3rd PART OF PLUTOCRACY OR DIRECT DEMOCRACY ?

2009-08-01T12:08:00.004+10:00

THE ZIONIST LOBBY FOR USA IMPERIALISM, AND FOR EXPANDING THE ZIONIST EMPIRE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
by Benjamin Merhav

Except for unexplained absence of the zionist apartheid regime of Israel from her article below, the author of the article has done a very good job in exposing the current crimes of USA imperialism, as did the New Statesman by publishing it.

However, the role of the zionist diktat over the current USA administration cannot be ignored. For while Obama has been doing the demagoguery, to pacify the people inside the USA and outside it, his picked top henchmen have been busy implementing the zionist diktat on a world scale.

Thus, for example, on the deadly dangerous issue of zionist nuclear bombs production and deployment - which could easily engulf the entire humanity in a nuclear world war - not a single word was uttered by the entire Obama administration, as this is the zionist diktat, of course. Yet, in line with the zionist diktat, the ongoing campaign of threats, sanctions and subversion against Iran's nuclear program never stops, although Iran has not produced a single nuclear bomb to provide an excuse for such a campaign. Similarly is the ongoing campaign against North Korea.

The Obama administration, like the preceding Bush administration, continues to provide the zionist apartheid regime of Israel with some 4 billion USD annually - including, of course, free military assistance - and what for ? To perpetrate more war crimes and more crimes against humanity ? To perpetuate the zionist military occupation of the Golan Heights, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as keep Lebanon under the permanent threat of a zionist invasion ?

In his Cairo speech Obama pledged that the USA administration ties with the zionist apartheid regime of Israel will continue to be "unbreakable", and he does keep this pledge. Thus, for example, as part of the Obama "peace plan" ,the zionist apartheid regime of Israel had to stop exapanding the illegal zionist settlements in the West Bank (including occupied Jerusalem), but it openly refuses to do so. Obama's administration reaction has been to further promise the zionists that they need not fear any sanctions from the USA !

Here is the New Statesman article :

http://www.newstatesman.com/asia/2009/07/military-bases-world-war-iraq

Obama’s empire

by Catherine Lutz

The 44th president of the United States was elected amid hopes that he would roll back his country’s global dominance. Today, he is commander-in-chief of an unprecedented network of military bases that is still expanding.

July 30, 2009 "New Statesman" -- In December 2008, shortly before being sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, Barack Obama pledged his belief that, "to ensure prosperity here at home and peace abroad", it was vital to maintain "the strongest military on the planet". Unveiling his national security team, including George Bush's defence secretary, Robert Gates, he said: "We also agree the strength of our military has to be combined with the wisdom and force of diplomacy, and that we are going to be committed to rebuilding and restrengthening alliances around the world to advance American interests and American security."

Unfortunately, many of the Obama administration's diplomatic efforts are being directed towards maintaining and garnering new access for the US military across the globe. US military officials, through their Korean proxies, have completed the eviction of resistant rice farmers from their land around Camp Humphreys, South Korea, for its expansion (including a new 18-hole golf course); they are busily making back-room deals with officials in the Northern Mariana Islands to gain the use of the Pacific islands there for bombing and training purposes; and they are scrambling to express support for a regime in Kyrgyzstan that has been implicated in the murder of its political opponents but whose Manas Airbase, used to stage US military actions in Afghanistan since 2001, Obama and the Pentagon consider crucial for the expanded war there.

The global reach of the US military today is unprecedented and unparalleled. Officially, more than 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees are massed in approximately 900 military facilities in 46 countries and territories (the unofficial figure is far greater). The US military owns or rents 795,000 acres of land, with 26,000 buildings and structures, valued at $146bn (£89bn). The bases bristle with an inventory of weapons whose worth is measured in the trillions and whose killing power could wipe out all life on earth several times over.

The official figures exclude the huge build-up of troops and structures in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade, as well as secret or unacknowledged facilities in Israel, Kuwait, the Philippines and many other places. In just three years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, £2bn was spent on military construction. A single facility in Iraq, Balad Airbase, houses 30,000 troops and 10,000 contractors, and extends across 16 square miles, with an additional 12 square mile "security perimeter". From the battle zones of Afghanistan and Iraq to quiet corners of Curaçao, Korea and Britain, the US military domain consists of sprawling army bases, small listening posts, missile and artillery testing ranges and berthed aircraft carriers (moved to "trouble spots" around the world, each carrier is considered by the US navy as "four and a half acres of sovereign US territory"). While the bases are, literally speaking, barracks and weapons depots, staging areas for war-making and ship repairs, complete with golf courses and basketball courts, they are also political claims, spoils of war, arms sale showrooms and toxic industrial sites. In addition to the cultural imperialism and episodes of rape, murder, looting and land seizure that have always accompanied foreign armies, local communities are now subjected to the ear-splitting noise of jets on exercise, to the risk of helicopters and warplanes crashing into residential areas, and to exposure to the toxic materials that the military uses in its daily operations.

The global expansion of US bases - and with it the rise of the US as a world superpower - is a legacy of the Second World War. In 1938, the US had 14 military bases outside its continental borders. Seven years later, it had 30,000 installations in roughly 100 countries. While this number was projected to shrink to 2,000 by 1948 (following pressure from other nations to return bases in their own territory or colonies, and pressure at home to demobilise the 12 million-man military), the US continued to pursue access rights to land and air space around the world. It established security alliances with multiple states within Europe (NATO), the Middle East and south Asia (CENTO) and south-east Asia (SEATO), as well as bilateral agreements with Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAS) were crafted in each country to specify what the military could do, and usually gave US soldiers broad immunity from prosecution for crimes committed and environmental damage caused. These agreements and subsequent base operations have mostly been shrouded in secrecy, helped by the National Security Act of 1947. New US bases were built in remarkable numbers in West Germany, Italy, Britain and Japan, with the defeated Axis powers hosting the most significant numbers (at one point, Japan was peppered with 3,800 US installations).

As battles become bases, so bases become battles; the sites in east Asia acquired during the Spanish-American war in 1898 and during the Second World War - such as Guam, Thailand and the Philippines - became the primary bases from which the US waged war on Vietnam. The number of raids over north and south Vietnam required tons of bombs unloaded at the naval station in Guam. The morale of ground troops based in Vietnam, as fragile as it was to become through the latter part of the 1960s, depended on R&R (rest and recreation) at bases outside the country, which allowed them to leave the war zone and yet be shipped back quickly and inexpensively for further fighting. The war also depended on the heroin the CIA was able to ship in to the troops on the battlefield in Vietnam from its secret bases in Laos. By 1967, the number of US bases had returned to 1947 levels.

Technological changes in warfare have had important effects on the configuration of US bases. Long-range missiles and the development of ships that can make much longer runs without resupply have altered the need for a line of bases to move forces forward into combat zones, as has the aerial refuelling of military jets. An arms airlift from the US to the British in the Middle East in 1941-42, for example, required a long hopscotch of bases, from Florida to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Barbados, Trinidad, British Guiana, north-east Brazil, Fernando de Noronha, Takoradi (now in Ghana), Lagos, Kano (now in Nigeria) and Khartoum, before finally making delivery in Egypt. In the early 1970s, US aircraft could make the same delivery with one stop in the Azores, and today can do so non-stop.

On the other hand, the pouring of money into military R&D (the Pentagon has spent more than $85bn in 2009), and the corporate profits to be made in the development and deployment of the resulting technologies, have been significant factors in the ever larger numbers of technical facilities on foreign soil. These include such things as missile early-warning radar, signals intelligence, satellite control and space-tracking telescopes. The will to gain military control of space, as well as gather intelligence, has led to the establishment of numerous new military bases in violation of arms-control agreements such as the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. In Colombia and Peru, and in secret and mobile locations elsewhere in Latin America, radar stations are primarily used for anti-trafficking operations.

Since 2000, with the election of George W Bush and the ascendancy to power of a group of men who believed in a more aggressive and unilateral use of military power (some of whom stood to profit handsomely from the increased military budget that would require), US imperial ambition has grown. Following the declaration of a war on terror and of the right to pre-emptive war, the number of countries into which the US inserted and based troops radically expanded. The Pentagon put into action a plan for a network of "deployment" or "forward operating" bases to increase the reach of current and future forces. The Pentagon-aligned, neoconservative think tank the Project for the New American Century stressed that "while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein".

The new bases are designed to operate not defensively against particular threats but as offensive, expeditionary platforms from which military capabilities can be projected quickly, anywhere. The Global Defence Posture Review of 2004 announced these changes, focusing not just on reorienting the footprint of US bases away from cold war locations, but on remaking legal arrangements that support expanded military activities with other allied countries and prepositioning equipment in those countries. As a recent army strategic document notes, "Military personnel can be transported to, and fall in on, prepositioned equipment significantly more quickly than the equivalent unit could be transported to the theatre, and prepositioning equipment overseas is generally less politically difficult than stationing US military personnel."

Terms such as facility, outpost or station are used for smaller bases to suggest a less permanent presence. The US department of defence currently distinguishes between three types of military facility. "Main operating bases" are those with permanent personnel, strong infrastructure, and often family housing, such as Kadena Airbase in Japan and Ramstein Airbase in Germany. "Forward operating sites" are "expandable warm facilit[ies] maintained with a limited US military support presence and possibly prepositioned equipment", such as Incirlik Airbase in Turkey and Soto Cano Airbase in Honduras. Finally, "co-operative security locations" are sites with few or no permanent US personnel, maintained by contractors or the host nation for occasional use by the US military, and often referred to as "lily pads". These are cropping up around the world, especially throughout Africa, a recent example being in Dakar, Senegal.

Moreover, these bases are the anchor - and merely the most visible aspect - of the US military's presence overseas. Every year, US forces train 100,000 soldiers in 180 countries, the presumption being that beefed-up local militaries will help to pursue US interests in local conflicts and save the US money, casualties and bad publicity when human rights abuses occur (the blowback effect of such activities has been made clear by the strength of the Taliban since 9/11). The US military presence also involves jungle, urban, desert, maritime and polar training exercises across wide swathes of landscape, which have become the pretext for substantial and permanent positioning of troops. In recent years, the US has run around 20 exercises annually on Philippine soil, which have resulted in a near-continuous presence of US soldiers in a country whose people ejected US bases in 1992 and whose constitution forbids foreign troops to be based on its territory. Finally, US personnel work every day to shape local legal codes to facilitate US access: they have lobbied, for example, to change the Philippine and Japanese constitutions to allow, respectively, foreign troop basing and a more-than-defensive military.

Asked why the US has a vast network of military bases around the world, Pentagon officials give both utilitarian and humanitarian arguments. Utilitarian arguments include the claim that bases provide security for the US by deterring attack from hostile countries and preventing or remedying unrest or military challenges; that bases serve the national economic interests of the US, ensuring access to markets and commodities needed to maintain US standards of living; and that bases are symbolic markers of US power and credibility - and so the more the better. Humanitarian arguments present bases as altruistic gifts to other nations, helping to liberate or democratise them, or offering aid relief. None of these humanitarian arguments deals with the problem that many of the bases were taken during wartime and "given" to the US by another of the war's victors.

Critics of US foreign policy have dissected and dismantled the arguments made for maintaining a global system of military basing. They have shown that the bases have often failed in their own terms: despite the Pentagon's claims that they provide security to the regions they occupy, most of the world's people feel anything but reassured by their presence. Instead of providing more safety for the US or its allies, they have often provoked attacks, and have made the communities around bases key targets of other nations' missiles. On the island of Belau in the Pacific, the site of sharp resistance to US attempts to instal a submarine base and jungle training centre, people describe their experience of military basing in the Second World War: "When soldiers come, war comes." On Guam, a joke among locals is that few people except for nuclear strategists in the Kremlin know where their island is.

As for the argument that bases serve the national economic interest of the US, the weapons, personnel and fossil fuels involved cost billions of dollars, most coming from US taxpayers. While bases have clearly been concentrated in countries with key strategic resources, particularly along the routes of oil and gas pipelines in central Asia, the Middle East and, increasingly, Africa, from which one-quarter of US oil imports are expected by 2015, the profits have gone first of all to the corporations that build and service them, such as Halliburton. The myth that bases are an altruistic form of "foreign aid" for locals is exploded by the substantial costs involved for host economies and polities. The immediate negative effects include levels of pollution, noise, crime and lost productive land that cannot be offset by soldiers' local spending or employment of local people. Other putative gains tend to benefit only local elites and further militarise the host nations: elaborate bilateral negotiations swap weapons, cash and trade privileges for overflight and land-use rights. Less explicitly, rice imports, immigration rights to the US or overlooking human rights abuses have been the currency of exchange.

The environmental, political, and economic impact of these bases is enormous. The social problems that accompany bases, including soldiers' violence against women and car crashes, have to be handled by local communities without compensation from the US. Some communities pay the highest price: their farmland taken for bases, their children neurologically damaged by military jet fuel in their water supplies, their neighbors imprisoned, tortured and disappeared by the autocratic regimes that survive on US military and political support given as a form of tacit rent for the bases. The US military has repeatedly interfered in the domestic affairs of nations in which it has or desires military access, operating to influence votes and undermine or change local laws that stand in the way.

Social movements have proliferated around the world in response to the empire of US bases, ever since its inception. The attempt to take the Philippines from Spain in 1898 led to a drawn-out guerrilla war for independence that required 126,000 US occupation troops to stifle. Between 1947 and 1990, the US military was asked to leave France, Yugoslavia, Iran, Ethiopia, Libya, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Algeria, Vietnam, Indonesia, Peru, Mexico and Venezuela. Popular and political objection to the bases in Spain, the Philippines, Greece and Turkey in the 1980s gave those governments the grounds to negotiate significantly more compensation from the US. Portugal threatened to evict the US from important bases in the Azores unless it ceased its support for independence for its African colonies.

Since 1990, the US has been sent packing, most significantly, from the Philippines, Panama, Saudi Arabia, Vieques and Uzbekistan. Of its own accord, for varying reasons, it decided to leave countries from Ghana to Fiji. Persuading the US to clean up after itself - including, in Panama, more than 100,000 rounds of unexploded ordnance - is a further struggle. As in the case of the US navy's removal from Vieques in 2003, arguments about the environmental and health damage of the military's activities remain the centrepiece of resistance to bases.

Many are also concerned by other countries' overseas bases - primarily European, Russian and Chinese - and by the activities of their own militaries, but the far greater number of US bases and their weaponry has understandably been the focus. The sense that US bases represent a major injustice to the host community and nation is very strong in countries where US bases have the longest standing and are most ubiquitous. In Okinawa, polls show that 70 to 80 per cent of the island's people want the bases, or at least the marines, to leave. In 1995, the abduction and rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl by two US marines and one US sailor led to demands for the removal of all US bases in Japan. One family in Okinawa has built a large peace museum right up against the edge of the Futenma Airbase, with a stairway to the roof that allows busloads of schoolchildren and other visitors to view the sprawling base after looking at art depicting the horrors of war.

In Korea, the great majority of the population feels that a reduction in US presence would increase national security; in recent years, several violent deaths at the hands of US soldiers triggered vast candlelight vigils and protests across the country. And the original inhabitants of Diego Garcia, evicted from their homes between 1967 and 1973 by the British on behalf of the US for a naval base, have organised a concerted campaign for the right to return, bringing legal suit against the British government, a story told in David Vine's recent book Island of Shame. There is also resistance to the US expansion plans into new areas. In 2007, a number of African nations baulked at US attempts to secure access to sites for military bases. In eastern Europe, despite well-funded campaigns to convince Poles and Czechs of the value of US bases and much sentiment in favour of accepting them in pursuit of closer ties with Nato and the EU, and promised economic benefits, vigorous protests have included hunger strikes and led the Czech government, in March, to reverse its plan to allow a US military radar base to be built in the country.

The US has responded to action against bases with a renewed emphasis on "force protection", in some cases enforcing curfews on soldiers, and cutting back on events that bring local people on to base property. The department of defence has also engaged in the time-honoured practice of renaming: clusters of soldiers, buildings and equipment have become "defence staging posts" or "forward operating locations" rather than military bases. Regulating documents become "visiting forces agreements", not "status of forces agreements", or remain entirely secret. While major reorganisation of bases is under way for a host of reasons, including a desire to create a more mobile force with greater access to the Middle East, eastern Europe and central Asia, the motives also include an attempt to prevent political momentum of the sort that ended US use of the Vieques and Philippine bases.

The attempt to gain permanent basing in Iraq foundered in 2008 on the objections of forces in both Iraq and the US. Obama, in his Cairo speech in June, may have insisted that "we pursue no bases" in either Iraq or Afghanistan, but there has been no sign of any significant dismantling of bases there, or of scaling back the US military presence in the rest of the world. The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, recently visited Japan to ensure that it follows through on promises to provide the US with a new airfield on Okinawa and billions of dollars to build new housing and other facilities for 8,000 marines relocating to Guam. She ignored the invitation of island activists to come and see the damage left by previous decades of US base activities. The myriad land-grabs and hundreds of billions of dollars spent to quarter troops around the world persist far beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, and too far from the headlines.

Catherine Lutz is a professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

2009-05-16T09:33:00.000+10:00

http://countercurrents.org/roberts150509.htm

Who Rules America?

By Paul Craig Roberts

15 May, 2009
Countercurrents.org

What do you suppose it is like to be elected president of the United States only to find that your power is restricted to the service of powerful interest groups?

A president who does a good job for the ruling interest groups is paid off with remunerative corporate directorships, outrageous speaking fees, and a lucrative book contract. If he is young when he assumes office, like Bill Clinton and Obama, it means a long life of luxurious leisure.

Fighting the special interests doesn’t pay and doesn’t succeed. On April 30 the primacy of special over public interests was demonstrated yet again. The Democrats’ bill to prevent 1.7 million mortgage foreclosures and, thus, preserve $300 billion in home equity by permitting homeowners to renegotiate their mortgages, was defeated in the Senate, despite the 60-vote majority of the Democrats. The banksters were able to defeat the bill 51 to 45.

These are the same financial gangsters whose unbridled greed and utter irresponsibility have wiped out half of Americans’ retirement savings, sent the economy into a deep hole, and threatened the US dollar’s reserve currency role. It is difficult to imagine an interest group with a more damaged reputation. Yet, a majority of “the people’s representatives” voted as the discredited banksters instructed.

Hundreds of billions of public dollars have gone to bail out the banksters, but when some Democrats tried to get the Senate to do a mite for homeowners, the US Senate stuck with the banks. The Senate’s motto is: “Hundreds of billions for the banksters, not a dime for homeowners.”

If Obama was naive about well-intentioned change before the vote, he no longer has this political handicap.

Democratic Majority Whip Dick Durbin acknowledged the voters’ defeat by the discredited banksters. The banks, Durbin said, “frankly own the place.”

It is not difficult to understand why. Among those who defeated the homeowners bill are senators Jon Tester (Mont), Max Baucus (Mont), Blanche Lincoln (Ark), Ben Nelson (Neb), Many Landrieu (La), Tim Johnson (SD), and Arlan Specter (Pa). According to reports, the banksters have poured a half million dollars into Tester’s campaign funds. Baucus has received $3.5 million; Lincoln $1.3 million; Nelson $1.4 million; Landrieu $2 million; Johnson $2.5 million; Specter $4.5 million.

The same Congress that can’t find a dime for homeowners or health care appropriates hundreds of billions of dollars for the military/security complex. The week after the Senate foreclosed on American homeowners, the Obama “change” administration asked Congress for an additional $61 billion dollars for the neoconservatives’ war in Iraq and $65 billion more for the neoconservatives’ war in Afghanistan. Congress greeted this request with a rousing “Yes we can!”

The additional $126 billion comes on top of the $533.7 billion “defense” budget for this year. The $660 billion--probably a low-ball number--is ten times the military spending of China, the second most powerful country in the world.

How is it possible that “the world’s only superpower” is threatened by the likes of Iraq and Afghanistan? How can the US be a superpower if it is threatened by countries that have no military capability other than a guerilla capability to resist invaders?

These “wars” are a hoax designed to enrich the US armaments industry and to infuse the “security forces” with police powers over American citizenry.

Not a dime to prevent millions of Americans from losing their homes, but hundreds of billions of dollars to murder Muslim women and children and to create millions of refugees, many of whom will either sign up with insurgents or end up as the next wave of immigrants into America.

This is the way the American government works. And it thinks it is a “city on the hill, a light unto the world.”

Americans elected Obama because he said he would end the gratuitous criminal wars of the Bush brownshirts, wars that have destroyed America’s reputation and financial solvency and serve no public interest. But once in office Obama found that he was ruled by the military/security complex. War is not being ended, merely transferred from the unpopular war in Iraq to the more popular war in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Obama, in violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty, continues to attack “targets” in Pakistan. In place of a war in Iraq, the military/security complex now has two wars going in much more difficult circumstances.

Viewing the promotion gravy train that results from decades of warfare, the US officer corps has responded to the “challenge to American security” from the Taliban. “We have to kill them over there before they come over here.” No member of the US government or its numerous well-paid agents has ever explained how the Taliban, which is focused on Afghanistan, could ever get to America. Yet this hyped fear is sufficient for the public to support the continuing enrichment of the military/security complex, while American homes are foreclosed by the banksters who have destroyed the retirement prospects of the US population..

According to Pentagon budget documents, by next year the cost of the war against Afghanistan will exceed the cost of the war against Iraq. According to a Nobel prize-winning economist and a budget expert at Harvard University, the war against Iraq has cost the American taxpayers $3 trillion, that is, $3,000 billion in out-of-pocket and already incurred future costs, such as caring for veterans.

If the Pentagon is correct, then by next year the US government will have squandered $6 trillion dollars on two wars, the only purpose of which is to enrich the munitions manufacturers and the “security” bureaucracy.

The human and social costs are dramatic as well and not only for the Iraqi, Afghan, and Pakistani populations ravaged by American bombs. Dahr Jamail reports that US Army psychiatrists have concluded that by their third deployment, 30 percent of American troops are mental wrecks. Among the costs that reverberate across generations of Americans are elevated rates of suicide, unemployment, divorce, child and spousal abuse, drug and alcohol addiction, homelessness and incarceration. http://www.truthout.org/051209J?n

In the Afghan “desert of death” the Obama administration is constructing a giant military base. Why? What does the internal politics of Afghanistan have to do with the US?

What is this enormous waste of resources that America does not have accomplishing besides enriching the American munitions industry?

China and to some extent India are the rising powers in the world. Russia, the largest country on earth, is armed with a nuclear arsenal as terrifying as the American one. The US dollar’s role as reserve currency, the most important source of American power, is undermined by the budget deficits that result from the munition corporations’ wars and the bankster bailouts.

Why is the US making itself impotent fighting wars that have nothing whatsoever to do with its security, wars that are, in fact, threatening its security?

The answer is that the military/security lobby, the financial gangsters, and AIPAC rule. The American people be damned.

2008-11-23T22:13:00.001+11:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/
Sunday, 23 November 2008

FEATURES, VIEWS, ANALYSIS

Seething anger

Why the Swiss want bank bosses fed to crocodiles

(Emphasis in red added - B.M.)

2008-11-22T08:32:00.000+11:00

"It's time to stop tinkering with a failed system"
by Benjamin Merhav

What humanity needs is not a "plan B", as the author of the article below concludes.What we all need right now is not the continuation of the "democracy" circus, as the bosses of the USA ruling class continue to do by replacing the former circus chief clown with a new one. What we all need now is the urgent replacement of the capitalist system by a direct and participatory democracy, a genuine democracy !

POWER TO THE PEOPLE NOW, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE !

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21280.htm
This Is Not A Normal Recession

Moving on to Plan B

By Mike Whitney

November 20, 2008 "Information Clearinghouse" -- - "The Winter of 2008-2009 will prove to be the winter of global economic discontent that marks the rejection of the flawed ideology that unregulated global financial markets promote financial innovation, market efficiency, unhampered growth and endless prosperity while mitigating risk by spreading it system wide." Economists Paul Davidson and Henry C.K. Liu "Open Letter to World Leaders attending the November 15 White House Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy" .

The global economy is being sucked into a black hole and most Americans have no idea why. The whole problem can be narrowed down to two words; "structured finance".

Structured finance is a term that designates a sector of finance where risk is transferred via complex legal and corporate entities. It's not as confusing as it sounds. Take a mortgage-backed security (MBS), for example. The mortgage is issued by a bank (the loan originator) which then sells the mortgage to a brokerage where it is chopped up into tranches (pieces of the loan) and sold in a pool of mortgages to investors that are looking for a rate that is greater than Treasurys or similar investments. The process of transforming debt ("the mortgage") into a security is called securitization. At one time, the MBS was a reasonably safe investment because the housing market was stable and there were relatively few foreclosures. Thus, the chance of losing one's investment was quite small.

In the early years of the Bush administration, Wall Street took advantage of the gigantic flow of capital coming into the country ($700 billion per year via the current account deficit) by creating more and more MBSs and selling them to foreign banks, hedge funds and insurance companies. It was real gold rush. Because the banks were merely the mortgage originators, they didn't believe their own money was at risk, so they gradually lowered lending standards and issued millions of loans to unqualified applicants who had no job, no collateral and a bad credit history. Securitization was such a hit, that by 2005, nearly 80 percent of all mortgages were securitized and the traditional criteria for getting a mortgage was abandoned altogether. Subprimes, Alt-As and ARMs flourished, while the "30 year fixed" went the way of the Dodo. Lenders were no longer constrained by "creditworthiness"; anyone with a pulse and a pen could get approved. The mortgages were then shipped off to Wall Street where they were sold to credulous investors.

The disaggregation of risk--spreading the risk to many investors via securitization--was as much of a factor in the creation of "the largest equity bubble in history", as the banks lax lending standards or Greenspan's low interest rates. By spreading risk throughout the system, securitization keeps interest rates artificially low because the real risks are not properly priced. The low interest rates, in turn, stimulate speculation which results in equity bubbles. Eventually, credit expansion leads to crisis when borrowers can no longer make the interest payments on their loans and defaults spiral out of control. This forces massive deleveraging and the fire-sale of assets in illiquid markets. As assets lose value, prices fall and the economy enters a deflationary cycle.

There are many types of of structured instruments including asset-backed securities (ABS), mortgage-backed securities (MBS), collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) all of which provide a revenue stream from loans that were chopped into tranches and turned into securities. There are many problems with these complex securities, the biggest of which is that there is no way to unravel the individual pools of loans to isolate the bad paper. That's why subprime mortgages had such a destructive affect on the secondary market, because--even though subprimes only defaulted at a rate of roughly 5 percent--MBS sales slumped nearly 90 percent. Why? Former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill explained it like this: "It's like you have 8 bottles of water and just one of them has arsenic in it. It becomes impossible to sell any of the other bottles because no one knows which one contains the poison."

Exactly right. So why weren't these structured debt-instruments "stress tested" before the markets were reworked and the financial system became so dependent on them?

Greed. Because the real purpose of these exotic investments is not to provide true value to the buyer, but to maximize profits for the seller by increasing leverage. That is the real purpose of MBS, CDOs and all the other bizarre-sounding derivatives; higher profits with less capital. It's a scam. Here's how it works: A mortgage applicant buys a house for $400,000 and puts 10 percent down. His mortgage is sold to Wall Street, chopped into pieces, and stitched together in a pool of similar loans. Now the brokerage can use the debt as if it were an asset, borrowing at ratios of 20 or 30 to 1 to fatten the bottom line. When Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken into conservatorship by the government, they were leveraged at an eye-popping 100 to 1. This shows that nearly an infinite amount of debt can be precariously balanced atop a paltry amount of capital. This explains why the $4 trillion aggregate value of the 5 big investment banks and the $1.7 trillion value of the hedge funds is now vanishing more quickly than it was created. Once the mighty gears of structured finance shift into reverse, deleveraging begins with a vengeance pulling trillions into a credit vacuum.

It all started when two Bear Stearns hedge funds defaulted in July 2006 and there were no offers for their MBS and other structured investments. Panic quickly spread to every corner of Wall Street as the alchemists of modern finance began to see that their worst nightmare might be realized, that trillions of dollars of Frankenstein investments could be worth nothing at all.

Since the Bear Stearns funds fiasco, there have been huge explosions in the financial markets. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Wachovia, Washington Mutual, Indybank, AIG, Lehman Bros and other industry giants have either gone under or been forced into shotgun weddings by the FDIC. The stock market has plunged over 40 percent and suffered wild gyrations not seen since the 1930s. The entire Wall Street landscape has changed completely. Investment banking is no longer a viable business model; the Big 5 have either vanished or transformed themselves into holding companies to escape short sellers. The hedge funds have been deleveraging with a ferocity that has sent sent stocks and commodities crashing. In one day last week, the stock market plunged 300 points in the morning only to bounce back 550 points a few hours later; a whopping 850 point-spread in one trading day! No one but a madman would dabble in this market. Cautious investors have pulled up stakes and moved to the safety of Treasurys. Meanwhile, the financial tsunami is roaring through the real economy where consumer confidence has plummeted, unemployment is soaring and retail sales have fallen to historic lows. The downdraft from the financial markets has flattened Main Street and set the stage for a humongous $500 billion stimulus package to be delivered in the first few months of the Obama administration. The meltdown appears to be playing out much like Henry Paulson anticipated. According to Bloomberg News : "Shortly after leaving Wall Street as Goldman Sachs' CEO, Henry Paulson was at Camp David warning the president and his staff of "over-the-counter derivatives as an example of financial innovation that could, under certain circumstances, blow up in Wall Street's face and affect the whole economy." (PAUL B. FARRELL, "30 reasons for Great Depression 2 by 2011", MarketWatch)

So far, the Federal Reserve has provided nearly $2 trillion through its lending facilities just to keep the financial system upright. The Treasury is currently distributing $700 billion to key banks and other financial institutions that are perceived to be "too big to fail". In truth, the "too big to fail" mantra is a just public relations hoax to conceal the web of counterparty deals that make it impossible for one institution to fail without dominoing through the rest of the system and wreaking havoc. That's why AIG is still on life-support with regular injections of taxpayer money; because it had roughly $4 trillion of credit default swaps (structured "hedges" that are not traded on a regulated exchange) for which AIG does not have sufficient capital reserves. In other words, the taxpayer is now paying the debts of an insurance company that didn't set aside the money to pay its claims. (As yet, No SEC indictments for securities fraud) In fact, the Fed and Treasury are now providing a backstop for the entire structured finance system which is frozen solid and shows no sign of thawing any time soon.

This is not a normal recession, which is a downturn in the business cycle and "a period of reduced economic activity" usually brought on by a mismatch between supply and demand. (that ends in two quarters of negative growth) The present situation is much more grave; it is the utter destruction of a system that was developed fairly recently and has proven to be thoroughly dysfunctional. It cannot withstand the effects of tighter credit or adverse market conditions. This is not a cyclical downturn; the structured finance system has collapsed leaving behind a multi-trillion dollar capital hole that is bringing the broader economy to its knees.

One by one, we have seen the structured instruments fail; mortgage-backed securities (MBS), collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), credit default swaps (CDS), commercial paper (CP), auction rate securities. Now we are seeing investors boycott anything related to structured investments. This is from Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis:

"There were NO sales of bonds backed by credit-card payments in October, the first time since 1993, when the asset-backed securities market was in its infancy. Yields on top-rated credit card bonds relative to benchmark interest rates reached a record high of 525 basis points more than the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, last week, according to Bank of America Corp. data."

Wall Street has turned off the faucet for securitized investments. That market is toast. The only reason that Libor and the other gauges of interbank lending have normalized is because the Fed guaranteed money markets and commercial paper. It has nothing to do with trust between the banks themselves. There is no trust. Even so, the banks are not capable of making up for the vast amount of credit which was produced by the now-defunct investment banks and hedge funds which are constrained by losses of nearly $3.5 trillion; half of their total value. In the best case scenario, bank credit will only shrink 15 or 20 percent, which will put the US on track for a deep "18 month to 2 year" recession rather than another Great Depression.

Paulson's attempt to divert $30 billion to non-bank financial institutions to revive loan securitization when there is no appetite among investors for such structured junk is pure folly. More troubling, is that neither Paulson nor Bernanke have a Plan B; an alternate scheme for rebuilding the financial markets on a solid, sustainable foundation rather than low interest rates and pools of debt. Everything they have done so far, suggests that they are focused on one thing alone; inflating another equity bubble. "Inflate or die", as the saying goes; and Bernanke intends to achieve this objective using the same tools that brought us to the brink of catastrophe. Here's a clip from a recent speech by Bernanke which shows his determination to prop up the broken system:

"The ability of financial intermediaries to sell the mortgages they originate into the broader capital market by means of the securitization process serves two important purposes: First, it provides originators much wider sources of funding than they could obtain through conventional sources, such as retail deposits; second, it substantially reduces the originator's exposure to interest rate, credit, prepayment, and other risks associated with holding mortgages to maturity, thereby reducing the overall costs of providing mortgage credit."

Sorry, Ben, the funding has dried up and the banks have shown no interest in going back to the days of conventional "30-year fixed" mortgages. It's a dead letter. The Fed and Treasury need to stop looking for ways to reflate the bubble and work to restore confidence in the markets by increasing regulation and reducing the amount of leverage that's allowable to 12 to 1. After all, it's no coincidence that AIG, Fannie and Freddie, Lehman Bros, General Motors, General Electric have all fallen off a cliff at the very same time. They are all victims of the same low interest, easy money finance swindle which allowed them to roll over huge amounts of short-term debt at artificially low cost. When Bear blew up; lending tightened, demand weakened, and credit was flushed from the system at an unprecedented pace. Borrowing short for long-term investments is not feasible when credit becomes scarce, but it's not because the banks aren't lending. That's just another myth that keeps the public from seeing what's really going on. As Jon Hilsenrath points out in his Wall Street Journal article, "Banks Keep Lending, but that isn't easing the crisis", that is not the case:

"Banks actually are lending at record levels. Their commercial and industrial loans, at $1.6 trillion in early November, were up 15% from a year earlier and grew at a 25% annual rate during the past three months, according to weekly Federal Reserve data. Home-equity loans, at $578 billion, were up 21% from a year ago and grew at a 48% annual rate in three months....The numbers point to one of the great challenges of the crisis. The credit crunch is surely real, but it is complex and not easily managed. Banks are lending, but they're also under serious strain as they act as backstops to a larger problem -- the breakdown of securities markets..The worst of the credit crisis is being felt not in banks but in financial markets..."

The banks are not to blame. There is a generalized contraction of credit in the non-bank financial system where structured finance has blown up and taken half of Wall Street with it. It's the end of an era. Here's how economist Henry C. K. Liu sums it up in his "Open Letter to World Leaders attending the November 15 White House Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy":

"Neoliberal economists in the last three decades have denied the possibility of a replay of the worldwide destructiveness of the Great Depression that followed the collapse of the speculative bubble created by unfettered US financial markets of the 'Roaring Twenties'. They fooled themselves into thinking that false prosperity built on debt could be sustainable with monetary indulgence. Now history is repeating itself, this time with a new, more lethal virus that has infested deregulated global financial markets with 'innovative' debt securitization, structured finance and maverick banking operations flooded with excess liquidity released by accommodative central banks. A massive structure of phantom wealth was built on the quicksand of debt manipulation. This debt bubble finally imploded in July 2007 and is now threatening to bring down the entire global financial system to cause an economic meltdown unless enlightened political leadership adopts coordinated corrective measures on a global scale."

Rome is burning. It's time to stop tinkering with a failed system and move on to "Plan B" before it's too late.

(Emphasis added - B.M.)

2008-10-07T09:50:00.000+11:00

http://countercurrents.org/

America ! Be Truly Afraid

By Rand Clifford

06 October, 2008
Countercurrents.org

While compulsory lying, distractions and inane diversions reduce our fourth estate into corporate government’s fifth column, it seems omission is the key tactic so solidly embedding mainstream corporate media into an exploiter of the people. Americans remain well informed regarding celebrities, entertainment, sports and weather—but when it comes to information people need to vote intelligently, understand what corporate government is really up to, or understand environmental issues, corporate media is little more than special-interest propaganda. And when it comes to the complex relationship of the nation and its citizens to the 95% of global population that are not American...strategies such as omission perpetuate the fossilized notion of "we’re number one" being all that Americans really need to know.

So what if instead of subjugating, dividing and stupefying the the people, corporate media actually lived up to its noblest reason for being and served the peoples’ best interests? What might be some of the headlines we’d see, and the essence driving them?

Perhaps....

Closed-door session of the House prompts representative outrage, leaks

(March 13, 2008) The House of Representatives held only its sixth closed session since 1812, and the first since July 1983, when it secretly discussed U.S. support for the Contras in Nicaragua. The publicly stated reason for the recent closed session was for members to discuss new citizen surveillance provisions. However, conversations off the record have indicated that the meeting was primarily about nine key issues:

1) the imminent collapse of the U.S. economy to occur by September 2008

2) the imminent collapse of U.S. federal government finances by February 2009

3) the possibility of civil war inside the USA as a result of the collapses

4) advance round-ups of "insurgent U.S. citizens" (those opposing the New World Order) likely to move against the government

5) detention of those rounded-up at "REX 84"camps constructed throughout the USA

6) possibility of retaliation against members of Congress for the collapses

7) the location of "safe facilities" for members of Congress and their families to reside during expected massive civil unrest

8) the necessary and unavoidable merger of the United States with Canada (for its natural resources) and Mexico (for its pool of cheap labor)

9) the issuance of a new currency – THE AMERO – for all three nations as the proposed solution to the upcoming economic Armageddon....

Imagine how much the above information would help people understand the enormity of, and better navigate lies blooming around the following:

Constitution violated, U.S. infantry troops to be deployed on U.S. soil starting October 1

The "Raiders", First Brigade Combat Team of the Third Division, are now under the command of US Army North, the Army’s component of NorthCom—the Pentagon’s northern command, which was created after 9/11 to defend the US "homeland" and aid local, state and federal authorities. Posse Comitatus was an act passed by Congress on June 16, 1878, which prohibits federal uniformed services from being deployed on non-federal property to maintain "law and order"....

Under the Constitution, federal armed forces are banned from law enforcement on home soil. So much for Posse Comitatus—as with so many Constitutional protections being stripped to "protect" the people. And now, amid all the scripted and pacifying rhetoric, as from 1st BCT’s Commander, Col. Roger Cloutier, an ominous picture is forming.

"I can’t think of a more noble mission than this," said Cloutier, "...to take care of citizens at home...and depending on where an event occurred, you’re going home to take care of your hometown, your loved ones. It makes me feel good as an American to know that my country has dedicated a force to come in and help people at home." And, "I don’t know what America’s overall plan is—I just know that 24 hours a day, seven days a week, that there are soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines that are standing by to come and help if they’re called."

"Take care of? Help?" 1st BCT, the "Raiders"—they are an elite killing force of 4000 troops, the first brigade to be deployed in Iraq three times. Fresh from kicking down doors and arresting insurgents before taking them to internment camps, they are now being trained to use the first ever nonlethal package the Army has fielded. "It’s a new modular package of nonlethal capabilities," said Cloutier, referring to crowd and traffic control devices designed to subdue the unruly and dangerous without killing them.

"Helping", "taking care of", "protecting" and more...wholesome euphemisms fogging the simple reality that Americans are FINALLY starting to wake up, and are going to need military kinds of subduing without killing them. With conditions of deepening economic crisis, the growing chasm between working Americans and the obscenely wealthy who control the government is becoming a threat to political stability that existing political framework cannot contain. Though the 1st BTC is scheduled to be deployed domestically for one year, their replacements are being groomed for permanent deployment on a larger scale.

Corporate government is demonstrating their true allegiance by so transparently maneuvering to protect the defacto ruling wealthy elite from righteous indignation of working people as the nation is destroyed from within. Does American government consider the people little more than a contemptible—and dangerous—nuisance now that the greatest transfer of public wealth up to the wealthy elite in history...is history? Consider this missing headline:

U.S. troops and recruits quizzed about willingness to shoot friends and family members

Soldiers recently returning from Iraq reveal that U.S. troops are being trained to conduct domestic round-ups and confiscate guns, and being quizzed about shooting American citizens—including their own friends and family members—as part of a long-standing program to prepare for the declaration of martial law....

For 15 years military chiefs have been assessing whether U.S. troops would be prepared to round up, disarm, an possibly shoot Americans who disobey orders during a national state of emergency. Origins of this can be traced back to an October 1994 Marine questionnaire out of the Twentynine Palms Marine Base in California. Recruits were asked 46 questions, including whether they would kill U.S. citizens who refused to surrender their firearms.

Pastors and other religious representatives are being groomed into secret police enforcers who teach their congregations to "obey the government" in the run up to martial law, property and firearm seizures, mass vaccination programs and forced relocation.

The following missing headline answers questions regarding citizen relocation:

Over 800 American concentration camps are fully operational and ready for prisoners

These camps are to be operated by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) following declaration of martial law (at the stroke of a Presidential pen plus the Attorney General’s signature on a warrant)....

While currently empty, all camps are staffed and manned by full-time guards, standing ready to receive U.S. prisoners who disagree with the government. Like Nazi extermination camps, many of the FEMA camps have Red/Blue lines:

Red List – These are enemies of the New World Order. Two weeks before martial law they could be taken from their homes and flown to camps for immediate extermination. Generally, these are people in leadership roles or other public positions.

Blue List – Also enemies of the New World Order but not necessarily leaders. After martial law these people could be rounded up for "re-programming" in the camps. Survivors will be used mostly for slave labor.

Omissions such as mentioned here—a comprehensive list would be enormous...even one covering just the last eight years. Such a list includes: obvious and repeated federal election fraud; truth about 9/11 and its coverup; truth about our illegal wars of aggression; truth about the current bankster coup and the trillion-dollar taxpayer drop in the bailout bucket which will largely go to foreign investors to avert lawsuits against fraudsters such as Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson; truth about the scuttling of the United States as a sovereign nation to make way for the corporate/fascist New World Order....

The main theme in omissions always orbits crucial truth people need to know, truth the ruling elite want suppressed. As it stands now, the more truth involved, and the more important that truth to the American people, the more likely a story is to be omitted.

We’ve come far down this road to oblivion, hustled along by lies, fraud, deception, distraction, fiendish exploitation of our own pathetic gullibility...and omission. How might we shatter the gullibility?

Imagine the American people...imagine us turning around and marching back toward truth. Can we still save the Republic, still save ourselves? The Big Bailout just blew us miles further, down the road.

Rand Clifford is a writer living in Spokane, Washington, with his wife Mary Ann, and their Chesapeake Bay retriever, Mink. Rand's novels CASTLING, TIMING, VOICES OF VIRES, and PRIEST LAKE CATHEDRAL are published by StarChief Press: http://www.starchiefpress.com

2008-10-04T10:23:00.000+10:00

THE THREAT OF A FASCIST DICTATORSHIP IN THE USA BY ITS RULERS
by Benjamin Merhav

The two news reports below are very important, of course, as they show that the USA ruling class is determined to preserve the political status quo in the USA, and elections or the Constitution do not make any difference to them.

There is an economic crisis, and the ruling class is determined to bail out its finance capital, and even more so to preserve and to perpetuate the plutocracy system which has caused the crisis. Therefore the people are threatened with full scale fascism if they resist the shifting of the crisis burden on to their shoulders.

POWER TO THE PEOPLE NOW !

Here are the two news reports :

'There would be martial law in America if we voted no.'

News Updates from Citizens For Legitimate Government
03 Oct 2008
http://www.legitgov.org/
All items are here:
http://www.legitgov.org/#breaking_news

'There would be martial law in America if we voted no.' --Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif., 27th District) says Congress threatened with Martial Law if bill is not passed --Posted by saluki420 02 Oct 2008 Transcript: The only way they can pass this bill is by creating and sustaining a panic atmosphere. That atmosphere is not justified. Many of us were told in private conversations that if we voted against this bill on Monday, that the sky would fall, the Market would drop two or three thousand points the first day-another couple thousand the second day-and a few members were even told that there would be martial law in America if we voted no. That's what I call fear mongering. Unjustified. Proven wrong.

AIG subsidiary parties in style in OC, two weeks after bailout By Teri Sforza 02 Oct 2008 Financial crisis? What financial crisis? Less than two weeks after Uncle Sam gave American International Group (AIG) an $85 billion loan - staving off financial collapse - execs from one of its insurance subsidiaries, AIG American General, gathered for a conference at the uber-swank St. Regis Monarch Beach Resort, billed as "California’s only Mobil Travel Guide Five-Star Resort," where ocean-view rooms start at $565 a night and "world class luxury" is the rule.

Senate package would bail out major foreign investors, including China 02 Oct 2008 Rep. Brad Sherman of California was on Larry Kudlow’s CNBC show on Sept. 30 to cite evidence that the legislation potentially "provides hundreds of billions of dollars of bailouts to foreign investors," including those in China... The provision referred to by Sherman is Section 112, "Coordination With Foreign Authorities and Central Banks," which "Requires the Secretary to coordinate with foreign authorities and central banks to establish programs similar to TARP, the Troubled Assets Relief Program."

US loads $700bn bailout bill with 'pork barrel' tax breaks 03 Oct 2008 As the White House and leaders from both parties conducted a final push to convert enough rebels to salvage the rescue plan from its stunning defeat in the House on Monday, an array of "pork barrel" projects have been inserted to soften up waverers. They are aimed at peeling away a handful of naysayers with the promise that if they vote yes this time their pet projects will see the light of day.

VP Debate Bails Out Bailout Bill --Satire By R J Shulman 03 Oct 2008 The long-awaited vice presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden may be just what the doctor ordered to get the stalled $700 Billion Wall Street Bailout package through Congress. "While everyone is on the edge of their seat wondering what else Sarah Palin can see from her house, the House will be passing the bailout," said Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson... "The debate is the second step in overcoming the American public’s resistance to bailing out Wall Street," said Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. "The first was that we have successfully convinced the media to stop calling the bailout a bailout, but to call it a 'rescue.' That sounds better. We didn't bail out New Orleans, we rescued New Orleans. Actually, come to think of it, we did neither."

Please forward this update to anyone you think might be interested. Those who'd like to be added to the Newsletter list can sign up: http://www.legitgov.org/#subscribe_clg. Please write to: signup@legitgov.org for inquiries.
=========================

http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_28394.shtml

U.S. Military
Domestic Militarization: U.S. Army conducting training exercises in cities, towns
By Patti Bielling
Oct 2, 2008, 10:40

Editor's Note: Under the pretext of protecting us from "catastrophic chemical, nuclear or biological attack", the U.S. government has been steadily militarizing the country. See O WHAT IS THAT SOUND? - LMB

U.S. Army conducting training exercises in cities, towns
Army News Service
By Patti Bielling

FORT STEWART, GA.The exercise scenario was a sobering one: a 10-kiloton nuclear device detonated in America's heartland, quickly overwhelming civilian responders.

Military leaders who recently trained for this response say they are now thinking differently about how to move equipment, extract the injured and take care of people following this type of attack. Their insights came from "Vibrant Response," a week-long command post exercise designed to train the commanders and staff of the nation's dedicated force for responding to chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and high-yield explosive incidents, or CBRNE incidents. The units completed the exercise Sept. 18 at Fort Stewart, Ga., just two weeks before their force, the CBRNE Consequence Management Response Force, or CCMRF, will be assigned to U.S. Northern Command to begin its mission. "Assigning them will allow Northern Command to directly influence the operational and training focus of the forces and ensure a trained and ready response force when needed," said Col. Lou Vogler, chief of future operations at U.S. Army North. U.S. Army North conducted the exercise while its subordinate, Joint Task Force Civil Support, provided command and control for the CCMRF. Joint Task Force Civil Support -- based at Fort Monroe, Va. -- plans, trains, develops policy and determines the way ahead for DOD CBRNE response, said the force's commander, Army Maj. Gen. Daniel "Chip" Long. Commanders and staff in the three task forces - Operations, Medical and Aviation - say that the academics and command post exercise offered valuable new perspectives for the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines assuming this important mission.

Task Force Operations

Responding to a catastrophic chemical, nuclear or biological attack is challenging because there is no notice and it requires a fast response, Long said. Developing the capability to deploy rapidly was a priority for the infantry unit assigned to the force, according to Army Maj. Marc Cloutier, planner for the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division. The unit forms the core of Task Force Operations, one of the three functional task forces within CCMRF. It's the first infantry brigade to be assigned to NORTHCOM for a year in order to respond quickly to civil-support missions. Cloutier said that one apparent challenge for the brigade will be turning an infantryman into a truck driver or a first responder. However, Cloutier said, the Soldiers and NCOs in the brigade are smart and adaptable and can easily learn to drive a truck or use a chain saw given a little instruction. "When I got to the unit in July, I looked at the mission and realized the biggest challenge was going to be organizing to become rapidly deployable," he said. "I knew we would have to preposition containers and equipment to deploy ourselves on very short notice." The brigade also began working with the division and the garrison at Fort Stewart to ensure there were mechanisms in place to support a short-notice deployment, Cloutier said. Once the exercise started, the brigade planners looked at how to reorganize their habitual formations from an infantry or armor battalion in order to accomplish the mission. "Do we want to take our internal assets and develop functional task forces like engineering, decontamination, heavy movement, and search and rescue, or do we want to develop multifaceted task forces and assign them by region?" he asked. Their conclusion? That configurations would likely change based on the type of catastrophe or the size of the geographical area. "We're developing something of a playbook from everything we do here," Cloutier said. "We'll capture everything and keep it on the shelf so if we see a similar situation down the road, we're starting that much further along."

Technical Support

Air Force Lt. Col. Kevin Martilla was especially impressed with the brigade's planning efforts, which structured the forces and established processes to efficiently execute any mission that comes down. As chief of the Air Force Radiation Assessment Team, Brooks City-Base, Texas, Martilla leads a unit responsible for supporting health-protection efforts for the force, to help commanders understand and manage radiation risks so they can complete their missions. The team has existed since 1968 to respond to Broken Arrow incidents, or those involving military nuclear weapons damaged during transport. "We've always been involved in planning to respond to Broken Arrow incidents, so it made sense that (the services) included us when developing CCMRF," Martilla said. The team provides technical advice and the capability to measure radiation levels, collect and analyze samples, and measure and track radiological exposure to the force. Being assigned to Task Force Operations allowed the team to work closely with the brigade planners and staff, Martilla said. "Our team gained an understanding we wouldn't get if exercising with units on paper," he said. "This exercise has been a great step forward toward accomplishing this mission in case it ever does happen." Also assigned to CCMRF within Task Force Operations is a Marine Corps technical support force called the Chemical, Biological Incident Response Force based at Indian Head, Md. The force, known as CBIRF, was created in the mid 1990s as a domestic response force following the sarin attacks on the Tokyo subway. The biggest misconception, said the unit's operations officer, is that the force is a nuclear, biological and chemical unit. "We are a life-saving organization," said Marine Corps Maj. Stan Bacon. "Although we can identify hazards and decontaminate personnel, those actions are all geared toward allowing our force to conduct search and extraction." Every one of the 500 Marines and Sailors in the battalion is trained to perform search and extraction, Bacon said. In addition, all members have received additional training to perform specialized technical rescues, including confined space, advanced rope, trench, collapsed structure, and vehicle and heavy machinery extraction. The battalion is able to "grab and drag" people from within the hazardous area. However, the force also developed procedures to stabilize casualties when moving them would cause more injury, Bacon said. "Very few military or civilian agencies plan to have medical personnel in the hot zone, in suits, treating and extracting casualties," he said. Bacon said the Marine Corps unit benefited from training with the forces that will provide its logistics, decontamination, aviation and command and control during a disaster. "We know we won't have to reach back to Indian Head for logistics support or work on mitigating the hazard," Bacon said. "We'll be able to focus our entire effort on saving lives."

'The main effort'

Civil support missions also are logistics intensive, as Army Lt. Col. Johnney Matthews found out. Matthews, a support battalion commander, knows what it takes to move the fuel, food and water for a brigade headquarters and four maneuver battalions for combat. However, the support battalion soon found they had gone from being the "unsung heroes" of the brigade to being the main effort, he said. As the exercise scenario unfolded, Matthews learned the importance of quickly building a supply base to keep their own forces sustained so he could focus on moving food and water to affected civilians. The battalion designed "speed balls," bundles of daily rations that feed up to 1,500 people and can be rapidly rolled on and off a military flatbed truck. "This exercise has been a good experience for us," Matthews said. "We've been able to shake out our staff and put some systems in place for future missions. And we've learned a lot about civil support - we've been given a picture of some of the things we might face."

Task Force Medical

The consequence management response force is able to deploy with robust medical capability, including patient treatment and evacuation, blood storage and distribution, environmental assessment, epidemiology, and even stress management. They were all coordinated by 1st Medical Brigade from Fort Hood, Texas. As with a number of units attending the week of academics before the exercise, the 1st Medical Brigade was on alert and planning for possible response to Hurricane Ike, which was barreling toward the coast of Texas. During every break, the medical brigade's executive officer was returning phone calls. "We knew that if Ike hit hard enough to trigger a federal response, we had to be ready to respond," Army Maj. Tim Walsh said. "We have a lot of ongoing requirements, but we know we have to be prepared to deal with the alligator that is in our room." Walsh said the exercise gave them an opportunity to look at mission requirements and the brigade's capabilities, then identify shortfalls and try to mitigate them. Although they may not be able to mitigate all the shortfalls, just knowing what they are is beneficial too, Walsh said. "States and local responders go through the same process," he said. "Our goal is to fill their shortfalls until they are able to handle the incident with just their capabilities, then we leave." As combat operations continue in Iraq and Afghanistan, military medical capability remains in high demand. Walsh said those deployments give the unit the credibility to do their mission within the United States. "We are proud and honored to do our mission anywhere, but to do it in the United States - that's extra motivation," he said. "We treat everyone with dignity and respect, whether it's a captured suicide attacker or one of our own Soldiers - we give them the same level of care we'd give our own parents."

Task Force Aviation

Speed is essential for this type of response, and rapidly moving people and equipment is nothing new for the 82nd Combat Aviation Brigade, according to Col. Paul Bricker. "We're not encumbered by roads or terrain, and we move vertically around obstacles that restrict vehicular movement," Bricker said. "If a bridge is out, we can move people or large equipment rapidly." The commander of the Fort Bragg, N.C., based aviation brigade said each of the unit's CH-47 Chinook heavy lift helicopters can move 30 people and large pieces of equipment - ideal for medical evacuation, patient transfer, logistical resupply and personnel movement. Each of the UH-60 Black Hawk utility helicopters can transport 11 people or 8,000 pounds of cargo - perfect for transporting search teams, dogs, high-priority equipment and radiological survey teams, Bricker said. The exercise allowed the brigade's staff to both come together as a team and to work with a joint task force headquarters. "Working with the joint task force and the civilian sector exposes our folks to a whole different set of coordination requirements," he said.

'What if'

Long, the Joint Task Force Civil Support commander, agreed that having a dedicated response force assigned to Northern Command can only improve DOD's ability to help save lives, prevent injury and provide temporary critical life support. "We've got to train like we've got to execute," he said. "There will be catastrophic deaths. Hospitals will be affected, first responders will be affected, and you've got to integrate all the response capabilities when citizens are trying to get away or trying to pull their lives together." Since the joint task force was created in 1999, the nation has made tremendous progress on 'what if,' Long said. "There are all sorts of deterrence capabilities, and this (force) is one of them," he said. "This exercise has been a great effort to prepare for a catastrophic CBRNE event. The nation needs to know we have this capability."

(Patti Bielling writes for the U.S. Army North Public Affairs Office.)

2008-10-02T07:35:00.000+10:00

http://www.blackagendareport.com/
Bailout Lesson: Capital Crisis Will Wreck Both Parties

Wednesday, 01 October 2008

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

The crisis of finance capital has thrown both big business parties into extreme disarray and split the Congressional Black Caucus right down the middle. "In the aftermath of Monday's bloody siege, it was difficult to tell who Wall Street guns-for-hire John McCain and Barack Obama hated most: each other, or the citizens who despite their outraged confusion had the presence of mind to bar the doors to the national treasury." As the Obama-McCain-Bush-Pelosi Axis struggles to serve a common master, "the rest of us must fashion new institutions to perform the societal tasks that were purportedly the domain of the now-extinct investment bankers."

Bailout Lesson: Capital Crisis Will Wreck Both Parties

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

"The Democratic and Republican Parties, creatures of capital, are decomposing in full view."

In their role as mercenaries in service of finance capital, three-fifths of Democrats joined one-third of Republicans in a (temporarily) failed heist of $700 billion of the people's funds - a nest-egg the public needs to hold onto to weather the unfolding collapse of the Lords of Capital. In the aftermath of Monday's bloody siege, it was difficult to tell who Wall Street guns-for-hire John McCain and Barack Obama hated most: each other, or the citizens who despite their outraged confusion had the presence of mind to bar the doors to the national treasury.

Understandably disoriented from having had to charge backwards - pretending to lead the people while simultaneously assaulting them - Obama peered across the field at the hastily-erected barricades that had broken Hank Paulson's Charge. "I'm confident we're going to get there," said the frustrated thief-enabler, "but it's going to be rocky."

To paraphrase Oscar Brown, Jr., "What you mean WE, Obama-man?" The Illinois senator and his pretend-opponents in the other business party just had their colluding asses kicked by the most motley, disorganized crew imaginable: the American public, who bombarded their legislators with threats of retaliation in November if they bowed to Wall Street's extortionist demands.

Never has Republican-Democratic co-subservience to finance capital been on such naked display. But then, "We the People" have never before been witness to the terminal unraveling of late-stage global finance capital. (See BAR, "Death Rattles of a Criminal Class," September 24.) When the New York Times features no less than three articles declaring the nation's investment bankers ready for burial, as did last Sunday's paper, it is time for the Democrats, especially, to find another paymaster.

Black Caucus Split

Obama's party is wedded to Wall Street. At the local level the Democrats have long been the party of "developers" - the money bags who shape urban policy to fit the needs of corporations. These gentrifiers are the "Renaissance Men" that insist Black politicians earn their campaign and graft payments by helping to expel their own constituents from the cities, so as to make them more congenial to business. Betrayal starts at home. So it's not surprising to find Rep. Charles Rangel (NY), the corporate-loving Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, among the 18 members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) to vote with the Bush-McCain-Obama Wall Street Axis. Edolphus Towns (NY), Gregory Meeks (NY), and Artur Davis (AL) are also in their element, reeking as they do of corporate excretions. However, it is strange - and sad - to see Maxine Waters (CA), Gwen Moore (WI) and other relatively progressive members aligned with the rump end of the Black Caucus.

Among the slim, 21-member majority of the CBC that defied Speaker Nancy Pelosi's edicts, one finds more curious company. Voting alongside usually reliable progressives such as Barbara Lee (CA), John Conyers (MI), Donna Edwards (MD) and Bobby Scott (VA), are some of the Caucus's most rightwing members: William "Dollar Bill" Jefferson (LA) and David Scott (GA), once described as the "Worst Black Congressman" in the House. Panic makes strange bedfellows.

Virginia Rep. Bobby Scott summed up the "No" position: "There's no point in spending all this money on worthless assets" such as toxic mortgages. Detroit's Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick said of the Obama-McCain-Bush-Paulson plan, "This helps the banks in their book of mortgages. It doesn't help the little person who needs it."

"It is strange - and sad - to see Maxine Waters (CA), Gwen Moore (WI) and other relatively progressive members aligned with the rump end of the Black Caucus."

These are eminently good reasons to resist the bipartisan, flag-waving, hyper-ventilating and increasingly ill-looking Wall Street mob, now regrouping for another bum-rush of the Congress. However, the anxious thieves are only a 12-vote switch away from consummating the Greatest Theft Ever. Pelosi's wing of the Business Party is confident they can assemble the blandishments and threats to do the trick.

The Last Hold-up

The criminal-minded and mortally wounded Lords of Capital believed, as Pam Martens has written, that they could "loot and collapse a 200-year old financial system and...be rewarded with a fresh $700 billion of public money to disperse among your cronies who aided and abetted in the collapse."

Or, as Mike Whitney puts it:

"...the $700 billion is just part of a massive ‘pump and dump' scheme engineered with the tacit approval of the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve. Once the banksters have offloaded their fraudulent securities and crappy paper on Uncle Sam, they will do whatever they need to do to pad the bottom line and drive their stocks up. That means they will shovel capital into hard assets, foreign currencies, gold, interest rate swaps, carry trade swindles, and Swiss bank accounts. The notion that they will recapitalize so they can provide loans to US consumers and businesses in a slumping economy is a pipedream."

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and his designated wrecking crew have but one objective: theft. Their own world is doomed - "The system is de-leveraging and nothing can stop it," says Whitney - so they are pulling off one last, mega-heist before it sinks beneath the waves.

The rest of us must fashion new institutions to perform the societal tasks that were purportedly the domain of the now-extinct investment bankers: to gather large amounts of capital for projects of social value - for example, a Marshall-type Plan for the cities, a nationwide infrastructure makeover, and fulfillment of the 70-year old federal commitment to provide truly affordable housing for everyone. And of course, jobs, jobs, jobs.

"We must fashion new institutions to perform the societal tasks that were purportedly the domain of the now-extinct investment bankers."

We have many other uses for that $700 billion - what Barack Obama called "our last bullet," although intending to make it a gift to mega-thieves - for instance, to provide relief to current and future homeowner (and rental) victims of the housing bubble that will take years to fully deflate, as prices (and rents) decrease to levels consistent with wages and other social factors.

In a perverse way, Henry Paulson and his co-conspirators have done the public a great favor. He has told us that, Yes, the federal government can come up with $700-plus billion, in an instant, if the health of the nation demands it. He has expanded the fiscal scope of the domestic political conversation, so that it may encompass projects of transformational size. Never again can the corporate class speak of socially valuable projects being so large as to "break the bank" or the budget. Popular forces are now free to think large, too, without being ridiculed from the corporate Right.

The demise of finance capital's premiere institutions, and the brutal arrogance with which their servants moved to strip the commonweal of every squeezable drop of cash, has alerted vast sectors of the citizenry to the reality of capitalism-in-crisis in ways that no amount of Left agitation could have accomplished.

Technical public "ownership" of previously "private" institutions has been thrust upon us by the capitalists, themselves. But this is merely an opening for the great debates and struggles that must follow. Power does not devolve to "the people" by simple virtue of majority shares in failing institutions or even outright nationalization. And "the people" have no need of institutions that serve no purpose but as creatures of capital.

The second casualty of the current crisis, after the collapse of the financial sector, is surely the twin-party game of musical chairs that served to legitimize the rule of capital. The obscenity of a Democrat-Republican syndicate arrayed against the roaring, raging sentiments of citizens of all self-described political persuasions, cannot be erased from the collective national memory - even if congressional party leaders succeed in whipping their members into line, later this week.

"The second casualty of the current crisis is the twin-party game of musical chairs."

When catastrophe hits, radicals must be ready. Recent events have proven Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente to be amazingly prescient in their belief that the Green Party can be - I emphasize can be - a vehicle for presenting and popularizing a truly transformational program for social change. (See McKinney "The Financial Crisis: Seize the Time!" BAR September 24.) McKinney and Clemente always intended that the Green Party become a nexus for the roiling social currents set in motion by the inexorable decomposition of ruling class institutions. The Democratic and Republican Parties, creatures of capital, are decomposing in full view, as witnessed by the events of this week. Too fragile to weather real political storms, they will not survive the larger, unfolding crisis of capital as twin hegemons. As the crisis deepens, the parties will crack - at a pace dictated by the increasing frequency of convulsions.

When we are confronted with the surreal spectacle of John McCain and Barack Obama attempting to destroy each other even as they rush to deliver nearly a trillion dollars to the same master, while the people scream at both of them to "Stop!" - we know that "change" is coming. But not the kind the Democrats or Republicans anticipate.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

2008-10-01T11:48:00.001+10:00

The current Layout is no longer available for the full list of my blogs. The full and updated list is in chapter 14 of my autobiography : http://2ndpartofmyautobiography.blogspot.com/

POWER TO THE PEOPLE NOW !

REPLACE PLUTOCRACY WITH DIRECT DEMOCRACY NOW, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE !

2008-09-30T10:54:00.001+10:00

http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_28341.shtml
No Bailout for Wall Street Billionaires!
By James Petras*
Sep 27, 2008, 17:45

September 27, 2008

Treasury Secretary Paulson and President Bush backed by the Democratic Congressional leadership have asked Congress for $700 billion dollars to bailout Wall Street financial institutions.

Over the past several years these banks reaped billions of dollars borrowing and speculating on mortgages, securities and other financial paper with virtually no capital covering their bets. With the fall in the housing market, Wall Street’s financial debts skyrocketed, the value of their holdings evaporated and they are saddled with trillions of dollars of debt.

Paulson, Bush and the Congressional leadership want the US taxpayer to buy Wall Street’s worthless private debts, saddling current and future generations of US taxpayers with worthless paper.

Paulson/Bush and the Congressional leaders falsely claim that failure to bailout the Wall Street swindlers will lead to the collapse of the financial system. In fact, almost 200 of our leading economists from the most prestigious universities reject Paulson’s bailout. The truth of the matter is that withholding funds to Wall Street will lead to the collapse of the swindler-speculator-run financial system, which created the current economic debacle.

The Federal Government can and should use the hundreds of billions of public money to establish a national, publicly controlled banking and investment system subject to oversight by elected representatives. The collapse of the current bankrupt financial system is both a threat and an opportunity: The collapse of this corrupt system has led to the loss of jobs and frozen credit and lending; the establishment of a new publicly owned banking system offers an opportunity to finance the priorities of the vast majority of the American people: the re-industrialization of our economy, a universal national health program, securing and extending social security into the next century, rebuilding our decaying infrastructure and many other programs essential to the American way of life.

The problem is not the false alternative of bailing out Wall Street or financial chaos and collapse: The real choice is between subsidizing swindlers or establishing a responsible, responsive and equitable publicly run financial system.

Ten Reasons to Oppose the Wall Street Bailout

In a market economy capitalists justify their profits by the risk of losses that they take. Gamblers cannot keep their profits and pass their losses to the taxpayers. They have to take responsibility for their bad decisions.

Much of the toxic (garbage) debts were based on fraudulent practices – opaque financial instruments unrelated to real assets (but which generated huge commissions). Bailing out swindlers only encourages more swindling.

The US Treasury will purchase worthless paper, the private banks will retain any assets of value. We buy the lemons, they drive the Cadillacs.

The chance of the Treasury recovering any value from their purchases of bad debt is near zero. The taxpayers will be stuck with paper with no buyers.

The long-term effect of a bailout will be to double the public debt and undercut funding for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education and public health programs while increasing the tax burden of future generations.

The dollar will devalue as the government debt will decrease its attractiveness overseas, increasing the cost of imports and resulting in an inflationary spiral which will further undermine working people’s living standards.

The channeling of funds to Wall Street will divert funds from getting us out of this deepening recession.

The bailout will deepen the financial crisis because, according to the Director of the Congressional Budget Office, it will expose the fact that many institutions may be carrying many more ‘toxic assets’ and reveal that those institutions are not solvent. In other words, the Treasury and Congress are freeing up bad debts to insolvent institutions.

The bailout is aimed at facilitating lending; but if the problem is not credit but (as the Congressional Budget Office has shown) the insolvency of the financial institutions, the solution is to create solvent financial institutions.

The bailout totally ignores the financial needs of 10 million homeowners facing foreclosures; the bankruptcy of small enterprises facing a credit crunch and the loss of workers’ jobs and health plans for their families because of the recession.

Alternatives to the Wall Street Bailout

The speed with which this gigantic amount of public funds had been made available by the Treasury and Congress puts the lie to their argument that popular programs cannot be funded or need to be cut back. In fact, investing $700 billion in the health and education of American workers will increase productivity, open markets and expand consumer power leading to a virtuous circle increasing public revenues and eliminating the budget and trade deficits.

Public funds invested in manufacturing, construction, education and health care leads to products with real use value and has a multiplier effect on the rest of the economy instead of ending up in the pockets of billionaires who speculate and invest in mergers and overseas buyouts.

The Treasury and Congress have inadvertently revealed that federal financing is readily available to rebuild the US economy, guarantee decent living wages and provide health care for everyone if we choose elective officials who are committed to the needs of the US workers and not the Wall Street billionaires.

2008-09-30T07:43:00.001+10:00

IS THIS THE EVE OF A POPULAR UPRISING IN THE USA, TO END THE PLUTOCRACY AND THE ZIONIST RULE THERE,TO REPLACE IT WITH A DIRECT AND PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY ?
by Benjamin Merhav

The following letter was forwarded to me today by a reader from India, Jayaprakash ND (jaypdsf@gmail.com). The letter is by Michael Moore, an American who made himself a name by purporting to oppose the regime of big business, while enriching himself and benefiting from the
plutocracy he has criticised. He has been a crony of Noam Chomsky - unreliable and dishonest like him. However, his letter below seems to signal a profound change by him, as this time he is actually calling Americans to "JOIN THE UPRISING!"

If opportunists like Michael Moore are calling for a popular uprising, it should mean that the uprising is actually underway ! His message is wrong because the rich do not need to stage a coup against their own rule. The entire political system - the plutocracy regime - including all the USA politicians are there to serve the rich. Now, when the system is in crisis, the rich are shifting the burden of their problems on to the people. For suppressing any possible resistance they have ready made concentration camps, and a great deal of legal cover too (never mind the Constitution ! ).

Here is Moore's letter :

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php?id=235

Monday, September 29th, 2008
The Rich Are Staging a Coup This Morning ...a message from Michael Moore

Friends,

Let me cut to the chase. The biggest robbery in the history of this country is taking place as you read this. Though no guns are being used, 300 million hostages are being taken. Make no mistake about it: After stealing a half trillion dollars to line the pockets of their war-profiteering backers for the past five years, after lining the pockets of their fellow oilmen to the tune of over a hundred billion dollars in just the last two years, Bush and his cronies -- who must soon vacate the White House -- are looting the U.S. Treasury of every dollar they can grab. They are swiping as much of the silverware as they can on their way out the door.

No matter what they say, no matter how many scare words they use, they are up to their old tricks of creating fear and confusion in order to make and keep themselves and the upper one percent filthy rich. Just read the first four paragraphs of the lead story in last Monday's New York Times and you can see what the real deal is:

"Even as policy makers worked on details of a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it.

"Financial firms were lobbying to have all manner of troubled investments covered, not just those related to mortgages.

"At the same time, investment firms were jockeying to oversee all the assets that Treasury plans to take off the books of financial institutions, a role that could earn them hundreds of millions of dollars a year in fees.

"Nobody wants to be left out of Treasury's proposal to buy up bad assets of financial institutions."

Unbelievable. Wall Street and its backers created this mess and now they are going to clean up like bandits. Even Rudy Giuliani is lobbying for his firm to be hired (and paid) to "consult" in the bailout.

The problem is, nobody truly knows what this "collapse" is all about. Even Treasury Secretary Paulson admitted he doesn't know the exact amount that is needed (he just picked the $700 billion number out of his head!). The head of the congressional budget office said he can't figure it out nor can he explain it to anyone.

And yet, they are screeching about how the end is near! Panic! Recession! The Great Depression! Y2K! Bird flu! Killer bees! We must pass the bailout bill today!! The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

Falling for whom? NOTHING in this "bailout" package will lower the price of the gas you have to put in your car to get to work. NOTHING in this bill will protect you from losing your home. NOTHING in this bill will give you health insurance.

Health insurance? Mike, why are you bringing this up? What's this got to do with the Wall Street collapse?

It has everything to do with it. This so-called "collapse" was triggered by the massive defaulting and foreclosures going on with people's home mortgages. Do you know why so many Americans are losing their homes? To hear the Republicans describe it, it's because too many working class idiots were given mortgages that they really couldn't afford. Here's the truth: The number one cause of people declaring bankruptcy is because of medical bills. Let me state this simply: If we had had universal health coverage, this mortgage "crisis" may never have happened.

This bailout's mission is to protect the obscene amount of wealth that has been accumulated in the last eight years. It's to protect the top shareholders who own and control corporate America. It's to make sure their yachts and mansions and "way of life" go uninterrupted while the rest of America suffers and struggles to pay the bills. Let the rich suffer for once. Let them pay for the bailout. We are spending 400 million dollars a day on the war in Iraq. Let them end the war immediately and save us all another half-trillion dollars!

I have to stop writing this and you have to stop reading it. They are staging a financial coup this morning in our country. They are hoping Congress will act fast before they stop to think, before we have a chance to stop them ourselves. So stop reading this and do something -- NOW! Here's what you can do immediately:

1. Call or e-mail Senator Obama. Tell him he does not need to be sitting there trying to help prop up Bush and Cheney and the mess they've made. Tell him we know he has the smarts to slow this thing down and figure out what's the best route to take. Tell him the rich have to pay for whatever help is offered. Use the leverage we have now to insist on a moratorium on home foreclosures, to insist on a move to universal health coverage, and tell him that we the people need to be in charge of the economic decisions that affect our lives, not the barons of Wall Street.

2. Take to the streets. Participate in one of the hundreds of quickly-called demonstrations that are taking place all over the country (especially those near Wall Street and DC).

3. Call your Representative in Congress and your Senators. (click here to find their phone numbers). Tell them what you told Senator Obama.

When you screw up in life, there is hell to pay. Each and every one of you reading this knows that basic lesson and has paid the consequences of your actions at some point. In this great democracy, we cannot let there be one set of rules for the vast majority of hard-working citizens, and another set of rules for the elite, who, when they screw up, are handed one more gift on a silver platter. No more! Not again!

Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com

P.S. Having read further the details of this bailout bill, you need to know you are being lied to. They talk about how they will prevent golden parachutes. It says NOTHING about what these executives and fat cats will make in SALARY. According to Rep. Brad Sherman of California, these top managers will continue to receive million-dollar-a-month paychecks under this new bill. There is no direct ownership given to the American people for the money being handed over. Foreign banks and investors will be allowed to receive billion-dollar handouts. A large chunk of this $700 billion is going to be given directly to Chinese and Middle Eastern banks. There is NO guarantee of ever seeing that money again.

P.P.S. From talking to people I know in DC, they say the reason so many Dems are behind this is because Wall Street this weekend put a gun to their heads and said either turn over the $700 billion or the first thing we'll start blowing up are the pension funds and 401(k)s of your middle class constituents. The Dems are scared they may make good on their threat. But this is not the time to back down or act like the typical Democrat we have witnessed for the last eight years. The Dems handed a stolen election over to Bush. The Dems gave Bush the votes he needed to invade a sovereign country. Once they took over Congress in 2007, they refused to pull the plug on the war. And now they have been cowered into being accomplices in the crime of the century. You have to call them now and say "NO!" If we let them do this, just imagine how hard it will be to get anything good done when President Obama is in the White House. THESE DEMOCRATS ARE ONLY AS STRONG AS THE BACKBONE WE GIVE THEM.

(Emphasis added - B.M.)

2008-09-29T08:48:00.000+10:00

1. US bailout fuels protests in streets, online

2. Wall Street Executives Made $3 Billion Before Crisis
by Benjamin Merhav

These two topics are the titles of the two articles/reports emailed to me today by Citizens For Legitimate Government (CLG) http://www.legitgov.org/ and pasted below. They show that the American people no longer trust the plutocracy under which they have been living for so many years. The second article, which originates from a capitalist media outlet - and therefore credible to even to the most conservative of bourgeois skeptics ! - does expose the cynical greed and corruption of the entire USA ruling class, which now endangers the very existence of the entire humanity !

http://sify.com/finance/fullstory.php?id=14767561
US bailout fuels protests in streets, online

Parveen Chopra

Sunday, 28 September , 2008, 11:46

New York: Even as lawmakers laboured to break the impasse on Bush administration's $700 billion plan to rescue giant Wall Street firms to solve the financial crisis, the bailout has spontaneously inspired street protests in the US and outrage gone viral across the web.

US turmoil and its impact in India | US financial crisis: End or beginning?

Protesters argue that they would want the Congress to protect millions of ordinary American citizens on the verge of losing their homes due to poor lending practices of creditors instead of handing out public money to big investment companies responsible for ruining the economy in the first place.

US bailout battle heading for a showdown

An Indian American, Arun Gupta, too was enraged on learning the details of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's bailout plan with taxpayer funds. Publisher of an alternative newspaper, The Indypendent, he sent an e-mail to some politically active friends in New York, which resulted in protests against the bailout in New York and at scores of other locations in the country Sep 25.

How to weather the global financial storm

"I couldn't sit back while this plan gets rammed through Congress," Gupta was quoted in the media as saying.

Biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression

He now works with the online group, truemajority.org, and is expecting hundreds to join a novel protest planned near Wall Street in Manhattan. Protesters intend building a pile of "citizen junk" that the government should also purchase in front of the iconic bull sculpture.

Buffett and bailout on investor minds

Besides street protests, the Internet is now the site of numerous petitions, debates bordering on rants, and satire about the treasury secretary's plan and its potential consequences. Vociferous critics spanning the political and ideological spectrum in the country demand that Congress amend, scale back, or scrap the plan altogether.

National road to bankruptcy

Much of online rage takes the form of signatures on petitions and electronic letters to members of Congress. One Independent Senator, Bernie Sanders, is circulating a popular one on the left-leaning blog Huffington Post.

Who bails out Uncle Sam?

The 1.9-million member Service Employees International Union is also circulating a sign-on letter to Congress that says point blank: "No deal. No blank check." Another website, StopTheHousingBailout.com argues: "A bailout tells responsible Americans that they are suckers."

A right-wing blogger urges Republicans to vote against the bailout, since "God himself couldn't have given rank-and-file Republicans a better opportunity to create political space between themselves and the administration".

Biting satire is the way of buymyshitpile.com, where users are posting pictures of their personal junk next to the tagline: "Hey Washington, can you buy my bad investments, too?" The total asking price of the "pile" submitted by users-which includes horse shit, baseball card collection, and an 'Immagrent', has crossed $7 billion as of Saturday.

Social networking sites are not immune to the new virus. The Facebook group "Just Say No to the Government Bailout" has over 300 members now.

=====================

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aGL5l6xOPEHc

Wall Street Executives Made $3 Billion Before Crisis (Update1)

By Tom Randall and Jamie McGee

Sept. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Wall Street's five biggest firms paid more than $3 billion in the last five years to their top executives, while they presided over the packaging and sale of loans that helped bring down the investment-banking system.

Merrill Lynch & Co. paid its chief executives the most, with Stanley O'Neal taking in $172 million from 2003 to 2007 and John Thain getting $86 million, including a signing bonus, after beginning work in December. The company agreed to be acquired by Bank of America Corp. for about $50 billion on Sept. 15. Bear Stearns Cos.'s James ``Jimmy'' Cayne made $161 million before the company collapsed and was sold to JPMorgan Chase & Co. in June.

Democrats and Republicans in Congress are demanding that limits be placed on executive pay as part of the $700 billion financial rescue plan proposed by U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. The former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO, who received about $111 million between 2003 and 2006, said in testimony to Congress on Sept. 24 that he would accept such limits as part of the plan, after initially opposing them.

``Shareholders and boards should have done something about this a long time ago,'' said Charles Elson, director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware in Newark. ``They justified these levels of pay on the idea that they're all geniuses. I think that balloon has burst.''

Wall Street firms have shared profits liberally with employees. The five biggest -- Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Merrill, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Bear Stearns -- paid their 185,687 employees $66 billion in 2007, as problems with subprime mortgages mounted, including about $39 billion in bonuses. That amounts to average pay of $353,089 per employee, including an average bonus of $211,849. The five firms had combined net income of $93 billion during the five years through 2007.

CEO Pay Doubled

The $3.1 billion paid to the top five executives at the firms between 2003 and 2007 was about three times what JPMorgan spent to buy Bear Stearns. Goldman Sachs had the highest total, with $859 million, followed by Bear Stearns at $609 million. CEO pay at the five firms increased each year, doubling to $253 million in 2007, according to data compiled from company filings.

Executive-compensation figures include salary, bonuses, stock and stock options, some awarded for past performance. The options were valued at a third of the fair-market price of the stock at the time the options were granted, a method recommended by Graef Crystal, a compensation specialist and author of the Crystal Report on Executive Compensation, an online newsletter. The companies value the options using different methods.

`Make It Rain'

Wall Street firms have paid employees a greater share of revenue than any other industry, about 50 percent, Crystal said. That tradition at investment banks comes from their history as closely held partnerships of investors who put their own capital at risk, he said.

``In Wall Street and Hollywood, the profits tend to come in great big packets, and everyone wants a piece,'' said Crystal, a former Bloomberg columnist. ``Whether it's the movie `Dark Knight' or a huge merger deal, he who can make it rain, he who can bring everyone to the theater, can earn whatever he wants.''

Until the rain stops

Lehman Brothers filed for the biggest bankruptcy in history on Sept. 15, with more than $613 billion in debt. The same day, Merrill Lynch was sold to Bank of America for $29 a share, about 70 percent below the stock's high of $97.53 on Jan. 24, 2007.

Goldman and Morgan Stanley, the two biggest independent U.S. investment banks, were forced to convert to bank holding companies, giving them more access to Federal Reserve funds and buying time to acquire deposits. Goldman Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein made $57.6 million in 2007 in salary and bonus, which includes stock and options granted at the beginning of the fiscal year to reward performance the previous year. Co- presidents Gary Cohn and Jon Winkelried each got $56 million.

`Tied to Performance'

Morgan Stanley's current and former chief executives, John Mack and Philip Purcell, were paid about $194 million over the last five years.

Mark Lake, a spokesman for Morgan Stanley, pointed to Mack's decision not to take a bonus for 2007 and said the $1.6 million in salary and other compensation he was awarded last year isn't ``a lot'' compared with other Wall Street CEOs.

``He has taken everything he had since rejoining the firm in equity, other than salary,'' Lake said. ``There's a difference in taking stock in the firm as a bonus and taking cash. Stock in the firm, obviously you are tied to performance of the firm.''

Goldman Sachs spokesman Michael Duvally declined to comment. Merrill Lynch spokeswoman Jessica Oppenheim, JPMorgan spokesman Brian Marchiony and Lehman spokeswoman Monique Wise didn't return calls for comment.

Paulson, Bush

``The American people are angry about executive compensation, and rightfully so,'' Paulson told a House panel on Sept. 24, departing from his prepared remarks. ``We must find a way to address this in the legislation, but without undermining the effectiveness of this program.''

President George W. Bush said that night in a televised address to the nation that the plan would provide ``urgently needed money so banks and other financial institutions can avoid collapse'' and ``should make certain that failed executives do not receive a windfall from your tax dollars.''

Congressional Republicans splintered late yesterday over the proposed $700 billion rescue plan. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said this morning at a news conference that Democrats are circulating a draft of legislation that contains limits on executive compensation and ensures that Congress has oversight over the bailout. Lawmakers from both parties are meeting again today in Washington.

Weak Record

The U.S. government has a weak record when it comes to regulating compensation, said Kevin Murphy, a professor of finance at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

``Every government attempt that has existed to limit or regulate CEO pay has backfired,'' Murphy said. ``I'm fairly confident this one will backfire too. There are always loopholes.''

Regulation of golden parachutes, or protection for executives in the case of an acquisition, were circumvented in the 1980s with severance agreements, and Nixon's wage-and-price- control experiment in the 1970s ultimately failed, Murphy said.

``It's either the compensation committee or the general counsel or the head of human resources who are trying to negotiate a pay package with someone who will be their boss in a week,'' he said. ``These are things that can be done a lot better.''

Corporate Governance

Rather than government regulation, the solution is in better corporate governance, Elson said. Companies should negotiate more aggressively with executives and should establish rules that encourage shareholders to protest excessive pay. The rescue package is not the place to have that debate, he said.

``This will get in the way'' of passing the $700 billion financial rescue legislation, Elson said. ``We are in a crisis. The patient is dying. Let's work on the details as soon as we get the patient out of the emergency room when we can do it in a thoughtful or deliberate manner.''

Not all Wall Street CEOs have escaped unscathed. Cayne sold a Bear Stearns holding once worth $1 billion for $61 million in March. Lehman's Chief Executive Officer Richard Fuld, who made $165 million between 2003 and 2007, sold 2.88 million of his firm's shares for 16 cents to 30 cents apiece, or less than $500,000, according to a regulatory filing.

Fuld owned 10.9 million shares and restricted stock units as of Jan. 31, valued at $931 million at their peak. He also had in- the-money options and other stock worth almost $300 million, according to Crystal.

To contact the reporter on this story: Tom Randall in New York at trandall6@bloomberg.net; Jamie McGee in New York at jmcgee8@bloomberg.net.

2008-09-28T09:20:00.000+10:00

Financial Meltdown And The Madness Of Imperialism

By Raymond Lotta

26 September, 2008
Revcom.us

The events of the last ten days on Wall Street represent a new and more destabilizing phase of the turmoil gripping financial institutions and markets in the U.S. A financial crisis has been unfolding for more than a year. It is now the most serious financial crisis of U.S. capitalism since the Great Depression of the 1930s. And it is by no means contained or under control.

The financial edifice of U.S. imperialism is in danger of crumbling. And the U.S. ruling class is cobbling together desperate measures to prevent wholesale collapse.

This analysis examines the recent eruptions on Wall Street of mid- and late September and the deeper structural causes of the crisis.

I. Wall Street Panics, the Guardians of U.S. Capitalism Scramble

A). A Week of Deepening Financial Crisis

Two of the last two independent investment banks on Wall Street ceased to exist in mid-September. In a matter of hours, Lehman Brothers went bankrupt on September 15, while Merrill Lynch was forced into liquidation and then absorbed by Bank of America. This follows the government-promoted buyout in April of Bear Stearns, another giant investment banking firm that was on the ropes, by JPMorgan Chase.

It was only several weeks earlier that the U.S. government had taken over the two major and failing mortgage-finance giants--Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. At the time, this takeover was presented as providing an effective firewall against future financial eruptions. But it proved to be no more than the patching up of a pothole during an earthquake. This past week the government had to take over the American International Group (AIG), the giant insurance-financial firm.

AIG had over a trillion dollars in assets. It had earned enormous profits from insuring mortgage-backed investments circulating in the financial system that were held by other banks. But this has turned into a disaster. Here is some of what happened:

Through deceit and aggressive marketing, banks pushed mortgages on people. The Federal Reserve Bank had pumped low-cost funds into the banking system to prop up mortgage loans. These loans were then combined into larger groups of loans by investment banks (like Lehman Brothers) and turned into financial products that were sold on financial markets. All kinds of lending took place with these original loans as collateral. But when housing prices fell, and mortgages could not be paid, much of this collateral became worthless.

AIG was insuring much of this lending against the risk of loss. But as the losses mounted astronomically, AIG could neither cover the costs of backing this debt nor borrow funds on the financial markets to keep itself afloat.

The financial markets had basically lost confidence, and AIG’s assets tumbled in value. AIG was in danger of collapse. But if AIG went under, the probability was great that it would have taken down other financial institutions with it. This forced the government’s hand.

Normally, so-called bad debt is marketed at distress prices. During the financial storm of mid-September, not only were there no takers for debt but it also proved impossible for the financial markets to establish any kind of value on this debt.

As the pace of the financial crisis grew more frenetic during the week of September 15, the U.S. ruling class was faced with a two-fold danger: additional and cascading losses and bankruptcies in the financial sector; and the possible choking up of lending channels, which could send the economy as a whole into a rapid downward spiral.

On September 19th, the U.S. government announced what will likely turn out to be the largest bail-out operation in U.S. history. Its initial cost is $700 billion, and this is on top of the $200 billion earmarked to shore up Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and the $85 billion to bail out AIG.

B). International Dimensions

This is a rolling financial and credit crisis. It is amplifying internationally with bursts of instability. In the midst of last week’s U.S. market gyrations, the Russian stock market sank and shut down for two days. In other parts of the world, concern spread about whether dollar-based loans in global markets would continue on the scale necessary to sustain daily business operations. In response, the central banks of Germany, Japan, England, Canada, and Switzerland pumped some $185 billion into the financial markets.

And investor worry is mounting in East Asia. China, Japan, and South Korea, for instance, count on the U.S. as a major export market.

One of the most significant features of world growth and expansion over the past decade has been the deepening integration of the world capitalist economy. This is happening both on the level of production and trade—like the parts that go into an automobile being manufacturing in different factories around the world. And it is happening at the level of finance—where banks are more globally and tightly interlinked with one another through chains of borrowing and lending and even, as in the case of AIG, insuring the risks of borrowing and lending.

The rescue operation announced by the U.S. government was motivated, on the one hand, by the need to stanch the bleeding of the U.S. financial system; and, on the other, by the need to restore international confidence in the U.S. economy.

A particular matter of concern for U.S. rulers is the international strength of the dollar. When we think about the dollar, we mostly think about it in terms of buying and selling with dollars changing hands. But the dollar is also an investible commodity—major currencies are bought and sold and traded on international currency markets. The dollar rises and falls in value in relation to other currencies and in response to international political and economic developments.

The dollar is the world’s leading currency for settling transactions, clearing debts, and holding foreign exchange reserves (trade and investment earnings that become part of the reserves of foreign central banks).

The dollar has been a linchpin of U.S. global supremacy. And it is a linchpin of the whole current global economic order.

If foreign central banks and investors were to flee from dollar holdings, this could set off a global monetary crisis and/or strengthen the position of rivals to U.S. imperialism and rival currencies (like the euro in Western Europe).

The dollar has for the most part held firm over the past month. But this is perhaps the calm before the storm.

C). Uncharted Waters and the Needs of Empire

These are uncharted waters for imperialist policymakers. They are uncharted in terms of the scale and complexity of the crisis. They are uncharted in terms of the magnitude of the rescue operations required to prevent financial breakdown. And U.S. imperialism does not have unlimited maneuvering room.

The U.S. is already the largest debtor nation in the world. It is waging costly wars for greater empire in Iraq and Afghanistan. And neither John McCain nor Barack Obama has any serious intention of ending America’s global “war on terror”--the umbrella under which the U.S. is waging these “wars for empire.”

And here an important dialectic comes into play. “U.S. military dominance,” to quote Kenneth Rogoff, the former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, “has been one of the linchpins of the dollar.”(Kenneth Rogoff, “America Will Need a $1,000bn Bail-Out,” Financial Times, September 17, 2008). But this military dominance and the wars the U.S. is waging have increasingly come to depend on the steady inflow of foreign capital into the U.S. economy, especially investments by foreign central banks in U.S. government debt (the U.S. Treasury sells bonds to cover the deficits). For this to continue requires that the U.S. economy and dollar remain stable. This is a major contradiction for U.S. imperialism.

When, since April, three of the five independent investment banks on Wall Street have gone bankrupt or been absorbed, when the U.S. government intervenes in the financial sector on the scale that it has…this has profound geopolitical implications.

At the same time, the world economy is not standing still. There are major shifts in global economic power. U.S. global economic dominance is declining. And U.S. imperialism is also facing new competitive challenges and the emergence of potential rival constellations of imperial and big powers.

D). The U.S. Ruling Class and Imperialist State Come Into View

As this financial crisis has unfolded, some of the realities of bourgeois rule came into sharper focus.

To begin with, while the jobs, homes, and futures of literally millions in this society are in jeopardy, what is the paramount concern of the ruling class? It is the protection of a financial system that sits atop a global system of exploitation. It is the bail-out of the owners and investor beneficiaries of that financial system.

There was no public debate over bailouts and loans for financial institutions. And the constant refrain from on-high was, “This is no time to assign blame.” Certainly, there is never a time, from the standpoint of the bourgeoisie, to talk about capitalism and its exploitative and anarchic functioning.

Politically, the system operates in such a way that the masses of people are either conditioned to be passive bystanders, or mobilized under the wing of this or that bourgeois political party or bourgeois-led movements--or subject to repression when people engage in serious resistance.

And through the media, the politicians, and the official “experts,” people are trained to look at things through a certain ideological filter. When a crisis like this one hits, the problem is never presented as the system but rather as particular flaws and malpractices that can be corrected: “excessive greed,” “Wall Street irresponsibility,” “too much regulation” or “too little regulation.”

The truth is that this crisis has deep structural causes in the very nature and workings of global capitalism and the particular position of U.S. imperialism within that global framework.

Lenin once described bourgeois parliaments (like the U.S. Congress) as “talk shops.” This time, Congress did not even get a chance to “talk” first. It has been basically presented with an accomplished fact: a bailout program. Now the bailout will be debated around the edges, with vying bourgeois economic and political interests also being fought out.

There are key institutional mechanisms of bourgeois rule and of the imperialist state. They include the Federal Reserve Bank--which plays a decisive regulating and lubricating role in the U.S. economy and which also plays a special role in the world capitalist economy-- and the Department of Treasury. Several mainstream news stories described how the head of the Federal Reserve and of the Treasury, and major Wall Street figures, met to sort out the AIG situation, to come up with a plan to deal with this phase of the crisis, and then to act on it.

As for McCain and Obama, one of whom will be the next “commander in chief of empire,” their response to the crisis has been an amalgam of the absurd, the hypocritical, and sworn allegiance to the system.

In the midst of the financial turmoil, McCain described the U.S. economy as having “sound fundamentals.” Then he moved to launch a rhetorical attack on “casino economies” and “greed” on Wall Street. Then he returned to his boilerplate calls for tax cuts, which will largely benefit the rich.

For his part, Obama has generally endorsed bailouts while deriding the policies of laxity and deregulation of the Bush presidency. The amnesia is striking. There was an orgy of deregulation during the Clinton years, including the repeal of regulatory legislation that laid the ground for the kind of mortgage-backed securities that became the rage on Wall Street. But then again, one of Obama’s chief economic advisers is none other than Robert Rubin, former chairman of Goldman Sachs (one of the last-standing independent investment banks) and head of the U.S. Treasury Department under Clinton.

Meanwhile, in Nevada on September 17, Obama declared, “Our free market is the engine of America’s great progress. It’s a market that has created a prosperity that is the envy of the world.” Tell that to the hundreds of millions around the world who are experiencing the ravages of a global food crisis. This food crisis is inextricably bound up with the operations of free markets that turn grain and rice into international commodities bought, sold, and speculated on by global investors. It is inextricably bound up with the “freedom” of U.S. agribusiness to dominate world food production and distribution. And it is inextricably bound up with so-called free-market “reforms” imposed on poor countries by the International Monetary Fund (which the U.S. also dominates).

E). Uncertainty Reigns

This crisis is far from over. There may be new rounds of financial upheaval. The economy is already in recession. And it could very well enter into a major slump.

And true to the workings of monopoly capitalism, investors and speculators are feverishly positioning themselves to take advantage of the market turmoil. They are unloading and grabbing up assets, angling to get a bite of the government bailouts, and shifting funds into different markets.

Whoever wins the election in November will be inheriting a battered financial system and a huge overlay of debt and bailout. This is not going to be an era of expanded social spending by government. But it will be an era of more direct government intervention in financial markets. And however U.S. capitalism tries to reconfigure itself, it will rest on more intense international exploitation, austerity, and more misery for people throughout the world and in the U.S.

For millions in U.S. society, this crisis is beginning to throw up many deep and troubling questions about the economy and this whole system. And it has the potential to throw up even deeper ones.

This is a fraught and rapidly unfolding situation.

II. The Deeper Structural Causes and Dynamics of the Financial Crisis

The buildup and collapse of the U.S. real estate bubble, the convulsions on Wall Street, and intensifying financial fragility that could lead to massive breakdown are the outward expressions of deeper processes and transformations at work in the world capitalist economy.

We need to take a step back.

A. Globalization and Financialization

For the last 15 years, world capitalist expansion has pivoted on a particular international dynamic and structure. This has involved heightened financialization and parasitism in the advanced capitalist countries —with the United States at the epicenter of this process; and the fuller integration of low-cost, export-producing countries of the Third World into the world capitalist market —with China at the epicenter of this process.

The turning point in this process was the collapse of the social-imperialist Soviet Union in 1990-91. With the implosion of the Soviet bloc, the main geopolitical obstacle to U.S. imperialist freedom of action was removed. At the same time, and very much in connection with this, imperialist globalization accelerated.

Over the last 15 years, a globally integrated cheap-labor manufacturing economy, with huge labor reserves from China, India, and other parts of the Third World, along with labor from the former Soviet bloc, has been forged. The globalization of production has had enormous effects on world accumulation: raising profitability for imperialist capital, acting to compress wages, and lowering inflationary pressures. The integration of cheap-labor manufacturing into world production is now so deep that in the U.S., fully half of imports (mostly consumer goods) come from the Third World.

A revealing statistic: a University of California study looked into who gains when an iPod manufactured by national firms in China is sold in America for $299. Only $4 stays in China with the firms that assemble the devices, while $160 goes to American companies that design, transport, and retail iPods.1

When we speak of capitalist accumulation, we are referring to the competitive production of surplus value (the source of profit) based on the exploitation of wage labor; and the investment and reinvestment of profit on an expanding, cost-cheapening, and technologically more productive basis.

When we speak of “financialization,” we are referring to two particular features of the larger structure of capitalist accumulation in this period of imperialist globalization: a) the vast expansion of financial activities and of financial services, like organizing and financing corporate takeovers, insuring investments against risk, creating new financial instruments, etc.—activities in which profit-making involves the siphoning, centralization, and reinvestment of surplus value through financial channels; and b) the increasing separation of finance from production.

This process of financialization has gone the furthest in the United States, and it is a major factor in U.S. imperialism’s ability to preserve and extend its dominance in international financial markets.2

Financialization is also a means through which wealth, and effective control over productive forces, is centralized by the imperialist countries—even as production has grown more geographically dispersed and increasingly carried out within subcontractural networks in the Third World.

Financialization involves efforts to squeeze out more “value” from already created value. One measure of this is that in 2006, the daily volume of trading in foreign exchange markets and in derivatives (financial instruments) added up to $11.4 trillion—which almost equals the annual value of global merchandise exports that year. In terms of the shifts in the structure of the U.S. economy, the financial services sector, comprising finance, insurance, and real estate, far exceeded other sectors—totaling over 20 percent of U.S. GDP by 2005, while manufacturing had fallen to 12 percent of U.S. GDP. The financial sector’s share of total corporate profits has risen from 5 percent in 1982 to 40 percent in 2007.3

B. Financialization and Production

As far removed as finance may be from processes of production, and as elaborate and multi-layered as its operations have become, finance cannot break free of the sphere of production. Even as it objectively seeks to do so—and even as the disjuncture between the two spheres (production and finance) grows—it is the underlying conditions and profitability of production that set the overall conditions for the accumulation of capital.

Imperialism is a worldwide system of production and exchange. It is the structure of social production—it is the global production of surplus value based on exploitation of people—that is at the foundation of this whole system. And in relation to the production of surplus value, “financialization” is both parasitic and functional. It is parasitic in the sense that financialization drains value from production.

But financialization is functional to the workings of global capitalism in the sense that it facilitates the gathering of money capital into ever-larger agglomerations of capital and finds new profit-yielding channels in which to rapidly invest it…and just as quickly to withdraw it! Global capital faces all kinds of financial uncertainties and risks on its competitive global playing field as it moves through different channels, or circuits, of production. And the “risk-management” techniques provided by the global financial system are actually vital to the accumulation of capital, to the success of “risk-taking,” in the turbo-charged globalized economy.4 That’s why, for example, money jumps into Thai real estate markets one day, and pulls out and goes into ethanol production in Brazil the next… and then back to mortgage securities.

And there is something else: the inflows and outflows of short-term and speculative capital also act as a perverse means of imposing discipline on and restructuring capitals—a major manufacturing firm can be starved of credit or threatened with a leveraged buyout. And this kind of “financial discipline” has been imposed on whole countries in the Third World—aided, abetted, and orchestrated by the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund.

All this is part of the reason that financial instability is a constant feature of capitalism in its more globalized and financialized forms of existence.

Financialization and the globalization of production have been tightly bound up with each other. It can be put this way: there is a relationship between sweatshop labor in Guangdong province in China, the recycling of China’s export earnings into the U.S. Treasury and U.S. financial markets, and the credit-financed expansion in the U.S. of the last decade. Or, to put it more graphically, there is a link between the agony of superexploited labor in the bowels of the new industrial zones of the Third World, the feverish search for high and quick returns at the top of the financial pyramids, and the chaos of the housing markets with people losing their homes in the U.S.

This is an extreme concentration of the nature of world capitalism. This world is highly bound together by production, trade, and finance. The requirements of life (consumer goods) and the requirements of production (machines and raw materials, etc.) are socially produced, that is, they involve the collective and interconnected efforts of wage-laborers in factories, warehouses, and so forth. But this wealth, the technology and means of producing it, and knowledge itself—all this is privately controlled and deployed by a small capitalist class.

C. Barriers, Contradictions, and Shifting Tectonic Plates

What we are witnessing now is that a particular dynamic of growth, marked by intensified financialization, is generating new contradictions and new barriers to sustained accumulation.

The level of debt to economic output in the U.S. is at an all-time high. The financing of the trade and government deficits of U.S. imperialism (that is, providing credit for purchases of imports and having investors buy Treasury debt) depends on a steady and growing inflow of capital from abroad. But the weakening of the dollar and the emergence of competitor currencies, like the euro, increasingly threatens these mechanisms. And very crucial to this has been the process where dollars earned by countries like China through trade with the U.S., are then recycled back into the U.S. economy through purchase of Treasury bonds and other investments.

In the U.S., the financial sector is seriously strained and is a flashpoint of heightened global financial instability, if not breakdown, leading to a major economic slump.

Here we come to a basic point of this analysis: A financial crisis has broken out because of the severe imbalances built up between the financial system—and its expectations of future profits—and the accumulation of capital, that is, the structures and actual production of profit based on exploitation of wage-labor.

The imperialist state is intervening to head off further damage and to discipline and restructure the financial system. But the very complexity of the “financial packages” created during the speculative boom—with their bundled-up loans and long strings of finance—are producing new challenges for policy-makers. As one Yale economist put it, perhaps unintentionally echoing a phrase from Marx: “like the sorcerer’s apprentice, we have created things we do not understand and cannot easily control.”5

This explosive uncertainty is developing against a larger international canvas. Major shifts are taking place in the world capitalist economy. The European market recently eclipsed the U.S. market in size. China’s growing demand for raw materials to fuel its export economy is making it a new player in the scramble for resources and control over them. And China’s increasing importance as a supplier of capital to the U.S. is giving it new leverage. Russia is reemerging as a world imperialist player, owing in part to its vast energy reserves and rising oil and gas prices.

At the same time, and at this very moment of financial crisis, U.S. imperialism’s freedom of maneuver is severely hobbled—and this includes its ability to stimulate the economy through fiscal and monetary policy. The United States has never run such large current account deficits and no single country’s deficit has ever bulked as large relative to the global economy.

D. The Military Fix

Which brings us to one of the “dirty little secrets” of the financial crisis: the military needs and the military costs of empire…and “greater empire.”

There is a brute fact of imperialist accumulation. The whole imperialist system rests on the domination of vast swaths of the globe through savage force, with the U.S. military colossus playing a special role. The U.S. military helps “create the conditions” for U.S. domination, pro-U.S. client regimes in the Third World, and conditions for investment by U.S. corporations.

In the Bush era, U.S. imperialism has been attempting to parlay its military might into a new world order. This involves a restructuring of global political and production relations that will enable it to resolve or mitigate some of the problems and tensions it faces—and to lock in its global supremacy over rivals and potential rivals for decades to come.

The U.S. share of world production has declined to about 20 percent, down from 30 percent forty years ago. But U.S. imperialism is compensating for this by pressing its military advantage as sole imperialist “superpower” (since the collapse of the Soviet Union).

In a recent study, Chalmers Johnson has calculated that defense-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. Leaving out the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, defense spending has doubled since the mid-1990s.6

Militarization is also embedded in the U.S. economy. It is a key structural component of growth, scientific research, and technological prowess of U.S. imperialism. And because of its sheer size, it also plays a role in the attempts of the U.S. imperialist state to “manage” and stimulate the economy.

But the recent wave of militarization has put enormous financial strains on U.S. imperialism. It has produced huge deficits that cannot be sustained without the inflow of capital into the U.S. And the wars for “greater empire” are incurring astronomically greater costs than military and government planners had anticipated. Not least because of the setbacks and difficulties U.S. imperialism has encountered in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is a sharp contradiction for U.S. imperialism—because in many ways it is staking the future of empire on these wars; but these wars have become more costly to wage. And it is the height of hypocrisy for Democrats to now blame the Iraq war for financial crisis—as they consistently voted for war-spending authorizations, to the tune of $500 billion.

E. A Reflection: Transparency and Anarchy

The free market is extolled by bourgeois ideologues for its “transparency.” This is the idea that markets, prices, and interest rates convey all necessary information: about supply, efficiency, choice, and reward.

But one of the distinguishing features of this crisis is the incredible and pervasive lack of knowledge among lenders, borrowers, traders, and insurers about the quality and backing of what they borrow from others…and even of what they lend to others! Things are obscured, covered up, and very opaque.

* There is the anarchy of capitalism, as giant agglomerations of capital battle others for market share and profits, and pursue competitive strategies that have unforeseen effects on the larger system.

* There is the emergence of a newer banking system operating parallel to the older commercial banks. These are the so-called hedge funds, private equity firms, and investment banks. They move huge amounts of capital in and out of financial markets to take advantage of momentary and slight changes in bond prices, interest rates, and currency exchange rates. They borrow against assets that have a shadow existence, far removed from the actual production of value. They have led in creating new financial instruments, in which all kinds of loans of varying risk are bundled together into interest-yielding bonds and the like. And this newer banking system operates in a more unregulated environment than do the commercial banks.

* This is a highly competitive, turbo-charged financial world, where huge blocks of capital seek quick gains at the expense of others. In this setting, speculation, fraud, and deception become part of survival strategies. One example of this in the unfolding of the financial crisis: financial agencies that rate the risk of things like mortgage-backed securities earn higher fees for providing favorable ratings on these new “financial products.” So they lied and deceived investors about real risk. This led to mis-pricing and to baseless expectations of return on investments.

F. A Reflection: A House…Is Not Always a House

As we descend from the skyscrapers of finance to ground level, the human toll comes into clearer view. At the start of 2008, nearly 1.3 million homes in the U.S were in some phase of foreclosure. That works out to more than one in every 100 U.S. households. According to Moody’s Economy.com : “not since the Depression has a larger share of Americans owed more on their homes than they are worth.”7

Think about it. Something as basic and essential as shelter is commodified. A house becomes an investment; its purchase underwritten by tradable financial instruments; and the lure of homeownership then engulfed by the devastating trade winds of the market. And what happens? People’s savings are wiped out. Their creditworthiness is damaged if not destroyed. And many face the prospect of homelessness.

The problem is not that people don’t need houses. Nor is it that society doesn’t have the resources or knowledge to build houses. The problem is that capital stands as a barrier to meeting human need.

Footnotes

1 Cited in Charlemagne, “Winners and losers,” The Economist, March 1, 2008, p. 56.

2. Among informative studies of financialization, neoliberalism, and dollar hegemony are David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (London: Oxford, 2005); Andrew Glyn, Capitalism Unleashed (London: Oxford, 2006); Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy (New York: Viking, 2006); Ramaa Vasudevan, “Finance, Imperialism, and the Hegemony of the Dollar,” Monthly Review, April 2008; and C.P. Chandrasekhar, “Continuity or Change? Finance Capital in Developing Countries a Decade after the Asian Crisis,” Economic and Political Weekly, December 15, 2007.

3. See Chandrasekhar, “Continuity or Change,” pp. 37-38; Kevin Phillips, Bad Money (New York: Viking, 2008), p. 5; Tony Jackson, “Has the Supercharged Banking Model Run out of Control?” Financial Times, January 21, 2008.

4. On financialization as a means to contain financial disorder and to impose neoliberal discipline, see Christopher Rude, “The Role of Financial Discipline in Imperial Strategy,” in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, eds., Socialist Register 2005: The Empire Reloaded (London: Merlin Press, 2004).

5. David Dapice, “Bad Spell on Wall Street,” Policyinnovations.org, January 24, 2008.

6. Chalmers Johnson, “Why the US has really gone broke,” mondediplo.com (English edition), February 5, 2008.

7. Data from RealtyTrac.com, January 29, 2008; Moody’s Economy.com, February 21, 2008.

2008-09-28T07:35:00.000+10:00

http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/global-warming/australian-emissions-still-rising-rapidly/2008/09/25/1222217430720.html

Australian emissions still rising rapidly

Marian Wilkinson and Ben Cubby

September 26, 2008

IN A serious setback to the Rudd Government's stated ambition to become a world leader on climate change, new global figures show Australia's greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuel are continuing to rise rapidly in stark contrast to other developed countries.

"Australia's position remains unique as a developed country," said Dr Michael Raupach, a CSIRO scientist and co-chair of the Global Carbon Project which released the figures yesterday. "Since 2000 Australian fossil-fuel emissions have grown by 2 per cent per year".

This rapid rise will make it difficult for Australia to cut its emissions by 2020, even by the modest amount of 10 per cent recommended by Professor Ross Garnaut, the Government's climate change adviser.

Scientists expressed alarm at the figures, which also show global greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels have soared since 2000, largely because of economic growth in developing countries. Emissions have grown four times faster than the previous decade, exceeding the worst-case scenarios of the UN's peak scientific body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

India is poised to become the third biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, taking the place of Russia. The top three emitters of carbon dioxide will soon be China, the US and India.

The new emissions figures put together by scientists from Australia, the US, France and Britain reveal that humans generated 10 billion tonnes of carbon in 2007 from the use of fuels like coal and oil, from making cement and from massive deforestation. This put the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at 383 parts per million, around 37 per cent above the levels at the start of the industrial revolution and the highest level for at least 650,000 years.

"This new update of the carbon budget shows the acceleration of both carbon dioxide emissions and atmospheric accumulation are unprecedented and most astonishing during a decade of intense international developments to address climate change," Dr Pep Canadell, another member of the project, said.

The figures only measure carbon dioxide emissions. When other gases like methane are added, the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are around 410 parts per million, according to CSIRO scientist Dr Paul Fraser. The most recent UN scientific reports find that if the concentrations go over 450 parts per million, the world risks increasing average temperatures more than 2.5 degrees, which could cause mass extinctions of species.

Dr Barry Brook, director of the Research Institute for Climate Change and Sustainability, said the latest figures for atmospheric carbon were ominous. "If you look at current government policy, then it doesn't add up anyway, even before these figures," he said."Cutting our emissions by 60 per cent by 2050 won't do it, because we are already such high emitters per capita. It has to be more like 90 per cent.".

Addressing a climate change meeting in New York, Mr Rudd warned the introduction of an emissions scheme in Australia and globally was vexed enough without expecting nervous economies to bear further expense by putting a price on carbon. "It is an even greater difficulty at a time when the global economy is under great global financial stress."

2008-09-25T06:18:00.000+10:00

http://countercurrents.org/connor240908.htm

THE METHANE TIME BOMB

By Steve Connor

24 September, 2008
The Independent

The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.

The Independent has been passed details of preliminary findings suggesting that massive deposits of sub-sea methane are bubbling to the surface as the Arctic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats.

Underground stores of methane are important because scientists believe their sudden release has in the past been responsible for rapid increases in global temperatures, dramatic changes to the climate, and even the mass extinction of species. Scientists aboard a research ship that has sailed the entire length of Russia's northern coast have discovered intense concentrations of methane – sometimes at up to 100 times background levels – over several areas covering thousands of square miles of the Siberian continental shelf.

In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through "methane chimneys" rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a "lid" to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.

They have warned that this is likely to be linked with the rapid warming that the region has experienced in recent years.

Methane is about 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and many scientists fear that its release could accelerate global warming in a giant positive feedback where more atmospheric methane causes higher temperatures, leading to further permafrost melting and the release of yet more methane.

The amount of methane stored beneath the Arctic is calculated to be greater than the total amount of carbon locked up in global coal reserves so there is intense interest in the stability of these deposits as the region warms at a faster rate than other places on earth.

Orjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University in Sweden, one of the leaders of the expedition, described the scale of the methane emissions in an email exchange sent from the Russian research ship Jacob Smirnitskyi.

"We had a hectic finishing of the sampling programme yesterday and this past night," said Dr Gustafsson. "An extensive area of intense methane release was found. At earlier sites we had found elevated levels of dissolved methane. Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface. These 'methane chimneys' were documented on echo sounder and with seismic [instruments]."

At some locations, methane concentrations reached 100 times background levels. These anomalies have been seen in the East Siberian Sea and the Laptev Sea, covering several tens of thousands of square kilometres, amounting to millions of tons of methane, said Dr Gustafsson. "This may be of the same magnitude as presently estimated from the global ocean," he said. "Nobody knows how many more such areas exist on the extensive East Siberian continental shelves.

"The conventional thought has been that the permafrost 'lid' on the sub-sea sediments on the Siberian shelf should cap and hold the massive reservoirs of shallow methane deposits in place. The growing evidence for release of methane in this inaccessible region may suggest that the permafrost lid is starting to get perforated and thus leak methane... The permafrost now has small holes. We have found elevated levels of methane above the water surface and even more in the water just below. It is obvious that the source is the seabed."

The preliminary findings of the International Siberian Shelf Study 2008, being prepared for publication by the American Geophysical Union, are being overseen by Igor Semiletov of the Far-Eastern branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Since 1994, he has led about 10 expeditions in the Laptev Sea but during the 1990s he did not detect any elevated levels of methane. However, since 2003 he reported a rising number of methane "hotspots", which have now been confirmed using more sensitive instruments on board the Jacob Smirnitskyi.

Dr Semiletov has suggested several possible reasons why methane is now being released from the Arctic, including the rising volume of relatively warmer water being discharged from Siberia's rivers due to the melting of the permafrost on the land.

The Arctic region as a whole has seen a 4C rise in average temperatures over recent decades and a dramatic decline in the area of the Arctic Ocean covered by summer sea ice. Many scientists fear that the loss of sea ice could accelerate the warming trend because open ocean soaks up more heat from the sun than the reflective surface of an ice-covered sea.

2008-09-20T11:03:00.001+10:00

2008-09-19T09:01:00.000+10:00

The Campaign of Terror at the Behest of Big Pharma in the USA and Elsewhere
By Benjamin Merhav

There has been a worldwide campaign of terror at the behest of the huge transnational phamaceutical corporations (Big Pharma) for a number of years now to silence critics and to put honest and effective competition out of business.

Thus, for example, the renowned German physician, Dr. Matthias Rath, who not only exposed the crimes of Big Pharma, but also successfully researched and produced effective and harmless alternative cures to various diseases, was recently silenced and put out of business in South Africa, and maligned in the UK and elsewhere. As another example ,Psychiatry, the junior partner of Big Pharma, continues to push and impose Big Pharma’s deadly psychiatric poisons as "medications", ignoring scientific warnings and public protests all over the world.

The following article is from a news letter produced in the USA. It reveals more on the campaign of terror to protect the colossal profits of Big Pharma in the USA and elsewhere. The author of the article, Mike Adams, correctly points out that as the USA plutocracy regime and its economy plunge into deeper crisis so do state terror and tyranny further intensify.

http://mail.google.com/mail/h/18wxxlo96xpiw/?v=c&s=a&th=11c770da7294dfae

FTC unleashes campaign of terror against natural cancer cures

NaturalNews Insider Alert (www.NaturalNews.com) newsletter

Dear NaturalNews readers,

Today the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched a campaign of terror against companies selling natural cures for cancer. Using the same tactics as the FDA (fear, intimidation, legal threats, etc.) the FTC is working hard to destroy the businesses of companies offering genuine cancer cures that really work. Companies like MushroomScience.com, for example, are under attack for daring to link to scientific studies about the anti-cancer benefits of Reishi mushrooms, and anyone using the word "cure" on their website is instantly presumed guilty of criminal acts.

It's all part of the knowledge cleansing campaign being undertaken by the FTC and FDA to destroy knowledge and keep the population nutritionally illiterate. It's being done, of course, to protect the lucrative profits of the cancer indstry and the drug companies who now seem to control the FTC, FDA and even the DEA.

Read my breaking news story on this dangerous development here: http://www.naturalnews.com/024246.html

And be sure to share this story with as many people as you can. The entire natural products industry is now threatened by the FTC / FDA mobsters, and if they have their way, ALL natural products companies will be either put out of business or their founders will be arrested and imprisoned. This is a government-sponsored knowledge cleansing of the population, much like a national "mind wipe" effort that hopes to suppress or destroy any memory of the healing power of natural medicine.

Dark days are upon us, folks, and the U.S. government is desperately trying to destroy knowledge and censor the truth about cancer cures. We need your help to protect the truth and spread the word about natural cancer cures that really work. Spread the word by sharing these stories and linking to NaturalNews.com so we can educate more readers.

Internet Freedom Now Under Assault

Speaking of efforts to destroy knowledge, one of the founders of the Internet is now proposing that websites be labelled with "trust ratings" that would destroy the credibility of any "alternative" information websites that argue against things like chemotherapy or mandatory vaccination of children. This censorship effort is described here:
http://www.naturalnews.com/024240.html

The bottom line in all this is that the institutions of power are declaring war against the Internet, attempting to silence the truth and imprison those who dare speak it. We are in the midst of a battle of truth vs. deceit, knowledge vs. ignorance and health vs. death. The U.S. government and its corporate cronies want you to be trapped in a culture of death, disease and disinformation, and they're pulling out ALL the stops to make sure that happens.

It is no coincidence that this is all happening during the global financial meltdown that may ultimately lead to the complete dissolution of the U.S. government (and all its rogue agencies). These actions are the last desperate grunts of a tyrannical police state power that senses its days are numbered...

(Emphasis added - B.M.)

2008-09-07T09:22:00.000+10:00

Why We're Planning To Prosecute Cheney And Bush

By David Swanson

06 September, 2008
Afterdowningstreet.org

Next weekend in Andover, Mass., a group of attorneys, academics, and activists will gather to plan the prosecution of Dick Cheney, George Bush, and the lawyers and advisors who, together with them, are responsible for war crimes. The conference is open to the public and expected to be well attended: http://war-crimes.info

I can't speak for everyone involved, but I can tell you why I'll be there. If I thought we could deter future presidents and vice presidents from abusing power by giving Cheney and Bush immunity for life, billion dollar pensions, and royal crowns, then that is exactly what I would propose we do. In fact, if there were just about anything that we could do that I thought would have that deterrent effect, I would advocate for it. I would give my life for it. I take the matter this seriously because we are preparing to hand what Michael Goldfarb, Deputy Communications Director for presidential candidate John McCain, approvingly calls "near dictatorial power" to every future president and vice president at a moment in history in which the twin dangers of global warming and nuclear war threaten us far more seriously than has any nation with which ours has ever clashed.

I am adamantly opposed to the possibility of imposing the death penalty on anyone, no matter what they are convicted of, because it has been shown to encourage violence rather than to deter it. Future presidents are not more likely to refrain from abusing power if they might be executed than if they might be imprisoned for life. If they are imprisoned for life, they can express their regrets in ways that their successors can understand. If they are killed, we will be the ones killing them, and we will thereby send a message to everyone that violence and vengeance are appropriate and admirable. Vengeance disgusts me. Bush and Cheney bore me. What interests me and inflames me is the desire to establish the rule of law, not for its own sake but in order to promote peace, fairness, human rights, and human survival.

Now, we may have an honest and verifiable election in November, although I can't see how. And we may elect a president and vice president who abide fully by the Constitution, the treaties our nation has ratified, and the laws that are on the books, although that seems highly unlikely. We might even see unconstitutional laws repealed, tyrannical executive orders torn up, and the Constitution amended to strengthen checks on power and expand the democratic influence of the people, although if you believe all that I've got a quick little cakewalk of a war to sell you. But think for a minute what message all those successes would send to future presidents and vice presidents and their subordinates: If you break the law, the punishment shall be that the duumvirate immediately following yours will not break the law. Oh, the horror! I can almost feel the terror gripping the spine of every future Dick Cheney and George W. Bush who will claim the throne throughout the remaining short life of our dying republic. "Nooooooo! Don't say that the next chump who comes after us won't get to be a war president! We can't stand such agony!"

In a December 31, 2007, editorial, the New York Times faulted the current president and vice president of the United States for kidnapping innocent people, denying justice to prisoners, torturing, murdering, circumventing U.S. and international law, spying in violation of the Fourth Amendment, and basing their actions on "imperial fantasies." If the editorial had been about Bush and Cheney robbing a liquor store or killing a small number of people or robbing a small amount of money or torturing a single child, then the writers at the New York Times would have demanded immediate prosecution and incarceration. Can you guess what they actually demanded? They demanded that we sit back and hope the next president and vice president will be better. Well, what if they are? The next guy who walked into the liquor store or played with the child would be better too. But how does that fact deter future crimes?

Well, we can announce new policies, pass new legislation, amend the Constitution. We can shift power to the Congress, and clean up our electoral system to allow real representation of the people in the Congress. We can shift our resources from the military to peaceful enterprises. We can eliminate secret government and create total transparency. We can perfect the brilliant cutting-edge democratic system that our nation created over two centuries ago and has done little to update since. We can put an end to plutocracy, reclaim our airwaves, ban war propaganda, and develop wholly different public attitudes toward those 95.5 percent of people in the world who are not Americans. And so we should. But even if we could do all of those things instantly, it would not be sufficient to chain the dogs of war. Exquisite laws and enlightened public attitudes are of no use at all as long as presidents and vice presidents suffer no penalty for disobeying them, and in fact benefit politically and financially.

Of course, in reality, we cannot reform our war government instantly, and we will be hard pressed to prevent even greater damage to our representative system as long as wars are going on. We are as likely to see President John McCain cheering for more wars in January as we are to see President Obama mumbling about moving wars from one country to another. If Obama loses or has his victory stolen, the Democrats will take everything they did wrong these past several years and redouble their commitment to screwing up even worse next time. Ending wars and impeaching criminal presidents will be even further "off the table," while patriotism, religion, and militarism will be on the rise. If, on the other hand, the Democrats win in November, they'll react exactly the same way. Their primary interest as soon as any election is won is winning the next one, and their only focus outside of the White House is on controlling the partisan re-gerrymandering of districts in 2012. I wish that this focus on each subsequent election could be seen as a sign of health in our democracy, but in the corrupt, money-laden, media-mangled, party-powered system we have, voters' choices are minimal, and the total focus on elections amounts to a total abandonment of governing in between elections.

During the Democratic primaries, Senator Obama said he'd have his attorney general look into the possibility that Bush and Cheney had committed crimes, but that as far as he knew they hadn't committed any. At the same time, Obama promised not to commit some of the same crimes himself. He later voted to give telecom companies immunity for cooperating with some of the crimes. This past week Obama's vice-presidential running-mate Joe Biden said that he, too, didn't know of any crimes that had been committed, but that an Obama-Biden administration would look into the question. He also promised a justice department that would no longer commit crimes. The day after Biden made these nonsensical remarks, he went on TV to insist that an Obama-Biden administration has no intention of prosecuting Bush and Cheney.

There's a much more serious potential road block to domestic criminal prosecution than Barack Obama's belief that Bush and Cheney's crimes should be hushed up, namely the possibility that Bush will issue blanket pardons of anyone who engaged in crimes he authorized, including himself. If such a pardon strikes you as a sick joke, I'm with you. But signing statements and military tribunals and pentagon pundits and a partisan justice department and ATM companies building election machines without the safeguards that ATMs have would have all sounded like sick jokes if they weren't real. Without admitting that Bush or anyone else has committed any crimes, Obama or McCain could take a position against any president, himself included, ever pardoning anyone for a crime that the president authorizes. Congress, or at least the House of Representatives, could stop vacationing and pass legislation forbidding such pardons. Lawyers and Constitutional experts could publish op-eds in major newspapers on the unacceptability of such pardons. A massive movement in the coming months to raise public pressure against pardons makes at least as much sense as continuing to ask Congress to pretty please "end the war," as if Congress will ever do anything about wars other than what the president tells it to do. A focus on pardons at least begins to limit the power of the individual holding all the power. Congress, unless it is restored to power, serves -- at best -- as just more people lobbying the president.

Now, blanket pardons or self-pardons could be challenged. There may be local and state and civil prosecutions possible despite pardons and strengthened by pardons. And prosecution by a foreign country or the International Criminal Court (ICC) is a possibility as well. With Obama and Biden suggesting they will "investigate" whether any crimes have been committed, there is no reason that they could not, without even joining the ICC or admitting that they know about the crimes, publicly commit to NOT vetoing at the United Nations any investigations that the ICC might choose to pursue. That commitment is a second demand that we can make of the candidates for emperor.

Some have expressed concern that when Cheney and Bush leave office they will destroy lots of evidence of their crimes. I do not share this concern, because they already have destroyed lots of such evidence, and nonetheless more than enough such evidence is in the public realm. We do not need any more, but do badly need to shake off the myth that we need any more. And there is something that cannot be destroyed: the many potential whistleblowers who have been keeping their mouths shut. We should not be relying on Congress. We should not be funneling our money through electoral campaigns and into TV ads on television networks that are destroying our country. We should be establishing a whistleblower protection fund that can guarantee financial security and legal defense to those considering blowing the whistle on their superiors.

As far as Congress goes, we should be demanding a commitment that the endless charades they have gone through with subpoenas and contempt citations for the past two years, while conscientiously avoiding impeachment, will not be dropped along with the ball in Times Square on New Year's Eve. "Executive privilege" loses even the slightest aura of respectability once the executive is guzzling beers on golf courses for a living. The committee chairmen and the House and Senate leaders who have authorized subpoenas and contempt citations only to be mocked and laughed at by the gang of pirates who will set sail in January must be compelled to publicly commit to re-issuing the same once the new justice department is in place.

There are also a variety of ways in which citizens can file suit. My friend John Bonifaz served as attorney on a law suit against the President before the invasion of Iraq on behalf of Congress members and military families claiming an invasion would be unconstitutional without a proper congressional declaration of war. John consulted in 2007 with a professor at Rutgers University, who worked up a case with his students for a full year, and in 2008 filed it in Federal District Court in Newark, New Jersey. The Complaint, filed on behalf of a number of peace groups, seeks a Declaratory Judgment that the President’s decision to launch a preemptive war against a sovereign nation in 2003 violated Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution, which assigns to Congress the power to Declare War. Every peace and justice group in the country should be working with lawyers, choosing their favorite Cheney-Bush crime, and filing a suit, the point being to change the public conversation until we reach the point that a prosecutor will act.

There is also a procedure called Qui Tam found in the Federal False Claims Act that allows individual citizens to sue if the government spends money fraudulently, and to receive a percentage of any funds recovered. Such a suit could conceivable be filed, or perhaps hundreds of such suits could be filed, against government officials, including Dick Cheney, who set up illegal contracts with Halliburton and other corporations, including contracts to spend in Iraq funding that had been legally appropriated for Afghanistan.

Prosecution is also possible in foreign nations. In May 2008 in Milano, Italy, 25 CIA agents and an Air Force colonel went on trial in absentia for kidnapping a man on an Italian street and renditioning him to Egypt to be tortured. The victim's wife testified for over six hours. A newspaper report read:

"Nabila at first rebuffed prosecutors' requests to describe the torture her husband had recounted, saying she didn't want to talk about it. Advised by prosecutors that she had no choice, she tearfully proceeded: 'He was tied up like he was being crucified. He was beaten up, especially around his ears. He was subject to electroshocks to many body parts.'
"'To his genitals?' the prosecutors asked.
"'Yes,' she replied."

The judge said that the current and immediate past prime ministers of Italy would be required to testify during the trial.

Foreign victims can also sue in U.S. courts. Also in May 2008, an Iraqi sued U.S. contractors for torture. Emad al-Janabi's federal lawsuit was filed in Los Angeles and claimed that employees of CACI International Inc. and L-3 Communications punched him, slammed him into walls, hung him from a bed frame and kept him naked and handcuffed in his cell. In July, three more Iraqis and a Jordanian who had been held and tortured in Abu Ghraib for years before being released without charges filed similar suits. Alleged methods of torture by the U.S. contractors included: electric shock, beatings, depriving of food and sleep, threatening with dogs, stripping naked, forcibly shaving, choking, being forced to witness murder, pouring feces on, holding down and sodomizing (a 14-year-old boy) with a toothbrush, being paraded naked before other prisoners, forcing to consume so much water that you vomit blood and faint, and tying a plastic line around your penis to prevent urination.

And on August 15, 2008, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York announced that it would hear the case against the United States of Canadian victim of U.S. torture Maher Arar. His suit names, among others, former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, and former head of "Homeland Security" Tom Ridge.

We can also work at the local level to follow the example of Brattleboro, Vt., passing ordinances making it the law that if Bush, Cheney, or key co-conspirators enter our towns they will be arrested.

And we can make citizens arrests all on our own right now: http://afterdowningstreet.org/citizenarrest

Judge William Price in Iowa in July heard the case of people who had been arrested for trying to make a citizens' arrest of Karl Rove. When told what they were charged with, the judge remarked "Well, it's about time!"

And it's about time we put together a serious plan to establish the rule of law at home and abroad. I'll see you in Andover next weekend.

2008-08-20T14:24:00.000+10:00

The current Layout is no longer available for the full list of my blogs.

The full and updated list is in chapter 14 of my autobiography :
http://2ndpartofmyautobiography.blogspot.com/

POWER TO THE PEOPLE NOW !

REPLACE PLUTOCRACY WITH DIRECT DEMOCRACY NOW,

BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE !

2008-08-20T13:42:00.000+10:00

GENOCIDE INSIDE THE USA
by Benjamin Merhav

The following article was emailed to me today by Dr. Alva Scruggs :

DR. J. ALVA SCRUGGS
FRANK(LY) SPEAKING OR LETTER TO EDITOR
1804 MAYFAIR DRIVE, TALLAHASSEE,
FLORIDA 32303
PHONE&FAX (850)385-5750E-MAIL JSCRU5750 (at) AOL.COMWebsite ; http://franklyspeaking.info/

ARE AMERICAN JAILS NOTHING BUT ANOTHER METHOD OF GENOCIDE ?
(WRITTEN April 4, 2008)

Genocide the American way is all encompassing and involves many supporting institutional constructs! America has more of its citizens in prison than any other country in the world today. Nearly one in four of all prisoners worldwide is incarcerated in America.

What does it take to get Americans to sit up and notice?

Germany had the most widely advertised system of extermination of a group of people. But American has outdone Germany by getting all the institutions in America involved. The incarceration of over two and one half million Americans or 1 in every 100 has spawn many supporting institutions.

These institutions include: 1. Religion-ministers can take college courses in serving inmates, 2. Higher Education-Colleges-Universities have courses and majors in Criminal Justice and management of jails and prisons. 3. The private Industry has become involved by running jail and prisons for profit, 4. Social Science Institutions have developed courses in the Schools of Social Service to train American citizens in the counseling and services to inmates. 4. Private Industry has developed testing of their new product using prisoners. 5. Medical Institution have developed agencies to obtain prisoners for medical student interns practice and testing and to get the bodies of prisoner for their Schools of Medicine. 6. Town and Counties have developed Lobbying for locating prisons and jails in there districts to elevate unemployment. 7. The TV media has entered into propaganda for making the institution of incarceration an accepted “American way of life” (e.g. MSNBC LOCK DOWN, etc), 8. The State legislatures haves added legitimacy to the unavoidable activity of male on male sex in prisons by making it possible for prisoners to marry their homosexual partners while in jail. 9. This has a method of population control of unwanted groups. When you consider that the average American family consists of two and one half children; then the two and one half male prisoners would be responsible for the production of about 5,000,000 more individuals if they were not in prison.

Of course there is a need for the incarceration and punish and rehabilitation of criminals. But America has allowed this function to evolve into an unfortunate way of doing other things. Between marijuana and movement of manufacturing to cheaper labor overseas producing extraordinarily high unemployment the jails will be costing more than all other public services combined!!

Ask did your uncle Joe, your brother little June Bug, or sister Mary Jo do so much Harm/bad that they must be jailed for life??

Dr J. Alva Scruggs, BS, MS, MA, EdD

Look Forward to Your Comments E-MAIL JSCRU5750 (at) AOL.COMWebsite ; http://franklyspeaking.info/

(Emphasis added - B.M.)

2008-08-15T06:30:00.000+10:00