The 12-step path to white-collar crime

Adelphia Communications, Barings Bank, Enron, HealthSouth, HIH Insurance, Hollinger International, Tyco International, WorldCom/MCI, Xerox...the white collar crime list goes on. But, did the executives at these companies start out as criminals or did they head down the slippery slope to criminality one misplaced step at a time? According to research to be published in the International Journal of Business Governance and Ethics, there are twelve steps to white-collar crime.

Ruth McKay of the Sprott School of Business, at Carleton University, Carey Stevens of Carey Stevens and Associates, in Ottawa, and Jae Fratzl of Artworks Counselling and Psychotherapy, in Ontario, Canada, worked together to examine the psychopathology of the white-collar criminal acting as a corporate leader.

Why Republicans Are in the Grip of an Apocalyptic Rapture Cult Centered on Revenge and Vindication

By Frank Schaeffer, Da Capo Press
Posted on October 13, 2009, Printed on October 13, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143232/

The following is an excerpt from Frank Schaeffer's new book, Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don't Like Religion (or Atheism) (Da Capo Press, 2009) to be released at the end of this month.

Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye's Left Behind series of sixteen novels (so far!) represents everything that is most deranged about religion. If I had to choose companions to take my chances with in a lifeboat, and the choice boiled down to picking Tim LaHaye, Jerry Jenkins, or Christopher Hitchens, I'd pick Hitchens in a heartbeat. At least he wouldn't try to sink our boat so that Jesus would come back sooner. He might even bring along a case of wine.

The Left Behind novels have sold tens of millions of copies while spawning an "End Times" cult, or rather egging it on. Such products as Left Behind wall paper, screen savers, children's books, and video games have become part of the ubiquitous American background noise. Less innocuous symptoms include people stocking up on assault rifles and ammunition, adopting "Christ-centered" home school curricula, fearing higher education, embracing rumor as fact, and learning to love hatred for the "other," as exemplified by a revived anti-immigrant racism, the murder of doctors who do abortions, and even a killing in the Holocaust Museum.

The $800 Billion Deception

Conservatives claim the stimulus has already failed. But it has barely started.

By Daniel Gross
Posted Monday, Oct. 12, 2009, at 4:10 PM ET

---

From the moment it passed, the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—the stimulus bill—has been the subject of controversy. Many critics have deemed it a debacle, since unemployment has continued to rise in the months since its passage. The Republican Party declared the bill a failure over the summer, and House Minority Leader John Boehner recently deemed it a waste: "You can't spend $800 billion of taxpayer money and not create jobs when you say that's what the goal was." At a dinner several weeks ago, I heard a cable news reporter, one whose job is to report numbers accurately, declare that "we've already spent $800 billion and it was a waste." I suppose it's too much to ask political hacks and TV reporters to get the size and timing of the stimulus package right. But I expect better from my colleagues at the Washington Post editorial page, which on Sunday argued against further stimulus measures because they would add to the scary national debt and because "the government still hasn't run through half of the $787 billion in tax cuts and spending increases enacted this year."

Some things about the stimulus are indeed complicated. How precisely do you measure the number of jobs "saved" when the federal government cuts checks to states, thus allowing them to avoid budget cuts? But some things about the stimulus are quite simple, including its size and the amount of it that has been spent so far.

Is the Insurance Industry Declaring War?

Over the weekend, America's Health Insurance Plans circulated a study it commissioned from PriceWaterhouseCoopers. In a memo to AHIP members, reproduced here, president Karen Ignani explained its significance:

The report makes clear that several major provisions in the current legislative proposal will cause health care costs to increase far faster and higher than they would under the current system. The report finds that the proposal “will increase premiums above what they would increase under the current system for both individual and family coverage in all four market segments for every year from 2010-2019.

The Insurance Industry's Deceptive Report

In the hallowed tradition of the tobacco and energy industries, the health insurance industry has commissioned a report (pdf) projecting doom and despair for those who seek to reform its business practices. The report was farmed out to the consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers, which has something of a history with this sort of thing: In the early-'90s, the tobacco industry commissioned PWC to estimate the economic devastation that would result from a tax on tobacco. The report was later analyzed by the Arthur Andersen Economic Consulting group, which concluded that "the cumulative effect of PW’s methods … is to produce patently unreliable results." It's perhaps no surprise that the patently unreliable results were all in the tobacco industry's favor. He who pays the piper names the tune, and all that.

Paul Krugman: Misguided Monetary Mentalities

One lesson from the Great Depression is that you should never underestimate the destructive power of bad ideas. And some of the bad ideas that helped cause the Depression have, alas, proved all too durable: in modified form, they continue to influence economic debate today.

What ideas am I talking about? The economic historian Peter Temin has argued that a key cause of the Depression was what he calls the “gold-standard mentality.” By this he means not just belief in the sacred importance of maintaining the gold value of one’s currency, but a set of associated attitudes: obsessive fear of inflation even in the face of deflation; opposition to easy credit, even when the economy desperately needs it, on the grounds that it would be somehow corrupting; assertions that even if the government can create jobs it shouldn’t, because this would only be an “artificial” recovery.

In the early 1930s this mentality led governments to raise interest rates and slash spending, despite mass unemployment, in an attempt to defend their gold reserves. And even when countries went off gold, the prevailing mentality made them reluctant to cut rates and create jobs.

Why It's Time to Retire the 401(k)

Retiree Robert Shively spends his days on the golf course. For many, that would be a dream come true, but not quite in the way Shively does it. The 68-year-old is the cart mechanic at the Niagara Falls Country Club.

Two and a half decades ago, his then employer, Occidental Petroleum Corp., cut its traditional defined pension plan in favor of a 401(k)-type system. So instead of getting a guaranteed pension check of $1,308 a month for his 36 years as a full-time, salaried employee, the former chemical-factory worker receives $225 a month from his 13 years as an hourly employee, plus $180.16 a month from a profit-sharing plan Oxy had for salaried employees until 1994. He also has $70,000 left of the money he saved from his tax-deferred 401(k). On the days he works, Shively rises at 5 a.m. to get to the golf course. He mostly enjoys the job. But on tournament mornings, he has to be at the course at 4 a.m. A few years ago the country club switched from gas to electric carts, some of which have four 84-lb. batteries each. Every year, Shively and another worker have to lift out all the batteries and store them for winter. "Your body aches all over," he says.

Rates to rise under Senate health plan, industry group says

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Health insurance premiums for the typical American family would increase by another $4,000 by 2019 under a key Senate overhaul plan, according to an industry trade group analysis.

The report raised new questions about the political viability of the 10-year, $829 billion compromise bill drafted under the guidance of Sen. Max Baucus, D-Montana, chairman of the Finance Senate Finance Committee.

The safety net and the recession

By Lawrence Mishel
October 8, 2009

"Some claim somehow that the recovery package isn't working by simply pointing to continued job losses. I consider this peculiar, especially from those who favored the policies that actually caused the recession to begin with," EPI President Lawrence Mishel said in testimony to Congress on October 8, where he proposed a five-part strategy for creating and preserving jobs, and stressed that the causes of today’s high unemployment pre-date President Obama.

"I consider President Obama to be in the situation of having inherited a burning apartment building. He proceeded to gather all the available fire trucks and douse the fires in half the floors. Yet his critics complain that the other floors are still on fire. Even worse, those critics are the ones who started the fire. And they want to withdraw the fire trucks."

President Warren Harding's lover Carrie Phillips spied for Kaiser

Despite being prone to verbal gaffes and political scandal, Warren Harding routinely tops polls of America’s dullest presidents. Now a new biography has added unexpected spice.

An Ohio lawyer has unearthed documents suggesting that Harding’s mistress while he was a senator during the first world war was a German spy whose network helped sink British ships.

Melting glaciers bring 1980s pollution revival

Bad hair and shoulder pads are not the only things from the 1980s that we'd rather not see again. Nasty chemicals banned in that decade are also on the list. Unfortunately, melting Alpine glaciers are generating a revival of toxic organic pollutants.

Christian Bogdal and colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich studied levels of pollution in sediment at the bottom of the Oberaar lake in Bern, Switzerland.

The Man Nobody Wanted to Hear

Global Banking Economist Warned of Coming Crisis

By Beat Balzli and Michaela Schiessl

William White predicted the approaching financial crisis years before 2007's subprime meltdown. But central bankers preferred to listen to his great rival Alan Greenspan instead, with devastating consequences for the global economy.

William White had a pretty clear idea of what he wanted to do with his life after shedding his pinstriped suit and entering retirement.

White, a Canadian, worked for various central banks for 39 years, most recently serving as chief economist for the central bank for all central bankers, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), headquartered in Basel, Switzerland.

Then, after 15 years in the world's most secretive gentlemen's club, White decided it was time to step down. The 66-year-old approached retirement in his adopted country the way a true Swiss national would. He took his money to the local bank, bought a piece of property in the Bernese Highlands and began building a chalet. There, in the mountains between cow pastures and ski resorts, he and his wife planned to relax and enjoy their retirement, and to live a peaceful existence punctuated only by the occasional vacation trip. That was the plan in June 2008.

And now this.

Frank Rich: Two Wrongs Make Another Fiasco

THOSE of us who love F. Scott Fitzgerald must acknowledge that he did get one big thing wrong. There are second acts in American lives. (Just ask Marion Barry, or William Shatner.) The real question is whether everyone deserves a second act. Perhaps the most surreal aspect of our great Afghanistan debate is the Beltway credence given to the ravings of the unrepentant blunderers who dug us into this hole in the first place.

Let’s be clear: Those who demanded that America divert its troops and treasure from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2002 and 2003 — when there was no Qaeda presence in Iraq — bear responsibility for the chaos in Afghanistan that ensued. Now they have the nerve to imperiously and tardily demand that America increase its 68,000-strong presence in Afghanistan to clean up their mess — even though the number of Qaeda insurgents there has dwindled to fewer than 100, according to the president’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones.

But why let facts get in the way? Just as these hawks insisted that Iraq was “the central front in the war on terror” when the central front was Afghanistan, so they insist that Afghanistan is the central front now that it has migrated to Pakistan. When the day comes for them to anoint Pakistan as the central front, it will be proof positive that Al Qaeda has consolidated its hold on Somalia and Yemen.

Steep Losses Pose Crisis for Pensions

By David Cho

Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 11, 2009

The financial crisis has blown a hole in the rosy forecasts of pension funds that cover teachers, police officers and other government employees, casting into doubt as never before whether these public systems will be able to keep their promises to future generations of retirees.

Glenn Greenwald: On the government's owners

The most revealing political quote of the last year came, in my view, from the second-highest ranking Democratic Senator, Dick Durbin, who told a local radio station in April: "And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place." The best Congressional floor speech of the last year on the financial crisis was this extraordinarily piercing five-minute revelation from Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio on the Wall Street bailout and how the Congress is subservient to their dictates. And the single most insightful article on the financial crisis was written by former IMF Chief Economist and current MIT Professor Simon Johnson in the May, 2009 issue of The Atlantic, when he argued that "the finance industry has effectively captured our government" and detailed how the U.S. has become very similar to failed emerging-market nations in both its political and economic culture.

Billmon: Godwin Takes the Day Off

by billmon

Wed Oct 07, 2009 at 07:49:26 AM PDT

Liberal bias has become the single biggest distortion in modern Bible translations . . . The committee in charge of updating the bestselling version, the NIV, is dominated by professors and higher-educated participants who can be expected to be liberal and feminist in outlook. As a result, the revision and replacement of the NIV will be influenced more by political correctness and other liberal distortions than by genuine examination of the oldest manuscripts. As a result of these political influences, it becomes desirable to develop a conservative translation that can serve, at a minimum, as a bulwark against the liberal manipulation of meaning in future versions.

Conservative Bible Project
Conservapedia
October 2009

The Lost Generation

Bright, eager—and unwanted. While unemployment is ravaging just about every part of the global workforce, the most enduring harm is being done to young people who can't grab onto the first rung of the career ladder.

Affected are a range of young people, from high school dropouts, to college grads, to newly minted lawyers and MBAs across the developed world from Britain to Japan. One indication: In the U.S., the unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds has climbed to more than 18%, from 13% a year ago.

Unapologetic

by Jed Lewison

Share this on Twitter - Unapologetic

Sat Oct 10, 2009 at 03:00:04 PM PDT

On Thursday, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) delivered one of the all-time greatest floor speeches ever from the floor of the U.S. House, challenging Republican obstructionists -- and the Democrats who enable them. The great thing about it wasn't that Grayson was saying anything particularly new. It was that finally someone with some power was saying everything that we already know about the GOP and Dems who play ball with them. If you haven't seen it yet, you've got to watch it.

Yesterday on Countdown, Lawrence O'Donnell interviewed Grayson on why he gave the speech and how it has been received. True to form, Grayson was a straight shooter, and managed to rip off a number of good lines, including one on perhaps the most important thing for Dems to remember: you don't beat Republicans by being a Republican.

Who's in Big Brother's Database?

By James Bamford

The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency

by Matthew M. Aid

Bloomsbury, 423 pp., $30.00

On a remote edge of Utah's dry and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may become America's equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges's "Library of Babel," a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world's knowledge is stored, but not a single word is understood. At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.

Unlike Borges's "labyrinth of letters," this library expects few visitors. It's being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency—which is primarily responsible for "signals intelligence," the collection and analysis of various forms of communication—to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital "pocket litter." Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.

Derivatives Lobby Links With New Democrats to Blunt Obama Plan

By Dawn Kopecki, Matthew Leising and Shannon D. Harrington

Oct. 9 (Bloomberg) -- As President Barack Obama vowed in a Sept. 14 speech in New York’s Federal Hall to correct “reckless behavior and unchecked excess” on Wall Street, Mike McMahon and Barney Frank sat in the audience discussing how to ease proposed rules for the $592 trillion over-the-counter derivatives market.

Side by side at 26 Wall St., across from the New York Stock Exchange, freshman congressman McMahon told House Financial Services Committee Chairman Frank he was worried that Obama’s derivatives plan, released in August, would penalize a wide swath of U.S. corporations and could push jobs in his home district overseas, McMahon said in an interview.

In Washington, The Revolving Door Is Hazardous to Your Health

by Bill Moyers & Michael Winship

On Tuesday, October 13, the Senate Finance Committee finally is scheduled to vote on its version of health care insurance reform. And therein lies yet another story in the endless saga of money and politics.

In most polls, the majority of Americans favor a non-profit alternative -- like Medicare -- that would give the private health industry some competition. So if so many of us, including President Obama himself, want that public option, how come we're not getting one?

Bill Moyers talks with Marcy Kaptur and Simon Johnson

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL.

I sat in a theater packed with passionate moviegoers, every one of them seemingly aghast at the Wall Street skullduggery exposed by Michael Moore in his latest film. It's called 'Capitalism: A Love Story.' Here's an excerpt:

MICHAEL MOORE: We're here to get the money back for the American People. Do you think it's too harsh to call what has happened here a coup d'état? A financial coup d'état?

MARCY KAPTUR: That's, no. Because I think that's what's happened. Um, a financial coup d'état?

MICHAEL MOORE: Yeah.

MARCY KAPTUR: I could agree with that. I could agree with that. Because the people here really aren't in charge. Wall Street is in charge.

BILL MOYERS: That's the progressive Representative from Ohio, Marcy Kaptur, she's with me now. She has a Masters from the University of Michigan, did graduate study at M.I.T. and still lives in the same house in the Toledo working class neighborhood where she grew up.

Too Politically Connected To Fail In Any Crisis

Over the past 30 years Wall Street captured the thinking of official Washington, persuading policymakers on both sides of the aisle not to regulate (derivatives), to deregulate (Gramm-Leach-Bliley), not enforce existing safety and soundness regulations (VaR), and to stand idly by while millions of consumers were misled into life-ruining financial decisions (Alan Greenspan).

This was pervasive cultural capture or, to be blunter, mind control. But when the crisis broke it was not enough. Having powerful people generally on your side is not what you need when all hell breaks loose in financial markets. Official decisions will be made fast, under great pressure, and by a small group of people standing up in the Oval Office.

MSU research: Small classes have long-term benefit for all students

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Providing small classes for at least several consecutive grades starting in early elementary school gives students the best chance to succeed in later grades, according to groundbreaking new research from a Michigan State University scholar.

The research by Spyros Konstantopoulos, associate professor of education, is the first to examine the effects of class size over a sustained period and for all levels of students – from low- to high-achievers. The study appears in the American Journal of Education.

F.H.A. Problems Raising Concern of Policy Makers

By DAVID STREITFELD and LOUISE STORY

Published: October 8, 2009

A year after Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac teetered, industry executives and Washington policy makers are worrying that another government mortgage giant could be the next housing domino.

Problems at the Federal Housing Administration, which guarantees mortgages with low down payments, are becoming so acute that some experts warn the agency might need a federal bailout. Problems at the Federal Housing Administration, which guarantees mortgages with low down payments, are becoming so acute that some experts warn the agency might need a federal bailout.

Glenn Greenwald: A historian's account of Democrats and Bush-era war crimes

The American Propsect's Adam Serwer notes that, yesterday, Sen. Joe Lieberman successfully inserted into the Homeland Security appropriations bill an amendment -- supported by the Obama White House -- to provide an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act's mandates by authorizing the Defense Secretary to suppress long-concealed photographs of detainee abuse. Two courts had ruled -- unanimously -- that the American people have the right to see these photographs under FOIA, a 40-year-old law championed by the Democrats in the LBJ era and long considered a crowning jewel in their legislative achievements. But this Lieberman amendment, which is now likely to pass, undermines all of that and -- as EBay founder Pierre Omidyar put it today -- its central purpose is to "legalize suppression" of evidence of American war crimes.

Paul Krugman: The Uneducated American

If you had to explain America’s economic success with one word, that word would be “education.” In the 19th century, America led the way in universal basic education. Then, as other nations followed suit, the “high school revolution” of the early 20th century took us to a whole new level. And in the years after World War II, America established a commanding position in higher education.

But that was then. The rise of American education was, overwhelmingly, the rise of public education — and for the past 30 years our political scene has been dominated by the view that any and all government spending is a waste of taxpayer dollars. Education, as one of the largest components of public spending, has inevitably suffered.

Until now, the results of educational neglect have been gradual — a slow-motion erosion of America’s relative position. But things are about to get much worse, as the economic crisis — its effects exacerbated by the penny-wise, pound-foolish behavior that passes for “fiscal responsibility” in Washington — deals a severe blow to education across the board.

Medical Malpractice in the Health Care Debate: Sucking Us Back Into the "Tort Reform" Bog?

Submitted by Anne Landman on October 5, 2009 - 3:00pm.

The current debate over health insurance reform has led to renewed calls by conservatives for tort reform, which they point to as the best way to decrease the cost of medical malpractice cases. "Tort reform" refers to any changes in liability laws that place higher burdens on people injured by products or services, erect barriers to keep their grievances out of the court system and generally tilt the legal playing field in favor of big businesses. Ample information, like that put out by Public Citizen, SourceWatch and investigative reports from other news sources have demonstrated that the so-called "tort reform movement" is actually a massive, corporate-funded, fake "grassroots" campaign perpetrated by American industry to try and restrict citizens' access to the legal system for redress against harms caused by defective products and negligent practices.

Good Billions After Bad

As the Bush administration waned, the Treasury shoveled more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in tarp funds into the financial system—without restrictions, accountability, or even common sense. The authors reveal how much of it ended up in the wrong hands, doing the opposite of what was needed.

By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele

October 2009

Just inside the entrance to the U.S. Treasury, on the other side of a forbidding array of guard stations and scanners that control access to the Greek Revival building, lies one of the most beautiful interior spaces in all of Washington. Ornate bronze doors open inward to a two-story-high chamber. Chandeliers line the coffered ceiling, casting a soft glow on the marble walls and richly inlaid marble floor.

In this room, starting in 1869 and for many decades thereafter, the U.S. government conducted many of its financial transactions. Bags of gold, silver, and paper currency arrived here by horse-drawn vans and were carted upstairs to the vaults. On the busy trading floor, Treasury clerks supplied commercial banks with coins and currency, exchanged old bills for new, cashed checks, redeemed savings bonds, and took in government receipts. In those days, anyone could observe all this activity firsthand—could actually witness the government and the nation’s bankers doing business. The public space where this occurred became known as the Cash Room.

Another faux issue: Obama's 'czars' are nothing new

By William Douglas | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama isn't skirting the U.S. Constitution or abusing his authority by appointing so-called "czars," or policy coordinators, to oversee certain issues or problems, a Senate panel was told Tuesday.

Conservative talk show hosts and some mostly Republican lawmakers have accused Obama of embarking on an unprecedented czar-appointment spree in a bid to circumvent Congress' authority over top executive appointments, to dodge congressional oversight and to consolidate power in the White House.

Support Is Building for a Tax Credit to Help Hiring

By CATHERINE RAMPELL

The idea of a tax credit for companies that create new jobs, something the federal government has not tried since the 1970s, is gaining support among economists and Washington officials grappling with the highest unemployment in a generation.

The proposal has some bipartisan appeal among politicians eager both to help their unemployed constituents and to encourage small-business development. Legislators on Capitol Hill and President Obama’s economic team have been quietly researching the policy for several weeks.

“There is a lot of traction for this kind of idea,” said Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the Republican whip. “If the White House will take the lead on this, I’m fairly positive it would be welcomed in a bipartisan fashion.”

Recovering the New Deal Ideal

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, October 7, 2009

A disquieting phrase has entered our economic lexicon: "new normal." The "new normal" economy that emerges from our recovery, many economists fear, won't look like the old normal, the American economy of the past couple of decades. It will look worse.

This is not, after all, a normal recession but a recession prompted by a banking meltdown. To gauge what that means for a recovery, consider the conclusions of a recent International Monetary Fund report that looked at 88 banking crises around the world over the past four decades. It found, on average, that seven years after these crises, the economic output of the affected nations was still 10 percent below what it would have been had the crisis not happened.

Re: Obama's Email Problem

Two watchdog groups want answers on how millions of Bush-era messages vanished—and they're losing patience with the White House.

—By Nick Baumann

Wed October 7, 2009 3:49 AM PST

An old problem is back in Barack Obama's inbox: What to do about millions of missing Bush-era emails?

In March, two Washington watchdog groups agreed to suspend a lawsuit against the White House—a case the Obama administration inherited from its predecessor—that aimed to force the government to recover the emails and modernize its archiving of electronic documents. At the time, the Obama administration had indicated it was willing to work toward a settlement. But months have passed with little progress and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the National Security Archive now say they are beginning to lose patience with the White House and are considering reviving the case. At stake are records that could shed light on controversies including the lead-up to the Iraq War and the leaking of Valerie Plame Wilson's covert CIA identity.

We Interact with 100,000+ Chemicals, and the Dangers Are Barely Understood

By Monona Rossol, AlterNet
Posted on October 7, 2009, Printed on October 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143130/

Last month, the Chemical Abstract Service, an agency that registers every new chemical as it is invented or discovered, assigned a registry number to the 50 millionth chemical. It's a landmark to be sure, but not one we're likely to look back on fondly.

The Chemical Abstract Service began to register chemicals in 1956, and it took 33 years to register the first 10 million new chemicals.

They identified these chemicals primarily from research papers accumulated from worldwide sources. But the last 10 million chemicals were registered in nine months at the rate of 25 per minute!

THE ROVING EYE: Stuck in Kabul, with Saigon blues again

By Pepe Escobar

Some things never change. It was "only" eight years ago that the George W Bush administration unleashed its mini-shock and awe over Afghanistan to, in theory, smash the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Stuck inside of Kabul with the Saigon blues again, the "overseas contingency operations" of the Barack Obama administration continue to perpetrate a myth; never shall the words "Afghanistan" and "oil" be mentioned in the same sentence.

Instead, what is played to the jaded Washington galleries is the shabby spectacle of the dance of the generals - the serpent biting its own tail of the show of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, National Security Adviser retired General Jim Jones and General Stanley McChrystal, the top man in Afghanistan. Add to it extended, "analytical" corporate media reports of the "Has Obama lost his mojo?" kind; and the grandiose "Amanpour" at George Washington University collecting platitudes from the Pentagon supremo Robert Gates-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton combo.

AP Poll: Health care overhaul has a pulse

By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR and TREVOR TOMPSON, Associated Press Wed Oct 7, 12:49 pm ET

WASHINGTON – The fever has broken. The patient is out of intensive care. But if you're President Barack Obama, you can't stop pacing the waiting room. Health care overhaul is still in guarded condition.

The latest Associated Press-GfK poll has found that opposition to Obama's health care remake dropped dramatically in just a matter of weeks. Still, Americans remain divided over complex legislation that Democrats are advancing in Congress.

Conservative Majority in Supreme Court Threatens Our Politics and Most Basic Freedoms

By , Think Progress
Posted on October 6, 2009, Printed on October 6, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143100/

by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Matt Corley, Benjamin Armbruster, Ian Milhiser, and Zaid Jilani

October 5 marks the beginning of a new Supreme Court term, a session that will marked by high-profile cases that the Court's conservative majority could use to reshape the law. In its first full term together, the Roberts Court's conservative bloc immediately began cutting back on women's reproductive freedom, entrenching public school segregation, and undermining equal pay in the workforce, among other things, prompting retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to comment that she fears that some of her decisions "are being dismantled" by the current, more conservative-leaning court. "If you think you've been helpful, and then it's dismantled, you think, 'Oh, dear,'" she said. "But life goes on. It's not always positive." Yet while the conservative justices are perfectly willing to thumb their noses at precedent, they occasionally restrain themselves from politically-charged rulings likely to inspire a congressional backlash. Last term, for example, the Court pleasantly surprised the civil rights community by resisting the temptation to eviscerate two landmark prohibitions on race discrimination. This term, the Court has already agreed to hear more potentially-earthshaking cases than it has in years; the only question is how aggressive the Court will be in pushing its right-wing agenda.

APPF's Dubious Story Gets Even More Dubious

We've known since last week that the story surrounding a deal that handed an empty jail in Hardin, MT, to shadowy private security company American Private Police Force just wasn't adding up. Today, it became still more clear that APPF has a lot of explaining to do.

The demise of the dollar

In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading

By Robert Fisk

Tuesday, 6 October 2009

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

The Washington Post Needs to Come Clean on Net Neutrality

by Timothy Karr

A Washington Post blog post published Monday hits on one central reason for making Net Neutrality the law.

In "Protecting Free Speech in the Digital Age [1], " guest blogger Dawn Nunziato says that free speech on the Internet is too important to be subject to the whims of powerful phone and cable companies -- companies that have already demonstrated their willingness to block new ideas and innovations via the Web.

Nunziato is spot on. But a blog post doesn't go nearly far enough to right the wrong the Post’s editors committed the Monday before, when they printed a full-fledged editorial [2] against Net Neutrality without revealing to readers that the Washington Post Co. has an economic incentive to block online speech.

White House angry at General Stanley McChrystal speech on Afghanistan

According to sources close to the administration, Gen McChrystal shocked and angered presidential advisers with the bluntness of a speech given in London last week.

The next day he was summoned to an awkward 25-minute face-to-face meeting on board Air Force One on the tarmac in Copenhagen, where the president had arrived to tout Chicago's unsuccessful Olympic bid.

Acidic clouds nourish world's oceans

Scientists at the University of Leeds have proved that acid in the atmosphere breaks down large particles of iron found in dust into small and extremely soluble iron nanoparticles, which are more readily used by plankton.

This is an important finding because lack of iron can be a limiting factor for plankton growth in the ocean - especially in the southern oceans and parts of the eastern Pacific. Addition of such iron nanoparticles would trigger increased absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Paul Krugman: The Politics of Spite

There was what President Obama likes to call a teachable moment last week, when the International Olympic Committee rejected Chicago’s bid to be host of the 2016 Summer Games.

“Cheers erupted” at the headquarters of the conservative Weekly Standard, according to a blog post by a member of the magazine’s staff, with the headline “Obama loses! Obama loses!” Rush Limbaugh declared himself “gleeful.” “World Rejects Obama,” gloated the Drudge Report. And so on.

So what did we learn from this moment? For one thing, we learned that the modern conservative movement, which dominates the modern Republican Party, has the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old.

But more important, the episode illustrated an essential truth about the state of American politics: at this point, the guiding principle of one of our nation’s two great political parties is spite pure and simple. If Republicans think something might be good for the president, they’re against it — whether or not it’s good for America.

Here's the Skinny on Why Wal-Mart Is So Evil (and Has Made Such a Killing)

By David Moberg, In These Times
Posted on October 3, 2009, Printed on October 5, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143009/

The success of Wal-Mart is in many ways paradoxical. The world’s biggest corporation -- and one of the most technologically sophisticated -- emerged from the poor, rural backwaters of Arkansas, a state regularly at the bottom of most state achievement rankings. Increasingly global in procurement and sales, it grew from a base that was racially homogenous -- a result of the violent expulsion of African-Americans -- and suspicious of all outsiders. A company that plays on “family values” is based in a region with one of the highest divorce rates in the United States. A region of low-income families adhering to a range of anti-materialist Protestant faiths gives birth to this colossus of consumerism. And the list goes on.

But as a business, it does a lot of things right, even if the social consequences are often wrong. Now, adding valuable new analyses to a growing literature on a company both deeply loved and passionately hated, two historians offer distinctive, if overlapping, accounts of what Sam Walton hath wrought. Both books are essential reading for understanding not just Wal-Mart, but also America’s general political and economic trajectory.

We've Given Trillions to the Super Rich -- There Are Many Better Uses for Your Money

By Matt Bivens, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on October 5, 2009, Printed on October 5, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143074/

There are many possible responses to the news that we have committed more than four trillion public dollars to Wall Street.

Mine is a roar of admiration.

Four trillion dollars! Holy hell! I didn't even know that was possible!

U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

After all, the cost of World War II in inflation-adjusted dollars was $4 trillion. This bailout thing is just getting started, and already we've burned through that.

New doubt on US's Iran plant claim

By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - An Iranian assertion that construction on its second uranium-enrichment facility began only last year and further analysis of satellite photos of the site have cast fresh doubts on the Barack Obama administration's charge that the construction of the plant near the holy city of Qom involved a covert decision to violate Iran's obligations to report immediately to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on any decision to build a new facility.

At a September 25 briefing on the site, senior administration officials refused to provide any specific information to back up the claim that construction had begun before the March 2007 Iranian withdrawal from an agreement requiring that it inform the IAEA immediately of any decision to build a nuclear facility.

Rethink the Patriot Act

Let's restore constitutional safeguards, protect civil liberties

by Susan Goering

Remember the Patriot Act?

How could librarian Peter Chase ever forget. In 2005, Mr. Chase, the director of the Plainville, Conn., public library and then-vice president of a consortium of 26 Connecticut libraries, received an FBI demand for library patron records via a National Security Letter authorized under the Patriot Act. The FBI also imposed a gag order prohibiting him from speaking to anyone about the demand - including Congress, when the Patriot Act was up for reauthorization in 2005.

Now, thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union, Mr. Chase has finally won the legal battle and has torn the Bush administration's tape from his mouth. So he's speaking out, and this is what he has to say: "The government was telling Congress that it didn't use the Patriot Act against libraries and that no one's rights had been violated. I felt that I just could not be part of this fraud being foisted on our nation."

Commentary: Now's the time for Obama to just say 'no'

By Joseph L. Galloway | McClatchy Newspapers

There are times when less is more and more is the wrong answer, and right now in Afghanistan would seem to be one of those times.

There are a lot of theories and proposals flying around as President Barack Obama and his national security advisers debate what our military and civilian arms of the government can do with the eight-year old war in Afghanistan.

Wanted: Leadership on Jobs

By every meaningful measure, the weak job market deteriorated further in September. Federal stimulus spending has prevented an even worse decline. But that is cold comfort for the tens of millions of working men and women for whom conditions are bleak and getting bleaker, and for the millions more who are destined to lose their jobs — or to have their hours and compensation cut — in the months and years to come.

Congress must enact emergency unemployment benefits without delay. Equally important, the Obama administration must flesh out its commitment to ensure that economic recovery does not leave middle-class and low-income families behind.

Inside the Crisis

by Ryan Lizza
October 12, 2009

In early August, Lawrence H. Summers, President Barack Obama’s top economic adviser, accompanied Vice-President Joseph Biden aboard Air Force Two on a trip to Detroit. Michigan has a fifteen-per-cent unemployment rate, the highest in America, and Detroit has become virtually a ward of the federal government: the United States now owns ten per cent of Chrysler and sixty-one per cent of General Motors. The purpose of Biden’s trip was to announce an additional $2.4 billion in federal grants, to help jump-start the electric-car industry; more than a billion will go to battery and auto manufacturers in Michigan.

Summers, who is the director of the National Economic Council, the White House office that coordinates all economic policy in the Obama Administration, has rarely traveled outside Washington this year, and was in Detroit on a fact-finding mission. After nearly a year of debate about how much federal intervention was needed to beat back the recession—a debate that started during the end of the Presidential campaign—he was somewhat optimistic. The principal measures that Obama had taken—implementing the stimulus package, rescuing the banks, restructuring the automakers—had begun to stabilize the economy. In a speech three weeks earlier, Summers had put it this way: “We were at the brink of catastrophe at the beginning of the year, but we have walked some substantial distance back from the abyss.” It seemed like a good moment to check in on the government’s investments in Michigan.

U.S. Job Losses May Be Even Larger, Model Breaks Down

Oct. 2 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. economic slump earlier this year was so severe it short-circuited the government’s model for calculating payrolls, raising the risk that today’s jobs report may be too optimistic.

About 824,000 more jobs may be subtracted from the payroll count for the 12 months through last March when the figures are officially revised early next year, a Labor Department report showed today. The revision would be the biggest since at least 1991.

After More Job Losses, Democrats Move to Extend Benefits

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

WASHINGTON — In the wake of further job losses in September, President Obama on Saturday called the new figures “sobering” and said that he was working with his economic advisers “to explore additional options to promote job creation.”

Mr. Obama suggested that a health care overhaul would help revive the economy and create jobs. The president’s remarks, in his weekly radio and Internet address, came as the White House and Congressional Democrats considered steps to help the unemployed, including extending enhanced unemployment benefits past December, continuing a tax credit for workers who have been laid off and extending a tax credit for first-time home buyers.

The jobless numbers, released by the Labor Department on Friday, showed that the unemployment rate for September had risen to 9.8 percent from 9.7 percent and that 263,000 jobs were lost last month.

Frank Rich: The Rabbit Ragu Democrats

IN the annals of American excess, there often arrives a moment when those with too much money, too much clout and too much hubris just can’t stop themselves from tempting the fates. They throw an over-the-top party in public, or parade their wealth and power before the press, and the next thing you know their world, and sometimes ours, has crashed.

In the go-go Reagan 1980s, the junk bond king Michael Milken bedazzled investors with lavish Predators’ Balls in Beverly Hills. Sure enough, he and Wall Street would end the decade in ruin. Back East, the financier Saul Steinberg celebrated his 50th birthday in 1989 with a $1 million party in the Hamptons. “Honey, if this moment were a stock, I’d short it,” he said when toasting his wife. He would soon suffer a stroke and see his company go bankrupt.

Steinberg sold his vast New York apartment to the private equity titan Stephen Schwarzman. In February 2007, Schwarzman marked his 60th birthday with a highly visible multimillion-dollar bacchanal in the Park Avenue Armory. Though Schwarzman hasn’t suffered much since — he is tied for 50th on the new Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest Americans — his bash presaged the bust to come. He became, as James Stewart wrote in The New Yorker, “the designated villain of an era on Wall Street — an era of rapacious capitalists and heedless self-indulgence.”

Politicians beware: Oil photo exhibit opens in DC

By BRETT ZONGKER, Associated Press Writer
Writer Sat Oct 3, 11:52 am ET

WASHINGTON – Politicians, cover your eyes.

The first exhibit of 56 large-scale color landscapes from Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky chronicling the impact of oil made its debut Saturday at Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art — less than a block from the White House. The show, chronicling the world's predominant energy source, can't help carrying a political zing.

"Edward Burtynsky: Oil," opens at the privately funded museum as Congress is struggling with a climate bill that could include a "cap and trade" system to reduce greenhouse gases. Critics say it could drive up energy costs.

Iran’s nuclear threat is a lie

John Pilger

Published 01 October 2009

Obama's "showdown" with Iran has another agenda. The media have been tasked with preparing the public for endless war

In 2001, the Observer published a series of reports that claimed an "Iraqi connection" to al-Qaeda, even describing the base in Iraq where the training of terrorists took place and a facility where anthrax was being manufactured as a weapon of mass destruction. It was all false. Supplied by US intelligence and Iraqi exiles, planted stories in the British and US media helped George Bush and Tony Blair to launch an illegal invasion which caused, according to the most recent study, 1.3 million deaths.

Something similar is happening over Iran: the same syncopation of government and media "revelations", the same manufacture of a sense of crisis. "Showdown looms with Iran over secret nuclear plant", declared the Guardian on 26 September. "Showdown" is the theme. High noon. The clock ticking. Good versus evil. Add a smooth new US president who has "put paid to the Bush years". An immediate echo is the notorious Guardian front page of 22 May 2007: "Iran's secret plan for summer offensive to force US out of Iraq". Based on unsubstantiated claims by the Pentagon, the writer Simon Tisdall presented as fact an Iranian "plan" to wage war on, and defeat, US forces in Iraq by September of that year - a demonstrable falsehood for which there has been no retraction.

Better world: Top tech for a cleaner planet

There's a lot more to green technology than renewable energy. From more efficient aircraft to thread made from chicken feathers, the world is awash with ingenious ideas. So we have scoured research labs and start-ups, and made some hard choices. Here you will find our pick of the best ideas to make our planet a more energy-efficient place

Pee-n-grow

Manufacturing artificial fertiliser is a highly energy intensive process that consumes roughly 1 per cent of the world's energy supply. As odd as it sounds, using sterile, nitrogen-rich human urine instead could prevent the emission of more than 180 million tonnes of C0₂ each year. Urine collection systems with basement storage tanks have been built by the Stockholm Environmental Institute in more than 800 apartments in rural China, saving an estimated 20 tonnes of C0₂ emissions annually.

China: available now

Magnetic fridge

The two biggest consumers of electricity in the home - air conditioners and refrigerators - may soon become much more energy efficient thanks to a new method of cooling. Magnetic refrigeration subjects metal alloys to a magnetic field, causing them to cool down. Camfridge, based in Cambridge, UK, says its fridges and air conditioners will cut energy usage by around 40 per cent in comparison with conventional models.

Cambridge, UK: under development

Despite Iran progress, Obama faces a world of hard trouble

By Steven Thomma | McClatchy Newspapers

When Iran agreed Thursday to let inspectors into its previously secret nuclear plant, it appeared to be at least a small victory for the United States and the coalition trying to stop the rogue nation from getting nuclear weapons. But it was just one step on a long road with the Iranians. And it was just one spot on the globe.

Population growth is not a problem - it's among those who consume the least. So why isn't anyone targeting the very rich?

by George Monbiot

It's no coincidence that most of those who are obsessed with population growth are post-reproductive wealthy white men: it's about the only environmental issue for which they can't be blamed. The brilliant Earth systems scientist James Lovelock [1], for instance, claimed last month that "those who fail to see that population growth and climate change are two sides of the same coin are either ignorant or hiding from the truth. These two huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the other is irrational." But it's Lovelock who is being ignorant and irrational.

A paper published yesterday in the journal Environment and Urbanization [2] shows that the places where population has been growing fastest are those in which carbon dioxide has been growing most slowly, and vice versa. Between 1980 and 2005, for instance, sub-Saharan Africa produced 18.5% of the world's population growth and just 2.4% of the growth in CO₂. North America turned out only 4% of the extra people, but 14% of the extra emissions. Sixty-three percent of the world's population growth happened in places with very low emissions.

Obama pwns Bush-Cheney on Iran; First day of Talks Yields Significant Confidence-Building Steps

For 8 years, Bush-Cheney practiced what I call "belligerent Ostrichism" toward Iran. They refused to talk to Tehran. They wanted to ratchet up sanctions on it. Bush sent 2 aircraft carriers to the Gulf to menace Iran. Bush's spokesmen professed themselves afraid of Iran's unarmed little speedboats in the Gulf. Aside from issuing threats to attack and destroy Iran the way they did Iraq, Bush-Cheney had nothing else to say on the matter. During the 8 years, Iran went from being able to enrich to .2% to being able to enrich to 3.8%, and increased its stock of centrifuges significantly. Bush-Cheney gesticulated and grimaced and fainted away at the horror of it all, but they accomplished diddly-squat.

Media Matters: Right-wing media lynch mob gay-baits White House, facts be damned

October 02, 2009 9:39 pm ET

For the better part of a week, conservatives in the media have been on a witch hunt for Kevin Jennings, the director of the Department of Education's Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools. Led by Fox News, the right-wing media have claimed that 21 years ago, when Jennings was a 24-year-old teacher at Concord Academy in Massachusetts, he "cover[ed] up statutory rape" by not reporting to authorities a conversation he had with a student who told him about being involved with an "older man."

The attacks on Jennings, the latest Obama administration official in the right's crosshairs, have been disgusting, misleading, baseless, and at times pointedly anti-gay.

Walmart Tops State Assistance Rolls in Ohio

Free enterprise isn't really free enterprise when American taxpayers are subsidizing corporations.

But in Ohio, responsible employers are being undercut by irresponsible big businesses who rely on the state to make up for the wages or health care they don’t provide to their workers.

And no surprise to regular readers of this blog--Walmart is at the top of the list.

The secret world beneath Sin City

The state of Nevada has one of the highest rates of homelessness in the US.

But even though there are more than 14,000 homeless people in Las Vegas, it is easy to spend a weekend in Sin City and never see signs of a crisis.

Rolling Stone Reports that Naked Short Selling Killed Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers

Posted on 01 October 2009 by Mark Mitchell

Matt Taibbi has published a story in Rolling Stone magazine that nobody should miss. It’s not yet available on-line, so you’ll have to pick it up at the newsstands, but here’s a quick summary.

Taibbi writes:

“On Tuesday, March 11^th, 2008, somebody – nobody knows who – made one of the craziest bets Wall Street has ever seen. The mystery figure spent $1.7 million on a series of options, gambling that shares in the venerable investment bank Bear Stearns would lose more than half of their value in nine days or less. It was madness – “like buying 1.7 million lottery tickets,” according to one financial analyst.”

Bear’s stock would have to drop by more than half in a matter of days for the mystery figure to make a profit. And that is what happened.

Big Pork and Sen. Grassley: the Danes want you to know your hogs don’t need endless antibiotics

According to the meat industry, the debate over legislation pending in the House that would ban the use of sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics comes down to a simple “fact”: hog-farming on any scale without sub-therapeutic use of antibiotics is impossible. The National Pork Producers Council says so. The American Veterinary Medical Association says so. Heck, even GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa says so.

For the record, these folks also say that livestock producers don’t really use 70% of all antibiotics distributed in the US as the Union of Concerned Scientists estimates. And you know what, we have no idea if they’re right. What many people don’t realize is that antibiotic use by American livestock producers is one of the best kept secrets on the planet. The UCS had to deduce that number based on US sales of antibiotics combined with data from a country that does publish figures on antibiotics use in livestock: Canada. That’s right. No one in the US, not the government, not industry—no one—has any responsibility to tell Americans how much antibiotics is actually in their meat. We’re just to supposed to Take Industry’s Word For It that everything’s peachy.

The Truth About Jobs That No One Wants To Tell You

Unemployment will almost certainly in double-digits next year -- and may remain there for some time. And for every person who shows up as unemployed in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' household survey, you can bet there's another either too discouraged to look for work or working part time who'd rather have a full-time job or else taking home less pay than before (I'm in the last category, now that the University of California has instituted pay cuts). And there's yet another person who's more fearful that he or she will be next to lose a job.

In other words, ten percent unemployment really means twenty percent underemployment or anxious employment. All of which translates directly into late payments on mortgages, credit cards, auto and student loans, and loss of health insurance. It also means sleeplessness for tens of millions of Americans. And, of course, fewer purchases (more on this in a moment).

How to limit risk of climate catastrophe

Comprehensive analysis of the odds of climate outcomes under different policy scenarios shows significant benefits from early actions.

David L. Chandler, MIT News Office

A new analysis of climate risk, published by researchers at MIT and elsewhere, shows that even moderate carbon-reduction policies now can substantially lower the risk of future climate change. It also shows that quick, global emissions reductions would be required in order to provide a good chance of avoiding a temperature increase of more than 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level — a widely discussed target. But without prompt action, they found, extreme changes could soon become much more difficult, if not impossible, to control.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT): ACORN vs. Defense Contractors

BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

(Editor's note: The following is a pending amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to the defense appropriations bill. Here is his floor statement.)

Mr. President, this country has a $12 trillion national debt, and this year, we are running up the largest deficit in the history of our country. The taxpayers of this country want to know that the money we expend -- whether it is for defense, housing, education, or any other purpose - is spent as wisely and as cost effectively as possible. They also want to know that the corporations and institutions and individuals who receive this funding are honest and trustworthy in terms of how they expend these federal dollars.

Mr. President, several weeks ago, as you'll recall, the Senate voted to prohibit any funding going to an organization called ACORN. This decision was largely motivated by a videotape which showed employees of ACORN involved in an outrageous and absurd discussion with actors who were posing, as I understand it, as a prostitute and a pimp. Those employees, appropriately enough, were fired. As I understand it, over a period of 15 years, ACORN has received about $53 million to promote affordable housing and encourage voter registration.

BOOK REVIEW: Named and shamed

Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy by Barry Ritholtz with Aaron Task

Reviewed by Muhammad Cohen

For the past three decades, finance replaced doctor or lawyer as the smart career choice. The cleverest people gravitated to business schools and then to Wall Street, some detouring to Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom. So how did these masters of the universe create the worst global economic misery in 80 years?

It was stupidity and arrogance, pure and simple, fund manager and TheStreet.com columnist Barry Ritholtz contends in Bailout Nation, the same traits that led a previous generation of America's best and brightest to the tragedy of Vietnam (and a group of more recent, less illustrious ideologues to the debacle in Iraq). At least Camelot's villains thought they were doing good for the world. The modern bankers and traders and quants and arbs who acted so irresponsibly, almost exclusively with other people's money, were simply trying to make themselves obscenely wealthy.

Jumpin' Jack Verdi, it's a gas, gas, gas

By Pepe Escobar

BRUSSELS - Oil and natural gas prices may be relatively low right now, but don't be fooled. The new great game of the 21st century is always over energy and it's taking place on an immense chessboard called Eurasia. Its squares are defined by the networks of pipelines being laid across the oil heartlands of the planet. Call it Pipelineistan. If, in Asia, the stakes in this game are already impossibly high, the same applies to the "Euro" part of the great Eurasian landmass - the richest industrial area on the planet. Think of this as the real political thriller of our time.

The movie of the week in Brussels is: When NATO Meets Pipelineistan. Though you won't find it in any headlines, at virtually every recent summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Washington has been maneuvering to involve reluctant Europeans ever more deeply in the business of protecting Pipelineistan. This is already happening, of course, in Afghanistan, where a promised pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India, the TAPI pipeline, has not even been built. And it's about to happen at the borders of Europe, again around pipelines that have not yet been built.

Paul Krugman: Mission Not Accomplished

Stocks are up. Ben Bernanke says that the recession is over. And I sense a growing willingness among movers and shakers to declare “Mission Accomplished” when it comes to fighting the slump. It’s time, I keep hearing, to shift our focus from economic stimulus to the budget deficit.

No, it isn’t. And the complacency now setting in over the state of the economy is both foolish and dangerous.

Yes, the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration have pulled us “back from the brink” — the title of a new paper by Christina Romer, who leads the Council of Economic Advisers. She argues convincingly that expansionary policy saved us from a possible replay of the Great Depression.

Break the Banks

Why don't any of the Obama administration's financial reforms help middle-class Americans?

By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Thursday, Oct. 1, 2009, at 11:29 AM ET

---

The Obama administration, which has spent much of the past year bailing out banks and protecting the markets, has done shockingly little to help the middle class that has borne the brunt of the financial meltdown. Two acts are particularly revealing. First, the administration failed to go to the mat to give judges the power to reform mortgages in the bankruptcy context. The administration barely winced as the Senate caved to the banks on this critical issue, risking no political capital to protect one of the few reforms that could have totally transformed the mortgage crisis. As the foreclosure wave continues, and as adjustable-rate mortgages hit reset points that are going to cause havoc for millions of additional families, this failure of political leadership by the administration stands as one of the early warning signs that things were amiss.

The second act is the recent—equally difficult to understand—concession to the banks, allowing them not to be required to offer what are called "plain vanilla" mortgages and other products to consumers. These products are simpler, more understandable, less ridden with fees, and less prone to long-term risk than most of what banks try to sell consumers on a regular basis. These are the very products consumers need.

Top Things You Think You Know About Iran That Are Not True

by Informed Comment

by Juan Cole

Thursday is a fateful day for the world, as the US, other members of the United Nations Security Council, and Germany meet in Geneva with Iran [1] in a bid to resolve outstanding issues. Although Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had earlier attempted to put the nuclear issue off the bargaining table, this rhetorical flourish was a mere opening gambit and nuclear issues will certainly dominate the talks. As Henry Kissinger pointed out, these talks are just beginning and there are highly unlikely to be any breakthroughs for a very long time. Diplomacy is a marathon, not a sprint.

But on this occasion, I thought I'd take the opportunity to list some things that people tend to think they know about Iran, but for which the evidence is shaky.

An Estate Tax Victory by Any Other Name

by Chuck Collins

Sometimes you can't declare victory until the other side concedes defeat. That's what happened Monday in the decade-long struggle over the future of the federal estate tax, our nation's only levy on inherited wealth.

The coalition of corporate lobbyists and wealthy families, including the U.S Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Businesses, dropped their long standing call for complete abolition of the tax [1], shifting their lobby resources into weakening the law.

A Truly Shocking Guantánamo Story: Judge Confirms That an Innocent Man Was Tortured to Make False Confessions

by Andy Worthington

In four years of researching and writing about Guantánamo, I have become used to uncovering shocking information, but for sheer cynicism, I am struggling to think of anything that compares to the revelations contained in the unclassified ruling in the habeas corpus petition of Fouad al-Rabiah, a Kuwaiti prisoner whose release was ordered last week by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly (PDF [1]). In the ruling, to put it bluntly, it was revealed that the US government tortured an innocent man to extract false confessions and then threatened him until he obligingly repeated those lies as though they were the truth.

The Public Option At Risk

By Jacob S. Hacker

Created 10/01/2009 - 1:44pm

In my interview with Laura Flanders of GritTV, I analyze the prospects for the public option in the Senate in the wake of the Senate Finance Committee's two votes against public option proposals this week.

I'm baffled, as I said in the interview, about how Democrats can think that it is good public policy to force Americans to buy private health insurance without doing anything to make sure that the health insurance is affordable.

FACT CHECK: Loose facts in health horror story

By CALVIN WOODWARD, Associated Press Writer Calvin Woodward, Associated Press Writer Wed Sep 30, 8:09 pm ET

WASHINGTON – Shona Holmes is the Harry and Louise of this year's health care debate, only unlike the fictional folks who memorably trashed the Clinton-era health plan in advocacy ads 15 years ago, Holmes is real.

But her story? It's not quite the slam-dunk indictment of socialized medicine that's been portrayed by Republican lawmakers and their allies.

Holmes, a Canadian living under that country's single-payer system, has said flatly that her brain tumor would have killed her if she'd accepted her fate in Canada — a wait of four months for one specialist and six months for another. Instead she went to the U.S. and had successful surgery.

UT Knoxville and ORNL researchers reveal key to how bacteria clear mercury pollution

KNOXVILLE -- Mercury pollution is a persistent problem in the environment. Human activity has lead to increasingly large accumulations of the toxic chemical, especially in waterways, where fish and shellfish tend to act as sponges for the heavy metal.

It's that persistent and toxic nature that has flummoxed scientists for years in the quest to find ways to mitigate the dangers posed by the buildup of mercury in its most toxic form, methylmercury.

A new discovery by scientists at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, however, has shed new light on one of nature's best mercury fighters: bacteria.

Plain Talk: Banks too big to fail? Break ’em up

The Madison-based Center for Media and Democracy recently gave its first-ever "Golden Throne Award" to the president and CEO of the American Bankers Association, Edward Yingling.

Suffice it to say that Yingling wasn't thrilled.

The War on Language

Posted on Sep 28, 2009

By Chris Hedges

There is a scene in “Othello” when the Moor is so consumed by jealousy and rage that he loses the eloquence and poetry that make him the most articulate man in Venice. He turns to the audience, shortly before he murders Desdemona, and sputters, “Goats and monkeys!” Othello fell prey to wild self-delusion and unchecked rage, and his words became captive to hollow clichés. The debasement of language, which Shakespeare understood was a prelude to violence, is the curse of modernity. We have stopped communicating, even with ourselves. And the consequences will be as extreme as in the Shakespearean tragedy.

Those who seek to dominate our behavior first seek to dominate our speech. They seek to obscure meaning. They make war on language. And the English- and Arabic-speaking worlds are each beset with a similar assault on language. The graffiti on the mud walls of Gaza that calls for holy war or the crude rants of Islamic militants are expressed in a simplified, impoverished form of Arabic. This is not the classical language of 1,500 years of science, poetry and philosophy. It is an argot of clichés, distorted Quranic verses and slogans. This Arabic is no more comprehensible to the literate in the Arab world than the carnival barking that pollutes our airwaves is comprehensible to our literate classes. The reduction of popular discourse to banalities, exacerbated by the elite’s retreat into obscure, specialized jargon, creates internal walls that thwart real communication. This breakdown in language makes reflection and debate impossible. It transforms foreign cultures, which we lack the capacity to investigate, into reversed images of ourselves. If we represent virtue, progress and justice, as our clichés constantly assure us, then the Arabs, or the Iranians, or anyone else we deem hostile, represent evil, backwardness and injustice. An impoverished language solidifies a binary world and renders us children with weapons.

Exposing How the Government Lied about National Security Letters and the Patriot Act

Last week, I was honored to be invited to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Patriot Act, a new endeavor for the Center for Media and Democracy, even though CMD has covered national security-related issues in its books and on SourceWatch.

One of the reasons I was so pleased to be able to join CMD is because in Washington, DC, I saw first-hand how propaganda and selective disclosures were used to influence and distort public opinion. In my testimony, I highlighted examples from the Patriot Act debate in 2005 where key information was hidden while the bill for reauthorization was being publicly debated, and did not come out until after the bill had passed.

ACORN Foresaw the Foreclosure Crisis in 2001

The grassroots group helped Oakland pass a tough anti-predatory lending law that would have halted the housing crisis before it started. Then subprime lenders started making campaign contributions in Sacramento.

By Robert Gammon

September 29, 2009

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now has been a favorite whipping boy of Fox News for a long time. And it's no secret that the right-wing attacks have worked. A few weeks ago, Congress voted to defund the group after a pair of young Republican operatives went undercover and caught ACORN workers engaged in fraud. And although the group immediately fired the workers, Democrats have sought to distance themselves ever since. But before they completely turn their backs on ACORN, they should remember that while the group has made mistakes over the years, it also was way out in front of the foreclosure crisis. In fact, if politicians had listened, the global financial meltdown might never have happened.

Back in the late 1990s, ACORN was acutely aware of the grave dangers posed by subprime mortgage lending because of the group's close work with low-income property owners. ACORN officials were witnessing first-hand how unscrupulous lenders were enticing people to buy homes they couldn't afford and advising long-time homeowners to strip out all of the equity in their homes. The group then saw those very same people lose everything when their subprime mortgages kicked in and low-income neighborhoods were devastated.

UPDATE: The 'Mysterious' Firm Policing Montana & hired to fill its empty jail is BLACKWATER

Posted by debbierlus in General Discussion
Wed Sep 30th 2009, 08:43 PM

I posted earlier that the following article with links from Rawstory & an AP Story:

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/...

Unknown private security company has been hired to fill the empty 27 million dollar jail. They showed up and started to police small Montana town....(go to the above link for full story)...

Well, a little sleuthing and a nod and cough/cough from Torn_Scorned_Ignored (thank you!)pointed to the formerly unknown company's (American Police Force) webpage:

APF head Hilton has history of legal trouble

Michael Hilton of American Police Force arrived in Hardin with promises of Mercedes police cars and expertise in operating prisons. He delivered the cars last week, but may have learned about prisons following a 1993 conviction for grand theft.

Public records from police and state and federal courts in California show that Michael Anthony Hilton, using that name and more than a dozen aliases over several years, is cited in multiple criminal, civil and bankruptcy cases, and was sentenced in 1993 to two years in state prison in California.