California Dreamer

The Gap Between Trans-Atlantic Thinking

2009-05-12T17:04:00.000-07:00

An excellent piece on the emotional gulf that divides Americans and Europeans. What does that portend for those of us who were raised with both American and European values homogenized in one body and brain - a constant internal conflict between the two perspectives and cultures ending up in a confusion of bipolar thought pulling the sufferer constantly back and forth between the two cultures and thought processes. Fred

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The Gap in Transatlantic Emotions

Monday 11 May 2009

by: Dominique Moïsi | Visit article original @ Les Echos

Dominique Moïsi reflects, "Of course, it's neither possible, nor, undoubtedly, desirable, to 'clone' 27 copies of Barack Obama. But how is it possible to reduce the 'hope deficit' that exists in Europe today?" (Photo: Radio Free Europe)

In spite of persistent misunderstandings, an incontestable rapprochement between Europe and the United States on the diplomatic and social fronts has occurred since Barack Obama's arrival in office. However, with respect to emotions and values, the gap remains as wide as it used to be between the two sides of the Atlantic. One may even wonder whether it hasn't deepened. So today, there's much more collective hope and individual fear in America. The opposite is true in Europe: there's less collective hope and less individual fear. It would be easy and not necessarily incorrect, to explain this difference in two words: Obama in the United States and the welfare state - that is, social protection - in Europe. In the United States, strengthened by a president who incarnates the return of hope and who simultaneously inspires and reassures, Americans are beginning to believe that the bottom of the crisis has been reached and that the worst is behind them. What was a shiver of hope only at the beginning of the spring has solidified as the days and weeks have gone by. Collectively animated by a mixture of optimism natural to American culture and profound nationalism, Americans have made their president's campaign slogan their own: "Yes, we can." Conversely, the extreme individualism that is one of the keys to American optimism translates on an individual level to situations that we in Europe would rightly deem perfectly unacceptable. "Tent cities fill up with victims of the economic crisis," headlined the popular US daily "USA Today," a few days ago. The media unceasingly report the tragic cases of middle-class Americans, for whom the loss of a job and health insurance coverage may literally lead to death when they are unable to assume the care of a serious illness such as cancer. It is not correct, as certain uber-capitalists sometimes maintain, that the absence of a social safety net makes people or society stronger. The goal of a society born of the Enlightenment cannot be to create a people "armed" with guns on the one hand and "disarmed" in the face of an illness on the other. Moreover, in a society in which people "live to work," the loss of a job is perhaps even more destabilizing than it may be in a continent like Europe, where people tend to "work to live." On this front, the behavior of a majority of Americans faced with the prospect of retirement is very revealing of a country where identity derives from work. Family breakup, very often a product of geographic distances, also makes retirement much less often associated, as is the case in Europe, with the joy of taking care of one's grandchildren.

Also see below:
The Economist: France Is Doing Better Than the Anglo-Saxons •

In Europe, the situation is exactly the opposite of that in the United States: Our societies, perhaps because they are older and more cynical, bask in a collective gloom that they have trouble emerging from. Of course, it's neither possible, nor, undoubtedly, desirable, to "clone" 27 copies of Barack Obama. But how is it possible to reduce the "hope deficit" that exists in Europe today? On the eve of elections for the European Parliament that will undoubtedly see gloom triumph through record abstention levels, the answer is far from obvious. Europe suffers from a deficit of incarnation, a deficit of plan, a deficit of identity. In contrast, America today has all that in abundance. However, it's not at all certain that it will be easier for the United States to respond to its citizens' individual fears through a reform of its health care and social protections systems than it will be possible for Europe to produce a renaissance of collective hope. The two sides of the Atlantic should, in fact, provide each other with a source of inspiration, to soften the consequences of inequalities in America and to rediscover the meaning of collective hope in Europe. Formulated in these terms, the European challenge certainly appears even more formidable than the American one.

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Dominique Moïsi, a special adviser at Ifri, is a guest professor at Harvard University.

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Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.

A Rose By Any Other Name is a ROSE!

2009-04-20T12:19:00.000-07:00

SECRECY

Bush Memos Suggest Abuse Isn’t Torture If a Doctor Is There

by Sheri Fink, ProPublica - April 17, 2009 4:38 pm EDT

Former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden was fond of saying that when it came to handling high-value terror suspects, he would play in fair territory, but with “chalk dust on my cleats.” Four legal memos released yesterday by the Obama administration make it clear that the referee role in CIA interrogations was played by its medical and psychological personnel.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, which authored the memos, legal approval to use waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other abusive techniques pivoted on the existence of a “system of medical and psychological monitoring” of interrogations. Medical and psychological personnel were assigned to monitor interrogations and intervene to ensure that interrogators didn’t cause “serious or permanent harm” and thus violate the U.S. federal statute against torture.

The reasoning sounds almost circular. As one memo, from May 2005, put it: “The close monitoring of each detainee for any signs that he is at risk of experiencing severe physical pain reinforces the conclusion that the combined use of interrogation techniques is not intended to inflict such pain.”

In other words, as long as medically trained personnel were present and approved of the techniques being used, it was not torture.

The memos provide official confirmation of both much-reported and previously unknown roles of doctors, psychologists, physician assistants and other medical personnel with the CIA’s Office of Medical Services (OMS). The government’s lawyers characterized these medical roles as “safeguards” for detainees.

Medical oversight was present from the beginning of the special interrogation program following the 9/11 attacks and appears to have grown more formalized over the program’s existence. The earliest of the four memos, from August 2002, states that a medical expert with experience in the military’s Survival Evasion Resistance, Escape (SERE) training would be present during waterboarding of detainee Abu Zubaydah and would put a stop to procedures “if deemed medically necessary to prevent severe medical or physical harm to Zubaydah.” (All interrogation techniques, the memos said, were “imported” from SERE.)

Later, OMS personnel were involved in “designing safeguards for, and in monitoring implementation of, the procedures” used on other high-value detainees. In December 2004, the OMS produced a set of “Guidelines on Medical and Psychological Support to Detainee Rendition, Interrogation and Detention,” a still-secret document that is heavily quoted from in three legal memos that were written the following year.

The CIA declined our request to comment further on the OMS’ role in detainee treatment. The OMS employs physicians, psychologists and other medical professionals to care for CIA employees and their families.

Perhaps the most chilling aspect of the memos is their intimation that medical professionals conducted a form of research on the detainees, clearly without their consent. “In order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations, it is important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented,” one memo reads. The documentation included not only how long the procedure lasted, how much water was used and how it was poured, but also “if the naso- or oropharynx was filled, what sort of volume was expelled… and how the subject looked between each treatment.” Special instructions were also issued with regard to documenting experience with sleep deprivation, and “regular reporting on medical and psychological experiences with the use of these techniques on detainees” was required.

The Nuremberg Code, adopted after the horrors of “medical research” during the Nazi Holocaust, requires, among other things, the consent of subjects and their ability to call a halt to their participation.

Former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden (Getty Images)
The memos also draw heavily on the advice of psychologists that interrogation techniques would not be expected to cause lasting harm. At times this advice sounds contradictory. While calling waterboarding “medically acceptable,” the OMS also deemed it “the most traumatic of the enhanced interrogation techniques.”

The fact that traumatic events have the potential to cause long-lasting post-traumatic stress syndrome has been well documented. Physicians for Human Rights, in interviews with eleven former detainees held in Iraq and Afghanistan, found “severe, long-term physical and psychological consequences.” “All the individuals we evaluated were ultimately released without ever being charged,” said Dr. Allen Keller, medical director of the Bellevue/New York University School of Medicine Program for Survivors of Torture.

The memos describe the techniques in highly precise and clinical detail, befitting a medical textbook. During waterboarding, in which a physician and psychologist were to be present at all times, “the detainee is monitored to ensure that he does not develop respiratory distress. If the detainee is not breathing freely after the cloth is removed from his face, he is immediately moved to a vertical position in order to clear the water from his mouth, nose and nasopharynx.” Side effects including vomiting, aspiration and throat spasm that could cut off breathing were each addressed: “In the event of such spasms…if necessary, the intervening physician would perform a tracheotomy.”

While physician assistants could be present when most “enhanced” techniques were applied, “use of the waterboard requires the presence of a physician,” one memo said, quoting the OMS guidelines.

Doctors were also described as having vetted the practices for safety. Certain limits on waterboarding were created “with extensive input from OMS.” One memo states that OMS “doctors and psychologists” confirmed that combining the various techniques “would not operate in a different manner from the way they do individually, so as to cause severe pain.”

Medical and psychological personnel were required to observe whenever interrogators came into physical contact with detainees, including slapping them and pushing them into flexible walls (“walling”). Whenever a detainee was doused with cold water, a medical officer had to be on hand to monitor for signs of hypothermia. Confining prisoners to cramped boxes required “continuing consultation between the interrogators and OMS officers.” Prisoners made to stand for long periods to prevent sleep were to be carefully monitored for swelling of their legs and other dangerous conditions, and at least three times early in the program were switched, on medical advice, to “horizontal sleep deprivation.”

This was one example of how medical personnel could, according to the CIA, help prevent “severe physical or mental pain or suffering” on the part of the detainees. However the memos show that the OMS’s role was not merely to limit the medical impact of interrogations, but also to consult on the effectiveness of interrogations. A May 30, 2005 memo quotes the OMS suggesting that cramped confinement was “not…particularly effective” because it provides “a safe haven offering respite from interrogation.”

Monitoring interrogations is a role that the American Medical Association, among others, has rejected, pointing out that the presence of physicians or other medical personnel could paradoxically make interrogations more dangerous. As Keller explains it: “The interrogator may think well, the health professional will stop me if I go too far. The health professional is thinking I’m really here at the behest of the CIA. There’s a tension of dual loyalty.”

Just as officials in the Justice Dept. now condemn waterboarding as torture, so, too, did opinion change at another organization, the American Psychological Association. In the frightening days following the 9/11 attacks, “there were two schools of thoughts in the psychological community. One was if you were there on the ground you could do some good," said APA spokesperson Rhea Farberman, whose organization was criticized for originally taking that position. The group's current stance is to forbid psychologists from participating, she said. "If you are there on the ground, you may be seen as condoning the behavior.”

Some medical professionals are calling for colleagues to be investigated and sanctioned. But finding out which professionals were involved in designing, monitoring and implementing the interrogation techniques may be difficult. The four memos were released almost in their entirety. The few redactions concerned mainly the names of the personnel involved.

Sheri Fink is both ProPublica reporter and a medical doctor.

Update 4/18: We added some detail about American Psychological Association's stance on interrogations.

Tags: CIA, Detainee Treatment Scandal, Memos, Missing Memos, Torture

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

2008-12-26T16:05:00.000-08:00

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
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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

2008-12-26T15:48:00.000-08:00

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
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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

2008-12-07T17:56:00.000-08:00

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

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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

2008-12-07T15:23:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-29T16:36:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-11-07T13:56:00.001-08:00

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

2008-11-06T16:31:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-06T16:24:00.001-08:00

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!!!

2008-11-06T14:00:00.000-08:00

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

2008-10-25T16:24:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-12T13:24:00.000-07:00

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

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

2008-10-11T18:10:00.000-07:00

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)

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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)

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

2008-10-11T16:06:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-11T15:35:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-10T19:29:00.000-07:00

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)

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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)

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The Murder of Military Women Continues

2008-10-07T14:46:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-07T03:37:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-07T01:07:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-06T20:47:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-06T18:19:00.000-07:00

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)

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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

50 People Murdered in Tijuana in the Last Week

2008-10-06T00:50:00.000-07:00

I volunteered in the only regional AIDS outpatient clinic in Baja California - Tijuana - every Thursday for over 20 years. Now I don't set foot on the Mexican side of the border because it is just too dangerous. The conditions described in Tijuana also exist in the other border town near hear - Tecate. In addition to all the killings taking place in those cities the drug gangs are also doing a thriving business in kidnapping people who appear or are believed to have the resources to generate an acceptable ransom. Targets for those kidnappings are wealthy Mexican nationals who haven't yet escaped to safety north of the border, foreign managers of the many maquiladoras along the border and American tourists. I speak Spanish, know the culture intimately and have many powerful and influential friends in Mexico. Even with all that I fear too much for my personal safety to cross the border into Mexico. I know several Mexican families who are my neighbors who moved up here for their own personal safety. They also have stopped crossing the border into Mexico.

Things have gotten so bad in Tijuana, that the killings are now making international news through the BBC.

Fred

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

More Mexican 'gang' victims found

The bodies of 10 more murder victims have been found by police in the Mexican city of Tijuana, where gang violence has escalated recently.

Five of the latest victims were found in an abandoned van near a shopping centre and the decapitated bodies of two others were found by a road.

State prosecutors have blamed the killings on a drugs turf war.

More than 50 people have been killed in the past week in Tijuana, a key transit point for drugs trafficked to the US.

It is not just suspected gang members who have been targeted in Mexico's recent spate of killings.

Mayor gunned down

On Saturday, the mayor of Ixtapan de la Sal, a tourist city near the Mexican capital was gunned down as he travelled in a vehicle with other officials.

BBC Americas analyst Warren Bull says the motive for the murder is still unclear, but public officials are major targets for crime gangs, especially if they are perceived to be a threat to illicit business.

Last week, the authorities found 16 bodies in 24 hours, most showing signs of having been trussed-up and tortured.

On Tuesday, President Felipe Calderon sent a series of measures to Congress aimed at fighting a wave of drug-related violence that has killed more than 3,000 people so far this year.

The package includes a proposal to set up a department to monitor and tackle corruption among Mexican police.

President Calderon launched a nationwide battle almost two years ago to reclaim territory controlled by some of the world's most powerful drug gangs.

But the cartels have responded with unprecedented violence - including kidnappings and killings that have sparked public outrage and huge street protests.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/7653118.stm

Published: 2008/10/05 02:04:47 GMT

© BBC MMVIII

Afghan Victory Hopes Played Down

2008-10-05T17:14:00.001-07:00

The BBC reports that British Brig Carleton-Smith said the war in Afghanistan cannot be won. Most European military strategists knew and still know that the US did not have sufficient troops and supplies in its military to successfully fight two wars (Afghanistan and Iraq) at the same time. They were and still are of the opinion that when the US cannibalized its troops in Afghanistan to support its war in Iraq that it made it impossible for the US to win either of those wars.

Fred

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

Afghan victory hopes played down

Brig Carleton-Smith said the war in Afghanistan cannot be won

The UK's commander in Helmand has said Britain should not expect a "decisive military victory" in Afghanistan.
Brig Mark Carleton-Smith told the Sunday Times the aim of the mission was to ensure the Afghan army was able to manage the country on its own.

He said this could involve discussing security with the Taleban.
When international troops eventually leave Afghanistan, there may still be a "low but steady" level of rural insurgency, he conceded.

He said it was unrealistic to expect that multinational forces would be able to wipe out armed bands of insurgents in the country.

The BBC's Martin Patience in Kabul says Brig Carleton-Smith's comments echo a view commonly-held, if rarely aired, by British military and diplomatic officials in Afghanistan. Many believe certain legitimate elements of the Taleban represent the positions of the Afghan people and so should be a part of the country's future, says our correspondent.

'Taken the sting out'
Brig Carleton-Smith is the Commander of 16 Air Assault Brigade which has just completed its second tour of Afghanistan.

"If the Taleban were prepared to... talk about a political settlement, then that's precisely the sort of progress that concludes insurgencies," said Brig Mark Carleton-Smith

He paid tribute to his forces and told the newspaper they had "taken the sting out of the Taleban for 2008".
But he stated: "We're not going to win this war.

"It's about reducing it to a manageable level of insurgency that's not a strategic threat and can be managed by the Afghan army." Brig Carleton-Smith said the goal was to change how debates were resolved in the country so that violence was not the first option considered.

He said: "If the Taleban were prepared to sit on the other side of the table and talk about a political settlement, then that's precisely the sort of progress that concludes insurgencies like this. "That shouldn't make people uncomfortable."

Since the start of operations in Afghanistan in 2001, 120 UK military personnel have been killed.

When Will Los Angeles Run Out of Water? Sooner Than You Think

2008-10-04T18:55:00.000-07:00

According to the current thinking of most climatologist, the southwestern states of the United States and the northern states of Mexico will be in perpetual draught by 2100. To survive, residents of those areas are going to have to make major adjustments in their life styles, water usage, water management and their treatment of their natural environments. I've already started changing the landscaping in my own yard to one of draught tolerant plants that are local natives and draught resistant plants from South Africa. But the only thing that will really motivate the residents of those area to start conserving water resources now is to charge considerably more for the water they use than they are presently paying.

Fred

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

When Will Los Angeles Run Out of Water? Sooner Than You Think.
By Scott Thill, AlterNet. Posted October 4, 2008.

L.A. has two options: Pray for rain, or suck off Northern California's supply. Guess which one it's going to try first? Tools

Somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

-- William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming""

Los Angeles has been sleeping far too long. But the question is not when will it wake, but rather what it will do once it does wake and realize the water is gone.

"We are way better than Third-World countries with no water supply," explains California Department of Water Resources drought coordinator Wendy Martin, "but it will take a significant change to keep ours."

Martin is speaking of California at large, but the science is in and the climate crisis isn't hard to figure out. Water isn't a renewable resource, so that makes Los Angeles the state's parched yet still bloated problem.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the state's water reserves are nearly finished, which leaves California with two options: Pray for rain, or suck off Northern California's supply. Guess which one it's going to try first?

If you guessed both, you're right. Indeed, California will revive a decades-old plan for a statewide water bank that will flow water to where it is needed most. Right now that means it flows from Northern California farmers and others to agencies in Southern California, whose citizens have lately been engaging in Option Two rather than studying up on reality -- specifically, the geographical and environmental kind.

"We as a state entity looking out for the broader good," Department of Water Resources Director Lester Snow told the Times, "are not going to allow somebody to have 100 percent supplies and be hosing off sidewalks while a community has no fire protection and poor-quality water to drink."

He may not have mentioned Los Angeles by name, but anyone who has ever read Day of the Locust or seen "Chinatown" could tell you that Los Angeles has always been a managed fantasy. Like its redheaded stepchild Las Vegas, it's a consumption and recreation oasis in the desert running on Hollywood simulations and immigrant labor, which is to say distractions from its more geographical reality.

It has water on its beaches, but rarely anywhere else. For that, it has drained someone else's supply for centuries. Which brings us back to the future of Los Angeles, whose Sierra snowpack will likely evaporate under the weight of global warming's changed game.

With declining snowfall and earlier snowmelts, there is nothing Los Angeles can do but borrow someone else's water and get its hyperreal and hyperconsumptive act together. "Los Angeles doesn't treat water like it lives in a desert," explains Martin. "Our director made it clear that we would not impact Northern California so Southern California could wash off their driveways. People who are participating in the bank will have to be forced to change their behavior."

Behavior modification is the only way Los Angeles can extend, but not prevent, what some scientists are saying will be a permanent drought for not just the sunshine-and-noir metropolis but also for most, if not all, of the American Southwest. Sustainability exercises and policies will go a long way to mitigating the desert's reclamation of its lands from Hollywood and Hummers, but the Dust Bowl had nothing on what's coming to California. And it's coming to stay.

"I don't know what permanent drought even means," admits Martin. "We have recorded the history of water in California for over 100 years, and that's nothing. We don't know where we are at. But what permanent drought means to me is that if we are getting drier, then we need to change the way we use our water."

Martin suggests the usual no-brainers: Short showers, low-flow everything, no lawns, total conservation, and so on. But these are all wonderful solutions in search of a population that cares. A recent sustainability forum attended by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, L.A. Department of Water and Power, Heal the Bay, and more was a wonderful outreach opportunity, with one all-important caveat: Attendance wasn't mandatory.

And therein lies California's problem, especially if it wants to prevent a NorCal/SoCal showdown over blue gold that could rewrite the state's borders. The drought that California, and especially Los Angeles, faces is a life-threatening crisis that has been treated like a cold. There is no corner of the city or state that it will not touch. If not treated immediately, it will start out as a serious pain in the ass, forcing citizens to alter their behavior and consumption with restrictive codes and financial penalties.

Then it will worsen, as the division between who gets water (the rich, the north) and who doesn't (the poor, the south) causes rampant itching and, as author Nathanael West predicted, lots of burning of lots of things.

Once malignant, it will force evacuations and realignments. By 2100, you will not recognize it. But even at this late date, I am watching the citizenry piss its water away, unaware of how it appeared in the first place. I see hybrids for sure, but also vacant mothers in empty Hummers.

I see water gushing into the gutters, carrying grime, toxins and other destructive chemicals into the sea, whose desalination remains one of Los Angeles' only playable cards on the hustler's table. I see extravagant lawns that are like gorgeously tended middle fingers to reality, which, like death and taxes always, has a way of winning in the end.

Most importantly, I see a public unready to accept the inevitable: That it lives in a desert, and that the desert is going dry with accelerating lethality. "I put this down to the myth of abundance that we all grew up with, coupled with a false First-World belief that technology can fix whatever goes wrong," says Maude Barlow, a water commodification and policy expert and the author of Blue Gold and Blue Covenant.

"We all learned long ago that water circles through the hydrologic cycle and we cannot destroy it, but this is patently false. Yet it is still held dear to our hearts. Now that the evidence is before our eyes, rather than changing our behavior, we trust that some modern machine will take care of us. We simply cannot come to think of ourselves as just another species that must adapt or die."

The good news is that eventually the planet takes care of these decisions for us if we don't act on them. Sustainability options are available, from the no-brainers mentioned by Martin to more ambitious exercises in solar development, water conservation and onward.

As the planet changes, so may its people, who have survived droughts and ice ages with ingenuity and hardiness. Indeed, the science of conservation is on the cusp of a cultural breakthrough, and the only thing that can stop it is, say, America nuking Iran or electing someone who will only push it harder down its destructive path. Which is why it is imperative that the United States, and its slumbering cities, get on the same page.

"What we are starting to see, and the science is supporting it over time," adds Martin, "is that the weather patterns are shifting and the trajectory is upward on continued diminishment. What we do know is that, because of the depletion of the aquifers, it will take a gully-washer to just get us back to square one. But we still abuse the resource, and we can't afford to do that anymore. People need to understand the true value of water. What amazes me is that it doesn't take much effort to do the right thing."

And that doesn't just go for the people, but also the politicians they elect to represent their best interests. And right now, that means taking control of what's left of California's water. The state will have to sooner or later, unless it wants to leave life's necessities to the stock market.

"The situation is such that the state may have to take control eventually of its water resources as a public trust, and allocate on a priority basis," counsels Barlow. "Water for ecological health of the system first, for drinking water and restricted daily use for citizens, water for local food production, and water for commerce and export last. As for water trading, I warn people against allowing it to become controlled by private brokers."

But you can't commodify what you can't capture, and the public and the brokers that rip it off won't have gushing taps forever. Again, behavior modification will only postpone the inevitable. Eventually, Los Angeles will walk off into the sunset a desert reclaimed. Like other desert cities, it may survive the transformative upheaval, but it will have to suck water from sand to stay alive in its current state. Water wasters might want to get to work on finding a new state. Of mind, if possible.

See more stories tagged with: water, california, drought, water scarcity, water shortage
Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com. His writing has appeared on Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, Wired and others.

GOP Strategists Whisper Fears Of Greater Losses in November

2008-10-04T15:25:00.000-07:00

Even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnel's seat is being targeted by the Democrats for a takeover. I personally would love to see that buffoon bite the dust in November's election. The worry I have is that the Democrats will do something really stupid, shoot themselves in the foot and lose an election that is being handed to them on a silver platter by the Republican leadership. The Democratic Party has a long history of very effectively snatching defeat out of victory.

Fred

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

GOP Strategists Whisper Fears Of Greater Losses in November

By Chris Cillizza and Shailagh Murray
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer and Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 4, 2008; A11

With the party already struggling to generate enthusiasm for its brand, Republican strategists fear that an outpouring of public anger generated by Congress's struggle to pass a rescue package for the financial industry may contribute to a disaster at the polls for the GOP in November.

"The crisis has affected the entire ticket," said Jan van Lohuizen, a Republican consultant who handled the polling for President Bush's reelection campaign. "The worse the state's economy, the greater the impact."

Republicans are trying to defend at least 18 House seats in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida, economic trouble spots that double as election battlegrounds. Rising unemployment, the meltdown in the housing market, and a credit crunch besieging consumers and manufacturers alike were factors in Sen. John McCain's decision Thursday to pull campaign resources out of Michigan. The McCain campaign's exit from the state leaves a pair of vulnerable Republicans, Reps. Tim Walberg and Joe Knollenberg, with a weakened party infrastructure heading into Nov. 4. Attempting to sound optimistic, Knollenberg, who opposed the bailout bill on Monday but supported a revised version yesterday, said simply, "I am going to fight harder."

In the Senate, where Democrats have been on offense all year as they try to attain a filibuster-proof, 60-seat majority, Republican incumbents are suddenly teetering in North Carolina, Kentucky and Georgia because of the economic crisis, according to several GOP strategists closely tracking the contests.

The pessimism in the GOP ranks reflects a striking shift in momentum in the four weeks since the Republican National Convention, when Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin made her national debut and rallied conservatives, helping to fuel the perception that longer-shot Democratic targets were drifting out of reach.

"If you turn the clock back two or two and half weeks, you could make a plausible argument that if a couple of things go our way we will lose three to four Senate races," said one Republican strategist. "Now we will lose six to eight." Polling in most Senate races over the past 14 days has shown a five-point decline for the Republican candidate, the strategist said.

The picture in the House is similar. The generic ballot test -- a traditional measure of broad voter attitudes -- has also moved decisively in Democrats' direction in recent days. The latest NBC-Wall Street Journal and Associated Press polls showed voters favoring a generic Democratic candidate for Congress over a generic Republican by 13 points, while a recent Time magazine poll gave Democrats a 46 percent to 36 percent edge.

GOP operatives said the party's declining fortunes are rooted in a series of events over the past two weeks, including McCain's decision to suspend his campaign in order to help broker a deal on the rescue plan and Republican opposition that doomed the bill in a House vote on Monday. Those incidents helped reinforce voter impressions that Washington is broken and that Republicans bear the brunt of the blame, the party insiders said.

In the most recent Washington Post-ABC News national poll, more than half of all voters said they were "very concerned" that the failure of the first bailout vote would cause a "severe economic decline." By a ratio of 2 to 1, they blamed the legislations' defeat on Republicans.

Neil Newhouse, a partner in the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, echoed van Lohuizen's sentiment. "The bailout crisis has had a corrosive effect on the national political environment, and that impacts not just John McCain, but GOP candidates up and down the ticket," he said.

The proximity to the election added to the chaos on Capitol Hill this week as lawmakers sought to pass a $700 billion package to stabilize banks and financial markets. In the House, most vulnerable Republicans opposed the version that failed on Monday, as well as the revamped legislation that passed easily yesterday. But in the Senate, which voted Wednesday, just two vulnerable Republicans, Sens. Elizabeth Dole (N.C.) and Roger Wicker (Miss.), opposed the bill (along with the only Democrat who is seen as endangered, Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu).

Seven Republicans who are being targeted for defeat by Democrats backed the plan: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), and Sens. Saxby Chambliss (Ga.), Ted Stevens (Alaska); Norm Coleman (Minn.); Gordon Smith (Ore.), Susan Collins (Maine) and John E. Sununu (N.H.).

Some states that have been hit particularly hard economically saw fractures within their delegations. In Michigan, Knollenberg switched his vote from no on Monday to yes on Friday, while Walberg voted no both times. Asked whether he changed his mind out of concern for his reelection, Knollenberg shrugged and responded, "This is politics." But he added that supporting the bailout "is really what's best for the community."

In North Carolina, the package was opposed by both vulnerable GOP incumbents, Dole and Rep. Robin Hayes. Dole's Democratic challenger, state Sen. Kay Hagan, also announced her opposition. Rep. Sue Myrick, one of the few Republicans in the state whose seat is considered relatively secure, was one of 25 GOP members who switched from no to yes. "I may lose this race over this vote," Myrick said. "But that's okay, because I believe in my heart that I'm doing the right thing."

Phil Singer, a former aide to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign who is currently advising several Democratic Senate candidates, said the current financial crisis provided a new opportunity to remind voters that President Bush remains the leader of the Republican Party. "The 'GOP candidate equals George Bush' argument was growing stale in the absence of any fresh proof points," said Singer.

Rep. Eric Cantor (Va.), the GOP's chief deputy whip, urged Republicans to go home and talk about kitchen-table issues such as the price of gas. "That's what this election is going to be about," he said, "and people are going to ask, 'Whose vision do we ascribe to?' " But it could take time to change the subject, Cantor acknowledged, depending on how quickly the crisis shows signs of easing.

Compounding Republican problems is a continued fundraising deficit that has left the party largely powerless to defend its congressional candidates against a televised Democratic onslaught. At the start of September -- the last time financial figures were available -- the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee held a $40 million cash-on-hand edge over its GOP counterpart and was advertising in 41 House districts, compared with just two districts in which the National Republican Campaign Committee was on the air.

The gap was less daunting on the Senate side, where the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee held a $7 million cash edge over the National Republican Senatorial Committee at the start of September. However, the DSCC spent $13.6 million in August -- largely on television ads -- while the NRSC dropped just $3.6 million.

That spending deficit and the economic reverberations are being felt most strongly in North Carolina, where Hagan appears to have moved into a lead over Dole. The DSCC has spent more than $3.5 million on ads painting Dole as out of touch with average North Carolina voters, and even Republicans acknowledge that the attacks have taken their toll. Independent polling puts Hagan's lead at three to eight points.

In Oregon, state House Speaker Jeff Merkley (D) has taken to the television airwaves to attack Sen. Gordon Smith (R) for his vote in favor of the rescue plan. "In this economy, who is really on your side?" asks the narrator in Merkley's ad, saying that Smith supported a "trillion-dollar blank check for Wall Street." Polling in that race shows a virtual dead heat.

U.S. loses 159,000 jobs in September, worst one-month drop in five years

2008-10-04T04:33:00.000-07:00

Most economic pundits in the US have been in deep denial doing everything they can not to utter the "R" (Recession) word and offering hope to the masses that the US economy will not go into recession. Now those economic pundits are daring to utter the words that not only is the US going into an economic RECESSION but could go into a very deep and prolonged DEEP RECESSION - comparing it to the very "deep recession" experienced in 1929 and the early 30s in the US. The things that have kept the present US economy from going into a full blown and devastating DEPRESSION have been the programs instituted back in the 1930s by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt - Social Security, Workmen's Comp and Unemployment Benefits (Insurance).

Fred

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

U.S. loses 159,000 jobs in September, worst one-month drop in five years

Economists say the accelerating pace of unemployment, combined with the most severe credit crisis since the Great Depression, makes the label of 'recession' increasingly likely.

By Maura Reynolds and Tiffany Hsu, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
October 4, 2008

WASHINGTON -- As the presidential election season nears its climax, there is growing evidence that the country is slipping into the deepest recession in decades.

The latest marker came Friday, when the government reported that employers shed 159,000 jobs in September, far more than expected. That was the worst one-month drop in more than five years and brings to 760,000 the number of jobs that have disappeared this year.

"This should remove any lingering doubts that the economy is in a recession," said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "The rate of job loss is accelerating and the unemployment rate is virtually certain to cross 7% early in 2009."

Perhaps most telling was the reaction of Edward Leamer, director of the respected UCLA Anderson Forecast, who has repeatedly predicted that the country will narrowly skirt recession. He called the payroll decline "the first number that is really bothersome to me" and added, "August was probably the first recession month."

August was when the unemployment rate jumped from 5.7% to 6.1%. That rate, calculated using a survey different from the one used to determine job losses, was unchanged at 6.1% in September. Economists took little comfort in that, however, pointing out that the jobless rate doesn't count people who have given up looking for work, nor those who have had to settle for part-time work.

"Factoring in discouraged workers, unemployment is closer to 7.9%," said University of Maryland economist Peter Morici.

LeAndrae Coates, a 37-year-old former optician, is trying to stay out of the ranks of the discouraged.

On Friday, he was working the computer job banks at an employment center in Lincoln Heights run by the Arbor Education and Training group. For the last six months, he's been going to the job center four days a week, and he sends out about 10 job applications a week. In that time, he's gotten only one in-person interview.

Coates said hiring managers have told him that they're accepting only part-time workers because they can't afford to pay full time. He now regrets leaving a part-time job as an optician for an eyeglass company in search of full-time work.

"The problem with this economy is different now than when I first started in the workforce," Coates said. "It's harder to get a job lately, and a lot of companies are downsizing."

The economy's fate is bearing down on the presidential contest, with Americans telling pollsters that economic recession is their top concern. Both major candidates -- Republican Sen. John McCain and Democratic Sen. Barack Obama -- addressed job losses from the campaign trail.

Speaking in a windy high school football stadium in Abington, Pa., Friday, Obama contended that the loss of payroll jobs was a direct result of the economic philosophy embraced by McCain and the Republican administration.

"This is the economy that my opponent said made 'great progress' under the policies of George W. Bush, and those are the economic policies that he proposes to continue another four years," Obama said. "So when Sen. McCain and his running mate talk about job killing -- that's something they know a thing or two about."

McCain, in turn, blamed entrenched politicians in Washington and greedy interests on Wall Street for the nation's economic turmoil, and told supporters in Pueblo, Colo., that the consequences were most dire for hardworking Americans like themselves.

"No one in this room doesn't know someone that's struggling to keep their job, their home, their healthcare, educate their kids," he told thousands packed into a town hall at the Massari Arena at Colorado State University's Pueblo campus. "There's no one in this room that doesn't know that this is the most severe financial crisis we have faced in our lifetime, and there's no easy answers to it."

"Our first goal and our only objective is to help Main Street, not Wall Street and not the corruption and evil that's in Washington, D.C., either," he said.

The unexpectedly high job losses -- many analysts had expected the number to be closer to 100,000 -- came on the same day that the House of Representatives successfully passed the $700-billion rescue plan for the financial system. Despite that vote, stocks declined Friday, in part because of anxiety over the economy.

The grim employment picture also triggered speculation that the Federal Reserve would attempt to pump some adrenaline into the faltering economy soon by lowering its benchmark interest rate, now at 2% -- perhaps acting even before its regularly scheduled meeting at the end of the month.

"With all economic signs flashing recession, we expect a 0.5% rate cut from the Fed this month," said Peter Kretzmer, senior economist at Bank of America Corp. in New York.

Economists noted that the bad job news was no longer confined primarily to the construction and manufacturing sectors. September's report showed sharp job losses across the board, encompassing stores, hotels, restaurants and temporary employment.

"The job losses in retail trade, leisure and hospitality and employment services -- those are ripple effects," said Harry Holzer, a labor economist at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Urban Institute.

Holzer said he believed the unemployment rate was likely to climb in coming months. One reason is that the September data -- collected until about the third week of the month -- did not fully reflect the convulsions on Wall Street and in banking, including the Sept. 25 collapse of Washington Mutual Inc., the biggest bank failure in U.S. history.

He and other economists say the downturn could turn into the worst since 1981-82, which lasted 16 months and saw unemployment rates approach 11%. The 1990-91 and 2001 recessions each lasted eight months.

"I think there's a good chance this one will be more severe than the last two," Holzer said, "because the last two were not accompanied by the widespread financial crisis that we have now."

UCLA's Leamer explained that job losses have a cascading effect in the economy: Workers who lose their jobs curtail spending, which depresses demand, which diminishes profits, which in turn causes more job losses.

"It's very worrisome because the labor market is the amplifier" for other negative economic trends, Leamer said. "If people still have their jobs and income, they will maintain their spending patterns tenaciously. But people who lose their jobs change their behavior overnight."

Nivia Soto, a 41-year-old former garment worker, has lost two jobs in five months and is in the midst of just that sort of belt-tightening.

She has stopped shopping at Trader Joe's, instead searching for better bargains at discount stores. She downsized to basic cable TV. Weekend dinners out, shopping trips and her buying a new car every few years are now memories.

"I'm doing a lot of praying, and that's what's helping," said Soto, who was also at the Lincoln Heights job center. "You can feel people getting scared, because the hard days are coming. There's not a lot of jobs out there."

The sour economy points toward a dismal holiday shopping season for retailers. For the first time in a decade of making projections, Marshal Cohen is predicting an outright decline in holiday sales.

"Consumers are just not feeling rosy," said Cohen, who studies the retail industry for market research firm NPD Group. "They don't have the ability to stretch their credit, and they're feeling very concerned. It's certainly going to slow the early momentum of the season, and if you impede that, it's going to take an awful lot to regain it."

The shorthand definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of a decline in gross domestic product. But the National Bureau of Economic Research, the official arbiter of when recessions begin and end, does not have a set definition and dates recessions only once they are over.

However, the NBER's deliberations tend to give heavy weight to unemployment.

"There is little question we are in a serious labor market downturn [and] whether the National Bureau of Economic Research eventually calls it a recession is irrelevant from the standpoint of workers," said Alan Krueger of Princeton University, former chief economist at the U.S. Labor Department. "I suspect that the labor market will continue to weaken before it improves."

That's one reason the House voted Friday to extend unemployment benefits an additional seven weeks beyond the standard 26 weeks for most workers and 39 weeks for workers in hard-hit states.

Although the House gave the extension a strong 368-28 vote, it's not clear whether it will become law any time soon. The Senate adjourned a day earlier without acting on the issue and has no plans to return until after the election.

With only six weeks to go before his unemployment benefits run out, Tom Della Flora, 50, of Columbus, Ohio, said he's swallowing hard and searching for temporary work instead of full-time.

"With the economy the way it is, nine months is just not a lot of time," the former lumberyard worker said. When the housing market imploded, he was laid off a job making $19 an hour at a retail lumberyard. "It's kind of a scary thought how long we can last."

maura.reynolds@latimes.com

tiffany.hsu@latimes.com

Reynolds reported from Washington, Hsu from Los Angeles. Times staff writers Maeve Reston and Seema Mehta contributed to this report.

OIC Report of Politics As Usual from the White House

2008-10-02T19:00:00.000-07:00

TPMmuckraker sheds light on the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General's report on the White House's deliberate political interference and manipulations for the termination of U.S. attorneys for not following in lock step the political agendas of the George W. Bush Administration.

Fred

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

The OIG Report: Tying Up Loose Ends
By Kate Klonick - October 1, 2008, 3:00PM

In the almost two years that TPMmuckraker has been covering the scandal over the removal of the U.S. attorneys, there have been many questions raised over the reasons behind the firings. On Monday, the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General's report answered some of those, but raised others. While it concluded that only three of the firings were carried out for political reasons or to interfere with active prosecutions, it could not gather sufficient evidence to conclude the rest of the firings were politically based. Regardless, the report strongly condemned the DOJs overall mishandling of the firings, calling the process "fundamentally flawed . . unsystematic and arbitrary."

As we wrote earlier this week, the report reveals that Todd Graves, David Iglesias and Bud Cummins were fired for reasons of politics, not performance.

The report lays out the investigations into each of the remaining U.S. attorney firings, but repeatedly states that its analysis and investigation were "hindered" due to many witnesses' "lack of recall"; the refusal of many witnesses to cooperate with the investigation or give testimony; and the administration's stonewalling in disclosing documents. Citing these obstacles, the report hedges its findings, requesting a prosecutor to continue the investigation with the power to compel testimony.

In the case of Margaret Chiara, the former Western Michigan U.S. attorney, the report could find no evidence that the rumors that Chiara was in a lesbian relationship with one of her subordinates were behind her removal.

Chiara has stated publicly that she believes the rumors -- which she called "false and malicious" in a statement yesterday from her attorney -- were the reason for the loss of her position.

Carol Lam, the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of California, was believed to have been asked to resign over her prosecution of former Executive Director of the CIA, Dusty Foggo and Brent Wilkes, a defense contractor who bribed former Republican Rep. Duke Cunningham and Foggo. But the report "found no evidence" to support those claims, stating that "the investigation and prosecution of Cunningham and Foggo were aggressively pursued by career prosecutors in Lam's office, both during and after her tenure."

Instead, the report supports the Department's previous claims that Lam was removed because of her poor statistics on gun and immigration prosecution statistics -- but blames the DOJ for poor handling of her removal.

In the case of Daniel Bogden of Nevada, little was known about his removal, except that he had not been diligent in prosecution of obscenity cases. The report found the claim to be behind Bogden's removal, but added some color to the removal. Interestingly, the report found that the complaints of Bodgen's dalliance in obscenity prosecutions were made by Brent Ward, the head of the DOJ Obscenity Prosecution Task Force -- who was friends with Attorney General Chief of Staff Kyle Sampson's brother and had direct conversations with Sampson regularly.

When questioned by the DOJ, Sampson stated he "did not recall whether those complaints played a role in the decision to remove Bogden," a response the report found "particularly suspect, given his role in the removal process."

In Arizona, Paul Charlton's termination was believed to be connected to his investigation of Republican Rep. Rick Renzi, but the report states that it could find no evidence to support that claim. Charlton had previously clashed with Main Justice on a decision he made to not seek the death penalty on a case involving a murder that transpired during a drug deal. Charlton believed it was this death penalty case as well as his policy of tape recording interrogations that led to his removal -- theories the IG report confirmed as the primary reasons for his dismissal.

Lastly, there is Seattle's John McKay who was believed to have been fired over his failure to prosecute voter fraud related to the 2004 Washington governor's election.

McKay famously received a call from Ed Cassidy, chief of staff to Washington Rep. Richard Hastings (R) asking about his prosecution, to which McKay responded, "Ed, I'm sure you're not about to start talking to me about the future direction of this case," after which Cassidy quickly ended the call.

Hastings claimed ignorance and told investigators that "he could not remember telling Cassidy to call McKay. . . or whether Cassidy had told him he had done so."

The report also mentions a meeting in Washington between McKay and White House Counsel Harriet Miers in which Miers reportedly asked McKay "why Republicans in the state of Washington were angry with him."

The report concludes that the "evidence suggests" that the primary reason for McKay's removal was an argument with Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty over an information sharing program -- not because of failure to prosecute voter fraud as McKay conjectured.

The OIG report, though nearly 400 pages long, is far from comprehensive. The investigation lacked the power to compel testimony or documents outside of the Justice Department and were consequently limited in their investigation. As a result, the report is forced to reserve judgment on whether many of the firings were inappropriately political, though it recommends that a prosecutor be appointed to look into whether crimes were committed.

Nora Dannehy, appointed on Monday by Attorney General Michael Mukasey will take up that mantle. It remains to be seen if that will be enough to ferret the truth out of unwilling witnesses and departments.

Mexico Gets the Wall Street Jitters

2008-10-01T10:08:00.000-07:00

For many years there has been a saying in Mexico, "When the US sneezes Mexico catches pneumonia.

Fred

October 1, 2008

Economic News

Mexico Gets the Wall Street Jitters

After months of denials, a dose of reality is starting to sink in with
some Mexican government officials. While still insisting that the economic
fundamentals in Mexico are sound, Calderon administration officials are
beginning to join others in voicing concern about events north of the
border.

Monday's Wall Street plunge also sent the Mexican stock market into a
dive, with the Bolsa plummeting by more than 6 percent, though it quickly
regained ground the following day like its deeper-pocketed big brother in
the north.

Illustrating the close ties between the US and Mexican companies, several
Mexican-owned firms that trade on Wall Street were among the big losers
September 29, including cement giant Cemex, construction king ICA and
Homex, the popular developer of working and middle-class homes in Ciudad
Juarez and elsewhere in the country.

On a recent visit to Ciudad Juarez, Gustavo Enrique Madero, coordinator of
the conservative National Action Party (PAN) in the Mexican Senate,
admitted he was chilled by talk comparing the current economic scene with
1929.

"I believe the crisis in the US could favor Obama," Madero added.

Already, three key Mexican economic sectors are experiencing repercussions
from the crisis on Wall Street and on Main Street USA- tourism, export
manufacturing and migrant remittances.

Hosting few foreigners overflowing with wads of cash like in the good old
days, tourist communities have been feeling the pinch for some time now.
Important international flights have been cancelled because of high fuel
costs, and some development projects put on hold. Originally scheduled to
begin service this year, a Spanish-owned cruise ship, "The Ocean Dreamer,"
postponed sailing the Mexican Pacific Riviera until next year.

In the state of Chihuahua alone, more than 26,000 jobs were lost in the
export-for-assembly sector since the first of the year, while auto exports
to the US decreased 2.4 percent during the first 8 months of the year.

"We are in a complicated stage in that the US market is falling 16.6
percent and that affects all of us who export to that country," said
Eduardo Solis Sanchez, president of the Mexican Automobile Industry
Association.

Budget and Taxation Secretary Agustin Carstens predicted last week that
the economic malaise in El Norte means that remittances from Mexican
migrants will decrease between 7 and 8 percent this year, adversely
impacting hundreds of thousands of Mexican families which depend on
dollars sent by relatives. Remittances brought $25 billion in income to
Mexico in 2007, but were already slowing down compared with past years.

Ironically, the best news dollar recipients have received in a good while
came this week when the peso lost value to the dollar. For much of 2008,
the dollar has bought far fewer pesos than in previous years.

Agreeing that the remittance and export sectors faced tough times, Bank of
Mexico President Guillermo Martinez still maintained that his country's
financial system is well-capitalized and unlikely to be as affected as the
remittance and export sectors.

The question of credit availability, however, is beginning to stir anxiety
in Mexico. Most Mexican banks are owned by foreign corporations which
could turn off or tighten up the money spigot. For instance,
Citigroup-owned Banamex is estimated to control nearly 30 percent of
consumer credit in Mexico.

Early this week, it was announced that Citigroup is gobbling up the
troubled Wachovia bank in the US for two billion dollars.

"To the extent that Citigroup needs capital, all of its branches and
entities that are scattered across the globe could obtain this capital and
have a direct impact on lending," observed Luis Garcia Pena, director of
the Investra Inteligencia Patrimonal economic analysis firm.

A high Citigroup official, meanwhile, raised another red flag about bad
Mexican credit card debts. Although the number of bad credit card debts in
Mexico officially stands at 6.6 percent, studies attributed to Banamex
have identified the six main banks in Mexico as holding an overdue credit
card debt portfolio of 16.2 percent. Banamex's own percentage of such bad
loans sits at 8.2 percent.

"We are still in a good position to correct it," said Manuel Medina Mora,
president of Citigroup for Mexico and Latin America. "It does not benefit
anyone in the country that the level of debt of many of our families and
individuals is high and causing them credit problems…"

According to the Bank of Mexico, 26 million credit cards are circulating
in Mexico; the country's bad credit card debts increased 53 percent during
the past year.

Mexico confronts still another potential problem with its oil exports.
Until now, high prices have helped stave off some effects of the US
slowdown on the Mexican economy, but sliding prices for crude spell
trouble for a country dependent on petroleum exports for nearly half its
social services budget.

As in the US, economic issues are taking front and center on the
political stage. Speaking to a large Mexico City rally against the
privatization of the national Pemex oil company on September 28, former
2006 presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador proposed an
emergency 10-point program. Drawn partly from his Alternative Project of
the Nation, Lopez Obrador called for spending $40 billion on emergency
public sector jobs, pensions for all senior citizens and more grants for
students, among other measures. Also, he proposed building three new
refineries to cut down on gasoline imports and save money.

The left opposition leader said his economic stimulus package could be
financed by re-shaping spending priorities in the Calderon
administration's current budget.

"It is undeniable that the economic situation of the country is in genuine
deterioration and if the direction is not corrected, the situation is
going to get worse and it will be the poor people who will be the most
impacted." Lopez Obrador contended. "All of us will suffer, though,
because in a society the destinies of some are tied to the destinies of
others,"

In a departure from past statements that there would be zero negotiation
with the political right, Lopez Obrador invited all the nation's political
actors to come together around a common rescue package. The former Mexico
City mayor, however, conditioned an agreement on the non-privatization of
Pemex.

Asked about Lopez Obrador's proposal, PAN Senate leader Madero said he was
grateful for the initiative but not the preconditions.

"I would like to respectfully tell Mr. Andres Manuel Lopez thanks for the
proposals, but it is not necessary to put conditions," Madero said.
"Dialogue is constructed in a situation of debate, and not by impositions
and restrictions for the dialogue.

In Mexico's executive branch of government, officials reaffirmed they were
prepared to weather any economic storm. "I have been instructed that we
should be on top of the markets and give them punctual follow-up, so as to
take pertinent measures if necessary," said Calderon cabinet official
Agustin Carstens.

Sources: Univision, September 30, 2008. El Diario de Juarez/El Universal,
September 30, 2008. International Herald Tribune/Associated Press,
September 30, 2008. El Sur, September 29, 2008. Article by Xavier Rosado.
El Universal, September 29 and 30, 2008. Articles by Ricardo Gomez,
editorial staff and the Notimex news agency. Lapolaka.com, September 27,
2008. La Voz de Nuevo Mexico/Agencia Reforma, September 26, 2008. La
Jornada, September 25, 26, 28, 29, 2008. Articles by Victor Ballinas,
Andrea Becerril, AFP and Notimex. El Diario de Juarez/Agencia Reforma,
September 22, 2008.

Frontera NorteSur (FNS): on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news
Center for Latin American and Border Studies New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

For a free electronic subscription email fnsnews@nmsu.edu

The House of Death Ciudad Juarez Mexico

2008-09-30T18:18:00.000-07:00

This Illegal behavior in some US Federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies is not uncommon. I have personally witnessed or became directly aware of it along the California/Baja California Border and in several Central American and South American countries over the past 40 plus years. Too often our Federal agents aren't always the guys in the White Hats. Fred

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

The House of Death
An interview with DEA whistleblower Sandy Gonzalez

Radley Balko | September 30, 2008
ReasonOnLine

Sandalio “Sandy” Gonzalez recently retired after a 32-year career in law enforcement, 27 as an agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), eventually ascending to his highest-ranking position as head of operations in South America.

Three years ago, Gonzalez’s career came to an abrupt end after he blew the whistle in a horrifying case now known as the “House of Death,” in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents stand accused of looking the other way while one of their drug informants participated in torturing and murdering at least a dozen people in the border town of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

The House of Death case was first reported by journalist Bill Conroy on Narco News, a website that covers the Latin American drug trade. Conroy, a reporter for a business journal in San Antonio, Texas who covers the drug war in his spare time, has had his own problems with federal retaliation. Federal agents have visited both his home and his office since he began reporting on the case.

At the center of the House of Death case is Guillermo Ramirez Peyro, also known as “Lalo,” a federal drug informant the U.S. government has over the years paid more than $220,000. Lalo was a valuable asset. He had worked his way into the upper echelons of Mexico’s Juarez drug cartel. As of 2003, Lalo was one of the federal government’s key contacts in an investigation targeting Heriberto Santillan-Tabares (“Santillan”), the cartel’s third in line behind leader Vicente Carrillo Fuentes. Fuentes and Lalo worked closely together on a number of drug smuggling operations, and Lalo’s esteem in the cartel grew with Santillan’s ascendance.

In August 2003, Santillan and Lalo commited their first murder at the abandoned house near the Texas-Mexico border—the House of Death—torturing and killing a man named Fernando Reyes, a Mexican attorney and childhood friend of Santillan. After the murder, Lalo briefed his handlers at ICE about what he had done. ICE agents would later testify that word of Lalo and Santillan’s first murder went out to ICE and Justice Department officials in Mexico City, El Paso, and Washington, D.C., including the office of U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton. But the federal government allowed the investigation to continue. Over the ensuing months eleven more people would be murdered at the House of Death, including a legal U.S. resident, at torture sessions Juarez cartel elites would grotesquely refer to as carne asadas, or “barbecues.”

In January 2004, while under torture at the House of Death, one man gave his captors the address of a DEA agent assigned to the agency’s office in Juarez. The gruesome murders of Mexican citizens may not have moved the U.S. government to cut short its investigation, but threats against a federal agent apparently did. Gonzalez, who was in Washington at the time, received news of the threat, and flew to El Paso to oversee the crisis. Over the next several weeks, Gonzalez grew increasingly outraged as he learned about ICE’s handling of Lalo and the Santillan investigation.

Rather than give up a drug operation (and apparently an unrelated cigarette smuggling operation), Gonzalez learned that federal agents had allowed a paid government informant to participate in a dozen brutal murders—all but the first of which could have been prevented.

When Gonzalez sensed that internal investigations of the case were headed toward a cover-up, he fired off a letter to his counterpart at ICE demanding he take responsibility. Gonzalez’s letter reached the highest levels of the Justice Department, including the desk of DEA Administrator Karen Tandy.

But instead of praising Gonzalez’s efforts to expose this egregious mishandling of a paid government informant, Tandy and other government officials reprimanded him for creating a record of ICE’s transgressions. Tandy and U.S. Attorney Sutton called Gonzalez “hysterical,” warning him not to talk to the media. They eventually forced him into an early retirement in 2005.

Since then, Gonzalez has been frustrated in his attempts to get the executive branch, Congress, or the media to investigate what happened in Juarez.

In August, reason Senior Editor Radley Balko spoke with Gonzalez by phone.

reason: When did you first hear about the House of Death murders?

Gonzalez: In January 2004. I was in the D.C. area on business when one of my assistants called me and said that Customs or ICE had contacted our office, and said that we had to evacuate all of our personnel from the Juarez office because they were in danger. I didn’t wait to get into specifics at the time. I just issued instructions to my staff to assist our Mexico City office and ICE in whatever they were doing.

So, that was the first inkling. When I went back to El Paso, I started looking into it. I started getting reports of what was going on, and eventually dug until I learned about the murders. I then spoke to my counterpart at ICE, and when I got the picture of what was going on, I just couldn’t believe it. It was outrageous.

reason: You then wrote a letter detailing what you knew and demanding an investigation. Who got a copy of that letter? And what was the reaction to it?

Gonzalez: This all started as a threat against some agents and their families. So even if ICE didn’t want to get into the murders, they had to at least investigate the threats to the agents. The DEA flew in a supervisor from Mexico City. He was operating out of my office in El Paso. When I finally found out what was going on with the House of Death, I wrote the letter to my counterpart at ICE. The letter basically said to him: Unless you can come up with a really good explanation, you’re responsible for this whole mess. These were murders, and we had the possibility of federal agents looking the other way, knowing the murders were taking place. Allowing an informant to take part in violent crimes is a very serious matter, so I also sent a copy to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Their reaction was completely negative. The U.S. Attorney never even contacted me to discuss the matter. Instead, he complained about me directly to the Justice Department. I got a call from the number three person in the DEA, who instructed me not to talk to the media, and not to write any more letters. He told me that everyone was very upset. No one wanted to discuss the issues I had raised. They just wanted me to shut up. I think at that point they realized that this whole mess was now a matter of record. So they went after the guy who put it on the record.

reason: You’ve said you wrote the letter because you saw signs that the investigation was looking more like a cover-up than an actual investigation.

Gonzalez: DEA was doing their investigation and ICE was doing theirs. When the officials met in Washington, it became clear to me that what was being reported by ICE and what was being reported by DEA were very different. I said “bullshit.” I mean, this is murder we’re talking about here—multiple murders—and something’s got to be done.

reason: At that point, the DEA had already dropped Lalo as an informant, right?

Gonzalez Yeah. They dropped him the previous July after he was caught at the border with an unauthorized stash of marijuana.

reason: But ICE kept using him—not only after he’d been caught smuggling while working as an informant, but after they learned that he had participated in a murder while on their payroll.

Gonzalez: Correct.

reason: Why do you think they kept using him? Did they want to get more information on the cartel, or were they using him in other cases that they didn’t want to compromise?

Gonzalez: I think it was a combination of those two things. They were also using him in some huge cigarette smuggling case. And of course he was well into this cell of the Juarez cartel. As long he was there, he could provide information.

reason: So of the 12 murders at the House of Death, in how many cases did ICE agents have prior knowledge that one was about to take place?

Gonzalez: That’s the big question. That’s why they don’t want an investigation.

reason: There’s evidence that there were at least two where they had advance knowledge, correct?

Gonzalez: Lalo gave an affidavit or a declaration to the Mexican authorities where he admitted to taking part and/or being present—and it’s been a long time since I’ve read that—in five murders.

reason: If ICE had handled the situation properly after they learned of the first murder, do you believe the subsequent murders could have been prevented?

Gonzalez: Oh, absolutely. I mean, after the first murder, they had all the evidence they needed. At the time that first murder took place, we already had a prosecutable drug case against Santillan. And then we had the murder on top of that.

reason: After all this, the main target of the investigation—Santillan—was only charged with drug trafficking. He pled guilty, and received a 25-year sentence. U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton dropped five murder charges against him—all committed at the House of Death. Do you think Sutton was afraid of what would come out in a trial where Lalo and Santillan were called to testify?

Gonzalez: Oh, there’s no question about that. No way they could afford to put Lalo on the stand and have him testify to all of this.

Remember, he had a drug case before the first murder took place. That’s the case that he pled guilty on. The murders had to be dismissed because the government’s star witness and informant, Lalo, would have had to testify that he took part in them. At that point, any defense attorney worth his salt would’ve gotten out of Lalo that he was reporting these murders to federal agents before they happened.

reason: The DEA administrator at the time, Karen Tandy, has admitted in court testimony that she gave you the only poor performance review of your career because of your letter calling for an investigation into the murders. That led to your retirement. Have any of the ICE officers who handled the Lalo case been held accountable—criminally, professionally, or otherwise?

Gonzalez: Not to my knowledge. I doubt it. I would have heard about it.

reason: Have you had any indication that Congress might step in? Have you talked to anyone on Capitol Hill?

Gonzalez: Back in 2005 I went and briefed the senior staff of two senators.

reason: Which ones?

Gonzalez: [Iowa Sen. Charles] Grassley and [Vermont Sen. Patrick] Leahy. I think what happened is one of the members of Leahy’s staff was a Justice Department officer who was on loan on a detail to the senator’s staff. I think she knew Johnny Sutton. She worked out of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys. She knew Sutton personally and throughout the whole interview she was antagonistic. My guess is that she railroaded the whole thing.

reason: You eventually won a lawsuit and a settlement from the federal government. What exactly did the jury determine in that case?

Gonzalez: I was suing the government for retaliating against me when I blew the whistle on some missing drugs on another case in Miami. But I amended the lawsuit to include their retaliation for my letter in the House of Death case. This was an ongoing pattern of discrimination and retaliation against whistle-blowing that began in Miami and continued in El Paso. Believe it or not, the government tried to use the letter against me in the case. The jury didn’t buy it.

reason: What were the terms of the settlement?

Gonzalez: The jury ruled in my favor and awarded me $85,000. Both parties appealed, and the government settled for $385,000. But the jury that heard all of the evidence ruled in my favor. Of course, the government didn’t admit to doing anything wrong.

reason: Some of the families of the people murdered at the site brought a class action suit against the federal government for its complicity in their deaths. Do you know the status of that case?

Gonzalez: The judge threw it out. I don’t know if they’ve appealed, but I don’t think they had a chance. I mean, these federal judges, they’re not really independent. They like to say they are, and I guess maybe some of them are, but most of them will rule in favor of the government every time.

reason: The Department of Homeland Security is now trying to deport Lalo back to Mexico, where he’ll almost certainly be murdered. Two questions. First, what is their stated reason for deporting him? And the more obvious question—do you think they’re trying to deport him because he’s likely to be killed?

Gonzalez: There’s no doubt in my mind that they’re trying to deport him because they know he’ll be killed. It gets rid of the main witness against the government should someone ever look into this.

I don’t know the stated or official reason they’re trying to deport him. I would guess that it’s because he’s an illegal alien, or something like that.

I mean, they want him dead. There’s no question about it.

reason: He has asked that if he is deported, it be to someplace other than Mexico. The government is arguing against that, too.

Gonzalez: I wasn’t aware of that, but it wouldn’t surprise me. All I know is that they are trying to get rid of him so he can get killed. Once he’s out of the picture, there’s no way this case can be revived, because all the other witnesses are government agents.

reason: Tell me about the Joint Assessment Team Report.

Gonzalez: The Joint Assessment Team was two guys from Customs, two guys from ICE, and two guys from DEA who were to go in and interview everybody and then hopefully come to a conclusion about what happened. They did that. They interviewed over 40 people, including me, and issued a classified report. But when I asked for a copy during discovery, they would only release the portion that was their interview with me. They said the rest of the report was “national security.”

So I was the agent in charge of that whole area, and they never showed me the results of the report. The only thing I can conclude from that is that what they found out was not pretty, and they weren’t about to tell me that I was right. They also never showed it to the regional DEA director in Mexico City, who had also signed on to my letter. Odd that neither he nor I received a copy of the report, isn’t it?

reason: You’ve had a long career at the DEA and you’ve seen two pretty serious abuses of power in that time. In both the House of Death and the Miami cases, you took more punishment for blowing the whistle than the people actually involved in the corruption.

Gonzalez: There’s no question.

reason: How widespread do you think these abuses of the informant system are in federal law enforcement?

Gonzalez: Well, I’m not sure that there is an “informant system.” I think every agency has its own rules and regulations regarding informants. It all has to do with individuals and how they handle their informants, but in general I think there is a tendency throughout the government to cover up misconduct, whether it’s informant-related or otherwise. At least in the law enforcement agencies.

reason: You said at a conference earlier this year that while corruption is a problem, the bigger problem is that federal prosecutors don’t hold corrupt agents accountable. Is that an accurate assessment of your opinion?

Gonzalez: Yes. In the House of Death case, the prosecutor’s office is involved, the U.S. Attorney is involved. So it gets covered up. If there had been no involvement of the prosecutor’s office in the misconduct, they might have gone after some of the agents. But Sutton’s people were in the thick of things. So, you know, it gets covered up.

reason: Have the higher-ups in Sutton’s office, the DEA, or ICE been questioned about the case? About why they allowed it to continue?

Gonzalez: No. Who’s going to question them? No one made the decision to investigate the initial misconduct, so everyone’s off the hook. I mean, the key person here is United States Attorney Sutton. He’s independent from Washington in the sense that if he decides to conduct an investigation, it gets done. I guess conceivably he could get enough pressure from the DOJ to step on it, but by then, so many people would know about it, it would turn into a major scandal. But if the U.S. Attorney wanted—if he had wanted this looked into—it would’ve happened.

reason: You’re now retired after a career in the federal government. What have you taken away from all of this?

Gonzalez: I think the American people would be justified in believing that their own government may be as corrupt as any of the countries our government criticizes for corruption.

reason: You’ve had more than a 30-year career as a DEA agent and you’ve seen all of this corruption go down. Has it caused you to rethink or reconsider the War on Drugs?

Gonzalez: I’m not ready to say that we should legalize drugs, if that’s what you’re talking about. I just don’t think that the problem has been dealt with properly. I think that we probably should concentrate more effort on demand reduction than give, for example, the Pentagon a bunch of money so they could run their ships and planes and say that it’s detection and monitoring, which doesn’t work.

Maybe concentrate more on education, when kids are young—making an effort in their formative years to make it so that they don’t ever think of using drugs. I know this is wishful thinking but just going at it through enforcement alone...I think it’s been shown that it really doesn’t work. We’re successful in putting people behind bars, but then other people take their place right away. It’s a never-ending cycle.

You Can Always Count On Americans...

2008-09-30T16:07:00.000-07:00

One of my friends in Germany sent me this wonderful quote of Sir Winston Churchill that so aptly applies to our government's efforts to untangle the economic mess they created for this country. I checked out the quote and YES - Winston Churchill actually said it. That man was an absolute political genius.

Fred

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

You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.
Winston Churchill

Statins Prevent Artery Ageing

2008-09-29T11:18:00.000-07:00

Great news for those of us old farts who are taking prescribed Statins to lower our "Bad Cholesterol" and increase our "Good Cholesterol.

Fred

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

Statins 'prevent artery ageing'
Drugs given to heart patients to lower cholesterol may have an additional benefit - keeping their blood vessels feeling younger.

Advanced heart disease patients have arteries which have effectively aged faster than the rest of their bodies.

University of Cambridge scientists, writing in the journal Circulation Research, say statins may be able to hold back this process.

They hinted the same drugs might also prevent damage elsewhere in the body.

It's an exciting breakthrough to find that statins not only lower cholesterol but also rev up the cells' own DNA repair kit
Professor Martin Bennett
Cambridge University
Statins are seen as a key tool in the fight against heart disease, and in low doses have been made available "over-the-counter" at pharmacies.

While it has been known for some time that they can lower cholesterol levels, this did not fully account for the benefits experienced by some patients, and evidence is growing that they can boost the function of the cells lining the heart arteries.

The Cambridge study adds to this evidence, and may shed light on how statins do this.

Cells in the body can only divide a limited number of times, and in patients with heart disease, the rate of division in these arterial cells is greatly accelerated - dividing between seven and 13 times more often than normal.

As the cells "run out of " divisions, they can suffer DNA damage, and do not work as well.

One of the important roles of these cells is to keep the artery clear of fatty "plaques" which can expand and block them, causing angina or heart attack.

Cancer clue

The research found that statins appear to increase levels of a protein called NBS-1, which is involved in the repair of DNA within cells. This means they may be able to hold off the effects of old age in the artery wall for a little longer.

Professor Martin Bennett, who led the research, said: "It's an exciting breakthrough to find that statins not only lower cholesterol but also rev up the cells' own DNA repair kit, slowing the ageing process of the diseased artery.

"If statins can do this to other cells, they may protect normal tissues from DNA damage that occurs as part of chemotherapy and radiotherapy for cancer, potentially reducing the side-effects."

Professor Peter Weissberg, the British Heart Foundation's medical director, added: "Too much cholesterol in the blood induces a repeated cycle of damage and repair in the blood vessel wall which results in a heart attack if the repair mechanism is inadequate.

"Statins protect against heart attacks by reducing cholesterol levels and subsequent damage to the vessel wall - this research has shown they may also enhance the blood vessels' natural repair mechanisms."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/7637937.stm

Published: 2008/09/28 23:13:23 GMT

In Memory of Paul Newman

2008-09-29T10:49:00.000-07:00

A Great Man. A Great Philanthropist. A Great Father. A Great Husband. A Great Actor.

Revoking Independence...?

2008-09-28T18:42:00.000-07:00

Subject: Revoking independance...?

A Message adapted and updated from Mr. John Cleese:

To the Citizens of the United States of America:

In light of the strong possibility you are about to elect an elderly

gentleman with a bad temper and a lady who thinks she can run foreign

policy because she can see Russia from her house as President and

President-In-Waiting of the USA and thus to risk Life As We Know It for

everyone else on the Planet, we hereby give notice of the revocation of

your independence, effective immediately.

Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties

over all states, commonwealths, and territories (except Kansas , which

she does not fancy). She won't actually be in charge, but she'll greet

foreign leaders as necessary and not put her foot in it or vomit on

anyone at a state dinner.

Your new prime minister, Gordon Brown, will appoint a Governor for

America without the need for further elections. You aren't very good at

elections, and unlike the ATM's from the same manufacturer, your voting

machines don't give receipts. So Prime Minister Brown will instead

choose someone who does not have his or her hand in the till and has

significant experience in running Big Things. You have not had one of

those for almost a decade and trust me, it is a big plus. And there

won't be any of that hanging chad nonsense and the three hour wait for

voting while poor or black.

Congress and the Senate will be disbanded. They have given away too much

of your money already to rescue incompetent business executives and soon

your American Dollars will resemble Zimbabwean Dollars in total

worthlessness. There is no free lunch you know. Although we originally

let you get away with secession because King George was robbing you

blind, recent events demonstrate that your present leaders are doing

much worse things and unfortunately you have not noticed.

A questionnaire will be circulated next year to determine whether more

than half of you still believe Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11.

Information to the contrary will again be provided by the rest of the

world and we request you read it this time and refrain from invading the

wrong country ever again if you possibly can.

To aid in the transition to a British Crown Dependency, the following

rules are introduced with immediate effect:

You should look up 'revocation' in the Oxford English Dictionary.

1. Then look up aluminum, and check the pronunciation guide. You will be

amazed at just how wrongly you have been pronouncing it.

2. The letter 'U' will be reinstated in words such as 'favour' and

'neighbour.' Likewise, you will learn to spell 'doughnut' without

skipping half the letters, and the suffix -ize will be replaced by the

suffix -ise. Generally, you will be expected to raise your vocabulary to

acceptable levels. (look up 'vocabulary').

3. Using the same twenty-seven words interspersed with filler noises

such as 'like' and 'you know' is an unacceptable and inefficient form of

communication.

There is no such thing as US English. We will let Microsoft know on your

behalf. The Microsoft spell-checker will be adjusted to take account of

the reinstated letter 'u' and the elimination of -ize. You will relearn

your original national anthem, God Save The Queen.

4. July 4th will no longer be celebrated as a holiday. But we have a

lot of Bank Holidays you will enjoy instead. In our country we still

have several banks.

5. You will learn to resolve personal issues without using guns,

lawyers, or therapists. The fact that you need so many lawyers and

therapists shows that you're not adult enough to be independent.

Guns should only be handled by adults. If you're not adult enough to

sort things out without suing someone or speaking to a therapist then

you're not grown up enough to handle a gun.

6. Therefore, you will no longer be allowed to own or carry anything

more dangerous than a vegetable peeler. A permit will be required if you

wish to carry a vegetable peeler in public.

7. All American cars are hereby banned. They are crap and this is for

your own good. When we show you German cars, you will understand what we

mean.

8. All intersections will be replaced with roundabouts, and you will

start driving on the left with immediate effect. At the same time, you

will go metric with immediate effect and without the benefit of

conversion tables. Both roundabouts and metrication will help you

understand the British sense of humour.

9. The Former USA will adopt UK prices on petrol (which you have been

calling gasoline), roughly $9 per US gallon. Get used to it. Your

driving armoured cars to buy groceries is unnecessary, boorish and

killing the planet.

10. You will learn to make real chips. Those things you call French

fries are not real chips, and those things you insist on calling potato

chips are properly called crisps. Real chips are thick cut, fried in

animal fat, and dressed not with catsup but with vinegar. And the term

Freedom Fries will not be used in future. Lets remember the French were

right and you were wrong, though it pains me to say so.

11. We will require that people running things, like your government,

are at least moderately competent and not related by blood or bribes to

those who benefit from their decisions. We know it makes you more cozy

when your leaders know as little as you do, but, honestly, it is short

sighted: you need doctors who know more about medicine, pilots who know

more about flying and leaders who know more about leading.

12. We respectfully request you give up this notion that Politics is

Entertainment, and that very complicated things have to be explained to

you in less than fifteen seconds. If you wanted to have a democracy,

honestly, you really should have taken the time to understand things a

bit before you voted. May I suggest the startling notion that

politicians don't need to look good to do a good job? And it really is

acceptable if they are a bit boring, so long as they do their homework.

It's especially important as evidently you have not done yours. Poor

old Al Gore and John Kerry. And by the way, are you happy now that you

chose a Governor for California based on his teeth?

13. The cold tasteless stuff you insist on calling beer is not actually

beer at all. Henceforth, only proper British Bitter will be referred to

as beer, and European brews of known and accepted provenance will be

referred to as Lager. South African beer is also acceptable as they are

pound for pound the greatest sporting nation on earth and it can only be

due to the beer. They are also part of the British Commonwealth -- see

what it did for them.

14. Hollywood will be required occasionally to cast English actors as

good guys. Hollywood will also be required to cast English actors to

play English characters. Watching Andie McDowell attempt English

dialogue in Four Weddings and a Funeral was an experience akin to

having one's ears removed with a cheese grater.

15. You will cease playing American football. There is only one kind of

proper football; you call it soccer. Those of you brave enough will, in

time, be allowed to play rugby (which has some similarities to American

football, but does not involve stopping for a rest every twenty seconds

or wearing full kevlar body armour like a bunch of nancies). Don't try

Rugby -- the South Africans and Kiwis will thrash you, like they

regularly thrash us.

16. Further, you will stop playing baseball. It is not reasonable to

host an event called the World Series for a game which is not played

outside of America. Since only 2.1% of you are aware that there is a

world beyond your borders, your error is understandable. You will learn

cricket, and we will let you face the South Africans first in their

country. The seven out of ten who don't own a passport will need to get

one first.

17. You must tell us who killed JFK. It's been driving us mad.

18. An Internal Revenue agent (i.e. tax collector) from Her Majesty's

Government will be with you shortly to ensure the acquisition of all

monies due (backdated to 1776). Although this will raise your taxes,

remember that the Neoconservatives will no longer be robbing you blind

and so your Dollars will stop shrinking. Didn't you know that inflation

and government bailouts of huge companies were really paid for by you?

We must do something about your educational system. What on earth is

going on over there? Are you oblivious to the crushing debt you are

leaving your children? You might as well throttle them now.

19. Daily Tea Time begins promptly at 4 PM with proper cups, never

mugs, with high quality biscuits (cookies) and cakes; strawberries in

season.

God Save the Queen. At least God won't instruct your President to

invade any more wrong countries.

The Passing of Paul Newman

2008-09-28T14:00:00.000-07:00

It was sad to learn of Paul Newman passing away from complications from cancer. But, 83 years of age is not a bad time to go. I loved all his films including the one he hated (The Chalice). All of his "Newman's Own" products are superior in taste and quality to anything else available on the grocery store shelves. That product line (a hobby of Paul's) donated all its profits to charities and became a cash generating machine for those organizations. He leaves behind an enviable legacy and example for others who achieve similar greatness. Fred

Russia Announces Major Military Expansion

2008-09-27T19:09:00.000-07:00

I've been expecting this announcement for some time. George Dubya backed Russia into a corner and gave Russia no other choice than to build up its military to maintain its sphere of influence with its neighbors.

Russia has always throughout its long history maintained a circle of "buffer states" between itself and the rest of the world - especially Western Europe. The US undermined this when George Dubya encouraged the independence of Georgia and the Ukraine, negotiated the placement of US ICBMs in Poland and negotiated the placement of guidance systems for those ICBMs in the Czech Republic. Would the US react any differently if Russia placed ICBMs in Cuba or Venezuela or Mexico?

None of Russia's "Buffer States" in its long history have been friendly toward Russia. They were bullied into submission, conquered or outright occupied going back to the time of Catherine the Great. That's a history not too dissimilar to that of the "Monroe Doctrine" of the US which told Europe to keep their hands off of the developing countries of Central and South America because they were in the sphere of influence of the US. The US has a history of even taking unilateral military and/or covert actions when a Central or South American government got out of line. US history books generally don't cover that part of US history. The War with Mexico which was instigated by President Polk because the new and independent government of Mexico would not sell its northwestern territories to the US. So the US took them by force. Covering just that one part of US history is lucky to get even a small paragraph in a US history book, but Mexico and the rest of Central America sure have never forgotten it. The same goes for the US's manipulations to have the independent country of Panama created so they could have a government there that would permit the US to build the Panama Canal. There are also the well documented interventions into the internal affairs of Chile, Cuba and Venezuela which get very scant coverage in US history books. Thorough information on those subjects can only be found in the dusty archives of academic research which are not open to the general public and many other documents from that period of our history which are still classified so that only persons with proper security clearances can see them and then only with a proven "Need to Know".

From my perspective and understanding of history, the US and Russia have equal amounts of blood on their hands and generally for the same reasons - homeland security and imperialism.

Fred

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

27.09.2008 | 14:00 UTC
Russia announces major military expansion

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has announced a comprehensive modernization of Russia's armed forces and its nuclear arsenal. The plans call for a complete overhaul of the country's nuclear deterrant, including a new generation of nuclear submarines and cruise missiles, as well as spy satellites and an improved missile defense system. The upgrade would be completed by 2020. Earlier this month, Moscow said it was boosting its defense budget by 25 percent to 96 billion dollars.

Reaction to Obama/McCain Debate

2008-09-27T17:41:00.000-07:00

I feel that the Great Debate between Obama and McCain
came out to a draw. Obama did worse than I expected
and McCain did better than I expected. On most issues
there's not too much difference between them except
for their positions on the War in Iraq. (I personally
feel that Obama is oh so right on when he wants us to
get out of that mess that is sucking $10 Billion a
month out of our economy.)

Between the two Obama is clearly the more intelligent
and more flexible in his thinking and negotiating
skills. McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, frightens
the shit out of me. She is another George Dubya, far
right wing, Christian fundamentalist and McCain
doesn't look like he will be able to survive the first
four years of his Presidency. On the other hand Obama
is a prime target for one of the racist nut jobs that
we have floating in the crowds here in the US and I
would feel much more comfortable with his running mate
taking over if he is assassinated than if it was Sarah
Palin taking over the helm from McCain.

In voting my own self interests in terms of my
investments, my way of living, my continued
comfortable retirement, the future health of the US
economy and my comfort level between the two possible
Vice Presidents - Obama is the only choice for me at
this time.

Fred

The Journey Begins

2008-09-26T22:37:00.000-07:00

Sixty-nine year old native of San Diego, California, born in Mercy Hospital on July 1, 1939. Educated in the United States (California, Maryland and Virginia) and Europe (Frankfurt am Main Germany, Berlin Germany, Cambridge England and Rome Italy). Multi-lingual (fluent in English, German and Spanish) (conversant in Italian, Catalan, Greek, Latin, Urdu and Great Russian).

Work experience: Interpreter, Covert Intelligence Collections, Computer Programmer and System Designer, Community Organizer, Community Activist, Management Consultant and Organizational Designer.