in countries like England, France, Germany, Canada and even China.
We could finance health care coverage for every American by taking the resources that employees and employers are pumping into the current broken system and still have money left over for a substantial tax cut, not to mention that it would put U.S. employers back on a level playing field with their competitors in the world market.
Yet we refuse to even put that debate on the front burner where it belongs, plodding along with a system that with each passing year continues to hurt more and more Americans in many different ways.
Health Care Solution is Simple: Single-Payer
by Dave Zweifel
The answer to the nation’s health care crisis is staring everyone in the face, yet as a country we continue to refuse to come to grips with it.
Late last month, the Wisconsin secretary of health services, Dennis Smith, held hearings to let people sound off about planned cuts to Wisconsin’s BadgerCare and Family Care programs. The state says it needs to reduce health care spending by some $554 million over the next two years, which is likely to leave tens of thousands of Wisconsin low-income citizens without health care coverage once again.
At around the same time Smith was holding his hearings, former Wisconsin governor and U.S. health secretary Tommy Thompson was telling a WisPolitics.com luncheon audience that American companies often find themselves at a competitive disadvantage because their health insurance costs are so much higher than those of companies in other countries.
But neither Smith nor Thompson, nor most of our state and national leaders, can bring themselves to a simple obvious solution to this continuing quandary that has faced Americans for the past several decades.
It is far from rocket science. What this country simply needs is a single-payer national health insurance program that covers all American citizens from the day they’re born to the day they die — just as other advanced countries have done for decades.
Bill Kraus, who was a confidant of the late Wisconsin Republican Gov. Lee Dreyfus, in a column on FightingBob.com last week traced the sad history of America’s health system. He went back to the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt, pointing out that Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins first proposed a national health care plan as part of the president’s vast New Deal program aimed at ending the Great Depression.
Before Congress was able to seriously debate the plan, World War II intervened, but it was revived again by President Harry Truman, only to run into stiff opposition from a Congress that was sympathetic to the American Medical Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
“The AMA exploited the power of the Chamber of Commerce to expand the fledgling health insurance industry by convincing its insurance company members to go into that business despite the dim prospects that (they) could make a profit,” Kraus wrote. “Over time the insurance industry solved the profit problem and private health insurance became a member of the status quo which is committed to protecting the status quo against change.”
The insurance lobby and others who benefit from the current system — decrying what they call “socialized medicine” — beat Richard Nixon when he tried to reform health care, destroyed Bill Clinton’s plan in the 1990s and now continue to fight tooth and nail against Barack Obama’s plan, which promises to at least provide health care coverage to most Americans but hasn’t been able to stem the rising costs.
“These oversights brought the shortsighted Chamber of Commerce into the battle against ‘socialized medicine’ again despite the woes many of their members were experiencing as they tried to price the products they were trying to sell abroad competitively,” Kraus noted.
So what we have today is a system that costs Americans nearly double the cost of single-payer national health insurance — in short, Medicare for all — in countries like England, France, Germany, Canada and even China.
We could finance health care coverage for every American by taking the resources that employees and employers are pumping into the current broken system and still have money left over for a substantial tax cut, not to mention that it would put U.S. employers back on a level playing field with their competitors in the world market.
Yet we refuse to even put that debate on the front burner where it belongs, plodding along with a system that with each passing year continues to hurt more and more Americans in many different ways.
© 2011 The Capital Times
Wait a minute here! If a corporation can't make a buck running a for profit prison, what the hell is the capitalist system coming to?
Published on Thursday, November 3, 2011 by ACLU Blog of Rights
Stop For-Profit Prisons
by David Shapiro
Yesterday, the ACLU released Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration, an in-depth examination of the private prison industry.The report finds that mass incarceration provides a gigantic windfall for one special interest group – the private prison industry – even as current incarceration levels harm the country as a whole.
While the nation’s unprecedented rate of imprisonment deprives individuals of freedom, wrests loved ones from their families, and drains the resources of governments, communities, and taxpayers, the private prison industry is expanding at an exponential rate, holding ever more people in its prisons and jails, and generating massive profits. Private prisons for adults were virtually non-existent until the early 1980s, but the number of prisoners in private prisons increased by approximately 1,600 percent between 1990 and 2009.In 2010, the two largest private prison companies alone received nearly $3 billion in revenue.
As detailed in the report, this year advocates of for-profit prisons trotted out privatization schemes as a supposed answer to budgetary woes in numerous states, including Arizona, Florida, Ohio, and Louisiana. But the evidence that private prisons provide savings compared to publicly operated facilities is highly questionable, and certain studies point to worse conditions in for-profit facilities.
Now is the time for serious criminal justice reform, not privatization schemes. The private prison industry feeds off the mass incarceration problem and cannot be part of the solution. The only real way to cut prison spending is to cut the number of people we keep in prison.
To learn more, listen to this new podcast with private prisons expert Alex Friedmann, then go here to read more about the ACLU’s work to end reliance on private prisons.
Want to help? Go here to take action!
Stop For-Profit Prisons
by David Shapiro
Yesterday, the ACLU released Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration, an in-depth examination of the private prison industry.The report finds that mass incarceration provides a gigantic windfall for one special interest group – the private prison industry – even as current incarceration levels harm the country as a whole.
While the nation’s unprecedented rate of imprisonment deprives individuals of freedom, wrests loved ones from their families, and drains the resources of governments, communities, and taxpayers, the private prison industry is expanding at an exponential rate, holding ever more people in its prisons and jails, and generating massive profits. Private prisons for adults were virtually non-existent until the early 1980s, but the number of prisoners in private prisons increased by approximately 1,600 percent between 1990 and 2009.In 2010, the two largest private prison companies alone received nearly $3 billion in revenue.
As detailed in the report, this year advocates of for-profit prisons trotted out privatization schemes as a supposed answer to budgetary woes in numerous states, including Arizona, Florida, Ohio, and Louisiana. But the evidence that private prisons provide savings compared to publicly operated facilities is highly questionable, and certain studies point to worse conditions in for-profit facilities.
Now is the time for serious criminal justice reform, not privatization schemes. The private prison industry feeds off the mass incarceration problem and cannot be part of the solution. The only real way to cut prison spending is to cut the number of people we keep in prison.
To learn more, listen to this new podcast with private prisons expert Alex Friedmann, then go here to read more about the ACLU’s work to end reliance on private prisons.
Want to help? Go here to take action!
© 2011 ACLU
Commie pinkos - forever screaming "Imperialist Empire Builders - destroyers of cultures and societies!
Published on Thursday, November 3, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
The News of Empire
by Robert C. Koehler
“Mr. Obama and his senior national security advisers have sought to reassure allies and answer critics, including many Republicans, that the United States will not abandon its commitments in the Persian Gulf even as it winds down the war in Iraq and looks ahead to doing the same in Afghanistan by the end of 2014.”
I pluck a paragraph from the New York Times and for an instant I’m possessed by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, aquiver with puzzlement down to my deepest sensibilities. I hold you here, root and all, little paragraph. But if I could understand what you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what empire is, and hubris . . . and maybe even, by its striking absence, democracy.
The paragraph contains the careful verbiage of exclusion, which is the only language in which the geopolitical powers that be are able to communicate.
The paragraph, one of many that could have been plucked for study and put under the microscope of outrage, is from a story just before Halloween, by Thom Shanker and Steven Lee Myers, informing us that, while the United States will be pulling troops out of Iraq at the end of the year, the regional war is anything but over: The U.S. military will be massing troops in Kuwait, sending more warships to the region and tightening its military alliance with the six nations that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council (including Saudi Arabia and Bahrain), in order to develop “a new security architecture” in the Gulf and establish its “post-Iraq footprint.”
Or in the words of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: “We will have a robust continuing presence throughout the region.” And this, she explains, “is proof of our ongoing commitment to Iraq and to the future of that region,” which we care about because it “holds such promise” — oh God, the compassion is killing me — “and should be freed from outside interference to continue on a pathway to democracy.”
What’s striking, first of all, is that the “news” is presented to us, under the guise of objective reporting, as a fait accompli: Our supreme leaders have the following plans, the cursory details of which they are nice enough to let us in on.
There is no countertide present in reporting that emanates from the national defense beat — no acknowledgement of a rising national disgust at war or our enormous military failures of the past decade, which the plans the Times story outlines merely continue. There’s no acknowledgment even of obvious contradictions or hypocrisies, such as the fact that our presence in the Gulf arguably constitutes the very “outside interference” from which, according to Clinton, the region should be freed.
And certainly there isn’t the least irreverence: no suggestion, for instance, that we have an interest in this oil-rich region beyond a deep love for the people and their democratic aspirations; or that our partners in the Gulf Cooperation Council are autocrats who brutally repress dissent and, ahem, democracy.
The story reads, instead, like interlocking blocks of propaganda dropped into place, not so much disseminating information as protecting the security state planners from questions and challenges. This is the news of empire.
Note that when the story does acknowledge critics, those critics are Republicans, that is to say, empire fanatics as opposed to empire moderates, thus implying that the only reasonable question our post-Iraq footprint raises is whether we should be “post-Iraq” at all. “. . . American military officers and diplomats, as well as officials of several countries in the region, worry that the withdrawal could leave instability or worse in its wake.”
This much should be clear: War is a given. Got it?
And war could follow more than one trajectory. If there’s a “security collapse” in Iraq, our troops in Kuwait could quickly redeploy to the country we’ve already destroyed. But those same troops could also respond to “a military confrontation with Iran.”
Perhaps the most telling quote in the Times story was from Bahrain’s foreign minister, Sheik Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa. With the United States out of Iraq, a regional alliance is necessary because, he said, “Now the game is different.”
Yeah, well . . .
The only thing wrong with this comment is that this isn’t a game: not our eight and a half years in Iraq, our decade in Afghanistan or our possible invasion of Iran. Innocent people have died and will continue to die in horrific numbers, toxins will spread, lives will be destroyed. The consequences cannot be contained. They are bleeding now and will continue to bleed into the future. But the Times story affects no awareness of this; it has the depth of a gamer review.
Is there a democracy at either end of the missiles, warships or troop deployments? Suddenly I’m back on the sidewalk with the Occupy movement, which has arisen at last in this era of passive citizenship to confront the embedded helplessness and hopelessness that come with the corporatocracy and its subservient media.
Citizens are standing up to the assumptions of empire. Their numbers are small — for the moment — but their spirit could prove to be irresistible.
The News of Empire
by Robert C. Koehler
“Mr. Obama and his senior national security advisers have sought to reassure allies and answer critics, including many Republicans, that the United States will not abandon its commitments in the Persian Gulf even as it winds down the war in Iraq and looks ahead to doing the same in Afghanistan by the end of 2014.”
I pluck a paragraph from the New York Times and for an instant I’m possessed by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, aquiver with puzzlement down to my deepest sensibilities. I hold you here, root and all, little paragraph. But if I could understand what you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what empire is, and hubris . . . and maybe even, by its striking absence, democracy.
The paragraph contains the careful verbiage of exclusion, which is the only language in which the geopolitical powers that be are able to communicate.
The paragraph, one of many that could have been plucked for study and put under the microscope of outrage, is from a story just before Halloween, by Thom Shanker and Steven Lee Myers, informing us that, while the United States will be pulling troops out of Iraq at the end of the year, the regional war is anything but over: The U.S. military will be massing troops in Kuwait, sending more warships to the region and tightening its military alliance with the six nations that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council (including Saudi Arabia and Bahrain), in order to develop “a new security architecture” in the Gulf and establish its “post-Iraq footprint.”
Or in the words of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: “We will have a robust continuing presence throughout the region.” And this, she explains, “is proof of our ongoing commitment to Iraq and to the future of that region,” which we care about because it “holds such promise” — oh God, the compassion is killing me — “and should be freed from outside interference to continue on a pathway to democracy.”
What’s striking, first of all, is that the “news” is presented to us, under the guise of objective reporting, as a fait accompli: Our supreme leaders have the following plans, the cursory details of which they are nice enough to let us in on.
There is no countertide present in reporting that emanates from the national defense beat — no acknowledgement of a rising national disgust at war or our enormous military failures of the past decade, which the plans the Times story outlines merely continue. There’s no acknowledgment even of obvious contradictions or hypocrisies, such as the fact that our presence in the Gulf arguably constitutes the very “outside interference” from which, according to Clinton, the region should be freed.
And certainly there isn’t the least irreverence: no suggestion, for instance, that we have an interest in this oil-rich region beyond a deep love for the people and their democratic aspirations; or that our partners in the Gulf Cooperation Council are autocrats who brutally repress dissent and, ahem, democracy.
The story reads, instead, like interlocking blocks of propaganda dropped into place, not so much disseminating information as protecting the security state planners from questions and challenges. This is the news of empire.
Note that when the story does acknowledge critics, those critics are Republicans, that is to say, empire fanatics as opposed to empire moderates, thus implying that the only reasonable question our post-Iraq footprint raises is whether we should be “post-Iraq” at all. “. . . American military officers and diplomats, as well as officials of several countries in the region, worry that the withdrawal could leave instability or worse in its wake.”
This much should be clear: War is a given. Got it?
And war could follow more than one trajectory. If there’s a “security collapse” in Iraq, our troops in Kuwait could quickly redeploy to the country we’ve already destroyed. But those same troops could also respond to “a military confrontation with Iran.”
Perhaps the most telling quote in the Times story was from Bahrain’s foreign minister, Sheik Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa. With the United States out of Iraq, a regional alliance is necessary because, he said, “Now the game is different.”
Yeah, well . . .
The only thing wrong with this comment is that this isn’t a game: not our eight and a half years in Iraq, our decade in Afghanistan or our possible invasion of Iran. Innocent people have died and will continue to die in horrific numbers, toxins will spread, lives will be destroyed. The consequences cannot be contained. They are bleeding now and will continue to bleed into the future. But the Times story affects no awareness of this; it has the depth of a gamer review.
Is there a democracy at either end of the missiles, warships or troop deployments? Suddenly I’m back on the sidewalk with the Occupy movement, which has arisen at last in this era of passive citizenship to confront the embedded helplessness and hopelessness that come with the corporatocracy and its subservient media.
Citizens are standing up to the assumptions of empire. Their numbers are small — for the moment — but their spirit could prove to be irresistible.
© 2011 Tribune News Services
Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Well, yeah! DUH!
Published on Thursday, November 3, 2011 by New Scientist
Revealed – The Capitalist Network That Runs the World
by Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie
As protests against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.
The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.
The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).
"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."
Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.
The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.
The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.
John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.
Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."
"It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.
Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.
Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.
One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara.
Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, "is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups". Or as Braha puts it: "The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy."
So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.
The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies
* Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used
Graphic: The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy
(Data: PLoS One)
© 2011 The New Scientist
Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie write for the New Scientist
Revealed – The Capitalist Network That Runs the World
by Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie
As protests against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.
The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.
The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).
"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."
Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.
The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.
The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.
John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.
Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."
"It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.
Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.
Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.
One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara.
Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, "is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups". Or as Braha puts it: "The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy."
So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.
The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies
1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company
* Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used
Graphic: The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy
(Data: PLoS One)
© 2011 The New Scientist
Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie write for the New Scientist
If he weren't such a black person, AND a community organizer, I might pay attention
Published on Wednesday, November 2, 2011 by Huffington Post
Tax the One Percent -- Make Wall Street Fund America
by Van Jones
The giant cries of protest sweeping across the country are starting to reverberate in the halls of Congress. Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Representative Peter DeFazio (D-OR) are proposing a Wall Street Tax. Their bill would establish a tiny financial transaction tax of 0.03% on every single trade of stocks, bonds, options, futures, swaps, and credit default swaps.
I think this is a great idea, and Congress should pass the bill. Rebuild the Dream and MoveOn.org started a petition so you can show support for the Wall Street Tax.
Notably, a Wall Street Tax is in the Contract for the American Dream, the 10-point plan to fix our economy that more than 131,000 people created earlier this year, through a grassroots, bottom-up process. To date, more than 300,000 people have signed the Contract for the American Dream. In other words, the idea of a Wall Street Tax is already popular.
The Wall Street Tax would be a tiny cost for those of us socking away our savings for retirement or our children's education -- the average person paying into a 401(k) would pay only one dollar per year.
But Wall Street traders could no longer bet thousands of times a second for free. Much of the risk in today's market comes from rapid-fire "flash trading," where financial firms use computer algorithms to make thousands of trades per second. This doesn't add any real value to the market or to our economy.
When we buy something of real value, like a winter coat for our kids, we pay a sales tax, and rightly so. Yet these Wall Street speculators pay zero taxes while making a fortune passing electrons back and forth millions of times a day, all the while destabilizing our economy.
The Harkin-DeFazio Wall Street Tax is common sense. The concept has been around for a while. Hundreds of economists and responsible investors have long called for it, including Nobel Laureates Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, plus stock market billionaire Warren Buffett and former Goldman Sachs Chairman John Whitehead.
This idea is already law in several countries, including financial centers like the UK and Hong Kong. And the European Union is currently considering a much steeper version of what's on the table in the U.S.
The Wall Street Tax would raise somewhere between $700 billion and $1.2 trillion over ten years, critical funds we need to create jobs and protect vital programs.
Meanwhile, the Super Committee has been charged with finding $1.5 trillion in deficit reductions and has floated the idea of targeting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Notice: the Wall Street Tax would cover nearly all of the Super Committee's mandated deficit reductions.
Congress is about to face a telling choice. Will they vote to tax Wall Street gamblers in the 1%, or cut the Social Security checks of senior citizens in the 99%?
Members of Congress should take note: If they vote against the 99% on this bill, they should be prepared for the 99% to vote against them next November.
Go here to learn more about the bill and what citizens can do.
Tax the One Percent -- Make Wall Street Fund America
by Van Jones
The giant cries of protest sweeping across the country are starting to reverberate in the halls of Congress. Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Representative Peter DeFazio (D-OR) are proposing a Wall Street Tax. Their bill would establish a tiny financial transaction tax of 0.03% on every single trade of stocks, bonds, options, futures, swaps, and credit default swaps.
I think this is a great idea, and Congress should pass the bill. Rebuild the Dream and MoveOn.org started a petition so you can show support for the Wall Street Tax.
Notably, a Wall Street Tax is in the Contract for the American Dream, the 10-point plan to fix our economy that more than 131,000 people created earlier this year, through a grassroots, bottom-up process. To date, more than 300,000 people have signed the Contract for the American Dream. In other words, the idea of a Wall Street Tax is already popular.
The Wall Street Tax would be a tiny cost for those of us socking away our savings for retirement or our children's education -- the average person paying into a 401(k) would pay only one dollar per year.
But Wall Street traders could no longer bet thousands of times a second for free. Much of the risk in today's market comes from rapid-fire "flash trading," where financial firms use computer algorithms to make thousands of trades per second. This doesn't add any real value to the market or to our economy.
When we buy something of real value, like a winter coat for our kids, we pay a sales tax, and rightly so. Yet these Wall Street speculators pay zero taxes while making a fortune passing electrons back and forth millions of times a day, all the while destabilizing our economy.
The Harkin-DeFazio Wall Street Tax is common sense. The concept has been around for a while. Hundreds of economists and responsible investors have long called for it, including Nobel Laureates Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, plus stock market billionaire Warren Buffett and former Goldman Sachs Chairman John Whitehead.
This idea is already law in several countries, including financial centers like the UK and Hong Kong. And the European Union is currently considering a much steeper version of what's on the table in the U.S.
The Wall Street Tax would raise somewhere between $700 billion and $1.2 trillion over ten years, critical funds we need to create jobs and protect vital programs.
Meanwhile, the Super Committee has been charged with finding $1.5 trillion in deficit reductions and has floated the idea of targeting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Notice: the Wall Street Tax would cover nearly all of the Super Committee's mandated deficit reductions.
Congress is about to face a telling choice. Will they vote to tax Wall Street gamblers in the 1%, or cut the Social Security checks of senior citizens in the 99%?
Members of Congress should take note: If they vote against the 99% on this bill, they should be prepared for the 99% to vote against them next November.
Go here to learn more about the bill and what citizens can do.
© 2011 Huffington Post
Yes, but, you see, guns only kill people - cameras tell the truth, which is far more dangerous to the powers that be
Published on Thursday, November 3, 2011 by PRWatch.org
18 Arrested in Wisconsin Assembly for Using Cameras; Guns Still Allowed
by Brendan Fischer
Eighteen people were arrested Tuesday for using cameras in the Wisconsin Assembly gallery, including the editor of The Progressive magazine, Matt Rothschild.
Rothschild and others had gone to the capitol to protest a series of arrests in recent weeks of individuals who carried signs or took photos or video in defiance of an Assembly ban.
"We ought to have a right to take a picture," Rothschild said.
Guns, Yes. Cameras, No.
The protest was organized through a Facebook event called "Concealed Camera Day at the Capitol!" The event coincided with the implementation of Wisconsin's new concealed carry law, which allows residents to carry a concealed firearm -- including inside the Assembly gallery.
Stephen Colbert said Governor Walker was bringing "a new freedom to America's dairyland" with the concealed carry law, but said people would not see "images of gunfire in the statehouse" because of the camera ban. "Thank God. Cameras are dangerous," he said.
On the agenda in Tuesday's session was a bill to institute the Castle Doctrine, a "shoot first, ask questions later" bill that gives a person immunity from civil and criminal liability if they shoot another in self defense in their home, work, or vehicle. The American Legislative Exchange Council also has a model Castle Doctrine bill -- see the side-by-side here.
Event organizers were clear that the protests were not about the gun laws, but instead about protecting First Amendment rights.
But is it Legal?
The Open Meetings law includes this provision (§19.90):
"Use of equipment in open session. Whenever a governmental body holds a meeting in open session, the body shall make a reasonable effort to accommodate any person desiring to record, film or photograph the meeting. This section does not permit recording, filming or photographing such a meeting in a manner that interferes with the conduct of the meeting or the rights of the participants."
The statute also contains this provision (§ 19.87(2)):
"No provision of this subchapter which conflicts with a rule of the senate or assembly or joint rule of the legislature shall apply to a meeting conducted in compliance with such rule."
The legal issue here appears similar to the one that arose in the challenge to Governor Walker's collective bargaining law. In that case, Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne alleged that the union-busting law should be struck down because it was passed in violation of another provision of the Open Meetings law requiring notice. In part, Ozanne's challenge failed because the legislature had passed a rule that trumped the Open Meetings law.
Likewise, here the Assembly had a rule banning cameras and video, but under the court's ruling in the Ozanne suit, that rule trumped the Open Meetings law permitting their use.
Despite this, both the Wisconsin and U.S. Constitutions have provisions protecting the right to free speech, free assembly, and a free press. "The gallery is a free speech area," says attorney Jim Mueller, who was ticketed in October for violating the Assembly rule. "Even if there are rules against signs, they're unconstitutional. It is our right to peaceably assemble and petition the government."
18 Arrested in Wisconsin Assembly for Using Cameras; Guns Still Allowed
by Brendan Fischer
Eighteen people were arrested Tuesday for using cameras in the Wisconsin Assembly gallery, including the editor of The Progressive magazine, Matt Rothschild.
Rothschild and others had gone to the capitol to protest a series of arrests in recent weeks of individuals who carried signs or took photos or video in defiance of an Assembly ban.
"We ought to have a right to take a picture," Rothschild said.
Guns, Yes. Cameras, No.
The protest was organized through a Facebook event called "Concealed Camera Day at the Capitol!" The event coincided with the implementation of Wisconsin's new concealed carry law, which allows residents to carry a concealed firearm -- including inside the Assembly gallery.
Stephen Colbert said Governor Walker was bringing "a new freedom to America's dairyland" with the concealed carry law, but said people would not see "images of gunfire in the statehouse" because of the camera ban. "Thank God. Cameras are dangerous," he said.
On the agenda in Tuesday's session was a bill to institute the Castle Doctrine, a "shoot first, ask questions later" bill that gives a person immunity from civil and criminal liability if they shoot another in self defense in their home, work, or vehicle. The American Legislative Exchange Council also has a model Castle Doctrine bill -- see the side-by-side here.
Event organizers were clear that the protests were not about the gun laws, but instead about protecting First Amendment rights.
But is it Legal?
The Open Meetings law includes this provision (§19.90):
"Use of equipment in open session. Whenever a governmental body holds a meeting in open session, the body shall make a reasonable effort to accommodate any person desiring to record, film or photograph the meeting. This section does not permit recording, filming or photographing such a meeting in a manner that interferes with the conduct of the meeting or the rights of the participants."
The statute also contains this provision (§ 19.87(2)):
"No provision of this subchapter which conflicts with a rule of the senate or assembly or joint rule of the legislature shall apply to a meeting conducted in compliance with such rule."
The legal issue here appears similar to the one that arose in the challenge to Governor Walker's collective bargaining law. In that case, Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne alleged that the union-busting law should be struck down because it was passed in violation of another provision of the Open Meetings law requiring notice. In part, Ozanne's challenge failed because the legislature had passed a rule that trumped the Open Meetings law.
Likewise, here the Assembly had a rule banning cameras and video, but under the court's ruling in the Ozanne suit, that rule trumped the Open Meetings law permitting their use.
Despite this, both the Wisconsin and U.S. Constitutions have provisions protecting the right to free speech, free assembly, and a free press. "The gallery is a free speech area," says attorney Jim Mueller, who was ticketed in October for violating the Assembly rule. "Even if there are rules against signs, they're unconstitutional. It is our right to peaceably assemble and petition the government."
© 2011 Center for Media and Democracy
Brendan M. Fischer is a law fellow with the Center for Media and Democracy and a student at the University of Wisconsin Law School in the class of 2011.
Is it really fair to blame the troops for the deaths caused by the guns they shoot?
Published on Thursday, November 3, 2011 by Salon.com
The Human Toll of the US Drone Campaign
by Glenn Greenwald
The principal reason so little attention is paid to the constant victims of American violence in the Muslim world is because the U.S. Government refuses to disclose anything about these attacks and media outlets virtually never report on those victims...[]
It’s easy to cheer for a leader who regularly extinguishes the lives of innocent men, women, teeangers and young children when you can remain blissfully free of hearing about the victims. It’s even easier when the victims all have Muslim-ish names and live in the parts of the Muslim world we’ve been taught to view as a cauldron of sub-human demons. That’s why it’s periodically worth highlighting the actual impact of those drones and the actual people they kill, as the BBC did [yesterday]:
When tribal elders from the remote Pakistani region of North Waziristan travelled to Islamabad last week to protest against CIA drone strikes, a teenager called Tariq Khan was among them.
A BBC team caught him on camera, sitting near the front of a tribal assembly, or jirga, listening carefully.
Four days later he was dead – killed by one of the drones he was protesting against.
His family told us two missiles hit the 16-year-old on Monday near Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan. His 12-year-old cousin Wahid was killed alongside him. . . .
After the missile strike on Monday, Pakistani officials said four suspected militants had been killed.
If the strike actually killed two young boys – as appears to be the case – it’s unlikely anyone will ever be held to account. . . .
Many senior commanders from the Taliban and al-Qaeda are among the dead. But campaigners claim there have been hundreds of civilian victims, whose stories are seldom told.
A shy teenage boy called Saadullah is one of them. He survived a drone strike that killed three of his relatives, but he lost both legs, one eye and his hope for the future.
“I wanted to be a doctor,” he told me, “but I can’t walk to school anymore. When I see others going, I wish I could join them.”
Like Tariq, Saadullah travelled to Islamabad for last week’s jirga. Seated alongside him was Haji Zardullah, a white-bearded man who said he lost four nephews in a separate attack.
“None of these were harmful people,” he said. “Two were still in school and one was in college.”
The article quotes the international human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith arguing that because Pakistan is not a war zone, these killings are “murder.”
Read the full article at Salon.com
©2011 Salon.com
Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book "How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, "A Tragic Legacy", examines the Bush legacy. His just-released book is titled "With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful." He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism.
Yes, but of course: "Too Big to Jail!"
Published on Thursday, November 3, 2011 by TruthDig.com
Too Big to Jail
by Robert Scheer
Can we all agree that a $1 billion swindle represents a lot of money, and the fact that Citigroup agreed last week to pay a $285 million fine to settle SEC charges for “misleading investors” demonstrates a damning admission of culpability?
So why has Robert Rubin, the onetime treasury secretary who went on to become Citigroup chairman during the time of the corporation’s financial shenanigans, never been held accountable for this and other deep damage done to the U.S. economy on his watch?
Rubin’s tenure atop the world of high finance began when he was co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, before he became Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary and pushed through the reversal of the Glass-Steagall Act, an action that legalized the formation of Citigroup and other “too big to fail” banking conglomerates.
Rubin’s destructive impact on the economy in enabling these giant corporate banks to run amok was far greater than that of swindler Bernard Madoff, who sits in prison under a 150-year sentence while Rubin sits on the Harvard Board of Overseers, as chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and as a leader of the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project.
Rubin was rewarded for his efforts on behalf of Citigroup with a top job as chairman of the bank’s executive committee and at least $126 million in compensation. That was “compensation” for steering the bank to the point of a bankruptcy avoided only by a $45 billion taxpayer bailout and a further guarantee of $300 billion of the bank’s toxic assets.
Those toxic assets and other collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps were exempted from government regulation by the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Rubin helped design while he was treasury secretary and which was turned into law when Rubin protégé Lawrence Summers took over that Cabinet post.
In arguing that the derivatives market in housing mortgages and other debt obligations required no government oversight, Summers told Congress, “First, the parties to these kinds of contracts are largely sophisticated financial institutions that would appear to be eminently capable of protecting themselves from fraud and counterparty insolvencies. ... Second, given the nature of the underlying assets—namely supplies of financial exchange and other financial instruments—there would seem to be little scope for market manipulation. ...”
Oops. One wonders if Summers, who went on to be president of Harvard after playing such a disastrous role in the federal government, ever asked his mentor Rubin what went wrong. After all, it was Rubin who was a honcho at the “sophisticated financial institution” of Citigroup when, as the Securities and Exchange Commission filing against the bank explains, Citigroup structured and marketed a $1 billion toxic asset to investors without disclosing that it was simultaneously betting against that asset.
Back in January of 2008, knowing full well of the chicanery of his own bank and others with which he was quite familiar, Rubin nonetheless told an audience at Cooper Union in New York that the turmoil in the markets was “all part of a cycle of periodic excess leading to periodic disruption.” CNNMoney, reporting on his talk, noted that Rubin “doesn’t seem particularly alarmed. ... And the economic problems that he did acknowledge were blamed on just about everyone but the major financial players.”
Rubin, who became a key adviser to the Obama campaign, has long cultivated an image as a do-gooder by making philanthropic contributions that deflect attention from the consequences of his own grievous actions. He has played a major role in shaping Obama administration economic policy not only through former aides like Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner but through the Hamilton Project, which he has funded at the Brookings Institution. The Hamilton Project has had much influence over the Democratic Party, and President Barack Obama as a young senator was the project’s first public speaker.
But facts these days tend to intrude in ways inconvenient to the superrich, who assume they can control the narrative. This month the Hamilton Project released a depressing assessment of the results of the era of radical market deregulation that Rubin’s policies launched, particularly as it had a horrendous effect on children.
Referring to the “Great Recession,” dismissed by Rubin at its inception as a mere blip in the business cycle, the report noted that the family income of the median child in the U.S. has fallen nearly 14 percent in the past five years and is now 7 percent lower than in 1975, concluding that while the income of the top 10 percent of families with children has increased 45 percent in the last 35 years, “half of America’s children are worse-off than their counterparts 35 years ago.”
That’s a telling obituary for the illusion, fostered by Robert Rubin as effectively as anyone, that the 22 percent of children in the United States who suffer below the poverty line and the offspring of multimillionaires like Rubin are living in the same America.
© 2011 TruthDig.com
Robert Scheer is editor of Truthdig.com and a regular columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle.
Too Big to Jail
by Robert Scheer
Can we all agree that a $1 billion swindle represents a lot of money, and the fact that Citigroup agreed last week to pay a $285 million fine to settle SEC charges for “misleading investors” demonstrates a damning admission of culpability?
So why has Robert Rubin, the onetime treasury secretary who went on to become Citigroup chairman during the time of the corporation’s financial shenanigans, never been held accountable for this and other deep damage done to the U.S. economy on his watch?
Rubin’s tenure atop the world of high finance began when he was co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, before he became Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary and pushed through the reversal of the Glass-Steagall Act, an action that legalized the formation of Citigroup and other “too big to fail” banking conglomerates.
Rubin’s destructive impact on the economy in enabling these giant corporate banks to run amok was far greater than that of swindler Bernard Madoff, who sits in prison under a 150-year sentence while Rubin sits on the Harvard Board of Overseers, as chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and as a leader of the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project.
Rubin was rewarded for his efforts on behalf of Citigroup with a top job as chairman of the bank’s executive committee and at least $126 million in compensation. That was “compensation” for steering the bank to the point of a bankruptcy avoided only by a $45 billion taxpayer bailout and a further guarantee of $300 billion of the bank’s toxic assets.
Those toxic assets and other collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps were exempted from government regulation by the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Rubin helped design while he was treasury secretary and which was turned into law when Rubin protégé Lawrence Summers took over that Cabinet post.
In arguing that the derivatives market in housing mortgages and other debt obligations required no government oversight, Summers told Congress, “First, the parties to these kinds of contracts are largely sophisticated financial institutions that would appear to be eminently capable of protecting themselves from fraud and counterparty insolvencies. ... Second, given the nature of the underlying assets—namely supplies of financial exchange and other financial instruments—there would seem to be little scope for market manipulation. ...”
Oops. One wonders if Summers, who went on to be president of Harvard after playing such a disastrous role in the federal government, ever asked his mentor Rubin what went wrong. After all, it was Rubin who was a honcho at the “sophisticated financial institution” of Citigroup when, as the Securities and Exchange Commission filing against the bank explains, Citigroup structured and marketed a $1 billion toxic asset to investors without disclosing that it was simultaneously betting against that asset.
Back in January of 2008, knowing full well of the chicanery of his own bank and others with which he was quite familiar, Rubin nonetheless told an audience at Cooper Union in New York that the turmoil in the markets was “all part of a cycle of periodic excess leading to periodic disruption.” CNNMoney, reporting on his talk, noted that Rubin “doesn’t seem particularly alarmed. ... And the economic problems that he did acknowledge were blamed on just about everyone but the major financial players.”
Rubin, who became a key adviser to the Obama campaign, has long cultivated an image as a do-gooder by making philanthropic contributions that deflect attention from the consequences of his own grievous actions. He has played a major role in shaping Obama administration economic policy not only through former aides like Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner but through the Hamilton Project, which he has funded at the Brookings Institution. The Hamilton Project has had much influence over the Democratic Party, and President Barack Obama as a young senator was the project’s first public speaker.
But facts these days tend to intrude in ways inconvenient to the superrich, who assume they can control the narrative. This month the Hamilton Project released a depressing assessment of the results of the era of radical market deregulation that Rubin’s policies launched, particularly as it had a horrendous effect on children.
Referring to the “Great Recession,” dismissed by Rubin at its inception as a mere blip in the business cycle, the report noted that the family income of the median child in the U.S. has fallen nearly 14 percent in the past five years and is now 7 percent lower than in 1975, concluding that while the income of the top 10 percent of families with children has increased 45 percent in the last 35 years, “half of America’s children are worse-off than their counterparts 35 years ago.”
That’s a telling obituary for the illusion, fostered by Robert Rubin as effectively as anyone, that the 22 percent of children in the United States who suffer below the poverty line and the offspring of multimillionaires like Rubin are living in the same America.
© 2011 TruthDig.com
Robert Scheer is editor of Truthdig.com and a regular columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle.
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