Bush's $1 Trillion War on Terror: Even Costlier Than Expected

President George Dubya's and our compliant Congress have spent us into perpetual debt for the left our lives, our children's lives and the lives of our grand-children. What a legacy he, the congress and the majority of the voters of the United States of America have created for this one eight year segment of our history. This is an excellent appraisal of this economic nighmare by Mark Thompson for Time Magazine

Fred


Bush's $1 Trillion War on Terror: Even Costlier Than Expected
Friday 26 December 2008
»
by: Mark Thompson, Time Magazine


Washington - The news that President Bush's war on terror will soon have cost the U.S. taxpayer $1 trillion - and counting - is unlikely to spread much Christmas cheer in these tough economic times. A trio of recent reports - none by the Bush Administration - suggests that sometime early in the Obama presidency, spending on the wars started since 9/11 will pass the trillion-dollar mark. Even after adjusting for inflation, that's four times more than America spent fighting World War I, and more than 10 times the cost of 1991's Persian Gulf War (90 percent of which was paid for by U.S. allies). The war on terror looks set to surpass the cost the Korean and Vietnam wars combined, to be topped only by World War II's price tag of $3.5 trillion.

The cost of sending a single soldier to fight for a year in Afghanistan or Iraq is about $775,000 - three times more than in other recent wars, says a new report from the private but authoritative Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. A large chunk of the increase is a result of the Administration cramming new military hardware into the emergency budget bills it has been using to pay for the wars.

These costs, of course, pale alongside the price paid by the nearly 5,000 U.S. troops who have lost their lives in the conflicts - not to mention the wounded - and the families of all the casualties. And President Bush insists that their sacrifice, and the expenditure on the wars, has helped prevent a recurrence of 9/11. "We could not afford to wait for the terrorists to attack again," he said last week at the Army War College. "So we launched a global campaign to take the fight to the terrorists abroad, to dismantle their networks, to dry up their financing and find their leaders and bring them to justice."

But many Americans may suffer a moment of sticker shock from the conclusions of the CSBA report, and similar assessments from the Government Accounting Office and Congressional Research Service, which make clear that the nearly $1 trillion already spent is only a down payment on the war's long-term costs. The trillion-dollar figure does not, for example, include long-term health care for veterans, thousands of whom have suffered crippling wounds, or the interest payments on the money borrowed by the Federal government to fund the war. The bottom lines of the three assessments vary: The CSBA study says $904 billion has been spent so far, while the GAO says the Pentagon alone has spent $808 billion through last September. The CRS study says the wars have cost $864 billion, but it didn't factor inflation into its calculations.

Sifting through Pentagon data, the CSBA study breaks down the total cost for the war on terror as $687 billion for Iraq, $184 billion for Afghanistan, and $33 billion for homeland security. By 2018, depending on how many U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan and Iraq, the total cost is projected likely to be between $1.3 trillion and $1.7 trillion. On the safe assumption that the wars are being waged with borrowed money, interest payments raise the cost by an additional $600 billion through 2018.

Shortly before the Iraq war began, White House economic adviser Larry Lindsey earned a rebuke from within the Administration when he said the war could cost as much as $200 billion. "It's not knowable what a war or conflict like that would cost," Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld said. "You don't know if it's going to last two days or two weeks or two months. It certainly isn't going to last two years."

According to the CSBA study, the Administration has fudged the war's true costs in two ways: Borrowing money to fund the wars is one way of conducting it on the cheap, at least in the short term. But just as pernicious has been the Administration's novel way of budgeting for them. Previous wars were funded through the annual appropriations process, with emergency spending - which gets far less congressional scrutiny - only used for the initial stages of a conflict. But the Bush Administration relied on such supplemental appropriations to fund the wars until 2008, seven years after invading Afghanistan and five years after storming Iraq.

"For these wars we have relied on supplemental appropriations for far longer than in the case of past conflicts," says Steven Kosiak of the CSBA, one of Washington's top defense-budget analysts. "Likewise, we have relied on borrowing to cover more of these costs than we have in earlier wars - which will likely increase the ultimate price we have to pay." That refusal to spell out the full cost can lead to unwise spending increases elsewhere in the federal budget or unwarranted tax cuts. "A sound budgeting process forces policymakers to recognize the true costs of their policy choices," Kosiak adds. "Not only did we not raise taxes, we cut taxes and significantly expanded spending."

The bottom line: Bush's projections of future defense spending "substantially understate" just how much money it will take to run Obama's Pentagon, Kosiak says in his report. Luckily, Defense Secretary Robert Gates plans to hang around to try to iron out the problem.

Bush's Final Fuck You

Rolling Stone has done an outstanding job analyzing how George Dubya is pulling out all the stops in his final rape of the United States of America.

Fred

URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/24991066/bushs_final_fu

Rollingstone.com
Back to Bush's Final F.U.

Bush's Final F.U.
The administration is rushing to enact a host of last-minute regulations that will screw America for years to come

TIM DICKINSON

Posted Dec 25, 2008 11:55 AM
ADVERTISEMENT


With president-elect Barack Obama already taking command of the financial crisis, it's tempting to think that regime change in America is a done deal. But if George Bush has his way, the country will be ruled by his slash-and-burn ideology for a long time to come.

In its final days, the administration is rushing to implement a sweeping array of "midnight regulations" — de facto laws issued by the executive branch — designed to lock in Bush's legacy. Under the last- minute rules, which can be extremely difficult to overturn, loaded firearms would be allowed in national parks, uranium mining would be permitted near the Grand Canyon and many injured consumers would no longer be able to sue negligent manufacturers in state courts. Other rules would gut the Endangered Species Act, open millions of acres of wild lands to mining, restrict access to birth control and put local cops to work spying for the federal government.

"It's what we've seen for Bush's whole tenure, only accelerated," says Gary Bass, executive director of the nonpartisan group OMB Watch. "They're using regulation to cement their deregulatory mind-set, which puts corporate interests above public interests."

While every modern president has implemented last-minute regulations, Bush is rolling them out at a record pace — nearly twice as many as Clinton, and five times more than Reagan. "The administration is handing out final favors to its friends," says Véronique de Rugy, a scholar at George Mason University who has tracked six decades of midnight regulations. "They couldn't do it earlier — there would have been too many political repercussions. But with the Republicans having lost seats in Congress and the presidency changing parties, Bush has nothing left to lose."

The most jaw-dropping of Bush's rule changes is his effort to eviscerate the Endangered Species Act. Under a rule submitted in November, federal agencies would no longer be required to have government scientists assess the impact on imperiled species before giving the go-ahead to logging, mining, drilling, highway building or other development. The rule would also prohibit federal agencies from taking climate change into account in weighing the impact of projects that increase greenhouse emissions — effectively dooming polar bears to death-by-global-warming. According to Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, "They've taken the single biggest threat to wildlife and said, 'We're going to pretend it doesn't exist, for regulatory purposes.'"

Bush is also implementing other environmental rules that will cater to the interests of many of his biggest benefactors:

BIG COAL In early December, the administration finalized a rule that allows the industry to dump waste from mountaintop mining into neighboring streams and valleys, a practice opposed by the governors of both Tennessee and Kentucky. "This makes it legal to use the most harmful coal-mining technology available," says Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. A separate rule also relaxes air-pollution standards near national parks, allowing Big Coal to build plants next to some of America's most spectacular vistas — even though nine of 10 EPA regional administrators dissented from the rule or criticized it in writing. "They're willing to sacrifice the laws that protect our national parks in order to build as many new coal plants as possible," says Mark Wenzler, director of clean-air programs for the National Parks Conservation Association. "This is the last gasp of Bush and Cheney's disastrous policy, and they've proven there's no line they won't cross."

BIG OIL In a rule that becomes effective just three days before Obama takes office, the administration has opened up nearly 2 million acres of mountainous lands in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming for the mining of oil shale — an energy-intensive process that also drains precious water resources. "The administration has admitted that it has no idea how much of Colorado's water supply would be required to develop oil shale, no idea where the power would come from and no idea whether the technology is even viable," says Sen. Ken Salazar of Colorado. What's more, Bush is slashing the royalties that Big Oil pays for oil-shale mining from 12.5 percent to five percent. "A pittance," says Salazar.


BIG AGRICULTURE Factory farms are getting two major Christmas presents from Bush this year. Circumventing the Clean Water Act, the administration has approved last-minute regulations that will allow animal waste from factory farms to seep, unmonitored, into America's waterways. The regulation leaves it up to the farms themselves to decide whether their pollution is dangerous enough to require them to apply for a permit. "It's the fox guarding the henhouse — all too literally," says Pope. The water rule goes into effect December 22nd, and a related rule in the works would exempt factory farms from reporting air pollution from animal waste.

BIG CHEMICAL In October, two weeks after consulting with industry lobbyists, the White House exempted more than 100 major polluters from monitoring their emissions of lead, a deadly neurotoxin. Seemingly hellbent on a more toxic future, the administration will also allow industry to treat 3 billion pounds of hazardous waste as "recycling" each year, and to burn another 200 million pounds of hazardous waste reclassified as "fuel," increasing cancer-causing air pollution. The rule change is a reward to unrepentant polluters: Nearly 90 percent of the factories that will be permitted to burn toxic waste have already been cited for violating existing environmental protections.

Environmental rollbacks may take center stage in Bush's final deregulatory push, but the administration is also promulgating a bevy of rules that will strip workers of labor protections, violate civil liberties, and block access to health care for women and the poor. Among the worst abuses:

LABOR Under Bush, the Labor Department issued only one major workplace-safety rule in eight years — and that was under a court order. But now the Labor Department is finalizing a rule openly opposed by Obama that would hamper the government's ability to protect workers from exposure to toxic chemicals. Bypassing federal agencies, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao developed the rule in secret, relying on a report that has been withheld from the public. Under the last-minute changes, federal agencies would be expected to gather unnecessary data on workplace exposure and jump through more bureaucratic hurdles, adding years to an already cumbersome regulatory process.

In another last-minute shift, the administration has rewritten rules to make it harder for workers to take time off for serious medical conditions under the Family and Medical Leave Act. In addition, the administration has upped the number of hours that long-haul truckers can be on the road. The new rule — nearly identical to one struck down by a federal appeals court last year — allows trucking companies to put their drivers behind the wheel for 11 hours a day, with only 34 hours of downtime between hauls. The move is virtually certain to kill more motorists: Large-truck crashes already kill 4,800 drivers and injure another 76,000 every year.

HEALTH CARE In late August, the administration proposed a new regulation ostensibly aimed at preventing pharmacy and clinic workers from being forced to participate in abortions. But the wording of the new rule is so vague as to allow providers to deny any treatment that anyone in their practice finds objectionable — including contraception, family planning and artificial insemination. Thirteen state attorneys general protested the regulation, saying it "completely obliterates the rights of patients to legal and medically necessary health care services."

In a rule that went into effect on December 8th, the administration also limited vision and dental care for more than 50 million low-income Americans who rely on Medicaid. "This means the states are going to have to pick up the tab or cut the services at a time when a majority of states are in a deficit situation," says Bass of OMB Watch. "It's a horrible time to do this." To make matters worse, the administration has also raised co-payments for Medicaid, forcing families on poverty wages to pay up to 10 percent of the cost for doctor visits and medicine. One study suggests that co-payments could cause Medicaid patients to skip nearly a fifth of all prescription-drug treatments. "People who have nothing are being asked to pay for services they rely upon to live," says Elaine Ryan, vice president of government relations for AARP. "Imposing co-pays on the poorest and sickest people in the United States is cynical and cruel."

NATIONAL SECURITY Under midnight regulations, the administration is seeking to lock in the domestic spying it began even before 9/11. One rule under consideration would roll back Watergate-era prohibitions barring state and local law enforcement from spying on Americans and sharing that information with U.S. intelligence agencies. "If the federal government announced tomorrow that it was creating a new domestic intelligence agency of more than 800,000 operatives reporting on even the most mundane everyday activities, Americans would be outraged," says Michael German, a former FBI agent who now serves as national security policy counsel for the ACLU. "This proposed rule change is the final step in creating an America we no longer recognize — an America where everyone is a suspect."


John Podesta, the transition chief for the Obama administration, has vowed that the new president will leverage his "executive authority" to fight Bush's last-minute rule changes. But according to experts who study midnight regulations, there's surprisingly little an incoming executive can do to overturn such rules. The Bush administration succeeded in repealing just three percent of the regulations finalized before Bill Clinton left office in 2001. "Midnight regulations under Bush are being executed early and with great intent," says Bass of OMB Watch. "And that intent is to lock the next administration into these regulations, making it very difficult for Obama to undo what Bush just did."

To protect the new rules against repeal, the Bush administration began amping up its last-gasp regulatory process back in May. The goal was to have all new regulations finalized by November 1st, providing enough time to accommodate the 60-day cooling-off period required before major rule changes — those that create an economic impact greater than $100 million — can be implemented.

Now, however, the administration has fallen behind schedule — so it's gaming the system to push through its rules. In several cases, the Office of Management and Budget has fudged the numbers to classify rules that could have billion-dollar consequences as "non-major" — allowing any changes made through mid-December to take effect in just 30 days, before Obama is inaugurated. The administration's determination of what constitutes a major change is not subject to review in court, and the White House knows it: Spokesman Tony Fratto crowed that the 60-day deadline is "irrelevant to our process."

Once a rule is published in the Federal Register, the Obama administration will have limited options for expunging it. It can begin the rule-making process anew, crafting Obama rules to replace the Bush rules, but that approach could take years, requiring time-consuming hearings, scientific fact-finding and inevitable legal wrangling. Or, if the new rules contain legal flaws, a judge might allow the Obama administration to revise them more quickly. Bush's push to gut the Endangered Species Act, for example, was done in laughable haste, with 15 employees given fewer than 36 hours to review and process more than 200,000 public comments. "The ESA rule is enormously vulnerable to a legal challenge on the basis that there was inadequate public notice and comment," says Pope of the Sierra Club. "The people who did that reviewing will be put on a witness stand, and it will become clear to a judge that this was a complete farce." But even that legal process will take time, during which industry will continue to operate under the Bush rules.

The best option for overturning the rules, ironically, may be a gift bestowed on Obama by Newt Gingrich. Known as the Congressional Review Act, it was passed in 1996 to give Congress the option of overriding what GOP leaders viewed at the time as excessive regulation by Bill Clinton. The CRA allows Congress to not only kill a new rule within 60 days, but to do so with a simple, filibuster-immune majority. De Rugy, the George Mason scholar, expects Democrats in the House and Senate to make "very active use of the Congressional Review Act."

But even this option, it turns out, is fraught with obstacles. First, the CRA requires a separate vote on each individual regulation. Second, the act prohibits reviving any part of a rule that has been squelched. Since Bush's rules sometimes contain useful reforms — the move to limit the Family and Medical Leave Act also extends benefits for military families — spiking the rules under the CRA would leave Obama unable to restore or augment those benefits in the future. Whatever Obama does will require him to expend considerable political capital, at a time when America faces two wars and an economic crisis of historic proportions.

"It's going to be very challenging for Obama," says Bass. "Is he going to want to look forward and begin changing the way government works? Or is he going to look back and fix the problems left by Bush? Either way, it's a tough call."

[From Issue 1068-69 — December 25, 2008 - January 8, 2009]

Spying on Pacifists, Environmentalists and Nuns

Another authenticated revelation that "Big Brother/Sister" is still spying on innocent and peaceful persons and abusing their authority by mucking up the lives of persons they don't like.

Fred

*********************

Spying on Pacifists, Environmentalists and Nuns
Sunday 07 December 2008
»
by: Bob Drogin, The Los Angeles Times


Non-violent activist Max Obuszewski (above) addresses the media at a press conference organized by the ACLU. Maryland law enforcement officials admit to spying on Obuszewski and others and wrongly classifying them as terrorists. (Photo: Karl Merton Ferron / The Baltimore Sun)


An undercover Maryland State Police trooper infiltrated nonviolent groups and labeled dozens of people as terrorists.
Takoma Park, Maryland - To friends in the protest movement, Lucy was an eager 20-something who attended their events and sent encouraging e-mails to support their causes.

Only one thing seemed strange.

"At one demonstration, I remember her showing up with a laptop computer and typing away," said Mike Stark, who helped lead the anti-death-penalty march in Baltimore that day. "We all thought that was odd."

Not really. The woman was an undercover Maryland State Police trooper who between 2005 and 2007 infiltrated more than two dozen rallies and meetings of nonviolent groups.

Maryland officials now concede that, based on information gathered by "Lucy" and others, state police wrongly listed at least 53 Americans as terrorists in a criminal intelligence database - and shared some information about them with half a dozen state and federal agencies, including the National Security Agency.

Among those labeled as terrorists: two Catholic nuns, a former Democratic congressional candidate, a lifelong pacifist and a registered lobbyist. One suspect's file warned that she was "involved in puppet making and allows anarchists to utilize her property for meetings."

"There wasn't a scintilla of illegal activity" going on, said David Rocah, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a lawsuit and in July obtained the first surveillance files. State police have released other heavily redacted documents.

Investigators, the files show, targeted groups that advocated against abortion, global warming, nuclear arms, military recruiting in high schools and biodefense research, among other issues.

"It was unconscionable conduct," said Democratic state Sen. Brian Frosh, who is backing legislation to ban similar spying in Maryland unless the police superintendent can document a "reasonable, articulable suspicion" of criminal activity.

The case is the latest to emerge since the Sept. 11 attacks spurred a sharp increase in state and federal surveillance of Americans. Critics say such investigations violate constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and assembly, and serve to inhibit lawful dissent.

In the largest known effort, the Pentagon monitored at least 186 lawful protests and meetings - including church services and silent vigils - in California and other states.

The military also compiled more than 2,800 reports on Americans in a database of supposed terrorist threats. That program, known as TALON, was ordered closed in 2007 after it was exposed in news reports.

The Maryland operation also has ended, but critics still question why police spent hundreds of hours spying on Quakers and other peace groups in a state that reported more than 36,000 violent crimes last year.

Stephen Sachs, a former state attorney general, investigated the scandal for Gov. Martin O'Malley - a Democrat elected in 2006. He concluded that state police had violated federal regulations and "significantly overreached."

According to Sachs' 93-page report and other documents, state police launched the operation in March 2005 out of concern that the planned execution of a convicted murderer might lead to violent protests.

They sent Lucy to join local activists at Takoma Park's Electrik Maid, a funky community center popular with punk rockers and slam poets. Ten people attended the gathering, including a local representative from Amnesty International.

"The meeting was primarily concerned with getting people to put up fliers and getting information out to local businesses and churches about the upcoming events," the undercover officer reported later. "No other pertinent intelligence information was obtained."

That proved true for all 29 meetings, rallies and protests that Lucy ultimately attended. Most drew only a handful of people, and none involved illegal or disruptive actions.

Using the aliases Lucy Shoup and Lucy McDonald, she befriended activists. "I want to get involved in different causes," she wrote in an e-mail, citing her interest in "anti-death penalty, antiwar and pro-animal actions!!!"

Max Obuszewski, a Baltimore pacifist who leads antiwar protests, said Lucy asked about civil disobedience, but didn't instigate any. "She never volunteered to do anything, not even hand out leaflets," he said. "She was not an agent provocateur."

Greg Shipley, a state police spokesman, said that no one in the department had been disciplined in connection with the spying program. Lucy, who has not been publicly identified, would not consent to an interview, he said.

The surveillance, Shipley said, was inappropriate. And the listing of lawful activity as terrorism "shouldn't have happened, and has been corrected."

Most of the files list terrorism as a "primary crime" and a "secondary crime," then add subgroups for designations such as antiwar protester.

Some contain errors and inconsistencies that are almost comical.

Nancy Kricorian, 48, a novelist on the terrorist list, is coordinator for the New York City chapter of CodePink, an antiwar group. She serves as liaison with local police for group protests, and has never been arrested.

"I have no idea why I made the list," she said. "I've never been to the state of Maryland, except maybe to stop for gas on the way to Washington."

Josh Tulkin, 27, a registered lobbyist with the Virginia state Legislature, is cited under "terrorism - environmental extremists." Tulkin was deputy director of Chesapeake Climate Action Network, an environmental group that claims 15,000 members and regularly meets with governors and members of Congress.

"If asking your elected officials a question about public policy is a crime, then I'm guilty," he said.

Barry Kissin, 57, a lawyer who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2006, heads the Frederick Progressive Action Coalition, a group that works "for social, economic and environmental justice," according to his police file. Their protests "are always peaceful," it added.

He was labeled "Terrorism - Anti-Government."

Nadine Bloch, 47, runs workshops for protest groups that seek corporate responsibility and builds huge papier-mache puppets often used in street marches. Her terrorism file indicates she participated in a Taking Action for Animals conference in Washington on July 16-18, 2005.

Animal rights, Bloch said, is one of the few causes she doesn't actively embrace. Besides, she was attending an educators conference in Hawaii that week as a contractor for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"This whole thing," she said, "is so absurd."

Today Is Pearl Harbor Day

Today is Pearl Harbor Day, a day to commemorate the day that Japan carried out a pre-emptive attack on the US military installations in and around Pearl Harbor. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the United States of America called the attack "A day that will live in infamy". Under the George W. Bush doctrine of the legitimacy of "Pre-emptive Attacks" as a legitimate way of carrying our US foreign policy, that attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor was totally legitimate.

Fred

**********************

"Remember Pearl Harbor!"
Sunday 07 December 2008
by: John Lamperti, t r u t h o u t | Perspective


Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. (Photo: National Archive and Records Administration)


"Pre-emptive" war, then and now.

The name Pearl Harbor resonates in American history; it is synonymous with the U.S. entry into World War II. It stands for tragedy - and for treachery. On December 7, 1941, Japanese carrier-based aircraft attacked United States naval and air forces in the Hawaiian Islands, and scored a major victory. Over 2,300 U.S. military personnel lost their lives - almost half of them when the battleship Arizona was blown up and sunk by bombs and torpedoes. The U. S. Pacific fleet was devastated.[1] The next day President Franklin Roosevelt called for a declaration of war, and described December 7, 1941, and the Japanese attack as "a date which will live in infamy."

But why, exactly, was the Pearl Harbor attack "infamous"? The Japanese planes attacked strictly military targets and there were relatively few civilian casualties.[2] The battle was a terrible blow for the American forces, which were taken completely by surprise. But a surprise attack is not infamous in wartime; every military commander would like to attack by surprise if possible. Nor did the bitter facts of U.S. defeat and heavy losses make the raid criminal. President Roosevelt used the word "infamy" because the raid was an act of military aggression. Until that moment Japan and the United States were not at war, although their conflicting interests had been threatening to boil over. The attack turned a dispute into a war; Pearl Harbor was a crime because the Japanese struck first.

Sixty years after Pearl Harbor, the administration of G. W. Bush has made "preemption" an official part of U.S. policy. According to this so-called "Bush Doctrine," the United States claims the right to use military force whenever it determines that its security or economic interests may be threatened by another nation in the future. The Bush National Security Strategy of 2002 states that "The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction - and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively."[3] In other words, if it is to our advantage, we will strike first - begin a war - when we see a potential threat.

That is exactly what the Japanese did in 1941, when the United States posed a huge threat to their leaders' conception of Japan's national interests. With bases reaching across the Pacific, the U.S. Navy, in particular, was potentially a major obstacle to Japanese expansion in China and Southeast Asia. Moreover, the United States had imposed an embargo on oil and steel shipments to Japan, a nation that depended on imports and had oil reserves sufficient for only about two years. By November 1941, negotiations to resolve or defuse these issues had stalled. Japanese military planners, by then in control of their country's government, saw armed conflict with the United States as inevitable, and disabling U.S. naval power in the Pacific seemed essential for achieving their goals. They judged that a high-risk, high-gain surprise attack would give Japan its best chance for success. That is, they chose preemption.

After the war, the United States and its allies did not accept Japanese or German claims that their preemptive acts had been legitimate. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson was the chief allied prosecutor of major Axis war criminals. In August 1945 Jackson wrote: "We must make it clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it... Our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy."[4] During the next few years, officials and military officers of both Germany and Japan were tried and convicted for planning and carrying out aggression by their countries' armed forces. There was no exception for "preemptive war," although some of the accused tried to use that concept in their defense.[5] The Bush administration's doctrine thus represents a reversal of long-standing principles of international law, principles that the United States has championed in the past.

In the years since 2002, far from reconsidering its doctrine of preemption, the Bush administration has reaffirmed and extended it. The invasion of Iraq in 2003, for example, was supposed to preempt the use by that nation of "weapons of mass destruction,"[6] weapons which did not exist and could not in any case have threatened U.S. security. Moreover, the administration's policy now specifically includes the possible use of nuclear weapons. The new (2005) nuclear doctrine identifies four conditions in which preemptive use of nuclear weapons could occur, including "An adversary intending to use weapons of mass destruction against U.S., multinational, or allies' forces or civilian populations."[7] The preamble states: "The US does not make positive statements defining the circumstances under which it would use nuclear weapons." This "calculated ambiguity" is said to "reinforce deterrence"; it is a sort of "mad dog" strategy meant to induce fear of our dangerous unpredictability. Such threats are both dangerous and immoral. Instead, there should be absolute clarity that this country will never attack another with nuclear weapons; starting a nuclear war would be an act that would truly "live in infamy." A declared U.S. "no first use" policy is long overdue, as part of a genuine campaign for world-wide abolition.

The Bush administration has also broadened the scope of non-nuclear preemption, calling its policy an "expansive new definition of self-defense." Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and other officials recently cited this doctrine to justify attacks such as the October 26 raid inside Syria and others inside Pakistan. The policy, they said, permits strikes on "militant targets" in a sovereign nation without its consent when that nation does not act on its own as the U.S. wishes.[8]

If these standards are applied to the Japan of 1941, the Pearl Harbor attack can no longer be seen as criminal; certainly George W. Bush and his associates are in no position to condemn it. For the rest of us, December 7, 1941 will remain a "day of infamy" as the war crimes tribunals concluded and as virtually all Americans have believed ever since. And if Japan's attack on that day was infamous, the policy of preemption must be condemned as well. Preemptive war was not legitimate for the Japanese in 1941, and it is not legitimate for the United States today.

Any policy that plans for "preemptive" or "preventive" war to promote national interests must be considered criminal, for the same reasons as was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It is an urgent challenge for incoming U.S. President Barack Obama to repudiate the Bush Doctrine and correct this dangerous situation. The United States must once again "renounce and condemn" any policy of preemptive war.

- - - - -

Notes:

[1] In addition to the Arizona, the battleship Oklahoma was lost, three others were sunk or beached but later salvaged, and three more were damaged. In all, 18 ships were sunk or seriously damaged, 188 U.S. aircraft were destroyed, and 158 other planes were damaged. The Japanese lost 29 planes in the raid. (From Walter Lord, Day of Infamy, first edition 1957.)

[2] 68 civilians were killed and 35 others wounded. There were some 40 explosions in the city of Honolulu, but all except one were caused by U.S. antiaircraft fire. (Lord, page 212.)

[3] The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, White House document, September 17, 2002, page. 19. Available on the web.

[4] Department of State Bulletin, June 10, 1945.

[5] Nazi leaders claimed, for example, that the 1940 German invasion of neutral Denmark and Norway was preemption, needed to "protect" them from an imminent British attack and occupation.

[6] The introduction of this terminology may have been intended to blur the distinction between chemical and biological weapons, which Iraq could conceivably have possessed in 2003 (although it in fact did not), and true weapons of mass destruction, i.e. nuclear weapons, which it could not have possessed.

[7] JP 3-12: Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations. Cited by Hans M. Kristensen in Arms Control Today, September 2005.

[8] Thom Shanker, "Gates Gives Rationale for Expanded Deterrence," New York Times, October 28, 2008.

-------

John Lamperti is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Dartmouth College. He is the author of several books on the theory of probability and on random processes. Since 1985 one of his main interests has been Central America and what the United States has been doing there. He is the author of "Enrique Alvarez Cordova: Life of a Salvadoran Revolutionary and Gentleman"(MacFarland, 2006).

fredscholl@yahoo.com http://californiadreamer-fred.blogspot.com/

My New Car

I won a new 2008 Honda Civic Hybrid from my credit union- North Island Credit Union. They have a sweepstake that members can enter throughout the years. They give away one Honda Civic Hybrid or one Toyota Preus each month. So the best tactic is to always enter the sweepstakes early in January so you are eligible for all 12 monthly drawings. Last I entered in January, 2007, but I never won anything. This last January I again entered the sweepstake and since it had gotten to late November I just assumed that I didn't win anything this year. Then last Monday a got call from my credit union and I just thought is was a telemarketing call. But, I was suspicious enough to call them back to find out about "the good they had for me". I was hoping that maybe I had one a car. I'm so glad that I did return that call. Yesterday afternoon I picked up my 2008 Honda Civic Hybrid and I have never a car to completely decked out with so many bells and whistles. It has everything one could imagine. I told the dealer who delivered the car to the Credit Union in La Mesa, California that about the only that car didn't have was a built-in coffee maker. He said he would forward that suggestion Honda.

Since I usually keep my cars until they have between 200,000 and 300,000 miles on them. Now that I'm semi-retired I only drive about 25 miles a week. That indicates to me that this car will probably be my last car and has a remaining life span longer than mine.

I gave my old car, a 1995 Honda Civic, to my brother, Bill, because he and his wife have a gas guzzling pickup and they live a good 25 miles out of town. My old Honda has 155,000 miles on it and has never required any major work on it except for regular maintenance. That car should then get a minimum of an additional 155,000 with nothing major required to be done to it except regular maintenance.

One of the many victims of politicizing by the George Dubya Administration was how the Employment Rate of the US is calculated and reported. The old U3 (Official Unemployment Rate) has been manipulated to show only the number of people who are currently receiving a weekly unemployment check and those who recently applied for Unemployment Benefits. It does not include those who have stopped receiving Unemployment Benefits even though they are still looking for work, those who have given up hope of finding work, those who have taken part-time jobs to survive, those who are under-employed and those who have taken temporary work to survive. The new rate reported today by the government of 6.5% (U3) is not comparable to the unemployment rates that have been reported in prior Recessions

To get comparable unemployment information one must go and look at the U6 Unemployment Report of the government. That is now at an Unemployment Rate of 11.3%. Now that is a really serious but accurate report of what is really going on in the US economy in terms of real unemployment.

U6 is the broadest measure of Unemployment: It includes those people counted by U3, plus marginally attached workers (not looking, but want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past), as well as Persons employed part time for economic reasons (they want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule).

When former Senator Phil Graham (Republican - Texas) recently pontificated that the unemployment rate was nothing more than a mental figment in the minds of the American public when the official rate was at 6.1% he was actually lying and knew he was lying because he holds a PhD in Economics and knows the difference between the U3 and the U6 reports and that the U6 report is the one that credentialed economists study and from which they draw their conclusions. Phil Graham is demonstrably a better politician than he is an honest economist.

Fred

The Great American Voting Machine

The one thing about American politics that my students
in Europe have a difficult time getting their heads
around is that the people of the United States of
America do not directly elect their President - That
is done by a bunch of "Electors" from each of the
States in a thing called the Electoral College - And
that has sometimes resulted where a candidate for
President gets a majority of the popular votes but
does not get a majority of the "Elector's" votes and
that it is the votes of the "Electors" are what
actually selects the President of the United States. I
have to always let them in on the secret that most
Americans are not aware that they do not directly
elect their President.

My students always wonder where the "so called"
greatest democracy of the world got the monarchic idea
of electing the "head of state" indirectly. They all
point out that was the way the Holy Roman Emperors of
the Holy Roman Empire (Germany of the Middle Ages)
were elected.

The cartoon I included today "The Great American
Voting Machine" I will be using as a visual in my
future classes in Europe. Actually, it's not a bad
illustration of the complex and overly complicated
system we use for electing our Presidents. Fred

fredscholl@sbcglobal.net

Obama Elected

My friends in Europe are ecstatic over Barack Obama
being elected to be our new President. Several of them
quoted Winston Churchill's famous statement about
Americans, "Americans always do the right thing - Once
they've tried every thing else." Fred

Thank You American Voters!!!

I am getting an avalanche of E-mails and Instant Messages from friends not only in Europe but also from throughout the rest of the world. The main message coming from all those friends is a great big Thank You to the voters of the US for bringing about the massive change in the government of the US that only they had the power to do. All of them say that they are personally thanking every American they meet in their work and run into on the streets for the bloodless revolution they brought about in the United States.

Another theme that is consistent in all those messages is that the prisoners at Guantanamo must be quickly given fair and impartial trials by qualified judges and to preserve the Guantanamo Prison compound for the housing of the War Criminals of the US government who will eventually be convicted for their crimes against Humanity by the World Court in the Hague. George Dubya, Dick Chaney, Don Rumsfeld and a big chunk of the Bush Administration's Department of Justice and other individuals of the George Dubya Administration are being named as defendants who must face responsibility and pay for their crimes against the people of the world.

Another observation coming out of those messages is that of discovering that this last US election demonstrated that Americans had not lost their humanity and their sense of justice and that they had taken responsibility to correct their errors made in the previous two presidential elections.

Fred

A Bleak Future

The house across the street from my house that was foreclosed on had a first and second mortgage of over $400,000 on it. It is now for sale for $229,000 by the bank. It looks like the holder of the 2nd mortgage took a direct hit on that loan. The bank that held the 1st mortgage also is taking a cleaning on their loan.

I never thought of my home as an investment but more as nothing more than housing that was being subsidized by the tax deductions the IRS allowed me to take for the interest I was paying on the loan on it. I paid $38,000 for my home when I bought it over 30 years ago and the loan on it has been completely paid off. My house turns out to be the best investment I ever made in my life compared to all my other investments and it still continues to be the best investment I've ever made.

When the US digs out of the economic mess it created for itself, the economy of the US just might not look like it did before our economic crash. I suspect that the economy of the US will resemble more the economies of Europe. There is a very good chance that homeownership for most Americans will become an untenable goal just like it is for most Europeans. Homeownership will become an advantage of a new privileged class made up of us old geezers who bought our homes when they were affordable and held on to them through good and bad times. Everyone else will be tenants like most Europeans are.

We are going to be living in very trying and "interesting" times for the rest of the time I have left to live. I hope things will be better for our grandchildren.

Fred

Financial Crisis Increasing Suicide Risk, WHO Warns

There's this wonderful drug that in generic form is dirt cheap. It works very well for many people suffering from depression. With that medication they can lose their job, be homeless and hungry and not be too bothered by it all. It's called Prozac (Fluoxetine). I call it "powdered happiness". Isn't modern technology fabulous?

Fred

*****************

HEALTH/WELLNESS | 12.10.2008
Financial Crisis Increasing Suicide Risk, WHO Warns

Will financial woes increase depression worldwide?

With global stock markets plunging and some banks teetering on bankruptcy, the World Health Organization (WHO) is warning of a surge in suicides and mental illness. Just how depressing can it get?

As the number of foreclosures grow and the value of stock portfolios plummet, news reports from the US of the financial fallout are growing increasingly dire.

A 90-year-old woman in Ohio shot herself while being served an eviction notice. A 45-year-old businessman in Los Angeles murdered five members of his family before turning the gun on himself, saying in a suicide note that he had done so because of his troubling financial situation.

While these stories put a human face on the toll the financial crisis has taken, the Director General of the World Health Organization this may only be the tip of the iceberg.

"We should not be surprised or underestimate the turbulence and the likely consequences of the financial crisis,” Margaret Chan told a meeting of mental health care professionals in Geneva, Switzerland on Thursday this week.

As people struggle to cope with losing their homes or livelihoods, she said, "It should not come as a surprise if we continue to see more stresses, more suicides and more mental disorders."

Financial crisis not the origin of the problem


Traders aren't the only ones feeling the pain

To those who can recall the stories of bankers jumping out of windows across New York at the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929, the correlation between a financial crisis and an increase in suicide seems quite real.

But to Ulrich Hegerl, Director of the Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University of Leipzig and spokesperson for German Research Network on Depression and Suicidality, the reality is more complicated than that.

“A person with depression can blame their depression on whatever has been in the news recently, so some might begin to say that they are depressed because of the financial crisis. But the financial crisis isn’t necessarily the basis for the illness in the first place.”

Indeed, one study conducted by the WHO/EURO Multicentre Study on Suicidal Behavior showed that a majority of suicides and suicide attempts committed by men were done so by those who were considered “economically active” (i.e. employed). That same study showed little annual change in numbers of suicides from 1989 to 2002, despite great economic changes after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Lack of care at root of problem


WHO is especially concerned about the mental health of those in low-income countries

Still, the problem is one that plagues many countries. A study released by WHO in 2001 identified depression as heading the list of disorders responsible for the global burden of disease in industrial countries.

According to the European Alliance Against Depression (EAAD), more than 58,000 persons in the countries of the European Union commit suicide annually. Europe-wide, dying from suicide accounts for the second highest risk of death for young men and the third highest risk for young women.

WHO chief Margaret Chanvstressed that the majority of people worldwide suffering from mental illness live in low- and middle-income countries, where there is an "abysmal lack of care," inadequate mental health care budgets and where victims suffer from social stigma and discrimination.

Hegerl likewise says that proper treatment is the only effective way to lower the prevalence of depression and suicide. And he warns against misinterpreting the statistics, which, according to the European Depression Association (EDA) show the number of cases of depression steadily increasing over the next decade.

“Simply because the financial crisis exists doesn’t mean we can assume a higher number of cases of depressed persons. It’s more complicated than that.”


Courtney Tenz

Share this article


Send us an e-mailSendPrint
DW-WORLD.DE

German Politicians Say Bank Managers Should Be Held Liable
Politicians from Germany's governing parties said bank managers should be held responsible if their institution gets into trouble. Meanwhile, Berlin called for a solution after the collapse of Hypo Real Estate's bailout. (05.10.2008)

Opinion: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Bail-Out is Not the End
The US government and Federal Reserve has saved mortgage companies Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which together lost $14 billion (9.9 billion euros), but DW's Karl Zawadzky still thinks crisis is too close for comfort. (08.09.2008)

German Scientists Say Smokers More Prone to Suicide
Plenty has been said about the effect of smoking on people's bodies, but for the first time a study has shown that smoking may also be related to emotional problems. (09.02.2008)

Feedback
Do you think the financial crisis will lead to an increased risk of suicide and a rise in depression? Send us an e-mail. Please include your name and country in your reply.

France, Germany Agree to Unite Europe in Face of Credit Crisis

Germany, France and the rest of the nations of the European Union (EU) will not be looking to the US for leadership in weathering the emerging world economic crises. The US and its leadership have more than adequately demonstrated that they have neither the skills or the intelligence needed to make the macro economics of the world more stable.

The EU has matured to the point that it is now a major player in world economics and doesn't have to take a back seat to anyone. All of the EU's economic decisions will be based in the economic self interest of the EU and not those of the US. Actually, I feel more comfortable with the people making the economic decisions for the EU than I do with those making them for the US. They have an almost 8 year track record of bumbling and failure.

Fred

********************


FINANCE | 11.10.2008
France, Germany Agree to Unite Europe in Face of Credit Crisis

Sarkozy said Europe can't afford France and Germany moving in different directions

German Chancellor Merkel and French President Sarkozy discussed the option of partially nationalizing European banks ahead of a meeting of euro zone leaders. Berlin is also reportedly set to present its own rescue deal.

The pair met at the home village and final resting place of General Charles de Gaulle on Saturday, Oct. 11, one day before a Paris summit on the global credit crisis of the leaders of all 15 members of the euro zone.

France and Germany have "exactly the same view" on the financial crisis, Sarkozy told reporters.

"We have prepared a certain number of decisions that we will submit to our partners in the presence of the president of the European Commission and the governor of the (European) central bank," he said. "All decisions, all preparations and all analyses, we're making together."

Merkel agreed on the need for unity, and said governments would have to "redirect the markets so that they serve the people, and not ruin them."

She also said Paris and Berlin were "on the same path as regards putting in place a concerted and coherent reaction for the euro zone." The chancellor, however, added that there was also "naturally room for maneuver for each member state."

Both leaders also rejected establishing a common European fund to aid banks. Sarkozy said a pan-European pot would create "gigantic problems.

"This isn't about a European fund, but about balanced behavior by all member states," Merkel added.

Euro zone mulls following British lead


The euro zone will discuss following the Bank of England in partially nationalizing banks

The heads of the European Union's four biggest economies -- Britain, France, Germany and Italy -- had held a first emergency summit one week earlier but Merkel and Sarkozy were split over the need for a common plan.

After a week of plunging stock markets, and crisis talks on Friday between the finance ministers of the G7 industrial powers, the euro zone has agreed to try once more to coordinate a response.

Sunday's meeting follows a move by Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown to guarantee inter-bank lending and to offer to take stakes in some of the country's biggest banks in a program of partial nationalization.

French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said that while French banks were in a relatively good position and would probably not need a government buy-in, other European economies may benefit from following the British example.

"It's very likely, because European banks are also under-capitalized," she said in an interview with France Info radio on Saturday. "We have seen Great Britain, which is outside the euro zone, make propositions in this area. We'll have to see about that in the euro zone, but I suppose it's one of the options."

Germany on verge of new rescue plan


Traders and investors around the world are hoping for an end to falling markets

There is a better chance of leaders making a nationalization deal after Berlin, which has expressed its reluctance to governments taking stakes in private banks, was reportedly preparing a new bank rescue package that includes such an option.

Merkel said Germany may inject capital into its banks but it was not planning to take permanent stakes in them.

"This is about providing the banks with sufficient capital," Merkel told reporters. "I don't rule out that there will be capital injections."

German media reported that Merkel's Cabinet would meet to discuss the rescue package on Monday and work to push it through parliament in an expedited process.

The plan to be discussed at the euro-zone leaders' meeting includes a mix of state guarantees and the possibility of the government buying a stake in faltering banks and could cost a total of between 300 billion euros and 400 billion euros, Handelsblatt.com reported Saturday.

"I hope that the guarantees for inter-bank credit and a easing of accounting policies will be enough for German banks," Michael Meister, the Christian coalition's deputy parliamentary leader, told the Web site.

He added that if the government did shore up banks with new capital, it would "demand substantial services in return."

Earlier in the week, the German daily Die Welt also reported that Germany was working on a British-style plan.

DW staff (sms)

Share this article

Send us an e-mailSendPrint
DW-WORLD.DE

G7 Vows Urgent, Decisive Action to Tackle Financial Crisis
The world's seven leading economies agreed to do everything in their power to beat a financial crisis threatening to plunge the world into recession, saying they will use "all available tools" to save tottering banks. (11.10.2008)

Germany Steps up Pressure for Bank Regulation
As Germany Friday, Oct. 10 stepped up diplomatic pressure to regulate financial markets under an eight-point plan, Berlin denied it had plans to nationalize commercial banks. (10.10.2008)

Why the EU Needs to Unite to Fight Credit Crunch
So far every EU nation has reacted in its own way to the international financial crisis. Christian Ehler, a member of the European parliament, talks to Deutsche Welle about what the EU nations can do about it. (09.10.2008)

Feedback
Do you think the euro zone should partially nationalize banks? Send us your opinion and please include your full name and country in your reply.

Wall Street Bailout Won’t Do Much to Help Ailing Economy

Excellent paper from The Center for Economic and Policy Research. It's a paper that should be read and studied by all of our elected representatives. But alas, most of them are very deficient in their intellectual skills and too proficient in their skills of persuasion, deceit and blatant fabrication of alleged facts.

Fred

*********************

Wall Street Bailout Won’t Do Much to Help Ailing Economy

by Mark Weisbrot

October 9, 2008, Modesto Bee (CA)
October 9, 2008, Lake Wylie Pilot (SC)
October 9, 2008, Tri-City Herald (WA)
October 9, 2008, Bellingham Herald (WA)

It is now clear the approval by Congress of President Bush’s $700 bailout package on Friday October 3rd has done nothing to ease the current financial crisis. Credit markets have worsened for several days after the bill passed the Congress. The stock market also plummeted to nearly ten-year lows.

So much for dire warnings from the Bush Administration that Congress was risking a Great Depression if it did not quickly fork over the dough. The bailout’s supporters said Congress had to do something to unfreeze the credit markets. It didn’t work.

There is a basic misunderstanding of the current financial crisis and economic recession that is widespread. Most people think that the current economic downturn – which will be officially designated a recession some time in the near future – is the result of the financial crisis. But this is not true. The current recession is mainly the result of a collapsing housing bubble. This bubble of more than $8 trillion dollars accumulated between 1996-2006, and it is only about 60 percent deflated so far. This means that even if all the problems in the financial system were miraculously solved tomorrow, the United States would still be facing a serious recession.

Of course the financial crisis can make this worse, as financial institutions cut back on lending and short-term interest rates for commercial borrowing rise. And we are indeed facing a serious financial crisis. But the bailout package is a wasteful and inefficient way of dealing with the problem of banks holding bad debt, mostly related to mortgages gone sour in the housing bust. It enables the U.S. Treasury Department to buy up “troubled assets” – mostly mortgage-related securities – from financial institutions, at prices that will likely be much higher than they are worth.

Economists across the political spectrum saw this as a wasteful and inefficient way to fill holes in banks’ balance sheets. Ordinary citizens and taxpayers saw the bailout as an enormous rip-off, and flooded Congress with phone calls, defeating the bailout on its first vote.

Indeed, the most important ways that our government is currently holding the financial crisis in check do not involve overpaying banks for bad assets. The Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury have intervened repeatedly to pour liquidity into the banking system. They have agreed to federally insure $3.4 trillion of money market mutual funds held by millions of Americans. This week the Fed created a new facility to buy commercial paper, the short-term debt issued by banks and corporations, where lending has been shrinking. The Federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the nation’s largest insurer, were also necessary to preserve the stability of the financial system.

All this is just the beginning of cleaning up the mess that has resulted from a de-regulated and un-regulated financial system gone wild. The government will have to take over more insolvent financial institutions and provide capital to others. It will have to take steps to help homeowners, to minimize foreclosures and evictions. And it will need to provide the largest fiscal stimulus package since the Great Depression, to prevent this recession from dragging on for years. The worst part about the bailout is that some politicians will say we can’t afford the necessary stimulus because we just added $700 billion to the national debt.

Americans will have to fight for measures that protect the public interest, not the interests of those who made this mess. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson made $163 million as CEO of Goldman Sachs in 2006. Now he and his former colleagues at Goldman are running the Wall Street bailout.

During the Asian financial crisis ten years ago, there was an expression for this kind of system: “crony capitalism.”

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. He is co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2000), and has written numerous research papers on economic policy. He is also president of Just Foreign Policy.

Surviving the Recession

Back when I was in High School I remember having an American History teacher who told the class that during the Depression in 1929 he lived on a boat and went to graduate school at UC Berkeley. He advised us that one of the best things to do when another Depression or major Recession comes along the best way to live through it is to go to graduate school and survive it living cheap and acquiring a skill that can be useful when the economic crises comes to an end.

Along came the major Recession of the 70's. I remembered his advice and I had not used my VA educational benefits yet. That's when I decided to go to graduate school and get an MBA. The VA paid for everything and even paid for my housing. The Recession came to an end about the time I finished graduate school and within a month I had a good paying full-time job.

The moral of the story - In a major Recession (also known as a Depression) go to graduate school and wait it out.

Fred

Scientist Warns Climate Change Happening Faster Than Predicted

CLIMATE | 10.10.2008
Scientist Warns Climate Change Happening Faster Than Predicted

Scientists warn sea levels are rising faster than predicted

Global warming calculations have been too optimistic and global sea levels are likely to rise a full meter this century, senior German scientists have warned. They say UN-backed data on climate change is out of date.

"We should prepare for a rise of sea levels of one meter this century," said Joachim Schellnhuber, head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), which advises the German government on environmental policy.

The melting rates of glaciers in the Himalayas and the Greenland ice-sheet have doubled or even tripled in recent years, due partly to increased greenhouse gas emissions by Chinese power stations, he said.

His findings used data which was unavailable to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) when it compiled its most recent global warming report.

In February 2007, in the first volume of a landmark report, the Nobel Prize-winning IPCC predicted the oceans would rise by between 18 and 59 centimeters by 2100.

The umbrella effect


The Earth is hurtling toward a warmer age at a quickening pace, say scientists

Further causes for concern include a drop in the amount of dirt particles in the air that protect from sunlight. Schellnhuber warned that cleaning air in Beijing and in other large cities suffering from pollution problems by limiting car and power-plant emissions may raise global temperatures instead of lowering them.

Aerosols, or particles suspended in air, have a cooling effect on the earth, countering global warming linked to carbon dioxide, said Schellnhuber, explaining that a drop in aerosols in the atmosphere could cause a rapid rise in temperatures.

Airborne pollutants act as an umbrella worldwide while CO2 provides insulation, trapping heat attempting to escape into the atmosphere. A rise in temperature because of declines in aerosols in the atmosphere can be offset by slashing CO2 emissions, he said.

By not reducing carbon output, humanity "is closing the last door we have through which we can possibly influence the global climate,'' Schellnhuber warned.

Urgent need for action


Carbon emissions must be cut back -- now

The scientist stressed that there is what he called a 50-50 chance of limiting the global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) before 2100, which would avert the worst damage of climate change -- so long as plans fleshed out by the G8 countries to reduce emissions are realized.

The United Nations-sponsored climate-change talks this December in Poznan, Poland, and next year in Copenhagen must reach an agreement to limit CO2, he added.

"There is really no time to spare,'' Schellnhuber said in an interview with Bloomberg. "Technology will play a decisive role in limiting carbon but we have to move to a carbon-free world by the end of the century.''

German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel (SPD) has warned that environmental issues risk being neglected because of the global financial crisis.

"We can spend relatively little money now or vast sums in decades to come," he was quoted as saying in Zeit Online. "We are wealthy enough to afford climate protection -- and we are too badly-off to ignore it."


DW staff (jp)

Share this article

Send us an e-mailSendPrint
DW-WORLD.DE

Sociologist: Climate Change is a Chance to Work Together
Climate change offers Europe a chance to change the way the world solves problems by drawing in poorer countries, says sociologist Ulrich Beck in an exclusive essay for DW-WORLD.DE. (22.07.2008)

Environmentalists Slam G8's Emissions Deal as Meaningless
As G8 leaders trumpeted their landmark deal to cut global emissions by 50 per cent by 2050, the '50/50' agreement, which has yet to be sealed, was quickly lambasted by environmentalists as virtually meaningless. (08.07.2008)

Opinion: Climate Conference is a Lesson in Irresponsibility
Combating global warming was the stated focus of the Major Economies Meeting in Paris on April 17 and 18, but according to DW's Helle Jeppesen, the conference didn't deserve the designation "Climate Conference." (19.04.2008)

Feedback
What do you think these new findings? Send us an e-mail. Please include your name and country in your reply.

The Murder of Military Women Continues

Excellent article from Truthout.org.

If I had a daughter in the US military I would be living in a state of constant fear for her safety from her own comrades in arms.

Fred

***********************************************

"My Daughter's Dream Became a Nightmare": The Murder of Military Women Continues
Tuesday 07 October 2008
by: Ann Wright, t r u t h o u t | Perspective



"My daughter's dream became a nightmare," sadly said Gloria Barrios, seven months after her daughter, US Air Force Senior Airman Blanca Luna, was murdered on Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas.

On March 7, 2008, Senior Airman Luna, 27, was found dead in her room at the Sheppard Air Force Base Inn, an on-base lodging facility. She had been stabbed in the back of the neck with a short knife. Luna, an Air Force Reservist with four years of prior military service in the Marine Corps including a tour in Japan, was killed three days before she was to graduate from an Air Conditioning, Ventilation and Heating training course.

When she was notified of her daughter's death, she was handed a letter from Major General K.C. McClain, commander of the Air Force Personnel Center, which stated that her daughter "was found dead on 7 March 2008 at Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas, as the result of an apparent homicide." When her body was returned to her family for burial, Barrios and other family members saw bruises on Blanca's face and wounds on her fingers as if she were defending herself. One of the investigators later told Mrs. Barrios that Blanca had been killed in an "assassin-like" manner. Friends say that she told them some in her unit "had given her problems."

Seven months later, Luna's mother made her first visit to the base where her daughter was killed, to pry more information from the Air Force about her daughter's death. Although the Air Force sent investigators to her home in Chicago several times to brief her on the case, she was concerned that the Air Force would not provide a copy of the autopsy report and other documents, seven months after Luna was killed. The Air Force says it cannot provide Mrs. Barrios with a copy of the autopsy as the investigation is "ongoing." Mrs. Barrios plans to have an independent autopsy conducted.

She was accompanied by her sister and six persons from a support group in Chicago and by several concerned Texans from Dallas, Fort Worth and Denton. The Chicago support group, composed of long-time, experienced social justice activists in the Hispanic community, also included Juan Torres, whose son John, an Army soldier, was found dead under very suspicious circumstances in 2004 at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Because of his battle to get documents from the Army bureaucracy on the death of his son four years ago, Torres has been helping the Barrios family in their effort to gain information about the death of Luna.

When Mrs. Barrios and friends arrived on the Air Base they were greeted by five Air Force officials. Mrs. Barrios requested that her support group be allowed to join her in an Air Force-conducted bus tour of the facilities where her daughter went to school and the lodging facility where she was found dead, but the request was denied. Mrs. Barrios then asked that her friend and translator, Magda Castaneda, and I be allowed to go on the bus and attend the meeting with the base commander and investigators.

After consultation with the base public affairs officer, Deputy Wing Commander Colonel Norsworthy decreed that only Mrs. Barrios' sister and Mr. Torres could accompany her. Mrs. Barrios, her sister and Mr. Torres are not fluent in English. Mrs. Barrios told the Air Force officers she did not feel comfortable with having translators provided by the Air Force and again asked that Mrs. Castaneda be allowed to translate for her as Mrs. Castaneda had done numerous times during Air Force briefings at her home. She asked that I be allowed to go, as I knew the military bureaucracy.

In front of the support group, the Air Force public affairs officer, George Woodward, advised Colonel Norsworthy not to allow Mrs. Casteneda and me to come on the base and attend the meetings as both of us were "outspoken in the media and their presence would jeopardize the integrity of the meeting with the family."

Mrs. Castaneda countered that during a previous meeting with the Air Force investigators in Chicago, she had been told by one investigator that she asked too many questions. Could that be the reason that she was unable to accompany Mrs. Barrios, she asked? Mrs. Barrios also reminded the officers that after she was interviewed for an article about her daughter that was published in July in the Chicago Reader, "Murder on the Base", she was warned by an Air Force official not to speak to the media again.

Mrs. Castaneda demanded that Woodward provide her a copy of the article on which he based his decision to recommend to the deputy base commander that she not be allowed on the base to translate for the family. Several hours later, Woodward gave Castaneda an article from Indy media in which she was quoted as the translator for Mrs. Barrios, and in which she had translated Barrios' statement: "Luna a four year Marine veteran."

While Colonel Wright (the author of this article) has written numerous articles concerning the rape and murder of women in the military, she reminded the officers that she holds a valid military ID card as a retired colonel, that she had not violated any laws or military regulations by writing and speaking about issues of violence against women in the military and that most families of military members who have been killed are at a disadvantage in dealing with the military bureaucracy in finding answers to the questions they have about the deaths of their loved ones. She reminded the officials that the parents of NFL football player Pat Tillman, who after three Congressional hearings on the death of their son in Afghanistan in 2002, still don't have answers to the questions of who killed their son and why the perpetrator of the crime hasn't been brought to justice. Families of "ordinary" service members, and particularly families with limited knowledge of the military and with limited financial means find themselves at the mercy of the military for information.

The base Catholic chaplain and the staff Judge Advocate, both colonels, were silent during the exchange. One would have thought that perhaps a chaplain who watched as Mrs. Barrios, a single mother whose only daughter had been killed and whose English was minimal, broke down in tears and sat sobbing on the curb as the public affairs officer described her friends as "outspoken and a threat to the integrity of the meetings" would have been sensitive to a grieving mother's need for a family friend who had translated in all the previous meetings with the Air Force investigators - but he was silent. Likewise, the senior lawyer on the base, who no doubt had handled many criminal cases, would have recognized that a distraught mother would need someone who could take notes and understand the nuances of the discussion in English during the very stressful discussions with the investigators - but he was silent. Instead, the colonels bowed to the civilian public affairs officer's advice that "outspoken" women were a threat to the "integrity of the meeting."

Eventually, Mrs. Barrios, her sister Algeria and Juan Torres met with Brigadier General Mannon, commander of the 82nd Training Wing, and with three members of the Office of Special Investigations. Mrs. Barrios said they were given no new information about the investigation and questioned again why her friends, who over the past seven months have been a part of the briefings from the Air Force, had been kept out of meetings where the Air Force officials knew they were not going to provide any new information.

Since 2003, there have been 34 homicides and 218 "self-inflicted" deaths (suicides) in the Air Force, and in 2007-2008 alone, five homicides and 35 "self-inflicted" deaths according to the Public Affairs Office of the 82nd Training Wing at Sheppard Air Force base.

On the same day that Mrs. Barrios went to Sheppard Air Force Base, October 3, 2008, the US Army announced that a US Army woman sergeant had been killed near Fort Bragg, North Carolina, by a stab wound in the neck. Sergeant Christina Smith, 29, was stabbed on September 30, 2008, allegedly by her US Army husband Sergeant Richard Smith, who was accompanied by Private First Class Matthew Kvapil.

Smith was the fourth military woman murdered in North Carolina in the past nine months.

On June 21, 2008, US Army Specialist Megan Touma, 23, was killed inside a Fayetteville, North Carolina, hotel, less than two weeks after she arrived at Fort Bragg from an assignment in Germany. She was seven months pregnant. Sergeant Edgar Patino, a married male soldier assigned to Fort Bragg, whom Touma knew from Germany and who reportedly was the father of the unborn child, has been arrested for her murder.

On July 10, 2008, Army 2nd Lt. Holley Wimunc, an Army nurse at Fort Bragg, was killed. Her estranged husband, Marine Corporal John Wimunc of Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, has been arrested in her death and the burning of her body and Lance Corporal Kyle Alden was arrested for destroying evidence and providing a false alibi.

Marine Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach had been raped in May 2007 and protective orders had been issued against the alleged perpetrator, fellow Marine Cpl. Cesar Laurean. The burned body of Lauterbach and her unborn baby were found in a shallow grave in the backyard of Laurean's home in January 2008. Laurean fled to Mexico, where he was captured by Mexican authorities. He is currently awaiting extradition to the United States to stand trial. Lauterbach's mother testified before Congress on July 31, 2008, that the Marine Corps ignored warning signs that Laurean was a danger to her daughter.

On Wednesday, October 8, at 11:30 a.m., a vigil for the four military women and all victims of violence will be held at the Main Gate at Fort Bragg, followed by a discussion on violence against women at the Quaker Peace Center in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and by a wreath laying at Lafayette Memorial Park. The events are sponsored by the Coalition to End Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault in the Military, Veterans for Peace and the Quaker Peace Center.

--------

Ann Wright is a retired Army Reserve colonel and a 29-year veteran of the Army and Army Reserves. She was a diplomat in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia. She resigned from the Department of State on March 19, 2003, in opposition to the Iraq war. She has written several articles on violence against women in the military, including "Sexual Assault in the Military: A DoD Cover-Up?", "U.S. Military Keeping Secrets About Female Soldiers' 'Suicides'?" and "Is There an Army Cover Up of Rape and Murder of Women Soldiers?". She is also the co-author of the book, "Dissent: Voices of Conscience."

Sarah Palin Debate Flow Chart

I received this flow chart today of Sarah Palin's thinking process during her debate with Senator Biden. Some system designer probably sat in a dark corner listening to his/her iPod and took a whole ten minutes to grind this out. It's a very good representation of what I perceived her thinking process was while I watched her in action. Fred

US - Field of Ruins

This is a very interesting opinion piece by a French/Canadian in Quebec on the legacy of the eight year George W. Bush Administration in the United States of America. I have to say that I agree with much of what he says.

This piece was originally published in the French Language newspaper La Presse. The translation of it into English was done by Leslie Thatcher of Truth Out.

Fred

***********************

Field of Ruins
Wednesday 01 October 2008
»
by: Mario Roy, La Presse


Quebec's Mario Roy describes the US as an "empire which has seen its reputation, influence and real power in the world crumble over the last eight years."

The Americans will recover one way or another from the present financial crisis, whatever remedy they finally come up with between Wall Street and Congress during the next few days. They'll recover because they still make up a nation that never counts itself defeated, that is still inventive, determined, and powerful.

But something of the crisis will persist...

And that will be something extremely serious for the "empire in spite of itself," as the United States has frequently been designated. An empire which has seen its reputation, influence and real power in the world crumble over the last eight years. And seen disappear most significantly, the degree of trust its administration and its institutions have always enjoyed, in spite of what people said about them in the darkest hours of the 20th century: those of the bloodiest wars and the worst economic difficulties, of triumphant dictatorships and abysmal monetary devaluations.

Of all American institutions, the dollar will have been the most respected, whether in the hushed recesses of central banks managing open countries, or under the counter in closed countries where the lower class had no right to meddle with this dollar. So, this greenback, this symbol of the planet's most solid and reliable economy, is now washed out, pared down, trampled upon.

The idea of uncertainty will - from now on and always - be attached to it.

This frightening crack in the American financial edifice comes after the failure of its military apparatus, the slow collapse of which insidiously began, one may perhaps consider, in Korea. After the erosion of the United States' scientific and technological hegemony - which, in fact, leaves American students indifferent, while Asian youth gobble up the molecule and the algorithm. And after the great disenchantment with its diplomacy, to the point we see Nicolas Sarkozy's France cheerfully resume the role it has always considered its own since the time of Cardinal de Richelieu!

The United States' only intact power today remains its culture. But for how much longer? Culture is not a self-sufficient creature that can forever remain in better health than the society that feeds it.

Perhaps American culture has had the luck to remain almost outside the reach of politics. For it is politics, in particular the politics inflicted on the country for the last eight years, that is the source of the present evils. And those politics, far more than Wall Street's lure for money; or the incompetence of the military apparatus; or the decline of the universities; or the generalized abdication of individual responsibility.

Last week, in front of the UN General Assembly during his televised address to the nation, we saw a George W. Bush suddenly aged by 10 years. He had the look of someone who staggers, shattered, in a field of ruins.

He now, inevitably, knows what his place in History will be.

--------

Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.

Rosh Hashanah

Got this photo today from a Jewish friend of mine. It's a Rosh Hashanah sign board in front of a Synagogue somewhere in the US. For those of you who don't speak Yiddish or German the word "Shvartzeh" means the Black guy/

German Government Under Pressure to Deliver on Crisis Promise

Germany isn't wasting any time in counteracting the economic tsunami generated by the outrageously mismanaged US economy. Unlike the US, Germany is a nation of very devout savers. Germans quickly learn in their youth that a minimum of 10% of all income is set aside in savings accounts for their own security and for the security of their country. Hence, the government of Germany will do whatever it takes to keep the bank deposits of its citizens secure and growing.

Below is a news item from Deutsche Welle describing the German governments actions to protect the economic assets of its citizens.

Fred

*********************

FINANCE | 06.10.2008
German Government Under Pressure to Deliver on Crisis Promise

Doom and gloom: Germany has not escaped the financial storm sweeping in from the US

The German government has come under pressure to deliver as it races to reassure investors and individual savers that it will protect Europe's biggest economy from falling victim to the global financial crisis.

The stock exchange may not have got the message however as shares tumbled seven percent Monday in line with heavy losses elsewhere in Europe and Asia as Wall Street plunged too.

Berlin hoped a new 50-billion-euro ($68-billion) rescue plan for the distressed mortgage lender Hypo Real Estate (HRE), a Munich-based company that lends to commercial developers and municipalities to build hotels, offices, roads, airports and the like, and a blanket guarantee on private bank accounts would prevent panic from seizing a nation of savers.

Finance minister Peer Steinbrueck said he did not rule out raising state guarantees on HRE credit lines and that there was "a plan B in the drawer" to ensure the banking sector did not collapse.

Steinbrueck did not provide details but told a press conference: "We are aware that we will not get very far with case-by-case solutions."

The bank is now to be provided with credit lines worth a total 50 billion euros, of which a little more than half was to be guaranteed by the state.

HRE shares were hammered in afternoon trading on the Frankfurt stock exchange however, losing 35.15 percent to 4.87 euros.

Meanwhile, the government said it would guarantee private bank accounts, estimated to be worth 1.6 trillion euros.

Economics professor Hans-Peter Burghof of the University of Hohenheim told German radio that amount represented "the biggest guarantee in history.

"Never has anyone anywhere in the world guaranteed such a sum in two simple sentences," he said, while noting that in principle the idea of giving guarantees was to ensure they would not be needed.

Merkel pledges to protect financial system


Merkel tried to instill calm in investors and savers

Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters on Sunday that the government "will not allow an institution's crisis to become a crisis for the entire system."

"We are saying to women and men savers that their deposits are safe. The federal government promises that," Merkel said.

Questions about the German government assurance of an estimated 1 trillion euros ($1.4 trillion) of personal savings at German banks meanwhile were being raised on Monday. Neighbouring nations came under pressure to follow Germany's lead.

Berlin described the assurance to savers, issued by Chancellor Merkel in two sentences in front of television cameras on Sunday, as "able to be relied on."

Berlin has not announced any legislation on a deposit-insurance scheme beyond existing bank-industry guarantees. Officials said they were still talking to banks on how to shape the guarantee.

Merkel's spokesman Ulrich Wilhelm said in Berlin, "It's a political statement that can be relied on and is decisive." The German government and its capabilities stood behind this assurance, he added.

Jonathan Todd, spokesman for European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, said: "We were informed by the German authorities of their intentions.

"The commission notes that the measures seem to be limited to retail bank deposits, and so less liable to give rise to distortions of competition."

Todd added, "In general, retail deposit guarantee schemes for savers can be an appropriate policy response to fears regarding the stability of the banking system."

The crisis reached Germany with the stumble by HRE and the embarrassment which followed a 35-billion-euro bail-out a week ago which proved inadequate.

Global Insight senior economist Timo Klein told reporters: "Since they were unable to correct themselves, financial markets looked to the German government (for help). The DAX is now looking for a general plan for the banks, maybe as early as Wednesday."

Brussels sees no problem with German plan


The Commission is keeping an eye on developments

In Brussels, the European Commission said the German decision regarding private accounts appeared to conform to EU competition rules and did not pose the same problems as a similar announcement by Ireland.

"The commission notes that the measures seem to be limited to retail bank deposits, so (it is) less liable to give rise to distortion of competition," said commission spokesman Todd.

In Britain, Prime Minister Gordon Brown's spokesman said London understood that Berlin did not plan to pass legislation on the guarantees and added: "We have been in the process of seeking clarification from Germany as to what they have committed themselves to."

An initial guarantee issued by the Irish government to banks has drawn criticism from several European Union countries which feared it could distort competition by making Irish bank accounts more attractive to EU savers.

HRE management under fire


The HRE has tottered on the verge of collapse for days

Meanwhile, as Germany sought to calm the public with a "decisive" pledge about savings, property lender HRE was under further pressure from other banks and Berlin to sack its chief executive.

German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck said it was "unthinkable" to keep dealing with the same HRE top management.

He charged that HRE, at the same time as seeking state aid, had used lawyers against the government so as to "escape its responsibilities."

In Monday trading, HRE stock declined as much as 40 percent from Friday's close as investors worried that the new bail-out might also prove inadequate.

In Brussels, the EU Commission's Todd, said, "As soon as the details are notified to us we will assess very quickly whether the new measures are compatible with (the EU's) state aid rules."

A newspaper, Die Welt, was to appear Tuesday with a report that HRE was blaming its plunge from grace on a downgrading by ratings agencies that allowed creditors to call up loans.

Berlin has refused demands by the banking industry to nationalize HRE, a lender seen in Germany as too important to let fail.

Steinbrueck said financial securities that have been disdained in the past by central banks would be used as security for much of the 15-billion-euro expansion of the HRE bail-out.

The European Central Bank (ECB) had agreed to this, he said.

"Nobody can forecast just yet how much this paper is actually worth," he added.

The government and banking-industry guarantee that backstops the new bail-out remains limited to 35 billion euros, as announced one week ago.


DW staff (nda)

Share this article

Send us an e-mailSendPrint
DW-WORLD.DE
Opinion: National Safeguards Won't Solve Financial Crisis
The German government's decision to guarantee private deposits is nothing more than a psychological gesture intended to calm markets and investors, writes DW's Andreas Becker. (06.10.2008)

Germany Mulls Umbrella Protection for Entire Bank Sector
In a step away from its long-held policy of aiding failing financial institutions on a case-by-case basis, the German government is reportedly examining ways to offer a safety net to the country's entire banking sector. (06.10.2008)

Germany Rescues Hypo Real Estate
The German government, together with banks and insurance companies, agreed late Sunday on a 50-billion-euro ($68 billion) deal to bail out the country's stricken commercial property lender, Hypo Real Estate. (06.10.2008)

Audios and videos on the topic
Shares in Hypo Real Estate Plummet Despite Deal
Munich: Center of Financial Crisis in Germany