Three Reasons We Need an Economic Wake Up Call

By Robert Kuttner, Huffington Post
Posted on July 7, 2009, Printed on July 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141156/

The June Unemployment Numbers. The green-shoots school was expecting that the rising rate of unemployment would continue to slow, as it did in May. But instead the number spiked back up. A total of 467,000 jobs were lost. The unemployment rate rose to 9.5 percent, and OECD economists project that U.S. unemployment will still be in double digits as late as 2011.

The 9.5 percent official figure -- the worst since 1983 -- conceals even worse news. The number of long-term unemployed is at record levels. This is the only recession since the Great Depression in which the job loss wiped out all the job growth of the previous recovery. As our friends at the Economic Policy Institute report.

What Religious Progressives Bring To The Party

By Sara Robinson

Created 07/08/2009 - 2:21pm

I spent several days over last weekend as a volunteer webworker covering the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly [1] in Salt Lake City. These annual confabs are always a highlight of the summer for me as a UU. They're also one of the best shows going if you want to remember, all the way down, what it means to be liberal in America -- or understand, once again, why religious liberals are so critically important to the ultimate success of the progressive project.

There are a lot of theories of change; but like many of us, I'm particularly drawn to the one that says that if you want to change reality, you start by changing the story. Worldview, narrative, discourse, framing, whatever word you want to use for it -- the stories we tell about how reality works are the frameworks through which we set priorities, evaluate the good and the bad, establish value, and make meaning. And those priorities, evaluations, values, and meanings in turn drive the more concrete political decisions we make about how we solve problems and invest our resources -- and thus determine what kind of world we actually end up making.

10 Dangerous Household Products You Should Never Use Again

By Sustain Lane

Posted on July 9, 2009, Printed on July 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141196/

You would never cross the street without looking both ways, walk alone down a dark alley alone at three a.m., or tell your child to accept rides from strangers. So why let hazardous, toxic, and even carcinogenic chemicals into your home everyday?

The message driven home for millions of Americans each day via TV and internet commercials is this: No need to scrub or scour. With just one squeeze of the spray bottle, you can wipe away dirt, grime, and bacteria.

Are Our Markets Being Manipulated by 'Rogues' or Firms?

There’s New Evidence to Suggest That Crime in the Financial Markets Is Rife

by Danny Schechter

Everyone has heard of the Wikipedia but not everyone knows about the Investopedia, a Forbes website, that monitors finance for market players. One of the issues it is concerned about is market manipulation, actions by rogue and not so rogue players who, working alone or together, unduly influence the way our supposed "free" markets function.

It is a fascinating source of information for the uninitiated who hear the daily reports on the ups and downs of the Dow and believe that somehow it is all part of the natural order of the universe.

It isn't.

The Most Important Financial Journalist of Her Generation

By Dean Starkman, The Nation
Posted on July 9, 2009, Printed on July 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141182/

On April 27, Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and chief executive of Goldman Sachs, sat down for a meeting at Goldman headquarters with Gretchen Morgenson, reporter, columnist and senior editor of the New York Times. The Wall Street titan and the Pulitzer Prize winner had never met, but this wasn't the usual polite getting-to-know-you session between reporter and source.

"I feel like I've been waterboarded," Blankfein told her, according to people familiar with the discussion. Blankfein was being dramatic, but he had reason to feel that way. It was Morgenson, after all, who had written the story this past fall that stripped the veil of secrecy from the most momentous closed-door deal in the annals of US finance: the government rescue of fallen insurance colossus American International Group. The September 28 story, "Behind Insurer's Crisis, a Blind Eye to a Web of Risk," was the first article published by a major news organization to reveal that the true beneficiaries of the bailout were the institutions to which AIG owed money, known as counterparties (mainly Wall Street investment banks). The 2,700-word piece said, among other things, that an AIG collapse "threatened to leave a hole of as much as $20 billion in Goldman's side" and that Blankfein attended a meeting at the Federal Reserve on September 15, the same day decisions were made to let Lehman Brothers fall and to save AIG.

Exclusive: Robert McNamara deceived LBJ on Gulf of Tonkin, documents show

By Gareth Porter
Published: July 8, 2009
Updated 13 hours ago

Official government documents reveal new side of defense secretary’s legacy

Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1967, took many secrets with him when he died Monday at 93. But probably no secret was more sensitive politically than the one that would have changed fundamentally the public perception of his role in Vietnam policy had it been become widely known.

The secret was his deliberate deceit of President Lyndon B. Johnson on Aug. 4, 1964 regarding the alleged attack on US warships in the Gulf of Tonkin.

After just four months, media figures ignore economists to declare stimulus a failure

July 07, 2009 7:41 pm ET

SUMMARY: Media figures have used a recent comment by Vice President Biden -- that the Obama administration "misread how bad the economy was" -- to suggest that the economic recovery package is a complete failure, rather than noting the assessment by economists then and now that the legislation does not go far enough and that further stimulus spending may be necessary.

What happened to those bad bank assets? So far, nothing

By Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — In March, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner unveiled a Public-Private Investment Program in which the government and private firms would bid together to purchase toxic assets from banks, freeing them to increase lending and help revive the economy.

The program's still not operating.

Thomas Frank: When Newspapers Peddle Influence

A revealing scandal at the Washington Post.

Some time last week the Washington Post issued a flier advertising a "salon" on the health-care issue. Over dinner at the home of the paper's publisher, Katharine Weymouth, participants were promised "a collegial evening, with Obama administration officials, Congress members, business leaders, advocacy leaders and other select minds."

The paper's executive editor and its "health-care reporters" would be there too, but not in a "confrontational" capacity, you could rest assured. Everything would be safely "off-the-record." And you could "bring your organization's CEO or executive director literally to the table" for a mere $25,000.

Even in Washington, it's unusual to see an actual price tag placed on a chance to "alter the debate," as the Post's flier tastefully put it. Stranger still is it to see the city's scourge of public corruption -- the Post broke the Watergate story and the Walter Reed scandal, among others -- seemingly offering its own good offices for hire.

Howard Dean: "This Is Ridiculous. We're 60 Years Behind the Times" on Fixing Health Care

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on July 8, 2009, Printed on July 8, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141129/

During the 2004 presidential primaries, the conventional wisdom among Howard Dean's energized supporters was that the over-the-top conservative attacks on the Vermont governor reflected the degree to which the right feared his nomination. With his blunt, plainspoken populism, the argument went at the time, Dean represented a threat to the Bush administration's prospects for re-election that his more polished Democratic opponents lacked.

Five years later, and it may be the "disease care" industry -- now spending $1.4 million each and every day to lobby lawmakers against implementing significant health reforms -- that may be sweating Dean's simple, but uncompromising, brand of politics.

Goldman good but not that bad

By Julian Delasantellis

I've seen every single James Bond movie, a few on their opening morning in the theatres, but as for the eternal debate as to who - Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, Brosnan or Craig - was the best Bond, I couldn't care less. I watch for the villains.

What a glorious gang they are. Suave, sophisticated, well spoken, all-powerful, all-seeing and all-knowing in their incredibly dastardly and ambitious plots, they seem quite the contrast with actors in today's world, Peter Principle incompetents who couldn't bomb the water even if they fell out of a boat. My favorites are Thunderball's Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi), a man so evil that he seemed to have an offscreen orchestra follow him around continually playing ominously threatening sounding overtures (also, I liked the part that he was called the "guardian" of Domino, Claudine Auger-yeah, right), and Alex Trevelyan (Sean Bean) of Goldeneye. Putting a rare bit of actual history in the plot lines, Trevelyan's story was that he was a descendent of the so-called Liensk Cossacks, nationalist, anti-communist Russians who fought for Hitler during World War II. This group was betrayed back to Stalin's most untender mercies by the West after the war, and Trevelyan, a former MI-6 agent, still burns for horrible revenge against a British society that gave him its class, manners and refinement in exchange for the murder of his parents.

Healthy examples

Plenty of countries get healthcare right.

By Jonathan Cohn | July 5, 2009

“I DON’T WANT America to begin rationing care to their citizens in the way these other countries do.”

That was Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, speaking last month about healthcare reform. But it could have been virtually any other Republican, not to mention any number of sympathetic interest groups, because that’s the party line for many who oppose healthcare reform. If President Obama and his supporters get their way, this argument goes, healthcare in America will start to look like healthcare overseas. Yes, maybe everybody will have insurance. But people will have to wait in long lines. And when they are done waiting in line, the care won’t be very good.

Typically the people making these arguments are basing their analysis on one of two countries, Canada and England, where such descriptions hold at least some truth. Although the people in both countries receive pretty good healthcare - their citizens do better than Americans in many important respects - they are also subjected to longer waits for specialty care and tighter limits on some advanced treatments.

Diagrams on Conservatism

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.

- John Stuart Mill, 1866

Are there any national conservatives who are actually promoting policies that will remotely benefit the country? Currently, about all they're offering is a) obstructionism, and b) variations on the same old policies that proved highly profitable to a privileged few but catastrophic to the nation as a whole during the Bush administration - and most of the past 30 plus years.

Watch the Sunday news shows and you'll see, as DistributorcapNY puts it, "callous Neros to the right, evil Neros to the far right." And it's not as if national Democrats as a whole, too beholden to corporate interests, are that admirable, either.

Digby: Trigger Finger

So, the latest scuttlebutt is that Obama walked back Rahm's "trigger" comments to the Wall Street Journal today by saying that he still thinks a public option is the best way to get to serious health care reform.

But it looks to me as if we are seeing the trigger being set up as the "compromise." I don't know that, of course, but it's highly doubtful to me that Rahm was totally off the reservation. But it would probably be a good idea to get the trigger off the table sooner rather than later. The trigger is a reform killer.

The Man Who Crashed the World

Almost a year after A.I.G.’s collapse, despite a tidal wave of outrage, there still has been no clear explanation of what toppled the insurance giant. The author decides to ask the people involved—the silent, shell-shocked traders of the A.I.G. Financial Products unit—and finds that the story may have a villain, whose reign of terror over 400 employees brought the company, the U.S. economy, and the global financial system to their knees.

By Michael Lewis August 2009

Six months ago, I received an odd phone call from a man named Jake DeSantis at A.I.G. Financial Products—the infamous unit of the doomed insurance company, staffed by expensively educated, highly paid traders, whose financial ineptitude is widely suspected of costing the U.S. taxpayer $182.5 billion and counting. At the time A.I.G. F.P.’s losses were reported, it became known that a handful of traders in this curious unit had sold trillions of dollars of credit-default swaps (essentially unregulated insurance policies) on piles of U.S. subprime mortgages, but its employees hadn’t yet become the leading examples of Wall Street greed. And so this was before Jake DeSantis and his colleagues found themselves suburban-Connecticut outcasts, before their first death threats, before the House of Representatives passed a bill because of them (taxing 90 percent of their large bonuses), before New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo announced he was going after their paychecks, and before Iowa senator Charles Grassley said that A.I.G.’s leaders should follow the Japanese example and “either do one of two things, resign or go commit suicide.”

Senate turns aside new attempt to scrutinize Fed

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Reserve, facing growing pressure as it tries to heal the ailing economy, dodged a bullet on Monday when the U.S. Senate cast aside a new effort to increase scrutiny of the central bank.

On procedural grounds, the Senate blocked a bid to permit the U.S. comptroller general, who heads the investigative arm of Congress known as the Government Accountability Office, to audit the Federal Reserve system and issue a report.

The Green Shoots are Dead

The latest jobless figures show America's economy is stuck in the doldrums. The US urgently needs a new stimulus injection

by Dean Baker

The June US employment report [1] should convince even the determinedly ignorant that the time has come for another round of stimulus for the American economy. The economy is continuing to shed jobs and work hours at a very rapid pace. The unemployment rate is virtually certain to cross 10% by the end of the summer and will likely hit 11% before we are very far into 2010. This is a scenario much worse [2] than the Obama administration [3] had expected when it crafted its stimulus package. It is time for it to adjust its plans accordingly.

When the Obama administration put together its stimulus package in January, it was projecting that, in the absence of any stimulus, the unemployment rate would peak at just over 9% early in 2010. With the unemployment rate reaching 9.5% in June, they clearly underestimated [4] the size of the downdraft hitting the US economy [5].

Adding Up the True Costs of Two Wars

by Joseph Stiglitz & Linda Bilmes

Last week the U.S. "stood down" in Iraq, finalizing the pullout of 140,000 troops from Iraqi cities and towns -- the first step on the long path home. After more than six years, most Americans are war-weary, even though a smaller percentage of us have been involved in the actual fighting than in any major conflict in U.S. history.

But not so fast. The conflict that began in 2003 is far from over for us, and the next chapter -- confronting a Taliban that reasserted itself in Afghanistan while the U.S. was sidetracked in Iraq -- will be expensive and bloody. The death toll for U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan reached 5,000 in June. An additional 80,000 Americans have been wounded or injured since the war in Iraq began. More than 300,000 of our troops have required medical treatment, and Army statistics show that more than 17 percent of our returning soldiers suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Life, Liberty and Employer-Provided Health Insurance

by: Dean Baker, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Independence Day is a time to reflect on the United States and to ask what it is that we really value about our country. Most people would probably list the freedoms that it has usually guaranteed to most members of society. The opportunities for economic success, while not as great as often touted, are nonetheless impressive.

However, some members of Congress were apparently celebrating our system of employer-provided health insurance last weekend. Or, at least that is what they want us to believe.

The Age of Paine

By Scott Tucker

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” wrote Thomas Paine in “Common Sense,” the revolutionary pamphlet published in January 1776. Ronald Reagan quoted those words on July 17, 1980, when he addressed the Republican National Convention and accepted his party’s presidential nomination. Reagan led a coalition of corporate oligarchs, imperial crusaders and Christian fundamentalists to power, and to this day Reaganism remains the official gospel of the old guard in the Republican Party. The republican and social democratic ideals of Paine are long lost to many modern partisan Republicans and Democrats, but many memorable phrases of Paine still fill the mouths of career politicians.

When the Iraq war, a broken health care system and a plunging economy gave the Democratic Party a political advantage, Barack Obama raised hopes and promised change. When Obama gave his inaugural address on Jan. 20, 2009, he too quoted Paine, this time from the first of 13 articles collected in “The American Crisis”—an article Gen. Washington ordered read to his troops before crossing the Delaware River on Christmas 1776 to fight the Hessian mercenaries of King George III: “Let it be told to the future world … that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive … that the city and country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it.” Reagan and Obama each lifted some good lines from Paine for their own rhetorical purposes; but each likewise cared more for stagecraft than for the original script.

Noam Chomsky's Major Address at New York's Riverside Church, 6/12/09

Noam Chomsky actually managed to summarize many of the themes in his 100 books and nearly half-century of political activism at New York's Riverside Church last month. I've included links to the actual video on Yahoo, as well as to the entire program on CSPAN, which featured an introduction by Amy Goodman. Below also is a report published on "IndypendentMedia".

Paul Krugman: HELP Is on the Way

The Congressional Budget Office has looked at the future of American health insurance, and it works.

A few weeks ago there was a furor when the budget office “scored” two incomplete Senate health reform proposals — that is, estimated their costs and likely impacts over the next 10 years. One proposal came in more expensive than expected; the other didn’t cover enough people. Health reform, it seemed, was in trouble.

But last week the budget office scored the full proposed legislation from the Senate committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP). And the news — which got far less play in the media than the downbeat earlier analysis — was very, very good. Yes, we can reform health care.

Let me start by pointing out something serious health economists have known all along: on general principles, universal health insurance should be eminently affordable.

Administration plans for end of ‘too big to fail’

Megabanks may be slimmed down, told to prepare plans for own demise

They are the biggest of the big — the Citigroups, the Goldman Sachses, the AIGs and other financial behemoths. The Obama administration doesn't want so many around anymore.

Financial regulations proposed by the president would result in leaner and simpler institutions that don't carry the weight of the system on their marble columns.

Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara dies at 93

By ANNE GEARAN, AP National Security Writer
1 hr 5 mins ago

WASHINGTON – Robert S. McNamara, the brainy Pentagon chief who directed the escalation of the Vietnam War despite private doubts the war was winnable or worth fighting, died Monday at 93.

McNamara revealed his misgivings three decades after the American defeat that some called "McNamara's war."

FDR's Second Bill of Rights and the Progressive Mission

by Vikingkingq
Sat Jul 04, 2009 at 02:08:53 PM PDT

Introduction:

In the spirit of the best 4th of July speeches, which like Frederick Douglass' peerless effort seek not to satiate with platitudes but rather to challenge and provoke, today I offer a reflection on America's past and its future.

At the end of "Resurrecting Henry George," I argued that a national housing assistance program would "help to make one more of FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, "the right of every family to a decent home," a legal reality. I would argue, and I will argue in future posts, that the longer-term mission of the progressive movement in America is (and has unconsciously been) the realization of the Second Bill of Rights." So today I intend to explain what I meant.

Rumsfeld On Abandoning Geneva: 'All Of A Sudden, It Was Just All Happening'

By Justin Elliott - July 3, 2009, 6:03PM

Donald Rumsfeld has finally said he's sorry. Sort of.

In an interview with biographer Bradley Graham, the former secretary of defense says he has regrets about the administration's controversial detainee policy.

Taibbi: NYSE ends transparency to protect Goldman Sachs

The New York Stock Exchange quietly announced last week that it would end its practice of requiring companies to report all their program trading — a move that helps shield large investment banks, particularly Goldman Sachs, from public scrutiny.

The new rule means the public will no longer be able to tell if large investment banks are manipulating the stock market for their own gain, says Matt Taibbi, the journalist whose Rolling Stone article on Goldman Sachs’ role in asset bubbles over the past century has rocked the financial world.

Wall Street’s Toxic Message

When the current crisis is over, the reputation of American-style capitalism will have taken a beating—not least because of the gap between what Washington practices and what it preaches. Disillusioned developing nations may well turn their backs on the free market, warns Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz, posing new threats to global stability and U.S. security.

By Joseph E. Stiglitz July 2009

Every crisis comes to an end—and, bleak as things seem now, the current economic crisis too shall pass. But no crisis, especially one of this severity, recedes without leaving a legacy. And among this one’s legacies will be a worldwide battle over ideas—over what kind of economic system is likely to deliver the greatest benefit to the most people. Nowhere is that battle raging more hotly than in the Third World, among the 80 percent of the world’s population that lives in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, 1.4 billion of whom subsist on less than $1.25 a day. In America, calling someone a socialist may be nothing more than a cheap shot. In much of the world, however, the battle between capitalism and socialism—or at least something that many Americans would label as socialism—still rages. While there may be no winners in the current economic crisis, there are losers, and among the big losers is support for American-style capitalism. This has consequences we’ll be living with for a long time to come.

The fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, marked the end of Communism as a viable idea. Yes, the problems with Communism had been manifest for decades. But after 1989 it was hard for anyone to say a word in its defense. For a while, it seemed that the defeat of Communism meant the sure victory of capitalism, particularly in its American form. Francis Fukuyama went as far as to proclaim “the end of history,” defining democratic market capitalism as the final stage of social development, and declaring that all humanity was now heading in this direction. In truth, historians will mark the 20 years since 1989 as the short period of American triumphalism. With the collapse of great banks and financial houses, and the ensuing economic turmoil and chaotic attempts at rescue, that period is over. So, too, is the debate over “market fundamentalism,” the notion that unfettered markets, all by themselves, can ensure economic prosperity and growth. Today only the deluded would argue that markets are self-correcting or that we can rely on the self-interested behavior of market participants to guarantee that everything works honestly and properly.

Frank Rich: Bernie Madoff Is No John Dillinger

THE judge condemned Bernie Madoff’s crimes as “extraordinarily evil.” The New York Daily News, whose publisher was a Madoff victim, chose “The Pariah” as its front-page headline and promised that the dastardly villain would suffer “everlasting consumption in the jaws of the devil.” The Times declared that the Madoff case, by attaching a human face to a financial meltdown that produced fear, panic and loss, had “put an entire era on trial.”

But for all this rhetorical thunder, Madoff’s 150-year sentence still seemed an anticlimax, as if the trial of the century had ended without a verdict. There was no national catharsis. The news landed with something of a thud. On the most-watched network newscast, “NBC Nightly News,” it received second billing to Day Four of updates on Michael Jackson’s death.

Madoff, it turned out, was no Public Enemy No. 1 to rival John Dillinger, the Great Depression thug at the center of Hollywood’s timely release this holiday weekend, “Public Enemies.” In the context of our own Great Recession, Madoff’s old-fashioned Ponzi scheme was merely a one-off next to the esoteric and (often legal) heists by banks and bankers. They gamed the entire system, then took the money and ran before the bubble burst, sticking the rest of us with that fear, panic and loss.

Mass Of New Docs Support White House Reasons For Firing AmeriCorps IG

By Zachary Roth - July 3, 2009, 1:42PM

As we noted yesterday, the Washington Post has published the documents turned over by the Corporation for National and Community Service to a Senate committee reviewing the White House's firing of AmeriCorps IG. Conservatives had charged that the IG, Gerald Walpin, was canned for going too hard after an Obama ally.

We've taken a look through the documents, and it's fair to say they offer a pretty clear picture of how and why the CNCS board lost confidence in Walpin. They jibe closely with what the White House and the board have already said -- to us, among others -- about the deterioration of the relationship between the IG and his agency. And they also make clear that this deterioration had begun long before the Obama administration existed.

Tea Parties Kaput?

by AlyoshaKaramazov
Fri Jul 03, 2009 at 10:46:11 AM PD

The poor, poor GOP. Seems to be going the way of Mrs. Nezbitt. And since we've found out that Neo-Nazis may be attending (you know, to talk about taxes) perhaps it's appropriate to see it in German.

Yes, even though Stormfront will be kicking out the jams at the 4th of July Tea Parties..........GOP bigwigs? Not so much.

The Film Big Coal Does Not Want You to See

by Jeff Biggers

As a groundbreaking clean energy counterpart to this summer's extraordinary Food, Inc. documentary on the agribusiness, the long-awaited "Coal Country" film on the cradle-to-grave process of generating our coal-fired electricity will be hitting the theatres next week with the big bang of an ammonium nitrate/fuel oil explosive.

And Big Coal ain't happy.

ExxonMobil Continuing to Fund Climate Sceptic Groups, Records Show

by David Adam

The world's largest oil company is continuing to fund lobby groups that question the reality of global warming, despite a public pledge to cut support for such climate change denial, a new analysis shows.

Company records show that ExxonMobil handed over hundreds of thousands of pounds to such lobby groups in 2008. These include the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) in Dallas, Texas, which received $75,000 (£45,500), and the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, which received $50,000.

According to Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, at the London School of Economics, both the NCPA and the Heritage Foundation have published "misleading and inaccurate information about climate change."

Matt Taibbi: On giving Goldman a chance

After my Rolling Stone piece about Goldman, Sachs hit the newsstands last week (unfortunately the piece is not yet up on the magazine’s web site, so I can’t link to it yet — but it is out in print), I started to get a lot of mail. Most of it was thoughtful and respectful criticism, although there was an amusingly large number of people writing in impassioned defense of their right, under our American system, to be ripped off by large impersonal financial companies. “If my pension fund is buying [crap mortgages] from Goldman, and my pension fund loses lots of value, that’s not Goldman’s fault,” wrote one reader. “No one is forcing anyone to buy anything. The only thing Goldman is guilty of is making profits.”

I’m not even going to go there — the psychology of a human being who would take the time to actually write in a complaint like that is so bizarre that it would take more time than I have today to even begin discussing it. One other complaint that I will address quickly, though, is the notion that I didn’t tell Goldman’s side of the story. “Not exactly a balanced approach,” complained one reader. “You should take an ethics class. You have to give the other side a fair shot.”

FBI Ignored Bush-Hussein Ties

By Robert Parry
July 2, 2009

The FBI has released reports on 20 interviews and five conversations conducted with Iraq’s deposed dictator Saddam Hussein before he was put to death, but none of the disclosed Q and A deals with the role of the Reagan administration in delivering key components for Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons in the 1980s.

Either those questions weren’t asked or they are still being hidden by the U.S. government. The contents of one interview on March 21, 2004, were almost entirely redacted for supposed national security reasons.

As the National Security Archive, a private non-profit group that obtained the documents under the Freedom of Information Act, wrote:

“Not included in these FBI reports are issues of particular interest to students of Iraq’s complicated relationship with the U.S. – the reported role of the CIA in facilitating the Ba’ath party’s rise to power, the uneasy alliance forged between Iraq and the U.S. during the Iran-Iraq war, and the precise nature of U.S. views regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons policy during that conflict, given its contemporaneous knowledge of their repeated use against Iranians and the Kurds.”

Cybersecurity Plan to Involve NSA, Telecoms

DHS Officials Debating The Privacy Implications

By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 3, 2009

The Obama administration will proceed with a Bush-era plan to use National Security Agency assistance in screening government computer traffic on private-sector networks, with AT&T as the likely test site, according to three current and former government officials.

President Obama said in May that government efforts to protect computer systems from attack would not involve "monitoring private-sector networks or Internet traffic," and Department of Homeland Security officials say the new program will scrutinize only data going to or from government systems.

Bubkes

Filed under:

• Greenhouse gases
• Climate Science

— gavin @ 8:00 AM - ()

Some parts of the blogosphere, headed up by CEI (”CO2: They call it pollution, we call it life!“), are all a-twitter over an apparently “suppressed” document that supposedly undermines the EPA Endangerment finding about human emissions of carbon dioxide and a basket of other greenhouse gases. Well a draft of this “suppressed” document has been released and we can now all read this allegedly devastating critique of the EPA science. Let’s take a look…

First off the authors of the submission; Alan Carlin is an economist and John Davidson is an ex-member of the Carter administration Council of Environmental Quality. Neither are climate scientists. That’s not necessarily a problem - perhaps they have mastered multiple fields? - but it is likely an indication that the analysis is not going to be very technical (and so it will prove). Curiously, while the authors work for the NCEE (National Center for Environmental Economics), part of the EPA, they appear to have rather closely collaborated with one Ken Gregory (his inline comments appear at multiple points in the draft). Ken Gregory if you don’t know is a leading light of the Friends of Science - a astroturf anti-climate science lobbying group based in Alberta. Indeed, parts of the Carlin and Davidson report appear to be lifted directly from Ken’s rambling magnum opus on the FoS site. However, despite this odd pedigree, the scientific points could still be valid.

A Violent Regeneration

A search for American identity after the Civil War led to a surge of machismo and bloodlust.
David Nasaw | June 25, 2009

Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920
by Jackson Lears, Harper, 448 pages, $27.99

History is lived forward but written backward. In October of 1929, no one knew that the Great Depression had begun and would last for over a decade. The soldiers who marched off to fight in the Civil War -- and the families and loved ones who saluted their departure -- had no idea of the carnage that would follow. Historians know better but can't let their knowledge of what came next overdetermine the story they tell. Neither can they make believe that the future of that past was an open book. It wasn't. There were options, openings, possibilities, but only one path was taken. The historian's task is to explain why it was that path and not another.

The best historians strike the right balance between the Scylla and Charybdis of inevitability and randomness. As Jackson Lears demonstrates again in his latest book, Rebirth of a Nation, he is one of the best, certainly of his (and my) generation of historians. His new book is a work of synthesis, an attempt to tell the story of "the making of modern America" in the long half century from the end of the Civil War to the end of the Great War. Although the book's subtitle indicates his narrative begins in 1877 -- the year when the inauguration of Rutherford B. Hayes as president supposedly marked the end of Reconstruction -- Lears ignores that arbitrary, conventional beginning point. "After the Civil War," he tells us, "the entire country was faced with the task of starting over." In the decades to come, the history of the nation and its peoples would be marked by longings for and attempts at rebirth, regeneration, and revitalization.

Paul Krugman: That ’30s Show

O.K., Thursday’s jobs report settles it. We’re going to need a bigger stimulus. But does the president know that?

Let’s do the math.

Since the recession began, the U.S. economy has lost 6 ½ million jobs — and as that grim employment report confirmed, it’s continuing to lose jobs at a rapid pace. Once you take into account the 100,000-plus new jobs that we need each month just to keep up with a growing population, we’re about 8 ½ million jobs in the hole.

And the deeper the hole gets, the harder it will be to dig ourselves out. The job figures weren’t the only bad news in Thursday’s report, which also showed wages stalling and possibly on the verge of outright decline. That’s a recipe for a descent into Japanese-style deflation, which is very difficult to reverse. Lost decade, anyone?

The Great American Bubble Machine

Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression

MATT TAIBBI
Posted Jul 02, 2009 8:38 AM

In Rolling Stone Issue 1082-83, Matt Taibbi takes on "the Wall Street Bubble Mafia" — investment bank Goldman Sachs. The piece has generated controversy, with Goldman Sachs firing back that Taibbi's piece is "an hysterical compilation of conspiracy theories" and a spokesman adding, "We reject the assertion that we are inflators of bubbles and profiteers in busts, and we are painfully conscious of the importance in being a force for good." Taibbi shot back: "Goldman has its alumni pushing its views from the pulpit of the U.S. Treasury, the NYSE, the World Bank, and numerous other important posts; it also has former players fronting major TV shows. They have the ear of the president if they want it." Here, now, are excerpts from Matt Taibbi's piece and video of Taibbi exploring the key issues.

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.