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Archive: POLITICS

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Chris Hedges: Democracy in America is a Useful Fiction

some related notes from James Fallows of The Atlantic

Sovereign Default and Self Delusions

When psychologists evaluate human behavior, one of the most prevalent observations regarding any activity is the all too often flawed basis of perceived versus realistic outcomes that dictates our every action. As imperfect creatures, we tend to construct theories that conform with our worldview, which are subsequently reinforced by our confidence (or lack thereof) in the future. This is true in any discipline: finance, politics, gambling, mating, etc. There is hardly a better example of this than the very basis of modern economic theory where assumptions about the validity of fiat currencies determine the actions of central banks, which in turn spill over into every aspect of modern society. Yet what if the very basis of core assumptions is wrong? What if every activity exhibited by humans in the post gold-standard world has a flawed assumption at its core? Austrian economists have, of course, claimed this for ages, usually seeing their efforts conclude with a dead-end as the attempt to change the status quo hits the brick wall of quadrillions of (arguably worthless) pieces of paper which dictate the status quo. However, with the recent turn for the worse, courtesy of sovereign bail outs (as confused as they may be) could the day of reckoning be fast approaching? With each passing the day an affirmative answer seems closer at hand. Today SocGen's Dylan Grice shares his perspectives on popular delusions, and why these may soon be coming to an abrupt end.

Dylan begins:

Behavioural psychology applies to central bankers, regulators and politicians as much as it does to investors. In promising to ‘fiscally retrench tomorrow’, finance ministers are exhibiting the behavioural phenomenon of overconfidence in their future self-control. The bitter fiscal medicine required to stabilise debt levels won’t become more palatable today relative to tomorrow until the bond market makes it so. It can only do this through higher yields. Thus, Ireland and perhaps now Greece lead the way. For the Japanese it’s too late.

Why should behavioural psychology be seen as something applying only to investors? "Behavioural" finance is a well defined sub-discipline in its own right. But where is behavioural politics, behavioural central banking, or "behavioural" regulation? Remember the Fed policy statements around the end of the 1990s? The ones that kept referring to the "technology-enhanced" rate of GDP growth? Wasn't this herding around a bad idea the very same herding then fuelling the NASDAQ bubble?

Nowhere is self delusion more prevalent that in the workings of the Federal Reserve duo of Greenspan and Bernanke. The issue is that any weakness, or any affirmation of faulty policy by the head money printer, will immediately be seen as weakness that could destabilize the reserve currency format. For a monetary system based on flawed assumptions that would be the beginning of the end.

As the housing bubble inflated, Bernanke in a quite staggering display of logical sloppiness, concluded that the risk of a housing collapse in the future was small because there had never been one in the past. Weren't they then guilty of "framing" their analysis in a way guaranteed to preclude an uncomfortable conclusion? If you don't expect to see something, you're less likely to see it. Similarly cringe worthy logic was used when sub-prime rolled over, and Bernanke concluded that there was no risk of contagion to the rest of the economy because... er... there had been no contagion to the rest of the economy yet... wasn't this textbook "recency bias" whereby the importance of recent events is over-weighted?

It probably was, and it probably demonstrates that central bankers are as prone to be as systematically silly as the rest of us. Indeed, just last year a study by yet more of Bernanke's "best and brightest" concluded that “monetary policy was not a primary factor in the housing bubble”. I don't want to pretend I'm any kind of behavioural expert, but isn't this the well documented "attribution bias" by which people attribute positive outcomes to themselves, but negative ones to others?

So with nobody willing to take blame for the massive errors of the past 3 decades, and what's worse, nobody attempting to place the blame, we happily plough along as if nothing has changed.

much more from Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com

The Last Station: Surging Into the Savage Past in Afghanistan

The current Nobel Peace laureate is continuing his noble and inspiring work of war this week in the latest PR blitz in Afghanistan: "Operation Moshtarak," the much-ballyhooed, extravagantly telegraphed "attack" on the city of Marja. Is it even worth discussing this monstrous sham? The perpetrators of the attack know full well that there will be no "battle." Even the American commanders cannot be so sealed in their arrogant ignorance that they do not know their insurgent opponents will do what every guerrilla army does when facing concentrations of conventional military force: disperse into the countryside, and into the urban populace, biding their time until the occupiers draw down their forces -- and in the meantime launching small ambushes with sniper fire and roadside bombs aimed at the sitting-duck cannon fodder placed in harm's way by their publicity-driven commanders.

And yet, the Western media has fully bought into the hackneyed, transparently false narrative of "the largest military operation of its kind since the American-backed war began eight years ago," with a plucky band of Marines and their faithful Afghan allies facing down "hundreds" of hardened fighters in the "largest Taliban sanctuary inside Afghanistan." The embedded media tracked the countdown to the attack as if they were hunkered down in the landing craft on their way to Omaha Beach. Except, of course, when one is genuinely planning an actual major attack on a strong, entrenched enemy -- as at Omaha Beach -- one does not normally advertise it around the clock for weeks on end beforehand.

If, however, one is attempting to galvanize public support for a long, grinding, bloody war of domination and occupation that has no discernible purpose (none that can be stated in public, anyway), why then, a nice set-piece "battle" which will end in a guaranteed, low-cost "victory" is just the ticket. It will demonstrate that the "new and improved" strategy of your "new and improved" president is "working," and that we are "winning" -- so we can't quit now!

This is of course the same message conveyed many years -- and many thousands of lives -- ago by the fall of Kabul, the "conquest" of Kandahar, and other great triumphs that "cleaned out" the various "largest Taliban sanctuar[ies] inside Afghanistan." But as any ad man can tell you, a commercial brand needs to be refreshed periodically in order to keep pulling in the profits. And the Afghan War brand has been a veritable bonanza, a cornucopia of contracts, corruption, profiteering and political pull for all of the interested parties involved: the various militaries and security apparats (and their contractors), the political elites, the many insurgent factions (loosely and falsely given the single rubric "Taliban"), the warlords, the druglords, organized crime, violent religious extremists -- in short, all those who traffic in hate, death, conflict and fear.

Or as "retired American military officer working in security in Afghanistan" put it to Nir Rosen in Mother Jones:

"Every time our boys face them, we win," he told me grimly. "We're winning every day. Are we going to keep winning for 20 years?"

Read the rest of Chris Floyd's piece at his Empire Burlesque

The U.S. Endangers the World Further

Osama Bin Laden's favourite son, Omar, recently abandoned his father's cave in favor of spending his time dancing and drooling in the nightclubs of Damascus. The tang of freedom almost always trumps Islamist fanaticism in the end: three million people abandoned the Puritan hell of Taliban Afghanistan for freer countries, while only a few thousand faith-addled fanatics ever traveled the other way. Osama's vision can't even inspire his own kids. But Omar Bin Laden says his father is banking on one thing to shore up his flailing, failing cause -- and we are giving it to him.

The day George W. Bush was elected, Omar says, "my father was so happy. This is the kind of president he needs -- one who will attack and spend money and break [his own] country." Osama wanted the US and Europe to make his story about the world ring true in every mosque and every mountain-top and every souq. He said our countries were bent on looting Muslim countries of their resources, and any talk of civil liberties or democracy was a hypocritical facade. The jihadis I have interviewed -- from London to Gaza to Syria -- said their ranks swelled with each new whiff of Bushism as more and more were persuaded. It was like trying to extinguish fire with a blowtorch.

The revelations this week about how the CIA and British authorities handed over a suspected jihadi to torturers in Pakistan may sound at first glance like a hangover from the Bush years. Barack Obama was elected, in part, to drag us out of this trap -- but in practice he is dragging us further in. He is escalating the war in Afghanistan, and has taken the war to another Muslim country. The CIA and hired mercenaries are now operating on Obama's orders inside Pakistan, where they are sending unmanned drones to drop bombs and sending secret agents to snatch suspects. The casualties are overwhelmingly civilians. We may not have noticed, but the Muslim world has: check out al-Jazeera any night.

more from Johann Hari in The Independent (U.K.)

Henry Kissinger, Master of Treachery

It is amazing how Henry Kissinger has been able to retain his aura of invincible genius in international relations, continuing to counsel presidents, foreign governments and major global businesses, while occasionally writing lofty Op Ed pieces advising the U.S. on what it should or should not be doing next. This mind you, despite Kissinger’s own history of monumental cynicism and duplicity when he was guiding foreign policy for President’s Nixon and Ford. Indeed, it’s a tribute to the ability of mainstream American media to forgive and forget.

The latest example is an Op Ed piece Kissinger just wrote for the New York Times warning American leaders that they are no longer giving Iraq the attention it deserves.

The fact is, however, when Kissinger was in charge of U.S. policy for Iraq, the results for its people, particularly the Kurds, were disastrous. I wrote about it in my book "Web of Deceit-the History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush."

Over the decades, the Kurds quixotic struggle for some form of independence doomed them to a seemingly endless cycle of rebellion followed by incredibly vicious repression. Those uprisings were usually encouraged by enemies of Iraq’s rulers who made use of the Kurds to destabilize the regime in Baghdad. It was a ruthless, deceitful process, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of Kurds being slaughtered and displaced over the years. And it was an ideal playing field for Kissinger.

For years, the Shah of Iran had been secretly supporting the Iraqi Kurds to put pressure on Baghdad. So were the Israelis, who hoped to distract Iraq’s increasingly virulent leader from joining an Arab attack on the Jewish state. In 1972, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, motivated by fear that Iraq was becoming too cozy with the Soviet Union, agreed to a request from the Shah to help back the Kurds.

For the sake of deniability, the U.S. supplied the Kurds with Soviet arms seized in Vietnam, while Israel provided Soviet weapons that it had captured from the Arabs. According to the Washington Post’s Jon Randal, the clandestine operation was kept secret even from the U.S. State Department, which had argued against any such support. The Kurd’s news friends, however, did not want their protégées to win their struggle. An independent Kurdish state would be much too disruptive for the region, they felt. Their support was carefully doled out—enough to keep the revolt going, but not enough to take it to victory.

The Kurdish leader, Mustafa Barzani, was hard-headed enough to understand his people were being used by Iran, but not worldly enough to comprehend that his American backers could be equally duplicitous. “We do not trust the Shah,” Barzani told reporter Randal in 1973. “I trust America. America is too great a power to betray a small people like the Kurds.”

It was to be a fatal error of judgment.

read the rest of Barry Lando's piece, especially for the quote at the end

Kidnapped by the State

What do you do if a young man who was a student in your class is thrown in prison on a terrorism charge?

Jeanne Theoharis teaches Political Science at Brooklyn College. In June 2006, when British authorities detained 29-year-old Syed Fahad Hashmi at Heathrow Airport, she remembered the youth from her class several years ago. Back in 2002, in the days following the 11 September attacks, Hashmi had been a student in Professor Theoharis’s class on race. He was articulate and very critical of the ways in which the civil rights of US citizens, especially Muslims, had been curtailed by the Bush Administration.

When Theoharis heard that Hashmi had been arrested by the British police because there was a warrant out for him in the US, she was struck by the irony of it all. A part of her former student’s thesis had been about the government’s surveillance and harassment of four or five Muslim groups in the US. Now, he was himself behind bars on suspicion of having aided and abetted terrorism. Less than a year later, when Hashmi was extradited to the US, the FBI revealed that the detainee had supplied ‘military gear’ to people who had delivered these materials to Al-Qaida members in Pakistan. Then, Hashmi’s lawyer found out that the items being labelled as ‘military gear’ were socks and rainproof ponchos. The rest of the details of the indictment remain shrouded in mystery. The FBI has revealed nothing more.

more from Amitava Kumar at openthemagazine.com

Power Politics (as Usual)

BEIRUT -- This has been a revealing but worrying few days for the exercise of power by some of the world's strongest countries. China showed the world that it could be just as silly as other powers in trying to use economic sanctions as punitive diplomatic tools. Hilary Clinton showed that a woman can be just as idiotic as a man when articulating foreign policy principles that also relate to the use of sanctions to change the behavior of other countries. The worst moment of the week, however, was the sight of the snake-like Tony Blair once again showing us how otherwise intelligent, articulate leaders can also comfortably splash around in the underbrush of human deceit and political arrogance.

These three incidents remind us that our world usually operates on the basis of power politics, not on the basis of law or morality. The strong use their power to pursue policies that they believe will serve their national interests. If in the process they also indulge in hypocrisy, illusion, and crass, self-interested double standards, well that is too bad for the rest of the world. It is useful to note these things when they occur, if only to keep seeking more effective ways of dealing with the world's problems than through military force and diplomatic arm-twisting.

The Chinese and American use of economic sanctions are fascinating because they are both so transparently destined to fail, yet they are attempted nevertheless. The United States signaled in the past week that it was moving away from its policy of "diplomatic engagement" with Iran to resolve issues related to Iran's nuclear industry, and instead would now work with other powers to apply greater sanctions on Iran. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that, "As we move away from the engagement track that has not produced the result that some had hoped for, and move forward the sanctions and pressure track, China will be under a lot of pressure to recognize the destabilizing impact that a nuclear-armed Iran would have in the Gulf from which they receive a significant percent of its oil supplies."

This intriguing American policy seems aimed at demonstrating primarily that Washington can bundle a series of distinct foreign policy failures into a single grand show of serial incompetence. The attempt to pressure both Iran and China through the use of punitive sanctions and threats is unlikely to work now because it has not worked in the past. These two countries, in particular, are unlikely to submit to American threats because they define their foreign policy partly on the basis of standing up to the United States and its allies, defying and disregarding American threats, and countering every American move with a gesture of their own that tries to show Washington the futility of its ways. Why the Obama administration would resort to such simple-minded and ineffective gestures remains slightly mysterious.

more from Rami G. Khouri at Agence Global

Mr. Fish

Your FDA in Action

While researchers and scientists investigate the cause of our diabetes, obesity, asthma and ADHD epidemics, they should ask why the FDA approved a livestock drug banned in 160 nations and responsible for hyperactivity, muscle breakdown and 10 percent mortality in pigs, according to angry farmers who phoned the manufacturer.

The beta agonist ractopamine, a repartitioning agent that increases protein synthesis, was recruited for livestock use when researchers found the drug, used in asthma, made mice more muscular says Beef magazine.

But unlike the growth promoting antibiotics and hormones used in livestock which are withdrawn as the animal nears slaughter, ractopamine is started as the animal nears slaughter.

As much as twenty percent of Paylean, given to pigs for their last 28 days, Optaflexx, given to cattle their last 28 to 42 days and Tomax, given to turkeys their last 7 to 14 days, remains in consumer meat says author and well known veterinarian Michael W. Fox.

Though banned in Europe, Taiwan and China--more than 1,700 people were "poisoned" from eating Paylean-fed pigs since 1998 says the Sichuan Pork Trade Chamber of Commerce-- ractopamine is used in 45 percent of US pigs and 30 percent of ration-fed cattle says Elanco Animal Health which manufactures all three products.

How does a drug marked, "Not for use in humans. Individuals with cardiovascular disease should exercise special caution to avoid exposure. Use protective clothing, impervious gloves, protective eye wear, and a NIOSH-approved dust mask" become "safe" in human food? With no washout period?

The same way Elanco's other two blockbusters, Stilbosol (diethylstilbestrol or DES), now withdrawn, and Posilac or bovine growth hormone (rBST), bought from Monsanto in 2008, became part of the nation's food supply: shameless corporate lobbying. A third of meetings on the Food Safety and Inspection Service's public calendar in January 2009 were with Elanco, a division of Eli Lilly--or about ractopamine.

In fact, in 2002, three years after Paylean's approval, the FDA's
Center for Veterinary Medicine's Office of Surveillance and Compliance accused Elanco of withholding information about "safety and effectiveness" and "adverse animal drug experiences" upon which ractopamine was approved, in a 14-page warning letter.

more from Martha Rosenberg at Counterpunch

What a Shame...

to have lost a man of this quality for such a trivial offense. Watch the full interview:

Elliot Spitzer interview

Hitting the brick wall in Afghanistan

The United States and its allies appear to be preparing for a significant U-turn in their Afghan policy. When President Obama enunciated his new policy in his West Point speech in November 2009, he announced a big increase in US and ISAF troops there. Their mission would be to turn the war around and hand it over to an Afghan government and army able to continue it in order to achieve full control of their country.

Within a couple of months this policy has hit the ‘brick wall’ of harsh reality, and all the rosy assumptions upon which it was based (many of them deliberately manufactured by the war party) lie in tatters.

The first reality-check was provided by the Afghan elections and their aftermath. They proved that there was no chance of a legitimate, reasonably effective Afghan government emerging to which a handover could take place in two years, as the policy envisaged. This realisation probably led to another, and harder, look at the wildly unrealistic assumptions relating to the setting up of a strong Afghan military able to take over security in the country from foreign troops at the same time. The election left the political strategy of the new policy in tatters.

read the rest of FB Ali's piece at Pat Lang's blog

Politics and Agribusiness

On some bureaucrat’s desk in President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), sits a document that has the power to either destroy the nation’s 1,800 family-operated organic dairy farms or come to their rescue.

In the early 2000s, virtually all of the nation’s organic dairy farmers—not to mention the millions of consumers willing to pay a premium for organic products—agreed that milk certified as organic by the United States Department of Agriculture had to come from cows that had access to pasture.

As government regulations go, it sounds pretty straightforward: room to roam, clean air to breathe, fresh grass to eat. And that was the general consensus on what the National Organic Standards required.

But beginning in the mid-2000s, at about the time when it became evident that the green “USDA Organic” label translated into bigger profits, huge Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) with herds of up to 10,000 cows located in western states got into the organic milk business.

There was one obvious problem. How do you provide pasture for thousands of hungry cows in a semi-arid landscape that would, at best, produce enough feed for a few dozen animals?

The answer, according to Mark Kastel, co-founder of the Cornucopia Institute, an advocacy group for organic family farms based in Wisconsin, is that the corporations that owned the CAFO’s did everything they could to muddy the definition of “access to pasture.”

In some cases, a narrow, grassless strip outside the vast barns in which the animals were kept was considered “pasture” because some hay had been spread there. National Organic Standard Board (NOSB) allowances for cows and their very young calves to be kept indoors for a short period after birth were twisted to include all milking cows being kept inside 24/7 for 310 days a year.

more from Barry Eastbrook at politics of the plate

The Illegal Destruction of Iraq

Glenn Greenwald, far and away the most important journalist of our time, crystalizes the issue:

British political news has been consumed for the last several weeks by a formal inquiry into the illegality and deceit behind Tony Blair's decision to join the U.S. in invading Iraq. Today, Blair himself is publicly testifying before the investigative commission and is being grilled about numerous false claims he made in the run-up to the war, not only about Iraqi weapons programs (his taxi-cab-derived "45-minutes-to-launch!!" warning) and Saddam's ties to Al Qaeda, but also about secret commitments he made to join the U.S. at a time when he and Bush were still pretending that they were undecided and awaiting the outcome of the U.N. negotiations and the inspection process.

A major focus of the investigation is the illegality of the war. Some of the most embarrassing details that have emerged concern the conclusions by Blair's own legal advisers that the invasion of Iraq would be illegal without U.N. approval. The top British legal officer had concluded that the war would be illegal, only to change his mind under substantial pressure shortly before the invasion. Several weeks ago, a formal investigation in the Netherlands -- whose government had supported the invasion -- produced the first official adjudication of the legality of the war, and found it illegal, with "no basis in international law."

As Digby notes, all of this stands in stark and shameful contrast to the U.S., which pointedly refuses to "look back" or concern itself with whether it waged an illegal (and horribly destructive) war. The British inquiry has been widely criticized for being too passive and deferential and lacking any credible threat of accountability (other than disclosure of facts). Still, one can barely even imagine George Bush and Dick Cheney being hauled before an investigative body and forced, under oath, to testify publicly about what they did as a means of determining the legality or illegality of that war. Doing that would fundamentally conflict with two leading principles in American political life: (1) our highest political leaders must never be accountable for actions they take while in power; and (2) whether something they do is "illegal" -- especially the starting of wars -- is utterly irrelevant. Instead of formally investigating whether they broke the law, we treat them like elder statesmen who deserve a life of luxury and media reverence. Tony Blair -- who had no discernible expertise or experience in banking -- himself is showered with riches for a "part-time" job by JP Morgan and by other institutions who benefited substantially from his acts in office.

All of this underscores the fact that -- despite how much public debate it has received -- we still childishly, and with moral blindness, refuse to come to terms with the true scope of our wrongdoing when it comes to the Iraq War. Several hundred thousand Iraqis -- at least -- were killed as a result of this war, with another 4 million being turned into refugees. As the Iraqi journalist and professor Ali Fadhil put it in 2008, on the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion: "basically, my assessment is we have a whole nation called Iraq, now it's wiped out." Contrary to self-justifying conventional wisdom, the alleged post-surge improvement in Iraqi civil society has not remotely mitigated the destruction spawned by the invasion. As The Economist detailed in September, 2009, the U.S.-supported Maliki government is relying increasingly on Saddam-era tactics of torture, censorship, lawless sectarian militias, and brutal punishment of dissent: "Human-rights violations are becoming more common. In private many Iraqis, especially educated ones, are asking if their country may go back to being a police state."

The invasion of Iraq was unquestionably one of the greatest crimes of the last several decades. Imagine what future historians will say about it -- a nakedly aggressive war launched under the falsest of pretenses, in brazen violation of every relevant precept of law, which destroyed an entire country, killed huge numbers of innocent people, and devastated the entire population. Have we even remotely treated it as what it is? We're willing to concede it was a "mistake" -- a good-natured and completely understandable lapse of judgment -- but only the shrill and unhinged call it a crime. As always, it's worth recalling that Robert Jackson, the lead prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, insisted in his Closing Argument against the Nazi war criminals that "the central crime in this pattern of crimes" was not genocide or mass deportation or concentration camps; rather, "the kingpin which holds them all together, is the plot for aggressive wars." History teaches that aggressive war is the greatest and most dangerous of all crimes -- as it enables even worse acts of inhumanity -- and illegal, aggressive war is precisely what we did in Iraq, to great devastation.

more from Marc Lynch at Foreign Policy

Wisconsin Pension Funds and the Corporate Bond Rush

Pension plans everywhere are in serious trouble. Pension plans in Wisconsin are about to get in still deeper trouble using leverage.

[snip]

Anyone looking at those charts should be asking "Where's the value?" Instead pension plans are asking "How do I get in with leverage?"

There is no value here and that is precisely why pensions plans have to leverage up to get the unrealistic returns they expect.

Corporate bonds, municipal bonds, credit bonds, high yield bonds are all fully valued and then some.

Bubbles form when the Fed floods the world with liquidity. We have seen bubbles in technology, in housing, in commercial real estate, in credit, in equities, and now arguably bonds.

No Lesson Ever Learned

That state pension plans are leveraging up is a huge warning sign in and of itself. That they are leveraging up in the latest "hot thing" makes it all the more likely a corporate bond disaster is just around the corner.

Thus, it's time to be taking profits in corporate bonds and equities, not leveraging into them. If corporate bonds collapse, I can all but guarantee equities go down hard right along with them.

review the frightening details at Mike Shedlock's blog

The Supreme Court Ruling: A different take

Of course, I-- like many social critics-- am dismayed at the Supreme Court ruling striking down elements of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act, and essentially giving corporations carte blanche to pay for attack videos against candidates they do not like and to release them late in a campaign.

But some of the hand-wringing about the decision seems to me excessive for a number of reasons. Here I am going to put on my hat as a blogger and as someone who has been deeply involved in the rise of internet communication, if in the narrow corner of foreign policy blogging.

The first thing to say is that it is not as if corporate interests were not already deeply involved in the electoral process. For instance, it has come out that five insurance companies funneled big money into attack ads against insurance reform. How? They just gave it to the Chamber of Commerce, which shares their view that 37 million Americans shouldn't get sick and if they do they should die quickly (as Rep. Alan Grayson correctly put it). Since there are so many already-existing work-arounds, the SCOTUS decision is less of a change than it might seem.

Moreover, the difference between Goldman, Sachs making a video and buying time for it on television, and a group of middle managers at firms like Goldman, Sachs forming a PAC and doing the same thing is not entirely clear to me. Because the top one percent of individuals in the US owns over 40% of the country's privately held wealth and takes home 20% of its income every year, those roughly 1.3 million persons already had lots of means of influencing campaigns. Videos are not that expensive to make and even television time is inexpensive for executives in a firm that gives out $40 billion in Christmas bonuses. In other words, given the extreme maldistribution of wealth in the US, the corporate sector already had things stacked in its favor through wealthy persons employed by corporations. Jeffrey Toobin on CNN pointed out that in a congressional race, a million dollars is a lot of money, but would be chump change for a corporation. But it would be chump change for a lot of corporate executives, too.

Then, corporations don't all agree with each other. We still have Net Neutrality in part because Google lobbied for it even as some of the telecoms lobbied against it. Some industries have an interest in polluting, others have an interest in a clean environment. They will fight each other with their political infomercials. But I think most Americans like their drinking water sludge-free, so over time the pro-pollution commercials will let us say lose a certain persuasiveness.

I agree that the danger is greatest where, e.g., war industries have an interest in an Afghanistan surge whereas few other corporate sectors care about it one way or another. But the public can still after all vote on whether it likes continued war.

Under the ruling as I understand it, corporations cannot give more money than before directly to candidates. They can just produce commercials, whether in favor of a candidate or attacking her opponent.

But there is a real question about the influence of commercials even in traditional television. At most, some experts estimate that only 19% of traditional advertising shows a return on investment. The conclusion is that great numbers of insecure corporations are wasting billions on those ads. Lots of wealthy people have entered politics and spent a great deal of their own money on commercials, and lost. That large numbers of voters are going to be swayed by infomercials flies in the face of what we know about how few people actually buy those fancy Japanese knife sets advertised at 3 am.

And then there is the question of the future of the commercial.

read the rest of Juan Cole's thought-provoking take on the recent ruling

Wall Street's Power Grab

You almost could hear the bankers heave a sigh of relief when Haiti’s earthquake knocked the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission hearings off the front pages and evening news broadcasts last week. At stake is Wall Street’s power grab seeking to centralize policy control firmly in its own hands by neutralizing the government’s regulatory agencies.

The first day – Wednesday, January 15 – went innocuously enough. Four emperors of finance were called on to voice ceremonial platitudes and pro forma apologies without explaining what they might be apologizing for. Typical was the statement by Goldman Sachs chairman Lloyd C. Blankfein: “Whatever we did, it didn’t work out well. We regret the consequence that people have lost money.”

Their strategy certainly made money for themselves – and they made it off those for whom the financial crisis “didn’t work out well,” whose bad bets ended up paying Wall Street’s bonuses. So when Paul Krugman poked fun at the four leading “Bankers without a clue” in his New York Times kcolumn, he was lending credence to their pretense at innocent gullibility.

Recipients of such enormous bonuses cannot be deemed all that clueless. They blamed the problem on natural cycles – what Mr. Blankfein called a “100-year storm.” Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase trivialized the crisis as a normal and even unsurprising event that “happens every five to seven years,” as if the crash is just another business cycle downturn, not aggravated by any systemic financial flaws. If anything, Wall Street accuses liberal government planners of being too nice to poor people, by providing cheap mortgage credit to the uninitiated who could not quite handle the responsibility.

But the Wall Street executives were careful not to blame the government. This was not just an attempt to avoid antagonizing the Congressional panel. The last thing Wall Street wants is for the government to change its behavior.

The Wall Street boys are playing possum. Why should we expect them to explain their strategy to us?

To understand their game plan, the Commissioners had to wait for the second day of the hearings, when Sheila Bair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) spelled it out. Their first order of business is to make sure that the Federal Reserve Board is designated the sole financial regulator, knocking out any more activist regulators – above all the proposed Consumer Financial Products Agency that Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren has helped design. Wall Street also is seeking to avert any thought of restoring the Glass-Steagall Act in an attempt to protect the economy from having merged retail commercial banking with wholesale investment banking, insurance, real estate brokerage and kindred arms of high finance.

Perception – and exposure – of this strategy is what made the second day’s hearing (on Thursday) so important. From Ms. Bair down to state officials, these administrators explained that the problem was structural. They blamed government and the financial sector’s short-run time frame. And they complained that neither the Federal Reserve nor the rest of the current Washington administration seemed very interested in cleaning up the problem.

more from Michael Hudson at Counterpoint.com

A Brutal System Stripped Bare

If you really want to know the truth about the sickening wretches who run our country, if you want to know exactly what they will commit, what they will command, what they will countenance and conceal, all the way to the very top of the blood-greased pole of the Oval Office, then read every word of this astounding piece by Scott Horton in the new edition of Harper's: "The Guantanomo 'Suicides.'"

This is a full-length article which the magazine is making available for free on its website. In it, Horton unfolds the story of three men, almost certainly innocent, who were almost certainly murdered by American "interrogators" at a secret site in the American concentration camp in Guantanomo Bay, Cuba, on the night of June 9, 2006 -- an atrocity that set off a long, complex chain of deceit that continues to this day.

These killings were not only declared "suicides" by Washington; it was even claimed that the deaths were deliberate acts of "asymmetrical warfare" carried out by hardened terrorists -- "fanatics like the Nazis, Hitlerites, or the Ku Klux Klan, the people they tried at Nuremberg," as a Pentagon mouthpiece told the press. Yet as Horton notes, all three men had been put on "a list of prisoners to be sent home." One of them was only a few weeks away from his formal release. There was no credible evidence of terrorist connections against any of the men, two of whom had been sold into captivity by bounty hunters.

Yet these prisoners did have one black mark against them. They had been taking part in hunger strikes to protest conditions in the concentration camp. They were troublemakers, loudmouths. They wouldn't break. They had lawyers.

And so, according to a mass of credible evidence -- from heavily redacted official reports pieced together by the students and faculty at the law school of Seton Hall University, and from the courageous testimony of soldiers who had been on duty that night -- these three men, Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, were taken to a "black site" at Gitmo known as "Camp No." All regular military personnel were forbidden to enter the site, or even acknowledge its existence -- although some soldiers later testified to hearing screams from behind Camp No's concertina wire. Eyewitnesses say that three prisoners were taken, one by one, in a white van to Camp No on the night of June 9; and later, just before the alarm went up about the "suicides," the van returned and unloaded a mysterious cargo.

As Horton notes, the official accounts of the "suicides" are risible:

According to the NCIS, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated.

[Yes, that's the same NCIS that has its noble adventures in the pursuit of truth and justice celebrated each week in a top-rated TV show.]

What really happened to the men? One clue comes from yet another hunger striker, Shaker Aamer, who was "interrogated" that same night, but managed to survive:

He described the events in detail to his lawyer, Zachary Katznelson, who was permitted to speak to him several weeks later. Katznelson recorded every detail of Aamer’s account and filed an affidavit with the federal district court in Washington, setting it out:

On June 9th, 2006, [Aamer] was beaten for two and a half hours straight. Seven naval military police participated in his beating. Mr. Aamer stated he had refused to provide a retina scan and fingerprints. He reported to me that he was strapped to a chair, fully restrained at the head, arms and legs. The MPs inflicted so much pain, Mr. Aamer said he thought he was going to die. The MPs pressed on pressure points all over his body: his temples, just under his jawline, in the hollow beneath his ears. They choked him. They bent his nose repeatedly so hard to the side he thought it would break. They pinched his thighs and feet constantly. They gouged his eyes. They held his eyes open and shined a mag-lite in them for minutes on end, generating intense heat. They bent his fingers until he screamed. When he screamed, they cut off his airway, then put a mask on him so he could not cry out.

The treatment Aamer describes is noteworthy because it produces excruciating pain without leaving lasting marks. Still, the fact that Aamer had his airway cut off and a mask put over his face “so he could not cry out” is alarming. This is the same technique that appears to have been used on the three deceased prisoners.

Aamer, who wife is British, continues to be held in the concentration camp, despite the UK government's request for his release, and despite the fact that there is "no suggestion that the Americans intend to charge him before a military commission, or in a federal criminal court, [or] indeed, [that] they have [any] meaningful evidence linking him to any crime." The only dangerous thing about Aamer is what he knows, and what he can tell.

more from Chris Floyd (Horton's piece is linked above)

UPDATE: This is from an interview of Horton on the Keith Olbermann show Countdown:

Now four members of the Military Intelligence unit assigned to guard Camp Delta, including a decorated non-commissioned Army officer who was on duty as sergeant of the guard the night of June 9–10, have furnished an account dramatically at odds with the NCIS report—a report for which they were neither interviewed nor approached.

All four soldiers say they were ordered by their commanding officer not to speak out, and all four soldiers provide evidence that authorities initiated a cover-up within hours of the prisoners’ deaths. Army Staff Sergeant Joseph Hickman and men under his supervision have disclosed evidence in interviews with Harper’s Magazine that strongly suggests that the three prisoners who died on June 9 had been transported to another location prior to their deaths. The guards’ accounts also reveal the existence of a previously unreported black site at Guantánamo where the deaths, or at least the events that led directly to the deaths, most likely occurred....

The compound was not visible from the main road, and the access road was chained off. The Guardsman who told Davila about the compound had said, “This place does not exist,” and Hickman, who was frequently put in charge of security for all of Camp America, was not briefed about the site. Nevertheless, Davila said, other soldiers—many of whom were required to patrol the outside perimeter of Camp America—had seen the compound, and many speculated about its purpose. One theory was that it was being used by some of the non-uniformed government personnel who frequently showed up in the camps and were widely thought to be CIA agents.

A friend of Hickman’s had nicknamed the compound “Camp No,” the idea being that anyone who asked if it existed would be told, “No, it doesn’t.” He and Davila made a point of stopping by whenever they had the chance; once, Hickman said, he heard a “series of screams” from within the compound....

By dawn, the news had circulated through Camp America that three prisoners had committed suicide by swallowing rags. Colonel Bumgarner called a meeting of the guards, and at 7:00 a.m. at least fifty soldiers and sailors gathered at Camp America’s open-air theater....

According to independent interviews with soldiers who witnessed the speech, Bumgarner told his audience that “you all know” three prisoners in the Alpha Block at Camp 1 committed suicide during the night by swallowing rags, causing them to choke to death. This was a surprise to no one—even servicemen who had not worked the night before had heard about the rags. But then Bumgarner told those assembled that the media would report something different. It would report that the three prisoners had committed suicide by hanging themselves in their cells. It was important, he said, that servicemen make no comments or suggestions that in any way undermined the official report. He reminded the soldiers and sailors that their phone and email communications were being monitored. The meeting lasted no more than twenty minutes....

All the families requested independent autopsies. The Saudi prisoners were examined by Saeed Al-Ghamdy, a pathologist based in Saudi Arabia. Al-Salami, from Yemen, was inspected by Patrice Mangin, a pathologist based in Switzerland. Both pathologists noted the removal of the structure that would have been the natural focus of the autopsy: the throat. Both pathologists contacted the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, requesting the missing body parts and more information about the previous autopsies. The institute did not respond to their requests or queries. (It also did not respond to a series of calls I placed requesting information and comment.)

When Al-Zahrani viewed his son’s corpse, he saw evidence of a homicide. “There was a major blow to the head on the right side,” he said. “There was evidence of torture on the upper torso, and on the palms of his hand. There were needle marks on his right arm and on his left arm.” None of these details are noted in the U.S. autopsy report. “I am a law enforcement professional,” Al-Zahrani said. “I know what to look for when examining a body.”

via Invictus

Our role in Haiti's plight

Any large city in the world would have suffered extensive damage from an earthquake on the scale of the one that ravaged Haiti's capital city on Tuesday afternoon, but it's no accident that so much of Port-au-Prince now looks like a war zone. Much of the devastation wreaked by this latest and most calamitous disaster to befall Haiti is best understood as another thoroughly manmade outcome of a long and ugly historical sequence.

The country has faced more than its fair share of catastrophes. Hundreds died in Port-au-Prince in an earthquake back in June 1770, and the huge earthquake of 7 May 1842 may have killed 10,000 in the northern city of Cap Haitien alone. Hurricanes batter the island on a regular basis, mostly recently in 2004 and again in 2008; the storms of September 2008 flooded the town of Gonaïves and swept away much of its flimsy infrastructure, killing more than a thousand people and destroying many thousands of homes. The full scale of the destruction resulting from this earthquake may not become clear for several weeks. Even minimal repairs will take years to complete, and the long-term impact is incalculable.

What is already all too clear, however, is the fact that this impact will be the result of an even longer-term history of deliberate impoverishment and disempowerment. Haiti is routinely described as the "poorest country in the western hemisphere". This poverty is the direct legacy of perhaps the most brutal system of colonial exploitation in world history, compounded by decades of systematic postcolonial oppression.

The noble "international community" which is currently scrambling to send its "humanitarian aid" to Haiti is largely responsible for the extent of the suffering it now aims to reduce. Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti's people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's phrase) "from absolute misery to a dignified poverty" has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.

Aristide's own government (elected by some 75% of the electorate) was the latest victim of such interference, when it was overthrown by an internationally sponsored coup in 2004 that killed several thousand people and left much of the population smouldering in resentment. The UN has subsequently maintained a large and enormously expensive stabilisation and pacification force in the country.

Haiti is now a country where, according to the best available study, around 75% of the population "lives on less than $2 per day, and 56% – four and a half million people – live on less than $1 per day". Decades of neoliberal "adjustment" and neo-imperial intervention have robbed its government of any significant capacity to invest in its people or to regulate its economy. Punitive international trade and financial arrangements ensure that such destitution and impotence will remain a structural fact of Haitian life for the foreseeable future.

It is this poverty and powerlessness that account for the full scale of the horror in Port-au-Prince today. Since the late 1970s, relentless neoliberal assault on Haiti's agrarian economy has forced tens of thousands of small farmers into overcrowded urban slums. Although there are no reliable statistics, hundreds of thousands of Port-au-Prince residents now live in desperately sub-standard informal housing, often perched precariously on the side of deforested ravines. The selection of the people living in such places and conditions is itself no more "natural" or accidental than the extent of the injuries they have suffered.

more from Peter Hallward in The Guardian (U.K.)

The US Media’s Misconception of Terrorism

BEIRUT -- It has been depressing this week to watch mainstream American television networks cover Yemen and wider issues related to tensions and terrorism in our region. It is depressing because -- with very few exceptions -- the mass media that provides the majority of Americans with their news and views of world events is covering the Yemen story with a shocking combination of amateurism, ideological distortion, and selectivity. If the mass media is a mirror of the political system in the United States -- and I believe it is -- then it is no wonder that the past two decades have seen a steady expansion of two related and symbiotic problems: the spread of terrorism in and from the Arab-Asian region, and the spread of the American armed forces and covert operations in the same region.

Yemen media coverage captures this very neatly. The mainstream American media, especially network and cable television, mainly report that the problems that spur terrorism from Yemen are poverty, religious extremism, and ineffective government. Charismatic Muslim preachers, often using the Internet, are also widely mentioned these days as a real problem that exacerbates the terror threat. In every report I have seen, without fail, the thrust of the report is that terrorism is a consequence of Islamic religious extremism that is somehow connected with a visceral hatred of the United States or Western ways in general.

The flaw in this approach -- and it was evident in President Barack Obama’s remarks last Thursday on how the United States will improve its intelligence defenses against terrorism -- is that it refuses to acknowledge that terrorism in our age is largely a reactionary movement that responds to perceived threats against those societies from where the terrorists emerge. It is striking that in most cases of successful or failed terror attacks, the perpetrators or the organizations that send them to kill explain that they carry out their deed as a response to the deeds of others – such as Israel’s assault on Palestinians, the US and British armies in Iraq or Afghanistan, American drone attacks against militants in Yemen, or some other such issue.

This fact has been well-documented by the pioneering work of Professor Robert Pape at the University of Chicago, whose analysis of over 500 “suicide” or “martyrdom” attacks around the world since 1980 indicates that, “what over 95 percent of all suicide terrorist attacks, around the world since 1980, have in common -- from Lebanon, to Chechnya, to Sri Lanka, to Kashmir, to the West Bank -- is not religion, but a specific strategic goal: to compel a modern democracy to withdraw combat forces from territory the terrorists view is their homeland, or prize greatly.”

more from Rami G. Khouri at Agence Global

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